Author

Khushi Srivastava

Instagram Marketing: 10 Simple Tips To Gain Massive Followers

Every company, entrepreneur or influencer who’s investing their time and money on social media marketing cannot ignore Instagram. Why? Because Instagram has 1 billion users.

In 2016, Instagram had just 500 million users. In January 2018, the number of users hit 1 billion. 80% of these users follow a business profile.

Statistics just put into perspective the growing popularity of Instagram. Like Pinterest, Instagram gives users opportunities to explore their hobbies and hence, it’s a great platform on which businesses can engage their audiences.

As of today, there are approximately 52 million business profiles on Instagram. These businesses are the ones that are benefiting from the powers of Instagram. Another statistic points out that 75% of the users take action after looking at the brand’s Instagram post.

Statistical data deduces that Instagram is an important social media platform for businesses. Equally important is it for entrepreneurs and influencers.

How To Gain More Instagram Followers

The key to being successful on Instagram is to know how to grow one’s ‘followers’. Once that hurdle is crossed, it’s then all about keeping your followers engaged.

Using statistical tools, case studies, and examples; we have found 10 proven tactics that anyone can use to grow their Instagram following and engagement. These tactics are given below:

1. Make it a practice to post content regularly

According to a research study that was conducted in 2017, the more often you post, the more likes you get and consequently, your followers too increase.

Follow this simple rule. Make sure that you post at least one piece of content daily. By doing so, you will not just see an increase in your following, your engagement rates too will see an increase.

The study found out that those profiles who posted more than seven times a week got more likes than the other profiles that posted less often. Another interesting find of this study linked higher engagement rates with more frequent posting. Before this research study was conducted, the belief was rather contrary- the less you post, the better your engagement rates.

The reason why the findings of this study concurred with the findings of the previously conducted studies is because in this study similarly sized accounts were monitored and compared– which proved to be all the difference.

The study also proved that posting often can increase your followers’ growth rate considerably.

2. Spend some time and effort in finding and promoting quality hashtags

Did you know that you can follow hashtags on Instagram?

To be popular on Instagram, you need to know your hashtags in and out. The reason why hashtags are so important on Instagram is that Instagram is a hobby exploratory social media platform where people search for content through topics. Hashtags align your content with these topics and thus, ensure that your content reaches a mass audience.

Instagram allows users to tag their content with 30 different hashtags. However, ideally, a post should be tagged with a maximum of nine hashtags.

Online tools such as Display Purpose can help you find the right and different kinds of hashtags for your posts. Like Display Purpose, there are many other free Instagram tools available online that can help you find the right hashtags for your content.

So this is how Display Purpose works. You type in the main subject matter of your post. You will then be given multiple options of the different kinds of hashtags with which you can tag your content.

3. Learn to use ‘Analytics’ to your benefit

Instagram has this feature that’s called ‘Instagram Insights’. However, this feature is available only to ‘Business Profiles’. Instagram Insights is like your Google Analytics for Instagram. It gives you all the information that you need in order to understand how your followers are interacting with your profile.

To get to the Instagram Insights page, follow these three simple steps (remember Instagram Insights is only available for business profiles):

Head to your business profile page.
On the top right-hand corner, you will see a ‘bar’ icon. Tap on that.
Choose what you want ‘insights’ on. You can select between specific posts, stories and promotions that you have run.

Instagram Insights allows you to track three key metrics: Impressions, Profile Visits & Reach.

Learn to use analytics to your benefit. Go through the Insights page regularly. Read the data. Understand what kind of content gains the most impressions, reach and engagement. Try finding out which posts of your reached people who weren’t following your page. Posts such as that can help you gain your follower count. Statistical data can help you improve your efficiency. Don’t make the mistake of ignoring the numbers!

4. Implement ‘Cross-Posting’ to your advantage

Cross-posting is the simple practice of trying to integrate the content that you share across all your social media platforms. It sounds like a very complicated task but in reality, it’s simple. You just have to take a little bit of effort.

In fact, since Instagram’s Facebook takeover, cross-posting has become extremely simple. Instagram’s interface itself allows you to easily share content on Facebook, Tumblr & Twitter. As marketers and businesses, it’s your duty now to exploit this feature to your benefit.

The objective of cross-posting is to let your customers know that you exist on different social media platforms. Why? So that your postings get more exposure. The more exposure that your postings get, the more engagement they will entice and hence, new customers will have a better image for your business.

To prove the importance of cross-posting, Buzzmo conducted a research study in 2016. The study found out that images that were posted on Facebook via Instagram generated 23% more engagement.

One tip on how you can go about cross-posting your content. Try embedding the posts that you share on social media with pictures that are linked to your Instagram account.

5. Find out the best times to post at & make it a practice of posting content in those time-intervals only

Okay so here’s the truth. Different social media platforms have different ‘best times’ to post it. Not just that. The best time to post at even differs within a social media platform. What one’s trying to say here is that; there’s no one particular best time as to post at that can be applied by all businesses on Instagram

The best time to post at depends upon your followers.

To find out the best times to post at for your business, go back to Instagram Insights. That’s where the information that you need is awaiting you. In order to get maximum engagement for your posts, you need to find out at exactly what time your followers are most active.

Here’s you get that information:

Head to Instagram Insights (Business Profile- Click on ‘bar’ icon)
Click on ‘Followers’.
Click on ‘See more’.

And more, you shall see indeed. On this page, you will be able to get exactly the kind of information that you need. What time your users are most active, on what days they are the most active, where your followers are from– there’s a lot of data for you to analyze. Analyze this data and find the best time to post for your business.

Instagram Insights is only available for business profiles. So, what do you do if you don’t have a business profile? How do you use analytics to your benefit then? You use other Instagram Analytic tools that are available online. Sprout Social, Simply Measured, Iconosquare are all examples of great Instagram Analytic tools.

Note: This above paragraph applies to ‘Point 3’ as well.

6. Plan regular ‘Profile Takeovers’

In other words, take an effort of collaborating with other businesses or influencers that have a mass following on Instagram. Think of it as a mini ‘co-branding’ process. You are using the following that others’ have to ramp up your own following by giving them also an opportunity to do so. A successful collaboration has to be structured as a win-win deal.

So you primarily have three different collaboration strategies to look at: influencer marketing, sponsorship and partnerships. All three strategies are great. Influencer marketing is the trend nowadays. It’s growing in popularity because of the ‘credibility’ that influencers bring. However, it can be an expensive Instagram strategy.

Make a business decision. Choose the strategy that’s correct for you financially.

A great example of influencer marketing done right is- Coachella. Coachella tied up with 416 influencers. Sure, it was an expensive strategy but it resulted in generating 4.4 billion impressions– more than their events main sponsor H&M.

7. Experiment with different content formats on Instagram

One of the reasons why Instagram has become so popular with the millennial population is because of their innovation. Every now and then, new content formats are springing up. Hence, by doing so, Instagram is able to keep the attention of their audiences and thereby, give businesses new opportunities to engage with their customers.

The popularity of video content is growing. Engagement for video content is growing fast– much faster than what’s happening with static content.

Instagram has some very interesting content formats for business to exploit. Live videos, stories & TV- these three content formats promise great ways to stimulate engagement.

Opel- well-known car manufacturers ran a sequence of carousel ads via the Instagram stories feature- the result was 2.5x greater registrations.

To see the Opel story click here.

Freshly Cosmetics- a cosmetic brand used Instagram stories to drive its consumers to their website-the result direct sales increased by 9 times.

Instagram Story run by Freshly Cosmetics that induced people to visit their website.

Yes, these case studies primarily focus on driving customer engagement. They don’t directly show how experimenting with different content formats can increase one’s followers. But what they do show is that people respond better to new content formats. And, that’s what can help you gain followers!

8. Make it a point to share user-generated content

Here’s a fact: User-generated content has a 4.5% higher conversion rate than non-user generated content. Take a look at Buffer Social- their Instagram following grew by 400% and they account much of its success to sharing user-generated content.

Apple really uses user-generated content well and it’s proven to be successful marketing strategy for them. Business wise also, using user-generated content makes a lot of sense. Lesser effort-greater rewards.

The key here is to find a way to attract quality user-generated content. The contest route works best here. The prize of the contest need not always be monetary gratification-social gratification works equally well, if not better. What do we mean by social gratification? Give them the credit for their work. Bring them into the limelight through your business.

User-generated content has that authenticity factor to it that’s otherwise found lacking in other posts. That’s why it strikes a chord in people’s hearts and generates more engagement.

An example of GoPro using user-generated content. Look at that engagement!

9. Host Contests

We humans are selfish beings. Until we see an advantage for something, we seldom act on it. Incentives go a long way in getting people to do what you want them to do.

On Instagram, the best way to incentivize people to follow you or engage with your content is to host contests. Yes, hosting contests is an old and cliched way of getting things done. But it still works and that’s what’s really important here.

Instead of hosting the old regular question and answer contests, identify the person contests-try putting your own spin on the contests to make it more exciting and interesting for the audience.

‘Tag a friend’ contests work really well to gain new followers!

10. Make use of ‘Filters’ & ‘Emoticons’ in your post

Adding ‘emoticons’ & ‘filters’ to your post serves a bigger purpose than fun. Believe it or not, they are great tools to entice engagement and promote the following.

A research study conducted found out that filtered photos are 21% more likely to get viewed than unfiltered photos. The same study found that filtered photos have 45% higher probability of getting a comment. Say goodbye to the days when ‘real was king’.

Here’s another weirdly fun statistic: in the UK, emoji is the fastest growing language. At least 50% of all the captions and comments on Instagram posts contain emojis.

Not to sound too old fashioned but if you aren’t using filters and emojis in your posts, the world will leave you behind.

To Summarize

With that, we come to the end of this article. Instagram is a fun social media platform. Sure, it’s about followers and engagement metrics but more than it’s about being exciting, fun & personal. If your posts encapsulate that, you should have no trouble with gaining a massive following on Instagram!

July 27, 2018 0 comment

Content Marketing

How To Use Content Marketing For Better Customer Retention

written by Khushi Srivastava

By now, all marketers have been sensitized to the importance of digital marketing. The world is going digital and so is marketing. Digital marketing alone has a comprehensive definition.

It constitutes of many different marketing strategies like social media marketing, content marketing, affiliate marketing and so on.

In this article, we will be talking to you about one of the most popular sub-branches of digital marketing: Content Marketing.

In simple words, content marketing is a marketing practice that focuses on creating, publishing and distributing content on digital media platforms.

A successful content marketing strategy adheres to the popular adage, “Content is king.”

Why are so many marketers focusing so much of their energy on content marketing? Given below are a few facts that will put the importance of content marketing into perspective:

Firms with sound content marketing strategies experience8 times more site traffic than other websites.
According to a study conducted by IBM, 56% of the marketers believe that great content can promote customer engagement.
Content marketing is 62% cheaper than outbound marketing.
Companies that adopt content marketing experience 6 times higher conversion rates than those companies who don’t use content marketing.

Content marketing is a flexible marketing strategy. A company’s content marketing strategy depends upon their goals or objectives. Content can be used to attain any one of these objectives:

Brand building
Lead generation
Information dissemination
Customer service goals
Support search engine optimization
Gauge & entice social media engagement
Improve customer retention

The rest of this article is going to be devoted to just one topic:

How To Use Content Marketing To Improve Customer Retention?

Customer retention is an important business goal for all businesses. Sure, it’s great to win new customers. But just winning new customers doesn’t guarantee success. The long-term success of a company greatly depends on its ability to retain its customers.

Content marketing is a great way to improve customer retention. But before we get into how to use content to drive customer-retention specifically, there’s something that all marketers need to understand.

Relationship Between Customer Retention & Customer Experience

A company can only retain its customers if its customers are happy with the interactions that they have with the company. Therefore, before focussing on a sound “customer retention strategy” as such, it’s important to focus on ensuring that customers have pleasant and positive interactions with the company.

Give your customers a reason to be your customer.

Seamless transactions, valuable customer service, informative, valuable and engaging content, transparency; these are specific areas that demand the company’s attention.

If you can satisfy your customers, you will have the best customer retention strategy in place that being, word of mouth.

6 Ways To Leverage Content Marketing To Improve Customer Retention

Now that you know the importance of customer experience to customer retention, you are much better equipped to understand and implement these strategies. Given below are the different ways in which content marketing can be used to improve customer-retention:

1. Publish excellent content religiously

Content marketing is not an overly complicated marketing strategy. If you stick to the basics and focus on quality, you will see its results.

Publish quality content regularly and religiously. Publishing content regularly is the best way to add value and experiences to your customers.

And don’t stick to publishing content in the same format. Experiment for better results. Look at videos, look at gifs, look at listicles- explore all the different kinds of content formats that you can exploit-make a calendar and post different content formats regularly.

Pre-plan content, hire influencers, hire freelancers, conduct regular brainstorming sessions, if you have to but ensure that you post content on a regular basis.

2. Make use of the information that your customers provide you with

Data is an invaluable asset in today’s time. When used correctly, companies can use their customer data to formulate their entire customer retention strategy.

Analyzing customer data can provide companies with compass-like guidance for their content strategy. It can help companies pinpoint what it is that their customers value and what it is that drives engagement.

Customize your content to disseminate the exact information that your customers value. This can be a great contributor to your customer-retention strategy.

3. Keep your customers informed

To keep your customers informed: keep two things in mind. One, you should be the first one to distribute content about anything new that’s happening in or to your company. A new product, new features, new business heads etc. Your customers should be kept in the loop about what’s happening in the business. And, they have to hear it from you and nobody else.

The second way to retain customers is by broadening the horizons of your content. Instead of distributing content that’s solely about your business, try to disseminate any interesting information that you come across that relates to your business directly or indirectly. Focus on distributing comprehensive content. By doing so, you can get all the attention to yourself.

Personalized email marketing campaigns are a great way to keep customers informed. When deployed correctly, email marketing in itself can be a great customer retention strategy. Design personalized email campaigns that talk to individual groups and make them feel special. You can define customer groups on the basis of their past interactions with the business. Email marketing campaigns are flexible so you can use them to distribute whatever content that you feel is right.

4. Run periodical webinars

Webinars are one of the most under-rated content formats. Traditionally, companies consider a webinar to be a tool that can be used to gain customers rather than retain customers. However, that approach is profoundly misguided.

When used right, a webinar can be a great customer retention tool. Webinars need to be run at periodic intervals. By following such a practice, the customers of a company will always know the exact time at which the webinar is running and can thus, make time for it accordingly.

Now the key here is to have great content. People are giving up their time to tune-in so the content has to be something useful and engaging. Ideally, the content should be a mixture of: humorous content & informative content. Tackle issues like the challenges that people may face with the product or service. Inform people about new product features, their benefits and how to use them. But do so in a fun way. It has to invigorating, interesting and exciting.

Example of Manchester United using email marketing to keep customers informed

5. Do your best to keep your customers engaged.

Ensuring customer engagement is crucial to a sound content marketing strategy. The engagement can adjudge the success of a content marketing strategy that it entices on social media.

Whatever content you post online, the objective of it should be to drive customer engagement. If your content is not driving engagement, you are doing things wrong. Engaged customers make for retained customers.

So, how to ensure customer engagement? Post regular contests with small giveaways. Reply to as many of your customers’ comments as possible on as many social media channels as possible. Try to act on some of the advice that’s given to you by your customers and let them know that their input was valuable.

Sportskeeda have created a loyalty program around content by allowing their audiences to write for them and paying them for published content

6. Create a loyalty program that runs around content.

For years now, loyalty programs have been the major drivers of customer retention strategies. And rightly so! The effectiveness of loyalty programs with respect to customer retention is second to no other strategy.

Try building a loyalty program that runs around content. Few examples of how this can be done. Invite your customers to share some content. Choose the best content out of all the content that you receive and publish it. You can choose to give the customer monetary and social recognition as an award. You can run such a program continuously.

This is just one example of how you can incorporate content into a loyalty programme. Be creative and think of other exciting ways to do so. The more fun, the more rewarding the program- the better for you.

4 Content Marketing Tools To Drive Customer-Retention

Traditionally, man designed tools to help him make his work simpler and more effective. The marketing tools found on the internet have been designed to fulfil the very same purpose.

The problem here is that there just too many different tools to choose from which is why many marketers forgo the helping hand offered by these tools.

The right tools though prove to be a worthy investment. There are a few content marketing tools that are really good and can be used to drive customer retention. Some basic information about these tools is given below:

MailChimp (Email Marketing): MailChimp is an email marketing tool that provides businesses with to readymade email template designs, A/B testing options, segmented email lists and a lot more.

Google Analytics (Data): In one of the points above, we spoke about the importance of using customer data to tailor one’s content strategy. Google Analytics is an online tool that allows you to analyze customer data and draw intelligent inferences from the wide-range of statistical information that it provides.

Keyword (Keyword Research): Filling up content with the right keywords is critical to ensure the success of a content strategy. Keyword.io is an online keyword research tool that provides you with all the information that you need with respect to finding and selecting the right keywords for a concerned topic.

Disqus (Website Audience Building): We spoke about the importance of customer engagement in a content strategy. Disqus is an online tool that offers users an easy solution to their customer engagement woes. It helps you keep track of all conversations spread across your social media channels and allows you to focus your attention on the important conversations.

4 Examples Of How Real Companies Have Used Content Marketing To Improve Their Customer-Retention

GoPro

GoPro: Using user-generated content.

GoPro sells one of the most versatile cameras available in the market. Their content strategy has been to focus on video content. And, it’s been successful. As a part of their content strategy, GoPro invites consumers to send in adventure videos that they have shot using the GoPro camera. These videos are then posted online. One such video of theirs got 20 million views on Youtube.

New York Times

New York Times made a truly revolutionary move by offering its customers VR newspapers. In one bold move, they changed their content offering mechanism. It was something new, something exciting, something unique and got the attention of all their customers.

HubSpot

HubSpot keeps it simple. They post quality content regularly and religiously, content that their target audience really cares about. They ensure that their customers are kept informed. They publish marketing and sales related topics that generate 2 million visitors a month.

HubSpot: Separate blog page on which articles related to marketing and sales are constantly published.

By keeping it simple, keeping their audience informed, they have built a sound customer-retention strategy cornered around content.

Cocoa Runners

Cocoa Runners are chocolate distributors that operate in the UK. They entice customer-retention using content by running a regular email marketing campaign. Through the email marketing campaign, they keep their customers informed about new offerings, chocolate insights and chocolate suggestions.

There, that’s the end of it. In this article, we have comprehensively covered all that you need to know about the relationship between customer-retention and content marketing.

Summary

To summarise everything; it’s unwise to overlook the importance of content marketing. Executing it is simple and not overly complicated. Sticking to the basics can help one reap its multiple benefits. Content marketing, when used effectively, can be a great customer-retention strategy. Customer-retention is as important if not more important than attracting new customers. Post content regularly, equip your customers with useful information, do all that you can to keep them engaged, exploit the advantages of webinars, build a unique loyalty programme and make good use of all the customer data that’s with you.

Take inspiration from successful content marketing strategies. Don’t copy them. Get inspired by them. Strive to better them!

July 26, 2018 0 comment

Tools

25 FREE Websites To Find Awesome Pictures For The Marketers

written by Khushi Srivastava

All text and no images make your webpage a dull one!

I am not going to waste any more words by overstating the universal fact that illustrations and graphics are essential in augmenting the visual appeal of your website or blog. But, strict copyright laws around the world does forbid us from using random photographs from the internet for our personal or commercial usage.

This is precisely where free stock image websites come into play and they turn out to be a life-saver for bloggers, website owners, and content creators.

Top 25 Websites To Find Free Pictures

Here are 25 free sites to find awesome pictures to spice up your website or blog.

1. Pixabay

Pixabay boasts of a massive collection of images thanks to the large community of photographers who keep making regular contributions to the website. Apart from the high-resolution pictures in its assortment, the site also has its fair share of illustrations and vector graphics. The photos from the website can be freely used in both print and digital format without any kind of attribution. The pictures can also be chosen based on the size and orientation that fits your requirement.

https://pixabay.com/

2. StokPic

The StokPic website might not have a collection that runs into lakhs, but the exclusivity of their images is what makes it stand apart. The pictures on the site are shot specifically for StokPic and they aren’t available for download from any other similar websites. The images can be freely used for both personal and commercial purposes, but the site forbids you from redistributing or selling them. Also, the user-friendly website has grouped its collection into 16 popular categories.

http://stokpic.com

3. Unsplash

Backed by the strength of about 40000 contributors, Unsplash is one of the largest websites when it comes to free stock images. Though the website doesn’t group its pictures into too many categories, the photos you want can be effortlessly found using the search bar on the home page. The stock pictures downloaded from Unsplash are free for both commercial and private usage.

https://unsplash.com/

4. Kaboompics

Kaboompics has a collection of more than 5000 stock images for you to choose from. The quality is striking, and the images can be used for both your private and professional projects without dishing out a single penny. The website also has a unique colour palette menu that allows you to find stock pictures that match the colour theme of your project. The free stock images are also conveniently sorted into 14 different categories.

https://kaboompics.com/

5. Pikwizard

The Pikwizard website is surely worth a visit if you are looking for free stock images for your online or offline ventures. The site has a large database with about 100000 pictures and it includes images relevant to most topics and niches. Another advantage is that Pikwizard has around 20000 stock pictures which are unique and exclusive to the website. The site does not categorise images for your convenience, but the search bar can be used to look for the picture you want.

https://pikwizard.com/

6. StockSnap

StockSnap is yet another website that can be relied on to get you free images with excellent quality and resolution. All the pictures on the site are released under the Creative Commons licence and can be used without any form of attribution. The extremely useful Categories page on the website has organized the images into 100 different sections. You can also make use of the gallery search option.

https://stocksnap.io/

7. Freerangestock

The Freerangestock website has an enormous database of stock pictures as it accepts contributions from both its in-house photographers and the public community. The images from the site can be used free of cost for both commercial and non-commercial endeavours. The pictures can be browsed by category and they can be downloaded in the resolution of your choice. But, the website does not allow you to download their pictures unless you register with them.

https://freerangestock.com/

8. Burst

Burst is a free stock images website backed by Shopify. You can find the desired picture using the search bar and the categories section of the website has 40 titles that include all the popular themes. The images on Burst are free for personal and commercial use under the Creative Commons licence and even giving an attribution to the photographer isn’t mandatory.

https://burst.shopify.com/

9. Pexels

Pexels is one website that is sure to be on any list made on free stock image sources. The database of Pexels is huge but the search option makes it comfortable to find the right picture for your usage. The images can be freely used with or without giving credit to the photographer or the website. The photos are also allowed to be used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

https://www.pexels.com

10. Picography

Picography has a packed library of high-resolution photos that can be used for your professional or personal needs. The images downloaded from the website are covered under the Creative Commons license and you needn’t give attribution to the creators. Picography does not have a dedicated category section but the search bar can be used to find the suitable photo for your project.

https://picography.co/

11. Stockvault

Stockvault stays true to its name by letting you access and use photographs, textures and graphics. The website is extremely user-friendly, and its large database is handily split into categories and even sub-categories. The search option can also be used to find the image that best suits your requirement. The photos on the website can be used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes but it shouldn’t be sold or redistributed by you.

https://www.stockvault.net/

12. Free Images

Free images is yet another reliable source for finding copyright-free photographs for your blog or website. The gallery of the site flaunts more than 350000 images with exceptional resolution and clarity. The pictures you are looking for can be zeroed in on using the keyword search option or the categories drop-down tab. The images downloaded from Free images can be utilized without any cost in both digital format and printed forms.

https://www.freeimages.com

13. Picjumbo

The Picjumbo website has an expansive collection of high-resolution photographs. The images are all properly tagged to ensure that only relevant photos show up while you browse via category names and keyword search. Picjumbo also has a unique Test Drive feature to try and see if a picture is ideal to be a blog post header or a website background. But, the site does look a bit messy with too many advertisements on it.

https://picjumbo.com

14. Negative Space

Negative Space doesn’t have a gallery jam-packed with thousands of stock images. But, its short library is filled with photos that have a refined finish. All the pictures downloaded from the website are free of any usage restrictions and copyright issues. Appropriate tagging of the images makes it easy to find photographs related to your specific need. Filters can be applied on the selected photos to match the colour scheme of your website or blog.

https://negativespace.co/

15. DesignersPics

The USP of DesignersPics must be the extreme simplicity in its design. The easy to use website allows you to search the photographs you want through a user-friendly search option. For the added convenience of the users, the images are also sorted into 10 different categories. The downloaded pictures can be used for both private and commercial use and it doesn’t require you to credit the website or the photograph owner.

http://www.designerspics.com/

16. Splitshire

The Splitshire website has a fair number of images in its gallery to be a great resource when it comes to free stock photos. The keyword search works like a charm as all the pictures in the site are well-tagged. The images from Splitshire can even be used for commercial purposes sans any charges. Also, the photos can be downloaded from the site without any registration or signups.

https://www.splitshire.com/

17. Realistic Shots

The Realisticshots website has a fitting name as the images in its library are natural and life-like without any artificial filters. The high-resolution photos on the site can be freely downloaded and used for both personal and professional requirements. The photos on the website are also categorised into five titles – Architecture, People, Travel, Nature and Technology. The royalty free images in the Realisticshots site can be used without any attributions.

http://realisticshots.com/

18. Find A Photo

The Findaphoto website is home to more than 10000 stock images gathered from similar websites across the globe. The photos are released under the Creative Commons licence and hence can be freely downloaded from the site and used for commercial and non-commercial purposes. The search bar gets you the right results as the images on the website are accurately tagged. Also, the site gives you a handy option to browse photos by colour.

http://finda.photo/

19. Morguefile

The website is a fine place to be looking for images and illustrations for your online or offline projects. Morguefile has a vast collection of more than 350000 stock photos with exemplary quality. The pictures are all free to download and there are no restrictions for using it for both your personal and commercial purposes. The photos on the website are not categorised based on content, but the tags on each photo make the search option comfortable to use.

https://morguefile.com/

20. Jay Mantri

Jay Mantri stacks up hundreds of gorgeous stock photos on its website and they can be used to enhance the visual appeal of your blog, website or printed material. The high-resolution pictures available on the site are free to download and use under the Creative Commons licence. But, the free stock images are not tagged and you would have to take the effort to manually search for the picture you want.

http://jaymantri.com/archive

21. Barn Images

The Barnimages website is a must-visit if you are looking for free images for both your personal and professional ventures. The assortment is enormous and the stock photos on the site have high resolution and superlative quality. The search bar can be used to narrow down the options to just images that are relevant to your content or need. But, the website does not have a category section.

https://barnimages.com/

22. Skitterphoto

The Skitterphoto website has an attractive design and a decent collection of public domain images. It is easy to navigate through the site and searching for the picture you want is an extremely user-friendly process. Apart from the suitable tags, the photos on Skitterphoto are also grouped into 16 diverse categories. The images from the website can be used without any restrictions or fees.

https://skitterphoto.com/

23. Flickr

Flickr is yet another reliable source for free stock photos. The images are all of high-resolution and appealing quality. But, you have to keep in mind that the photographs in the website are licensed under 6 variations of the Creative Commons licence. This should be looked into before you use an image or make any modifications to it. The search bar on the homepage would help you find the image pertinent to your content.

https://www.flickr.com/

24. Albumarium

The creativity of Albumarium website isn’t just limited to its naming and its library is filled with high-resolution stock photographs. Thousands of images available on the site are categorised based on its content. While using the photos from the website, please check the attribution restrictions on each of them. The search option doesn’t work very well as some of the images on the site aren’t tagged.

http://albumarium.com/

25. Goodfreephotos

Goodfreephotos has a decent collection of royalty free images with outstanding quality. No signup is required to download the stock photos and the photographer or website needn’t be credited. Apart from the search column, Goodfreephotos provides a unique option to browse photos based on the country it is related to.

https://www.goodfreephotos.com/

To Wrap Up

These 25 free websites we have listed should be more than enough to take care of all your stock photo needs. We have made sure that all the sites we have mentioned are totally free to use and that the licence conditions on their images are generally non-restrictive. Also, the photographs downloaded from these websites are free of any unwanted watermarks or logos.

So, the next time you need a high-resolution image without copyright issues, you know where to go!

July 24, 2018 0 comment

Online Marketing

How to Use Google AdWords to Boost Your Online Marketing

written by Khushi Srivastava

In 2018, what’s the first thing that a consumer do if they want to buy something? The days of visiting the shops to inquire about each and every product are long gone. Nowadays, with the growth of online business and the ease offered by search engines, people search the internet and order the desired product with a few mouse clicks. Saves the effort and time!

But while searching for a product online, the primary factor that comes to play is the products which are shown to us. In other words, the immediate search results which are provided to us. Here is where the significance of Google AdWords lies.

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is a term we have heard since 2004 and has brought a remarkable change in the business or marketing sector. AdWords has been and is a big game changer and will continue to grow as long as online business exists. So let’s get a bit deep into this topic.

Google AdWords is a paid online service by Google that allows you to place or prioritize your company website or links on a SERP (search engine results page) by spending some money. With the help of AdWords, you don’t have to waste time and effort to bring up your website to the top with stuff like SEO, etc. This service is not at all difficult to use and does not cost the hefty sum of money either. The search results will be organically placed at the top or at the side with a small yellow Ad box just above the respective search links.

This is not a service provided by Google alone. Yahoo and Bing also have their online advertising services. But for now, we will be exploring the service by Google alone.

Basic things to know about AdWords

Merely saying, to get an AdWord service, all you need is to select some keywords which are related to your service/product and then create an advertisement which will be appearing on the search engine results page based on the given keywords. However, yours will not be the only organization that wants people to look up to you based on those particular keywords. Rivals can bid for the same word, which often leads to mixed and prioritized results.

If you are adamant about your ad appearing on the first page of searches made by the same keyword, then you must be willing to bid against other rival marketers on how much amount you are willing to pay AdWords every single time a person clicks on your ad.

The more money you are willing to pay for PPC, there is more chance of your ad topping the search results. The word ‘chance’ needs to be stressed upon as it is not only the highest bid that pushes your ad to the top. A feature called ‘quality score’ is used by Google to determine this.

What do you mean by Quality Score?

Google monitors your add and it is based on this observance that your add is placed. It checks how useful and relevant an ad is to the users and the search terms used by them. It also takes in account how relevant the landing page is and the number of clicks the ad has previously received, known as CTR (click-through rate).

For example, if a user search for ‘Men’s Adidas Originals’ and your ad is shown saying “buy Men’s Adidas Originals here,” once the user clicks the ad it should directly lead him/her to the page which features Men’s Adidas Originals trainers. But instead, if it goes to the generic homepage, that won’t be good enough.

The higher quality score you can get, the better it can be. Even if your best bid is less than your rival’s bid, having a higher quality score can push your ad above your rival’s ad.

About Bidding

Every time a user clicks your ad. It will cost you some money to Google AdWords. This price which you will have to pay for each click when using their service is called the CPC (cost per click). Either you can choose a maximum bid amount, or you can opt for the automatic option. In automatic option, Google will automatically select a bid amount within the budget and (theoretically speaking) will bring the most number of clicks in that budget.

There is another option called CPM (cost-per-impression), which is not very commonly used. If you opt for this option, you will have to pay AdWords for every thousand times your ad appears on the search engine results page. In this, the user need not click through. The payment method is left to the choice of every individual.

Google AdWords takes about 0.26 seconds to look all the relevant advertisements circling a specific search term, decide to auction or not, hold the auction and work out between the maximum bid and quality score. This is the time taken for the search results to appear after entering the search term. (Provided you have an internet connection with decent speed)

Some of the successful AdWords Ads till date are given below:

Logo Design Guarantee
North American Spine
ThermaCare
POC Hiring
BeyondDiet.com
Dr. Simoni – Plastic Surgeon
Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery
1-800-Need-Help
Proflowers.com and From You Flowers
Elance.com

What makes these AdWords Ads top the list beating all the competition around them are because of the following features:

Use of Numbers
Use of ASCII characters
Main focus on benefits
Offer proof or credibility
Usage of quotes
Questions asked
A strong offer is made
Call to action is included

The Money Spent on Ads: A Case Study

Even though some people claim there are many drawbacks to Google AdWords, the money spent on Ads by different sectors states otherwise. Almost all the business sectors have spent the significant amount of money on online advertising through the Google service which tells us that there is a large impact on people due to this online marketing/ advertising.

Amount spent by Finance and Insurance sector on Google pay-per-click ads: $4.0 Billion
Amount spent by Retailers & General Merchandise sector on pay-per-click ads: about $2.8 Billion
Amount spent by Travel and Tourism sector on PPC advertising with the help of AdWords: $2.4 Billion
Amount spent by Jobs & Education sector on Google AdWords ads: $2.2 Billion
Amount spent by Home and Garden sector on AdWords service: $2.1 Billion
Amount spent by Computer and Consumer Electronics sector on AdWords PPC ads: $2.0 Billion
Amount spent by the Vehicles sector on Google advertising: $2.0 Billion
The amount spent by Internet and Telecommunications sector on Google ads: spent $1.7 Billion
Amount spent by Business and Industrial sector on Google PPC ads: $1.6 Billion
Amount spent by Occasions and Gifts sector on ads: $1.2 Billion

Source: https://www.wordstream.com/articles/google-earnings

The use of Google AdWords | What & Why

AdWords is Measurable and Flexible

AdWords come equipped with a lot of PPC metrics so that you can check what is working and what is not. It also can be used to show your ad for specific keyword searches, view detailed information (product images, contact info, links, directions), filter the audience on different aspects and grant access to non-search websites like YouTube, Gmail, etc.

More speed than SEO

Unlike SEO, AdWords does not take a long time to see the results. Once the campaign is live, ads will start appearing, and instant results can be observed. This can also help you to build up an effective better SEO campaign.

Controllable costs for Advertising

A daily limit on cost can be set in your online advertising campaign which will help you to stay within the total budget. This limit can be increased and decrease according to your wish.

Get ahead in the competition

Use of AdWords will help you to get ahead in competition as you will be appearing in the top search results and getting a lot of clicks. Suppose, if your competitors are also using AdWords service, the only way to beat them is by staying in the game.

Increased Brand Awareness

In addition to boosting the market, the use of AdWords will create a name for you in the market. The awareness is increased, and people usually tend to buy things whose brands they are usually aware of.

Gmail – Email marketing

The use of AdWords allows you to reach customers through the email platform also. Since 2015 Gmail ads are in use and cost less compared to search ads.

Performance measurement

Unlike the traditional means of advertising like newspapers, cable tv, brochures, etc. the performance of AdWords ads can be monitored. Monitoring helps to create changes and offers scope for improvement. Some of the things that can be monitored are people who clicked on the ad., leads generated, traffic from AdWords to the site, cost per lead, etc.

Explore more

Google AdWords helps you to explore more and in-depth. You can find out how many pages of our site have been visited, duration of visit, the bouncing rate of your page, new visitors, repeat visitors, etc. with the help of Google Analytics.

Is Google AdWords suitable for everyone’s use? Or who can use them?

One must not go for Google AdWords just because they have seen it to be useful to some other person. You must first find out if it is suitable for the kind of business you are involved in and if it is then the next step is figuring out what types of ads. can be of use to you.

Google AdWords can be of your use only if these criteria are met:

Only if you have an online audience for your product or service.
If the search terms or keywords which are related to your area of business are searched online often. This can be found out with the help of Google’s Keyword Planner.
Whether articles related to your service or industry are published online by online bloggers and magazines
Whether Google displays relevant search results related to your keywords
If your rival competitors are also investing in online marketingthrough paid or unpaid means.

Top 10 PPC Management Firms of AdWords

Ignite Visibility 5060 Shoreham Place, #260, San Diego, CA 92122
Directive Consulting Orange County, California
Jellyfish Baltimore, Maryland
Galaxy Weblinks Cambridge, Massachusetts
Powerweave Columbia, Maryland
Hanapin Marketing Bloomington, Indiana
USA Marketing Associates Mansfield, Massachusetts
Jumpfly Elgin, Illinois
Agency PPC Chicago, Illinois
ZeroCompany Dana Point, California

Source: http://www.10bestppc.com/companies/adwords/

Drawbacks of AdWords

Unawareness: Even the perfect things will have one or two drawbacks so does Google AdWords. Even though it works so well, it has been observed by a study conducted that about 40% of the online consumers are not aware that the Google AdWords are advertisements. Most searchers usually skip the AdWords search results thinking it to be something unrelated or spam. This is a major drawback as it directly goes against its very own purpose.

Alternatives to Google AdWords: The Yahoo Bing Network: the YBN accounts for about 29% of online searches in the United States. Its own data shows that the searches made on the YBN spend about 23% more on the same sites from other search engines

Search engine optimization: SEO includes all the processes, methods and tactics to bring your website to the top and rank high in the results of search engines. If you have an awesome SEO, there won’t be any need for an option for the paid ad. services. But experts suggest that both SEO and online ads. are vital in the area of online marketing and is effective differently.

In The End

Since Google AdWords is a powerful way to reach out to your audience, we can’t find a reason to not do it. In addition, we recommend that you use Google Analytics when you start your Adwords campaign. Google Analytics is a tool to review your ad strategy in more detail than the standard Adwords data.

If you have any useful information to add to it, feel free to share in the comments below.

July 19, 2018 1 comment

Miscellaneous

50 Catchy Giveaway Slogans That Are Sure To Attract Audience

written by Khushi Srivastava

A key marketing goal for all kinds of companies, big or small, is to find successful ways to engage with their customers. Engagement facilitates two-way communication and two-way communication has considerable advantages, for companies, over one-way communication.

Giveaways are a great way to entice customer engagement. They are freebies that companies give to all or select consumers for different reasons. Giveaway campaigns are generally promotional tools and have many benefits attached to it. Here are some of the benefits of a giveaway campaign in general:

They are a great networking tool.
They are one of the best and simplest lead generation strategies.
They offer surprisingly cost-effective and time-efficient promotional strategies.
They facilitate great product/service exposure.
They provide brands with great ways to entice brand loyalty.
They give brands an opportunity to communicate a fun and exciting image of themselves.

Two key components of a digital giveaway campaign are the giveaway slogan and the prize itself. A great combination of the two can help companies build very successful giveaway campaigns. The prize has to be something that customers will want; something useful, something fresh, something unique. At the same time, to get customers’ attention, the giveaway slogan has to overcome the cliché expectations that are set for it by the customers themselves.

Here’s where we come in. You decide the prizes and we will give you some great giveaway slogans that you could improvise or directly use for your campaigns.

50 Best Catchy Giveaway Slogans

It’s Giveaway O’Clock.
It’s Giveaway Fever.
I hear ‘Giveaways’.
Warning! Giveaways Coming Your Way!
Who Doesn’t Love A Giveaway?
Giveaway Alert!
Happiness Is A Great Giveaway.
Everyone Loves A Good Giveaway.
Ho-ho-ho! Giveaways For All!
Just Keep Calm And Accept This Giveaway.
Yup, It’s For Free. No T&C Attached.
You Like Us. We Love You. Here’s A Giveaway, What To Do?
Don’t Panic. It’s Just A Giveaway.
Sign Up & Stand A Chance To Win.
Are You In-It To Win-It?
An Epic Person Deserves An Epic Giveaway!
Sign Up, It’s Never Too Late!
Here’s An Opportunity To Add Another Giveaway To Your Collection.
Sign Me Up!
I Spy A Giveaway.
Spreading The Love With Giveaways!
Pin It To Win It!
It’s Your Friendly Neighbourhood, Giveaways!
Giveaways Guaranteed For All.
It’s Not A ‘Treat’, It’s A Giveaway.
Limited Giveaways! Hurry Now!
Sign Up Before It’s All Gone!
Special Giveaway Offer Only For You!
Pay Nothing, Just Accept.
Exclusive Giveaway Offer.
Buy Nothing But Get Something For Free.
Award-Winning Giveaways!
These Are Giveaways. Unavailable At Our Nearest Outlet.
Yes, We Excel At Giving Away Free Stuff.
Here’s What You Want, What You Really-Really Want. A Giveaway!
Not Our Birthday, Just Giving Away Free Stuff.
Guess Who’s Our Favourite?
A Surprise Awaits You. Just Click.
Don’t Buy, This Is Not A Lie.
Hi, Nice To Meet You. My Name Is Giveaway.
Knock-Knock. Who’s There? Giveaways!
The Best Things In Life Are For Free.
Here’s Something To Prove To You That You Are Always In Our Minds.
Sign In For A Surprise That’s Better Than Gin.
Hello Kin. Please Sign In?
Can We Giveaway Something To You?
How About A Nice Giveaway?
What Do You Think About A Giveaway?
Giveaways Bring Goodluck, Seriously!
Fortune Cookie Says, Giveaway Time Is Approaching.

10 Best Brand Examples Using Giveaway Slogans

No two giveaway campaigns can ever be the same. Copying a successful brand giveaway campaign is difficult simply because giveaways differ from brand to brand and hence, the impact of the prizes too, differs. Instead of copying the strategy, it’s better to draw inspiration from such successful campaigns.

The campaigns illustrated below are all known for their ingenious use of giveaway slogans and overall success.

10. Qwertee (Free T-Shirts Giveaway, Facebook Campaign)

Qwertee chose to operate this giveaway campaign focusing on simplicity. People just had to like their Facebook page to stand a chance to win a free giveaway, in this case, the giveaway being their t-shirts. The goal of the campaign was to get to 100,000 likes for their Facebook page. Instead, the campaign ended up getting 270,000 likes!

Giveaway Slogan: “Win 30 Free TEES from Qwertee.com and do no laundry for a month”.

Reason Behind Success: It’s smart, clear-cut and witty. It creative and indirectly incentivizes people to participate in the contest by highlight a unique benefit of winning the giveaway prize.

9. Dove (Giveaway Being Personal Recognition, Facebook)

The ‘Real Beauty Should Be Shared’ campaign run by Dove is one of the most successful social media giveaway campaigns ever. It was unique in every sense of the word. Instead of offering a materialistic giveaway, Dove promised to giveaway ‘social and personal recognition’ to its participants. It was a simple fill-in-the-blank contest which required the entrant to answer questions about their friend’s beauty and what particularly made them beautiful in their eyes. The humanitarian edge of it set it apart from all other campaigns that had run online thus far.

Giveaway Slogan: “Tell us why your friend represents Real Beauty and you both could be the faces of Dove at Shoppers Drug Mart”.

Reasons Behind Success: It’s an extremely inviting slogan that calls people to enter the contest along with their friends. In addition to that, it’s unique, challenging and personal too.

8. Mark’s Work Warehouse (Free Movies For A Year Giveaway, Facebook)

Mark’s Work Warehouse designed this simple giveaway contest teaming up with Cineplex to help them give out a lucrative giveaway. By giving away free movies, they were able to attract numerous local people to their contest page, which was exactly what they were aiming for. The contest in itself was quite simple. It just required participants to fill up some basic information about themselves.

Giveaway Campaign: “Win Free Movies FOR A YEAR.”

Reasons Behind Success: Direct and straight to the point, it focuses participants attention directly on the prize which is very attractive in the case of this contest.

7. Macy’s (Gift Card Giveaway, Facebook)

The objective of this contest was to promote fitness clothes. However, the way it was designed and structured, it looked more like a fitness program promotion rather than a clothing promotion. That’s how Macy’s successfully got the attention of their target audience. It was a straightforward contest, users just had to ‘like’ the Macy’s Facebook page. Because of all of this the campaign was quite successful.

Giveaway Campaign Slogan: “Get Fit With Frank Sepe.”

Reasons Behind Success: It highlights an added giveaway to the initial shopping card giveaway, knowing fully well that the fitness class giveaway is a better way to grab the attention of their target audience.

6. Gillie’s Coffee (Gift Bag Giveaway, Facebook)

Here’s a perfect example of a nice and simple holiday giveaway campaign. It’s simple yet different. Instead of the normal cliched holiday designs and slogans, Gillie’s have done something a bit differently. It’s a nice striking holiday visual that reinforces the giveaway campaign with a heart-warming slogan. Winners would win a Gillie’s gift bag and the contest was run exclusively for their Facebook fans.

Giveaway Campaign Slogan: “Stocking Stuffer Giveaway!”

Reasons Behind Success: Creative in the way that it strikes the holiday relation, it gives a nice feel-good factor by reminding people of the gifting spirit. It’s extremely successful in promoting the holiday festivity.

5. Poof New York (Christmas Sweater Giveaway, Facebook)

The ‘Ugly Christmas Sweater’ giveaway contest was highly successful on account of the way it was executed. It was run as a referral based promotional campaign on Facebook and thus, word about the contest reached a lot of new consumers. The winner of the contest would literally win an ‘Ugly Christmas Sweater’.

Giveaway Campaign Slogan: “Enter To Win An Ugly Christmas Sweater”

Reasons Behind Success: Brutal & straightforward honesty. That’s the main reason for the success of this campaign slogan. It clearly tells consumers what to expect without sugarcoating anything.

4. Fairmont Hotels (Holiday & Gift Card Giveaway, Facebook)

One of the coolest bits about this contest, apart from the prize and layout of the page, was its structure. Participants were allowed to enter the contest multiple times, daily if they wished to do so. By building a giveaway contest of this fashion, Fairmont Hotels developed a substantial brand following and brand recall in the minds of its consumers. Furthermore, the entire contest for the giveaway was something that most people found interesting and hence, it garnered great popularity amongst the masses.

Giveaway Campaign Slogan: “Reveal Your Travel Personality & Win”

Reasons Behind Success: The slogan is exceptionally intriguing and inviting. It’s participative too, unlike other slogans. It leaves people with an unsatisfied curiosity which is the main reason behind its success.

3. My Sports Club (Free Membership Giveaway, Facebook)

Here’s an example of high modern age digital giveaway campaigns run. Much to its success, My Sports Club ran this campaign extremely professionally. It had multiple CTA button, a great layout, gym member testimonials and great imagery to attract audiences to the page. Its giveaway slogan too, was nice and crisp. The contest was quite successful racking up more than 7000 entries.

Giveaway Campaign Slogan: “Enter For A Chance To Win One Year Of Free Personal Training”

Reasons Behind Success: Direct and attractive, it clearly states what’s in it for participants who enter the contest. There’s absolutely no room left for confusion.

2. URDogs (Cash Giveaway, Facebook)

The contest took advantage of a popular existing Facebook trend: dog picture sharing. Owners, for some reason or the other, loved posting pictures of their dogs online and URDogs decided to entice engagement by capitalizing on this existing trend. A smart move, the photo-contest got more than 2000 individual entries. The cash prize being lucrative many people who were exposed to the contest and owned a dog participated willingly.

Giveaway Campaign Slogan: “Show off your Dog and enter to win!”

Reasons Behind Success: It was quite challenging and hit the personal pride that dog owners possess very successfully. By hitting the sweet spot, it was successful in bringing in a number of entries.

1. SuperHeroStuff.com (Gift Pack Giveaway, Facebook)

SuperHeroStuff.com ran this very successful and simple giveaway campaign just before the Thanksgiving festivities set in. Festivals are great occasions to giveaway stuff especially if the festival has a gift-giving culture tied down to it. This giveaway campaign revolved around the most basic Thanksgiving question. “What are you thankful for?” And, its simplicity proved to be one of the major reasons behind its success. The campaign gathered around 1500 responses approximately and was therefore adjudged a success.

Giveaway Campaign Slogan: “What Are You Thankful For? Contest.

Reasons Behind Success: It’s straightforward and is hugely successful in establishing the Thanksgiving festival connect. Since it’s framed as a question it gives the readers a degree of importance which initiates them to participate in the contest.

Conclusion

Giveaways can play an important role in a brand’s marketing strategy when used right. We have already enlisted all the numerous advantages that a giveaway strategy has to offer to a brand. In this article, we have covered one main aspect of a giveaway strategy, the giveaway slogan.

The giveaway slogan is a crucial piece of the overall giveaway strategy. The key to mastering giveaway strategies is to find ways to marry campaigns and content seamlessly. While devising slogans, try to be creative and informative at the same time. Fluff is fine to a certain degree but avoids too much fluff. Too much fluff can ruin a perfectly good giveaway strategy.

As marketers, don’t be afraid to get creative. Let creativity guide you through all your marketing problems. Cliched’ as it may sound, creativity is the best and most foolproof of all marketing strategies. Hopefully, you found something of value in this article and learnt something from all the successfully executed giveaway campaigns done by various brands.

If you liked an idea that you saw on this page a lot, don’t copy it. Improvise on it instead!

July 17, 2018 0 comment

Content Marketing

3 Techniques To Build A Silo Structure For Your WordPress Website

written by Khushi Srivastava

WordPress websites are the hottest thing on the Internet, but few know about Silo-ing; an excellent technique which instantly ups your ranking on search engines and improves the organizational structure of your WordPress website. The need for WordPress websites to be effectively organized by linking keywords is viewed as the most sought-after SEO technique. In the simplest of terms, Silo Structuring refers to strengthening the navigability of your WordPress website manifold, so that it reads like a book to your website visitors and is effortlessly indexed by search engine crawlers. Although there are hundreds of guides on the Internet that meticulously explain WordPress Silo Structure Creation, the basic idea is lost to users new to the concept. This article provides a brief overview of all the fundamentals involved in building an effective Silo Structure for your WordPress; but before we jump into complex techniques, let’s understand what Silo-ing essentially means.

What Siloing means?

Siloing in the simplest definition is the ultimate way to organize your WordPress pages and posts by doing away with the hassles of categories and tags. Siloing is a manual process which if done to perfection will result in a highly organized WordPress website.

There are two crucial uses of implementing a Silo Structure for your WordPress website:

SEO Boost: With the Silo technique, you can be confident that you will have outperformed your WordPress SEO strategy. A Silo Structure creates highly interlinked content which considerably reduces the indexing time required for search engines to crawl your website. Thus, your website is SEO-ready with Siloing.
Backlinking: With a strong Silo Structure in place, you don’t have to worry about creating backlinks because your posts are all closely knit together resulting in over 80% backlinking done by the time you share a few posts. Since backlinks make all the difference to obtaining high search rankings, Siloing in WordPress demonstrates its high efficacy.

Breaking down the Silo Structure:

Building a Silo Structure for your WordPress website does not have a rule book that lists a step by step guide. Siloing is a strategy that combines more than one optimization and organization technique, which collectively contribute to building an effective Silo. Although WordPress has categories, tags, and plugins that help in the effective organization of Posts and Menus, Siloing is much more advanced than these simple methods. 3 essential components form a part of the Siloing theory:

Keyword Research: Your Website needs a strong Keyword Research strategy.
Content Hierarchy: Your WordPress content must be categorized in a parent-child hierarchy as shown in the representation above. To do this, you must utilize WordPress Pages to arrange your content using the keywords obtained through keyword research.
WordPress Tools: Use Categories, Tags, Links, Breadcrumbs, and Plugins to bring order within your WordPress Content further.

The Relationship between WordPress and Siloing:

WordPress does not have an ultimate Siloing technique, but WordPress and the Silo Structure have had a very long and strong bond. There are Silo-based WordPress themes as well as Plugins that claim to introduce the Silo Structure into a WordPress site. But there are no special tools out there that will instantly help bring your content into a Silo Structure.

Actionable Steps to create a Silo Structure in WordPress

1. Start with Keyword Research:

Perform Keyword Research by starting out with the free Google Keyword Tools including;

The Google AdWords Keywords Tool
The Google Analytics Organic Report
The Google Analytics SEO Queries Report
Competitor Keyword Ranking.

Here are a few excellent ideas to have a robust Keyword Research Strategy best suited for Siloing:

Obtain Longtail Keywords and Secondary Keywords
For each parent page, get up to 5 Keywords to serve as subtopics.
Ensure that your keywords are relevant to the purpose of your niche, are popular in your niche, and all have high traffic.

2. Get Organizing:

When it comes to organizing the posts and pages to form a Silo Structure, there’s no other way than to get your hands down and dirty. The organization process has the following essential stages:

Silo Content Creation and Organization:

Create WordPress Pages which will serve as your Silo Pages. In these pages, add epic content regarding your niche. Plan your Content around the Keywords procured from Keyword Research. Plan how you will map out all the information in your website content using the keywords into an organized architecture. While creating content, focus on writing more evergreen posts (content that you don’t have to update or rewrite more often). Research well and add relevant information pertaining to your niche in your posts. Incorporate long-tail keywords and secondary keywords to make your content SEO rich.

Silo Pages and Supporting Blog Posts:

Next comes Blogging. Note that Silo Pages and Blog Posts are different but will mutually support each other. When it comes to Blog Posts, you don’t need to churn a mindless one every other day. Your Blog Posts must be used for your Silo Structure and must be centered around the main silo keyword. Under each Silo Page, you will need a minimum of 3 supporting blog posts.

3. The Art of Interlinking:

Interlinking holds the high priority in the Silo Structure. Interlinking makes for a close-knit website structure that’s bound to get maximum attention by search engines. Interlinking in the Silo Structure has basic ground rules that are simple enough and intuitive if you think about the overall effect they have on the site:

All Silo Pages must be linked to the Homepage and this is imperative as the first step in successful interlinking.
Parent Silo Pages must link to their child pages as a rule.
Supportive Posts must link to their parent pages in the same Silo.

Exceptions:

Child Pages may not link to cousin pages but may link to aunt/uncle pages, and always to the Main Silo.
Supportive Posts mustn’t link to Parent Pages in a different Silo.

Limit Link Count:

Each page must have minimal links and most of the links must point to the main Silo landing Pages. The links that do point to the silo pages must have anchor text with your relevant keywords. The reason you need to limit links on each page is so that the most important Silos are interlinked, and your search engine rank is not brought down.

Additional Silo Strategies:

1. Powerful Silo Landing Pages:

Your Silo Landing Pages will make all the difference to the effectiveness of your Silo Structured WordPress website. In order to make powerful landing pages that get you high search rankings on Google and attract traffic, the following tips will prove most useful:

Create Dynamic Content:

The Landing Pages for your Silo Structure must not only contain highly unique content but must regularly receive brand-new dynamic content to keep up the freshness of your site, thus getting it all the attention from Google.

Changing how the Category Page works for your WordPress:

In an un-Siloed WordPress website, a Category Page typically only lists sub-categories which is not very useful to our Silo strategy. To put the Category Page of your WordPress to good use, you will need to make a few changes to the category.php code for your WordPress theme. Here is the list of steps to follow to change category.php:

Add a unique Category Description for your Category Page. Although the Category Description does not allow for HTML Content, with the use of a suitable plugin you can add HTML in the form of Links and Images to further improve the Category Description’s utility.
Interlink Child Silo Pages for the category in the Category Page.
Use the Sticky Posts Feature to add in a few relevant posts in the Category Page.

Here is a visual representation of what your Category Page should look like:

Source: http://scratch99.com/wordpress/wp-seo/siloing/

2. Having an official Home Page:

Your site needs a Home Page which also needs content that will describe and navigate to the top-level Silo Pages. To do this, you can use the ‘Static Home Page’ function in WordPress where you can input content that describes and is relevant to the main silo pages. Don’t forget to interlink the main Silo Pages here.

3. Fixing the Recent Posts Sidebar Widget to be inclusive of Silo Strategy:

The ‘Recent Posts Sidebar Widget’ in WordPress generally lists the most recent posts published on your WordPress website. When this widget is added to a Silo Page, it breaks the uniform Silo structure by interlinking to posts in other Silo Pages. To make this widget list posts from the current Silo page alone, the following code will work best when inserted into your function.php:

// initialise widget

function sjc_silo_widget_init() {

if ( function_exists( ‘register_sidebar_widget’ ) && function_exists( ‘register_widget_control’ ) ) {

register_sidebar_widget( ‘Latest Silo Posts’, ‘sjc_silo_latest_widget’ );

}

add_action( ‘plugins_loaded’, ‘sjc_silo_widget_init’ );

// create widget

function sjc_silo_latest_widget( $args ) {

$sidebar_category = get_the_category();

// if we have a category and we’re on a normal post / page / cpt page call the function

if ( $sidebar_category[0] && ! is_front_page() && is_single() ) {

extract( $args );

sjc_silo_latest_content( $sidebar_category[0], $before_widget, $after_widget );

}

// echo the sidebar – called by widget, can also be called directly

function sjc_silo_latest_content( $this_sidebar_category = null, $before_widget = null, $after_widget = null ) {

global $post;

if ( ! empty( $this_sidebar_category ) ) :

$posts_in_this_category = get_posts( ‘category__in=’ . $this_sidebar_category->cat_ID . ‘&exclude=’ . $post->ID );

if ( count( $posts_in_this_category ) > 0 ) { ?>

<?php echo $before_widget; ?>

<h2 class=”widget-title”>Latest from <?php echo $this_sidebar_category->cat_name; ?></h2>

<?php foreach ( $posts_in_this_category as $sidebar_value ) : ?>

<li><a href=”<?php echo get_permalink( $sidebar_value->ID ); ?>” title=”<?php echo $sidebar_value->post_title; ?>”><?php echo $sidebar_value->post_title; ?></a></li>

<?php endforeach; ?>

</ul>

<?php echo $after_widget; ?>

Notes on Silo Implementation for Unstructured WordPress Site

Once you’ve realized the immense potentiality of a Silo structured WordPress website, you may want to incorporate Silo for your existing website containing existing content. In order to implement Silo for an existing site that’s receiving traffic and ranking for keywords (although poorly), the following tips will come handy:

Find out what Keywords your site ranks for and turn them into sub-niches.
Map your existing blog posts in a way that they sit under a single category rather than a few different categories. Each category must contain at least 3 blog posts so make this change for all the posts on your existing site.
Your Category Names must match your Silo names. Categories that do nothing to improve your Silo Structure must be removed.
Edit your Pages to add keyword content and interlink sub-posts and sub-silos in them.

Silo Structure Facts

Here are a few interesting facts about Siloing in WordPress which will be helpful while you’re at it:

The Right Conditions for Siloing:

So, when do you know its time to Silo your WordPress site? Is Siloing an option or are there indications that tell you it’s time to reorganize your ordinary site into a Silo Structured site? You know Siloing can save the day for you under the following circumstances:

Your Site targets few keywords.
Your Site is chaos in the flesh and everything including posts, pages, categories appear highly disorganized.
You have a specific page that you want to rank highly for keyword(s).
Your site seems averse to Organic Traffic.
You’re starting out on creating a brand-new WordPress website. This is an excellent opportunity to own a high ranking, beautifully SEO-optimized WordPress website by adding Silo implementation to your development strategy from scratch.

The Indispensable Benefits of Siloing:

Siloing is highly recommended for all WordPress sites. The benefits are too great to be ignored.

For one, Siloing is a very safe method with no deceptive strategies to outwit Google. As such, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from Sioing your WordPress site.
With Siloing, Organization is at its peak and all your content and information is neatly placed and waiting for Google to sniff it out. A Silo Structure has many similarities to an Information Architecture Model which renders it high appeal.
Silo Structure is a friend of SEO and with this structure in place, you can rest assured that your SEO game is on point.

To Sum Up

Websites need regular maintenance and updation, and this fact holds relevance to a Silo Structured WordPress Site as well. If you neglect your site, search rankings will drop before you realize. This is attributed to the fact that keyword rankings and search algorithms change every other day and your site must adapt to these changes as soon as they arrive. With a Silo Structure in place, ongoing maintenance becomes mandatory. Perform Keyword Research every time you obtain new content to add to your site. Add new content to appropriate Silos and weed out everything that attempts to spoil or bring down the strength of your overall Silo Structure.

July 13, 2018 0 comment

Content Marketing

INFOGRAPHIC: 6 Easy Ways To Build A Powerful Personal Brand

written by Khushi Srivastava

There’s no better time to build a personal brand with content marketing than NOW.

With content marketing at the rise, this marketing type is outperforming traditional marketing. Today, it is not just about the business or brand as an entity. Personal brands are becoming more influential.

Advertisements and brands are omnipresent. Owing to the Internet, it is quite easy to build a brand through marketing. But is it enough to get you what you aim for?

To the marketers, Personal branding is becoming more of a necessity in order to grow as a business as well as an individual.

The practice of marketing yourself, your career and your experience as a brand is called ‘Personal branding.’ It helps establish a position and create the impression among your prospects. This could be in a form of a tagline, writing, logo, image, video or even your product. Personal branding involves creating a value statement that represents your purpose.

Check out six easy ways to build a personal brand with content marketing to grow and prosper.

PRO TIP: You can always seek help from the content experts to provide you high-quality content that is beneficial in a long run.

If there any other way that worked for you to build your personal brand? Let us know in the comments below.

July 11, 2018 1 comment

Case Studies

10 REAL CASE STUDIES To Increase Organic Traffic With Blogging by 850%

written by Khushi Srivastava

Blogging has evolved tremendously since 1994 when the first blog was written. Today around 53% of the marketers rely on content purely to drive traffic to an official blog. The percentage clears all the doubts about the blog being a reliable channel to drive traffic to your website.

Out of 3 billion active websites, 650 million are active blogs that range from official blogs to entertainment blogs. The question that remains unanswered is how many of them are successful and WHY?

You may start a blog for multiple reasons, but the goal remains the same as always.

We witness bloggers developing quality content, adding visual content, posting frequently and what not to drive revenue. There are hundreds of blogs proclaiming to reveal the secret behind successful bloggers. The hard fact is there is no magic potion to make a blog successful; it needs your brain and heart put together to make it work. One thing that comes easy to you in the ecosystem of blogging is learning from the leaders who made it to the top.

Over the last few years, blogging got its share of recognition as a potent marketing tool for the enterprises also. A well and strategically built blog play a pivotal role in any organizations growth today but what is important is to understand the strategy that will work for you. As the blog can be easily propagated over the social media channels, they both share a symbiotic relationship to increase the website traffic. With each company today having a dedicated blog page or using the acronym knowledge, we are seeing blogging going a long way to bring traffic to websites. As a very lost cost incurring channel as compared to the jitter SEO techniques, blogging establishes you as a subject matter expert who imparts knowledge to the visitors. This is a trust developing channel that is far more valuable than just ranking high with nothing to offer.

Learn From These Case Studies

Check out these 10 spot-on case studies, purely backed by stats of how they increased the organic reach of the blog & increase the organic traffic:

#1 – 850% increase in sales leads – Louis E. Page

Louis E. Page blogging success is a perfectly-quoted example of what a blog can do your business with just organic traffic. Louis E. Page did enough of groundwork to understand what his target audience was looking for. This is where many of the bloggers of the year 2018 fail. Most of them run into a rat race trying to copy the competitor’s strategy and staying limited. The best part of blogging is that you are open to unleash your creativity to your audience and that is what Louis E. Page an old-school marketer did.

Source: Louispage.com

Key takeaway:

Louis E. Page remained consistent with developing valuable content like a white-paper on the How to build a horse paddock using Woven-wire fencing that alone received 1500 downloads. It was pure organic traffic that downloaded the Whitepaper because it was an exceptional content that the audience was looking for. What we found unique about his blog page is that there is no skimmed knowledge, each blog is well detailed and offers a small Question and answer section at the end of the page that saves the blog visitors time of hopping to other websites or FAQs page for better understanding. The blog projected the company as a trustworthy source of information in fencing.

#2 – A single blog increased landing page traffic by 59% – Snack Traffic

It may sound unusual because it is. Not because it is not possible but no one does it so perfectly and that is why reaching 59% jump in traffic figure seems unusual. Snack traffic proved that there is no need to stay in the crowd. While the blog page was not bringing any revenues, the SEO team sat down to churn the core of their blogging technique that leads to the facts that they were using keywords where the traffic was very high but the keyword buyers were big fishes who were ranking very high on these keywords.

What they did after that is what everyone must follow. They studied the content their competitors were posting and as was expected it was found that the competitors were purely focusing on ranking high without offering any value in their content. They engaged with the bloggers who wrote for them and with the customers and came up with a blog that had listed the most concrete wellness programs from the actual buyers.

Source: backlinko.com

Key Takeaway:

It may sound like it took one blog to earn 10,000 blog page traffic every month but it took deep competitor analysis, right keyword selection, and engagement with real customers to attain those amazing stats.

#3 – A Whooping 2.7 times increase in website traffic- Kinaxis

Kinaxis had been blogging for quite some time but were not quite sure if their efforts were yielding results. When they planned to move to social media for marketing, hardly did they know that their blogs would help them garner a lot of customer attention. The key remained the same to develop highly customer focused blogs rather than mere promotional content.

This approach of blogging led to 3.2 times increase in their traffic conversion. A unique technique they used to change the landscape of blogging was instead of just Kinaxis employees were blogging on the official page, they opened up gates for leading industry experts to write blogs on their official page.

Source: Kinaxis.com

Key takeaway:

A new approach to traditional blogging where their website took credit of experts putting across their articles on the official blog page leads to a tremendous increase in traffic.

#4 – From 0 to 1.5 million footfall monthly – Buffer

Let us talk realistically. Buffer did not reach this figure overnight. It took them around six years of hard work to achieve consistency in their monthly traffic. They lost and learned over the journey of 6 years and that is how they are now the best content developers in their niche. They kept a record of how each of their posts performed. They tracked down the engagement, stay time, shares, likes and more of each blog that went online. It was derived that long-form educational blogs were bringing in a major share of monthly traffic and Buffer team kept on getting better at it as they learned and adapted quickly.

Source: Bufferapp.com

Key Takeaway

Buffer’s blog is all about keeping up with the trends in their niche and bringing across statements of influential experts in their niche. Working with a highly focused approach, the team optimizes the headline of the post and focuses on updating the old well-performing posts with valuable updates and republishing them

#5 – 15% increase in their traffic – Hinda Incentives

Hinda Incentives plugged in the opportunity of zero availability of informational and conversational blog in its business niche of corporate incentive programs. They began with a purely conversational blog which would help customers make an informed decision in buying incentive programs. They garnered a lot of customer attention by being the first mover in this space and till today they remain the center of all the conversations that happen on the blog.

Key Takeaway

If your services are yet to be on a blogging platform, start one today and be steady with educational blogs that allow the subscribers to talk discuss various aspects so that they are able to take a right decision just like with Hinda Incentives, the monthly website visit is around 1000.

#6 – Built the right content to earn backlinks – The Renegade Pharmacy

Mere blogging the traditional way will not work wonders. A business must evolve with the changing landscape of blogging and that is what Renegade Pharmacy did and earned more than 1,000 organic backlinks. Creating an infographic that went viral 2 months after it was posted on their blog, earned The Renegade Pharmacy its share of glory. The infographic talked about how Coke effects your body.

The infographics earned lots of backlinks for them, coming from authority websites and that led to an increase in the number of keywords for which The Renegade Pharmacist website ranked for.

Source: Ahrefs.com

Key Takeaway

Renegade Pharmacist became a domain authority with a simple infographic that put together what all the audience already knew but the Renegade Pharmacy pulled out a bigger picture out of it that was innovative and thought-provoking. This type of content intrigues the audience and benefits the blog page. One has to be innovative in every 2-3 posts.

#7 – Infographics driven blog page – KISSmetrics

Achieving the ladder rank of 2.5 million visitors and 4,000 backlinks from mere 47 infographics – Is it common?

In less than a year is no child’s play. There is some serious blogging going on KISSmetrics in a unique way. Yes, they do long-form educational and informational blog post but did you notice the difference? They focus a lot on developing infographics offering the readers a clear picture of what is going around in the article.

Their infographics talk about data that is available to them and represent it to its readers in the most simple and digestible form. With the quality of infographics, they go their links from authority websites like Forbes and Huffington Post at the cost of just building the infographic.

Source: QuickSprout.com

Key Takeaway

Visual representation of data is the best way to make your content more presentable and readable. KISSmetrics focused on creating the best infographics that are self-propagated pieces of content.

#8 – A single post received 4,865 views in a view by only organic traffic – Vero

You read it right, the single post led to 953 email signups and 256 free trial signups for Vero. The first look at the page reveals a lot about the hard work that went into the creation of the single post.

It was one of its kinds with the most appropriately priced keywords with right traffic density and an information-wise rich 5000+ word blog led to the amazing success. Easily navigable post that connected so well to the practical world made waves of a sensation among the audience. As per an email marketing organization, the post was shared more than 5,000 times on social media and earned multiple backlinks to the website.

The prime player part of the Vero content strategy is that they focus on developing highly actionable content. They do develop long-form content but they highlight the actions one needs to take very prominently so that if a reader is in a hurry he knows the key points and can act on it immediately. This way they sacrifice the stay time of the blog to earn market credibility as a blogger who intends to make things easier for his readers.

Source: Backlinko.com

Key takeaway

They spent time planning the blog content and extracted the most valuable data to back their blog. It was a beautifully woven content that required a meticulous effort of bloggers, market researches, and graphic designers. Vero’s single post success if a proof of a quality effort with an innovative approach offers 360-degree coverage to the requirements of a viral blog.

#9 – The new blog follows up competitor success – Honorable mention

While we do focus on being innovative and creative, it is important not to lose focus on what your competitor is up to and that is what Honorable mention did to achieve 800 views on a single blog post. It was quite a marketing technique rather than the blogging technique but if it worked for them, it could work for you too. The team Honorable mention piggybacked the success of a competitor blog post.

What they did was, put their thoughts about the competitor blog post in their own blog. They pointed to our few things that could have been better and offered a page to readers to get into a conversation that leads to a grand success.

Source: Socialtriggers.com

Key Takeaway

It is not a strongly recommended strategy but keeping your eyes open to what your competitor is up to and it may do no harm to follow up on their glory and win some leads for your website.

#10 – 70 times higher return on investment – Slidebean

If you ask as to exemplify targeted advertising, it would be Slidebean that is currently at 50,000+ website visitors every month. Slidebean laid a strong emphasis on keeping its blogging roots strong by selecting the right domain name. While they used advertising partly to get traffic to their blog post, they focused on segmented marketing and precise keyword selection that would bring them maximum traffic.

The team kept on improvising its blogging techniques and decided to keep the content real so that the audience would connect with what they are reading. How they achieve it? They choose the topics and competitors rather than just working randomly.

It took them 12 months to reach 70 times more Return on investment by reaching qualified traffic.

Source: Slidebean.com

Key takeaway

You do not always need to buy backlinks and heavy traffic keywords to achieve astounding success. But a well put content strategy and focused effort makes sure your money does not go down the drain. After they strategize the content, its summary and writers persona, they always give it a thorough read to pick out any gaps that could lead to the saturation of the audience.

Bonus Tip for Multiplying the Organic Reach of your Website

Value your content

Cisco, the leader of networking solutions recently has always been active on social media and its blogging channel. They were yet to find its impact in real data so the team decided to launch a new router product and market it only via its content strategy that is to develop simple technical content that is of great value and unparallel. This content was shared only over social media channels and helped Cisco reach the anticipated goals shot by just $100,000 and this campaign grabbed its position in top five launches of the company’s history.

It was pure good quality content that did the job for Cisco.

To Wrap Up

A successful blog is an ideal mix of traditional blogging approach and trending strategies to achieve the success you desire. If you plan to choose content marketing overpaid SEO, the prior requires much less investment but a little more focused effort to yield fantastic results that propagate with the same level of effort.

The factors that drive content marketing is Keyword research, backlink building, developing infographics, long-form non-promotional content and upgrading the existing content. Put a good thought into the headline of your content as it is the face of what lies inside and make sure you post with consistency or your return on investment will drop. Creating a blog and mere publishing will not work; you need to share it along the powerful social media accounts that establish you as a market influencer. If you wish to gain more organic traffic for your blog, your strategy will play the pivotal role.

INFORMATION SOURCE:

http://www.louispage.com/blog
https://backlinko.com/white-hat-seo
https://blog.kinaxis.com/page/6/
http://blog.hinda.com/
https://backlinko.com/content-strategy
https://socialtriggers.com/new-blog-increase-traffic/
https://slidebean.com/blog/marketing/content-marketing-the-real-cost

July 10, 2018 0 comment

Freelance Writing Tips

13 Most Important Soft Skills Freelancers Need To Develop

written by Khushi Srivastava

There has been a rise in the freelance economy in the recent times. And this rise has brought a pool of freelancers who want to work in a flexible manner and are held responsible for their own success. They are given freedom to work according to their will and this, in turn, demands them to have soft skills like other professionals. Many a times freelancers deal with professional clients who are in the habit of adopting work ethics. So in order to build a long-term relationship with them, freelancers need to focus on soft skills.

13 Essential Soft Skills For Freelancers

Soft skills are necessary for freelancers to help them to create a first impression and ensure smooth communication with the clients and fellow freelancers. You can communicate in an effective manner which would help you to win contracts over the time. It is not just enough to have the expertise and technical know-how when working as a freelancer. One also requires a set of soft skills in order to handle the flexible work environment. Some small changes in habits and attitudes along with the professional skills would make a big difference.

Below we have listed some soft skills which should be adopted by a freelancer in order to succeed:

#1 – Discipline

When you work as a freelancer, you are your own boss and also there is no annoying co-worker sitting beside you who keeps a check on your work. This may look as an advantage but consequently, it turns out to be a disadvantage. You may become very lenient towards your work when there is no one to keep a check. There are always many distractions on the web which may keep you from working regularly. But if one is disciplined towards their work, all these hindrances will not matter.

It is important that you develop a habit of being disciplined and hit your deadlines, otherwise, clients would lose interest in you and won’t award you a job again. Lack of discipline would make you ruin your career as you won’t be able to handle the workload.

#2 – Communication skills

Communication is an essential part of freelancing because if you want to get work, you would have to communicate with your client. Be it through emails, Skype, video calling, messaging or any other form, you cannot avoid communication in the field of freelancing.

Good communication helps you to interpret your statements and understand the work provided by the client. This way you would be able to deliver the work according to client’s need. Handling all of their requirements and making them happy would put you in their good books which eventually would get you more work. If there is lack of communication, you would not be able to understand your client’s requirements. Regular communication would help you build trust between you and your client so that you both can work towards a common goal.

#3 – Teamwork

Every freelance project consists of a lot of freelancers working together. Like for a particular project someone would be responsible for the content, another person would look after web designing and a different person for SEO. All people working on a project would have to interact with one another if they want to collaborate. One must inculcate teamwork skills and understand their role and other freelancer’s contribution to the project. This would also help the client to smoothly carry on the work without any hindrance. Many times you would have to work with people who speak a different language, live in a different country or have a different approach towards work. Teamwork skills would help you to work with them seamlessly.

#4 – Organizational skills

When you work as a freelancer, you lack a proper organization working with you. So you need to have organizational skills if you want to get going. As there is no HR department, IT department or accounts department, you have to take care of all the tasks. It is only possible if you possess some organizational skills. As a freelancer, you are responsible for your work as there would be no project manager or team leader who can remind you of your duties.

Being organized means planning all your tasks and setting priorities. Once your schedule is on track, your productivity would also increase, which would eventually reflect in your work. Moreover, you would take less time to complete a particular task. You can get organized by setting milestones so that you know which task should be completed at that time. Your client would also be happy to receive his work on time. While Google Calendar can be used to keep a track of your deadlines, Outlook can be used to arrange all your files and folders.

#5 – Stress management skill

It is vital for you to deal with stress if you are working as a freelancer. While freelancing, you are not accompanied by any co-workers, so you have to cope up with all the workload and stress. Without stress management skills, you will break down under work pressure and deadlines. Stress is a huge problem for freelancers as there is a tough competition in the industry. There is a pool of freelancers available who would be ready to do a task at a lower price. Even when you are an expert in your field, you would be losing out on clients as they are getting work done at a lower price.

With stress management, you would be able to keep competing and getting the attention of new clients. Successful freelancers never fuss over small things and keep themselves occupied with work. They deal with all the distractions and maintain a balance between work and life. Stress is one such thing which can ruin your whole freelancing career. Always remember that there is also life outside freelancing which may be getting affected because of it.

#6 – Problem-solving skills

It is essential for a freelancer to be a good problem solver as problems occur unexpectedly and they must solve them in order to continue working effectively. Problem-solving skills means a person should be able to identify a problem, analyze it and then come up with a solution. As a freelancer, you would have to face many challenges like clients not paying on time, not getting time to work, not able to complete the work before deadline, working for very less amount, not getting good reviews etc. but you will have to recognize these problems and search for a solution to them.

The better you deal with your problems, the better freelancer you would become. Problem-solving also involves flexibility, many of your challenges would disappear if you are flexible with your working manner. No two clients are same, and every project would come with their own challenges. So you should be flexible enough to work in every kind of environment along with solving problems.

#7 – Presentation skill

Presentation technique not only applies to you but your work as well. You should present yourself in a professional manner and your work in an arranged way. There are many tools like projectors, powerpoint presentations, and charts through which you can present your work in a better way. In this era of competition, you need to stand out as sometimes even the best of the work is not appreciated due to a shabby presentation. Well-arranged work would also make it easier for your client to get an understanding of your task.

#8 – Time management

Whether you work at a small scale or a large scale, time management is a must. Time is valuable and you should know how to manage it properly. Before committing to your client, you should make time estimations according to the workload. Always keep some extra time in hand so you can complete your tasks before allotted deadline. Be picky about taking projects and manage your work according to time limitations. Overstuffing yourself with work would not only create a mess but would also prevent you from completing your work on time. Time management helps you to plan so there is no chaos in the end.

#9 – Networking skills

Being a freelancer, one should be good at networking, online or offline. As freelancers do not work on a monthly salary basis, they have to search for work themselves. Networking helps them to meet new people who by any chance may be looking for a freelancer to get work done. Through networking, you can easily find your potential clients who are related to your fields. Talking to new people and interacting with them online would be beneficial in the long run. Moreover, a freelancer should also be active on social networking sites to know about any freelancing requirement.

#10 – Research and development skills

As a freelancer does not have any research and development team, they have to do all of this work by themselves. This involves keeping themselves updated with the recent trends in freelancing market related to their fields. They also have to keep up with the latest technologies so that they can cope up with the cut-throat competition. Freelancers must also keep searching for new clients or else they may have to sit idle once their current project completes.

#11 – Public relationship skills

A freelancer does not have any PR team working for him. So he has to promote his freelancing business. He should be able to market his expertise and experience in the field so the potential clients can notice his work. It is crucial for a freelancer to inculcate public relation skills because good relations with clients would not only get them repeated orders but would also improve their goodwill in the market.

#12 – Professionalism

Although you are working as a freelancer, you must never forget professionalism while working with clients. One must always use professional language while communicating with their clients. Even while discussing work, professionalism should be maintained. You should also reply to your clients on time because making them wait is nothing but unprofessionalism. If you and your client disagree on anything, it should be solved by coming to a conclusion which lies in the interest of both the sides.

#13 – Positive attitude

Having a positive outlook is very important when you work as a freelancer. One should be optimistic about their work when they start a project. A positive attitude would help you to maintain a healthy relationship with your client as you would be satisfied with the pay and would also work with full zeal. If you are not positive about your work then you won’t be able to do full justice to it.

To Wrap It Up

Your freelancing career is a long journey along with a lot of adventures. And to survive in this journey, you must possess the above soft skills. It is not enough to be an expert in your field; you should also look at the other essential things along with it. The soft skills are the first thing that a client would notice about you, even before you start working on the project. So making a good impression, in the beginning, would keep the things smooth until the end. Freelancer is nothing but a one-man army because he himself has to inculcate the qualities of all the departments which a big company has. Soft skills help you to present the best version of yourself in front of the clients. Forgetting the importance of soft skills would not get you freelancing work anymore. Even if you think that you possess all the above skills, then also there is a space for some improvement. Keep working on the above mentioned soft skills and you will find yourself in a better place than before.

July 2, 2018 3 comments

Content Marketing

Content Gap Analysis : The Strategy That Will Change Your SEO Game

written by Khushi Srivastava

The quote ‘Content is King’ has been thrown one too many times around a marketer’s table. The backbone of any marketing strategy is its content. Similarly, the term SEO will seize to exist without a top-notch content strategy.

Building a content strategy that actually works is like a game of puzzles. Once you know what the missing piece is, all you have to figure out is where it goes. Finding these blind spots in your content strategy is an opportunity.

What Is Content Gap Analysis?

It is an intricate process to find a window of opportunity to improve and enhance the content on your website as a measure to increase customer relations.

You could find a gap in your buyer’s journey, buyer persona or even the information on your website. They all require a thought out content plan that does not deter the goal of the business. All of these lead to a content gap in your content marketing strategy. This, in turn, will hamper the relationship with the consumers or potential leads.

Before we head on to different ways to conduct an effective content gap analysis, let us come in terms with why it is beneficial.

Benefits of Content Gap Analysis:

A stellar content makes sure your website ranks organically on the search.
A great content plan can help outrank competitors by obtaining benefits the brand is currently not targeting.
Filling gaps in the content inventory can help drive more traffic and increase engagement organically.

Mentioned above are only a few of the benefits of content gap analysis. We will have a clearer approach once we venture into the methods on how to use it to better your websites SEO.

How to Perform an Effective Content Gap Analysis

The following are the surefire methods for content gap analysis for SEO.

Inventory Auditing

Performing an inventory audit entails grabbing data from all over the website and breaking them down into different levels to understand where the gap exists. Often the content we hold gets lost in translation within the buyer’s journey.

With the help of a customer’s experience loop, companies can figure out at what stage their content is at. The obvious step is to bring your customers to the awareness stage. The content you possess must tell you customer’s about who you are and what you do. Later stages include acquisition and then retention.

Keyword Audits

If your website has a massive amount of content, then the next step is to find out what your competitors are writing about, and you’re not. These keyword audits help in analyzing the top keywords the competitors are using to fare well on the search engines.

The first step is to ask yourself the right questions. ‘What is competition doing that I am not?’ ‘What is the bigger picture?’

This is termed as competitive analysis. In this method we know how high we want to rank; hence we scavenge for those keywords that will help us in doing so. A great way to do this is to look into your competitor’s keywords.

It is impractical to search their blogs and websites to find the keywords they are ranking well for. This where the various tools come into the picture. A few of the tools that could help achieve this are SEMrush, MutualMind and ahrefs.

At ahrefs.com you can perform a prefix on a URL or domain on their Site Explorer page. They have a ‘content gap’ sections that will compare keywords based on the URL inserted in the search column. And if you do not have a clear picture of who your competitors are you can always select the ‘Competing Domains’ button to find websites that rank for the similar keywords you use. Once the search is narrowed down, it will display a list of keywords ranking high on Google. The next smart step is to incorporate it into the content you wish to curate for your website.

Content Refresh

This step primarily involves updating the old content with new and fresh ideas that are more relevant to your business. One way to do this is to search for the blog that has generated maximum engagement amongst your customers. Use this link to perform yet another keyword audit as mentioned above. A list of a potential keyword which you could have used in your blogs will show up.

If you have a large website, with a lot of content, the trick is to look at it as one single entity. This way you can create a more thorough analysis without getting buried in details.

On a more general tone, identifying the keywords that could fare well for a content topic can help in unimaginable ways. For example, the blog title ‘How to make chocolate cake’ could be your top rated article on your website. The URL for this blog post is posted on the Site Explorer page and compared with the competitors URLs. A list of potential keywords is displayed along with its rank. For example, ‘No eggs’ or ‘No oven’ are a few keywords which are missing from your article but your competitors are using. You can now use these to enhance and update your blog content.

While updating old content, make sure the quality is as good as the current ones. It’s simple, lower the quality, lower the rank. Remember, not every keyword your competitor ranks for will work for your business. This is where prioritization comes into the picture. Trying to rank for every keyword your competitor does is never a wise move.

After the keyword analysis. If you will be adding 2-3 paragraphs of extra content in your blog, don’t forget to consider the design factors. Add in images, infographics, or even a video. One of the key steps during content refresh is link building. Various tools like ahrefs and Majestic help in doing so.

Document to Explore

Once you run the keyword analysis tool, the next step is to document them on an excel sheet or wherever you deem fit.

You can tabulate the data as shown above. A column for the keywords you wish to use, the type of keyword with regard to your business, the search volume and the keyword density. The information above will provide a clear picture on which keyword to focus first on. Before curating content, you must align your thought process to the customer’s needs and whether your content can provide them with solutions.

Of course, a more in-depth review on each keyword is a must. Once we have a more detailed look into the keywords, we can begin creating a stellar content marketing strategy. Different types of content like Blog posts, Infographics, Videos etc. must be incorporated depending on the title of the content. For example, ‘Top 10 chocolate cake recipes’ could be a blog post or a video. On the other hand, ‘Nutritional value of chocolate cake’ is best being an infographic as it resonates well with the topic.

Another stellar approach is to look into how the competitors are creating content for a specific keyword. Then figure out different ways to dominate that niche by creating content with a different approach. While selecting a competitor, choose the direct ones. There won’t be much of an opportunity to fill the gap if you select one too many competitors from different niches. Similarly, it is hard to analyze your competitor if they are from massive brands, as they deal with more than one type of product.

To Wrap Up

It takes a lot of effort to create content that ranks well in Google. The key is to not focus on just the rank but on the quality of the content. It must reach the audience to engage them and convert them to possible customers. A content gap analysis is one of the easiest ways to identify where and how your business can flourish. It is important you bridge this gap in your content strategy around the customer’s needs.

Never stop scrutinizing the quality and quantity of your own content. Performing a content gap analysis every forequarter will prevent you from missing out on the game. After you have documented your keyword analysis, marking which one works best for you and working around that will help in dominating your business niche. Add them all to our content strategy and see what works best for you.

At the final stage, you must ask yourself the following questions. ‘Does my content rank higher in Google search engines for my customer’s query?’ ‘Is my content doing a decent job in letting the search engines know what my company is all about?’

Always remember, just when you think your content is top-notch, there is a better one out there that ranks much higher than yours.

June 21, 2018 2 comments

Online Marketing

How Virtual Reality Marketing Can Contribute To The Success Of Brands

written by Khushi Srivastava

The field of marketing is witnessing a tremendous rise and is trying to incorporate numerous tactics to stay on top. Brands have been using many techniques over all these years but the innovation that is occurring in today’s world, as far as marketing is considered, is beyond our wildest imagination.

Virtual reality is a concept that was limited to entertainment and games earlier. But with the tremendous advancement in technology, it has spread its paws to the field of marketing too. Since many years, VR has played a crucial role in many areas. Let us take a look at what virtual reality marketing is and how it can be a significant advertising medium.

What is Virtual Reality?

Before straightaway diving into the details of virtual reality marketing, let us know what virtual reality is. Virtual reality is a technology that uses high-performance sensory equipment and computers that are used for the stimulation of bits of the imaginary worlds or the real world.

It enables us to experience environments that are unrealistic. Without even leaving the premises of your home, you can swim with fish, fly a plane or virtually go to any planet you like. The computers enable you to experience things that are not real. As you move around the space, your virtual world moves along with you. It takes the user in a different and a unique dimension.

Virtual Reality Marketing

What is Virtual Reality Marketing?

Brands and consumers can equally have access to the virtual reality technology. With the help of quality headsets powered by advanced smartphones, anyone can get immersed into the exotic world of virtual reality. Any brand with an aim to expand their territory must give virtual reality a go. VR campaigns can provide a massive gain to the organization apart from strengthening the client base.

In order to create an engaging and personalized interaction with consumers, most of the brands these days are experimenting with the use of virtual reality in marketing their products.

How Virtual Reality Can Be a Big Advertising Medium

Even though this concept is not in the mainstream yet, brands are increasingly beginning to take part in VR campaigns to uncover new marketing opportunities.

1. Enhanced Customer Engagement

With the help of VR, the customers are completely immersed and engrossed in an experience that intrigues them at a personal level. VR can be influential at an emotional and mental level due to close virtual contact with reality. The entire concept is highly engaging and has an enormous impact on the whole thinking level of an individual. It brings the brand closer to the consumers and also brings people closer to each other.

VR Marketing

The shared experience is what builds new relationships and improves the existing ones. It gives an insight into how the product is going to turn out and whether it is going to work properly or not. A successful virtual reality experience assures the customers that the product is useful to them, thus, increasing the sales and revenue generated. Increased revenue means increased profits for the company and an overall enhancement of the brand and its products.

2. The Programming Of Human Brain

Our brain is programmed in a way that it responds to virtual reality. Virtual reality experiences influence our minds at a deeper level. Total three parts of the brain control our reactions and perceptions: the reptilian brain which is responsible for primitive instincts, the limbic system is responsible for motivation, behavior, and emotions and the neocortex carries out the high-level thought process. Even though the content of your other marketing tactics is outstanding, it is next to impossible to appeal to all the three parts of the brain at the same time.

This being said, there is absolutely no doubt that VR marketing is one of the most effective promotional strategies. By providing your potential clients with an interactive virtual environment that gives a realistic experience, you nudge their brains, thus, prompting them to take some action.

This way, the chances of a positive reaction are increased as the audience are mesmerized owing to the enhanced experience. Instead of just seeing or listening to things, the customers can feel them working. They feel more connected to the brand. This acts as a trigger for reaction.

3. Versatility

Virtual reality can be used in various industries. Since it is a rare thing to use it as a marketing strategy, the brand which adopts this approach to marketing will definitely gain an edge over the others. Tech geeks are already familiar with the magical effect of virtual reality.

They already know the experience that the developers of the game provide. Just like VR is used in the entertainment and the sports industry, it can be easily implemented in various other niches as well. An example is, if you are having registrations done for a particular event, you can let your customers get a peek into the actual thing with the help of virtual reality. The conceptualization of experience can be created via virtual reality with ease.

VR marketing in 2018

4. Video Marketing

One of the most successful approaches that have proven their efficiency in the past is video marketing. When a product appeals to the customer base visually, the odds of sales drastically increase. Videos have always been a compelling and influential way to drive traffic to an e-commerce website. Now imagine this excellent strategy providing a 3D experience. Isn’t that amazing? The marketers will face no difficulty at all in illustrating their concepts and provide a better understanding of the product to people.

5. Rapid Growth

Without a doubt, VR is one of the most rapidly evolving technologies in the world. The explosive growth of VR is evident from the sales of VR gadgets that is ever increasing. The unprecedented rise is nothing unexpected. As more and more companies begin to create virtual content, the user base will keep on growing. The number of consumers displaying an interest in the VR gadgets is increasing day by day. Thus, the companies that start investing in providing VR experiences to their audience will be the ones on the top.

Top 3 Examples Showing The Impact Of Virtual Reality:

1. Pokémon Go

The game Pokémon Go took the world by storm in 2016. All you have to do is install the application and it enables you to search for a pokemon in the real world. The characters on the screen could carry out an interaction with your surrounding environment perfectly. With the sudden explosion of the user base, people started to spend more time on the game rather than various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. It soon became a sensation worldwide and almost anywhere, you could easily spot a person playing this game.

The various businesses began to purchase add spaces to attract more customers to their brand. In exchange for a nominal fee, companies started to see this game as a way of attracting a crowd. This was the first instance that made people realize how huge the impact of virtual reality can be. It is quite unbelievable how a virtual reality game could actually drive real customers to a store or a joint.

Virtual Reality marketing examples

2. IKEA

IKEA is a home design company that allows its customers to test the products virtually before they buy them. This home furnishing store has launched an app known as “Ikea Place” that enables people to test how a particular piece of furniture works for them in their own homes. This saves the store the trouble of trying to convince the customers via ads and blogs.

3. Volvo Test Drive

Racing games have always been favorites of gaming geeks. Now imagine the car your game character is driving is the one you are about to purchase and the feel you get while driving is a test drive. Volvo Test Drive has incorporated this feature as a Google Cardboard initiative. You can download the app even if you don’t have Google Cardboard. This move has brought Volvo in the big picture again and has made its services easily accessible.

To Sum Up

All in all, the use of virtual reality in the field of marketing has paved the way for new opportunities. In the past five years, we have seen an entirely new face of the world in the form of VR that we could have never imagined. In this tech-savvy world, the incorporation of VR can entirely revolutionize marketing, and the present situation of brands can improve to a great extent. By embracing virtual reality, you can avail of the benefits that come with an improved customer relationship and engagement.

As companies and brands grab on to this opportunity and a rapidly growing trend, the consumers have been consistently showing their support by encouraging and using the technology. Along with the technology, the user base is also on the rise. It seems as though the technology is serving us well and will continue to do so for years to come.

June 13, 2018 0 comment

Content Marketing Content Strategy

Thin Content: Easy Ways To Find It & Fix Low-quality Pages

written by Khushi Srivastava

The Google Algorithm is a tricky customer to deal with. Its updates are as frequent as a OnePlus phone release. Therefore; it’s hard to comply with it’s changing demands. Consider this: You get all your SEO strategies right. Still, the algorithm ensures that the all-important first page of Google eludes your website. Why?

Most probably, this because of ‘thin content’ issues of your website. Thin content is a fancy way of saying that the content on your website is of low quality. Prior to the Google Panda update; thin content was never penalized so severely. More often than not, it was overlooked. Thankfully, for the general audience, Google has addressed this issue and quality is again an important scoring factor.

First things first.

What’s ‘Thin Content’?

Look at it this way. You are the student. Google is the teacher. The content that you post on your website is like a submission of some sort. If Google doesn’t like your content or thinks that it’s not valuable; it classifies your submission as ‘thin content’. Again, in simple words, poor quality content is thin content.

So how does Google classify content and determine whether it’s thin or not? According to Google, thin content is content that’s:

Unoriginal or copied
Poor word count
Stuffed with keywords
Irrelevant subject matter when aligned to the topic
Lack of information
Unstructured content
Overstuffed with ads and popups

That’s the gist of exactly what thin content is and what it looks like. Given below are some pictorial examples:

Too Many Ads and Popups

Poor Word Count

Irrelevant subject matter. Search doesn’t align with the results. Hence, page 22.

Moving one step further. The importance of addressing a ‘thin content’ issue.

Importance of Addressing a ‘Thin Content’ Issue

Through the Google Panda update; Google is trying to bring about an overall improvement in the content quality online. Thus; thin content is penalized harshly. Its specific importance is underlined below:

Thin content has an adverse impact on the overall quality of a website. Websites with a lot of thin content have a low Google page rank.
Thin content doesn’t make for happy readers. When presented with unwanted content, people get frustrated and lose trust in a website altogether.
There’s a possibility that Google imposes a penalty upon you. Google strives to make quality content available online. Thin content is the exact opposite. Hence, Google has the power to impose a penalty on such websites either manually or algorithmically.

In one of the paragraphs above; we have briefly covered how Google identifies thin content. All the sorting is done by Google’s algorithm. Sadly; there’s no algorithm as such to help individuals identify their thin content web pages. We have to do it manually.

How To Find Thin Content Web Pages

‘Content audit’ is a process wherein one reviews all the web pages that make the website. The general norm in companies is to conduct this audit on a quarterly or half-yearly basis; whatever works best for you. It’s through this process that one can identify the web pages with thin content. The challenging bit with a content audit is when there are a lot of web pages to audit. When the number of web pages is less; it’s a fairly simple process. However, for websites with a large number of web pages, this process can get quite confusing and irritating.

Patience is key.

The step-by-step process to conduct a content audit is given below:

1. Go Through Each Webpage

Content audit is a review process. The first step is to go through all the web pages and collect some information. Scan through each page to find out the following:

Identify web pages with little or no content at all.
Identify web pages that have been created by automatically generated content machines.
Look for old pages that have no ranking.
Look for pages that exhibit duplicate content from the internet.
Look for landing pages with duplicate content.
Identify those web pages that have a high bounce rate.

Traffic Analytic Reports provide some useful information.

2. Select The Right SEM Tool

Manually without the use of any tools, it’s impossible to get access to such data as mentioned above. Therefore; in order to identify the thin content web pages; most marketers use SEM tools. All the data that you need to identify thin content web pages is provided by these tools. Most professionals use either SEMRush or Google Analytics to help uncover this data.

And, that’s about it. As you can see; a content audit is not all that hard. With the right tool and an eye for the right kind of information; identifying thin content web pages is an easy task. What’s a little more challenging is fixing the thin content web pages.

How To Fix Thin Content Or Low-quality Web Pages

Identifying the thin content web pages is just one half of the solution to your problem The next half involves taking measures to fix these low-quality pages.

Once you conduct a content audit review; you will know the reasons as to why the content of a particular web page is being deemed as thin content. Based on the problem; you take action.

Problem #1: Dealing with unoriginal content.

An easy problem to fix. For content that’s considered to be unoriginal, you mainly have three corrective measure options available to you. One, remove the content or delete it. Two, change the content, improve it, reduce the amount of duplicate content. And the third option is that, you keep the web page on your website as it is but you de-index them so that they don’t show up on Google’s page ranking and thereby, adversely impact the entire website’s ranking.

Problem #2: Dealing with navigation based web pages.

Certain web pages on some websites are created in order to facilitate easy navigation through the website. The problem here is that, these pages generally have a low word count. As you know by now, low word account is a thin content characteristic according to Google. These navigation pages are extremely important for the proper functioning of the website. But at the same time, you don’t want them to be a reason contributing to your website’s poor Google page ranking. Therefore, the best way to deal with such pages is to de-index them.

Problem #3: Dealing with old web pages with little content.

Old web pages generally means old content. Old content is more often than not, useless to your website. Therefore; the best strategy while dealing with such thin content web pages is to delete the pages altogether and also remove them from one’s sitemap.

Problem #4: Dealing with duplicate content.

Some pages, like category pages for example, exhibit duplicate content automatically. Now, when you are dealing with duplicate content as a whole; it’s not smart to de-index or delete the web page. Instead, work on improving the content. Two simple strategies that you can use to improve the content are:

Redefine the web page title and meta description.
Place all the relevant content at the very top of the web page.

Problem #5: Dealing with web pages that do not have a Google page rank.

This is where things get slightly complicated. Google does not assign all web pages online a page rank. Why? Simply because there are too many web pages online to go through. Therefore; often you will find a lot of web pages with a low rank or no rank at all. Now, not all low ranked web pages translate to poor quality web pages. That’s precisely what you have to identify. While trying to identify the thin content web pages; keep the following aspects in mind:

It takes time for Google to rank your web page. Look at only those web pages which have been online for more than 6 months.
If the web page is older than 6 months and is still ranking low; relook the SEO strategy that’s been employed.

When the web page has no ranking at all; there are two options at your disposal.

Redirect users who land on that web page to a more relevant web page. To do so, you can add a 301 redirection.
Use the content of that page to improve the content of some other page, if possible.

Problem #6: Dealing with pages that have a high bounce rate.

Today, high bounce rate pages do not classify as thin content web pages. But, it’s highly possible that the next Google algorithm update puts such web pages on the list. A smart person with foresight would keep this in mind and address the issue immediately. Pages generally exhibit a high bounce rate when they are unable to satisfy the searchers needs effectively. The only way to solve this problem is to actually improve the content and make it relevant for prospective searchers.

To Sum Up

Everyone online has to address thin content issues if/when it arises. Avoiding to do so, would be foolish and naive. Fixing low-quality pages is not difficult. If you stick to the basics, you are good. Always remember; when it comes to SEO, quality content reigns king.

June 7, 2018 2 comments

Content Writing

How To Write An Effective Long-form Essay

written by Khushi Srivastava

Whether you are an aspiring author or a digital marketer, you must familiarize yourself with Essay writing and Long-form writing for both academic and professional purposes. Before we learn how to write essays and long-form write-ups, let us try to understand what they are.

As the name suggests, long-form writing is basically the act of writing long essays. It can range anywhere from 1,000 words to 5,000 words or even longer. Memoirs, research papers, theses, long-form content or articles and novels are the perfect examples of long-form writing.

On the other hand, an essay is a piece of writing that revolves around a particular topic which can be in both short and long-form. The author of the essay states his arguments, gives his opinion, and conveys his knowledge in a narrative or expository format. Usually, an essay deals with a particular problem, situation or issue in a formal piece of writing.

An in-depth essay can attract both audience and brands. Businesses look for investment-worthy content online to advertise, sponsor, or extend their partnership. In short, in-depth essays can help you grow your business or website while attracting new viewers every day. The word limit for every essay may differ as it is based on several factors like institution’s policy, publication format, etc. Now, it’s time to learn how to write them.

About Long-form Writing

Anybody can write long-form write-ups in the form of essay, novel, long article, journal article, thesis, research paper, white paper, etc. You must follow the individual format of each one of them. However, we will learn here how to write long-form articles without losing audiences’ interest. It can be a daunting experience for first-time or amateur writers to write even a 1,000 word write-up. But, with the right knowledge and tips, you can easily master the art of writing long-form content write-ups.

8 Steps For Effective Long-form Writing

1) Do intense research – start by doing research on the topic you wish to cover. For longer write-ups, you need more research material, so spend a substantial amount of time researching facts and relevant information.

2) Create an outline – it is extremely important to create an accurate outline that can work as a roadmap. Mention all the topics and sub-topics that you wish to cover and align them in a logical sequence.

3) Follow the correct structure – every writing style has a format and a structure and you must follow it. For instance, journals have an introduction, abstract, body, keywords, conclusion, reference, etc. Similarly, essays have an introduction, a body, and a concluding paragraph. Choose the best suitable structure before you begin writing.

4) Write a splendid write-up – now comes the most crucial part of writing. Sit down and start writing the first draft of your write-up. Follow the outline and structure properly. Use proper punctuation, grammar, and vocabulary. Support your argument with examples and statistics. Write a factual and thought-provoking piece.

5) Give real-life examples – one way to keep the readers engaged is to give real-life examples as they are human-interest stories. It makes the write-up well-researched, interesting, and believable. Give examples that support your argument or thesis statement.

6) Use relevant pictures – using good-quality images is imperative for a long-form write-up as lengthy text can be unattractive and less-readable to your readers. Add images that support the preceding paragraph and give life to your write-up.

7) Edit your copy – proofread and edit your write-ups before publication or submission. Make sure that your copy is error-free and properly formatted. Eliminate errors, if any. Look for repetitions and irregularity and fix it.

8) Add references or sources – most of the academic write-ups require writers to include a reference section or bibliography at the end of the write-up. Include the names and other details of the books, journals, websites, studies, or any other research material that have been used as a reference in the write-up.

Not that difficult, right? It is actually quite easy if you know what to do and how to do it. These 8 steps can turn you into a professional long-form writing expert. So, let us learn about essay writing now.

About Essay Writing

Students have been writing essays since primary schools, however, the difficulty level rises as a person excels to a higher class. In terms of online marketing or content marketing, essays can play a vital role in attracting more viewers that eventually improve your SERPs ranking and customer base. You can either write relevant and factual essays for your website or blog or write on another person’s website to build your profile. There are several ways to use great write-ups to engage new customers and retain the old customers. However, you must first know how to write a banging essay to attract readers. So, let us take a look at the right structure for essays.

<Title>

<Introduction>

<Body – At least 2 or 3 paragraphs>

<Conclusion>

Strictly follow this structure while writing an essay. There are several types of essays, some of them are mentioned below:

Informative
Persuasive
Argumentative
Descriptive
Cause and effect

6 Steps To Write An Award-winning Essay

1) Choose a topic and title – understand the requirements of your business, assignment or project and explore the topics that you wish to cover. It is your choice so choose wisely. Once you are sure about the area or topic that you wish to cover, choose a suitable title for your essay.

2) Research – research is mandatory for all write-ups. Conduct research and collect as much information you can about the topic. Use scholarly articles, recent statistics, surveys and other resources to support your argument.

3) Outline – an outline can help you create a logical and sequenced essay. It guides the writer and reduces the chance of going off-track while writing. Create a rough outline and avoid doing silly mistakes later.

4) Summary – An essay summary is a one-line argument that summarizes the essay. This statement reflects the core message of your essay, so write it carefully.

5) Write it – writing an essay becomes an easy job if you follow the above steps. Just write down your thoughts, cite sources, add infographics & visuals, give examples, and clearly communicate your thoughts. Integrate research evidence and your personal opinion to create a balanced essay. First, write the introduction then the body and at last, the conclusion or summary.

6) Edit it – review, revise and edit your long-form essay and omit all the errors. Remove all the mistakes from the paper and format it properly. Make sure that you don’t publish or submit an essay without proofreading and editing.

These are 6 simple and easy steps to write an academic level essay. Just keep these points in mind and start writing. You can further enhance your writing skills with the help of the tips mentioned below.

Quick Tips

1) Use proper vocabulary and grammar in your essay. Double check your copy before publishing it. You can use tools like Grammarly, GrammarChecker, Reverso, etc. These tools can even detect those errors that may be difficult for human eyes to find.

2) Convey your point-of-view instead of writing general statements or common facts. Your essays and write-ups are read by professionals and industry experts who have years of knowledge so don’t give extra weight to general facts. They don’t wish to read it in your essay, instead, they want you to add your point-of-view precisely.

3) Read other essays on similar topics and compare your work with them. It is a great way to point out both weak and strong points of your write-up. Once you see the difference, you will know what to do and what not to do.

4) Use quotations in your essays to give it a strong theoretical back-up, however, don’t overuse it as it may be considered plagiarism. You can quote original texts from books or you can write certain quotations that support your argument. However, use quotations marks and mention the name of the person who wrote it.

5) Keep a check on the tone of voice used in your write-ups. Use active voice instead of passive voice. Use a formal tone but don’t be boring instead be confident in your tone of voice.

6) Don’t use clichés or common facts in your essay as it can reduce the quality of your write-up. For instance, everybody knows that the sun rises from the east so there is no point mentioning it.

7) Answer all these three main questions in your essay – what, why, and how. This means that you must convey what the topic is about, why it is important, and how you are contributing to it. Be specific and write your thoughts clearly.

8) Finally, have fun writing. You must enjoy the writing process as it will make your write-ups more creative and interesting.

Remember these points while writing and don’t forget to give a final touch-up. You can choose the length of your write-up according to your requirement and word-limit. If you have got specific guidelines, then don’t forget to follow them. Most of the essays have general guidelines but a few may need you to consider extra guidelines. Make sure you check them before you start writing.

To Sum It Up

Writing can be both, a daunting and an enlightening experience, it all depends on your knowledge and expertise. Learning is the only way to break all linguistic barriers. If you follow the guidelines properly, then your essay or write-up is bound to succeed. Otherwise, it may get rejected. Therefore, follow the steps mentioned above religiously while writing a long-form write-up or essay and master the art of effective writing.

June 5, 2018 1 comment

Online Marketing

8 Ultimate Tips To Build A Great Email Marketing Campaign For Your Customers

written by Khushi Srivastava

The ultimate goal of an effective email marketing campaign is to bridge the chasm between potential customers and loyal customers. With increasing number of emails hitting the mailbox of the user, a successful email marketing campaign should focus on differently working to grab the attention of its customers. You might have the most exclusive offers or discounts available, but it comes out to be of no use till you can reach your audience through the right ways.

The first important step for a successful email marketing campaign will be to get that first click on your email. You need to follow a full proof strategy to be able to tempt users to peep through your email and read it. Here are a few excellent tips which can help you start your email marketing campaign successfully. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that the change won’t come overnight. You would need to be consistent with your efforts before you actually see your customers building through an email marketing campaign.

8 Tips To Make An Effective Email Marketing Campaign

Trust me, the only thing that you need is more conversions and leads to be able to earn huge profits. Also, customer engagement should be your sole aim in the initial stages of email campaigning. It is just the play of words which can persuade the customers to use your services. The only way you can make a place in their heart is by drawing an effective and strategic email campaign to compel the customers as to why they need to choose you over others. This list would definitely help you in building a more effective email campaign to make a place in the competitive market.

1. Writing An Attractive Subject Line To Make The First Impression On The Users

#TIP – Proper subject line with perfect grammar.

Adding a persuasive subject line is highly recommended as this is the key to your success. You cannot expect the customers to click on emails which have irrelevant and dull headlines as their subject. You need to create an irresistible feeling in the customers so that they feel an urge to open your email and read it. You can create curiosity, tempt your customers through exciting deals and offers, and lure them with a bunch of freebies. This is what you should keep in mind while building a subject line which can make a difference. An added call to action will be icing on the cake if you want your users to drop everything and make a purchase with you. Buy, Purchase, Download and Learn More can be some of the CTAs which you can use to your advantage.

2. Personalize Your Emails To Attract Your Target Audience

#TIP – Create an impression by using images and videos.

It has been observed that emails that are more customized perform way better than those who are not. A simple way of measuring whether your email is performing well or not is through CTR and open rate. According to statistics, 36% of revenue was driven by emails which were more segmented and targeted. You need to focus on providing relevant content to your users and at the same time persuade them to avail your products or services. Talk to them as a friend and not as a machine. Connecting with your audience with a personal touch will be fruitful rather than just writing a fancy email with nothing concrete to offer.

3. Give A Detailed Account Of Benefits, Not Features

#TIP – Focus on advantages and importance.

You need to remember that customers would always want to hear about how they can be benefitted from your products or services. Therefore, you need to make sure that you are emphasizing more on how their lives can be immensely transformed by using what you offer. You just need to write the advantages in such a way that you subconsciously convince your customers to take action before the opportunity is gone. You should know the right tactics of marketing your content in the ways that it doesn’t seem hyped or exaggerated. Also, some credible customer reviews can add value to your well-written email.

4. Keep Your Email Brief, Crisp & Concise

#TIP – Lengthy emails should be avoided.

Writing long emails won’t create more impact as it is thought by many. On the contrary, in the era of listings and visual marketing becoming equally popular, long emails can backfire your effective email campaign. Longer emails tend to bore the readers, and they lose the patience to read the most important parts in that longish written piece. Hence, the key to increased customer engagement will be to be compelling and convincing.

5. Don’t Get Spammy To Get The Attention

#TIP – Avoid sending too many emails.

You might feel the urge to see your email marketing going well when you put your utmost efforts. But, trust me, you need not become desperate if you don’t see the positive results of everything you do. Spamming the inbox of your customers is a big NO. The sole reason is that you have to make a place in the market gradually. You cannot expect overnight results. Getting spammy will only create a bad impression on your potential customers. What do you do when you receive a lot of emails from a particular company? It makes you feel annoyed and irritated, and you are sure on not using their services ever. This is what can exactly happen with you. Also, using all caps and too many exclamation marks in your email copy would all go in the drain as your key to expanding your business should just be persuasive content.

6. Know Your Ultimate Goal

#TIP – Let the readers connect with your business.

With every email copy being sent to your customers, your focus should be on the result that you desire to reach. It could simply be increased conversions or more purchases or just creating awareness among the customers that you exist. Whatever be the case, you have to subtly hint your customers as to what your end goal is. You have to direct them to do exactly what you want you to do. Follow simple content marketing tips to follow this idea in a better way. Your email copy should be like your sales manager who effectively conveys what he wants the users to do.

7. Keep A Check On What Your Competitors Are Doing To Attract Traffic

#TIP – Stay updated with industry trends.

You might have left no stone unturned, but you can still be disappointed if the tide doesn’t flow in your favor. Email Marketing is a bit of luck with a lot of hard work. Achieving the results you strive for, is not always possible. What you can do in this case is look at how your competitors are doing your business. It is not wrong to follow what others in the market are doing. You learn a lot when you try to imitate others if not blindly but differently. You can try out doing something out of the box to captivate your email readers. Experimenting new stuff is what can keep you going in email marketing. Therefore, don’t shy away from making those little changes which can help your business grow exponentially.

8. Reward Your Readers

#TIP – Distribute gifts, coupons and gift prizes.

Effective email marketing will about be about creating awareness among the customers and keeping them well informed about the industry you are dealing with. Add relevant case studies and statistics to showcase that you know what is happening in your industry. Also, let them know that they won’t regret reposing trust in your products or services. An email copy should be informative at the same time so that users know what they are signing up for. They shouldn’t feel that it is just another email copy which is trying to snatch a part of their money. On the other hand, build your copy in such a way that they are convinced to believe that you are best in the market and worth their precious time and money. This is ultimate step to building a complete email marketing campaign.

To Sum Up

Hence, in a nutshell, try a mix and match of old and new email marketing trends to stand out in the crowd. Also, remember that solid foundation of your business cannot be built just with email marketing. It is undoubtedly one of the essential aspects of content marketing but not the only one. In this dynamic industry, you need to be open to new challenges. You never know what might work for you. Therefore, don’t shy away from trying the things you are hesitant of. In the end, what would really matter would be how well you are able to build your target audience. It is a win-lose situation if you are not willing to do the things in the right way.

May 30, 2018 3 comments

Content Marketing Search Engine Optimization

How To Write SEO-friendly Blog Posts For Your Site

written by Khushi Srivastava

Do you own a website? One of the best-proven ways to keep traffic pouring in your website is through making your posts SEO-friendly. For bringing traffic to your older posts or articles, you must aim at making them search engine friendly. In the long run, only search engine rankings will help in getting relevant traffic from the older posts or articles on your web portal.

SEO-optimized posts or articles are pieces of content that are written following specific rules that enable the given content to appear on Google (other search engines as well) and then, rank higher for SERPs for specific keywords. When you are devising content for your site, it is imperative for you to follow such rules such that your site has a higher chance of ranking higher on the search engines.

In today’s highly digitalized market, creating SEO-friendly content has become crucial for active revenue generation for the online businesses out there. If you wish to enhance the overall ROI for your business, it is high time that you start creating SEO-optimized articles and blog posts that reach out to the target audience easily and quickly. In this post, we will help you learn about the ways of writing SEO-friendly articles in WordPress.

Writing SEO-friendly Articles on WordPress

1- Plan Out Your Content

This is one of the most basic and essential steps that you need to follow while creating content for your site. You must follow the “Think first, Write later” rule for coming up with a content that catches the attention of your target audience effectively. When you have a proper plan laid out in front of you, there are lesser chances of making any errors. Think about a proper topic that will help the readers gain some insight & adequate knowledge about your products or services.

Once you have a fair idea of what you would like to present to the readers, start preparing grounds for its effective implementation. You must always note that ‘content is the king.’ The topic that you have chosen and the material for it must be relevant enough to deliver the right information about your business. Focus on the relevant keywords pertinent to your product or service range. Most importantly, the content must be trending in the current scenario.

2 – Emphasize on Post Title & Meta-Title

For this, you would, first of all, need to understand the difference between ‘Post Title’ and ‘Meta Title’. Post Title is how your readers will see the title of the given post on your site. Similarly, Meta Title is how the search engines will be showing your position in the provided search results.

If you have not mentioned the proper Meta Title in the respective SEO settings for your post, the content for your site will be treated as the Meta Title. Moreover, it is also essential to contain some important keywords in the Meta Title for your blog post. Meta Titles and descriptions are crucial for your blog posts. These help the post rank higher for a given set of keywords in the search engines.

3 – Select the Right Keywords

Keyword selection is another vital component of devising an SEO-optimized content for your site. The keywords that you will be selecting will help in determining whether or not the given content will achieve better ranks in the search engines. The experts recommend that you must always start off with simple keywords and then, move towards the complex ones as your domain gets strong & established enough.

For obtaining the right keywords for your site’s content, effective keyword research is vital. Take your time and research for the keywords phrases that your target readers must be using on the different search engines. Once you have come up with some possible target keywords, you can make use of proper Keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Bing Keyword Research tools, and others. These tools will help you in gaining a proper insight into the competitiveness of the given keywords for creating an SEO-optimized article.

4 – Make Use of Keyword Variations

When you wish to create the SEO-friendly content on WordPress, you must be aware of the technical specifications involved. One such important aspect that you need to consider is keyword Variation. Keyword Variations are also referred to as LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). The primary purpose of the LSI keywords or Keyword Variations is to make your site’s content understandable by Google. Thus, it helps in increasing the possibility of ranking your site’s content for more keywords on the search engines.

5 – Post High-quality & Valuable Content

Once you have understood all the technical aspects of composing the SEO-optimized content on WordPress, it is also important to get through with the generic rules. One of the most vital considerations is to write high-quality, informative content for your readers. On the Internet, you can come up with a plethora of articles & posts. But, you tend to read only the particular ones that you find relevant or informative enough.

This principle must be applied when it comes to posting your site’s content as well. You must aim at writing highly informative and user-friendly content. It will help the readers gain an interest in your site’s posts such that they will keep re-visiting your site for more such material.

6 – Link to Proper, High Authority Sites

If you wish to minimize the overall bounce rate, you must make use of the concept of interlinking. You must aim at linking your site’s content to some high authority sites that must be relevant to the particular blog post. However, while doing so, you must note that the sites that you will be linking your content to should not be competing with your website on the main keywords or targeted keywords of the given piece of content.

Conclusion

When you wish to make your site’s articles & blog posts rank higher in the search engines, you must follow the tips as mentioned above for making the content SEO-optimized and SEO-friendly.

May 18, 2018 4 comments