In theory, using affiliate commission to boost your income could not be easier or more straightforward. However, in reality, in such a saturated market, it’s important that one is 100% sure of the things to take into account before committing to affiliate sales.
Here are the top questions you should consider:
- Are you doing it for the right reasons?
It’s all well and good thinking that your blog is at the stage where it could start making you money, and it’s true that affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways to make money online.
However, simply because you want to ‘make money’ should not be the sole reason for wanting to continue a blog. Blogging and writing insightful and imaginative articles that strike a chord with your audience should be the ultimate driving force spurring your blog on. Readers will see through posts that are too promotion-heavy.
- Do you have a wide enough following?
In order to start making some money from your blog, you don’t necessarily need to have thousands and thousands of existing subscribers. In our experience, much of the engagement and comments left on a lifestyle blog will be from individuals who have organically discovered your site through social media pages and not by those who are already subscribed to your blog. If you feel as though your content is generating enough unique views, engagement and comments from a wide plethora of readers, then becoming an affiliate site is absolutely something to consider seriously.
- Are you driving enough traffic to your blog from social media platforms?
We cannot highlight enough the important role that social media will play in whether or not a move into the realm of affiliate commission is a successful one. By staying active and sharing original content on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google + and Pinterest, you can make sure you are continually building your following and chances of making commissions through sales made through your site. It is also worth actively encouraging shares, retweets and re-pins of particularly popular posts, especially by other high-profile bloggers who may follow you.
- Is your content engaging enough for your audience?
If you are seriously interested in making money through your blog, you will need to start writing reviews of products and services with affiliate marketing in mind. You cannot simply throw links out randomly and expect a wave of commission to start rolling in. It is far more effective to think of the affiliate links as added resources that compliment your existing copy, and not the sole reason you have written the piece in the first place.
- Do you have the extra time to dedicate to your blog?
Perhaps a rather straightforward point, but chances are you already juggle writing and managing your blog with full-time work or studying. Therefore, an important question to ask yourself is whether you can dedicate the required amount of time to monetising your blog, especially if it starts to do very well for you. Would you be willing to forego the odd night out or shopping trip with friends in order to stay in and work on your blog? If the answer is no, then you might want to re-think your options.
- Would you know the kinds of affiliate programs to approach?
Affiliate links will earn you commission if you successfully drive a sale to the merchant, which means that a blog reader will need to click on one of your embedded links, and either purchase or sign up to something before you see any kind of commission. Therefore, the more relevant your affiliate ad is to your reader’s likes and preferences, the higher the chances they will click on the link and make a subsequent purchase.
Source: http://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/digital-marketing-features/top-tips-for-bloggers-considering-becoming-affiliates/1264
By Mark Russell
Showing posts with label Social Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Media. Show all posts
Wednesday, 17 December 2014
Thursday, 27 November 2014
55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love
Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.
1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.
2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written, and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.
3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for a site to link to you, you don’t want the link.
4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.
5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.
6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.
7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.
8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.
9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.
10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.
11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.
12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.
Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.
13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.
14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.
15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.
17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.
19. Text around your links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.
20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.
21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.
22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.
23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.
24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.
25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.
26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.
27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.
28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.
29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.
30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.
31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.
32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.
33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.
34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.
35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.
36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!
37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.
38. Use keyword rich captions with your images.
39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.
40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.
41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:
(1) Log out of Google
(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar
42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.
43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.
44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.
45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.
47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.
48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.
49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.
50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.
51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.
52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.
53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.
54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.
55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.
Maybe a little technical here and there, but most of them easy to understand and quick to use in your blog. Other tips? Please share.
Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/
1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.
2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written, and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.
3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for a site to link to you, you don’t want the link.
4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.
5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.
6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.
7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.
8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.
9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.
10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.
11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.
12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.
Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.
13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.
14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.
15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.
17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.
19. Text around your links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.
20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.
21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.
22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.
23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.
24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.
25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.
26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.
27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.
28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.
29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.
30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.
31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.
32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.
33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.
34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.
35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.
36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!
37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.
38. Use keyword rich captions with your images.
39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.
40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.
41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:
(1) Log out of Google
(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar
42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.
43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.
44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.
45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.
47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.
48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.
49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.
50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.
51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.
52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.
53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.
54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.
55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.
Maybe a little technical here and there, but most of them easy to understand and quick to use in your blog. Other tips? Please share.
Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/
Thursday, 6 November 2014
Professional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Internet Marketing Plannin...
SEO how important is it?
5 Website Features Google Loves
Every business owner wants Google to love their website. While search engine optimisation is a complex topic, the starting point is a well designed website that helps Google understand what your business is all about. By incorporating these 5 features into your website design, you’ll build a great foundation for gaining Google’s love.
1. Create a clean website structure and easy navigation
Google’s robots are smart, but they can get confused! A clean website structure and easy navigation will not only benefit the robots, but your human visitors too. Your website structure should follow a clear hierarchy, e.g. with sub pages for your various product categories or services. If possible, each main product category or service should have its own page on your website, and should be easy to find through your navigation menu. Google also likes you to create a sitemap to make it even easier for the robots to crawl your website.
2. Include the right keywords, in the right places
Keywords help Google understand what your website pages are about. Think about the keywords a potential customer may be using to look for your type of business or product. Then incorporate these keywords into your website, ideally one main keyword per page. For example, you might create a page for the keyword “flower delivery melbourne”, and a separate page for the keyword “wedding flowers melbourne”.
On your target page, include the keyword in the page title, meta description, main heading, page text, URL and in image alt tags.
3. Write a blog to keep content fresh
If you haven’t updated your website for 5 years, you may be in trouble! Google is always hungry for fresh content and will prioritise websites that have been updated recently. A blog is a great way of keeping your website updated and feeding Google the fresh content it craves. Posting new articles at least twice a month is recommended.
Another benefit of your blog is that it creates new pages with long-tail keywords related to your business, e.g. “how to pick your wedding bouquet colours”. While there may not be as many searches for this keyword as for “wedding flowers melbourne”, the smaller amounts of traffic you can capture with each blog post will add up.
4. Be sociable
Incorporating social media into your website has many benefits. While it is still unclear how much weight Google really gives to social shares and likes, it does crawl social media websites and will take social chatter into account when evaluating your brand’s online footprint. If you are talked about on social media, and people share links to your website, Google will take note!
5. Make your website responsive
Google likes us to create websites that are useful and relevant to its human visitors. Usability on mobile phones and tablets can be an issue, and Google clearly recommends making websites responsive so that they adjust for mobiles and tablets. That way, you can have one website that serves all devices and is easy for Google to crawl and index.
While there are a lot more factors involved in SEO, these 5 tips will hopefully get you a head start on your way to a loving relationship with Google.
Source: http://www.motivatingmum.com/blog/5-website-features-google-loves/
By Alli
This post brought to you by Frederike Ramm, Ondetto Web Design
1. Create a clean website structure and easy navigation
Google’s robots are smart, but they can get confused! A clean website structure and easy navigation will not only benefit the robots, but your human visitors too. Your website structure should follow a clear hierarchy, e.g. with sub pages for your various product categories or services. If possible, each main product category or service should have its own page on your website, and should be easy to find through your navigation menu. Google also likes you to create a sitemap to make it even easier for the robots to crawl your website.
2. Include the right keywords, in the right places
Keywords help Google understand what your website pages are about. Think about the keywords a potential customer may be using to look for your type of business or product. Then incorporate these keywords into your website, ideally one main keyword per page. For example, you might create a page for the keyword “flower delivery melbourne”, and a separate page for the keyword “wedding flowers melbourne”.
On your target page, include the keyword in the page title, meta description, main heading, page text, URL and in image alt tags.
3. Write a blog to keep content fresh
If you haven’t updated your website for 5 years, you may be in trouble! Google is always hungry for fresh content and will prioritise websites that have been updated recently. A blog is a great way of keeping your website updated and feeding Google the fresh content it craves. Posting new articles at least twice a month is recommended.
Another benefit of your blog is that it creates new pages with long-tail keywords related to your business, e.g. “how to pick your wedding bouquet colours”. While there may not be as many searches for this keyword as for “wedding flowers melbourne”, the smaller amounts of traffic you can capture with each blog post will add up.
4. Be sociable
Incorporating social media into your website has many benefits. While it is still unclear how much weight Google really gives to social shares and likes, it does crawl social media websites and will take social chatter into account when evaluating your brand’s online footprint. If you are talked about on social media, and people share links to your website, Google will take note!
5. Make your website responsive
Google likes us to create websites that are useful and relevant to its human visitors. Usability on mobile phones and tablets can be an issue, and Google clearly recommends making websites responsive so that they adjust for mobiles and tablets. That way, you can have one website that serves all devices and is easy for Google to crawl and index.
While there are a lot more factors involved in SEO, these 5 tips will hopefully get you a head start on your way to a loving relationship with Google.
Source: http://www.motivatingmum.com/blog/5-website-features-google-loves/
By Alli
This post brought to you by Frederike Ramm, Ondetto Web Design
Tuesday, 14 October 2014
Three Easy Tips For Effective Social Media Marketing
You’ve heard that social media marketing can lead to more loyal customers, more brand recognition, more repeat business, more… well, everything.
But successes like these aren’t instant or automatic. Effective social media marketing requires a great deal of effort. It isn’t easy for small business owners—or anyone—to come up with a steady stream of pithy statements in 140 characters or less.
That said, there are some simple solutions that can make a difference in reaching and connecting with your audience. Here are three strategies you can add immediately to your social media marketing arsenal.
1. It’s all about timing
Schedule your emails, tweets, status updates and blog posts at the right time—when you have a captive audience. You want to catch your audience not only when they’re checking their messages and news feed, but when they might have a few minutes to click through a link and check something out.
When’s that? It depends, of course. For marketing consultant Jay Baer, the best time to reach his audience of busy professionals tends to be during a “micro-opportunity window.” These may be as short as just a few minutes, but they’re critical for reaching a busy audience. Baer times his messages to hit before or after the top of the hour, when many time-starved professionals are sneaking a peek at their phone on the way back to their desk.
Late in the day is another good time to post. Author and social media expert Dan Zarrella’s Twitter analysis found that tweets in the late afternoon and early evening—during commute hours and around dinner time—led to higher click-through rates than those published in the morning.
Zarrella also found that tweets posted on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays drew more click-throughs.
A report by Buddy Media saw a similar phenomenon on Facebook. Brand interaction rates were 14.5 percent higher on weekends than on weekdays. The report also recommends posting between 8 pm and 7 am, when interaction is 14 percent higher than the rest of the day. The reason is simple: catch your audience during their downtime.
Don’t want to work on the weekends or after hours? Tools like Buffer and HootSuite can help by letting you compose your thoughts in advance and publish them at an appointed time.
2. Issue calls to action
If you want to engage with your customers on social media, you have to ask for it (in moderation, of course).
Facebook posts with questions generate 92 percent higher comment rates than posts without questions, according to the Buddy Media report. Be sure to ask your question at the end of your post—that draws a higher comment rate than if the question is placed higher up.
If you post a cool or amusing picture, don’t just ask your audience to “check it out!” Increase interaction rates by encouraging your audience to caption it, too. Or you can ask your fans to “fill in the blank,” a tactic that leads to four times as many comments as other posts.
If you plan to run a promotion, note that some keywords work better than others. The words that drew the most interactions were “winner,” “win” and “giveaway.” Not so popular? “Sweepstakes,” “coupon,” “clearance,” and discount phrases “% off” or “$ off.”
Twitter looked at about 20,000 random promoted tweets and found four effective ways for businesses to engage their followers. Including a link and asking their audience to download something, its number-one suggestion, drew an average of 13 percent more clicks.
Twitter also recommends that brands ask their followers to retweet a message, keeping it short and simple, and spelling out the word “retweet,” rather than just the abbreviation “RT.”
If you’re looking to build your following, you may simply want to ask people to follow your brand while offering them a compelling reason to do so, such as free prizes or behind-the-scenes access. Twitter found brands that paid for a promoted tweet and asked for a follow increased their audience by an average of 258 percent.
3. Use images often
Research shows that photos perform better than videos, links and text alone on Facebook.
According to digital marketing blog Kissmetrics, photos attract 53 percent more “Likes,” 104 percent more comments and 84 percent more click-throughs.
Here’s the caveat, though: The best pictures are self-explanatory, like infographics and charts. Just posting a stock image doesn’t do much. Social media publishing app Buffer compared the responses to two different photos—one that didn’t need a caption to explain it and one that did. The infographic, which didn’t require a caption, drew 78 “Likes” and 20 comments while the other only attracted 11 “Likes” and three comments.
All in all, social media marketing can help your business win new customers and engage with a broader audience. Making it work requires time, effort and some strategic thinking. By knowing your audience, interacting with them on their terms, and making engagement easy and attractive, you can elevate your brand and even drive revenue. Not bad for 140 characters or less.
Source:http://www.forbes.com/sites/sage/2014/03/31/three-easy-tips-for-effective-social-media-marketing/
But successes like these aren’t instant or automatic. Effective social media marketing requires a great deal of effort. It isn’t easy for small business owners—or anyone—to come up with a steady stream of pithy statements in 140 characters or less.
That said, there are some simple solutions that can make a difference in reaching and connecting with your audience. Here are three strategies you can add immediately to your social media marketing arsenal.
1. It’s all about timing
Schedule your emails, tweets, status updates and blog posts at the right time—when you have a captive audience. You want to catch your audience not only when they’re checking their messages and news feed, but when they might have a few minutes to click through a link and check something out.
When’s that? It depends, of course. For marketing consultant Jay Baer, the best time to reach his audience of busy professionals tends to be during a “micro-opportunity window.” These may be as short as just a few minutes, but they’re critical for reaching a busy audience. Baer times his messages to hit before or after the top of the hour, when many time-starved professionals are sneaking a peek at their phone on the way back to their desk.
Late in the day is another good time to post. Author and social media expert Dan Zarrella’s Twitter analysis found that tweets in the late afternoon and early evening—during commute hours and around dinner time—led to higher click-through rates than those published in the morning.
Zarrella also found that tweets posted on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays drew more click-throughs.
A report by Buddy Media saw a similar phenomenon on Facebook. Brand interaction rates were 14.5 percent higher on weekends than on weekdays. The report also recommends posting between 8 pm and 7 am, when interaction is 14 percent higher than the rest of the day. The reason is simple: catch your audience during their downtime.
Don’t want to work on the weekends or after hours? Tools like Buffer and HootSuite can help by letting you compose your thoughts in advance and publish them at an appointed time.
2. Issue calls to action
If you want to engage with your customers on social media, you have to ask for it (in moderation, of course).
Facebook posts with questions generate 92 percent higher comment rates than posts without questions, according to the Buddy Media report. Be sure to ask your question at the end of your post—that draws a higher comment rate than if the question is placed higher up.
If you post a cool or amusing picture, don’t just ask your audience to “check it out!” Increase interaction rates by encouraging your audience to caption it, too. Or you can ask your fans to “fill in the blank,” a tactic that leads to four times as many comments as other posts.
If you plan to run a promotion, note that some keywords work better than others. The words that drew the most interactions were “winner,” “win” and “giveaway.” Not so popular? “Sweepstakes,” “coupon,” “clearance,” and discount phrases “% off” or “$ off.”
Twitter looked at about 20,000 random promoted tweets and found four effective ways for businesses to engage their followers. Including a link and asking their audience to download something, its number-one suggestion, drew an average of 13 percent more clicks.
Twitter also recommends that brands ask their followers to retweet a message, keeping it short and simple, and spelling out the word “retweet,” rather than just the abbreviation “RT.”
If you’re looking to build your following, you may simply want to ask people to follow your brand while offering them a compelling reason to do so, such as free prizes or behind-the-scenes access. Twitter found brands that paid for a promoted tweet and asked for a follow increased their audience by an average of 258 percent.
3. Use images often
Research shows that photos perform better than videos, links and text alone on Facebook.
According to digital marketing blog Kissmetrics, photos attract 53 percent more “Likes,” 104 percent more comments and 84 percent more click-throughs.
Here’s the caveat, though: The best pictures are self-explanatory, like infographics and charts. Just posting a stock image doesn’t do much. Social media publishing app Buffer compared the responses to two different photos—one that didn’t need a caption to explain it and one that did. The infographic, which didn’t require a caption, drew 78 “Likes” and 20 comments while the other only attracted 11 “Likes” and three comments.
All in all, social media marketing can help your business win new customers and engage with a broader audience. Making it work requires time, effort and some strategic thinking. By knowing your audience, interacting with them on their terms, and making engagement easy and attractive, you can elevate your brand and even drive revenue. Not bad for 140 characters or less.
Source:http://www.forbes.com/sites/sage/2014/03/31/three-easy-tips-for-effective-social-media-marketing/
Friday, 3 October 2014
Social Media Monetization in a 'Mobile First' World
As much as Silicon Valley's ethos is the constant pursuit of creating value, eventually the byproduct of this process (and the stakeholders involved) will also require the creation of revenue.
In the past year, we have seen these dynamics play out in the social networking sector across a variety of companies at different stages of growth, maturity, and monetization.
While the early phases of social media success tend to focus on metrics around user growth and engagement, every social media company must eventually figure out some sort of revenue stream (unless they prefer to go the acquisition route).
Most social networking companies eventually monetize through advertising, and more specifically through "native advertising" – or non-standard ad units that are specific to the platform and are organically integrated into the content experience.
Facebook and Twitter, both mature, publicly traded companies with well-established revenue streams, have been the pace-setters in social by effectively monetizing their respective native ad units, Sponsored Stories for Facebook and Promoted Tweets for Twitter.
Linkedin also introduced their Sponsored Content ads, and while its advertising business has not yet monetized to the same degree as Facebook and Twitter, it also has a strong value proposition to advertisers given the quality of its business-oriented audience.
Other established players like Tumblr and Pinterest are in the earlier days of monetizing through advertising, but they too have native ad units that integrate into their content experience.
Social Evolving in the Direction of 'Mobile-First' Experiences
But all of these networks are children of the desktop web. True, they are all in various phases of transition towards mobile as the dominant medium for consumption, but their networks were all built around a fixed Internet experience.
Fast forward to today, and we've seen another evolution in the social networking space that centers around “mobile-first” networks. Social brands such as Instagram, SnapChat, and Vine are all recent examples of mobile-first success stories, which represent an evolution in social media by focusing on the single core utility of capturing and disseminating interesting content captured through mobile phone cameras.
Each of these services has built massive audiences in a very short period of time (70 million users age 18+ for Instagram, 25 million for Vine and 21 million for Snapchat), something that has clearly been enabled by being mobile-first.
With people carrying their smartphones around with them 24/7, the opportunity to capture a slice of life on camera is always within arm's reach. This has created an environment of fast and simple content creation that is fueling the experience of these networks and driving their rapid growth.
Consider that Instagram already has an audience the size of Twitter in the U.S., and both Vine and Snapchat have reached audiences about half that of Tumblr and Pinterest in little more than a year of existence.
Turning Eyeballs into Dollars... Natively
While these newer networks aren't necessarily under extreme pressure to monetize just yet, all are beginning to work with brands in experimenting around marketing. In each case, they will likely be looking to native advertising models to pave the way toward monetization.
The trick with native advertising is that the ad units, by definition, are not one-size-fits-all. Such ad models typically only work for companies who can deliver ad impressions at significant scale.
Because the popular social networks not only amass a large number of users, but those users are also highly engaged, this affords the opportunity to deliver billions of ad impressions every month. It is this sort of scale needed for advertisers and marketers to want to play ball with an individual media company.
Native ads also dovetail particularly well with the mobile environment because they are typically delivered within the content stream. Hence, the mobile-first networks have a built-in monetization advantage, providedthey can reach a level of scale to become viable peddlers of native ad inventory.
Since Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine all provide visually rich environments that reach strategic audience segments (read: young people), they offer platforms that are clearly compelling to marketers. These mobile-first networks are rapidly changing the social networking space and creating a significant amount of value very quickly for their users.
Value for users means potential value to marketers, and when marketers turn their attention to an emerging platform, it's only a matter of time before these networks can turn on the revenue faucets.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)