Monthly Archives: March 2015

Tips on Writing an Effective Content

When users visit your site, they have a certain picture in mind of the kind of contents they are looking for. In order to keep these users on your site – and returning – you need to provide them with effective and valuable articles and contents. Many site owners are often daunted by the thought of writing high quality contents, but the task is actually not so difficult to complete.

Help Users Remember Your Content

One of the first things you need to keep in mind when writing your site’s content is to help users keep the content in mind. Use pointers, H1 and subheadings as well as other web elements to make the article more memorable. You can also attach suitable pictures, diagrams and charts to simplify the information.

Make Your Content Scan-able

When users first visit your site, they don’t normally read the content right away. What users love to do is scan through the site – or the article – for information. To lower your bounce rate, the articles you post must be informational even when users only scan them.

You can use bold, italic and coloured text to help strengthen key information in the articles. Similar to helping users remember, you can also use lists and titles to achieve the same thing.

Make the Article Practical

The most popular type of contents on the internet is practical guides. By helping users complete a specific task, you are providing them with valuable information. Instead of writing a long article about a topic, keep the article short and information-packed.

Keep the Articles Relevant

There are two things you need to keep in mind when writing articles that are relevant: the main theme of your blog or website and the latest trends. You need to align the contents you are sharing with these two sides of the content writing coin.

Following the latest trends will help you gain more traffic as well. Paired with high quality content and good web design, you can actually retain more visitors and increase your site’s traffic gradually.

Write for Your Audience

This is probably one of the most important things to do when writing web contents: write for your audience. The kind of language, writing style and overall delivery you use must be in alignment with how your audience see and read articles. If you are writing for a serious audience, for instance, using slangs and informal delivery may not be suitable.

Watch Your Keyword Density

Search engines are moving away from keyword-packed articles and currently valuing good, well-written articles more. Instead of trying to pack as many keywords as possible to an article, write a short article that your users can actually read and benefit from. The SEO-side of your content marketing strategy will take care of itself.

Stay on Topic and Have a Point

When writing an article, stay on topic and produce a point at the end of it. The point – or a conclusion – will provide that satisfied feel to your users, making them return for more articles and spend more time on your site.

How to Run a Successful Twitter Account

Communicating a message, whether it is a promotion for your products and services, a contest or just articles on your website, on Twitter can result in great responses. However, the message needs to be delivered correctly so that audience – your followers – can pick it up quickly. To run a successful Twitter account and gain a lot of great benefits from the social network, here are a few things you need to do.

Construct the Right Message

Twitter is 80% noise and 20% useful information. This is just how the social network is developed. Most of the time, you will see users sharing their daily activities, jokes and links to random sites. These are what we call noises. In order for your message to be received, you need to separate yourself from the noise.

A good Twitter message, or a Tweet, is one that can grab followers’ attention. You need to have:

A catchy line that users will read when scrolling through the timeline
A link to more information on the message
A picture to help separate the message from other Tweets on the users’ timeline

By combining these three elements, you can reach a high number of followers every time.

Ignite Engagement

Twitter is not the place to do one-way sharing of content. It is a place where users – including yourself – can share, interact and communicate in real-time. Sharing the message and not engaging to responses is just bad practice.

In fact, you should always design your message to arouse engagement. Let users reply, retweet and reshare your message. Have them involved in a conversation or an activity.

A good example of getting engagement is the campaign for The Godzilla 2014 movie. It uses a transparent image of the Godzilla’s tail in the clouds. When seen on Twitter’s timeline – with a white background – the tail is simply invisible. When users started to zoom in – showing the picture against a black background – however, the tail was visible. It instantly went viral and millions of users were talking about it. This is the kind of response you need to ignite.

Tweet Regularly

Just like posting new articles on your blog or website, tweets must also be sent regularly. Not tweeting for a day or two will make users think the account is no longer active; you may lose a lot of followers this way.

Instead of posting sporadically, keep tweeting at least once every two hours. Don’t forget to reply to users publicly (with the user’s Twitter handle on the back of the Tweet) and answer questions to increase your level of engagement.

Interact and Be Personal

The Twitter account may be about your brand, but the person running it is still human. Address users who interact with you on Twitter personally. Answer questions whenever you can and ask questions so users can get involved with sharing valuable content. Don’t forget to incorporate links to a blog post when you need to share something in details. One last thing: don’t hesitate to apologize when you make mistakes.

Getting Started with Internet Marketing on a Budget

If you think internet marketing is expensive, then you have come to the right page. On the surface, at least, internet marketing does seem like a costly thing to do. You need to invest on PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising, SEO campaigns and many more. The truth, however, is fairly different. Internet marketing doesn’t have to be expensive for it to be effective.

Start Blogging

A good way to start your internet marketing campaign is by blogging. By sharing valuable content to the public, you are attracting more traffic and increasing your site’s credibility. It doesn’t have to be complicated as well. You can share how-to and short tips related to the products and services you are selling. You can also share industry-related news or tips in general.

Once you start posting blog posts on your website, you will see an increase in traffic almost immediately. This is because search engines will pick up those updates and rank your site higher in search results for relevant keywords. Everything is done generically.

Leverage Social Media

Social media is the hottest tool of internet marketing these days. You can connect with your users directly, share content to the public and market your site effectively without spending a dime. You don’t even have to hire a social media expert; simply manage the account yourself to get started.

The key to successfully reaching new audience through social media is communication. Don’t hesitate to communicate, reply and ask questions to the users on your social networks in order to gain more audience. Do cross-posting and cross-promotions with other brands on social media to expand your followers even further.

Use Email Marketing

I don’t suggest spamming random email addresses with promotional mails. What I’m suggesting is building a target oriented mailing list that you can use to keep promoting your site as well as the new content you post on it. Email marketing is still one of the easiest, most affordable ways to market your site.

Services such as MailChimp allow you to send newsletters – thousands of them – for free. These are the best places to start. Put a Subscribe box (or popup) on your site and start building an effective mailing list for your brand. Once you start sharing viral content through the mailing list, you can reach new audience as well.

Send Out Press Releases

One last tip I can give you about doing internet marketing on a budget is to use press releases and connect with other blogs, news sites and various websites in the industry. By sending out press releases upon launching a new product, service or feature, you can increase your media coverage substantially.

Not all news sites will write your story. The target is not to get all of them to write about your new product or service, but to get at least 10% of them interested. You may not be able to get media coverage the first time, but you are already building a relationship with these websites. Communicating with them in the future should be much easier to do.

Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an on going thing. You can’t expect to complete a round of SEO campaign and have your site appear at the top of search results forever. To continue performing well SEO-wise, your site needs to be improved continually as well. Sadly, the mistakes you make will also reflect on your SEO performance. Which are the most common SEO mistakes you should avoid?

Keyword Stuffing

This is a classic SEO mistake many ‘experts’ still make. As sad as it may sound, there are still a lot of web owners that stuff their articles with keywords, hoping the articles will perform well SEO-wise. The truth is, this type of articles are now blacklisted from search results.

Instead of stuffing your articles with keywords, write valuable contents that users can actually read and benefit from. The more time your users spend browsing your site, the better your SEO performance will be.

Broken Links

Almost all websites accumulate broken links over time; this is a natural thing that occurs as changes are made to the websites. Although broken links are not uncommon, they are still very annoying for users and search engine crawlers alike.

The good news is, you can now use web services and tools to help you scan broken links and remove them. Google Webmaster Tools is a good place to start. Other tools such as SEOMoz and Pingdom helps review your site’s performance in general, including how the broken links impair your user’s experience.

Copied Contents

Search engine crawlers are now smarter than ever. They can identify not only copied text, but also stolen images and duplicate content. When these things are found on your site, your search engine rankings will drop substantially.

Producing high quality content is not an easy task to complete, but that doesn’t mean you should copy articles from other sites. At the very least, you should rewrite the articles so that search engine crawlers see them as original.

You should also try to write shorter articles instead of pushing yourself to write long contents. Not only will you be spending less time on writing the contents, you will also find it much easier to be consistent in updating your site.

Meta Keyword Tags

This next mistake may not be so obvious, but it is a mistake nonetheless. Webmasters and site owners are still using Meta Keyword tags for SEO purposes. This is wrong for several reasons:

Search engines no longer weight Meta Keyword tags as an essential element, so they are rather obsolete in today’s SEO scene.
The Meta Keyword tags reveal the keywords you are targeting. These keywords can be picked up by your competitors, allowing them to figure out your SEO strategy without so much as a problem.
You are adding more lines to your page. When you start adding a lot of keywords to the tag, you are actually slowing your site down.

Now that you know about the negative effects of using Meta Keyword tags, it is time to remove them from your header for better SEO performance.

5 Plugins Any WordPress Site Should Use

WordPress is a very wonderful platform. It is flexible and easy to use, offering a wide range of customization options without making the whole thing too complicated for everyday users. Whether you want to create a simple personal blog or a corporate website, WordPress is the platform to use. WordPress also comes with thousands of plugins that can enhance the capabilities of your site even further. Here are the top 5 WordPress plugins you should use.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

There are a lot of WordPress SEO plugins out there. All in One SEO is a good alternative to look into, but the WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most comprehensive and user-friendly to use. The plugin allows you to fine-tune every part of the site for SEO purposes.

WordPress SEO is very easy to use. Once installed, you can add SEO-related tags, perform site-wide scans and even get suggestions on how to improve your site’s SEO performance. There is a premium version with more tools if you are serious about optimizing your site for SEO purposes.

Contact Form 7

A good website should come equipped with a handy and easy-to-use contact form. Contact Form 7 is one of the best plugins to use if you want to create contact form for your site. You can construct multiple contact forms, customize each of them, send contact emails to multiple recipients and provide notifications to your users.

Contact Form 7 is also a lightweight plugin that will not slow down your site. The interface is very clean and simple. Even when you have no prior experience in using WordPress tags or shortcodes, you will be able to make a contact form in minutes.

Simple Sitemap

Managing a sitemap for Google and other search engines doesn’t have to be difficult now that you have Simple Sitemap helping you. Once installed, the plugin will crawl your site and make a sitemap automatically. As you add more content, you can choose whether to add those new pages to the sitemap from the WordPress Editor.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Most WordPress themes are compatible with Google Analytics. All you need to do is copy-paste the tracking code and you are all set. The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, however, takes it a step further. It offers you the tools for tracking multiple campaigns, hotspot analysis and a lot of other advanced Google Analytics capabilities. Even better, you don’t have to go deep into the Google Analytics advanced settings to access these features. Everything is displayed cleanly and all features can be access with just a few clicks.

WP Super Cache

WordPress is a content management platform so dynamic it can be used for almost every kind of websites. However, your contents don’t have to be served dynamically every time. Using WP Super Cache, you can speed up your WordPress site substantially by serving dynamic content as static pages. The result is lower server load, higher site performance and faster loading time; all translates to a much better user experience.

How To Create SEO-Friendly Content

Content is the root of all internet marketing campaigns. In order to have a successful campaign, you need to produce high quality content that attracts users. Even further, the contents need to be optimized for SEO. Forget about flooding the articles with keywords and links; here are a number of things you can actually do to optimize your content even further.

Content Optimization for Search Engines

Identifying how your users search for information is just the first step towards optimizing your contents for SEO. Next, you need to start writing and posting content in order to be more visible on search results. There are a few tips you can use to get started right away, including:

Create a content schedule and be consistent. Search engines value websites that are updated regularly. Instead of posting blog posts sporadically, keep a tight schedule and update your site regularly.

Use headlines, page titles, subtitles and URLs to your advantage. These web elements are rated higher than the rest of the articles. By placing keywords as these elements, you can gain better search engine rankings much faster.

Don’t hesitate to use additional tools to review the content before posting. Yoast for WordPress is a good example of how an SEO tool doesn’t have to be complicated. Even when you don’t have prior experience in doing SEO audits, the tools you use will point you towards the right direction.

Don’t forget to also optimize content for local searches. Add country- or city-specific information to your article, particularly if you are targeting a specific market segment. Search engine crawlers will pick up these information and adjust your rankings accordingly.

As with any SEO effort, don’t forget to be consistent. You need to evaluate your efforts and make subtle adjustments to keep the SEO campaign effective, but posting contents consistently is still necessary. It is the only way you can stay ahead of your competitors and keep your pages appearing on search results.

How To Find Guest Blogging Opportunities

Guest posting is a good way to market your blog to new, wider audiences. By tapping into the audience of another blog, you are growing your own audience base and increasing your credibility at the same time. Of course, there are a lot of challenges you will face when you want to use guest blogging as a way to market yourself. One of those challenges is finding the best guest blogging opportunities.

Search Engines To the Rescue!

One of the easiest ways to find guest blogging opportunities is by actually using search engines to search for keywords such as:

Guest post
Guest blogging
Writers wanted/needed
Write for us
Get in touch

These keywords usually lead to guest blogging opportunities, and you can actually find thousands of results by doing a simple search on popular search engines.

Social Networking Sites

Almost all bloggers and news sites are now on social media. Since social media is meant to be social, you can actually reach out to them and get responses almost instantly. This is a good way to explore guest posting opportunities. Simply ask if you can do a guest post on the blogs you are interested in engaging and act on the response you receive.

Don’t worry about bloggers and sites that reject your request or offer. Focus on the ones that gives you the opportunity to write an article for them. Once you have a couple of guest posts published, finding more opportunities will be much easier to do.

Be Part of Communities

Blogging communities, online blogging forums and even blogs or websites that specialize in blogging are very easy to find these days. By connecting with them, you can also find hundreds – if not thousands – of guest posting opportunities.

Linknami, for instance has a page dedicated to those who want to exchange guest posts. You can meet fellow bloggers, explore the possibilities of posting on each others’ blogs and gain a lot of credibility very quickly. Other sites such as BlogSynergy uses a similar system to connect bloggers with each other.

Ask for People to Contact You

Last but not least, add a contact form to your page and ask people to contact you about possibly doing a guest blog. You can exchange blog posts and publish posts by other bloggers on your site as a return. You can even create a special category on your site for guest posts from various sources.

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