Monthly Archives: November 2014

How to Write Engaging Content for your Facebook Followers

As most of you should already know, companies today often come with their own website, as well as a handful of useful social media websites that are used to assist in spreading the word about their business and creating brand awareness. However, although having a Facebook page as a small company today may be perfectly common, finding the right content to break through to your target market and keep them coming back for more, is a rare occurrence. The unfortunate truth is that most of your fans don’t actually spend a lot of time reading or even seeing your content on Facebook. So how do you make sure you optimize the fantastic social media design and offer up wonderful content every day?

Write Content the right way

The first and most important aspect of content writing is being relevant. You can choose the best words and select the best tone of voice to reach out to your target market, but nobody is going to be interested in what you have to say unless you’re talking about a topic in context. This means that your Facebook business group cannot update its status talking about the weather or what the marketer is having for dinner, when he or she should be focusing on real estate, or whatever industry the business exists in.

Furthermore, it’s a good idea to keep up to date with promotions, events, holidays, and other exciting marketing techniques for your audience, as this will help you to keep your market engaged throughout the year. Try and present answers to the most common problems your customers have, and if you don’t know what they want to learn about, then ask! Some of the other things you should ensure you do with each post include:

Making sure that you don’t go over 205 characters. This is the longest your message on Facebook can be in a status. However, if you don’t want it to be truncated at all, you will have to cut the number down by about one hundred characters.

Providing interesting and engaging information that your audience is going to want to know more about. If you’re linking to a blog page, make sure that your reader is going to want to continue reading after the first hundred characters of teaser-text.

Call your readers into action. This means asking people to let you know if they agree with what you have to say, to give their opinion on certain things or share if they have something to add. However, this doesn’t mean that you should tell your readers to ‘like if’ something, as Facebook has recently begun to punish groups who try to hoard their followers ‘likes’.

Try including images with your posts, pictures can catch a readers eye more readily than a paragraph of text, and get someone interested in what you have to say. Usually, it’s a better idea to use an original picture than something you have simply found floating around on google.

The Top Tips on Optimizing your Content for SEO Purposes

Ensuring that your website is supplying helpful and relevant information is one of the best ways to make sure that you gather traffic and keep that traffic coming back time and time again. Today, some of the older marketing methods don’t generally produce the same results as they once did, and you have to be more careful about the content that you’re putting out there if you want to be recognized by the search engines for all of the right reasons. Writing content that has been perfectly tailored for SEO purposes is the best way to benefit your business. The right content can lead to better bank links for your site, higher levels of traffic and improved respect among your potential customers. Here are some tips to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your content for SEO purposes.

Make Sure it’s Relevant

Make sure that whatever you’re writing is about is both relevant and interesting. If your customers do not feel as though they’re benefitting from reading your content, then they’re not going to stick around for very long. The more valuable your content seems to be, the more traffic you are going to see in the long run. Remember, search engines are smarter today than ever before, so you cannot simply use transparent efforts to make keyword dense content with a little bit of extra wording. Read through your article and make sure you’re offering something to your reader.

Keywords are important, but you need to be careful about how many you shove into one article. Remember, an article that has been loaded with keywords is going to sound ridiculous and unnatural. Try not to use repetitive terms very often and keep your content as clear as possible.

Go for Quality over Quantity

One of the most important things about writing content for SEO purposes, is making sure that it is information your readers want to know about. Simply submitting hundreds of pointless words is not going to get you anywhere when it comes to the search engine ranking pages. Try to go for quality, over quantity whenever you can, and see whether you can use your space to answer some of the most important questions your target audience is asking. If you don’t know what your market wants to know about, then find a way to ask them, either through:

Social media websites such as twitter or Facebook
Blogging and commentary
Polls

Another important thing to remember about search engine optimization is that the title is also an important aspect over the overall article. Your title should provide a miniature summary of what a reader can expect when they click through onto your website. Remember, search engines will use your title to match searches towards your content, and they will be looking for accuracy, so make sure your title reflects the purpose of what you have written. Also, it’s a good idea to keep your title underneath ten words if you can, otherwise it’s just going to get truncated.

Separating Fact from Myth with Online Marketing

Online marketing is a tricky subject and what works can change within a matter of moments, leading a lot of clients to approach writers and marketing agencies with a simplistic or overly general idea of what they think will make them successful. Although it’s useful to have handy information online that individuals can access whenever they like, there are also times when writers will take advantage of the availability of the internet and simply provide content to fill up space, rather than offering content that they have taken the time to research. The first thing to remember is that not every tactic is going to work for every customer, but that doesn’t mean that customers should give up all together. Here are some of the most commonly believed myths in the world of online marketing.

Myth Number 1: SEO Isn’t Important Anymore

Although this concept has seen some popularity over the recent months, it’s important to remember that SEO marketing is just as important as ever, the tactics that work have simply changed somewhat. Once upon a time, agencies used to recommend that articles be completely overstuffed with keywords, but today Google has gotten smarter, and decided to focus on bringing quality content to the masses. Content writers have to write genuinely good information that incorporates relevant keywords from time to time would going over the top.

Myth Number 2: Online Marketing Doesn’t take a Lot of Effort

Some people think that they can simply get away with a one time investment into their online marketing strategies. Even if you decide to inject your website with thousands of dollars worth of quality design and content, you’re still not done. If you want to attract more traffic to your website and keep your users coming back for more, then you’ll need to implement various strategies, including email advertising, social media, content marketing and more. Expect to have to devote some of your efforts to patience, too.

Myth Number 3: Traffic is the Most Important thing

Getting tons of traffic to your website does seem like a pretty good thing, but it’s not always the most crucial aspect of online marketing. If you want to get really good business, then the traffic you attract needs to be relevant to your business. Optimize your website with high quality information and data, and make sure that your search engines are picking your website up for the right reasons. The more relevant your site is, the more of the right traffic you’re going to acquire. It’s no good driving thousands of people to your website if they only spend two seconds within the first page before immediately clicking the back button.

If the website traffic that you receive is not from the right audience, then you’re just going to get a higher bounce rate, which means that your business isn’t performing as it should be. Check your rate and see where it falls, if you’re currently between sixty and seventy percent, then it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Tips on Finding Valuable Guest Posting Opportunities

These days, a lot of people understand the benefit of running an active blog, but not everyone has the time or resources to commit to posting articles and updates every day. That’s where guest blogging or guest posts can come in so useful. As well as providing you with more time to focus on other aspects of your business, guest posting allows you to give different perspectives on the same topic. Every customer, vendor, partner, or industry expert that you speak to will provide a new voice for your blog, and a new light for your readers to view the work you do. Finding someone to give you guest blogs is a simple task. There are hundreds of writers out there that are happy to offer you work. However, finding someone who can actually do an amazing job and draw clients in with their voice, is a slightly more challenging issue.

Make Sure you’re sending out the right message

One important thing that you need to remember is that although bloggers may love the work that they’re doing, it’s still their work. They’re writing for a living, and the two main things that they’re going to want from you are cash, and exposure. If you want to lure in experienced, high-quality bloggers, then you need to give them the right bait, so make sure that you come up with some good incentives. At the least, let your blogger know that they’ll be able to provide a link to the work they have done to you from their site, so they’re getting recognition for their content. Furthermore, although exposure is important, the right money never hurts, and offering a decent price for a good post will help to draw in the higher standards of writer out there. Bigger names with better credentials are going to want more money, but remember that there are a few un-noticed stars still in the mix today.

Give your bloggers guidelines

Bloggers and writers are a fairly creative bunch, but you shouldn’t expect them to come up with absolutely everything themselves. If possible, provide a complete list of guidelines on your website to show guest posters that you have a very clear business plan already set in motion. You’ll usually find that this is a great way of weeding out writers of a poorer quality, because of the guidelines look too complex, some bloggers will recognize they’re just not going to make the cut. Include:

Your preferred word count
Policies on adding links and pictures
Lists of topics your writers should cover

Remember, just like searching for anything else of worth in life, you’re going to have to be patient if you want to make sure you get the best quality. Take the time to reach out to different networks and ask bloggers for samples for you commit to any individual in particular. If you can, try to build a group of writers that you can rely on to help your blog grow.

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