Monish Vora - Blurbpoint

Big Transformation for Content Marketing in 2014

It’s almost past one month since the New Year began and the assumptions, predictions and various insights have found their way into the discussions in the digital industry on what will be in during the current year 2014.

The fundamentals of good content will never change, however, the way it will be consumed, the channels, the tactics of distribution will continue to evolve. So it calls for some key trends on the horizon for the year 2014 that are predicted to directly affect the online content marketing initiatives.

Before we explore the upcoming trends, let’s have a look at some of the headlines of the year 2013:

• 92% of online marketers are now using content marketing

• There was an increase in the number of B2B marketers and B2C marketers who were planning to increase their investment in content marketing

• The success of your content marketing strategy is hugely affected by how well the strategy has been documented.

So, what exactly is required in the New Year? Let’s breakdown the requirements

1. Making up a marketing team

The role of traditional marketing is being redefined constantly, and one of the additions to the marketing teams should be a director of content. For organizations, this is the case as you need to assign the sole responsibility to someone to drive your online content strategy and measure the impact on the business goals. The role of the director of content is to shape and give a definition to the organization’s marketing strategy, directing all the aspects needed to be executed by the business. The key responsibilities of this person are mentioned here:

• Strong verbal and written communication skills

• A strong taste for visual content

• An analytical mind

• Should understand the value of conversion optimization

• Should be updated with the current trends and possess the skills of a journalist.

The need for a director of content will only be more felt in 2014

2. Responsive design will be mandatory

2014 will not be only about mobile strategy. Content marketers will need to focus on an “everything” strategy that includes multiple channels at one go. We are almost only three years away when a majority of internet device sales will be out of mobile devices including tablets. Thus, without a strategy in place that addresses the needs of the target audience, you might be going ahead with content that is least engaging and shareable.

However, one should bear in mind that this doesn’t imply that they need a native app. The main aspect over here is to create a responsive experience for the audience. Your content has to be instantly accessible and navigable on any device. This increases the chances of the content performing well for your business. Hence, the creation of a responsive design for your content channels should be incorporated into all your content planning processes.

Each time new content is rolled out it should be tested to fit all screen sizes. While this could involve a bigger investment, your content would be setup for maximum consumption and discoverability helping it to move forward.

3. Link earning will defeat link building

The hummingbird update wants to make it clear that search has begun to shift by taking the context and conversational language into account in the process of ranking pages and providing the SERP’s. This also means that synonyms will be a part of this update and would be considered while delivering search results. This will hopefully help steer away from badly written, thin content overloaded with keywords. Thus content marketers will now how to invest all their time and resources on “big content” rather than 100 pieces of small content that have nothing much to offer. This process will help in earning respect, authority, and thus, links which is the basis of all the content marketing efforts.

4. Custom content streams and curation will take the centre-stage

It will be easier than ever to curate the best content from multiple resources and creating highly intent content streams. Through the introduction of various utilities on social media networks, marketers will find it more convenient to organize and target content. This will enable creating the content for highly targeted segments of the audience.

This is an exciting turnaround in the content marketing field and has great potential for the brands and also their customers. Brands could pick out the important pieces that will tell a story, thus helping the people in finding what they need rather than letting them surf through mounds of content or sending them to only a single resource.

Wrap-up

Marketers know one thing for sure – this is a fast-paced industry so it is vital to stay on top of the changes. The above trends are just the samples of what is expected to come, however, preparing for them and adapting to the same could make a huge difference for your brand’s success.

Hashtags – The dark horse of social media marketing

The # is enjoying its moment. It is no longer considered a number sign or a mere pound. It has reincarnated on social media and how!

With a completely new identity – hashtag or #tag, it has found its place in all places that are non-digital. There are hashtags at all places that have social media. In simple terms, a hashtag is a convenient way for people to categorize, locate and join conversations on a particular topic. All thanks to Twitter for giving this lowly pound a completely new role on the social web. The hashtag is used to highlight topics or keywords and could be placed anywhere within a post.

One of the greatest advantages provided by social media is that it has the ability to reach a large number of people. Using the hashtag, one could spread the brand, get their message out and take advantage of the popular trends. The term hashtag refers to the topics that a # symbol contains. Some hashtags are only single words (#medicine), while some are multiple words tied together (#ask4more). It’s similar to an index of a book with many chapters. You would go to the index page to search for a particular topic, let’s say George Washington. Social media’s index page is the hashtag, which could be used as #GeorgeWashinton to find all the posts and tweets related.

Let’s have a quick look into the history of hashtags and check out how it has evolved to be such a hit amongst the users throughout all the social media platforms.

A Brief History of Hashtags:

• 2007: After being proposed for the first time on Twitter, the hashtags were used with #sandiegofire during the wildfire in California.

• 2009: Twitter now accepts hashtags by linking anything preceded with the # symbol.

• 2011: Audi premiered its first Super Bowl commercial with the help of the hashtag. In the same year, Instagram added hashtag support. Incidentally, even Google+ started linking hashtags in posts.

• 2013: Flickr started supporting hashtags in March. By the end of June, even Facebook started supporting hashtags.

Regardless of how they started, hashtags have now become an essential part of marketing on social media and if used properly, they could help in building a community, grow the following and impart vital points within your own posts.

Some Little Known Facts about Hashtags

• More than 70% of users use hashtags on their mobile

• Only 30% use the hashtag on their PC’s or laptops

• Chances of the tweets being re-tweeted are 55% more if they have a hashtag.

• More than 50% of users would share hashtags more often if they knew there were some special promotional offers.

Why Use a Hashtag for your content?

Typing a relevant hashtag into your content will help your targeted readers find your given information, although they aren’t following you. Using the right hashtag is the key to success on the social web as there are millions of hashtags being circulated in a single day.

If you are visiting an event and aren’t sure about the venue, the organizers would have designated a hashtag for all those who would be becoming. Look on the literature or the events web page to get the right hashtag.

The best way to find the right hashtag is to test the term out. Type it into the search box of the social media website and if it is in use, you will get a list of all related posts. It’s the thumb rule that the larger the list, the more popular the hashtag is.

How to create hashtags?

Like any other marketing effort, the hashtag needs to be promoted with a well-planned strategy. Use it at all those places where your brand is being mentioned. Put it on your website, on the promotional materials of your company. All those tweets that use the hashtag, should be retweeted and invite the targeted users to submit their suggestions or experiences with your firm.

Starting a hashtag strategy from scratch would require a continuous and consistent effort. Although there are instances of hashtags going viral instantly, there still goes a lot of work in maintaining the top slot for the hashtag.

Tips for using hashtags

• Don’t use your brand/company name: Use those hashtags that your targeted visitors would be actually searching. Your posts already bear the company name and other information. So, it means you only have to optimize a better social media strategy, than simply wasting time hashtagging the posts with your brand name.

• Don’t overdo the hashtagging: Use only those that are relevant to the content that you are posting. The worst thing that you do to your content is to overstuff it with hashtags and with those that are not relevant.

• Be specific: Don’t go off the track while determining the hashtag. The content meant for those looking for a bed will only look for #bed rather than the more generic #furniture.

• Be consistent on all platforms: Whether you are posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Google Plus, make sure that you are doing it regularly and consistently.

Hashtags are the most unique concept of social media. The best part about this is that it wasn’t started by a company. As the story goes, a group of users got it all started. The suggestions here will hopefully improve the results that you have been getting with your hashtags. Though there is a lot more to be understood, these are the most basic things that one could consider and experiment and measure the differences it brings about. Before creating content, make sure that you research the best hashtags available based on your industry so that you could reap the maximum benefits from it. If you are an SEO service provider, you should convey to your client to use hashtags on their business social media account, so that it reflects in your SEO effort as well.

SEO On The Way: A Short Guide On Implementing SEO Alongside Web Designing

If you think that designing a beautiful, fully functional website that addresses your clients’ needs is enough to rank on search engines, you’re wrong. If your goal is that your client should reap the benefits of having a good online presence, SEO is unavoidable. Simply for the fact that it helps all the hard work put into web-designing show up on search engines, for all the helpful information, and not to forget the best user experience.

The following web design practices could improve a website’s SEO and their visibility. The points here are the foundations for any web-designer, who will get relief simply by knowing that all the hours spent in creating a website is now one of the top page contenders on search engines. These tactics may also help in improving the overall user experience as well.

Keywords:

Keywords are the most essential part for any search engine optimization projects. If wrong keywords are inserted without a thorough keyword research, search engines and the target market will never be able to find your site. When starting to work on the making of a website, it is important to define the objectives. Is a local area targeted, or is it wider with national or global targets? Keeping this plan in the mind, you could build pages that target those selected keywords.

The process of creating…

1. Make a list of some potential keywords. The words or phrases should be relevant to your business, but not generic.

2. Input all the keywords into the Google Adwords Keyword Planner or Wordtracker or Wordstream and see their status.

3. Make a final list of the keywords based on the research.

4. Prepare all the required stuff to launch the keywords along.

The Placement Of Keywords:

For a website to make it into Google’s index, it is first required to tell Google what a particular page is all about. It is vital to position all the keywords rightly onto the page. It is recommended not to overstuff the page with keywords. Here are some of the best places.

• Title tag

• Website slogans

• Meta description and keywords

• Breadcrumb trails

• Navigation

• Bullet points

• Alt text

• The main website copy

• H1, H2 and H3 tags

• Title attribute on links

• Internal links

• Footer links

• URL’s

Search Engine Friendly Navigation:

Search engine friendly navigation basically means having website structure that could be easily followed by search engines. Why a majority of websites are not found by the search engines, is because the links are not used smartly. Links play a very essential part in your organic search rankings, and thus it is advised to address this issue and see that all the links and buttons are text based. Search engines find it difficult to understand java script too and may result into crawling issues. With more and more people surfing the web on their mobile, using advanced scripting languages won’t work very well.

URL’s and Filenames:

Having an SEO friendly URL means that you have inserted the keywords appropriately and the search engine is quickly able to figure out what the page is all about.

An example of an un-friendly URL:

http://www.xyzstore.com/products/item4?=206574

A better, more friendly URL would be:

http://www.xyzstore.com/home-furniture/bedrooms/wardrobe

As it could be observed, that the second option is enriched with keywords with a readable structure of the URL, which will help the search engine in indexing you.

Website Images:

Images are often overlooked in managing all the aspects of SEO, however they plan an equally important role in the success of a website on search engine.

The images are to be optimized for faster loading time and also search engine visibility. It should be ensured that the size of the image file is as small as possible, keeping in mind the mobile users and the ones with slower internet connections.

The best size for an image is anywhere between 30 and 100 kb and the best resolution for an image for SEO is 72 dpi.

It is a good practice to keep the images in context to all the content on the web page. The more relevant the image is to the text, the better results you’ll get for the rankings.

Give a description to the images with the help of the alt tag. The alt tags could smartly be used to describe what the image is all about, helping to place your targeted keywords as it is also an essential part of on-page SEO.

Social Media:

Social Media should essentially be integrated into an SEO strategy as it is a proven fact that a brand gets a phenomenal boost by building relations and interacting with connections. In addition to that, it gives you the exposure and helps in earning credibility.

Perhaps social media is considered a hot property. The number of visitors sharing links plays a huge role in your success in search engines. An engaging content could result into a large number of inbound links. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Digg are some of the most popular social media channels that could provide any organization and affordable online marketing channel that bring positive results.

Conclusion:

The above mentioned ways will definitely ensure that your website gets the desired visibility on search engines, if implemented during the web designing process. There are methods that claim to reach the website on the top of Google overnight, however it is always effective to have a strong foundation for a website in the first place. Of course, having a reliable product and a service is the pre-requisite, however your online presence and marketing of the products and services will depend on how well your implement these techniques.

3 Future-Proof Link Marketing (Building) Techniques To Initiate Your Online Marketing

Link earning is an essential tactic in online marketing not only because it improves the SEO efforts, but also because it helps a website in being discovered, in lead generation, building relationships and create a strong base for online brand presence.

Link Marketing is unavoidable, although search engines want you to establish yourself as an authority in order to earn links. Link marketing/Link building should be highly considered, as it makes a brand more well known in its own niche, and lays down the foundation for earning genuine links.

Below mentioned are some of the most genuine link marketing techniques for today and the future.

Have your own database of images: This tactic could be well-capitalized if used smartly. If you are in search of industry relevant places, this could be a good investment. You can start making a list of all relevant bloggers, who are always in search of unique images relevant to their blogs. Create your own gallery of images and cinemagraphs, which will require a little more investment to hire a graphic artist or a professional photographer. This will definitely boost your link building campaign through link attribution from those bloggers who’ll be using your premium pictures.

One more feature that could be integrated is the reverse image search, wherein you could get in touch with all those bloggers who start using your images without your consent. Tineye and Google’s image search are the tools that can be used to detect those websites where your image has been used.

Acquisition of outdated content: Millions of content on the web aren’t timeless and many of them are not well maintained. This opens door to a number of opportunities, wherein it would be possible to surf through hundreds of outdated pieces of content in your industry. This content may have been successful in earning natural links in the past.

This content are well-suited to be acquired. Also, Greenlane SEO’s outdated content finder tool is a convenient one to find those content that is under-maintained that could be repurposed or recreated. Contact the blog owners and request to purchase the old page and redirect it to the new version of the page that is hosted by your domain. Make sure that the information on that topic is updated.

Tell the blog owners that they will get due credit as the original creator with a mention to their brand, and improve your chances of getting the content.

When selecting outdated web documents that could be revived, use tools like ahrefs or open site explorer and check the external links to the old content.

One more option apart from buying the content is that, the webmaster could be asked to update the content with your given information. This could also help in getting links back to your site from that updated content.

Getting More Shares On Google+: Google+ posts do pass link equity. The more shares your Google+ posts get, the more high value links you will get if a link to your site’s pages is included in the Google+ post.

Google+ is a microblogging platform that offers huge opportunities to promote a brand/website:

In order to get more shares for your post on Google+, it is vital to build a strong follower base, to maximize the chances of getting the posts shared. Integrate Google+ with your content marketing efforts.

Google+ is also a microblogging platform. So, it is wise to start blogging on Google+. Lengthy posts have a higher potential for getting more shares.

Add links to external pages that are relevant within the Google+ posts, which helps your link building purpose when shared by people. Link to the works of other people too to build a good rapport with them, and to smartly get them to share your post.

Though the list is long, I believe that the tactics mentioned here are definitely going to stay and will be implemented in a number of SEO projects for a long time. Having said that, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Google still likes those sites that show authority. Keeping in mind this important fact if one moves ahead with their SEO efforts, they will definitely see positive results.

The Comprehensive Guide To Link Reclamation Best Practices

With the constant evolution in the internet industry, websites have to change and their designs are altered. This results in the creation of broken links on other websites. Backlinks may get lost generally, due to the removal of pages and the changes implemented on urls during the website’s renovation process. While starting a new campaign for a client, link reclamation is the most convenient and swift way to boost the efforts of search engine optimization. A 301 redirect process will restore the SEO values of your inbound links, however, a link reclamation process is the surest way to retain the complete value of the link.

What is the Link Reclamation process?

Link reclamation is the process of tracking, getting in contact and fixing the problem of internal and external broken links pointing to your own website. The best tool for your link reclamation projects is Microsoft Excel and Open Site Explorer. OSE is the most comprehensive, convenient tool providing in-depth analysis of linkage on various web pages. In addition to the inbound and outbound links, OSE also gives metrics on internal and broken links.

It is mandatory to carry out a link reclamation project each time content is removed, the URL’s are changed, or a website has been redesigned. To determine if a website requires a link reclamation project, investigate the results from the tab “Top Pages” in OSE for the root domain of the website. Export the derived results to a .csv format and sort them by the “HTTP Status”. Link reclamation is a must if any of the pages have a 404 HTTP Status.

Upon review, if found that the back-links are coming up as 404’s, broking links pointing to non-existent pages, there are a few steps that need to be performed. Make a list of all the old URL’s anchor texts, new URL’s and location of the broken links. The best solution for an internal linking problem is to go to the page manually, and fix the broken link by replacing the URL. In order to fix broken links from external websites, the only saviours are a 301 redirect campaign and a link reclamation project. A direct link is more valuable than a redirect. So, it is the best practice to wait for a few weeks after link reclamation to put the redirects in place. There is no need to bother other websites for fixing their links when you have set up a redirect.

Sometimes, it could be a bit tricky to figure out a new URL for broken links. With the use of context clues, it is possible to find the correct pages. If not, you could always use the home page as the default target.

Once the list is created with new URL’s, the next step is figuring out the number of pages that are linking to the missing page. For this, use Open Site Explorer to run each 404 status URL and see the “Linking Pages” tab. This will give a list of all the links and anchor texts pointing to that missing page. This step should be performed for every missing page. The spreadsheet will become very long with this process. If some 404’s come up with no pages linking to it, there may be some problem with the old redirects.

Once all the steps are complete, sort the spreadsheet of your list by the linking URL’s. This makes it convenient to figure out the websites that have multiple broken links to your targeted website. The next step involves going through the list and contact each of the website owners to inform them about the broken links and what the correct link is. Older the links, the less likeliness of a response. Most people would be glad to fix the links as it makes up for a good experience for their users. The vital thing is to be very informative in the approach and avoid seeming like a bot.

It is not possible to reclaim all the links. Set up 301 redirects for all those pages, which showed up as 404’s, a few weeks after the initial contact. Although the broken links have been fixed, it is still highly recommended to set up redirects for these pages. Having all the inbound links clean will help Google to index the website more effectively and efficiently.

Bounce Rate – The Hostile Enemy for Your SEO Campaign

A website’s bounce rate could prove to be a deciding factor for SEO tactics to be implemented. This post deals with lowering the bounce rate to a certain extent, so as to increase the engagement rate of your website.

Prior to that, let us understand some basic points about the bounce rate. Here are the answers to some common questions pertaining to the bounce rate.

What’s Bounce Rate?

In simple terms, bounce rate shows the number of visitors who went back to the search engine in a very short time after getting directed to your website through the search engines. The reason to go back would be to find some more useful information, inability to relate to your site, or they didn’t like the look of your site. They don’t care to surf through the rest of the pages of your website.

Does it impact my SEO campaign?

The bitter truth is that a higher bounce rate will have negative effects on your SEO campaign. A higher bounce rate would prove that your webpage doesn’t offer any value to the visitors, though it contains the relevant keywords. This will enforce the search engines to drop your rankings and bring more relevant pages to the top of the search engine rankings.

How is the bounce rate measured?

There are a number of available tools however, the most convenient one would be Google Analytics that is committed to giving more accurate results.

What are the min and max numbers?

The golden rule is that anything less than 30% is a low bounce rate. But 50% or high is a sign of danger, which requires performing some serious analysis to know the exact reasons behind the high bounce rate.

Some steps to lower your bounce rate

How does your website look?: The vital step for any website, at the fundamental stage is the layout and the design part. The website should be pleasing and appealing to the user if you want them to stay longer on the website. A website not organized well would create a very bad impression on the reader’s mind, forcing them to leave the site at once, ticking your bounce rate at an all-time high. The fonts that you select should be readable and at any point, the reader should not feel that the site has been built just for the sake of it.

Stick to the subject: Content is the key player for your website, as the visitors are coming in to get some relevant information for which they have entered the keywords in the search bar. The content has to be relevant, original and pertaining to the industry niche.

Check the loading time: A slow loading time would add to the bounce rate as impatient visitors will never wait for aeons for your website to load. Consequently, they will lose hope and leave the website. Avoid heavy files of pictures and videos on the webpage. Compress them, as they take less time to load.

External links: Sources of information would be highly appreciated if the links to them are provided on your webpage. Insert a link to some valuable source at the end of your content, so that the visitor could visit that page for more information. Make sure that the link opens in a new window so that the visitor could come back to your site when required.

Headline with targeted keywords: Use the keyword in the headline of your content on the webpage. Having said that, it is strongly advised to have the content related to the headline, else it would prove to be very harmful with the bounce rate at an all-time high.

Include a Search Box: Have search bars on your website so that the visitors could easily enter the topic of their interest and search for the same on your website.

About Us: Having an attractive About Us page, which gives detailed information on your business, the products and services, or even you.

Enable commenting: Having a comment box on the website would help to lower the bounce rate as the visitor stays for some time to enter his/her suggestion. Design a web page that refreshes each time a comment is entered.

Internal Linking: The best example of this is Wikipedia. If there are some more sources on your website, which you feel might interest the visitor, you could insert the links to those pages on your own website.

Pop-up windows: Do not disturb the visitors with pop-up windows emerging every now and then as it will devalue the user experience. Pop-up windows which are irrelevant and keep on popping up annoy a visitor the most.

Make your website mobile-friendly: It is strongly advised to have websites that are built keeping in mind mobiles and tablets. This could lessen the effect of bounce rates. The language in any version of your website should be lucid so that the users could easily grasp the given information.

These guidelines are meant to lower your bounce rate and if followed religiously, they will surely bring it down, at the same time enhance the overall user experience. High bounce rates are the cold-blooded murderers of your conversion and you need to make sure that the visitor’s get one great experience when they come on your site searching for things.

The Inevitables: Most Overlooked Factors When Launching A Website

For any business or online marketer, relaunching a website is one task that scares the daylights off them. It could get really stressful as there are a number of things to be considered in this process.

The newly developed site has all the things to catch the eye-balls of the audience. It includes graphics, videos built with Adobe videos and wonderful content. You have successfully managed to rank for some relevant key terms, which are successful in driving the highest level of traffic on a monthly basis.

What will be the result of your hard work, when your site is completely transformed?

Is it possible to maintain the rankings?

What will be the state of all the link that has been acquired over the years?

Have no fear, as there are a lot of things during this transition period that is in your control. Ensuring that you regularly work towards maintaining the rankings, preserve the online reputation and avoid duplicate content, will make sure that your company stays at its deserved place and outwits your competitors.

301 Redirects

There are all chances of creating duplicate content when planning a site relaunch. Duplicate content could prove to be harmful to your website’s reputation, sometimes inviting penalization as well. It doesn’t get any value from the search engines’ spiders as a result of it being duplicated. This compels them to provide rank to your competitor’s site instead of you.

Have a comprehensive inventory of your sites’ various URLs. Using tools like the Screaming Frog will allow you to scan your website and identify all the links within your site.

After acquiring the list of URL’s, it is vital to create a 301 Redirect that exactly outlines where a particular URL would be transferred in the new site.

Integration of Company Blog

If blogging is something that you weren’t used to doing in your old website’s promotional campaign, it’s time to start it with the new site.

Having fresh content on your new site frequently will signal the search engines that you are still active and credible to rely on as a good source of information.

This will also enable you to be found for pertinent keyphrases, entered by the users before the search engines are able to determine and recognize the transfer from your 301 redirects.

Analytics

It is essential to track all the necessary analytics in order to know how your new website is working.

Create a base report, which lists your keyword rankings, most popular landing pages and monthly traffic levels of the last six months. This will give you a clear idea on how you are performing by comparing the former results.

Page Load Speed

According to Google’s declaration on what visitors expect the most from their digital experience, they tend to stay with the site which has a fast loading time and find it more valuable than those sites that run slowly.

One way is image compression to increase the site’s load time. The superfluity and the irrelevance of the data is reduced in the images. This enables a quick and efficient manner of maintaining the data.

Search crawlers identify the type of your content quite faster if the dimensions of the image and the file size are worked upon. The lag time for online users will go down considerably with this practice.

While We Are Talking About Images, Make Sure They Are Formatted Correctly

An Image built with Flash or have a .tiff extension will not be supported by search crawlers and will be considered waste content if you are looking at it from the search engine’s perspective. Review all the landing pages to see if the images have a JPG, PNG, or GIF extension.

Fulfill All Forms of Meta Data

Before the launch of a new site, make sure that you clearly understand fulfilling each metadata into your new site.
If there is some confusion on using the keywords or how each term could perform in your strategy for pulling traffic to your website, check out Google’s Keyword Planner to test the primary and the variations of the keywords.

Structure the URLs

Restructuring the URL is an unavoidable factor if you are looking to relaunch the company website and spending your fortune on it.

Convert all the boring, dynamic and too long URLs into an organized system that could be read clearly by search engines and searchers alike. Make sure that you make the correct use of key phrases for the URL of each internal page.

Test Cross Browser Compatibility

The new site may look fantastic on Firefox, but all those who are using Google Chrome may not be impressed by your site’s look. So, it is vital to make sure that the new site should be designed in a way so that is compatible with all the browsers.

There is a plethora of online resources, which could be used to perform such tests. It is highly recommended to verify the compatibility of the website with each browser.

XML Sitemap

After all the URL’s are redirected, metadata is properly inserted and fulfilled that the site is ready to launch, create an XML Sitemap and upload it on Google and Bing Webmasters Tools. XML sitemaps allow search engines to understand properly what exactly your website is all about and connects it well with the target audience who are looking for the products or services that you are offering.

Once a new sitemap is created and uploaded to Google and Bing’s Webmasters Tools, both the search engines will be able to quickly interpret what lies within your site.

There will always be a few ups and downs in your way while launching a new company website. The only way to get more visibility on your new site is by properly managing the things on which you have direct control.

Checking out these nine steps during your relaunch process will definitely support the digital success of your new site and get it up and running.

From Data To Visualization: 4 Tools For Effective Infographics

It’s no news that effective data visualization has made it’s mark, and earned respect in the online marketing fraternity. With the explosion of online information and advertising, online marketers are now inclined towards information graphics, or infographics to convey a message, tell stories, give out instructions, how-to-guides and various other things.

The interactive visualizations and infographics that have emerged in the past few years have changed the perspective of both audiences and online marketing companies around the world. Now, a reader gets all the required information encapsulated in one graphic, which makes it easier to comprehend the detailed information. Looking for reader engagement? A good visualization factor will not only increase the engagement, shares, likes and comments, it typically makes the readers come back for some more every time.

With budgets very tight throughout the industry, online marketing firms are now taking it upon themselves to learn the tools of creating a visualization, to make the utmost use of their resources. Fortunately, there are sufficient user-friendly infographic tools for all levels of skills to allow the average graphic designer to cook an interesting recipe in the form of interactive graphics.

Here are some of the best tools for adding data in the best visual form and enhance interactivity.

Infogr.am:

While I am writing this post, there are 1,029,362 infographics created with the help of this free tool, and the count is increasing. Infographics are just easy with this tool. It helps in illustrating with more than 30 chart types, ranging from bubble and treemaps to plain pie charts.

It enables data editing and we could import our XLS, XLSX, and CSV files for easy data editing. It has recently introduced the Microsoft Excel app and you would be able to use it from the excel toolbar itself. As per the company’s statistics, the content was created with Infogr. am tool are being viewed by 3 to 4 million unique visitors monthly with a 25% monthly growth.

One of the salient features of this tool is that you could download your creations in PNG or PDF format.

Piktochart:

This one is rock steady with clients such as Harvard University, GE, Red Bull. It has built this liking with its more than 90 included themes. Giving access to the WYSIWYG editor for $29/month, it lets you drag and drop the elements while creating the infographic. It has built an impressive user base of some 3,00,000 users.

In the latest version, Piktochart is allowing its users to create search-friendly graphics. It is possible to share your creations via your social network account or you could also download print-quality files.

Easel.ly:

This one also takes a WYSIWYG approach to create infographics. However, it comes with a very small collection of 10 “vhemes” (visual themes). Why it stands apart? Its because it makes it easy to select objects and insert them from various categories such as animals, nature, icons, people, banners among others.

The layouts provided by Easel.ly contain a nice choice of colors and stylish layouts. It is not over complicated and quite simple to use compared to other tools. If you are not looking for more themes, this one would prove to be a good choice.

Visual.ly:

You don’t have to be a stalwart in designing to make infographics with Visual.ly. It helps you customize you infographics in seconds. Visual.ly also help you to discover infographics from other users and their favorites.

With a range of topics, Visual.ly makes sure that you get to see and create infographics on the topics of your interest. The infographic gallery contains 27 categories, so you will find something interesting even though you don’t normally check out infographics. Also, if you want to have infographics made by others, Visual.ly has a marketplace where they bring together marketing gurus, design junkies and data nerds, to build an infographic that best suits your requirements. Visual.ly gives you an option to reach a population of more than 10 million people.

If a picture is worth thousands of words, an Infographic is worth millions of them. Give your readers 2 options: a 1,000 words article or an Infographic with the same information. They will definitely prefer to consume all the information with the help of the Infographic with just a few scrolls up and down. Colours and pictures are attractive and you could leverage more out of it if implemented in the right way.

Mission Engagement: The New Era Of Media Solutions

Until the emergence of engagement, which has now gained the status of a high priority media solution, it was exposure that dominated media planning to a large extent. Brands are now generating deep, intuitive insights and encouragement, to get responses from those who matter the most. Thus, engagement is slowly and gradually taking overexposure in the online marketing circuit.

Earlier, in the exposure model, communication was basically one-way traffic. This required brands to reach a number of people and sift the consumers out of them, who matter the most. In contrast, the engagement model seeks the audience’s participation by interacting, sharing, commenting, and through other mediums. This model successfully helps brands in getting real-time feedback, when ideas echo, and the message is spread by your audience.

Hence, it is more important to build a deep and profound community with strong and enthusiastic connections, than a broader one that is strong but fails to spread the message. Engage your users deeply. Encourage their participation, devotion, interconnection and show how valuable they are. Turn them into your brand ambassadors, charging them with the idea of bringing more focussed and intent traffic.

According to Caren Fleit, Senior Client Partner and head of Korn/Ferry International’s Global Marketing Center of Expertise, “It is not surprising that customer engagement remains a top priority for marketers. The marketing team may not be directly selling a service or product, as the sales team does, but they are wholly tasked with engaging with the customer across multiple touchpoints to build brand value, and as a result business value.

The best marketers will know how to leverage all the moving parts to create a unique, long-lasting relationship with customers that can ultimately be monetized on behalf of the business.”

According to the Korn/Ferry Marketing Pulse Survey, which polled 124 CMO’s from its own database of top U.S. Companies, 35% of respondents believe that the marketing department within their organization is entirely responsible for customer experience and engagement. 31% believe that it is a joint effort of the sales and the marketing departments, 28% had to say that it was a multi-functional task force, 3% say that it’s not anyone’s responsibility, while 2% say that the sales department is solely responsible. This shows that data-driven marketing activities need to be backed up by strong customer engagement for a successful marketing program.

Get insights into your customers

Moving ahead is the key. Move beyond your products and services. Put your feet in the customers’ shoes and see how your life could change by using the products and services. The best way to attract customers to adopt your business culture is by creating customer personas. Persona is a consequent understanding of your customers driven by the physical, emotional, aspirational, intellectual, needs, and other aspects which propel the customers to embrace your products and services.

Your reward?? Well, when you see that the level of understanding is in fact producing outstanding results with enhanced customer engagement and user experience, you will know what you have been rewarded with?

Remember good content is read, but great content stands out. Content marketing is the new advertising. Companies need to know the importance of deciding the format in which the customers would like the content. Again this is where customer persona comes in.

In addition to having exceptional content, there are other elements that I have mentioned and explained in brief, and if implemented, are sure to bring in positive results.

Here I have mentioned the 6 very common ways of encouraging user engagement. Something that shows the consumers, how valuable are they for your business.

Website Search Box: The quality content on your website needs exposure, and it will not be possible that the user gets access to all the content in a jiffy. Your user knows why he/she has come to your site. Let them enter the keywords in the search box and check out the relevant content based on their needs.

Comment Box: Give your visitors the freedom to express themselves. Make sure that you have a comment box and let them know how valuable their feedback and suggestions are, and you eagerly look forward to receiving the same to innovate.

Social Media Buttons: You have some of the wonderful creations in various forms on your website. Give your customers the chance to share the same, whether they find if informative or hilarious. Help them with a “like”, “tweet”, “share”, or a “comment” button.

Images and Videos: Visual expressions are the best form of content marketing and why not give your visitors a visual treat. All those information and guides which take a lot of words and a lot of your visitors time could be incorporated into a video or an infographic. Representing the information in an entertaining, colourful and enjoyable form will increase customer retention.

Popular Posts Widgets: You could guide the visitors to some of your best posts by having a popular posts widget on the website. This will direct the visitors to those posts which have gained the maximum number of likes and reactions from other readers. Knowing that it has been liked by other visitors, there are chances that the visitors may get engaged with the content.

Surveys: The best method for gathering data so far, surveys could play a significant role in your customer engagement goals. This helps in understanding the customer persona in an effective manner.

In this era of cut-throat competition, where almost everything is common and the chances are very less that your products and services are unique. What you offer doesn’t necessarily have to be new, but how you offer is what actually matters. For a while stop thinking like a marketer, and start thinking like a maker. Find something in your product that is very much similar to people’s lives and show it with an alluring light.

5 Types of Content People Like To Read

Perhaps content marketing is one of the most effective tools to reach our target demographic, and raise awareness with interest in our clients. For a truly efficient content marketing strategy, we need to build an audience and a loyal following. And gaining both requires some big-ticket items that lure the crowd.

With this video, I intend to show the 5 types of content which have proved to be an instant hit with a massive number of visitors. All the good qualities of content, if put into these 5 forms of content, can help you in realizing your marketing goals. So, here is a quick review:

List: It is an accepted fact that a shorter version of the information is highly preferred than a long article. People like to quickly go through the information which is given in lists or bullets.

Reviews: A large share of your prospects will always look out for reviews or suggestions given by other users before availing of any products or services. Also, a thorough comparison between two or more products helps the audience in the decision making process.

The stupid and the funny: This one is very interesting as attracting your prospects with a humorous or some stupid quotation will definitely generate interest in the audience and help you stay in their minds for a long time.

Polls and Surveys: Conducting interesting polls and surveys, which invites suggestion from the audience regarding your products and services, or even a social issue. People feel important making them respond to your content quite naturally.

Pricing: Well, divulging facts about the pricing is not something that major brands would like to do. However, people are much more curious as this is something related to their pockets. So, giving out a range of price is something that is very hot among the masses.

I hope that this video serves the purpose of helping to create engaging, shareable, likeable and commentable content, which helps in achieving your desired goals.