Evaluate & Energize Your Social Content Marketing Strategy

 Social Media Marketing (SMM) is almost the same as like having a conversation with your friends at a coffee shop.  It is also like getting that unexpected phone call from an old friend and just talking to each other.  It is conversational and laid back.  There are hundreds of companies jumping in on the social media band wagon that really just don’t get it and they are usually trying to hard. Take a look at whatToprankblog.com has to say.

 As marketers, social strategist and business owners we have the ability to create, consume, publish, interact and transact online. With 88% of brand and agency marketers using social media for social content distribution, how can social be leveraged in a way that’s meaningful enough to attract and engage customers? Below are five questions that can help evaluate and energize your current social content marketing strategy.

1) Why Invest in Social?

It’s important to first define the correlation between what you want to achieve as an organization, and how you want your audience to feel about you. Is what you’re putting out into the social sphere optimized for the best possible performance? Do you know what your customer’s goals are and how they align with the business goals your company is trying to achieve? This dialogue has to go beyond features and benefits, tell a story and make that a part of your content strategy. If from there it can be determined how best to integrate through social media marketing, that’s the win.

2) Who is Your Audience?

Do you understand the consumer? Who is your target audience? Are they new or existing customers, and are you optimized for those audiences? If we understand our audience we have an opportunity to appeal to them based on what they want and what’s important to them, and in turn create content that speaks to them throughout the sales process. By empathizing with customer’s wants and needs and knowing why they care about you as a company, you can leverage that through content marketing and deliver it to those customers in a way that speaks to them.

If we examine a hub and spoke model, assuming we know our primary goal or objective, we can do more than just release a piece of content on Facebook or YouTube. We can utilize our existing networks to exponentially increase the reach of that content. It’s not about just putting something up on Slideshare, its segmenting that content and posting it to Facebook and Twitter, publishing a blog or a white paper and truly leveraging what audience you have and motivating them to take action. If you’re going to take advantage of a model like this it’s imperative you continually grow those networks.

3) Are You Optimized for Consumption?

The notion of content optimization isn’t just about SEO; optimization is a continuous effort to make something better over time. SEO itself can be very limited to just search engines; optimization is relevant to all content and objectives. If we understand who we are trying to do business with we need to understand three things:

• How do they discover information?
• What are their preferences when it comes to topics and in what format do they prefer? What does your target audience appreciate that would motivate them to take action?
• How do we retain and evolve that customer?

Creating a better user experience requires that you know what your customers are talking about, and then blend that information into a content marketing and social media marketing plan. Be focused and you will stand out.

4) What’s The Customer Journey?

Traditional sales funnel would suggest we bring most consumers to the top of the funnel. But if we look at what might be more relevant to customers throughout the entire buying cycle we can create awareness. From a 360 degree perspective we look at the lifecycle as Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Purchase, Retention and finally Advocacy. It’s important to be optimized in every phase of that customer journey and map content to throughout each phase.

People tend to make decisions based on emotions, so think about how you want people to feel when they consume your content. Instead of publishing an infographic, determine where that infographic fits within the customer journey. Remember it’s not the media format that’s most important it’s the information. Don’t fall into the trap of creating content for SEO, content should be created for people and THEN you bring in SEO.

5) How Do You Measure Value? 

If the key performance indicators or KPI’s have been defined, the next step is measuring the progress being made to achieve those goals. What’s our share of voice how many times are people talking about us vs. our competition? Are we improving the customer experience? Are we increasing orders?
Social media is about meaningful relationships with people who will take action when asked. It makes more sense to produce a smaller quantity of content that has a higher level of engagement than it does to produce a large quantity of content that elicits little to no engagement. Knowing the level of engagement customers expect can determine what they are going to deem quality. Once you know that you can then optimize for it.

Optimization whether it be search or social is an approach, so set goals, test, revise, scale and repeat. There are the talking heads out there that might provide insight from time to time, but those who have experienced high levels of success have done so because they have learned to test and adapt based on their experiences. For more information on how to optimize your content strategy check out this blog on Content Marketing 101.

Speaking of your own experiences, what questions have you posed or tested to inform your social strategy? Demonstrate your social genius with a comment below.

Blog Marketing Strategy: 7 Steps to Social SEO Success

Content marketing should not just be seen as placing random articles of text on your website and blog with the hopes of getting attention. If you can create quality content for your target audience that catches the attention of interested people, and they decide to share the content with their own community and network, you have succeeded in creating good content that will work for you. I found this article below on toprankblog.com, have a look.

All marketing efforts should start with a goal and means for measuring success, so I do not get into specifics on those tasks in this list, but focus more on the content and promotion.

1.  Social SEO Personas

While blogging evolved out of personal expression, business blogging is less about corporate egocenticism and more about empathy with customers. Customer centric content for blogging is more relevant and does a much better job of engaging. In the way that direct marketers segment customers by key characteristics, online marketers that blog can create buyer personas to create more relevant experiences for their readers.

Personas are customer profiles (preferences for information discovery, consumption & sharing) that represent groups of customers that a brand wants to engage and do business with.  Information from Personas drives keyword research & optimization, content plan and promotion. More about persona creation here. So one of the first things a blogger should do after defining objectives and general audience, is to understand who they’re trying to reach by developing personas.

Collect data through reader / customer surveys, analytics, social monitoring and other tools to form a profile. That profile represents topics, behaviors and preferences that can translate into search keywords, social topics, social channels, editorial calendar and promotion plans.

2.  What is your unique selling proposition?

When people (or search engines) visit your website, is the primary topic crystal clear? With the increased competition in search and for attention in social conversations, it’s essential for blogs to stand out.  Being able to articulate your Unique Selling Proposition helps distinguish your content the value of your blog content for people and search engines. The screenshot above shows a blog that is crystal clear in it’s focus. The result is reflected both in popularity and search visibility (#1) for highly competitive phrases like “digital photography“.

Developing a Unique Selling Proposition for your blog (h/t SEOBook) is pretty straightforward: Identify the key benefits of your blog’s content and how you will address customer/reader pain points. As you communicate your USP, be specific, concise & show proof. It’s also important to live your USP so that it’s a key component of your messaging.

3.  Search & Social Media Keywords

Personas and your USP represent the intersection of customer interests and the goals for your blog. In order to activate your blog content for effective discovery via search and social media channels, it’s essential to create a search phrase keyword glossary for Search Engine Optimization purposes and a social media topic glossary for Social Media Optimization.

SEO Keywords: Resources like Google’s keyword research tool are a great start for finding which words and phrases are in demand, relevant to the content you’re publishing on your blog. It’s tempting to be egocentric and use whatever language you want, but if there is an expectation to attract significant search traffic and an interest in using language that resonates with a community in search of what you have to offer, keyword optimization of content is very appropriate.

Social Topics: Social topic tools that work like a SEO keyword tool are very rare and a to really get into useful source information, there’s a lot of manual research necessary. However, to get started, tools like socialmention.com offer a list of social keywords (bottom left of search results page) that can be downloaded as a CSV file for use in your Social Topic Glossary. Social keywords represent topics of interest to the people your blog is intended to reach and engage. By researching these topics and the specific language the community uses to express their interest, your blogging can be more effective at being relevant and shared on the social web.

The SEO Keyword and Social Topic glossary provide guidance towards editorial plans and specific phrases/topics can be mapped to content for search and social media optimization. It’s a great management tool that keeps SEO and SMO efforts accountable.

4.  Create a Content/Editorial Plan

Keywords inform content and documenting an Editorial Plan for your blog can ensure that content is true to the goals of the business and interests of the community that reads it. An content plan also offers ideas and guidance, months in advance, which is priceless when bloggers hit creative roadblocks. This is inevitable, and after 7+ years of blogging myself, I can’t vouch enough for the guidance of an Editorial Plan.

Keep in mind, such a plan is a guide – not a set of hard and fast rules.  It’s effective to schedule recurring themes with posts, like “Thought Leadership Monday”, “Practical Tips on Tuesdays”, “News Roundup on Fridays”. But it’s also important to allow for wildcards, because opportunities will come up spontaneously based on events within your company or the industry that require blogging. And you don’t want to delay publishing important news or a reaction to news, just because it wasn’t planned for that day.

The Editorial Plan defines the application of keywords in topics to be covered, categories, titles, tags and how/where/when the posts will be promoted. It also allocates for the future repurposing of appropriate blog posts.

5.  Search & Social Media Optimization

Optimizing content for search on websites like Google and optimizing social content for ease of discovery and sharing within social channels is essential for reach and engagement of blog content. Optimizing for search & social media is the one two punch of blog marketing. If SEO efforts are initiated with an existing blog, then a SEO audit would be completed, including a review of the blog templates and configuration, existing content, internal links and links from other websites. If you’re starting a new blog, then SEO would be baked in to the editorial plan via the keyword glossary.

Optimizing for search is about helping search engines do a better job of connecting readers with your content. It’s not about tricks or manipulations. It’s about providing search engines and people what they need to find, consume and be inspired to share your blog content.

Optimizing for social media is about search as well, as in the search that’s possible within Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. But SMO is also about optimizing content editorially to resonate with social audiences. It’s about ease of discovery and sharing through things like feed distribution and widgets that make it easy to ReTweet or post to the reader’s favorite social sites.

SEO and SMO are about making life easy for both search engines and people to connect with, interact and share your blog content.

6.  Links: Internal and External Acquisition

Links between pages and links acquired from relevant websites in the industry provide a good user experience and strong signals for search engines when they crawl, index and rank web pages. Following best practices for internal linking is one of the most impactful things a blog can do to help website realize SEO benefit.  For example, a tips blog that cross links the keywords relevant to specific products being sold gives readers and search engines a quick and relevant way to move from editorial about how to use and get benefit from a type of product to a page that actually sells the product.

Attracting links from other relevant websites as pictured in the diagram above is essential for attracting new visitors to your blog, directly and indirectly because of the effect relevant links have on search engine visibility.  What’s important to remember is that links to your blog home page are important, but relevant links into specific category or individual blog posts is essential  External link sources that are relevant to broad topics that link to your home page or category pages provide the user (and search engine) with a very relevant connection.  Links from niche sites to your specific blog posts do the same.

There are myriad ways to attract links for blogs ranging from commenting and guest posting to creating content that attracts links from other bloggers and the media.

7.  Content Promotion

Content isn’t great until it gets shared. A lot. That doesn’t mean a blogger should aggressively promote every post. It does mean that when a particular post is especially promotable (you would know this because you planned for it in your Content Plan) then it warrants special attention.  Blog content can be promoted in a variety of ways and effective promotion is tied to the quantity and quality of the networks you’ve built. That includes readers and subscribers of your own blog, an email list, Facebook Fan page, Twitter, LinkedIn and other relevant sites where people with common interests interact and share.

Some content promotion is automatic, like RSS feeds, syndication of blog posts to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn or content syndication partnerships. Other content promotion might be tied to the content itself, like using industry thought leaders to crowdsource insights into a topic (your keywords) of importance to your readers. Those participants will often help you promote the post. You can also reach out to your network and suggest or share relevant posts they might be interested in. Commenting and being social on/offline are also effective promotion methods.

The bottom line with content promotion is that great content that isn’t promoted vs. mediocre content that is promoted in a relevant way, will often lose in terms of traffic and therefore meaningful engagement with a greater number of readers. The amount of content being published on a daily basis creates levels of competition never before experienced, so promotion is essential to stand out and get noticed. But it has to be content that’s WORTH promoting.

Summing it all up.

The implementation and refinement of these steps is a work in progress. The web continues to change in terms of technology and how people use it. It’s essential that companies follow an adaptable online marketing strategy when focusing on the social web and search engines. Opportunities will reveal themselves in web analytics and social media monitoring and the promotion efforts outline above apply to those real-time marketing situations just as well as tasks included in a Content Plan. Hopefully these guidelines are useful to you and if you need more specific information, you’ll likely find it in blog posts we’ve published in the past. At TopRank Marketing we do this kind of consulting on a daily basis so there’s a lot of rich information published in our archives.

What other types of insight about blogging and blog marketing would you like to see? What are some of the biggest obstacles you’ve had (and maybe overcome) when it comes to implementing blog marketing tactics like those mentioned in this post?

Why you should understand Search Engine Optimization

If you have a Search Engine Optimization(SEO) agency that are busy handling all your SEO efforts, does that mean that you shouldn’t care about what is going on with your campaign? In all honesty, you can, but it’s not a smart move. Most businesses with managers in departments usually oversees the work that their team are busy doing. More than likely that specific manager started in the team that he manages. If they haven’t, then more than likely they had a similar position elsewhere. These people have the know how and knowledge to perform work that those are doing that they manage.

To explain it even simpler: if you are hiring an internet marketing agency for your search engine optimization campaign, you will sometimes have to manage and look at all the finer detail to make sure it’s consistent. If you don’t know anything what they are doing with your SEO strategy, how will you be able to measure the effectiveness of the campaign. Are they actually doing what they are supposed to be doing?

Have a basic understanding of SEO

You don’t have to be the best SEO guru out there and the agency that you use can be, but you should at least have some basic understanding of SEO. You should know how the basics works, and what questions you should ask them to make sure you are on the right track. There are many people online spreading bad advice regarding SEO online (black hat SEO techniques). You should make it a point to check if your SEO campaign is being done the right way.

Have some basic understanding of your search engine optimization campaign to make sure you are on the right track with your strategy. Search engine optimization is still one of the best ways to ensure your website gets targeted traffic that can convert.

Smart Social Media Campaigns Integrate Search Engine Optimisation

According to VeriSign, over 1 million new website addresses are registered every month – that’s over 40,000 per day! How do consumers find their way through all these sites? The answer is search engines. Have you ever wondered why some sites turn up at the top of a search result while others are buried 10, 20 or 100 pages down? It is because some sites are not search engine friendly. Search Engine Optimization leads to increased targeted traffic. Have a look at whatFourthSource.com has to say.

Ever since major search engine developers stated last year that they do take social media signals into consideration when evaluating webpages for ranking within their search results, marketers all over the world have been scrambling to understand exactly what this entails and discover the best ways to tailor their content accordingly. The term ‘social search’ was coined to encapsulate the new phenomenon of social media influencing search results. This became the hottest buzzword this side of sliced bread. But what does it really mean?

Ever since Google expanded beyond search to offer other products to users, it has been collecting information on the internet habits of millions of people. By gathering information on social connections through products like Gmail, the company has developed a comprehensive understanding of the type of influence each user wields, as well as their interests, in order to serve them related content and give higher rakings to information they are interested in.

With the advent of Google+, the search giant has tied social media into its portfolio of services in a subtle and continually evolving manner. Part of the reason that social search signals are so important to search engines is that they are actually able to look at the person on the other side of the keyboard and can now connect the real human to their various profiles. This means that the information has more tangible value in that it is being processed and vetted by actual people rather than programmes that can be gamed.

Adding social signals into the complex criteria that web crawling algorithms take into account grants another layer of legitimacy to the ultimate results. Rather than just posting content for the sake of SEO or scattering link baits all over, updates in Google’s technologies are now encouraging online marketers to work harder to attract real people, adding another level of authenticity to search results.

With the re-launch of Digg, social search has found another powerful ally. The potential success of the site might further contribute to content scores that can influence search engine rankings. A Digg score is granted to a webpage according to the number of positive votes for its content in addition to the amount of approbation from Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, those sites earning the highest Digg ranking will be featured more prominently on the homepage of Digg itself, and so those brands with quality online content will have an additional chance to gain traffic.

Further signs of the continually strengthening relationship between search and social are the user interface updates that leading search engines have recently deployed. Bing has introduced a social sidebar, has started including Foursquare tips in its results and has also introduced the ability to tag Facebook friends as part the search process. Google has started to test a share button that allows those using the search engine to directly post a link to their Google+ stream and choose between sharing publicly or just within the user’s Circles.

As the relationship between SEO and social media strengthens, even to the point of blurring, it becomes important for marketers to develop strategies that create a symbiotic relationship between the two. Optimising content on social networks for better SEO benefit and optimising SEO content for greater impact in the social sphere will keep a brand ahead of the game, especially considering the current trend of further integration between the two. For example, another Google offering, YouTube, feeds into search results in several ways. The tags listed below each video, comments posted, number of likes versus dislikes, words in the title, number of views and length of viewing, and the video description all have sway on how the video ranks in searches both within YouTube itself and on the broader Google platform.

Thus it is important to know how social activities are affecting the visibility of websites in the rankings of search engines. Social media professionals should undertake various tests to monitor their efforts in order to better understand how one relates to the other. They can measure the effects of using different keywords, employing various branded terms like the company name and specific products, and linking to different pages rather than just the homepage. Additionally, for links to websites within social media content, the use of tracking codes in the URL will help to create information that can be viewed in Google Analytics, such as click-throughs, bounce rates, and conversion paths. In doing so, they can monitor any rankings fluctuations in search engine results for the keywords, pages linked to, and the social profiles themselves.

In the grand scheme of things, these developments are ultimately positive. It means that digital professionals are now tasked with creating higher quality content that will be directly rewarded by being praised and further disseminated by real users. Basically, it is all about creating a great user experience and increasing engagement with excellent online content.

Marketing Your Blog: 10 Essential Tips You Should Know

With so many blogs being created every day, it’s a mystery to many bloggers how to make their blog stand out. There are many types of blogs or purposes for blogs and a certain number of tactics are applicable to just about all of them.Some companies choose to hire a blog consultant, but others like to try things internally. Blog marketing is a must if you are a blogger. Take a look at these tips from Hongkiat.comabout marketing your blog.

Everything from contacts and invoicing to project management

Well, a new year is upon us, it’s also the start of a new decade within the blogosphere. More and more people are building blogs, and that means there are lots of blogs competing for the same eyeballs and your blog is just one of many. Try finding accurate figures on how many blogs there are and you will know it’s impossible to find a verifiable number because bloggers and their blogs come and go. Look around. It’s certainly a disheartened moment when you see blogs with quality articles that have been abandoned by their creators.

With all of these blogs out there, and all those information available at no cost, how do you make your blog stand out? No problem, just follow these tips and your blog will blossom in this new era when you stay ahead of the rest of your competitors.

1. Target Your Content To A Specific Readership

Image: via Dat Le

Unless you want to throw all of your marketing budget and precious time on people who could care less about your blog, then you must pay attention to determine the preferred audiences to whom you would like to target. Before posting any piece, determine if it hits the sweet spot of your demographic.

2. Be Original, Be Honest

Don’t follow the herd within your sphere of interest. Followers aren’t innovators and innovation keeps readers reading. So, don’t simply spin the same old post. Take an original slant on a common topic.

Be honest. Verify your facts and provide links to additional verification. Readers trust you to be a good reporter, instructor, mentor or inspiration so keep it honest at all times.

3. Don’t Be Afraid Of A Little Controversy.

Controversy sells. You and I know that. If it is a part of your business model, be prepared to engage others with differing opinions because, guaranteed, lots of readers will disagree, and you may even encounter a few trolls and haters who frequent blogs for no other purpose than to post inflammatory garbage.

4. Post As A Guest Blogger

Image: via AjDreams

Don’t post to just any blog within your realm. Submit your best pieces to the prestigious blogs – the ones that already have a substantial following. For example, Hongkiat.com is considered by industry insiders to be one of the best blogs for designers, marketers and freelancers. Getting one of your posts published on a top of the line blog is a great way to drive traffic to your blog where readers can find tons of content – all your archives – just waiting for a bookmark.

Of course, getting published on a well-established blog requires insight and something new to be added to the discussion. A rehash of conventional wisdom, regardless of the field of endeavor, won’t make the cut with top tier blogs within any industry or area of interest.

5. Simplify Subscriptions

Don’t hide your RSS button down the page together with your WordPress theme credit links, make them visible & clear for your reader’s eyeballs by taking the following approaches:

• Add an RSS chicklet at the top of your sidebar so visitors can easily load your posts into their RSS readers.
• Offer email subscriptions.
• Provide links to mobi feeds so readers can access new content from their cells or iPhones.
• Provide one click subscriptions using reader links to PageFlakes, Google Reader and other remote site readers. You can build a big following fast if you make it easy to find your blog again. And again, and again.

6. Social Media Marketing

The expansion of social media and the evolution of multi-generational media apps are only going to pick up steam. Social media sites have taken off, providing bloggers with an arsenal of tools based on the guerrilla-marketing axiom: Use the resources of others to your advantage.

A few years back, Twitter didn’t exist. Today, not only is it ubiquitous, it spawned a whole new level of web innovation and interactivity.

Follow the rules & open accounts at Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter. Every time you make a new post to your blog, let your readers know about it by posting to these popular sites. Update your status with interesting & latest news that fascinates your readers.

7. Create Different Profiles For Each Social Media Site

On LinkedIn, you want to be all about business. On Facebook, show a little of your personality – the carbon-based life form behind the blog. On Twitter, shine the spotlight on your blog. Each profile should be designed to show a different facet of you and your expertise.

8. Don’t Oversell. Teach, Too

If you post to social media sites all day long, flogging your latest blog post, it won’t be long before your Facebook friends hit the hide button next to your name. It can’t be all selling and no sizzle. Instead, post information on a new blog piece, but also post news from other sites that you think will benefit your readers. Know when to stop pushing for a larger readership and when to start giving away information to drive more readers to your blog.

9. Long Tail Keywords Get You Found

Image: via Wiki

If you maintain a book review blog, a broad keyword like books will keep you buried in the backwash of Google’s SERPs. Instead, narrow the focus of a search engine search through the use of terms and phrases, broadly referred to as long tail keywords.

So, instead of using “books” as a primary keyword, use a long-tail keyword like “independent book reviews” or “book reviews of current bestsellers.” Sure, not as many people will use these long tails when conducting a search but those who do will discover your blog at the top of page 1. And that’s just where you want to be.

10. Optimize Your Blog – Both For Readers & Bots

Cut the clutter of 23 affiliate banners, animated adverts and other distractions. Remember, your site should be attractive to human sensibilities.

Indeed, it’s important to look good to readers who follow you. It’s just as important to look good to search engine spiders. Conduct keyword research using tools like Google’s keyword generator that provides keywords used by actual Google users over the past 30 days. Place those keywords in headlines, sub heads and a few of them in your blog posts.

If you don’t know much about SEO, grab yourself a cup of coffee & start reading the comprehensive list of search engine ranking factor provided by Seomoz.

The pace of innovation is only going to increase in this new decade so, if you’re standing still you’re losing ground to competitor bloggers. Stay current, use all the new tools and follow all the new rules.

Your blog space is your real estate. It has value. Make the most of it.

Optimize your website for conversion

It amazes me everytime that only a short percentage of website visitors will complete an action. Doesn’t it annoy you that the most of your website visitors will leave your website without doing anything at all? How can you optimize and change your website so that it converts more?

If your website isn’t converting enough of your targeted visitors in completing an action and turning into customers, how can you fix this? To get started you will need to optimize your website for conversion. Your website visitors arrive at your website because they have a problem or a question that needs to be answered, you just have to optimize your website so that it’s easy for your visitor to find exactly what they need.

Here’s a couple of tips to help you get started with this

Optimize your website for conversion

Targeted audience: Are you targeting the right audience to your website? The best website doesn’t have a chance to convert visitors they they are targeting the wrong keyword phrases.

What are they looking for? What questions does your buyers need answered? If you are local restaurant, provide useful information to your visitors such as your open times, menu, prices, etc. Make the content easy to scan on your website.

Provide the best solution: When new visitors arrive to your website, show them that you can provide them with the best solution to their needs and queries. If you can demonstrate that you have the best solution, then they are ready to complete an action.

Call to action: Make the call to actions on your website visible, clear, easy, and visual. When your targeted visitors are ready to buy, make it as easy as possible for them to take an action. Be clear and short with the required information that you need.

Build trust: It is important to build trust with your website visitors at every step. Don’t hide any surprises away on your website. Show your address and phone number. At the end of the day, it’s all about gaining the trust of your visitors.

5 Online Marketing Tips for Your Small Business

Internet Marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including: design, development, advertising, and sales. The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet marketing in terms of providing instant responses and eliciting responses are the unique qualities of the medium. Have a look at this article below that I came across onTopRankMarketing.com with tips for marketing your small business online.

Many small business owners have had their websites up and running for a long time.  More recently though, small business owners are starting to revisit their websites and ask, “What has my website done for my business lately?”  For many the answer is “not much” and that’s because they really haven’t done much to keep it up over the years.

Times have changed and if small business owners aren’t tending to their website garden, weeds will take over and it won’t be much use to their business and driving new customers.  Below are a few ideas I picked up at the MIMA Summit which, if implemented, can help small business owners start to see a solid ROI on their web marketing efforts.

1. Static websites are dead. The days of building a web site, filling it with content and waiting for Google to reward you with a first page ranking are gone.  More than ever, companies need to do a better job of putting out steady stream of fresh, relevant content if they want to get people to find and engage them online.

2. It’s not about the platform, it’s about the message.  Many companies are spending a lot of time focusing on which new platforms they should be launching instead of focusing on how to produce better content.  Launching a new platform like Facebook, Twitter or others with the same content strategy you are using now will not yield any better results in the form of visitors, leads and sales.  Companies who are trying to get more traffic and leads online should review and improve their content strategy and focus on better content before they start launching new platforms.

3. Every content plan should start with keyword research.  The problem with most website content is that it was written without any relevant keywords in mind.  Before writing content for any page on your site or any other platform for that matter, conduct thorough keyword research to determine what keywords your prospects are using to search for what you are selling.  Incorporate these keywords in your content and in the title whenever possible.

4. The #1 source of influence when making a purchase is people we know. This definitely makes a case for developing a solid social media strategy for your business.  As I mentioned above, the message is still the most important part of any social media strategy.  The best thing to do on your social media platforms is to engage your audience so in addition to publishing great content, add in questions, surveys, photos, videos and other interactive content to get and keep your audience interested and coming back.

5. Don’t miss out on the opportunity with Google Universal Search. Google has been adding images, videos, local search results, and news results to their SERPs for awhile now.  This is a great opportunity for companies to start showing up in the search results for keywords where they were having trouble ranking and also to start taking over more of the first page real estate.  If your site is ranking reasonably well for particular keyword and you also have a video or image, and a news story appearing on that page, you just increased your chances of getting a visitor and you made it more difficult for people to see your competition.  Remember to use good SEO and digital asset optimization best practices when posting your videos, photos, articles and other media so they will have a good chance of showing up on the first page.

As Internet marketing becomes more competitive, business owners can no longer take the “launch and leave” approach to their website.  It’s important to stay active, have a plan and stick to it if you want to grow a steady stream of new customers from your website.  The 5 ideas I’ve shared in this post are a great place to start if you are one of the small business owners who is painfully aware that your website isn’t driving any business and you’re asking “what now?”  Keep in mind, content before platform, keyword research before anything and remember, your prospects and customers are social so meet them where they live online.

7 Ways to Drive More Blog Traffic Using LinkedIn

The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet Marketing in terms of providing instant responses and eliciting responses are the unique qualities of the medium. Blogging can be used for a lot of things but if you use wisely, you can utilize it to promote yourself on the internet. What we can say with certainty is that it is one of the most effective methods of reaching out to readers. Have a look at this article from SocialMediaExaminer.

Want more people to read your blog?

Are you fully leveraging LinkedIn?

Many business bloggers neglect one of the most powerful social networks for growing visibility and traffic. LinkedIn is THE professional web.

If you are a business owner or entrepreneur, or a working person who is blogging, you should consider LinkedIn as a valuable place for getting more exposure.

Keep reading to discover seven powerful tips to use LinkedIn to drive more traffic to your blog.

LinkedIn Profile Views Drive Blog Traffic

Your LinkedIn profile can serve as one of the most important referral sources for your blog.

If you consider that significant blog traffic from LinkedIn can come directly from LinkedIn profile views, it makes sense to work to increase your profile views.

Fortunately this is something you can measure.

LinkedIn will display the number of times your profile has been viewed. Keep track of this each week and as you implement the steps below, most likely you will see this number consistently rising.

If you are active and engaged on LinkedIn, members are going to click through to view your profile.

#1: Add Profile Links

Your LinkedIn profile is where members are going to land to learn more about who you are, what you do and whom you help.

From your profile, the most natural next step that members will take if they are intrigued or interested in what they see is to click through one of the links that you showcase on your profile under Websites.

Get creative with your LinkedIn profile website links.

Showcasing descriptive and interesting links on your LinkedIn profile will encourage visitors to click through!

You can link directly to your blog homepage, or you can link to specific landing pages on your blog where you provide a special offer to potential subscribers.

Regardless, make your link descriptions compelling and don’t be afraid to experiment!

Given that your LinkedIn profile serves as the “gateway” to your primary web presence, it is imperative that you have a powerful LinkedIn profile. Learn more about how to enhance and improve your LinkedIn profile.

#2: Build Connections to Boost Your LinkedIn Profile Views

I recently invited someone in my industry to connect. We had a few connections in common and we run similar, perhaps even complementary, businesses. When she received my invitation, she responded with “I limit my LinkedIn connections to people I know personally.”

This is certainly your decision, but I firmly believe that if you limit your connections, you limit opportunities to expand your visibility. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you should only keep a small number of first-degree connections on LinkedIn.

If you want to grow your visibility on LinkedIn, connect with anyone who presents a good reason for connecting!

As you grow your connections, your updates on LinkedIn will be visible to more people.

Remember that every time you update your status on LinkedIn or participate in any activity on the network, that update shows up on the homepage of each one of your connections. If your connections engage with the update, it will be visible to their connections.

This is how my status update appears on the homepage of one of my connections.

Furthermore, be consistently visible and valuable, and the members in your extended network will click through to view your profile in order to learn more about you.

By growing your LinkedIn connections, you have the ability to expand your visibility exponentially. You will also increase your LinkedIn profile views, which in turn can increase traffic to your blog.

Don’t limit your opportunities for visibility and traffic by limiting your connections. Instead, always be connecting. Consider these creative methods for growing your connections.

#3: Get Active and Engaged to Drive LinkedIn Profile Views and Blog Traffic

It doesn’t take much activity to stand out on LinkedIn. All you need to do is spend a little time on the network.

Every action you take on the network will show up as an update on the homepage of your connections. If you’re active, some of your updates may even show in the “Network Update” that LinkedIn sends to members via a weekly email.

Examples of LinkedIn activities that will get visibility:

• Update your profile
• Post a status update
• Participate in a group discussion
• Comment on someone else’s status update
• Post to your LinkedIn company page
• Answer questions in LinkedIn Answers

Answering LinkedIn questions can position you as an expert and grow your visibility.

Ideally, visiting LinkedIn a few times a week to post interesting and compelling status updates, join in a few group discussions and answer a question or two will keep your profile active. Do not forget to engage with connections as well.

Leaving comments or sharing what your connections have posted can also lead to profile views.

Commenting is a very effective way to start dialogue with first-degree connections and beyond. When you leave a comment on someone else’s update, the conversation will show up with your picture in the homepage of all of your connections. It will also show up on the homepage of that person for their connections to view.

Commenting is a great way to gain exposure to your second- and third-degree connections while engaging in conversation.

See the commenting example below.

Comment on the status updates of your network connections to increase profile views and visibility on LinkedIn.

I posted a comment on an update that one of my connections had shared. The screenshot above shows what another one of my connections was able to see with regard to the comment and conversation.

Notice that the person who originally posted this status update (Sarah) gets less visibility than I do as the commenter.

#4: Use LinkedIn on the Go

Mobile devices now account for 22% of LinkedIn traffic.

LinkedIn has developed robust mobile applications to make networking on the go easy and fun. When you participate on LinkedIn through your mobile devices you can stay engaged and visible with your connections anytime and anywhere.

LinkedIn’s iPad application.

Spending time on the network and keeping your profile active is the best way to drive views to your profile and ultimately visits to your blog. A significant percentage of my LinkedIn referral traffic to my blog comes directly from my profile!

#5: Post Blog Articles as Status Updates and Link to Relevant Articles

It goes without saying that to drive traffic to your blog from any social network, your blog posts need to be shared with your network.

• Manually post a link to a particular blog post in order to pull an image and control the messaging.
• Don’t be afraid to repurpose your blog posts as status updates from time to time (see image below).
• Post during high-traffic periods (lunchtime and afternoons).
• Edit your comments to engage your connections.

An example of manually posting a link to your blog through a repurposed status update.

It’s also acceptable to post your articles in LinkedIn Groups, but make sure it’s information that will add value to the group, and always include a question or ask for feedback.

Additionally you can point to relevant articles on your blog when participating in group discussions, answering questions in LinkedIn Answers and posting comments on the updates of your connections.

#6: Leverage LinkedIn Tools and Applications

LinkedIn provides a few tools to help you showcase your blog and encourage the sharing of your blog posts to the network.

Install the LinkedIn blog application.

Choose the appropriate blog application to install to pull your blog posts into your LinkedIn profile. This will enhance your profile and showcase your latest insights from your blog.

Use one of these applications provided by LinkedIn to showcase your blog directly on your profile.

The blog application will pull in excerpts of your latest posts.

Excerpts of your latest blog posts are pulled into your LinkedIn profile using the WordPress blog application.

#7: Utilize the LinkedIn Share Button on Your Blog

I’m amazed at how many business-related blogs I see that do not incorporate the LinkedIn Share button as a part of their social sharing tools. Most of the social sharing plugins provide the LinkedIn Share button as an option.

Using the LinkedIn Share button will not only help you get your posts shared on LinkedIn by blog visitors, but that in turn will drive views to your profile and new traffic to your blog!

Use the LinkedIn Share button on your blog to drive shares of your blog posts into LinkedIn.

As you can see, there are a number of ways to integrate your blog more closely with LinkedIn and ultimately boost your traffic.

What do you think? Are you currently taking advantage of any of these ideas? If so, what has worked well for you? I’d love to hear additional creative ideas that I may have left off of the list! Leave your questions and comments in the box below.