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6 Technical Skills You Need to Become a Good Product Description Writer

E-commerce business stores rely heavily on good product descriptions to make sales. That makes product description a very important element ...

Sunday, October 30, 2016

5 Ways Blogging Can Help Your Small Business

Blogging graphics in a web.

If you run a small business, you are probably into blogging already to help promote your business in an extremely cost-effective way. In this era of content marketing, blogging manages to help small businesses climb up the ladder of success more steadily at very minimal costs. For that reason, I believe you prefer online promotion over offline promotion because the former is cheaper and more cost-effective. Since many small businesses are almost always on a shoestring budget, investing time and resources in blogging has proved to be a better option than other marketing alternatives. The icing on the cake is that blogging can help to get a high ranking for your small business on search engines and that helps it to gain social media visibility. Here now are some very direct benefits.



01. Getting your business noticed. Getting your business noticed can cost you a fortune in advertising but blogging does it in an extremely cost-effective way. Blogging is an excellent way to get noticed by big industry players, investors and customers. People easily get skeptical about commercial advertising but with a blog, the expertise you put out there convinces people more easily and they take you seriously once they realize you are an expert in a subject matter which is highly beneficial to them.

02. Offering how-to guide. People always want to know how to get things done more easily which add real value to their lives. Blogging offers this guide succinctly. When you offer how-to guide in your blog, you easily draw readers’ attention through feedback and questions you receive. That helps to generate active interaction to your blog. That in turn helps to give your business the much-needed visibility.

03. Makes it easy to plan your content. Bloggers have realized that brands which excel in blogging are those that plan their content very meticulously. In fact, planning your content is a vital prerequisite for blogging. Blogging thus makes content planning fairly easy for brands.

04. Blog monetization. This appears to be the popular one. Everyone wants to make some side money in the course of running a blog alongside their small businesses. For example, Google adsense monetization among others offers ads from advertisers which they run on your blog as a publisher. You get paid per view, PPV and per click, PPC on such ads. Good business no doubt if your blog gets a lot of inbound traffic. For small businesses struggling with cash to stay afloat, blog monetization can be an alternative way for them to make money.



05. Promotes thought leadership. Online marketing experts argue that blogging is instrumental in establishing thought leadership for small businesses to get themselves firmly out there in a highly competitive market. Because people are a bit skeptical about direct business promotion/advertising, blogging appears to them as genuinely offering them help while subtly getting out the message about a brand. Because many customers don’t always take promotions too seriously, organic efforts, especially blogging, helps to establish thought leadership by filling in that gap adequately.
 



Saturday, October 29, 2016

How to Build Links by Thinking Convergence

Build Links banner displayed by man on dark jacket.

Are you marketing online? Then you must have use for credible ways to successfully link-build to increase your website traffic. Thinking convergence is one such credible ways. Once you are able to get your content and social-media tactics right, high quality link building will follow, and it will happen naturally. Doing so requires some kind of convergence in all your digital-marketing activities which include content marketing and social-media marketing. All these activities have inevitably intricately woven themselves into link-building processes for good SEO results and ultimately good traffic to your website.

If you are a keen online marketer and a good observer, you must have noticed that the way SEOs look at link building has changed dramatically in recent times. That is understandable because of the characteristic rapid changes in the way people do business on the Internet. You need good search visibility for a wider target audience. That is why search engines particularly Google habitually and always want to fetch only the most relevant results for searchers, and the evolution in link building falls in line with this aim.

Once your content manages to go viral on social media, it will lead to the creation of natural links. In addition to that, great content acts like a link magnet. Experience shows that more and more people are always willing to link to content that offers tremendous value to its audience. This is the reason why contemporary link building is actually a convergence of various tactics that are a part of the brand’s overall marketing strategy. What that means is that in link building business, you can’t afford to leave out any strategy that works. You must explore ways to converge your strategies for optimal results. Smart marketers know that content marketing complements link-building efforts and vice versa. It is much the same thing for social-media marketing.
 

Friday, October 28, 2016

How to Build Links by Thinking Long Term


Backlinks graphics display on huge screen in a conference.
Expert marketers generally agree that if you want to improve the search visibility of your business, link building, or increasing the number of inbound links to your website, still remains a critical and powerful online-marketing tool. But link building is a slow process which requires that you earn trust first. That takes some time though because relationships cannot be built in a hurry. For a while, bloggers may ignore you completely for many and varied reasons. For that reason, you’ve got to have real patience and to think and plan long term. Impatience never achieves anything worthwhile anyway. For you, your business and the links you are building, being patient for results always pays better on the long run.

Building trust takes a lot of time and patience. Your job is to find and cultivate a mutually trusting relationship with others online. Reach out and convince them how what you are offering can benefit them. Show them how you and your brand can actually contribute meaningfully towards their own brand building efforts. This no doubt takes time and efforts. Even if you already have a very good brand name and it has a certain amount of niche credibility and influence, you still need time to build trust with others. Building trust through long term is very vital because it is that trust which helps develop sustainable relationships. That is where long-term planning enters the picture so as to be able to streamline all your link building strategies very well for optimal results. 



Thursday, October 27, 2016

How to Build Links by Building Relationships


Links building graphics, mobile phone and man on white shirt.
If you are marketing online, you may be aware of the very simple fact that link building is a slow process. No matter how authoritative and experienced you are in link building, you must have to take deliberate steps to build links naturally and systematically. Have you ever heard of relationship building? Great if you have! Relationship building is simply the new link building process in town. What you need to start doing is build relationships with websites and the people who are their driving force. This you can do by searching and finding reputable websites within the domain you are operating from and the people (influencers) who are behind these websites. That done, you can then identify a goal which you and these websites share in common. It is that common goal which can act as a catalyst for a meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship with these websites. That in a nutshell is a highly beneficial relationship building which is good for your backlink strategy.

When established, relationships must be nurtured. That is where outreaching becomes very important. To do it right, you need to be personal in what you are bringing to the table that will benefit others you are cultivating a relationship with. It becomes a win, win situation for all parties involved if they easily see how the relationships will benefit them and their businesses. Guest blogging easily comes to mind in such relationships. If for instance you guest-blog high authority content that attracts more readers to the host blog, you get quality backlinks readily. Your host blog will be glad to have you because of the steady traffic your quality blog brings to it. That kind of arrangement makes for a great relationship. It is the nature of your relationship with the host website and the people behind it that usually sets the stage for natural link building. That scenario is what impresses major search engines particularly Google to index your site favorably. Great for your backlink building strategy no doubt!



How to Build Links through Contextual Relevance


Build Links graphics, pens, markers and notepads on work table. 
If you want to improve the search visibility of your business, link building, or increasing the number of inbound links to your website, still remains a critical and powerful online-marketing tool. For Google search engine, there is a new kid on the block. The arrival of the Google Hummingbird algorithm has completely changed the game of link building. This algorithm lays real emphasis on the need for building links to amazing content that is extremely relevant to end users. This update focuses on understanding the context of the search query rather than identifying and then chasing specific keywords in the query. That has completely changed the whole thought process of link building in a very dramatic way.

With this new updated algorithm, your links not only must help improve search influence but also provide value to target users. It has again put long-tailed keywords back in business and you need to keep these in mind while optimizing content. Once again, Content! Content!! and very good Content is back fully in link building lexicon. You can now do a better job building links through need-based content instead of focusing on keywords. This in a nutshell is contextual relevance. With it, you have a better chance of ensuring your links will provide real value to users. The emphasis is now more on making your web pages "worth it" for intended visitors. By contextual relevance, link building has become more about them (users) rather than you (online presence). Many thanks to Google Hummingbird algorithm!
 
 



Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Credible Reasons Why You May Not Be Earning Enough Links

Backlinks graphics on huge screen in a conference.
Many online marketers deliberately build links for Search Engine Optimization, SEO enhancement purposes. They also know that it is in their best interest to build links in a natural way. This they do mostly by smart link building through guest posting or co-op opportunities, but for the most part, they try to attract links naturally by way of heavy reliance on posting very good content consistently and reliably. These natural link building techniques may appear simple but in actual fact, they are a bit complex. If you rely on natural link building techniques and you are not getting enough links, the following reasons may be responsible.



01. Your content is not linkable. If you are an experienced online marketer, let me simply assume that the content you post is always very good. That each time you post, you are indeed offering something new and very useful to your target audience. If your content manages to generate some excitement through generous comments and plenty of shares, it is expected to be getting good links there from. If that is not happening, it could mean that your content is not linkable. That means people do not like very much what they are reading from you and therefore unwilling to link to you.

02. You are not doing sufficient link building. Guest posting easily comes handy in link building if well utilized. If your content is good enough and the publisher is authoritative, any manual link you build can start passing authority immediately. In addition, any external publication channels you tap will serve as valuable additions to your syndication and visibility network. What all that boils down to is that you’ll be guaranteed more total inbound links, and at the same time, you’ll increase your potential for reaching new audiences and attracting new links. If you are not doing these, it means you are not doing sufficient link building and that affects your SEO strategy adversely.

03. Your content is not good enough. If your content is not good enough, it simply means, it is guilty of one, two or more of the following. It means it is not original, not relevant, not well-researched, not detailed, not concise, not useful, not entertaining, not educative, not informative and even written in pretty bad English. If any of these factors are off, even an otherwise good piece of content can be downgraded by search engines from a “linkable asset” to a basic article. That adversely affects its ability to attract links.

04. You are not scaling your content enough. Never make the mistake of writing the same types of content to the same audiences through the same channels and hope to see better and better results. These things don’t always work out that way. If your desire is to earn more links, the efforts you are investing must increase proportionately. You must make conscious and deliberate efforts to produce better content for more receptive audiences online. You can spice that up by branching out in new social contexts, new groups and with new distribution channels. You must find new influencers to engage with, and also increase your engagement with your own users. Since strategies don’t scale by themselves you have to invest your own efforts to scale your content. That is what works to get good links.



05. You are not syndicating your content enough. In the past, marketers really believed and acted with the notion that “good content attracts links on its own.” These days, no matter how good your content is, if you want it to attract good links fast enough, you must make efforts to syndicate it. Even if the followers you already have will help share your content, you must find ways to compliment that by your own deliberate efforts through content syndication. You can do that effectively by syndicating your published material on your own social media channels and pushing it as far and as wide as you can on your own to attract backlinks.