How to Improve Your Online Reputation with Content Marketing

For many small business owners, online reputation matters a lot. If your online reputation is good, you stand a good chance of doing better business with prospective customers and customers. For this reason, managing your online reputation is hugely essential to your business success. Then what to do? You must explore all ways to market across multi-channel using content marketing. These here tips from experienced marketers can help improve your online reputation.

Sell Digital Products and Courses Online

As a digital marketer, you do not necessarily have to create free content all the time. In addition to free content, you create and sell good content as well. If you have the skills, you can create and sell digital products and online courses. Such content which is largely informative and educational can be sold to improve your revenue stream.

Use Social Media Tools to Streamline Your Marketing

Social media marketing is one great way to sell content on the internet. There are very many social platforms with peculiar tools that help the marketing process and many of these tools are free. Some of the platforms have in-house analytics tools which marketers depend on for great insights into their marketing activities. If you want to market through the various platforms, it can be quite time consuming. Therefore, you can take advantage of special online tools to help manage your platforms to save time and other resources.

Manage Reviews with New GMB Tools

As most marketers very well know, online reviews can always make a great difference in the online reputation of their businesses. If you want to quickly build a great reputation for your business online, just sign up on Google-My-Business, GMB, and take advantage of its tools. With continuous release of new options/tools for businesses, GMB has become one of the most important online platforms businesses can depend on to build their online reputation through reviews.

Be Dominant in Local Search Results

If you optimize your website for local searches it will help with your search results. A huge number of potential customers now habitually search Google for businesses “near me” in their search activities. “Near me” searches usually turn up local businesses. For many local businesses therefore, online search is often where new customers first interact with their brands. Therefore, your ability to get found through local searches can make a major impact on your reputation and the bottom line of your business.
 
Improve Your Live-streams

Video content marketing is hugely important to digital marketers because of the great results it gets when compared to other types of content. It is even better still if the video is live. So, live-streaming videos can be incredibly powerful ways to reach an audience real time. The results are great for your business reputation, lead generation and sales.

Market Differently with Testimonials, Reviews, and Recommendations

Testimonials, reviews and recommendations tend to help your marketing business in many different ways. They are very important because they serve as very sincere, genuine and useful insights that come directly from your customers. As such, they can provide valuable social proof to potential new buyers. But because they represent different types of feedback in content and context, it is helpful to marketers if they really understand and appreciate these differences. If they do and they market with them differently, it can greatly help to improve on their online reputation in addition to many other ancillary marketing benefits.

 

Build an Effective Instagram Presence

Instagram is becoming one social media platform that is quite business-friendly because you can open a business account on Instagram. This is why it is now one of the top social media platforms for today’s businesses. Instagram will not only help you to build an effective presence by having your content on its Feed and Stories, it will also help you to better and more effectively communicate with your customers.

Use the Best WordPress Plugins for Podcasting

Marketers who market with podcasts usually need multiple ways to share content. For these marketers, plugins are indispensable in their marketing activities. That is why many usually seek out and use web-hosts like WordPress to have access to the best plugins. WordPress provides many free and hugely versatile plugins to help the marketing activities of the websites they host. If your website is hosted by WordPress, you’ll find their plugins as very valuable assets for your podcasts.

Effective WordPress SEO Techniques

If you own an online business, your priority should always be how to grow your sales. This you can do by deliberately and systematically raising your brand awareness and acquiring new customers. That task is easier if you have in place some effective Search Engine Optimization, SEO techniques, without which the task becomes almost impossible. For marketers in e-commerce business, smart digital technologies from WordPress can indeed make such SEO tasks easy for marketers that are not too experienced. That is because digital marketing and online advertising techniques are getting more and more sophisticated in tandem with the sophistication of the internet. Some SEO techniques may be specific to the type of platform you are using for your e-commerce business. But because of the ease-of-use and popularity of WordPress websites among marketers, SEO techniques come with the package. If your own website is on WordPress, here are some effective techniques you can try out for your business.

Take Advantage of Plugins

Luckily, WordPress has many different plugins that marketers can take advantage of to help them identify and fix broken links. Doing so helps to ensure your website is simple to navigate and with improved website speed. These are very critical SEO requirements. Plugins help your website to be properly optimized on WordPress making it easy for customers to find your products online.

Publish only SEO-Optimized Content

The language you use and the way you deploy keywords on your website content matters a great deal for your search engine ranking. These keywords help Google and other Search Engines to qualify and rank your website in their SERPs. If your content is relevant, easily readable, and has the right keywords, it helps its SEO.

Create a Sitemap

If you market from your WordPress website, never fail or ignore to create an XML Sitemap file. That map helps to provide detailed information about pages and the relationship between each of them for the benefit of search engines. It helps them to easily understand and crawl your website’s structure and content for ranking purposes. The ultimate goal of every marketer is to create an online store website that ranks tops by the search engines. A good XML Sitemap file helps that effort.

Use only SEO-Friendly Themes

On WordPress, marketers have the advantage of using in-house well-optimized themes that have built-in SEO options if you are diligent enough to locate them. Such SEO-friendly themes are built specifically for some types of businesses and niches. If you are lucky to find one that matches your business, it helps to create more chances of getting a better ranking for your website store by search engines. Since content is what is largely responsible for driving traffic to online stores, well-optimized themes help content to do so.  

Mend Broken Links

Characteristically, search engines are always very sensitive to broken links. For that reason there is hardly anything else that tends to affect SEO more negatively than broken links. As a marketer, it is inevitable that you must use redirect links and backlinks to your products. But be sure that these links are always through links. You can do this by regularly and routinely checking the links you added on your website to be sure they are not broken. Broken links always have negative affects on previous SEO efforts you may have already undertaken. Nothing distracts customers worse than clicking on links that lead them to nowhere.

Improve Your Google Ads Settings

Smart online marketers always rely on search engines to advertise their goods/services. Many inevitably turn to Google Ads. If you want your paid clicks to transfer in higher percentages over organic clicks, be careful with your Google Ads settings. To make sure your advertising is properly optimized, check your ads settings and consider using cheaper cost-per-clicks ads for better results.

Be Creative in Your Product Descriptions

Write only catchy and easy-to-remember product descriptions. That requires some creativity. Unique content is important, but it should not be plain and monotonous. Your aim is to arrest the attention of visitors at the quickest opportunity. Catchy product descriptions tend to help that process. If you write product descriptions that people easily see and remember, you attract more and better traffic for your website. By adding relevant keywords to your catchy descriptions, it usually works great for your website SEO.

Optimize Your Products Images

For traffic purposes, visuals are hugely essential for online stores. Most people always want to see beautiful, clear pictures of the products they wish to buy. For this reason, the more aesthetically pleasing the images are, the more attractive they are to buyers. That is why it is very important to put up only images of the highest quality to market your products. Even with that, it is also essential to optimize such images. That helps search engines associate and link the images with your products. The optimization is done by adding the ALT tags with relevant keywords to every image of your products you put out on your content.

Make Your Checkout Process Seamless

Making your checkout process seamless is to reduce the percentage of abandoned orders in the checkout process. Most online shoppers always love what is easy and user-friendly. Unfriendly and uncommon payment methods together with cumbersome, complicated and long checkout processes can frustrate many customers to abandon orders in shopping carts. This phenomenon no doubt greatly affects sales volumes and profits.

Essential Plugins Your Blog Needs

Every blog needs plugins to help fortify its functionality and availability for search engines. You can access some plugins free while some others come at a premium. If you are running your blog on WordPress you will have free access to many essential plugins that can add functionality to your blog. Knowing the service you want from plugins is important before you decide on which to install. There are a variety of plugins you can install depending on your blogging experience and the level of dexterity you’ve at blogging. What you choose to install is determined by the type of functionality you want for your blog. That is what digital marketing experts recommend.


 
Here are a few plugins of choice for many bloggers.

Google XML Sitemaps: Helps to develop sitemaps in XML format that has links to all the pages of your website. This is monitored by search engines to make sure all your web pages are indexed. These get automatically updated with links as you publish new posts.
Full SEO Pack: Helps to optimize your blog for the search engines.
Akismet: Helps to prevent spam comments on your blog.
Mashare Social: Helps to show the share count of your articles and add social share icons to your blog.
CSS and Javascript Toolbox: Helps you add Javascript codes like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel that will load on all the pages of your blog.
OptinChat: Helps you add a chat module, which will automatically chat with your site visitors and collect their email IDs to help you build a subscriber list.
WP Time Capsule: Backs up your blog's content and files every day and stores it on Dropbox. It helps to make sure your blog is safe in the event of a crash, security compromise or file corruption.
W3 Total Cache: Helps you create static pages of your web pages to enable your website load faster. Fast loading websites are search engine friendly.

Plugins are really essential to enhance the functionality of your blog. In digital marketing world, the competition is so stiff that any little thing you can do on your blog to give you some edge no matter how little over your competitors is always highly welcome. That is where plugins become really essential. They manage to help out providing such little essentials to enhance your blog. If you want to go far as a blogger, it is wise not to ignore them.


 

How to Blog Like a Pro

Do you know something others don’t know? Are you good at something? Are you passionate about something? Do you express yourself well in writing? Great if you do. You can be a blogger and a good one at that just like the Pros. Now, how badly do you want to blog like a Pro? Simple! Just do exactly what Pros do. The good news is, Pros don’t do anything much different from what other bloggers do. They only manage to do better and differently same things other bloggers do in blogosphere. That is what makes them Pros. Here is how you too can get started if you want to blog like a Pro:

#1 Decide on a Domain Name

You may ask what’s in a name. In blogging, the answer is a lot. This is more so when your domain name will automatically become your brand name. In choosing a name, don’t go with the Joneses unless you want to struggle for recognition over a long time. You may even be crowded out easily if you are not lucky. You must make this choice very carefully because your web success may directly depend on it when search engines come to recognize it. Any name which resonates with your chosen niche always gets better results. AnyName.com is ok provided it is brandable and memorable. It must align with what you’ve decided for your brand recognition and it is available for web registration. 


 
#2 Carefully Choose Your Blog Niche

If you want to blog like Pro, you must carefully choose a niche and stick with it over the long haul. Your blog can not grow if it is not known for something unique to it even if it is just one thing. That is the reason you should not go for something too general like blogging for food or fitness. You can settle for a unique type of food or for some brand of fitness unique to pregnant women, to athletes or the elderly. These unique types of niches are likely to earn you recognition faster than general niches. Any niche you choose must be a combination of your talent, passion and marketing opportunity if you want to blog like Pro. 

#3 Get a Custom Logo

You may choose to get professionals to design a unique logo for you with a little fee or you go for free themes available in the WordPress repository. Either way, what matters is to get a unique logo which fits the niche theme you’ve chosen. A unique logo adds to your professionalism too. You must therefore be careful to settle for a design that is not excessively colorful and distracting. It must easily appeal to the eye and good for readability and page load speed both of which can help the SEO of your blog.

#4 Install a Self-Hosted Blog

You can easily have access to many blogging platforms on the web but some are free while some are not. The platforms that are not free may require that you pay a small rental fee monthly, quarterly or annually. The choice is yours to make. Free blog platforms like Blogger.com or WordPress.com. appear to be most popular with many bloggers. However, there is some snag with many of the free platforms. Most of them do not allow commercial use of their platforms. Some others will not allow you to own your web-property. For these reasons, most Pros prefer to register and host their own domains with reputable Domain Hosts even at a premium.

#5 Write and Publish Your First Content

This is where what you know and are passionate about will come to the fore. Just relax, collect your thoughts and start writing something great. Be ready for the long haul because blogging is a marathon and not a sprint. The rules are no that strict, but always ensure the information you are giving out is authentic, rich, personal and unique enough for other persons to be interested in reading it. Your success as a blogger is heavily dependent on how much of rich, informative and educative information you can give out about your chosen niche in a prolonged basis. That is where your knowledge and expertise really come to the fore. It is this knowledge/information that helps you to acquire loyal readership and followership. Before making the first post on your content, be sure that your “About Me” page is carefully written out to tell readers who you are and what you can do and have done in the past. Most people always want to know who exactly they are dealing with before reading blog posts.

#6 Adopt a Good SEO Strategy

This stage involves some technicalities which experts can help you with if you are not too sure you can handle it on your own. It is very important you adopt a good SEO strategy because how the search engines find your blog and send traffic to it depends hugely on your SEO strategy. It is about the most challenging aspect of blogging and it must be done right at all times because a huge percentage of the traffic expected in your blog will be sent there by search engines. Simply put, SEO, (Search Engine Optimization) is a unique way of playing around with and positioning keywords in your blog posts to enable them rank high in search results. The higher they rank, the more people find them and the higher traffic your blog gets. You can use web tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, UberSuggest and the likes to research keywords to know what people are searching for most and how best to use such keywords in your posts to take advantage of these popular searches. That is how SEO works.


 
#7 Install Web Analytics
 
Analytics are very helpful in measuring results, carrying out research and even spying on other bloggers. Google Analytics is most preferable here but be sure you configure its search console as well. It is simple to deploy and use. Just sign up for a free account at Google Analytics. After signing up, Google will send you a javascript code, which you have to deploy on all the pages of your blog you need to track and measure their performance. Once your Google Analytics is in place, you can daily track the number of visitors, to which page, sources of the traffic and even the countries and geographical regions of the world the traffic is coming from. The search console gives you essential data and insights about how your website is performing in Google Search. Through it, you will also be able to see the keywords that people search for when they come to your site. It gives you the right information you really need to rejig your SEO strategy from time to time depending on your blog readers’ behavior online.

#8 Install Essential Plugins

As soon as your blog is up and running, it becomes a very valuable web property which you must protect and enhance its functionality. That is when you need to install some essential and useful plugins. You may get some plugins free and you may have to pay for some others. What you use depends on what you aim to achieve or get from your blog. Here are some of the most popular plugins with bloggers.

Google XML Sitemaps: Helps to develop sitemaps in XML format that have links to all the pages of your website. This is monitored by search engines to make sure all your web pages are indexed. They get automatically updated with links as you publish new posts.
Full SEO Pack: Helps to optimize your blog for the search engines.
Akismet: Helps to prevent spam comments on your blog.
Mashare Social: Helps to show the share count of your articles and add social share icons to your blog.
CSS and Javascript Toolbox: Helps you add Javascript codes like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel that will load on all the pages of your blog.
OptinChat: Helps you add a chat module, which will automatically chat with your visitors and collect their email IDs to help you build a subscriber list.
WP Time Capsule: Helps to back up your blog's content and files every day and stores it on Dropbox.

#9 Get Your Blog on Social Media

As most marketers now know, social media is the place to be. This is because of the huge popularity of social media and the ease of sharing information and interaction. One blog can go viral in minutes via sharing to hundreds of thousands of persons all over the internet. As soon as you start publishing, just get your blog on the most popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. That helps to put your blog before a very huge audience where you can easily source customers from the “likes” and “followers” you get on these platforms. If you do so, you will notice from your Google Analytics dashboard that your first set of visitors will be coming in good numbers from social media sites.

#10 Monetize your Blog

Yeah, this is the icing on the cake. Pro bloggers get to make real good money from their blogs when they monetize them. Some Forbes Research Results indicate that many Pro bloggers make averagely $5,000-$20,000 per year with some posting much higher figures. That is good money no doubt. For most bloggers, making money with their blog is readily their most important objective for blogging. Display ads as monetized with Google Adsense is readily one of the easiest ways to make money with your blog. But, there are many others which Pros have learned to combine into making multiple streams of income. It is also possible to earn money through Pay-Per-View, PPV, Pay-Per-Click, PPC and direct product ads on your website if your blog has become sufficiently popular by way of good traffic inflow. Other methods include, selling E-books, Lessons, Lectures, How-to videos, Webinars and many other electronic products which you can create yourself, advertise on your blog and sell to buyers online.