Affiliate Marketing Manager - Client side

View details & apply online for this Affiliate Marketing Manager - Client side vacancy on reed.co.uk, the UK’s #1 job site.

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Webgains Wins Mothercare Affiliate Programme

Performance marketing specialists Webgains will be running the affiliate programme for the Mothercare family of brands: ELC and Mothercare.

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Q&A: Zanox's Florian Wallner on Affiliate's Place in Driving New Customers

Gaining new customers through affiliate marketing is an important objective for advertisers. However, last-click rewarding mechanisms and current …

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Sports affiliate manager

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Rock Hall named to Main Street Maryland affiliate program

Auerbach said the affiliate program uses strategies based on redevelopment and revitalization goals. Those are economic vitality, design, marketing …

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Live Lounge launches affiliate program with Income Access

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Affiliate Marketing Analyst

We are currently seeking an Affiliate Marketing Analyst to collaborate with internal and external clients to execute all aspects of affiliate marketing …

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The Functional Content Masterplan – Own the Knowledge Graph Goldrush with this On-Page Plan

Posted by SimonPenson

[Estimated read time: 17 minutes]

On-page content is certainly not one of the sexier topics in digital marketing.

Lost in the flashing lights of “cool digital marketing trends” and things to be seen talking about, it’s become the poor relative of many a hyped “game-changer.”

I’m here to argue that, in being distracted by the topics that may be more “cutting-edge,” we’re leaving our most valuable assets unloved and at the mercy of underperformance.

This post is designed not only to make it clear what good on-page content looks like, but also how you should go about prioritizing which pages to tackle first based on commercial opportunity, creating truly customer-focused on-page experiences.

What is “static” or “functional” content?

So how am I defining static/functional content, and why is it so important to nurture in 2016? The answer lies in the recent refocus on audience-centric marketing and Google’s development of the Knowledge Graph.

Whether you call your on-page content “functional,” “static,” or simply “on-page” content, they’re all flavors of the same thing: content that sits on key landing pages. These may be category pages or other key conversion pages. The text is designed to help Google understand the relevance of the page and/or help customers with their buying decisions.

Functional content has other uses as well, but today we’re focusing on its use as a customer-focused conversion enhancement and discovery tactic.

And while several years ago it would have been produced simply to aid a relatively immature Google to “find” and “understand,” the focus is now squarely back on creating valuable user experiences for your targeted audience.

Google’s ability to better understand and measure what “quality content” really looks like — alongside an overall increase in web usage and ease-of-use expectation among audiences — has made key page investment as critical to success on many levels.

We should now be looking to craft on-page content to improve conversion, search visibility, user experience, and relevance — and yes, even as a technique to steal Knowledge Graph real estate.

The question, however, is “how do I even begin to tackle that mountain?”

Auditing what you have

For those with large sites, the task of even beginning to understand where to start with your static content improvement program can be daunting. Even if you have a small site of a couple of hundred pages, the thought of writing content for all of them can be enough to put you off even starting.

As with any project, the key is gathering the data to inform your decision-making before simply “starting.” That’s where my latest process can help.

Introducing COAT: The Content Optimization and Auditing Tool

To help the process along, we’ve been using a tool internally for months — for the first time today, there’s now a version that anyone can use.

This link will take you to the new Content Optimisation and Auditing Tool (COAT), and below I’ll walk through exactly how we use it to understand the current site and prioritize areas for content improvement. I’ll also walk you through the manual step-by-step process, should you wish to take the scenic route.

The manual process

If you enjoy taking the long road — maybe you feel an extra sense of achievement in doing so — then let’s take a look at how to pull the data together to make data-informed decisions around your functional content.

As with any solid piece of analysis, we begin with an empty Excel doc and, in this case, a list of keywords you feel are relevant to and important for your business and site.

In this example, we’ll take a couple of keywords and our own site:

Keywords:

Content Marketing Agency
Digital PR

Site:

http://ift.tt/10MOZUy

Running this process manually is labor-intensive (hence the need to automate it!) and to add dozens more keywords creates a lot of work for little extra knowledge gain, but by focusing on a couple you can see how to build the fuller picture.

Stage one

We start by adding our keywords to our spreadsheet alongside a capture of the search volume for those terms and the actual URL ranking, as shown below (NOTE: all data is for google.co.uk).

Next we add in ranking position…

We then look to the page itself and give each of the key on-page elements a score based on our understanding of best practice. If you want to be really smart, you can score the most important factors out of 20 and those lesser points out of 10.

In building our COAT tool to enable this to be carried out at scale across sites with thousands of pages, we made a list of many of the key on-page factors we know to affect rank and indeed conversion. They include:

• URL optimization
• Title tag optimization and clickability
• Meta description optimization and clickability
• H1, H2, and H3 optimization and clickability (as individual scores)
• Occurences of keyword phrases within body copy
• Word count
• Keyword density
• Readability (as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability score)

This is far from an exhaustive list, but it’s a great place to start your analysis. The example below shows an element of this scored:

Once you have calculated score for every key factor, your job is to then to turn this into an average, weighted score out of 100. In this case, you can see I’ve done this across the listed factors and have a final score for each keyword and URL:

Stage two

Once you have score for a larger number of pages and keywords, it’s then possible to begin organizing your data in a way that helps prioritise action.

You can do this simply enough by using filters and organising the table by any number of combinations.

You may want to sort by highest search volume and then by those pages ranking between, say, 5th and 10th position.

Doing this enables you to focus on the pages that may yield the most potential traffic increase from Google, if that is indeed your aim.

Working this way makes it much easier to work in a way that delivers the largest positive net impact fastest.

Doing it at scale

Of course, if you have a large site with tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of pages, the manual option is almost impossible — which is why we scratched our heads and looked for a more effective option.The result was the creation of our Content Auditing and Optimisation Tool. Here’s how you can make use of it to paint a fuller picture of your entire site.

Here’s how it works

When it comes to using COAT, you follow a basic process:

• Head over to the tool.
• Enter your domain, or a sub-directory of the site if you’d like to focus on a particular section
• Add the keywords you want to analyze in a comma-separated list
• Click “Get Report,” making sure you’ve chosen the right country

Next comes the smart bit: by adding target keywords to the system before it crawls, it enables the algorithm to cross-reference all pages against those phrases and then score each combination against a list of critical attributes you’d expect the “perfect page” to have.

Let’s take an example:

You run a site that sells laptops. You enter a URL for a specific model, such as /apple-15in-macbook/, and a bunch of related keywords, such as “Apple 15-inch MacBook” and “Apple MacBook Pro.”

The system works out the best page for those terms and measures the existing content against a large number of known ranking signals and measures, covering everything from title tags and H1s to readability tests such as the Flesch-Kincaid system.

This outputs a spreadsheet that scores each URL or even categories of URLs (to allow you to see how well-optimized the site is generally for a specific area of business, such as Apple laptops), enabling you to sort the data, discover the pages most in need of improvement, and identify where content gaps may exist.

In a nutshell, it’ll provide:

• What the most relevant target page for each keyword is
• How well-optimized individual pages are for their target keywords
• Where content gaps exist within the site’s functional content

It also presents the top-level data in an actionable way. An example of the report landing page can be seen below (raw CSV downloads are also available — more on that in a moment).

You can see the overall page score and simple ways to improve it. This is for our “Digital PR” keyword:

The output

As we’ve already covered in the manual process example, in addition to pulling the “content quality scores” for each URL, you can also take the data to the next level by adding in other data sources to the mix.

The standard CSV download includes data such as keyword, URL, and scores for the key elements (such as H1, meta, canonical use and static content quality).

This level of detail makes it possible to create a priority order for fixes based on lowest-scoring pages easily enough, but there are ways you can supercharge this process even more.

The first thing to do is run a simple rankings check using your favorite rank tracker for those keywords and add them into a new column in yourCSV. It’ll look a little like this (I’ve added some basic styling for clarity):

I also try to group keywords by adding a third column using a handful of grouped terms. In this example, you can see I’m grouping car model keywords with brand terms manually.

Below, you’ll see how we can then group these terms together in an averaged cluster table to give us a better understanding of where the keyword volume might be from a car brand perspective. I’ve blurred the keyword grouping column here to protect existing client strategy data.

As you can see from the snapshot above, we now have a spreadsheet with keyword, keyword group, search volume, URL, rank, and the overall content score pulled in from the base Excel sheet we have worked through. From this, we can do some clever chart visualization to help us understand the data.

Visualizing the numbers

To really understand where the opportunity lies and to take this process past a simple I’ll-work-on-the-worst-pages-first approach, we need to bring it to life.

This means turning our table into a chart. We’ll utilize the chart functionality within Excel itself.

Here’s an example of the corresponding chart for the table shown above, showing performance by category and ranking correlation. We’re using dummy data here, but you can look at the overall optimization score for each car brand section alongside how well they rank (the purple line is average rank for that category):

If we focus on the chart above, we can begin to see a pattern between those categories that are better optimized and generally have better rankings. Correlation does not always equal causation, as we know, but it’s useful information.

Take the very first column, or the Subaru category. We can see that it’s one of the better-optimized categories (at 49%) and average rank is at 34.1. Now, these are hardly record-breaking positions, but it does point towards the value of well-worked static pages.

Making the categories as granular as possible can be very valuable here, as you can quickly build up a focused picture of where to put your effort to move the needle quickly. The process for doing so is an entirely subjective one, often based on your knowledge of your industry or your site information architecture.

Add keyword volume data into the mix and you know exactly where to build your static content creation to-do list.

Adding in context

Like any data set, however, it requires a level of benchmarking and context to give you the fullest picture possible before you commit time and effort to the content improvement process.

It’s for this reason that I always look to run the same process on key competitors, too. An example of the resulting comparison charts can be seen below.

The process is relatively straightforward: take an average of all the individual URL content scores, which will give you a “whole domain” score. Add competitors by repeating the process for their domain.

You can take a more granular view manually by following the same process for the grouped keywords and tabulating the result. Below, we can see how our domain sizes up against those same two competitors for all nine of our example keyword groups, such as the car brands example we looked at earlier.

With that benchmark data in place, you can move on to the proactive improvement part of the process.

The perfect page structure

Having identified your priority pages, the next step is to ensure you edit (or create them) in the right way to maximize impact.

Whereas a few years ago it was all about creating a few paragraphs almost solely for the sake of helping Google understand the page, now we MUST be focused on usability and improving the experience for the right visitor.

This means adding value to the page. To do that, you need to stand back and really focus in on the visitor: how they get to the page and what they expect from it.

This will almost always involve what I call “making the visitor smarter”: creating content that ensures they make better and more informed buying decisions.

To do that requires a structured approach to delivering key information succinctly and in a way that enhances — rather than hinders — the user journey.

The best way of working through what that should look like is to share a few examples of those doing it well:

1. Tredz Top 5 Reviews

Tredz is a UK cycling ecommerce business. They do a great job of understanding what their audience is looking for and ensuring they’re set up to make them smarter. The “Top 5” pages are certainly not classic landing pages, but they’re brilliant examples of how you can sell and add value at the same time.

Below is the page for the “Top 5 hybrids for under £500.” You can clearly see how the URL (http://ift.tt/29eH2DW), meta, H tags, and body copy all support this focus and are consistently aligned:

2. Read it for me

This is a really cool business concept and they also do great landing pages. You get three clear reasons to try them out — presented clearly and utilizing several different content types — all in one package.

3. On Stride Financial

Finance may not be where you’d expect to see amazing landing pages, but this is a great example. Not only is it an easy-to-use experience, it answers all the user’s key questions succinctly, starting with “What is an installment loan?” It’s also structured in a way to capture Knowledge Graph opportunity — something we’ll come to shortly.

Outside of examples like these and supporting content, you should be aiming to

create impactful headlines, testimonials (where appropriate), directional cues (so it’s clear where to “go next”), and high-quality images to reflect the quality of your product or services.

Claiming Knowledge Graph

There is, of course, one final reason to work hard on your static pages. That reason? To claim a massively important piece of digital real estate: Google Featured Snippets.

Snippets form part of the wider Knowledge Graph, the tangible visualization of Google’s semantic search knowledge base that’s designed to better understand the associations and entities behind words, phrases, and descriptions of things.

The Knowledge Graph comes in a multitude of formats, but one of the most valuable (and attainable from a commercial perspective) is the Featured Snippet, which sits at the top of the organic SERP. An example can be seen below from a search for “How do I register to vote” in google.co.uk:

In recent months, Zazzle Media has done a lot of work on landing page design to capture featured snippets with some interesting findings, most notably the level of extra traffic such a position can achieve.

Having now measured dozens of these snippets, we see an average of 15–20% extra traffic from them versus a traditional position 1. That’s a definite bonus, and makes the task of claiming them extremely worthwhile.

You don’t have to be first

The best news? You don’t even have to be in first position to be considered for a snippet. Our own research shows us that almost 75% of the examples we track have been claimed by pages ranked between 2^nd and 10^th position. It’s far from being robust enough yet for us to formalize a full report on it, but early indication across more than 900 claimed snippets (heavily weighted to the finance sector at present) support these early findings.

Similar research by search data specialists STAT has also supported this theory, revealing that objective words are more likely to appear. General question and definition words (like “does,” “cause,” and “definition”) as well as financial words (like “salary,” “average,” and “cost”) are likely to trigger a featured snippet. Conversely, the word “best” triggered zero featured snippets in over 20,000 instances.

This suggests that writing in a factual way is more likely to help you claim featured results.

Measuring what you already have

Before you run into this two-footed, you must first audit what you may (or may not) already have. If you run a larger site, you may already have claimed a few snippets by chance, and with any major project it’s important to benchmark before you begin.

Luckily, there are a handful of tools out there to help you discover what you already rank for. My favorite is SEMrush.

The paid-for tool makes it easy to find out if you rank for any featured snippets already. I’d suggest using it to benchmark and then measure the effect of any optimization and content reworking you do as a result of the auditing process.

Claiming Featured Snippets

Claiming your own Featured Snippet then requires a focus on content structure and on answering key questions in a logical order. This also means paying close attention to on-page HTML structure to ensure that Google can easily and cleanly pick out specific answers.

Let’s look at a few examples showing that Google can pick up different types of content for different types of questions.

1. The list

One of the most prevalent examples of Featured Snippets is the list.

As you can see, Media Temple has claimed this incredibly visual piece of real estate simply by creating an article with a well-structured, step-by-step guide to answer the question:

“How do I set up an email account on my iPhone?”

If we look at how the page is formatted, we can see that the URL matches the search almost exactly, while the H1 tag serves to reinforce the relevance still further.

As we scroll down we find a user-friendly approach to the content, with short sentences and paragraphs broken up succinctly into sections.

This allows Google to quickly understand relevance and extract the most useful information to present in search; in this case, the step-by-step how-to process to complete the task.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the article, highlighting key structural elements. Below this is the list itself that’s captured in the above Featured Snippet:

2. The table

Google LOVES to present tables; clearly there’s something about the logical nature of how the data is presented that resonates with its team of left-brained engineers!

In the example below, we see a site listing countries by size. Historically, this page may well not have ranked so highly (it isn’t usually the page in position one that claims the snippet result). Because of the ways it has structured the information so well, however, Geohive will be enjoying a sizable spike in traffic to the page.

The page itself looks like this — clear, concise and well-structured:

3. The definition

The final example is the description, or definition snippet; it’s possibly the hardest to claim consistently.

It’s difficult for two key reasons:

• There will be lots of competition for the space and answering the search query in prose format.
• It requires a focus on HTML structure and brilliantly crafted content to win.

In the example below, we can see a very good example of how you should be structuring content pages.

We start with a perfect URL (/what-is-a-mortgage-broker/) and this follows through to the H1 (What is a Mortgage Broker). The author then cleverly uses subheadings to extend the rest of the post into a thorough piece on the subject area. Subheadings include the key How, What, Where, and When areas of focus that any good journalism tutor will lecture you on using in any good article or story. Examples might include

• So how does this whole mortgage broker thing work?
• Mortgage brokers can shop the rate for you
• Mortgage brokers are your loan guide
• Mortgage broker FAQ

The result is a piece that leaves no stone unturned. Because of this, it’s been shared plenty of times — a sure fire signal that the article is positively viewed by readers.

Featured Snippet Cheatsheet

Not being one to leave you alone to figure this out though, I have created this simple Featured Snippet Cheatsheet, designed to take the guesswork out of creating pages worthy of being selected for the Knowledge Graph.

Do it today!

Thanks for making it this far. My one hope is for you to go off and put this plan into action for your own site. Doing so will quickly transform your approach to both landing pages and to your ongoing content creation plan (but that’s a post for another day!).

And if you do have a go, remember to use the free COAT tool and guides associated with this article to make the process as simple as possible.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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5 Growth Hacks That Continuously Deliver Results

“Growth hacking” is a hot term in the marketing community and many people are denouncing the strategies.

But what is growth hacking really?

I like to define it as any strategy that helps your brand grow and reach new audiences quickly and efficiently. The term growth hacking itself might be a new one, but the strategies have been around for a while.

The lifespan of a new business, brand, or startup is short. We must grow and expand quickly if we plan on sticking around for the long term.

If you’re a new business looking to grow rapidly then you need proven tactics to back you up month after month. You need to growth hack.

Add these five growth hacking strategies to your marketing strategy and watch your audience grow by leaps and bounds.

1. Content upgrades

If you own and operate a website, there’s no debating that you must be collecting emails.

A wise bearded man on a mountaintop once said, “Emails are the gateway to sales”.

Once you get someone’s email address it allows you develop a relationship with them directly through email – the highest converting digital sales channel.

The question is, how can you collect more emails?

Content upgrades are a proven method for offering highly valuable, highly relevant content in return for an email address.

Examples of a content upgrade are:

• A downloadable checklist (with bonus item) within a list-type piece of content
• A downloadable infographic, poster, or image
• An extended ebook or a collection of popular blog posts in ebook format
• Video of behind-the-scenes highlights
• A simple PDF copy of the digital article
• Prebuilt templates for email, blog headlines, landing pages, etc.

Our content team has had tremendous success with content upgrades as a part of our email collection strategy.

Pay Flynn of SmartPassiveIncome.com uses massive value drivers like his free ebooks to collect emails and grow his audience. His strategy involves providing incredible resources that offer up massive value first, then suggest they should subscribe to his email list. Hook, line, and sinker.

Pat also regularly offers up insightful blog posts and in-depth podcasts with successful entrepreneurs – all for free. But if you’d enjoy all his most important tips condensed into one ebook, you’re free to upgrade.

Remember that the content upgrades you offer should always be of high value to your readers before trying to collect their contact information. There’s no better way to piss off your audience than failing to deliver on promises.

2. A post-writing outreach checklist

We no longer live in a “if we build it, they will come” type of internet world. To extend the life of your content you must have an outreach strategy.

This is a list of influencers, groups, websites, and content syndication tools that you reach out to and promote your content with. Outreach amplifies your content, extends its lifespan, and helps it be seen by others in your industry.

Start with some research. Find out who the big players in your industry are, what the leading websites are, and where your audience finds industry-related news.

Every time you publish a piece of content, run down your checklist to make sure the right eyes are on your work.

Some of the content outreach we do includes:

• Social media sharing, tagging, and @mentioning of influential people and brands
• Posting on websites that syndicate popular content in our niche
• Sharing in industry-related groups on Facebook and LinkedIn
• Email outreach to popular websites and influencers for guest posting

3. Scroll, entry, and exit popups

Are you using popups on your website?

If your answer is no, then you’re missing out on valuable touch points with your audience.

Popups are becoming more important these days because they command action from your visitors. Many internet users are now experiencing what marketers call “banner blindness“; becoming so accustomed to advertisements and CTAs that they don’t even notice them.

How many of you can recall the last banner ad you clicked on let alone seen? None I bet, and that’s why popups are so important.

I’m guessing that your first reaction would be to throw shade at popups because you think they’re “annoying or spammy”.

I’m here to tell you that if you refuse to use popups, then a massive amount of people are coming to your site, consuming all your free content, and then leaving. All while your passive footer, inline, or sidebar CTA is being ignored in the corner like your weird cousin at family gatherings.

There’s just no way you can rely on your visitors to hand over their email or make a purchase unless you make it super clear how they can (and why they should).

There are four types of popups you can use on your website (please don’t use all four at once):

• Entry popup – Displays right when a visitor lands on your website. Entry popups can be used to ask for an email in exchange for a discount on a visitor’s first purchase. You could also alert people of a sale or a new promotion, or direct people to a new page you’re currently promoting.
• Timed popup – Displays after a set period of time to ensure that your visitor is interested in whatever you’re offering. If they stick around for 30 seconds reading your blog then you know they’re interested and you can then present them with your offer.
• Scroll popup – Displays after a user has scrolled a set portion of the content they’ve landed on. After they’ve read half of your article on “5 Social Media Monetization Tactics” let’s say, you can present your online course on social media management for business.
• Exit popup – Displays when a user goes to close or exit your page. As their mouse moves towards the exit button in the corner, your popup will display with a “Wait! There’s more!” and you can offer a discount or special promotion to get them to stick around.

Take a page from the uber-successful menswear retailer Frank & Oak. As soon as you land on their page you’re presented with an entry popup.

If it’s your first time on the website they’ll offer you a discount on your first purchase just for creating an account with them. If you’ve been on Frank & Oak before their entry popup will display current sales or promotions so you’re aware of them before you begin to explore the site.

4. Dedicated landing pages

Why should I use dedicated landing pages?

If you want to get the maximum ROI for your marketing efforts, and I hope you do, then you need to be directing all of your paid traffic to a landing page.

Unlike the homepage of your website, a landing page has only one purpose: to convert visitors.

The homepage of your website on the other hand, offers a litany of options for your visitors: to learn more, explore, shop, discover, read, etc.

A landing page converts a far higher percentage of visitors by dropping these distractions and presenting a single focus point. This will result in a higher conversion rate for all of the traffic you’re bringing in with your marketing.

The more visitors you’re able to convert – the larger your audience grows.

The $5 freelancer for hire website Fiverr.com sends their Facebook ads for intro video production to this landing page. On the landing page they have a demo for different styles of intro videos you could have produced for your business. In just 3 clicks you could have a custom intro video made – just enter your email to get started.

5. Social media sweepstakes

As of writing this there are 1.65 billion people using Facebook, 3 million Facebook advertisers, 75 million daily Instagram users, 9,000 snaps shared on Snapchat per second, and a gazillion other ways to send our friends stupid cat videos.

Social media is more popular than ever and the train doesn’t look to be slowing down.

What does this mean for my business?

This means that to reach and grow a large audience in your industry, you must go where the people are. The strength of social media is in its ability to create engagement. And what better way is there to entice engagement than to give away something awesome to your audience?

If you can offer an irresistible prize for a social media sweepstakes, like an Instagram hashtag contest, it will attract huge numbers.

This is how you can run a successful social media contest in 5 steps:

1. Choose a prize that is highly related to your industry. Don’t offer an iPad if you’re in the finance industry. Something to tie the contest back to your business works best, like a gift card or a related tool. If you operate a fitness center for example, give away personal training sessions or a pair of sneakers – something that will get the winner and participants into your gym.
2. Establish your contest rules. How will people participate? Post using a hashtag? Submit a photo? What are the requirements to participate?
3. Create a contest page. There are two different ways to create the contest page. If you’re running your contest within Instagram then your contest page will just be an Instagram photo. Whereas if you run it off-Instagram – for example, in a Tab on your Facebook Page or website – using an Instagram Contest App.
4. Monitor the contest. Using a dedicated contest page on your website is easiest and can be accomplished with a social media contesting tool. If you are running your contest on Instagram or Twitter, have all submissions entered using a unique hashtag so you can see all the entries.
5. Announce the winner and promote them on your network. Showcase the winner and the awesome prize they won for an instant boost in credibility and brand awareness. Send a follow up email thanking everyone who entered, plug your business, and tease future contests.

That’s it! Social sweepstakes are a speedy high impact method of boosting your audience and the possibilities you can have with it are endless. The right prize and contest could be highly viral for your audience and give you the growth you’re looking for.

Putting it all together

Progressively growing and reaching an audience for your brand can be a tedious task. If you haven’t developed a plan full of proven growth strategies then you’re basically stuck without a paddle.

You need reliable strategies to get you in front of the audiences you need to reach.

Remember that growth hacks are more than trendy marketing jargon. They are proven strategies that will increase your reach and grow your target audience.

To reach our KPIs we’ve had to rely on proven growth hacking strategies more than once to save our asses.

Five of the most effective growth hacking strategies we recommend are:

1. Content upgrades

2. A post-writing outreach checklist

3. Scroll and entry popups

4. Dedicated landing pages

5. Social media sweepstakes

If you find yourself in a bind and need to increase your conversions for the month, growth hacking your audience is the way to do it.

What are some of your favorite growth hacking strategies? Share your thoughts and suggestions below!

Guest Author: Jordan Lore is a Content Marketer at Wishpond in Vancouver, BC. Wishpond makes it easy for marketers to run lead generation and marketing automation campaigns, all in one place. When he’s not writing he has a camera attached to his arm. Follow him on his budding twitter account @jordanlore6.

The post 5 Growth Hacks That Continuously Deliver Results appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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The Balanced Digital Scorecard: A Simpler Way to Evaluate Prospects

Posted by EmilySmith

[Estimated read time: 10 minutes]

As anyone who’s contributed to business development at an agency knows, it can be challenging to establish exactly what a given prospect needs. What projects, services, or campaigns would actually move the needle for this organization? While some clients come to an agency with specific requests, others are looking for guidance — help establishing where to focus resources. This can be especially difficult, as answering these questions often requires large amounts of information to be analyzed in a small period of time.

To address the challenge of evaluating prospective clients and prioritizing proposed work, we’ve developed the Balanced Digital Scorecard framework. This post is the first in a two-part series. Today, we’ll look at:

• Why we developed this framework,
• Where the concept came from, and
• Specific areas to review when evaluating prospects

Part two will cover how to use the inputs from the evaluation process to prioritize proposed work — stay tuned!

Evaluating potential clients

Working with new clients, establishing what strategies will be most impactful to their goals… this is what makes working at an agency awesome. But it can also be some of the most challenging work. Contributing to business development and pitching prospects tends to amplify this with time constraints and limited access to internal data. While some clients have a clear idea of the work they want help with, this doesn’t always equal the most impactful work from a consultant’s standpoint. Balancing these needs and wants takes experience and skill, but can be made easier with the right framework.

The use of a framework in this setting helps narrow down the questions you need to answer and the areas to investigate. This is crucial to working smarter, not harder — words which we at Distilled take very seriously. Often when putting together proposals and pitches, consultants must quickly establish the past and present status of a site from many different perspectives.

• What type of business is this and what are their overall goals?
• What purpose does the site serve and how does it align with these goals?
• What campaigns have they run and were they successful?
• What does the internal team look like and how efficiently can they get things done?
• What is the experience of the user when they arrive on the site?

The list goes on and on, often becoming a vast amount of information that, if not digested and organized, can make putting the right pitch together burdensome.

To help our consultants understand both what questions to ask and how they fit together, we’ve adapted the Balanced Scorecard framework to meet our needs. But before I talk more about our version, I want to briefly touch on the original framework to make sure we’re all on the same page.

The Balanced Scorecard

For anyone not familiar with this concept, the Balanced Scorecard was created by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in 1992. First published in the Harvard Business Review, Kaplan and Norton set out to create a management system, as opposed to a measurement system (which was more common at that time).

Kaplan and Norton argued that “the traditional financial performance measures worked well for the industrial era, but they are out of step with the skills and competencies companies are trying to master today.” They felt the information age would require a different approach, one that guided and evaluated the journey companies undertook. This would allow them to better create “future value through investment in customers, suppliers, employees, processes, technology, and innovation.”

The concept suggests that businesses be viewed through four distinct perspectives:

• Innovation and learning – Can we continue to improve and create value?
• Internal business – What must we excel at?
• Customer – How do customers see us?
• Financial – How do we look to shareholders?

Narrowing the focus to these four perspectives reduces information overload. “Companies rarely suffer from having too few measures,” wrote Kaplan and Norton. “More commonly, they keep adding new measures whenever an employee or a consultant makes a worthwhile suggestion.” By limiting the perspectives and associated measurements, management is forced to focus on only the most critical areas of the business.

This image below shows the relations of each perspective:

And now, with it filled out as an example:

As you can see, this gives the company clear goals and corresponding measurements.

Kaplan and Norton found that companies solely driven by financial goals and departments were unable to implement the scorecard, because it required all teams and departments to work toward central visions — which often weren’t financial goals.

“The balanced scorecard, on the other hand, is well suited to the kind of organization many companies are trying to become… put[ting] strategy and vision, not control, at the center,” wrote Kaplan and Norton. This would inevitably bring teams together, helping management understand the connectivity within the organization. Ultimately, they felt that “this understanding can help managers transcend traditional notions about functional barriers and ultimately lead to improved decision-making and problem-solving.”

At this point, you’re probably wondering why this framework matters to a digital marketing consultant. While it’s more directly suited for evaluating companies from the inside, so much of this approach is really about breaking down the evaluation process into meaningful metrics with forward-looking goals. And this happens to be very similar to evaluating prospects.

Our digital version

As I mentioned before, evaluating prospective clients can be a very challenging task. It’s crucial to limit the areas of investigation during this process to avoid getting lost in the weeds, instead focusing only on the most critical data points.

Since our framework is built for evaluating clients in the digital world, we have appropriately named it the Balanced Digital Scorecard. Our scorecard also has main perspectives through which to view the client:

1. Platform – Does their platform support publishing, discovery, and discoverability from a technical standpoint?
2. Content – Are they publishing content which combines appropriate blends of effective, informative, entertaining, and compelling?
3. Audience – Are they building visibility through owned, earned, and paid media?
4. Conversions – Do they have a deep understanding of the needs of the market, and are they creating assets, resources, and journeys that drive profitable customer action?
5. Measurement – Are they measuring all relevant aspects of their approach and their prospects’ activities to enable testing, improvement, and appropriate investment?

These perspectives make up the five areas of analysis to work through when evaluating most prospective clients.

1. Platform

Most consultants or SEO experts have a good understanding of the technical elements to review in a standard site audit. A great list of these can be found on our Technical Audit Checklist, created by my fellow Distiller, Ben Estes. The goal of reviewing these factors is of course to “ensure site implementation won’t hurt rankings” says Ben. While you should definitely evaluate these elements (at a high level), there is more to look into when using this framework.

Evaluating a prospect’s platform does include standard technical SEO factors but also more internal questions, like:

• How effective and/or differentiated is their CMS?
• How easy is it for them to publish content?
• How differentiated are their template levels?
• What elements are under the control of each team?

Additionally, you should look into areas like social sharing, overall mobile-friendliness, and site speed.

If you’re thinking this seems like quite the undertaking because technical audits take time and some prospects won’t be open with platform constraints, you’re right (to an extent). Take a high-level approach and look for massive weaknesses instead of every single limitation. This will give you enough information to understand where to prioritize this perspective in the pitch.

2. Content

Similar to the technical section, evaluating content looks similar to a lightweight version of a full content audit. What content do they have, which pieces are awesome and what is missing? Also look to competitors to understand who is creating content in the space and what level the bar is set at.

Beyond looking at these elements through a search lens, aim to understand what content is being shared and why. Is this taking place largely on social channels, or are publications picking these pieces up? Evaluating content on multiple levels helps to understand what they’ve created in the past and their audience’s response to it.

3. Audience

Looking into a prospect’s audience can be challenging depending on how much access they grant you during the pitch process. If you’re able to get access to analytics this task is much easier but without it, there are many tools you can leverage to get some of the same insights.

In this section, you’re looking at the traffic the site is receiving and from where. Are they building visibility through owned, earned, and paid media outlets? How effective are those efforts? Look at metrics like Search Visibility from SearchMetrics, social reach, and email stats.

A large amount of this research will depend on what information is available or accessible to you. As with previous perspectives, you’re just aiming to spot large weaknesses.

4. Conversion

Increased conversions are often a main goal stated by prospects, but without transparency from them, this can be very difficult to evaluate during a pitch. This means that often you’re left to speculate or use basic approaches. How difficult or simple is it to buy something, contact them, or complete a conversion in general? Are there good calls to action to micro-conversions such as joining an email list? How much different is the mobile experience of this process?

Look at the path to these conversions. Was there a clear funnel and did it make sense from a user’s perspective? Understanding the journey a user takes (which you can generally experience first-hand) can tell you a lot about expected conversion metrics.

Lastly, many companies’ financials are available to the public and offer a general idea of how the company is doing. If you can establish how much of their business takes place online, you can start to speculate about the success of their web presence.

5. Measurement

Evaluating a prospect’s measurement capabilities is (not surprisingly) vastly more accurate with analytics access. If you’re granted access, evaluate each platform not just for validity but also accessibility. Are there useful dashboards, management data, or other data sources that teams can use to monitor and make decisions?

Without access, you’re left to simply check and see the presence of analytics and if there is a data layer. While this doesn’t tell you much, you can often deduce from conversations how much data is a part of the internal team’s thought process. If people are monitoring, engaging, and interested in analytics data, changes and prioritization might be an easier undertaking.

Final thoughts

Working with prospective clients is something all agency consultants will have to do at some point in their career. This process is incredibly interesting — it challenges you to leverage a variety of skills and a range of knowledge to evaluate new clients and industries. It’s also a daunting task. Often your position outside the organization or unfamiliarity with a given industry can make it difficult to know where to start.

Frameworks like the original Balanced Scorecard created by Kaplan and Norton were designed to help a business evaluate itself from a more modern and holistic perspective. This approach turns the focus to future goals and action, not just evaluation of the past.

This notion is crucial at an agency needing to establish the best path forward for prospective clients. We developed our own framework, the Balanced Digital Scorecard, to help our consultants do just that. By limiting the questions you’re looking to answer, you can work smarter and focus your attention on five perspectives to evaluate a given client. Once you’ve reviewed these, you’re able to identify which ones are lagging behind and prioritize proposed work accordingly.

Next time, we’ll cover the second part: how to use the Balanced Digital Scorecard to prioritize your work.

If you use a framework to evaluate prospects or have thoughts on the Balanced Digital Scorecard, I’d love to hear from you. I welcome any feedback and/or questions!

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Rakuten Marketing Announces Winners of 14th Annual Golden Link Awards

“The Golden Link Awards allow us to recognize and celebrate stand-out innovations and successes in affiliate marketing,” said Adam Weiss, SVP and …

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55Haitao.com Wins Rakuten Marketing's Top Award for Affiliates

After five years of nonstop growth, 55Haitao is helping affiliate marketing networks and their advertisers tap into China’s cross-border space. Rakuten …

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Affiliate Marketing

AdvancedPropertyAnalysis.com is a SaaS start-up we have just launched. Our software is a powerful cloud based Investment Property Analysis …

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XsunX launches Affiliate Sales Program

XsunX launches Affiliate Sales Program … has begun its entrance into an affiliate network marketing relationship to boost exposure and enhance the …

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How Ad Fraud Ruins the Internet

Cost per acquisition (CPA) ad fraud usually involves affiliate marketing programs. Brands will reward affiliates who talk about their product or services …

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Account Manager

A globally renown digital marketing company representing some of Australia’s and the worlds largest retail companies. Focusing on Affiliate marketing, …

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10 Unforgivable Facebook Marketing Mistakes From Big Brands

Dear brands, we love you but you have been making a mess of our Facebook newsfeeds with your constant, inappropriate selling, content and updates.

Please stop!

Ever logged into Facebook to be social and interact, only to see a brand trying to sell to you right there? I cringe at the sight of misplaced advertising and selling.

A whopping 66% of brands do not have a Facebook strategy, and brands that do have a Facebook strategy do not have it documented – hence, there’s nothing to implement. Nobody goes to the grocery store without a grocery list, so don’t jump on the Facebook train without a strategy!

Here’s a whole list of Facebook marketing mistakes and sins almost every brand is committing;

1. Posting less content and inconsistently

By posting on Facebook inconsistently and inappropriately you tell your audience, “Dear customer, we are busy doing more important things, therefore, we have no time to be human and keep you updated about us”.

Organic page reach on Facebook is declining. Now more than ever, engagement should be a priority.

Solution: Create an editorial calendar for Facebook, and focus on inspiring your audience. A perfect example of a brand succeeding at this would be SaaS Company Post Planner. Their Facebook updates are consistent and their content is great. Hence, engagement is off the roof.

2. Always begging for engagement or likes

Most brands publish content that screams, “We need likes!” or they ask users to like the post and bleh bleh bleh in Dracula’s voice (like-bait post).

Well, the bitter truth is Facebook will actually bury such a post. Don’t post visuals or updates asking fans to like or comment, as this tells the world how desperate your brand is and your lack of a social media strategy.

Facebook users like myself visit to share photos, watch funny ferret or cat videos, and catch up on the latest happenings in my circle; what do you think I would do seeing a brand asking for likes? I either skip the content or come pour out my heart in your comments (you don’t want the latter).

Solution: Provide a lot of helpful content regularly, and put up “real questions” that spark engagement.

3. Not paying to play

Truth be told, brands can’t market or fully reach individual Facebook audiences without paying. So to get more eyes on your content, you must be willing to pay Facebook.

You don’t publish and pray and expect it to rain likes and comments; with great content you should get a healthy organic reach but want a larger reach? Pay to play.

Solution: Facebook admitted it several times that organic page reach is decreasing. However, using the “boost post” feature would instantly get more eyes and engagement on your brand and content.

4. Ignoring the fact that the world is mobile

Facebook statistics as at March 2016 have shown that there are over 1.65 billion monthly active Facebook users, and a whopping 1.51 billion of these are mobile users or visitors.

These numbers are too huge to ignore. Brands should optimize their Facebook pages for mobile users; having cropped out visuals or missing page components damages the user experience.

Take, for example, the visuals below: the visual on Coca-Cola’s cover was optimized for desktops only, making mobile visitors to the page believe Coca-Cola has some spiritual agenda.

Now take a look at the mobile version of the same cover

Choosing what now Coca-Cola? Have they gone spiritual?

5. Publishing the wrong type of content

You don’t plant a potato and harvest marshmallows. The same applies to content and engagement on Facebook; using irrelevant hashtags or twisting up trends can be a bad blow for business.

For example, the visual below:

Having made up Star Wars day isn’t enough, brands have to make it even more contrived and use an absurd hashtag.

Want to grow a following on Facebook or increase engagement? Posting inappropriate comments and pictures, using click bait, being all about traffic and sales would not work!

Damn, you are so greedy and we can see it! However, Facebook is cracking down on click-bait posts and will continually drown them in the newsfeed; be original and creative.

Solution: Publishing behind-the-scenes pictures of employees, pictures of products, videos or pictures of a typical day at the company or events, holidays and birthdays will increase brand perception, engagement, and page likes.

Brands should not rely on Facebook marketing to make sales. The truth is everyone hates being sold.

6. Not engaging customers in comments

Another deadly sin brands make includes not engaging fans in comments. Being social involves you interacting with fans, asking questions and responding.

Brands should be involved in the conversation in their Facebook comments, responding to feedback, lending a helping hand or increasing engagement creatively.

Solution: Engage fans in your comments, address feedback and spread the brand image.

7. Trying to sell every time

Too much of selling beats the purpose of being social. Brands should abstain from selling and focus more on user experience, building a community and providing value. That way, users remain loyal and increase their spending potential to your brand through the law of reciprocity.

Solution: Facebook is rolling out the shop store for Facebook pages, simply add your products into your shop andusers can buy once they visit your page.

8. Ignoring or deleting negative feedback or comments

Handling trolls and negative feedback requires a dedicated Facebook team, patience and creativity. Brands are expected to respond to trolls and negative comments in a respectful and playful tone to keep the community mood light and friendly or it might result in disastrous PR for that brand.

Solution: Tara Hornor wrote an epic post with tips on handling Trolls and negative comments.

9. Ignoring advanced Facebook advertising

Advertising on Facebook does not end with clicking “Boost Post”. For instance, you could create a lookalike audience based on subscribers already on your mailing list, who are on Facebook, and send targeted ads to them.

The true potential of Facebook advertising cannot be quantified; brands should take specific steps in creating ads that offer great incentives while achieving business goals.

Solution: Use Facebook’s Power Editor to create ads to gain leads and advertise new products, but don’t spam your users’ newsfeed.

10. Refusing to evolve like Facebook’s algorithm

Facebook changes its algorithm randomly; the latest changes in the Facebook algorithm include bringing content to users based on previous interaction.

Brands are expected to keep up with the latest updates to ensure a consistent user experience in regards to content, cover photos, and ads.

Solution: Brands should bookmark (literally) the Facebook for pages web page to stay updated with the latest algorithm updates and implement to increase engagement and brand perception.

Sum up

Facebook marketing requires creativity, A/B testing, and constantly staying ahead of the latest changes from Facebook. For a brand to successfully reach, inspire and engage its audience, the above solutions are required.

What other sins do you see brands commit on Facebook? I would like to know in the comments section.

Guest Author: Pius Boachie is a freelance writer and social media strategist who offers ghostwriting, copywriting and blogging services. He works closely with B2C and B2B businesses providing digital marketing content that gains social media attention and increases their search engine visibility. On his blog DigitiMatic, he shares actionable marketing and branding advice for businesses.

The post 10 Unforgivable Facebook Marketing Mistakes From Big Brands appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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10 Simple Editing Hacks For DIY Bloggers

Creating content can be an ongoing challenge for startups.

Content marketing provides a platform for us to show off our expertise, but it takes a lot of time and effort to pull it off correctly.

Quality over quantity is key, but even publishing one blog post per week can be hard when there are so many other facets to running a small business.

Even if you manage to write your blog post for the week, the work doesn’t end there. The last thing you want to do is publish a blog post that has errors or doesn’t read well. Remember, your content is representative of your business!

Even though it is best practice to get another pair of eyes on your content before you hit that publish button, sometimes due to time constraints or team size, that’s just not possible. Fortunately there are some simple editing hacks that can help you eliminate, or at least minimize, errors in your content.

Don’t know where to start?

Here are some straightforward hacks to edit your own content effectively and easily.

Give it a few hours

Once you’ve finished a piece, take a break from it and do something else for a few hours. If you can sleep on it, that’s even better.

The important part here is that you get your mind off your first draft. This way you’ll be able to look at it with fresh eyes, allowing you to see errors and awkward wording that you may have missed.

Evaluate “weak” words

Read over your content with a specific eye for “weak” words. A weak word is one that is vague or overused. Take your writing up a notch by replacing these less than specific words with descriptors that improve your content, or removing them altogether.

Here are 11 “weak” words to watch out for:

○ Very

○ Really

○ Good

○ Important

○ Big

○ Small

○ Every

○ Went

○ Got

○ Things

○ Stuff

Keep in mind that it’s not necessarily bad to use these words here and there, but over-using them could devalue your content. A simple trick I use is to look for these words using the “Find” feature in Word.

Look out for passive voice

While using passive voice is not necessarily wrong, writing in passive voice often leads to weak sentence structure. A good trick here is to look out for all of the “to be” verbs like “were”, “are”, “is”, “had” or “will be”.

Is there a better way to structure the sentence that would be more interesting and engaging? Sentences written in a passive voice aren’t living up to their potential.

If you’re still unclear about passive voice, check out this example. The first sentence is written in passive voice, while the second has been rearranged and is much stronger.

1. Charles was a terrible leader, which was shown by his refusing to listen to his team.
2. A terrible leader, Charles refused to listen to his team.

Read it aloud

Take the time to read your work out loud. While this might seem like a bit of an onerous step, it’s well worth it.

Read quietly to yourself, mostly mouthing the words in a soft voice that only you can hear if you’re working around others. If a sentence sounds awkward, there’s likely a grammar or sentence structure problem. When in doubt, go with a quick rewrite.

Seek out structural opportunities

Sometimes we miss natural breaks in content or opportunities to convey ideas more clearly through bullet points, headings or paragraph breaks. When you’re combing over your writing, seek out places to improve the structure of the piece, letting your content shine through.

Editing Tools

Just because you’re editing your own content doesn’t mean that you’re actually on your own. Look for a boost from editing tools, which are especially useful if you’re feeling less than confident in your skills.

Hemingway

The Hemingway app assesses writing based on passive voice, readability, long sentences, adverbs and complex words.

Inexpensive and effective, Hemingway is more than serviceable when it comes to running a quick check for spelling and readability. The only downsides are that the app doesn’t do much for grammar problems, nor does it offer solutions to the problems that it finds.

ProWriting Aid

The truly useful thing about ProWriting Aid is that it offers you not only a checklist of actions you can take to improve your content, but it also gives you ways to fix the problems that it finds.

For the full set of features, including a detailed analysis on sentence length, plagiarism, redundancies, consistency, writing style, overused words, clichés and more, you’ll need the premium version. However the basic is still amazingly functional and works well for most blogs, marketing emails and the like.

Word Rake

If you’re interested in pulling your writing down to its most potent and readable form, then Word Rake is the ticket you’ve been looking for.

This app scrapes your Microsoft Word documents for extra bits of fluff and unnecessary phrases. It’s important to remember that this tool will not check for grammar and spelling, but then those functions can be covered well with other supports in Microsoft Word.

Another limitation is that it has to be used on a PC as it’s connected to Word. Given all of that it’s still an incredible tool.

After the Deadline

This is another holistic piece of editing software that goes above and beyond. After the Deadline flags spelling, grammar, passive voice and more, in addition to offering style suggestions as well.

You’ll get a detailed set of reasons behind the corrections that the program presents to you. The best part about that feature is that the more you use this program, the better your writing gets as you learn what you’re doing wrong and why.

Perhaps the biggest boon to After the Deadline is the sheer number of platforms that it’s available on – everything from Google Chrome to WordPress to Open Office. You can truly use this proofreading tool wherever you are.

A few points to remember

Keep in mind that editing tools are really just what they sound like – tools. While they will assuredly give you a jumpstart on the editing process, you still need to read and re-read your content in order to ensure that it’s readable to actual humans.

Unless you’re in a real emergency situation for a piece of content, don’t rush your editing process. While you might be able to get something quick and dirty out there without thoroughly editing, it’s not going to be the best that you can offer. Taking the time for a thorough edit is always worth it, particularly if you are editing your own content.

On the other side, be wary of over-editing, which can cause you to lose the flow of your writing. The goal is to execute minimal amendments that have a significant impact. It’s rarely necessary to go over a piece more than once or at the most twice before publication. Balance is key.

You are perfectly capable of editing your own content, even if it’s not how you might go about it in a perfect world. By following the steps outlined here, you can be confident that the content you’re publishing is high quality.

Guest Author: Michael Georgiou is the CMO and Co-founder at Imaginovation, a web design & mobile apps development firm in Raleigh, NC. He’s a dynamic business professional and entrepreneurial guru with proven success in creative strategy, online branding, project management, and communication projects in both the public and private sectors.

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