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This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Bing Network. All opinions are 100% mine.
I get asked this question from big brands all over the world, and my answer is always the same…
Search engine marketing.
It often shocks people, because social media and content have been such a big contributor to my success. But in reality, search engines are where I continue to get the best return on investment.
In fact, 55% of the traffic for this site comes from organic search alone. And for me, more traffic means more earning potential.
Search engines are the lifeblood of digital marketing, not just because they deliver the most sustainable traffic to websites, but also because they are an essential component of our every day life.
Without search engines, life from a digital sense would inevitably stand still, stop functioning and most likely create widespread panic.
We are reliant on our ability to get answers and information at the click of a button, and that’s why search engine marketing is such a powerful tool for you as a marketer.
But don’t take my word for it, let me show you what I mean…
There is more to search engine marketing than just website traffic, and to illustrate why you should consider it an integral part of your digital strategy here are some statistics:
Of course these are just stats, but they tell a compelling story. Search engine marketing is here to stay, and it’s importance will only grow as the global adoption of mobile devices continues to accelerate.
So how can you make the most of it?
A few weeks ago I wrote an article that encouraged you to diversify your search engine marketing strategy; in order to stay competitive and create a distinct point of difference for your website.
The most natural place to start if you’re looking to diversify your strategy, reduce your overall risk and tap into some unique opportunities, is with the Bing Network.
Bing has come along way in the past decade, and it’s much more than just a search box on a webpage. It’s now a powerful connector between technology, information, people and knowledge.
Beyond being your typical search engine, Bing powers over 14 billion searches around the world across the Microsoft ecosystem; from Cortana, Xbox, Twitter, Apple and Amazon.
This means as a search engine marketer, Bing offers a unique opportunity to reach MORE people, in MORE ways and on MORE platforms.
Bing helps search engine marketers reach people at times when they are ready and willing to spend money – in their everyday lives. They connect you to prospects where and how they want to be reached.
Search engine marketing isn’t just about dropping a few keywords into a search bar anymore…
It’s much more than that.
Now search is present in everything we do, from interacting on social networks, to purchasing products, to finding a local restaurant.
As the digital marketing space continues to evolve, so will search, and you need to be prepared to ride that wave and capitalize on opportunities when they surface.
Networks such as Bing help you diversify your search marketing risk and tap into a growing and unique opportunity to reach your ideal customers.
The post The Undeniable Power Of Search Engine Marketing appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
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How effective is your digital marketing strategy? Would you consider yourself a successful digital marketer?
If that question makes you feel queazy, you’re not alone. Digital marketing is hard to get right, and it’s changing every day.
The only way to keep up with these changes and get ahead of your competition is to innovate. Get out of your comfort zone, experiment, and test new methods to improve the effectiveness of your digital marketing.
If digital is a big part of your business, then you’d be familiar with terms like link building, content marketing, social media marketing etc. These are umbrella terms covering a number of marketing techniques that can really up your game.
But knowing this alone is insignificant if you don’t know how to make the most of each technique with new and interesting tactics. So let’s walk through some techniques that can increase the effectiveness of your online marketing.
While you may have heard arguments that guest blogging is being overused as a tool for link building, and losing value as a means of useful content deliverance, none can deny its effectiveness in the marketing world.
Guest blogging is here to stay, so you better make it part of your marketing strategy!
Ironically, the hardest part about guest posting is not the content creation; rather, it’s sourcing the blogs. Thankfully, the internet is a great place where you can find solutions to every problem imaginable.
BuzzStream is one solution to the ordeals of guest posting. It carries out a number of tasks for guest bloggers, such as:
As interesting as its sounds, the skyscraper technique requires that you find the tallest skyscraper content in your niche and improve it with stories of your own.
Once you get going, you will realize the numerous ways you can edit and improve people’s content and make it so much more useful. Also, you will be amazed by the grand attention your content receives through the skyscraper method!
Here are three fairly easy steps to guide your way through the skyscraper technique:
This relatively new term coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko has taken marketing agencies by surprise. The method is the marketing equivalent of revamping old clutter to create something way more useful than the original.
This marketing technique requires you to:
Simple and witty, just like what we expect from marketers of the twenty-first century!
Internationalization is a method not too common but of great significance. You make your website/blog accessible to more people by offering it in languages of more than one country. Makes sense!
Offer translations of your website in multiple languages and localize words to get your fair share of an international audience.
Image Source: Moz
Many times while implementing your marketing strategy, you will have to think like more than just as a marketer; you will have to think as a psychologist.
Understanding the psyche of your audience and creating content that they can actually relate to are skills possessed by only rare, true marketers. If you learn the art you can conquer the hearts and minds of your audience.
This psychological effect is sometimes created by the use of powerful words. Don’t hesitate or fall short of researching such power words within your niche as they can compel new customers to join your community.
Image Source: Buffer
The second strong psychological effect is that of social sharing and caring. Use social media sites and communication to your full advantage by being humanistic and generous in your approach. Connect with people and other companies as people. When they share your content, always remember to return the favor.
Increasing your CTR in search engines is a time tested method of improving search engine ranking for websites.
Business blogs and websites have been going through the struggle for a long time. However, it’s really not that hard if you have a systematic approach to it.
CTR can be increased fairly easily by:
LinkedIn is a wonderful place to run into new businesses and clients, stir up conversations, offer deals, and market your products in the process. In order to provide value and engage in a conversation with members of your target audience, share content through LinkedIn groups.
Image Source: Soho Tech Training
Who hasn’t tried email marketing in order to address a wide audience? But the process and content of email marketing has become so monotonous and predictable that most companies usually get ignored by email recipients.
It’s about time we start getting innovative with email marketing;
Learn from the geniuses, such as Dropbox which designed this sleek, beautiful email you just cannot ignore!
Image Source: HubSpot
There’s no point in trying to target and build connections with random websites which have no correlation to topics in your niche. You can better spend the effort on reasonable prospects. Companies employ a number of methods when trying to identify and reach to potential websites which can backlink to their content.
One such technique is email marketing to people who have backlinked to relevant content already. Get in touch with these websites which have established positions in the market. Break the ice with them and ask politely for a feature or two of your own website.
Advertorials are the way forward in the present age of content marketing and promotion. They are unique and unlike traditional advertising because the content imitates editorial content but serves to fulfill the goals of a brand.
Following are ways to make advertorials advantageous for your brand:
Redirection is a process of sending both users and search engines to a URL different from what they requested. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which transfers almost all of the link juice to the new page.
A 301 redirect is the most preferable type of redirect because it indicates to browsers, search engine bots, and the users, that the page has been permanently moved. Search engines may take some time to discover your new page but once they do, they will take your new page to the same rankings where your former page stood.
The 11 ways of making online marketing more effective are the latest and most responsive of their kind. However, online marketing is a long, on-going process which cannot be summed up in 20, let alone 11 techniques.
Go beyond your threshold, employ all the methods discovered here and you might eventually find what works best for your business.
Guest Author: Junaid Ali Qureshi is a digital marketing specialist who has helped several businesses gain traffic, outperform competition and generate profitable leads. His current ventures include Elephantation, eLabelz, Smart Leads.ae, Progos Tech and eCig.
The post 11 Advanced Tips To Be A Successful Digital Marketer appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
Now, with the increased continuity between the affiliate’s presell page and the … focused on Cost-Per-Action and Cost-Per-Click affiliate marketing.
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Affiliate marketing is another way to spread the word about your business. In a nutshell, you are able to promote yourself on someone else’s website, …
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Tipalti Introduces HitPath Integration to Reduce Affiliate Payment Friction … data-driven marketing companies, for implementing the new integration.
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Is the practice of tracking keywords truly dying? There’s been a great deal of industry discussion around the topic of late, and some key points have been made. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand speaks to the biggest challenges keyword rank tracking faces today and how to solve for them.
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Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about keyword ranking reports. There have been a few articles that have come out recently on a number of big industry sites around whether SEOs should still be tracking their keyword rankings.
I want to be clear: Moz has a little bit of a vested interest here. And so the question is: Can you actually trust me, who obviously I’m a big shareholder in Moz and I’m the founder, and so I care a lot about how Moz does as a software business. We help people track rankings. Does that mean I’m biased? I’m going to do my best not to be. So rather than saying you absolutely should track rankings, I’m instead going to address what most of these articles have brought up as the problems of rank tracking and then talk about some solutions by which you can do this.
My suspicion is you should probably be rank tracking. I think that if you turn it off and you don’t do it, it’s very hard to get a lot of the value that we need as SEOs, a lot of the intelligence. It’s true there are challenges with keyword ranking reports, but not true enough to avoid doing it entirely. We still get too much value from them.
So let’s start with the case against keyword ranking data. First off, “keyword ranking reports are inaccurate.” There’s personalization, localization, and device type, and that biases and has removed what is the “one true ranking.” We’ve done a bunch of analyses of these, and this is absolutely the case.
Personalization, turns out, doesn’t change ranking that much on average. For an individual it can change rankings dramatically. If they visited your website before, they could be historically biased to you. Or if they visited your competitor’s, they could be biased. Their previous search history might have biased them in a single session, those kinds of things. But with the removal of Google+ from search results, personalization is actually not as dramatically changing as it used to be. Localization, though, still huge, absolutely, and device differences, still huge.
But we can address this, and the way to do that is by tracking these things separately. So here you can see I’ve got a ranking report that shows me my mobile rankings versus my desktop rankings. I think this is absolutely essential. Especially if you’re getting a lot of traffic from both mobile and desktop search, you need to be tracking those separately. Super smart. Of course we should do that.
We can do the same thing on the local side as well. So I can say, “Here, look. This is how I rank in Seattle. Here’s how I rank in Minneapolis. Here’s how I rank in the U.S. with no geographic personalization,” if Google were to do that. Those types of rankings can also be pretty good.
It is true that local ranked tracking has gotten a little more challenging, but we’ve seen that folks like, well Moz itself, but folks like STAT (GetStat), SERPs.com, Search Metrics, they have all adjusted their rank tracking methodologies in order to have accurate local rank tracking. It’s pretty good. Same with device type, pretty darn good.
Another big problem that is expressed by a number of folks here is we no longer know how much traffic an individual keyword sends. Because we don’t know how much an individual keyword sends, we can’t really say, “What’s the value of ranking for that keyword?” Therefore, why bother to even track keyword rankings?
I think this is a little bit of spurious logic. The leap there doesn’t quite make sense to me. But I will say this. If you don’t know which keywords are sending you traffic specifically, you still know which pages are receiving search traffic. That is reported. You can get it in your Google Analytics, your Omniture report, whatever you’re using, and then you can tie that back to keyword ranking reports showing which pages are receiving traffic from which keywords.
Most all of the ranked tracking platforms, Moz included, has a report that shows you something like this. It says, “Here are the keywords that we believe are likely to have sent these percentages of traffic to this page based on the keywords that you’re tracking, based on the pages that are ranking for them, and how much search traffic those pages receive.”
So let’s track that. We can look at pages receiving visits from search, and we can look at which keywords they rank for. Then we can tie those together, which gives us the ability to then make not only a report like this, but a report that estimates the value contributed by content and by pages rather than by individual keywords.
In a lot of ways, this is almost superior to our previous methodology of tracking by keyword. Keyword can still be estimated through AdWords, through paid search, but this can be estimated on a content basis, which means you get credit for how much value the page has created, based on all the search traffic that’s flowed to it, and where that’s at in your attribution lifecycle of people visiting those pages.
Pages often rank for keywords that they aren’t specifically targeting, because Google has gotten way better with user intent. So it can be hard or even impossible to track those rankings, because we don’t know what to look for.
Well, okay, I hear you. That is a challenge. This means basically what we have to do is broaden the set of keywords that we look at and deal with the fact that we’re going to have to do sampling. We can’t track every possible keyword, unless you have a crazy budget, in which case go talk to Rob Bucci up at STAT, and he will set you up with a huge campaign to track all your millions of keywords.
If you have a smaller budget, what you have to do is sample, and you sample by sets of keywords. Like these are my high conversion keywords — I’m going to assume I have a flower delivery business — so flower delivery and floral gifts and flower arrangements for offices. My long tail keywords, like artisan rose varieties and floral alternatives for special occasions, and my branded keywords, like Rand’s Flowers or Flowers by Rand.
I can create a bunch of different buckets like this, sample the keywords that are in them, and then I can track each of these separately. Now I can see, ah, these are sets of keywords where I’ve generally been moving up and receiving more traffic. These are sets of keywords where I’ve generally been moving down. These are sets of keywords that perform better or worse on mobile or desktop, or better or worse in these geographic areas. Right now I can really start to get true intelligence from there.
Don’t let your keyword targeting — your keyword targeting meaning what keywords you’re targeting on which pages — determine what you rank track. Don’t let it do that exclusively. Sure, go ahead and take that list and put that in there, but then also do some more expansive keyword research to find those broad sets of search terms and phrases that you should be monitoring. Now we can really solve this issue.
This one I think is a pretty insidious problem. But for many organizations ranking reports are more of a historical artifact. We’re not tracking them for a particular reason. We’re tracking them because that’s what we’ve always tracked and/or because we think we’re supposed to track them. Those are terrible reasons to track things. You should be looking for reasons of real value and actionability. Let’s give some examples here.
What I want you to do is identify the goals of rank tracking first, like: What do I want to solve? What would I do differently based on whether this data came back to me in one way or another?
If you don’t have a great answer to that question, definitely don’t bother tracking that thing. That should be the rule of all analytics.
So if your goal is to say, “Hey, I want to be able to attribute a search traffic gain or a search traffic loss to what I’ve done on my site or what Google has changed out there,” that is crucially important. I think that’s core to SEO. If you don’t have that, I’m not sure how we can possibly do our jobs.
We attribute search traffic gains and losses by tracking broadly, a broad enough set of keywords, hopefully in enough buckets, to be able to get a good sample set; by tracking the pages that receive that traffic so we can see if a page goes way down in its search visits. We can look at, “Oh, what was that page ranking for? Oh, it was ranking for these keywords. Oh, they dropped.” Or, “No, they didn’t drop. But you know what? We looked in Google Trends, and the traffic demand for those keywords dropped,” and so we know that this is a seasonality thing, or a fluctuation in demand, or those types of things.
And we can track by geography and device, so that we can say, “Hey, we lost a bunch of traffic. Oh, we’re no longer mobile-friendly.” That is a problem. Or, “Hey, we’re tracking and, hey, we’re no longer ranking in this geography. Oh, that’s because these two competitors came in and they took over that market from us.”
We could look at would be something like identify pages that are in need of work, but they only require a small amount of work to have a big change in traffic. So we could do things like track pages that rank on page two for given keywords. If we have a bunch of those, we can say, “Hey, maybe just a few on-page tweaks, a few links to these pages, and we could move up substantially.” We had a Whiteboard Friday where we talked about how you could do that with internal linking previously and have seen some remarkable results there.
We can track keywords that rank in position four to seven on average. Those are your big wins, because if you can move up from position four, five, six, seven to one, two, three, you can double or triple your search traffic that you’re receiving from keywords like that.
You should also track long tail, untargeted keywords. If you’ve got a long tail bucket, like we’ve got up here, I can then say, “Aha, I don’t have a page that’s even targeting any of these keywords. I should make one. I could probably rank very easily because I have an authoritative website and some good content,” and that’s really all you might need.
We might look at some up-and-coming competitors. I want to track who’s in my space, who might be creeping up there. So I should track the most common domains that rank on page one or two across my keyword sets.
I can track specific competitors. I might say, “Hey, Joel’s Flower Delivery Service looks like it’s doing really well. I’m going to set them up as a competitor, and I’m going to track their rankings specifically, or I’m going to see…” You could use something like SEMrush and see specifically: What are all the keywords they rank for that you don’t rank for?
This type of data, in my view, is still tremendously important to SEO, no matter what platform you’re using. But if you’re having these problems or if these problems are being expressed to you, now you have some solutions.
I look forward to your comments. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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Content marketers, does the following scenario sound familiar?
You’re tasked with creating content that attracts publicity, links, and social shares. You come up with great ideas for content that you’re confident could accomplish these goals. However, any ideas that push the envelope or might offend anyone in the slightest get shot down by your boss or client. Even if a provocative idea gets approved, after feedback from higher-ups and several rounds of editing, you end up with a boring, watered-down version of what you originally envisioned.
Given the above, you’re not surprised when you achieve lackluster results. Repeat this cycle enough times, and it may lead to the false assumption that content marketing doesn’t work for the brand.
In this post, I’ll answer two questions:
To get big results, content needs to get people talking. Often times, the best way to do this is by creating an emotional reaction in the audience. Content that deals with a controversial or polarizing topic can be a surefire way to accomplish this.
On the other hand, when you play it too safe with your content, it becomes extremely difficult to ignite the emotional response needed to drive social sharing. Ultimately, you don’t attract the attention needed to earn high-quality links.
Below is a peek at the promotions report from a recent controversial campaign that resulted in a lot of high-quality links, among other benefits.
We understand and respect a client’s fierce dedication to protecting their brand. The thought of attaching their company to anything controversial can set off worst-case-scenario visions of an angry Internet mob and bad press (which isn’t always a terrible thing).
One such example of balancing a sensitive topic while minimizing the potential risk is a recent campaign we created for apartment listing site Abodo. Our idea was to use Twitter data to pinpoint which states and cities had the highest concentration of prejudiced and tolerant tweets. Bigotry in America is an extremely sensitive topic, yet our client was open to the idea.
Want to get a contentious idea approved by your boss or client? Here’s how we did it.
Controversy for the sake of controversy is not going to provide value to the brand or the target audience.
I asked Michael Taus, VP of Growth and Business Development at Abodo, why our campaign idea got the green light. He said Abodo’s mission is to help people find a home, not to influence political discourse. But they also believe that when you’re moving to a new community, there’s more to the decision than what your house or apartment looks like, including understanding the social and cultural tone of the location.
So while the campaign dealt with a hot topic, ultimately this information would be valuable to Abodo’s users.
If your “safe” content is struggling to get attention, make the case for taking a risk. Previous campaign topics for our client had been too conservative. We knew by creating something worth talking about, we’d see greater results.
While we couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be a negative response once the campaign launched, we could guarantee that we’d do everything in our power to minimize any potential backlash. We were confident in our ability to protect our client because we’d done it so many times with other campaigns. I’ll walk you through how to do this throughout the rest of the post.
On the client’s end, they can get approval from other internal departments; for example, having the legal and PR teams review and give final approval can help mitigate the uncertainty around running a controversial campaign.
The campaign was a big success, with results including:
Beyond these metrics, Abodo has seen additional benefits such as partnership opportunities. Since this campaign launched, they were approached by a nonprofit organization to collaborate on a similar type of piece. They hope to repeat their success by leveraging the nonprofit’s substantial audience and PR capabilities.
We find that good journalism practices can greatly reduce the risk of a negative response. Keep the following five things in mind when creating attention-grabbing content.
Rather than presenting an opinion, just present the facts. Our clients are usually fine with controversial topics as long as we don’t take a stance on them and instead allow the data we’ve collected to tell the story for us. Facts are facts, and that’s all your content needs to offer.
If publishers want to put their own spin on the facts you present or audiences see the story the data are telling and want to respond, the conversation can be opened up and generate a lot of engagement.
For the Abodo campaign, the data we presented weren’t a direct reflection of our client but rather came from an outside source (Twitter). We packaged the campaign on a landing page on the client’s site, which includes the design assets and an objective summary of the data.
The publishers then chose how to cover the data we provided, and the discussion took off from there. For example, Slate called out Louisiana’s unfortunate achievement of having the most derogatory tweets.
How do you feel when you watch a news report or documentary that only shares one side of the story? It takes away credibility from the reporting, doesn’t it?
To keep the campaign topic from being too negative and one-sided, we looked at the most prejudiced and least prejudiced tweets. Including states and cities with the least derogatory tweets added a positive angle to the story. This made the data more objective, which improved the campaign’s credibility.
Regional publishers showed off that their state had the nicest tweets.
And residents of these places were proud to share the news.
Pleased WI was one of the top-10 least nasty places for pejorative tweets! Stay away from Louisiana. https://t.co/ijoAMsmKao
— Sam Million-Weaver (@millionweaver) March 9, 2016
If your campaign topic is negative, try to show the positive side of it too. This keeps the content from being a total downer, which is important for social sharing since people usually want to pass along content that will make others feel good. Our recent study on the emotions behind viral content found that even when viral content evokes negative emotions, it’s usually not purely negative; the content also makes the audience feel a positive emotion or surprise.
Aside from objective reporting, a huge benefit to telling more than one side of the story is that you’re able to pitch the story for multiple angles, thus maximizing your potential coverage. Because of this, we ended up creating 18 visual assets for this campaign, which is far more than we typically do.
Be careful of twisting the data to fit your agenda. It’s okay to have a thesis when you start, but if your aim is to tell a certain story you’re apt to stick with that storyline regardless of what the data show. If your information is clearly slanted to show the story you want to tell, the audience will catch on, and you’ll get called out.
Instead of gathering research with an intent of “I’m setting out to prove XYZ,” adopt a mindset of “I wonder what the reality is.”
You don’t want the validity of your data to become a point of contention among publishers and readers. This goes for any data-heavy campaign but especially for controversial data.
To combat any doubts around where the information came from or how the data were collected and analyzed, we publish a detailed methodology alongside all of our campaigns. For the Abodo campaign, we created a PDF document of the research methodology which we could easily share with publishers.
For even more transparency, make your raw data available. This gives publishers a chance to comb through the data to find additional story angles.
This is true for any content campaign, but it’s especially important to have an error-free campaign when dealing with a sensitive topic since it may be under more scrutiny. Don’t let mistakes in the content become the real controversy.
Build multiple phases of editing into your production process to ensure you’re not releasing inaccurate or low-quality content. Keep these processes consistent by creating a set of editorial guidelines that everyone involved can follow.
We put our campaigns through fact checking and several rounds of quality assurance.
Fact checking should play a complementary role to research and involves verifying accuracy by making sure all data and assertions are true. Every point in the content should have a source that can be verified. Writers should be familiar with best practices for making their work easy to fact-check; this fact-checking guide from Poynter is a good resource.
Quality assurance looks at both the textual and design elements of a campaign to ensure a good user experience. Our QA team reviews things like grammar, clarity (Is this text clearly making a point? Is a design element confusing or hard to read?), and layout/organization.
Although the controversial subject matter helped this campaign gain attention, we also incorporated other proven elements of highly shareable content:
The more share-worthy elements you can tack onto your content, the greater your chances for success.
Have you seen success with controversial or polarizing content? Did you overcome a client’s objection to controversy? Be sure to share your experience in the comments.
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Are you a content creator? Do you find yourself desperately looking for something to share about two-thirds of the way through the month?
I have been where you are, staring at my screen willing an idea, any idea, to come to me. It can feel like everything has been said, and that there are just no more topics to cover.
This is the point in every content marketer’s life when they start getting a little overwhelmed by their editorial plans.
Updated posts, recycled blog posts in new formats, master list posts… these are all pretty standard workarounds for when the inspiration just isn’t flowing.
But I want to point you towards a different route that should immediately become a regular part of your publishing routine: expert roundups.
You can probably guess what an expert roundup is, but I am going to explain anyway. An expert roundup is a collection of quotes or interviews of people who are influential in your chosen field. Someone who has authority, and has some advice to provide to you and your readers.
An example of an expert roundup is this one. It is a collection of experts discussing Google’s quality raters’ guidelines.
Creating your own is one of the greatest ways you can freshen up your content. It is also a pretty simple process, just follow these five steps!
The first step is an obvious one… you need to know what experts to contact! I try to make a few lists of experts about once every three months, which will encompass several expert roundups using a couple of different media forms. That gives me a better selection to choose from.
So one list will be bloggers and book writers who I think could contribute something special for a roundup. Another list will be YouTube or podcasters that I want to contact.
The third type of list is usually an occasional type. I only put it together when I am going to be attending some kind of event where experts will be. A conference, an expo, a meetup, a party… somewhere that networking is a natural part of the environment.
I use Twitter lists to keep in touch with different kinds of experts.
Once you have your lists it is time to move onto the next phase…
Some people will suggest coming up with your topic list first, but I have never found it to be as helpful as putting it second. Having a list (or several) of experts will allow you to start organizing the topics you want covered. It may even give you some ideas to help you along the way.
Coming up with an interesting question determines the success of the future article: A good question prompts the participating experts to come up with detailed answers and directs the conversations to something your audience would be willing to learn about.
SerpStat is a great tool to get some question-inspiration. Type in your core term and it will return the search queries that are questions.
SerpStat is powered by Google Suggest which means it shows you the questions people actually type into the search field (Those are definitely questions they’d appreciate answers to). Here are some more tips on using the tool.
Take a look at each expert and ask yourself, “What do they know best? What can they contribute to my followers?” From there, begin to separate them into groups depending on how long you want your roundups to be. I prefer to make a couple of posts or videos on any topic, and so split those experts up to get more content out of the deal.
It also leads directly to number 3…
Having a specific topic in mind when you contact your experts will make them much more likely to follow up with you. After all, it doesn’t take that long for someone who really knows their stuff to write a paragraph or two giving a tip, opinion or anecdote. And it is a benefit for them, because it further expands their authority and loops them in with other respected members in the industry.
I would say two weeks are plenty of time prior to the publication date to contact experts for blog bites. However, if you are contacting for a video or other recorded media style, you will need to provide a lot more notice. I try to aim for 4 – 6 weeks, in order to find a good time to get the recording, without having to rush the edits.
If you are in a hurry (e.g. filling in your editorial calendar before you leave for a vacation), use MyBlogU to easily find and contact the experts. MyBlogU scales many steps I am listing here:
Finally, it is time to start hyping up those readers / viewers / listeners! About a week before you publish send out a social media post alluding to something big and expert-filled on the horizon. Then a couple days before release a teaser with a bit of the info and a promise for more to come.
Work on your promo materials! Your participating experts are your assets: Feature them in your teaser videos and banners.
Tool alert: I highly recommend using Bannersnack for creating your promo materials. It’s an easy-to-use banner creation and hosting platform that lets you make awesome banners and even track their performance through analytics.
If you plan on turning expert roundups into a long-term strategy, Bannersnack analytics will help you A/B test and identify the best-working promo media.
Don’t forget to tag your participating experts in social media updates to engage them in promoting the piece! Here’s a quick checklist on social media tagging.
If you choose to make expert roundups a regular feature you can lessen the hype time and just send out a reminder, but by then people will know the score and get excited all on their own.
By now you should have a good idea of what expert advice you will have, and you can start planning the content itself. This is pretty straightforward: design, formatting, presentation, visuals, publishing date, etc.
I like to gather enough advice to make several expert roundup posts and schedule them for a few months, with a quick email to the expert thanking them and letting them know when it will be posted, and that you will shoot off a link to it once it hits the site.
I don’t do more than one expert roundup a month not to overwhelm my readership. Expert roundups are for diversifying your editorial calendar once in a while. When used too often, they may hurt your blog because too much of anything is not a good thing.
Since videos, podcasts and graphics take longer, consider alternating between content formats when you publish. So you can release a blog expert roundup, and then a few weeks later release a video, etc.
Here are different types of expert interviews you can try adding to your editorial plans.
Monitor the performance of each roundup religiously to be able to identfy what works and why. Again, don’t run roundups too often: It’s much more effective to do them right each time than publish them each week.
I use Cyfe to monitor every roundup I do: I monitor social media signals, traffic (using Google Analytics) and rankings of each roundup I do on my blog.
The beauty of doing expert roundups is that you are no longer alone promoting them: Those experts will be there to share, link and comment!
Guest Author: Ann Smarty is the brand and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas and co-founder of Viral Content Buzz, the free platform helping your content reach social media influencers!
The post 5 Easy Steps For Creating A Traffic-Driving Expert Roundup appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
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Every Monday morning, you find yourself sitting down to send 10-15 emails to people you’d love to get responses from.
Maybe they are cold prospects, or potential joint venture partners, or press outlets you’re hoping to get coverage in.
Regardless of why you email, to ultimately get what you want the other person has to open and reply to your email, lost in the over 205 Billion emails sent per day according to Radicati Group.
Over the past 2 months, for every 100 emails I sent to influencers, A-Listers, and CEO’s, 97 were opened and 92 were replied to, using 3 nifty secrets built into this tool called Send Later for Gmail.
When I send 15-50 emails every Monday morning to new potential partners, the last thing I want to do all week is try and remember to follow up with people who don’t respond.
Enter the Clock.
When I send my emails each Monday morning, I click the clock which will remind me to follow up in some amount of time (tomorrow at 9am) if no one replies.
Tomorrow at 9am, if the person hasn’t replied, the clock will put that email back to the top of my inbox to remind me to follow up.
On average, for every 100 emails I sent, 40% did not get a response by “tomorrow at 9am”. Had the clock not reminded me, I would have lost 40% of my total opportunities. Instead, I followed up and closed many more deals.
If you’re in sales, you know follow up is key. Use the clock if you want to out-sell your competition.
You might wonder what email I sent after Send Later for Gmail reminded me that the person had not replied.
Many times I’d call them, email them with a simple “bump”, or use the double arrow button.
When I’m trying to schedule podcast guests I used to gather all of their emails into a google spreadsheet using EmailHunter.io and then update it every Monday based on who responded and who didn’t.
Here’s what that looked like:
Now, I use the double arrows which will “send email 2 of podcast guest sequence if guest doesn’t reply within 2 days”.
Then 3 days later it’ll “send email 3 of podcast guest sequence if guest doesn’t reply within 5 days”.
Here’s what it looks like:
I think of this almost like one to one email marketing.
Get this: Over 60% of my total opens and responses came after 4 follow up emails!
Everyone always says consistency wins and this was proof.
The problem is folks like you and I don’t have time to keep manually following up.
Use this double arrow icon to set up the auto follow up sequence right from the start. Then go enjoy your family and the pool.
The subject lines that got the highest open and reply rates (sometimes after 5+ automated follow ups) for me included:
“Hey” (92% open, 85% reply)
“quick question” (90% open, 77% reply)
“do you know” (84% open, 75% reply)
Try copying these when you’re trying to get a reply.
In a recent report by GetResponse, it was found that most emails are opened between 6am and 11am or early afternoon.
That means if you want to maximize the chances of your emails getting opened, you want to send your email in those time slots so you appear at the top of the inbox.
My problem was, I like keeping my mornings to myself to read (Right now enjoying Ego is The Enemy by Ryan Holiday).
So what I now do is I write all my emails at 6pm each day and then use the Send Later button to have them all send at 6am the next day.
This ensures my email is at the top of the inbox when my recipient opens their inbox for the day.
Many of you are like me in that email frustrates the heck out of you and sucks up your time.
Try using the auto-follow up button, clock button, and send later button to save yourself time while increasing your open and reply rates by a healthy 40-45%. These buttons are all free to use and are part of Send Later for Gmail which you should be able to find here.
Tools Mentioned:
Guest Author: Nathan Latka Founded software company Heyo.com at 19 and after raising $2.5M and growing to 10,000+ monthly paying customers sold it to his number one competitor. He’s now the host of the fastest growing business podcast, Top Entrepreneurs on iTunes, having passed 2,000,000 downloads in 9 months.
The post 3 Secret Gmail Buttons To Guarantee Your Cold Emails Get Opened appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
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Posted by Dr-Pete
It’s been over two years since Google launched Featured Snippets, and yet many search marketers still see them as little more than a novelty. If you’re not convinced by now that Featured Snippets offer a significant organic opportunity, then today is my attempt to change your mind.
If you somehow haven’t encountered a Featured Snippet searching Google over the past two years, here’s an example (from a search for “ssl”):
This is a promoted organic result, appearing above the traditional #1 ranking position. At minimum, Featured Snippets contain an extracted answer (more on that later), a display title, and a URL. They may also have an image, bulleted lists, and simple tables.
We’re all busy, and Google has made so many changes in the past couple of years that it can be hard to sort out what’s really important to your customer or employer. I get it, and I’m not judging you. So, let’s get the hard question out of the way: Why are Featured Snippets important?
Here’s the top portion of a SERP for “hdmi cable,” a commercial query:
There are a couple of interesting things going on here. First, Featured Snippets always (for now) come before traditional organic results. This is why I have taken to calling them the “#0” ranking position. What beats #1? You can see where I’m going with this… #0. In this case, the first organic is pushed down even more, below a set of Related Questions (the “People also ask” box). So, the “#1” organic position is really third in this example.
In addition, notice that the “#0” (that’s the last time I’ll put it in quotes) position is the same URL as the #1 organic position. So, Amazon is getting two listings on this result for a single page. The Featured Snippet doesn’t always come from the #1 organic result (we’ll get to that in a minute), but if you score #0, you are always listed twice on page one of results.
In our 10,000-keyword tracking data set, Featured Snippets rolled out at approximately 2% of the queries we track. As of mid-July, they appear on roughly 11% of the keywords we monitor. We don’t have good historical data from the first few months after roll-out, but here’s a 12-month graph (July 2015 – July 2016):
Featured Snippets have more than doubled in prevalence in the past year, and they’ve increased by a factor of roughly 5X since launch. After two years, it’s clear that this is no longer a short-term or small-scale test. Google considers this experiment to be a success.
When Featured Snippets launched, SEOs were naturally concerned that, by extracting and displaying answers, click-through rates to the source site would suffer. While extracting answers from sites was certainly uncharted territory for Google, and we can debate their use of our content in this form, there’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that Featured Snippets not only haven’t harmed CTR, but they actually boost it in some cases.
In August of 2015, Search Engine Land published a case study by Glenn Gabe that tracked the loss of a Featured Snippet for a client on a competitive keyword. In the two-week period following the loss, that client lost over 39K clicks. In February of 2016, HubSpot did a larger study of high-volume keywords showing that ranking #0 produced a 114% CTR boost, even when they already held the #1 organic position. While these results are anecdotal and may not apply to everyone, evidence continues to suggest that Featured Snippets can boost organic search traffic in many cases.
Featured Snippets were born out of a problem that dates back to the early days of search. Pre-Google, many search players, including Yahoo, were human-curated directories first. As content creation exploded, humans could no longer keep up, especially in anything close to real-time, and search engines turned to algorithmic approaches and machine curation.
When Google launched the Knowledge Graph, it was based entirely on human-curated data, such as Freebase and Wikidata. You can see this data in traditional “Knowledge Cards,” sometimes generically called “answer boxes.” For example, this card appears on a search for “Who is the CEO of Tesla?”:
The answer is short and factual, and there is no corresponding source link for it. This comes directly from the curated Knowledge Graph. If you run a search for “Tesla,” you can see this more easily in the Knowledge Panel on that page:
In the middle, you can see an entry for “CEO: Elon Musk.” This isn’t just a block of display text — each of these line items are factoids that exist individually as structured data in the Knowledge Graph. You can test this by running searches against other factoids, like “When was Tesla founded?”
While Google does a decent job of matching many forms of a question to answers in the Knowledge Graph, they can’t escape the limits of human curation. There are also questions that don’t easily fit the “factoid” model. For example, if you search “What is ludicrous mode Tesla?” (pardon the weird syntax), you get this Featured Snippet:
Google’s solution was obvious, if incredibly difficult — take the trillions of pages in their index and use them to generate answers in real-time. So, that’s exactly what they did. If you go to the source page on Engadget, the text in the Featured Snippet is taken directly from on-page copy (I’ve added the green highlighting):
It’s not as simple as just scraping off the first paragraph with a spatula and flipping it onto the SERP, though. Google does seem to be parsing content fairly deeply for relevance, and they’ve been improving their capabilities constantly since the launch of Featured Snippets. Consider a couple of other examples with slightly different formats. Here’s a Featured Snippet for “How much is a Tesla?”:
Note the tabular data. This data is being extracted and reformatted from a table on the target page. This isn’t structured data — it’s plain-old HTML. Google has not only parsed the table but determined that tabular data is a sensible format in response to the question. Here’s the original table:
Here’s one of my favorite examples, from a search for “how to cook bacon.” For any aspiring bacon wizards, please pay careful attention to step #4:
Note the bulleted (ordered) list. As with the table, not only has Google determined that a list is a relevant format for the answer, but they’ve created this list. Now look at the target page:
There’s no HTML ordered list (<ol></ol>) on this page. Google is taking a list-like paragraph style and converting it into a simpler list. This content is also fairly deep into a long page of text. Again, there is no structured data in play. Google is using any and all content available in the quest for answers.
So, let’s get to the tactical question — how can you score a Featured Snippet? You need to know two things. First, you have to rank organically on the first page of results. Every Featured Snippet we’ve tracked also ranks on page one. Second, you need to have content that effectively targets the question.
Do you have to rank #1 to get the #0 position? No. Ranking #1 certainly doesn’t hurt, but we’ve found examples of Featured Snippet URLs from across all of page one. As of June, the graph below represents the distribution of organic rankings for all of the Featured Snippets in our tracking data set:
Just about 1/3 of Featured Snippets are pulled from the #1 position, with the bulk of the remaining coming from positions #2–#5. There are opportunties across all of page one, in theory, but searches where you rank in the top five are going to be your best targets. The team at STAT produced an in-depth white paper on Featured Snippets across a very large data set that showed a similar pattern, with about 30% of Featured Snippet URLs ranking in the #1 organic position.
If you’re not convinced yet, here’s another argument for the “Why should you care?” column. Once you’re ranking on page one, our data suggests that getting the Featured Snippet is more about relevance than ranking/authority. If you’re ranking #2–#5 it may be easier to compete for position #0 than it is for position #1. Featured Snippets are the closest thing to an SEO shortcut you’re likely to get in 2016.
The double-edged sword of Featured Snippets (for Google) is that, since the content comes from our websites, we ultimately control it. I showed in a previous post how we fixed a Featured Snippet with updated data, but let’s get to what you really want to hear — can we take a Featured Snippet from a competitor?
A while back, I did a search for “What is Page Authority?” Page Authority is a metric created by us here at Moz, and so naturally we have a vested interest in who’s ranking for that term. I came across the following Featured Snippet.
In very short order, our changes had the desired impact, and we took the #0 position:
Featured Snippets can require a slightly different and broader approach to keyword research, especially since many of us don’t routinely track questions. So, what kind of questions tend to trigger Featured Snippets? It’s helpful to keep in mind the 5 Ws (Who, What, When, Where, Why) + How, but many of these questions will generate answers from the Knowledge Graph directly.
To keep things simple, ask yourself this: is the answer a matter of simple fact (or a “factoid”)? For example, a question like “How old is Beyoncé?” or “When is Labor Day?” is going to be pulled from the Knowledge Graph. While human curation can’t keep up with the pace of the web, WikiData and other sources are still impressive and cover a massive amount of territory. Typically, these questions won’t produce Featured Snippets.
A good starting point is “What…?” questions, such as our “What is Page Authority?” experiment. This is especially effective for industry terms and other specialized knowledge that can’t be easily reduced to a dictionary definition.
Keep in mind that many Featured Snippets appear on implied “What…” questions. In other words, “What” never appears in the query. For example, here’s a Featured Snippet for “PPC”:
Google has essentially decided that this fairly ambiguous query deserves an answer to “What is PPC?” In other words, they’ve implied the “What.” This is fairly common now for industry terms and phrases that might be unfamiliar to the average searcher, and is a good starting point for your keyword research.
Keep in mind that common words will produce a dictionary entry. For example, here’s a Knowledge Card for “What is search?”:
These dictionary cards are driven by human-curated data sources and are not organic, in the typical sense of the word. Google has expanded dictionary results in the past year, so you’ll need to focus on less common terms and phrases.
“Why… ?” questions are good fodder for Featured Snippets because they can’t easily be answered with factoids. They often require some explanation, such as this snippet for “Why is the sky blue?”:
Likewise, “How…?” questions often require more in-depth answers. An especially good target for Featured Snippets is “How to… ?” questions, which tend to have practical answers that can be summarized. Here’s one for “How to make tacos”:
One benefit of “Why,” “How,” and “How to” questions is that the Featured Snippet summary often just serves as a teaser to a longer answer. The summary can add credibility to your listing while still attracting clicks to in-depth content. “How… ?” may also be implied in some cases. For example, a search for “convert PDF to Word” brings up a Featured Snippet for a “How to…” page.
Once you have a question in mind, and that question/query is eligible for Featured Snippets, there’s another piece of the targeting problem: which page on your site is best equipped to answer that question? Let’s take, for example, the search “What is SEO?”. It has the following Featured Snippet from Wikipedia:
Moz ranks on page one for that search, but it still begs two questions: (1) is the ranking page the best answer to the question (in Google’s eyes), and (2) what content on the page do they see as best matching the question. Fortunately, you can use the “site:” operator along with your search term to help answer both questions. Here’s a Featured Snippet for [site:moz.com “what is seo”]:
Now, we know that, within just our own site, Google is seeing The Beginner’s Guide as the best match to the question, and we have an idea of how they’re parsing that page for an answer. If we were willing to rewrite the page just to answer this question (and that certainly involves trade-offs), we’d have a much better sense of where to start.
Featured Snippets have a close cousin that launched more recently, known to Google as Related Questions and sometimes called the “People Also Ask” box. If I run a search for “page authority,” it returns the following set of Related Questions (nestled into the organic results):
Although Related Questions have a less dominant position in search results than Featured Snippets (they’re not generally at the top), they’re more prevalent, occurring on almost 17% of the searches in our tracking data set. These boxes can contain up to four related questions (currently), and each question expands to look something like this:
At this point, that expanded content should look familiar — it’s being generated from the index, has an organic link, and looks almost exactly like a Featured Snippet. It also has a link to a Google search for the related question. Clicking on that search brings up the following Featured Snippet:
Interestingly, and somewhat confusingly, that Featured Snippet doesn’t exactly match the snippet in the Related Questions box, even though they’re answering the same question from the same page. We’re not completely sure how Featured Snippets and Related Questions are connected, but they share a common philosophy and very likely a lot of common code. Being a better answer will help you rank for both.
If you want to know where all of this is headed in the future, you have to ask a simple question: what’s in it for Google? It’s easy to jump to conspiracy theories when Google takes our content to provide direct answers, but what do they gain? They haven’t monetized this box, and a strong, third-party answer draws attention and could detract from ad clicks. They’re keeping you on their page for another few seconds, but that’s little more than a vanity metric.
I think the answer is that this is part of a long shift toward mobile and alternative display formats. Look at the first page of a search for “what is page authority” on an Android device:
Here, the Featured Snippet dominates the page — there’s just not room for much more on a mobile screen. As technology diversifies into watches and other wearables, this problem will expand. There’s an even more difficult problem than screen space, though, and that’s when you have no screen at all.
If you do a voice search on Android for “what is page authority,” Google will read back to you the following answer:
“According to Moz, Page Authority is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engines.”
This is an even more truncated answer, and voice search appends the attribution (“According to Moz…”). You can still look at your phone screen, of course, but imagine if you had asked the question in your car or on Google’s new search appliance (their competitor to Amazon’s Echo). In those cases, the Featured Snippet wouldn’t just be the most prominent answer — it would be the only answer.
Google has to adapt to our changing world of devices, and often those devices requires succinct answers and aren’t well-suited to a traditional SERP. This may not be so much about profiting from direct answers for Google as it is about survival. New devices will demands new formats.
After years of tracking rich SERP features, watching the world of organic search evolve, and preaching that evolution to our customers and industry, I’m happy to say that our Product Team has been hard at work for months building the infrastructure and UI necessary to manage the rich and complicated world of SERP features, including Featured Snippets. Spoiler alert: expect an announcement from us very soon.
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