вторник, 31 января 2017 г.

Graduate Affiliate Marketing Assistant - Digital Marketing Consultancy - London

View details & apply online for this Graduate Affiliate Marketing Assistant - Digital Marketing Consultancy - London vacancy on reed.co.uk, the UK’s #1 …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kOKEOG via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2keQaKq

18 Unusual Habits of Extremely Creative People

18 Unusual Habits of Extremely Creative People

Are you continuously trying to create new social media posts, Instagram photos, blog posts, articles, press releases, and promotional strategies? Have you paid attention to your creative process when creating these things?

When you have an idea, you’re driven by an inner force. Creative people get into their own world, and we don’t know what happens in their heads. What we do know, however, is that creativity means nothing without persistence and effort. Plus, some habits. Creatives have specific habits that help them turn creativity into a daily routine.

Here are 18 habits of creative people. They can inspire you to do things differently and find a way to keep the creative process going.

1. Me time

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” – Aldous Huxley

When you want to understand your ideas and get deep into your mind to test them, you’ll naturally gravitate towards solitude. Does this mean you have to be an introvert to be as creative as you possibly could? No. Extroverts can be just as creative as introverts. The key to success is in the balance.

Creatives need both socializing and solitude at different times. They depend on the surroundings if they want to get better ideas, but they also need their me time to reconsider their own opinions and dig deep into their creative hub.

2. Risk

An idea may seem silly at the beginning. When you first tell it to someone, they may laugh at you. Do you think that Jack Dorsey and his team had it easy when they got the idea of Twitter? Of course not! It was new. It was risky. Fortunately, they took the risk.

risk-for-habits-of-creative-people

Image  Source

3. Collaboration

Maybe a painter could work alone, but even they need to get inspired by other people. There’s no great novelist who didn’t rely on an editor and publisher. Jack Dorsey didn’t create Twitter alone. For a modern creative business, you need to get an outside perspective, which might shift or support ideas.

4. Preparation

If you thought that the most creative people could start creating in a matter of seconds after getting an idea, you were wrong. Dan Pearce, a resume writer at Careers Booster, explains that a creative project needs systematic work.

“When we have an idea, we have to find the existing thoughts and patterns that led to it. When I write a new project, I have to connect the dots in my own mind, and then connect them with the ideas of the client. That process takes time and effort. Most of all, it takes planning to bring everything together,” – he says.

5. Conservation of ideas

Sometimes you get an idea in the middle of the night. You think: “this is great; I should start doing something about it.” In the morning, you start your usual day and continue with the current project. Later, you’ll be left only with the impression of your idea. You know you had something, but you lost a particular element that was very important: the excitement.

That’s why creative people write down their ideas. Every single one of them. Have you seen Dostoevsky’s notes and doodles? The writer used to write down all ideas before transforming them into the novels we still read and love.

6. Movement

Yes, it’s a habit. Haruki Murakami, one of the most appreciated and inventive novelists of our time, commits to an intense running schedule. This is what he said in an interview for the Paris Review, when asked about the structure of a typical workday:

“When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4 a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9 p.m.”

You need physical strength to carry the burden of creativity. When an idea tortures you, you’ll spend many hours and days working on it. Just like Murakami, you need a habit that brings you to a healthy, energized body.

7. Routine

“I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism,” – Murakami continued in the same interview. “I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

Routines are not as bad as we think they are. They are not killing our creativity; they are supporting it.

8. Flexibility

Creativity is not a 9-to-5 job. Let’s take Murakami’s routine as an example again. Did you notice something unusual there? He wakes up at 4 a.m. and works in the very early morning. He probably experimented a bit and found that his mind works best in that chunk of the day.

Analyze your own circadian rhythm to find out how you function in different parts of the night and day. Then, follow the lead and create when you’re most inspired.

flexibility-for-habits-of-creative-people

Image Source

9. Wondering

“People love Facebook. Hmm, I wonder why. I wonder how I could use their love for social media to create something new for them.” Do you see the point in this mental concept? Curiosity is what drives ideas.

Creative people have a habit of intense conversations with themselves. They wonder, and they try to find the answers within.

10. Observing

The world is your greatest inspiration. Marcel Proust’s incredible memory was triggered by a madeleine. “I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.”

This was no ordinary cake. Nothing is ordinary in this world! A single ray of light can inspire you to create something beautiful; you just need to notice it. Observe!

observing-for-habits-of-creative-people
Image Source

11. Reflection

Whenever you see something interesting, you should wonder if you could apply it to what you’re doing. If you’re in the marketing niche, you can get inspired by novels, paintings, nature… anything. Reflect on your impressions and think how you can accumulate new ideas from them. Then, write those ideas down.

12. Daydreaming

What’s creation without imagination? Routines are good, and commitment is even better. But, sometimes you need to unleash your mind, so you can observe how it works when you don’t control it. You may find beautiful ideas hidden in there.

daydreaming-for-habits-of-creative-people

Image Source

13. Embracing obstacles

Have you heard about posttraumatic growth? All people suffer, but some of them find ways to express the experience from trauma through beautiful creations.

Posttraumatic growth is characterized by greater personal strength and identification of new possibilities. When you’re at a low point in your life, try to find those new possibilities. Turn the struggles into a foundation for growth.

14. Traveling

Hemingway used to live in different countries throughout his life. He needed to meet different people and explore their culture and drinks, lots of drinks.

Traveling opens your viewpoint. It makes you see, explore, experience, wonder! That’s what creativity is all about, isn’t it?

15. Accepting Failure

Resilience is an important personal strength that keeps creatives going. The creative process often comes with repeated failures. You need to test different approaches, and many of them will be total failures. Then, you’ll find the one that works.

16. Self-expression

What is creativity, anyway? It’s a form of self-expression. Take Allen Ginsberg’s tip: “Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”

You get opportunities to express your unique ideas, desires, and character through every single project you work on. Use it!

17. Losing track of time

Have you had a creative moment so great that you couldn’t sleep, eat, or do anything else for days? You lost track of time and simply followed the flow. Yes, creativity can do that to you. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave an inspiring TED talk on that flow.

“There’s this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though, difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.”

18. Mindfulness

We don’t know exactly when meditation originated, but we can assume that people had that ability and need to work with their own minds since… forever. Today, we have scientific proof that meditation helps us learn and remember, but it also makes us introspective and self-aware. Do you notice the connection with creativity?

A great number of Fortune 500 companies, including Apple and Google, offer mindfulness and meditation classes for their employees. Why? Because meditation supports the creative process. It brings you to a place where you’re alone with your thoughts, and you can finally understand yourself. The process of such achievement is long and needs hard work. That’s why you need to turn this into a habit.

mindfulness-for-habits-of-creative-people

Image Source

Wrap

Creativity is a blessing, but it can also become a torture if you don’t know how to express it. When you adopt certain habits, you’ll be able to support the process and find the best way to bring it to action. Hopefully, adopting the habits of creative people from this article will lead you to a better, more creative state of being and working.

Guest Author: Eva Wislow is a writer and career advisor from Pittsburgh. She is focusing on helping people discover their true calling and achieve their most ambitious career goals. Connect with Eva on Twitter.

The post 18 Unusual Habits of Extremely Creative People appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.



from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kNM0MN via Affiliate Marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jSB9gq

Turkish Speaking Affiliate Marketing Executive

Currently we are looking for a self-motivated and proactive Turkish speaking Affiliate Marketing Executive with a passion for sports and an interest in …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jqZePk via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jR3XZ5

MoreNiche Selects CAKE by Accelerize to Power its Health Affiliate Network

NEWPORT BEACH, CA–(Marketwired - Jan 31, 2017) - Accelerize (otcqb:ACLZ) ACLZ, +5.25% and its digital marketing software division, CAKE, …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kcP5mi via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kQoZEE

Seven Interactions Before Purchase Produce 'Healthiest' E-Commerce Sales

When it comes to marketing a multichannel approach, seven may be the magic … For shopping journeys with four or more interactions, affiliate and …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jqTmp3 via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jQIj7o

Cashcade Affiliate Program's Closure or When Lifetime Deals Do Not Mean for Life

‘Risk’ and 'trust’ are two very important words in the iGaming affiliate … After all, the affiliate marketing business, as any other trade, should be built on …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kcTvtu via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kQyfc7

Affiliate Marketing Assistant

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

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jr2OZL via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jQQMHA

Google Search Console Reliability: Webmaster Tools on Trial

Posted by rjonesx.

There are a handful of data sources relied upon by nearly every search engine optimizer. Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) has perhaps become the most ubiquitous. There are simply some things you can do with GSC, like disavowing links, that cannot be accomplished anywhere else, so we are in some ways forced to rely upon it. But, like all sources of knowledge, we must put it to the test to determine its trustworthiness — can we stake our craft on its recommendations? Let’s see if we can pull back the curtain on GSC data and determine, once and for all, how skeptical we should be of the data it provides.

Testing data sources

Before we dive in, I think it is worth having a quick discussion about how we might address this problem. There are basically two concepts that I want to introduce for the sake of this analysis: internal validity and external validity.

Internal validity refers to whether the data accurately represents what Google knows about your site.

External validity refers to whether the data accurately represents the web.

These two concepts are extremely important for our discussion. Depending upon the problem we are addressing as SEOs, we may care more about one or another. For example, let’s assume that page speed was an incredibly important ranking factor and we wanted to help a customer. We would likely be concerned with the internal validity of GSC’s “time spent downloading a page” metric because, regardless of what happens to a real user, if Google thinks the page is slow, we will lose rankings. We would rely on this metric insofar as we were confident it represented what Google believes about the customer’s site. On the other hand, if we are trying to prevent Google from finding bad links, we would be concerned about the external validity of the “links to your site” section because, while Google might already know about some bad links, we want to make sure there aren’t any others that Google could stumble upon. Thus, depending on how well GSC’s sample links comprehensively describe the links across the web, we might reject that metric and use a combination of other sources (like Open Site Explorer, Majestic, and Ahrefs) which will give us greater coverage.

The point of this exercise is simply to say that we can judge GSC’s data from multiple perspectives, and it is important to tease these out so we know when it is reasonable to rely upon GSC.

GSC Section 1: HTML Improvements

Of the many useful features in GSC, Google provides a list of some common HTML errors it discovered in the course of crawling your site. This section, located at Search Appearance > HTML Improvements, lists off several potential errors including Duplicate Titles, Duplicate Descriptions, and other actionable recommendations. Fortunately, this first example gives us an opportunity to outline methods for testing both the internal and external validity of the data. As you can see in the screenshot below, GSC has found duplicate meta descriptions because a website has case insensitive URLs and no canonical tag or redirect to fix it. Essentially, you can reach the page from either /Page.aspx or /page.aspx, and this is apparent as Googlebot had found the URL both with and without capitalization. Let’s test Google’s recommendation to see if it is externally and internally valid.

External Validity: In this case, the external validity is simply whether the data accurately reflects pages as they appear on the Internet. As one can imagine, the list of HTML improvements can be woefully out of date dependent upon the crawl rate of your site. In this case, the site had previously repaired the issue with a 301 redirect.

This really isn’t terribly surprising. Google shouldn’t be expected to update this section of GSC every time you apply a correction to your website. However, it does illustrate a common problem with GSC. Many of the issues GSC alerts you to may have already been fixed by you or your web developer. I don’t think this is a fault with GSC by any stretch of the imagination, just a limitation that can only be addressed by more frequent, deliberate crawls like Moz Pro’s Crawl Audit or a standalone tool like Screaming Frog.

Internal Validity: This is where things start to get interesting. While it is unsurprising that Google doesn’t crawl your site so frequently as to capture updates to your site in real-time, it is reasonable to expect that what Google has crawled would be reflected accurately in GSC. This doesn’t appear to be the case.

By executing an info:http://concerning-url query in Google with upper-case letters, we can determine some information about what Google knows about the URL. Google returns results for the lower-case version of the URL! This indicates that Google both knows about the 301 redirect correcting the problem and has corrected it in their search index. As you can imagine, this presents us with quite a problem. HTML Improvement recommendations in GSC not only may not reflect changes you made to your site, it might not even reflect corrections Google is already aware of. Given this difference, it almost always makes sense to crawl your site for these types of issues in addition to using GSC.

GSC Section 2: Index Status

The next metric we are going to tackle is Google’s Index Status, which is supposed to provide you with an accurate number of pages Google has indexed from your site. This section is located at Google Index > Index Status. This particular metric can only be tested for internal validity since it is specifically providing us with information about Google itself. There are a couple of ways we could address this…

  1. We could compare the number provided in GSC to site: commands
  2. We could compare the number provided in GSC to the number of internal links to the homepage in the internal links section (assuming 1 link to homepage from every page on the site)

We opted for both. The biggest problem with this particular metric is being certain what it is measuring. Because GSC allows you to authorize the http, https, www, and non-www version of your site independently, it can be confusing as to what is included in the Index Status metric.

We found that when carefully applied to ensure no crossover of varying types (https vs http, www vs non-www), the Index Status metric seemed to be quite well correlated with the site:site.com query in Google, especially on smaller sites. The larger the site, the more fluctuation we saw in these numbers, but this could be accounted for by approximations performed by the site: command.

We found the link count method to be difficult to use, though. Consider the graphic above. The site in question has 1,587 pages indexed according to GSC, but the home page to that site has 7,080 internal links. This seems highly unrealistic, as we were unable to find a single page, much less the majority of pages, with 4 or more links back to the home page. However, given the consistency with the site: command and GSC’s Index Status, I believe this is more of a problem with the way internal links are represented than with the Index Status metric.

I think it is safe to conclude that the Index Status metric is probably the most reliable one available to us in regards to the number of pages actually included in Google’s index.

GSC Section 3: Internal Links

The Internal Links section found under Search Traffic > Internal Links seems to be rarely used, but can be quite insightful. If External Links tells Google what others think is important on your site, then Internal Links tell Google what you think is important on your site. This section once again serves as a useful example of knowing the difference between what Google believes about your site and what is actually true of your site.

Testing this metric was fairly straightforward. We took the internal links numbers provided by GSC and compared them to full site crawls. We could then determine whether Google’s crawl was fairly representative of the actual site.

Generally speaking, the two were modestly correlated with some fairly significant deviation. As an SEO, I find this incredibly important. Google does not start at your home page and crawl your site in the same way that your standard site crawlers do (like the one included in Moz Pro). Googlebot approaches your site via a combination of external links, internal links, sitemaps, redirects, etc. that can give a very different picture. In fact, we found several examples where a full site crawl unearthed hundreds of internal links that Googlebot had missed. Navigational pages, like category pages in the blog, were crawled less frequently, so certain pages didn’t accumulate nearly as many links in GSC as one would have expected having looked only at a traditional crawl.

As search marketers, in this case we must be concerned with internal validity, or what Google believes about our site. I highly recommend comparing Google’s numbers to your own site crawl to determine if there is important content which Google determines you have ignored in your internal linking.

GSC Section 4: Links to Your Site

Link data is always one of the most sought-after metrics in our industry, and rightly so. External links continue to be the strongest predictive factor for rankings and Google has admitted as much time and time again. So how does GSC’s link data measure up?

In this analysis, we compared the links presented to us by GSC to those presented by Ahrefs, Majestic, and Moz for whether those links are still live. To be fair to GSC, which provides only a sampling of links, we only used sites that had fewer than 1,000 total backlinks, increasing the likelihood that we get a full picture (or at least close to it) from GSC. The results are startling. GSC’s lists, both “sample links” and “latest links,” were the lowest-performing in terms of “live links” for every site we tested, never once beating out Moz, Majestic, or Ahrefs.

I do want to be clear and upfront about Moz’s performance in this particular test. Because Moz has a smaller total index, it is likely we only surface higher-quality, long-lasting links. Our out-performing Majestic and Ahrefs by just a couple of percentage points is likely a side effect of index size and not reflective of a substantial difference. However, the several percentage points which separate GSC from all 3 link indexes cannot be ignored. In terms of external validity — that is to say, how well this data reflects what is actually happening on the web — GSC is out-performed by third-party indexes.

But what about internal validity? Does GSC give us a fresh look at Google’s actual backlink index? It does appear that the two are consistent insofar as rarely reporting links that Google is already aware are no longer in the index. We randomly selected hundreds of URLs which were “no longer found” according to our test to determine if Googlebot still had old versions cached and, uniformly, that was the case. While we can’t be certain that it shows a complete set of Google’s link index relative to your site, we can be confident that Google tends to show only results that are in accord with their latest data.

GSC Section 5: Search Analytics

Search Analytics is probably the most important and heavily utilized feature within Google Search Console, as it gives us some insight into the data lost with Google’s “Not Provided” updates to Google Analytics. Many have rightfully questioned the accuracy of the data, so we decided to take a closer look.

Experimental analysis

The Search Analytics section gave us a unique opportunity to utilize an experimental design to determine the reliability of the data. Unlike some of the other metrics we tested, we could control reality by delivering clicks under certain circumstances to individual pages on a site. We developed a study that worked something like this:

  1. Create a series of nonsensical text pages.
  2. Link to them from internal sources to encourage indexation.
  3. Use volunteers to perform searches for the nonsensical terms, which inevitably reveal the exact-match nonsensical content we created.
  4. Vary the circumstances under which those volunteers search to determine if GSC tracks clicks and impressions only in certain environments.
  5. Use volunteers to click on those results.
  6. Record their actions.
  7. Compare to the data provided by GSC.

We decided to check 5 different environments for their reliability:

  1. User performs search logged into Google in Chrome
  2. User performs search logged out, incognito in Chrome
  3. User performs search from mobile
  4. User performs search logged out in Firefox
  5. User performs the same search 5 times over the course of a day

We hoped these variants would answer specific questions about the methods Google used to collect data for GSC. We were sorely and uniformly disappointed.

Experimental results

Method Delivered GSC Impressions GSC Clicks
Logged In Chrome 11 0 0
Incognito 11 0 0
Mobile 11 0 0
Logged Out Firefox 11 0 0
5 Searches Each 40 2 0

GSC recorded only 2 impressions out of 84, and absolutely 0 clicks. Given these results, I was immediately concerned about the experimental design. Perhaps Google wasn’t recording data for these pages? Perhaps we didn’t hit a minimum number necessary for recording data, only barely eclipsing that in the last study of 5 searches per person?

Unfortunately, neither of those explanations made much sense. In fact, several of the test pages picked up impressions by the hundreds for bizarre, low-ranking keywords that just happened to occur at random in the nonsensical tests. Moreover, many pages on the site recorded very low impressions and clicks, and when compared with Google Analytics data, did indeed have very few clicks. It is quite evident that GSC cannot be relied upon, regardless of user circumstance, for lightly searched terms. It is, by this account, not externally valid — that is to say, impressions and clicks in GSC do not reliably reflect impressions and clicks performed on Google.

As you can imagine, I was not satisfied with this result. Perhaps the experimental design had some unforeseen limitations which a standard comparative analysis would uncover.

Comparative analysis

The next step I undertook was comparing GSC data to other sources to see if we could find some relationship between the data presented and secondary measurements which might shed light on why the initial GSC experiment had reflected so poorly on the quality of data. The most straightforward comparison was that of GSC to Google Analytics. In theory, GSC’s reporting of clicks should mirror Google Analytics’s recording of organic clicks from Google, if not identically, at least proportionally. Because of concerns related to the scale of the experimental project, I decided to first try a set of larger sites.

Unfortunately, the results were wildly different. The first example site received around 6,000 clicks per day from Google Organic Search according to GA. Dozens of pages with hundreds of organic clicks per month, according to GA, received 0 clicks according to GSC. But, in this case, I was able to uncover a culprit, and it has to do with the way clicks are tracked.

GSC tracks a click based on the URL in the search results (let’s say you click on /pageA.html). However, let’s assume that /pageA.html redirects to /pagea.html because you were smart and decided to fix the casing issue discussed at the top of the page. If Googlebot hasn’t picked up that fix, then Google Search will still have the old URL, but the click will be recorded in Google Analytics on the corrected URL, since that is the page where GA’s code fires. It just so happened that enough cleanup had taken place recently on the first site I tested that GA and GSC had a correlation coefficient of just .52!

So, I went in search of other properties that might provide a clearer picture. After analyzing several properties without similar problems as the first, we identified a range of approximately .94 to .99 correlation between GSC and Google Analytics reporting on organic landing pages. This seems pretty strong.

Finally, we did one more type of comparative analytics to determine the trustworthiness of GSC’s ranking data. In general, the number of clicks received by a site should be a function of the number of impressions it received and at what position in the SERP. While this is obviously an incomplete view of all the factors, it seems fair to say that we could compare the quality of two ranking sets if we know the number of impressions and the number of clicks. In theory, the rank tracking method which better predicts the clicks given the impressions is the better of the two.

Call me unsurprised, but this wasn’t even close. Standard rank tracking methods performed far better at predicting the actual number of clicks than the rank as presented in Google Search Console. We know that GSC’s rank data is an average position which almost certainly presents a false picture. There are many scenarios where this is true, but let me just explain one. Imagine you add new content and your keyword starts at position 80, then moves to 70, then 60, and eventually to #1. Now, imagine you create a different piece of content and it sits at position 40, never wavering. GSC will report both as having an average position of 40. The first, though, will receive considerable traffic for the time that it is in position 1, and the latter will never receive any. GSC’s averaging method based on impression data obscures the underlying features too much to provide relevant projections. Until something changes explicitly in Google’s method for collecting rank data for GSC, it will not be sufficient for getting at the truth of your site’s current position.

Reconciliation

So, how do we reconcile the experimental results with the comparative results, both the positives and negatives of GSC Search Analytics? Well, I think there are a couple of clear takeaways.

  1. Impression data is misleading at best, and simply false at worst: We can be certain that all impressions are not captured and are not accurately reflected in the GSC data.
  2. Click data is proportionally accurate: Clicks can be trusted as a proportional metric (ie: correlates with reality) but not as a specific data point.
  3. Click data is useful for telling you what URLs rank, but not what pages they actually land on.

Understanding this reconciliation can be quite valuable. For example, if you find your click data in GSC is not proportional to your Google Analytics data, there is a high probability that your site is utilizing redirects in a way that Googlebot has not yet discovered or applied. This could be indicative of an underlying problem which needs to be addressed.

Final thoughts

Google Search Console provides a great deal of invaluable data which smart webmasters rely upon to make data-driven marketing decisions. However, we should remain skeptical of this data, like any data source, and continue to test it for both internal and external validity. We should also pay careful attention to the appropriate manners in which we use the data, so as not to draw conclusions that are unsafe or unreliable where the data is weak. Perhaps most importantly: verify, verify, verify. If you have the means, use different tools and services to verify the data you find in Google Search Console, ensuring you and your team are working with reliable data. Also, there are lots of folks to thank here -Michael Cottam, Everett Sizemore, Marshall Simmonds, David Sottimano, Britney Muller, Rand Fishkin, Dr. Pete and so many more. If I forgot you, let me know!


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!



from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jPYAa8 via Affiliate Marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jqMd8m

понедельник, 30 января 2017 г.

Affiliate Marketer For Leads

Apply, or post a similar freelance job: I am looking for Affiliate to help me sell my YOGA BACKPACKS. If you have the ability to reach yoga enthusi …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kJDMls via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kOyLHp

Affiliate Marketing Executive / Digital Marketing Executive

View details & apply online for this Affiliate Marketing Executive / Digital Marketing Executive vacancy on reed.co.uk, the UK’s #1 job site.

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jLSQRg via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jM1yic

The Affiliate Ecosystem -- And How to Attribute

Not so many offer them in the context of affiliate marketing. Rakuten Marketing, an affiliate network that helps e-commerce clients with tasks ranging …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jOwSuj via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kMOA1k

What is Next for Attribution?

The affiliate channel is dead – long live affiliate marketing. The maturing of attribution will see marketers working to meet business objectives rather …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jM47kh via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jLXQFy

Fresh8 Gaming partners with Income Access

The partnership will see Fresh8 Gaming’s adverts enhance the affiliate … providing us with massive reach within the affiliate marketing channel, …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jOCTHx via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kN0eJy

A Guide to White Label Reseller Programs

Doing business online has been made even easier by the emergence of online business programs such as affiliate marketing, which means that you …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jM4taR via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jLTSwC

Rising Star Series: Jessica Brown, Account Manager - vouchercloud

Sponsored by Affiliate Future, the Performance Marketing Awards’ Industry Rising Star category shines the spotlight on the next generation of …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jOBOiN via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kMYO1V

How to Deal With Google’s Latest Mobile Ranking Update About Popups

How to Deal With Google's Latest Mobile Ranking Update About Popups

Here’s why you hear the word “intrusive” more often these days: Suddenly it has become a part of Google’s mobile ranking algorithm!

Last year Google warned webmasters it would start down-ranking sites with intrusive interstitials, commonly known as popup ads, in mobile search results. As of today, that update should be live, so you can start monitoring your mobile rankings to see if your site seems to have been effected.

With more and more people searching and finding your website on a mobile device, suffering a drop in your mobile rankings can be a huge loss.

What exactly is intrusive?

An intrusive ad is one that interferes with the user experience. If a user has to perform an action to hide an opt-in form to continue using your site, that form is intrusive.

Google is OK with intrusive popup forms if they cannot be avoided (for example, by law, you need to confirm your age before proceeding to the site).

Google is not OK with intrusive popup forms you can basically do without if they provide a poorer user experience, distract a user from their initial intent, force the user to opt out or somehow remove the form before they can fully interact with the page.

For example, covering half of your above-the-fold screen with an opt-in form encouraging a user to subscribe to your email list and forcing a user to click away to remove the form before they can read further, is what Google considers intrusive.

What’s more, Google doesn’t care whether an intrusive popup or an ad is served immediately once the user lands on a page or whether they’ll see it after scrolling. In both cases, that’s considered intrusive if you use the popup to capture a lead or monetize your website.

As per Google, here’s exactly how much screen you can cover with your opt-in form and avoid being intrusive:

Remember, Google only cares about immediate user experience – Once a user clicks on a search listing and lands on your page, that’s where Google wants to make sure you serve them right. Basically, they want to make sure if they send you the user for you to provide them with a satisfactory user experience.

After the user starts clicking your navigation links going from page to page, you can serve them more noticeable ads based on their behavior. It will be between you and your users once they choose to stick around.

The bad news for marketers is that many of those popup lightbox windows work like a charm for conversions. People claim huge spikes in signups once they start serving them.

So how do you make sure you are not hit with this Google Update without losing your conversions? How do you have people complete your forms without being obnoxious?

To summarize what I’ll describe in more detail below, here are three generic tactics:

  • Don’t show popup opt-in forms for mobile users at all. Instead, serve different less disruptive forms to them such as an opt-in bar for example. Note: You may keep your lightbox popup forms for desktop users.
  • Don’t show popup opt-in forms for Google referrals. Or only serve them your forms once they go deeper into your site.
  • Switch from being intrusive to being effective. Serve different calls-to-action based on user intent.

1. Use different opt-in forms for mobile users

If you are not ready to change your website opt-in forms in fear of losing your conversions, you can at least change how they appear for mobile users. Remember, this update is only about mobile user experience, so it is crucial that you take action and make sure your opt-in forms qualify as non-intrusive for mobile users first.

Hello Bar is a full-width bar that spans across the top or bottom of your website and helps you grab visitors’ attention without interrupting their browsing. Hello Bar can be used for all kinds of calls-to-action:

You can choose to create a separate Hello Bar specifically for mobile device users where you can choose to:

  • Change your call-to-action to find the best working one
  • Animate entry/exit of the bar to draw your visitors’ eyes to it.
  • Select the width of the bar to make it easy to notice and use, while preventing it from covering too much of the screen.
  • Keep it always on top of the page while the user scrolls down.
  • Allow to hide the bar (I would certainly recommend checking this option as web users prefer to have a choice).
  • Place it on the top or bottom of the page
  • A/B test different bars you have been running and compare results

It’s very easy to integrate Hello Bar with your email provider. Just choose your email marketing platform, authenticate Hello Bar access and choose your email list to add new contacts to.

Here’s a quick Hello Bar case study from DIYthemes to illustrate how it works. Hello Bar helped DIYthemes gain an additional 1,180 email subscribers within 30 days!

You can also use expandable calls-to-action allowing your users to act after a click.

Here’s a good example of what I am talking about:

It’s an interesting way to test two-step optin performance on your site.

2. Show different forms based on the referral

Another possible way to ensure you comply with Google’s guidelines is to serve different ads based on the referral. For example, you may choose to show different opt-in forms to people coming from Google search results or serve them no forms at all.

PadiAct is one of the easiest ways to create intricate rules for when to show your calls-to-action and how to customize your opt-in form behavior. For example, whenever a user is referred to your site by Google, you can choose to only serve your opt-in form once they proceed to page #2 of your site:

You can also connect PadiAct to Google Analytics to clearly see how your forms are working based on the referral.

You can also use PadiAct to serve your forms only to people who have visited a certain page or a certain section of your website.

3. Use different calls-to-action based on the keyword intent

This is not specific to this Google mobile ranking update but it’s a great way to make sure your calls-to-action are relevant to your specific landing page.

It may not be about how well your call-to-action stands out or how easy it is to notice. The issue may be in how well you meet the needs of visitors of a particular page.

If you notice a high bounce rate or a low conversion rate on a specific landing page of your site, the chances are your call-to-action doesn’t match the intent of users coming to that page. Fixing this is likely to increase your conversions.

For example, there may be little point in trying to sell a product to someone who came to find an answer to an informational query. A better way to address different types of user intent would be:

  • If a user lands on your knowledge base page looking for an answer on how to use your product, a good subtle call-to-action to chat with a company representative for further help would make more sense than inviting a user to subscribe to your email list or buy the product. In contrast, the same online chat popup on a page where a user can buy a product may be intrusive and distracting.
  • If a user lands on a page in hope of finding an answer to a generic non-commercial question, serving them a subtle popup inviting them to opt-in to download a more detailed PDF guide addressing the same question is a good way to have the user engage.

Two helpful tools in this section are Serpstat and Whatagraph.

Use Serpstat to research keywords for your landing pages, especially questions. Question-type queries work wonders for email opt-in because users are hungry for more information.

To access Serpstat question data, type in your core term and then proceed to the “Content Marketing” section:

Serpstat also provides a tag cloud containing words which most often occur in questions containing your core term:

This is a great source of information to direct your content strategy and organize your keyword lists into groups for each landing page, and target a specific keyword group. Clicking each tag will filter the list of questions to those containing that word. Most of these queries can fit into one landing page:

Whatagraph integrates with Google Analytics and turns its data into daily reports which are highly visual and easy to understand. Their reports contain a section listing pages with the highest bounce rate and the highest exit count. These are the pages to look into to see if your information and calls-to-action match the user intent!

Whatagraph also emails daily goal completion stats for you to easily keep an eye on your forms and which of them seem to perform better or worse, so you can act accordingly.

Wrap

A high conversion rate is not about being intrusive, it’s about being effective!

Are you prepared for Google’s latest mobile ranking update? Please share your tips!

Guest Author: Ann Smarty is the brand and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas and co-founder of Viral Content Bee, the free platform helping your content reach social media influencers!

The post How to Deal With Google’s Latest Mobile Ranking Update About Popups appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.



from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jmx7Rm via Affiliate Marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kKNzv1

Become an Affiliate Marketer. Get Paid to Post.

Job ID: TBT2BAM20170121 (New York City, New York) If you love posting on social media, have a talent for affiliate marketing or you are simply great …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kKDM3I via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kiDbtq

Why You Should Steal My Daughter's Playbook for Effective Email Outreach

Posted by ronell-smith

During the holidays, my youngest daughter apparently had cabin fever after being in the house for a couple of days. While exiting the bedroom, my wife found the note below on the floor, after the former had slyly slid it under the door.

Though tired and not really feeling like leaving the house, we had to reward the youngster for her industriousness. And her charm.

Her effective “outreach” earned plaudits from my wife.

“At least she did it the right way,” she remarked. “She cleaned her room, washed dishes, and read books all day, obviously part of an attempt to make it hard for us to say no. After all she did, though, she earned it.”

Hmm…

She earned it.

Can you say as much about your outreach?

We’re missing out on a great opportunity

Over the last few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about outreach, specifically email outreach.

It initially got my attention because I see it so badly handled, even by savvy marketers.

But I didn’t fully appreciate the significance of the problem until I started thinking about the resulting impact of bad outreach, particularly since it remains one of the best, most viable means of garnering attention, traffic, and links to our websites.

What I see most commonly is a disregard of the needs of the person on the other end of the email.

Too often, it’s all about the “heavy ask” as opposed to the warm touch.

  • Heavy ask: “Hi Ronell … We haven’t met. … Could you share my article?”
  • Warm touch: “Hi Ronell … I enjoyed your Moz post. … We’re employing similar tactics at my brand.”

That’s it.

You’re likely saying to yourself, “But Ronell, the second person didn’t get anything in return.”

I beg to differ. The first person likely lost me, or whomever else they reach out to to using similar tactics; the second person will remain on my radar.

Outreach is too important to be left to chance or poor etiquette. A few tweaks here and there can help our teams perform optimally.

#1: Build rapport: Be there in a personal way before you need them

The first no-no of effective outreach comes right out of PR 101: Don’t let the first time I learn of you or your brand be when you need me. If the brand you hope to attain a link from is worthwhile, you should be on their radar well in advance of the ask.

Do your research to find out who the relevant parties are at the brand, then make it your business to learn about them, via social media and any shared contacts you might have.

Then reach out to them… to say hello. Nothing more.

This isn’t the time to ask for anything. You’re simply making yourself known, relevant, and potentially valuable down the road.

Notice how, in the example below, the person emailing me NEVER asks for anything?

The author did three things that played big. She…

  • Mentioned my work, which means she’d done her homework
  • Highlighted work she’d done to create a post
  • Didn’t assume I would be interested in her content (we’ll discuss in greater detail below)

Hiring managers like to say, “A person should never be surprised at getting fired,” meaning they should have some prior warning.

Similarly, for outreach to be most effective, the person you’re asking for a link from should know of you/your brand in advance.

Bonuses:Always, always, always use “thank you” instead of “thanks.” The former is far more thoughtful and sincere, while the latter can seem too casual and unfeeling.

#2: Be brief, be bold, be gone

One of my favorite lines from the Greek tragedy Antigone, by Sophocles, is “Tell me briefly — not in some lengthy speech.”

If your pitch is more than three paragraphs, go back to the drawing board.

You’re trying to pique their interest, to give them enough to comfortably go on, not bore them with every detail.

The best outreach messages steal a page from the PR playbook:

  • They respect the person’s time
  • They show a knowledge of the person’s brand, content, and interests with regard to coverage
  • They make the person’s job easier (i.e., something the person would deem useful but not necessarily easily accessible)

We must do the same.

  • Be brief in highlighting the usefulness of what you offer and how it helps them in some meaningful way
  • Be bold in declaring your willingness to help their brand as much as your own
  • Be gone by exiting without spilling every single needless detail

Bonus: Be personal by using the person’s name at least once in the text since it fosters a greatest level of personalization and thoughtfulness (most people enjoy hearing their names):

“I read your blog frequently, Jennifer.”

#3: Understand that it’s not about you

During my time as a newspaper business reporter and book reviewer, nothing irked me more than having people assume that because they valued what their brand offered, I must feel the same way.

They were wrong 99 percent of the time.

Outreach in our industry is rife with this if-it’s-good-for-me-it’s-good-for-you logic.

Instead of approaching a potential link opportunity from the perspective of “How do I influence this party to grant me a link,” a better approach is to consider “What’s obviously in it for them?”

(I emphasize “obviously” because we often pretend the benefit is obvious when it’s typically anything but.)

Step back and consider all the things that’ll be in play as they consider a link from you:

  • Relationship - Do they they know you/know of you?
  • Brand - Is your brand reputable?
  • Content - Does your company create and share quality content?
  • This content - Is the content you’re hoping for a link for high-quality and relevant?

In the best case scenario, you should pass this test with flying colors. But at the very least you should be able tp successfully counter any of these potential objections.

#4: Don’t assume anything

Things never go well when an outreach email begins “I knew you’d be interested in this.”

Odds suggest you aren’t prescient, which can only mean you’re wrong.

What’s more, if you did know I was interested in it, I should not be learning about the content after it was created. You should involved me from the beginning.

Therefore, instead of assuming I’ll find your content valuable, ensure that you’re correct by enlisting their help during the content creation process:

  • Topic - Find out what they’re working on or see as the biggest issues that deserve attention
  • Contribution -Ask if they’d like to be part of the content you create
  • Ask about others - Enlist their help to find other potential influencers for your content. Doing so gives your content and your outreach legs (we discuss in greater detail below)

#5: Build a network

Michael Michalowicz, via his 2012 book The Pumpkin Plan, shared an outreach tactic I’ve been using for years in my own work. Instead of asking customers to recommend other customers for a computer service company he formerly owned, he asked his customers to recommend other non-competing vendors.


Genius!

Whereas a customer is likely to recommend another customer or two, a vendor is likely able to recommend many dozens of customers who could use his service.

This is instructive for outreach.

Rather than asking the person you’re outreaching to for recommendations of other marketers who could be involved in the project, a better idea might be to ask them “What are some of the other publications or blogs you’ve worked with?”

You could then conduct a site search, peruse the content the former has been a part of, then use this information as a future guide for the types and quality of content you should be producing to get on the radar for influencers and brands.

After all, for outreach to be sustainable and most effective, it must be scalable in an easy-to-replicate (by the internal team, at least) fashion.

Bonus: Optimally, your outreach should not be scalable — for anyone but you/your team. That is, it’s best to have a unique-to-your-brand process that’s tough to achieve or acquire, which means it’s far less likely others will know about, copy or use it or one like it.

Awaken your inner child, er, PR person

Elements of the five tips shared above have been, singularly, on my mind for the better part of two years. However, they only coalesced after I read the note my daughter shared, primarily because her message delivered on each point so effectively.

She didn’t wait until she needed something to get on our radar; never over-sold the message; was selfless in realizing we all likely needed to get out the house; didn’t assume we were on the same page; and activated her network by first sharing the note with her sister first, and, through her mom, me.

Now, the question we must all ask ourselves is if the methods we employ as effective?


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!



from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jJ03Bh via Affiliate Marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2k82ZWM

воскресенье, 29 января 2017 г.

The 5 Step Influencer Formula (and its money making secrets)

5 Step Influencer Formula

Do you have “like” anxiety?

The ever present Facebook app that sits on your smartphone is an addiction for many of us. You post a cute photo of your dog, maybe your latest trip to the Caribbean and then check in later to see how many likes you have.

Received a low response? Only a few people responding? Maybe the “like” metrics aren’t what they should be.

Social media anxiety strikes!

The internal conversations question that all important popularity gene that the school yard conditioning gave us. For some it was all about being “popular”.

Then the big temptation is to spend a lot of time creating or finding “that” piece of amazing content to share. To go back and search your photo library to have another go and focus on chasing likes.

No wonder many of us are not getting any work done.

Popularity has been redefined by the social web and many are still trying to work out the new game.

What’s your popularity?

In “Nosedive” (the opening episode of the third Netflix series, Black Mirror) the popularity contest is an app.

The episode’s story is based in a world where everyone rates each other out of five for nearly every interaction and social media post. Lucie Pound as the central character has an obsession to get a rating of 4.5 or above so she can move into an exclusive new apartment.

Image source: Wired

Pound’s obsession with improving her rating sends her on a rapid spiral to madness and it is all about improving her rating….her likes. Does part of that sound familiar?

This satire is maybe closer to the truth than we care to admit.

Online clout

In the early days of the social web the measurement of influence and possible popularity was attempted and we saw that with the establishment of the Klout platform in 2008. It used metrics scraped from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks to rank your online impact.

People started sharing the Klout scores and it was even touted as a metric that could be used for being employed or hired.

It was a bit rough and ready. But it was a glimpse of what a social media popularity contest looked like. But it was fun for a while as people shared their scores.

The rise of the influencer

Growing your popularity online is part of the puzzle of buildng digital influence.

The early attempts at measuring influence were fun and a bit superficial but it was a glance into the future. Towards the end of 2014 the term “influencer” started to make a serious move into  marketing consciousness.

Go to Google Trends today and type in the term “Influencer”. It is now currently ranked as a “breakout trend. That means its search volume has risen by over 5,000% over the previous period.

This is one way to see if a meme or a trend is emerging or declining. This graph shoes that since the end of 2014 the term influencer is on an inexorable rise in online consciousness as determined by a rising search volume.

It is also interesting to see associated search terms and topics that are an indicator of rising sub-topics within the influencer eco-system. Instagram ranks as the top term and content marketing and being being “listed” on Forbes are in the mix.

This trending topic has led to the emergence of influencer platforms that connect and monetise personal brands with corporate brands that want to reach the influencer’s audience and tribes that they have trust, credibility and influence with.

The traditional PR approach

Thought leadership is associated with influence and many brands (both personal and corporate) want to be seen as idea leaders in their industry.

A few years ago I attended a PR event and the public relations professionals were postulating. The question? How do you position your company as a thought leader in your industry?

This was the overwhelming and suggested approach.

Beg a journalist or pay a media media mogul for permission to write and publish one article for the flagship magazine or newspaper in your city. Tick that box and you are now an “authority”.

But it’s not that simple on the social web.

The new paradigm

On the social web influence is earned.

If you think you can beg or pay for authority then you may need to reassess your tactics. Most influencers and online thought leaders never set out to be one. They just took their passion and expertise online and built web traffic and a social media following.

What sets them apart from the rest?

It can be summed up with 3 words. Content, distribution and persistence. Great content, whether that is words, videos or images and its distribution on social networks grown with passionate persistence over years is the secret sauce mix.

Thought leadership is built and earned. One word at a time, one tweet and mentions on blog posts and online articles.

These are all bricks in the wall of influence. But there is a cumulative digital footprint of this activity.

Defined by data

The tone and quality and quantitiy of your content does indeed define you online with ebooks, blog posts, tweets and social sharing as some of the content credibility indicators. We also have seen the rise of content marketing over the last 10 years as it has moved on from what could have been a short term fad to an embedded marketing trend.

The outcome and footprint of all this content and sharing? It’s data.

Thought leadership and influence can now be measured. Appearing on a Forbes list is now a data game.

It is one of the indicators that  you are making an impact and exerting some digital influence. I was honoured to rank on this Forbes list of “The Top 20 Influencers of CMO’s” in the USA and appearing at #10. The reason that happened? The big data machines and collectors measured tweets of 1,300 North American CMO”s who are active on Twitter and analysed over 680,000 tweets for  12 months.

This should not be taken as the only definer of influence but it is part of how the game is now being played. The machines are now watching and defining you.

Why strive to be an influencer?

Growing your online influence provides empowerment. It means building a life, business and career on your terms. It also allows you to become more of a price giver rather than price taker

Why?

Because…. it puts you in the driving seat.

As a creator and a person of influence, opportunities come to you. No longer is chasing and begging for attention required. You can earn it yourself with passion, persistence and hard work.

The intersection of technology and the democratisation of publishing and marketing has put the power in your hands when you understand the influencer formula.

Many of us dream about leaving a legacy and making a difference. It’s never been easier. The authors, creators and makers in the past needed the King’s support or the traditional power brokers permission. It’s still great to have the advocacy of the people that matter but the tables have turned.

You can now bypass the gatekeepers and write your own story.

Exerting online influence can lead to being asked to publish a book, or even being invited to speak and be paid for it. It opens doors to global opportunities as your content and distribution and credibility spread to the nooks and crannies of the web. It gives you a seat at the table.

People want to touch the hem of the thought leaders and influencers of many persuasions. Offline and online now intersect.

What defines an influencer?

It starts with content that arises out of expertise and experience. Next you need attention. The marketing of the virtual you. Many creators and makers stumble at this critical step, but it’s crucial.

That means building distribution and earning attention. Social media is often the initial attention seeker….the awareness generator.

It can be distilled into a simple formula.

How do you make money as an influencer?

The holy grail for many bloggers is to be discovered by a big brand in their niche and become their ambassador and be given a lucrative annual retainer. That is the Tiger Wood’s mass media model. For most that won’t happen.

The multiple revenue stream strategy is the best long term approach. This includes the following

  • Paid speaking engagements
  • Selling your books
  • Hired as a coach
  • Paid as a consultant
  • Selling your expertise via packaged online training
  • Selling offline training
  • Running conferences and offline masterclasses
  • Earning affiliate revenue by promoting other people’s products
  • Being hired as an influencer to create and share sponsored posts, content and attend events

You need to experiment with different tactics to see which fits in best with your personality, skills and inclination. It is not one size fits all.

The influencer formula

Influencers often have a focus on one primary network. These include: Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook and even Snapchat is emerging as another place for influence. But as user numbers and followers aren’t revealed, the metric is the number of views that happen when publishing content and Snapchat story videos.

The reality is that just being influential on social is only part of the journey in generating income or building a substantial business.

So what is the formula for building online influence that will last? Here are the 5  crucial steps.

  1. Passion
  2. Platform
  3. Content
  4. Distribution
  5. Conversion

Let’s take a closer look.

Passion

All influencers are passionate. Now, this isn’t passion that is there one day and gone the next. It’s not just a fleeting feeling. It’s a passionate persistent  purpose that is supported by experience, expertise and innate ability. It’s your story revealed. Passion that works is not a singularity but an intersection of the key elements that support the story. It will also evolve as you learn on the journey.

Remember…. you have never arrived.  It’s not a destination you are seeking but a journey that has meaning and purpose.

Platform

Influencers may focus on one social media network and build a big following that is seen as influential. Some stop there but that is only the start.

If you want to protect yourself against social media algorithm dependency then you need to build a more substantial foundation. A singular network addiction is dangerous place to feel comfortable. All social networks keep changing what is visible in timelines and streams. They are looking after their own bottom line and not yours.

You need to have you own online portal with a domain name you own. That is your own blog or website. A platform presence on Tumblr, Medium or blogger is not enough.

Content

We all have a media preference. Some like writing others prefer great visuals or a video. Others are podcasters.  Whatever that is, you will need to create and publish the best content you can that is consistent with the topic ecosystem.

The top influencers are always thinking like a publisher. That means consistent and persistent posting.

Distribution

Many creators and artists are happy to sit in a cave and produce awesome art. They are often introverts.

But to step into the light means to willing to be vulnerable and push your content out to be judged. Your creation needs to move to be found and discovered. Self promotion is essential and is not an activity to be avoided. We all need to be marketers of our own productions. Whistling in the dark is a lonely activity.

Conversion

Being listed as an influencer on Forbes maybe be cool and a boost for the ego but it doesn’t pay the bills unless you complete the final critical step. Converting that attention and influence into leads and sales. Generating a profit and a return on your creative investment allows you to continue to do what you love. Living on the border of poverty while hugging your creation in solitude is not my idea of fun.

It can be seen as the most boring step but don’t ignore implementing this tactic that is often the difference between survival and financial freedom. The passion project needs to grow into a business.

Capturing an email subscriber and turning attention into sales means learning the art of landing pages and the skills needed to move people through the sales funnels.

Word of warning

The tension between being defined by your content and your data is real. Posting what gets the most likes all the time will lead to more content “lite”. This is great for Facebook and sharing but playing there all the time is a dangerous place to be.

As an influencer it needs to be written for both you and the audience. Content needs to have a gravitaas. But the challenge is making content insightful and attractive enough to be shared. That is a challenge all content creators and influencers face.

Want to be an influencer?

Micro influencers can convert attention into a bit of cash. Maybe all they want is $1,000 a month and that is fine. That pays for a great holiday every year or pays the mortgage.

Others want to go large. It’s up to you.

The post The 5 Step Influencer Formula (and its money making secrets) appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.



from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jGl3ZC via Affiliate Marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kCHHjV

пятница, 27 января 2017 г.

US8600811

A method of affiliate marketing provides inbound affiliate link credit without coded URLs. Affiliate web sites link directly to merchant web sites, so that …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kDp6Dp via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kcFL46

Registration Open for Performance Marketing Summit Austin 2017

There is a Performance Marketing Summit coming up in Austin on March 14, 2017, and registrations are now open for attendees and sponsorships.

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kdnkfM via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jHbF5n

A Look at How You Can Make Money With Your Email

Email marketing is a very popular method of making money online. How can … One of the preferred uses for an email list is affiliate marketing. Affiliate …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kDugzm via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kcCvWe

Marketing School: How to Integrate Affiliate Marketing

Marketing School: How to Integrate Affiliate Marketing - What it is and how it can benefit your company. (Podcasts, Marketing, and Growth Hacking)

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kCgilp via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jedJWz

What Businesses Can Learn From Restaurants

Full-service marketing agencies can help you with much more than SEO. … Affiliate marketing is a way to get new clients by having other marketers, …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kCagxi via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2k18eYi

ActiveWin collaborates with Fred Done at LAC 2017

… exclusive appearance at the ActiveWins stand during this year’s London Affiliate Conference, one of the largest affiliate marketing events of the year.

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kCdmFq via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2jekMhL

App-Based Affiliate Network Button Takes $20 Million Investment

App-Based Affiliate Network Button Takes $20 Million Investment … and brands look towards the opportunity of ‘contextual marketing’ on mobile users.

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kBSBFY via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2k1gaJg

Affiliate Marketing Manager

Nations Info Corp. is looking for an Affiliate Marketing Manager to join our growing, dynamic, fast-paced team. The Affiliate Marketing Manager will …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kCgKjF via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kCkqlD

The death of affiliate marketing; what I learned at Affiliate Summit West

A lesson from Affiliate Summit West: how affiliate marketing can fit in with the changing market dynamics brought about by performance marketing and …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kBZSFK via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kBSBWu

English EN

Support C-suite and higher management in developing affiliate marketing and … Performance marketing enthusiast with 1-2 year experience in online …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kCjw8p via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kCpnef

NetRefer begins beta test of new customer loyalty programme

Affiliate marketing solutions provider NetRefer has introduced a new customer loyalty programme to its Performance Marketing Intelligence (PMI) …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kBR3eQ via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kC1Wxj

How to Choose a Good SEO Company for Your Business or Website - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

When it comes to choosing a reputable company to manage your SEO, there’s both a right way and a wrong way to go about the hiring process. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand identifies common pitfalls to avoid and advice to take when it comes to selecting an agency or consultant to optimize your site for search engines. SEOs, take note: there are great ideas here for how to market yourselves to clients, as well!

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about how to choose a good SEO company, a consultant or an agency. It could be an independent person. What I want to do as we get into this is help you to understand some of the mechanics behind SEO consulting work. This is a critical hire, because if SEO is important to your business, then the choice of which company or person to use is going to have a huge impact, probably one of the biggest impacts on whether you get great results. There are a bunch of mistakes that people make when they go down this selecting an SEO company path.

Don’t make these mistakes

Mistake #1: Using Google as your filter

The logic makes a lot of sense here if you think about it simplistically. Simplistic thinking is a good SEO company will do a great job ranking for SEO company or SEO consultant or SEO consultant plus my city name. So if I’m looking for the best SEO in Seattle, I have only to Google “best SEO Seattle” and surely the number-one company will show up at the top. But, unfortunately, what happens is most of the very good companies, the ones that are in high demand, the ones that do consistently great work and get great referrals, they don’t actually need to rank here. They’re overwhelmed with clients all the time because their clients refer them to people and lots of people in their network refer folks to them. They have a high retention of clients. Lots of people are very satisfied. They’re making plenty of money and they’re incredibly busy, so they don’t spend any work optimizing their own website to get new clients.

As a result, you are often left with some of the dregs here. Many of the companies that rank well for best SEO plus city name or best SEO plus a region or plus a particular specialty, like best ecommerce SEO, are not the best. They are, in fact, the folks who are simply without any client work and so they’re concentrating all their energy on trying to get new clients. Sometimes, maybe, you can find some good folks in there. It’s just not a great filter.

Mistake #2: Trusting “Top SEO” lists

Many people will search for “best SEOs” or “best SEO consultants” or “best SEO companies,” “best SEO companies United States.” They’ll get to a website like, I don’t know, bestSEOs.com or topSEOs.com. There are a number of these types of websites that are essentially just aggregators. Their business model is they try and rank for terms like this, and then they sell those listings, the listings on their page, to SEO firms and companies. Back when Moz was a consulting company many, many years ago, they’d call us up and they’d say, “Hey, do you want to be number 3, we can make you number 3 on the best SEO companies list for $20,000 a year. Or we can make you number 1, but you’re going to have to pay $75,000 a year.”

That is not a great… I mean it’s a great model for them. Don’t get me wrong. But that pay-to-play scheme is not trustworthy for you as a consumer of SEO companies. You would never trust someone that said, “Oh well, what’s the best restaurant in this particular region?” You’d never go to a list where the restaurants just paid. That would give you the conglomerates and the people who can afford to spend the most and the worst. Don’t trust those types of lists.

There are a few lists, there are a few websites, places like getcredo.com run by John Doherty. There’s obviously Moz’s recommended SEO list, which is just my personal recommendations and the recommendations of my network. You can’t pay to be on there. You can’t pay to be listed. Some of those are more trustworthy. We’ll try and link to a few of those good ones at the end of this whiteboard.

Mistake #3: Believing there’s a “secret sauce”

Mistake number three is believing the sales pitch that unfortunately many I’m going to say low-quality SEO consultants use, which is there’s a secret sauce. There are no secret sauces in SEO. If you hear like, “This is how Google works blah, blah, blah, and then here’s how we do our secret optimization techniques. I can’t tell you what those are. It’s a proprietary methodology, but it works really well,” that’s baloney. You should reject that. If you ask, “How do you do it,” and they say, “I’m sorry I can’t tell you, it’s a secret or it’s proprietary,” that is a very, very bad sign. No one has a secret proprietary process. SEO is a very, very open field. It’s well understood. It has origins in a lot of secrecy, but that is not the way it is today and you should never accept that as an answer. That is a red flag.

My recommended process for choosing an SEO company:

Step 1

I want you to establish, sit down with your team, with your CEO, with your executive team, your board, whoever you’ve got, and figure out the goals you’re trying to achieve with SEO. Why do you want to do SEO? Why do you want to rank organically for keywords? Then, figure out how you’re going to judge success versus failure. In this process, there are good goals and bad goals.

Good goals:

  • I want to get in front of a lot of people who are researching this, and so we need traffic from these specific groups. I know that they perform searches for this. Great.
  • We’re trying to boost revenue, and we’re trying to boost it through new sales and SEO is a sales driving channel. Fine, great.
  • We’re trying to boost downloads or free sign-ups or free trials. Also a fine goal.
  • We’re trying to boost sentiment for our brand. Maybe if you Googled some of our branded terms today, there are some poor reviews, there’s lots of good reviews that rank below them, and we want to push the good reviews up and the bad reviews down. Fine. Sentiment, that could be something you’re driving as well. You know a lot of people are researching your brand or branded terms. Those are all good goals.

Bad goals:

  • We just want traffic, more traffic. Why? Well, because we want it. Terrible, terrible goal. Traffic is not a goal in and of itself. If you say, “Well, we want more traffic because we know search traffic converts well for us and here are the statistics on it,” fine, terrific. Now it’s a revenue driving thing.
  • Rankings alone, unfortunately this is a vanity thing that many people have where they want to rank for something simply because they want to rank for it. Usually a bad sign for SEO companies considering clients. You shouldn’t have that on your goals list. That’s not a positive goal.
  • Beating a particular competitor out for specific keywords or phrases. Again, not a great goal. Doesn’t drive directly to revenue. Doesn’t drive directly to organizational goals.
  • Vanity metrics. I still see people who are saying, “Hey, does anyone know a great SEO company that can help bring our domain authority up or our Majestic trust flow up or, worst of all, our Google PageRank up?” Google dropped PageRank years ago. It’s terrible. Vanity metrics, bad ideas too.

Step 2

Once you have a list of these good goals that you’re trying to optimize for, my suggestion is that you should assemble a list of usually three to five is I think sort of the right comfort zone. You can do more if you have the bandwidth to evaluate more, but three to five, at least, consultants or agencies. Those could be by a bunch of criteria. You might say, “Hey, look we really need someone in our region so that we can meet with them in person or at least someone who can fly to us on a regular basis.” Maybe that’s a requirement for you. Or you might say, “That’s not important. Remote is great.” Fine, wonderful. You might say something like, “Our price range or our budget is this particular thing.”

You want to find whatever those criteria are and make sure you’ve got a list of three to five folks that you can consider against one another. Have some conversations with them and dig into references.

Good sources:

  • Your friends and personal networks and professional networks as well.
  • Similar non-competitive companies. You will find that if you’re, for example, in a B2B space or in an ecommerce space and there’s a non-competitive ecommerce company whom you’re friendly with, you can build those relationships. You should certainly already have those relationships. Talking to those folks about who they use and whether they were successful, great way to find some good people.
  • Industry insiders. If you’re watching Whiteboard Friday here on Moz, chances are good that you follow some great SEO people on Twitter, which is a very popular network for SEOs, or that you read SEO blogs. You can reach out to some of those influential insiders with whom you have a relationship or whose opinion you really like and care about and ask them who they would recommend.

Good questions to ask:

  • By the way, I like asking SEO companies: What process are you going to use to accomplish our goals, and why do you use those particular processes? That’s a really smart one to start with.
  • Ask them about their communication and reporting process. How often? What’s their cadence like? What metrics do they report on? What do they need you to collect? Why do they collect those metrics? How do those match up to your goals and how do they align?
  • What work and resources will you have to commit internally? You should know that before you go into any arrangement, because it could get very complex. If your SEO company says, “Great here’s a list of recommendations,” and you say, “Fine, we don’t have the development bandwidth, or we don’t have the content creation bandwidth, or we don’t have the visual or UI or UX exchange bandwidth to make any of those. So what do we do?” Well, now you’re road blocked. You should’ve had that conversation much earlier in time. *By the way, SEO usually requires some intensive resource allotment. So you should plan for that ahead of time.
  • What do you do when things aren’t working? I love asking that question, and I like asking for specific examples of when things haven’t gone right and what they’ve done to fix that in the past and work around it.
  • I like asking broadly. Especially when you open a conversation, especially if you’re feeling like, hey I want to get to know this company’s approach to SEO and their understanding of Google, you can ask them something like, “Hey, tell me how does Google rank results, and how do you as a company influence them?” You should hear good answers about, yes, this is how Google does things, and here’s how we know that and here’s how we do our process of influencing those results. That’s great.

Step 3

I like to recommend that folks choose on these four things:

  1. The trust that you’ve established with a company. That’s through references, through the conversation, through people that you’ve talked to in your network.
  2. Through referrals. If you hear great referrals and you trust those referral sources, that’s a wonderful signal.
  3. Through communication style match. If your communication style, even if everything else is good, but when you have conversations, you walk away from them feeling a little frustrated, maybe you got the things you needed, but it didn’t flow smoothly, I would suggest that maybe that’s a cultural mismatch and you should look for another provider.
  4. Price and contract structure. Many SEO firms have a contract structure that’s month-to-month and that has a certain length of time. You should expect to pay some upfront payment and then some ongoing monthly fee. There’s usually a time at which the payment will recur and the contract will renew. It’s pretty similar to a lot of other services, consulting types of agreements, so you should expect that. If you’re seeing very non-standard stuff, that can be a bad thing sometimes, but not always. A lot of times SEOs have more creative pricing, and that’s all right.

Pro tips

Three pro tips:

  1. If SEO needs to be a core competency at your company, bring it in-house. An agency or consultant can never do as much with as much resources, with as much communication, as someone in-house can do. Starting with a consultant externally and then bringing someone in-house is a fine way to go.
  2. If the quality SEO folks that you’re considering are too pricy, my suggestion might be to say, “Okay, how about you just advise us on the work, and we’ll hire an in-house person, maybe who’s more beginner-level and you coach that person?” That can work well, again especially if you have that budget to bring that person in-house.
  3. Remember that SEO is not for everyone. SEO is extremely competitive. Page 1 gets 95% plus of the clicks. The top 3 or 4 results are getting more than 70% of those clicks, 65% or 70%. So a lot of the time, if you can’t afford yet to do SEO or to engage in it seriously, it may not be all that valuable to go from ranking on page five for a lot of your key terms to page two or the bottom of page one. Unless you have the budget and the energy to really commit yourself to SEO, it might be a channel you consider later down the road.

All right, everyone, hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. Would love to hear your thoughts on how you’ve picked good SEO companies in the past and the experiences you’ve had there. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Resources

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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!



from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kzDNaK via Affiliate Marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kbEMBA

четверг, 26 января 2017 г.

Affiliate Marketing Manager

The marketing team at TodayTix is seeking an Affiliate Marketing Manager. This person will be responsible for identifying and developing affiliate …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jkfblg via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kyGbyF

Top 10 online business

Online affiliate marketing dollars rebates modelling penang. How can i make money today, Start business ideas turn. I want to open my own business …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2juRudg via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kyNZUV

IGB affiliate to host affiliate focused seminars during ICE

January 2017 (London) – iGB Affiliate, the most respected information provider for the igaming affiliate market, have announced today they will be …

from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2jkrAWf via Affiliate Marketing


from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2kyAEbp

How to Get Your Content Published on Forbes, Huffington Post, and Business Insider

How to Get Your Content Published on Forbes, Huffington Post, and Business Insider

Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman is an expert in the psychology of judgment and decision, and his research has challenged assumptions of human rationality as a driver in economic decision-making.

He has said, “Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept.”

No pressure there, right?

If your business is new, building your reputation when you have no brand recognition and little capital isn’t easy.

Gaining traction in the media is, of course, important, but you can’t simply wait around for influencers to discover and rave about your brand.

The goal of getting your company covered in high-profile online outlets is lofty, but attainable. Once you are able to do this, you will enjoy better brand visibility, a more solid reputation in your industry, better web traffic, more online followers, an easier time recruiting talent, and possibly even interest from new investors.

Succeeding in obtaining the media coverage you need requires a strategic approach that includes a healthy mix of tactics peculiar to your brand and your industry.

But gaining media attention can get you immediate results, in the form of an influx of new Twitter followers, high-ranking search engine results, and backlinks from prestigious publications and journalists.

Top-tier business sites are coveted by content marketing professionals, so you have to be at the top of your game when you submit content to them.

Here is a roundup of top content sites and information from contributors on how they got their content published.

Publishing your content on Forbes

Speaker, writer, and entrepreneur Josh Steimle has written over 160 articles for Forbes since 2013.

Though vetted contributors used to be able to blog about any topic, today they’re required to stick to their particular area of expertise. Additionally, Forbes contributors post directly to the live site, so it won’t go through an editor first.

Editors may make minor changes after publication, and if writers veer too sharply off-topic, posts can be taken down altogether.

Here’s a screen grab of one of Steimle’s Forbes articles:

publishing-your-content-on-forbes-for-how-to-get-your-content-published

You can approach being published on Forbes in a couple of ways.

You can submit a completed article (regardless of length) to opinion@forbes.com for consideration on one of their opinion pages. This content has to be original and exclusive to Forbes. If you’ve already published it somewhere else, they’ll reject it.

Expect it to take several business days to review your content. If a week goes by and you haven’t heard from them, you can assume they aren’t interested and try to place your content elsewhere.

If your goal is to become a regular Forbes contributor, you can apply via Google Form. In addition to your typical contact information, you’ll also be asked for LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, and ideas about what you want your page to be. You’ll also need to link to examples of your writing and explain why you’re qualified to have the page you envision.

publishing-your-content-on-forbes-for-how-to-get-your-content-published-2

Steimle published articles on a once-a-week basis, and especially liked the site’s great analytics that allow writers to see how well their content performs. Training webinars for contributors are also offered regularly.

Publishing your content on Huffington Post

Co-Founder at Authority Alchemy, Brian Ainsley Horn knows firsthand what it takes to write for Huffington Post. He says it isn’t easy, but it’s certainly possible.

Huffington Post is one of the main “authority” publications where business owners and content marketers want to publish. The site has phenomenal SEO power, helping content rank for multiple three-to five-word terms only hours after publication.

Here’s a shot of one of Horn’s blog posts on Huffington Post:

publishing-your-content-on-huffington-post-for-how-to-get-your-content-published-2

You should craft your pitch based on what top bloggers in your targeted section write. It should be short and should emphasize the most captivating parts of your idea, according to Horn.

To submit your idea to Huffington Post, you fill out a Google Form similar to the one Forbes uses. There is a blank on the post for the final draft of your proposed 500 to 1000-word post, which you include right on the form.

publishing-your-content-on-huffington-post-for-how-to-get-your-content-published-3

Bare in mind that you won’t hear back from Huffington Post unless they’re interested in publishing your content.

Publishing your content on Business Insider

A few years back, Thenuka Karunaratne, founder of AdMark Technologies, was determined to have his product featured in Business Insider (and other prominent online publications) on essentially no budget.

In addition to stories about technology, business, and celebrities, Business Insider will also run compelling profile pieces, which can be an option if you have a gripping personal story to tell.

If you’re interested in having your content viewed by the tens of millions of readers who use Business Insider every month, your first stop should be at the How to Contribute to Business Insider page.

You won’t submit a pitch, but will send the final, polished draft of your content to contributors@businessinsider.com. Along with the content itself, include a headline, links to other content of yours, and a brief bio.

Here you can see a feature on Karunaratne’s product in Business Insider from earlier this year:

publishing-your-content-on-business-insider-for-how-to-get-your-content-published-2

If they’re interested, they say they’ll get back to you, but Karunaratne did not know his content had been accepted and published until he found it by Googling the topic.

He also says that Business Insider will sometimes pick up stories from other major sites, and publish content to their international editions as well.

Additionally, Karunaratne says pitching his content (whether to Business Insider or another publication) on Sunday worked well for him, allowing outlets to pick up a story as it gained traction throughout the workweek.

Other publication options

Another option you may consider for content that can be republished is publishing it on a site like Medium. It’s currently a hot platform and has a large audience, plus republishing is mostly a simple matter of copying and pasting.

Many people worry about Google penalizing them for “duplicate content,” but that penalty may not mean what you think it means. Google is fine with you syndicating your content on multiple sites, and will show the version they believe is most appropriate for each searcher, though that may not be the version you prefer. They recommend including a link back to your original article in your syndicated content.

Medium only requires that you create an account in order to publish content there, and you can create an account with Twitter, Facebook, Google, or with your email:

other-publication-options-for-how-to-get-your-content-published-2

Content posted or republished on Medium gains traction based on the interest and engagement it receives, and article lengths are flexible. Before publishing something, you should check out this 3 min read, on the official Medium blog to gain an idea of what is trending on the site.

After making the effort to create powerful, engaging content, you naturally want it to reach the largest audience. It’s not necessarily easy to have your article on Huffington Post or Forbes, but it can certainly be done if you follow various sites’ instructions carefully and submit content that resonates with their readership.

If you’re ready to get serious about content marketing, we invite you to receive three high-performance content ideas that will raise your brand’s profile.

Guest Author: Mary Hiers is a content writer for Media Shower and founder of Kittenheel Enterprises. If she’s not in front of a keyboard, she’s probably with her dogs at the dog park or reading mid-20th century European history. Her superpower is the ability to fold fitted sheets.

The post How to Get Your Content Published on Forbes, Huffington Post, and Business Insider appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.



from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2kwYDeL via Affiliate Marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2k6hQ68