суббота, 30 сентября 2017 г.

How to Turn Your Instagram Profile into a QR Code

We live in world and a social web that is a whirlpool of innovation and creativity.

Every day via the blogs I read, the tweets that I glimpse and the emails that arrive in my inbox, I see an array of ideas that makes my head spin with amazement.

How to Turn Your Instagram Profile into a QR Code

Who would have thought that an online pinboard would attract nearly 20 million people a month sharing photos. It sounds like an idea that could have originated after a few drinks down at the local bar!

That is a social media platform called “Pinterest“.

Who would imagine that a social mobile app that can be shared from your phone to Facebook and Twitter, would attract 40 million users a month in less than 2 years, have a library of over 1 billion photos and then be bought by Facebook for $1 billion.

That app’s name is “Instagram“.

Who could have dreamed that a social media platform that allows you to upload your PowerPoint business presentations ( 9 million to date) and publishes them on the web for all to see would attract 29 million unique visitors a month and be snapped up by LinkedIn for $118 million.

This is a social media site called “Slideshare

Sometimes the simplest focused ideas are the best and those ideas are increasingly in the mobile and social innovation ecosystems.

The Social and Mobile Media Addiction

We live in a world where we are can’t get enough of our mobiles and social networks where we publish media in all its formats that continues to define us and displays our lives to the planet of 7 billion people.

A startup called scan.me founded by Garret Gee, Kirk Ouimet and Ben Turley in 2011, was based on the concept of simplifying the creation of QR codes using a mobile iPhone and iPad app.

The idea was to use simple online and mobile tools to give users a better option for scanning QR codes, and to offer a polished option for businesses that wanted to create those codes.

In its first 12 months Scan.me had 10 million downloads!

How to Turn Your Instagram Profile into a QR Code

Scan.me has just decided, for a bit of technological fun to create a  “ScantoGram” website that turns your “Instagram Profile” into a QR code.

Here is the Jeff Bullas ScantoGram which I created.

Jeff Bullas scantogram

Stage 1: Scan to Gram

Scan to Gram has just been created and they recently did this at a company hackathon where they built out the super-super simple web app.

It allows a user to create a page with Instagram-ified QR Codes, which allow an auto-follow on Instagram.

As an example:

  • Say there are 15 Instagrammers whose content blows you away.
  • With Scan to Gram, you can create a page to share those 15 people’s content.
  • You’ll then have a site, (eg. http://ift.tt/2x5q0OV) that you can share with others, and that will be filled with Instagram-ified QR codes.
  • As you mouse over a profile the image flips and the QR code is revealed which you scan with your mobile scan.me scanning app.
  • Anybody who scans those QR codes using a QR code reading app will auto-follow the person on Instagram.

To view my Scan to Gram website to see how it works click here.

This website is a bit of fun but it provides an insight into what potentially can be done.

They have much bigger plans to take the technology to a new level of social engagement.

Future Stage 2: QR Codes Meets Social Commerce

This is where scan.me says it will get super-exciting. They are planning to marry QR Codes with social commerce.

They haven’t revealed anything more than that at this stage and their simple Scan to Gram example and it may get your ideas and creative juices flowing.

The Scan.me venture is being taken very seriously and is getting some attention from the big boys in Silicon Valley.

In February Google Ventures and Shervin Pishevar’s Menlo Talent Fund invested $1.7 million in Scan.me.

So take a mobile app, make it social add some media and keep it easy and you never know what may happen

I will bring you more of this as it happens

What about You?

Are you adapting to this social mobile revolution.

How do you think social commerce will evolve. We are seeing glimpses of how it is panning out on Pinterest.

How will a social commerce QR code ecosystem pan out.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

More reading

The post How to Turn Your Instagram Profile into a QR Code appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.



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Update Your Online Marketing Strategy with These 10 Tips

Here are some new ways to update your online marketing from members of the online … And affiliate marketing can be a huge part of your strategy.

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50+ Affiliate Marketing Mistakes and How to Rectify Them (Part-1)

Affiliate = Attachment with a larger body In affiliate marketing, you as a person, join a big network and promote their products to potential clients by …

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пятница, 29 сентября 2017 г.

Affiliate Migration Program

We provide an individualized, step-by-step migration solution for a seamless transition from your current provider to our network. Step 1: Analysis

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Adobe retail report: mobile visits will pass desktop soon

… social media, affiliate marketing, and it’s the push and pull of how much do get from one to another, but they’re all important in my overall program.

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Affiliate marketing strategies for success during the holidays

The holidays are just around the corner and will be in full force before we know it. Columnist Adam Weiss outlines key strategies to help you prepare …

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Senior Affiliate Manager

We are looking for a highly motivated, ambitious, positive minded individual to join our Affiliate Marketing team in a senior account manager role.

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Used Future Is Our Brand of the Week & Here's Some of the Brand's Best Product

As the name implies, Used Future is a brand with a sense of humor. Founded in 2009 in Seoul, South Korea, Used Future refines menswear, but on its …

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Rakuten Marketing Launches Customized Dashboards for Brands

The Rakuten Marketing Partnership Dashboard better positions advertisers to engage partners who aren’t already familiar with affiliate marketing by …

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Esports Entertainment Group, Inc sign affiliate deal with Better Collective

Esports Entertainment Group, Inc has signed another deal prior to launch, this time signing an Affiliate Marketing Agreement with Better Collective, one …

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Here Are Our Must-Have Picks From Virgil Abloh's OFF-WHITE FW17 Collection

Our designated shopping section features products that we love and want to share with you. Highsnobiety has affiliate marketing partnerships, which …

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Sophie Personne to Speak at the 50th iDate Dating Industry Conference in London on October 3-4 ...

The event discusses online dating, mobile dating, social dating, speed dating, affiliate marketing, matchmaking, software and other forms of the …

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10 Ways Social Media is Transforming our World

I feel more calm about our future than ever before.

10 Ways Social Media is Transforming our Culture and World

The Internet has saved our asses, and we should celebrate.
I’ve been on the Web for a long time, but every once in a while I have one of those tremendous moments when I have a mental flashback to these last 20 or so years…  It happened today… one of my favorite Adele songs, writ large in a YouTube fan culture spectacular.

Someone had pruned the 71 best YouTube covers of the track from the 350,000 or so available.

Woven into a mash-up of all the covers in perfect synchrony.

A Snippet of Magic

I think it must have been magic that produced it.

I mean, even if I had the skill, would I spend that time on a small gift to the Internet?

But that’s what we’ve been doing. Building a capability network of epic proportions.

Leveraging the power of six degrees of separation.

Uniting in common purpose and effort in ways that we had been rapidly losing.

New Possibilities Created by Connections

Here are 10 ways I see us transforming as a culture, based on the possibilities now afforded to us by connections and technology:

1. Challenging the Status Quo

Before we could reach out to anyone on the planet, did we ever see anything as amazing as the projects and successes associated with challenged paradigms in the world?  With collective marketplaces that match previously disconnected buyers and sellers, fans of every color, ‘it takes a village‘ projects like Open Source, and collective effort never before seen in the world.  We are challenging the status quo, building things, creating things, connecting with each other, self-organizing around important issues, and yes, changing the world little bit by little bit.

2. Changed by Exposure to Diversity

We pay attention to the small details of people’s lives, delight over their family photos, and share at the level of family with a whole bunch of people.  We’re supported when we need to be. We talk about issues and conundrums and joys.  People are connecting and being exposed to both comfortable and diverse perspectives.

That will serve us well.

3. Support is Now Visible

We support people and things we like, on sites like Digg and Reddit

4. Learn More from Each Other

We learn from each other. You can find everything from make-up tips to channeled extraterrestrial messages on YouTube. And if you have ever doubted that kids are learning things these days, check out this very interesting exchange between a student and his English teacher.

5. Crowd Sourced Wisdom

We share our knowledge, wisdom and experiences. Quora is a place where you can ask any question in the world, and expect a reasonable answer.

6. Creativity  and Inspiration is Unleashed

We share our creative ideas and inspirations. Pinterest has redefined the digital portfolio/catalog.

7. Increased Appreciation of the Unique and Handmade

We still have a healthy respect for the unique and the handmade.  Etsy has enabled many a domestic entrepreneur and infused our culture with an amazing richness of creativity.

8. Truth is Exposed

We still haunt Twitter waiting for a cause or idea to support.  Retweets are our weapon in an effort to expose information and transform thinking.  It’s still an incredibly powerful tool, as its signal can not be easily stopped (following censorship laws or not).  ‘Can’t stop the signal!’

9. We are More Authentic

People in the social media space are finally talking more about authenticity, which might help minimize some of the junkier parts of our lovely information city.

10. Anyone can Contribute

We acknowledge that everyone has something to contribute, as long as you’re nice about it.

Tools for Total Transformation of Our World

I’ve been commenting on the Internet and its specifics for a while.  But for now I just want to comment on the wonder of it all.  That in our hands we have a tool that could allow a total transformation of our world, by first transforming our values through visceral experiences and real-time sharing of information.  The Planned Parenthood debacle (and the response to it) is an incredible example of this in action.

We vote with our clicks, and that’s some real power.

All of this underscored by a documentary I watched today.  It’s one of those everyday miracles of the Internet era.  A creation that just a couple of decades ago would have cost many thousands to produce.  Now all you need is the motivation and the time.

The Power to Reach Anyone

But more importantly, here’s how the Internet has changed us: we have been given power to reach anyone, tools to do it with, and reasons to think we might effect change with a vote, e-mail or blog post.  Changing people’s minds and seeing consciousness grow is one of the delights of information mavens.

Relishing in diverse and divergent thinking is another

We are having conversations in unparalleled ways with unparalleled access to the people and forces who can help create change.  We are also increasingly choosing the information we choose to expose ourselves to, and that’s a very good thing.

Now if we could only start getting paid for our contributions…but OMG, I can help change the world, just by using this far-reaching Internet voice.

That’s amazing.

Guest Author: Lisa Galarneau is a socio-cultural anthropologist who studies emerging cultures and trends in technology, information and media.

More Reading

Image by h.koppdelaney

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How to Get 10,000 Facebook Fans in 72 Hours

Patience. It is a virtue I don’t have.

So when I wanted to grow my audience quickly before my current book launch, I started researching growth hacks. I had a few requirements for what I was looking for:

  • It couldn’t take a lot of time to execute. I run three companies, am a published author, have two kids and occasionally like to see my husband, so time is limited. This hack had to be quick.
  • It had to be easy. I am not a techie and my tech team is busy working on client accounts, so this had to be simple. And yes, I could have hired someone, but I wanted to make sure I could personally do this hack so I could share it with our students as a strategy they could use when I found what worked.
  • There had to be ROI. Audience growth is great, but you can’t use audience to pay for your next vacation or hire your next employee. The growth strategies had to be ROI positive.
  • It had to work quickly. I started this project in June and our launch started just a few months later, so this had to work quickly. And as mentioned before, I am not patient, so speed was a must.

When I was in my research phase, I uncovered a way to grow Facebook fans (qualified fans) for less than one penny each. I was skeptical at first because I had tried for years to get Facebook fans and grow my audience.

Why was my own worst skeptic?

It had taken me 5 years to get to 10,000 and it cost me thousands of dollars because fans came in at $3 to $5 each.

Is growing your Facebook fans worth doing?

I had first heard about growing your fan count from New York Times Best-Selling Author and motivation guy, Brendon Burchard, when he spoke at a conference.

From stage he talked about how when he got over 100,000 fans, his reach multiplied. He had more sales and had a bonus perk of getting free stuff sent to him. Just like the iPhone before it came out on the market.

I mean, that sounded pretty fantastic. I was intrigued for sure. But I was unable to grow in a way that I could afford. Until now.

In the last 90 days, my fan count has grow to over 270,000 fans and I am bringing them in for less than 1 penny each. And these aren’t bots, or fake fans.

They are real people who are buying our products, programs, and services. In fact, we have tracked the results and for every dollar we spend getting fans, we get $7.56 back. Try getting those odds in Vegas.

You start first by targeting a worldwide audience and then once you grow it to 2,000 new fans, you flip over the targeting to your exact perfect target customer.

It’s a little unknown setting in the ads manager that does the trick.

Jeff Bullas did the challenge and got 10,272 new fans for $173.85. That is 1.69 cents per like.

How do you convert Facebook fan visits into revenue?

You can monetize these fans through your lead capture spots on your Facebook Page, the cover photo, the Call to Action Button, the “About,” and the “long story description.”

Send them to something that is so good that they’d pay you for it, if it weren’t free. But it is free. All you are doing is asking for their contact information.

We have had people with 5 fans go through the program and those with thousands go through it. And it works. Every time.

When is the last time, you tried a marketing strategy and 10 minutes after launching, it started to work?

The only warning is that you will become a bit addicted to checking the numbers as your fan count rises. Just ask Jeff…

To get the full step-by-step and get your 10,000 fans in the next 72 hours, get a copy of my latest book.

Game Changer: How to get 10,000 new real fans in 72 hours and turn them into your next cash-paying customers (Without a marketing budget)

Get it free here.

About Kim Walsh Phillips:

Kim Walsh Phillips, @KWalshPhillips, is the world’s #1 expert at direct response social media. She is the CEO of Elite Digital Group, a direct response social media agency and co-hosts the Morning Coffee Marketer podcast on iTunes. Her two best-selling books are “The No B.S. Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing,” with Dan Kennedy, and “The Ultimate Guide to Instagram for Business.”

You can get her latest release, “Game Changer: How to get 10,000 new real fans in 72 hours and turn them into your next cash-paying customers (Without a marketing budget)” for free here.

The post How to Get 10,000 Facebook Fans in 72 Hours appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.



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Comms Pro Åsa Hillsten joins Catena as Head of Investor Relations

Stockholm-listed industry affiliate marketing network Catena Media has confirmed the appointment of Åsa Hillsten as its new Head of Investor …

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Ramp Up Your Affiliate Marketing with Affiliate Summit West

Are you just getting into affiliate marketing? Or needing to ramp up your efforts? Affiliate Summit West is for you.

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Internet and Mobile Association of India to host biggest affiliate get-together in Oct

This summit is the premiere offline meeting point for affiliate marketers to gather, where elites from the industry will discuss innovations, dissect …

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National Public Radio, wine seller? Yep.

Now, in the parlance of a public media story, “it remains to be seen” whether affiliate marketing can rescue a journalism industry that has undergone …

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Paid Social for Content Marketing Launches - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KaneJamison

Stuck in a content marketing rut? Relying on your existing newsletter, social followers, or email outreach won’t do your launches justice. Boosting your signal with paid social both introduces your brand to new audiences and improves your launch’s traffic and results. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, we’re welcoming back our good friend Kane Jamison to highlight four straightforward, actionable tactics you can start using ASAP.

Paid social for content marketing launches

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



Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Kane. I’m the founder of a content marketing agency here in Seattle called Content Harmony, and we do a lot of content marketing projects where we use paid social to launch them and get better traffic and results.

So I spoke about this, this past year at MozCon, and what I want to do today is share some of those tactics with you and help you get started with launching your content with some paid traction and not just relying on your email outreach or maybe your own existing email newsletter and social followers.

Especially for a lot of companies that are just getting started with content marketing, that audience development component is really important. A lot of people just don’t have a significant market share of their industry subscribed to their newsletter. So it’s great to use paid social in order to reach new people, get them over to your most important content projects, or even just get them over to your week-to-week blog content.

Social teaser content

So the first thing I want to start with is expanding a little bit beyond just your average image ad. A lot of social networks, especially Facebook, are promoting video heavily nowadays. You can use that to get a lot cheaper engagement than you can from a typical image ad. If you’ve logged in to your Facebook feed lately, you’ve probably noticed that aside from birth announcements, there’s a lot of videos filling up the feed. So as an advertiser, if you want to blend in well with that, using video as a teaser or a sampler for the content that you’re producing is a great way to kind of look natural and look like you belong in the user’s feed.

So different things you can do include:

  • Short animated videos explaining what the project is and why you did it.
  • Maybe doing talking head videos with some of your executives or staff or marketing team, just talking on screen with whatever in the background about the project you created and kind of drumming up interest to actually get people over to the site.
So that can be really great for team recognition if you’re trying to build thought leadership in your space. It’s a great way to introduce the face of your team members that might be speaking at industry conferences and events. It’s a great way to just get people recognizing their name or maybe just help them feel closer to your company because they recognize their voice and face.


So everybody’s instant reaction, of course, is, “I don’t have the budget for video.” That’s okay. You don’t need to be a videography expert to create decent social ads. There’s a lot of great tools out there.

  • Soapbox by Wistia is a great one, that’s been released recently, that allows you to do kind of a webcam combined with your browser type of video. There are also tools like…
  • Bigvu.tv
  • Shakr
  • Promo, which is a tool by a company called Slidely, I think.

All of those tools are great ways to create short, 20-second, 60-second types of videos. They let you create captions. So if you’re scrolling through a social feed and you see an autoplay video, there’s a good chance that the audio on that is turned off, so you can create captions to let people know what the video is about if it’s not instantly obvious from the video itself. So that’s a great way to get cheaper distribution than you might get from your typical image ad, and it’s really going to stick out to users because most other companies aren’t spending the time to do that.

Lookalike audiences

Another really valuable tactic is to create lookalike audiences from your best customers. Now, you can track your best customers in a couple of ways:
  • You could have a pixel, a Facebook pixel or another network pixel on your website that just tracks the people that have been to the site a number of times or that have been through the shopping cart at a certain dollar value.
  • We can take our email list and use the emails of customers that have ordered from us or just the emails of customers that are on our newsletter that seem like they open up every newsletter and they really like our content.

We can upload those into a custom audience in the social network of our choice and then create what’s called a lookalike audience. In this case, I’d recommend what’s called a “one percent lookalike audience.” So if you’re targeting people in the US, it means the one percent of people in the US that appear most like your audience. So if your audience is men ages 35 to 45, typically that are interested in a specific topic, the lookalike audience will probably be a lot of other men in a similar age group that like similar topics.

So Facebook is making that choice, which means you may or may not get the perfect audience right from the start. So it’s great to test additional filters on top of the default lookalike audience. So, for example, you could target people by household income. You could target people by additional interests that may or may not be obvious from the custom audience, just to make sure you’re only reaching the users that are interested in your topic. Whatever it might be, if this is going to end up being three or four million people at one percent of the country, it’s probably good to go ahead and filter that down to a smaller audience that’s a little bit closer to your exact target that you want to reach. So excellent way to create brand awareness with that target audience.

Influencers

The next thing I’d like you to test is getting your ads and your content in front of influencers in your space. That could mean…
  • Bloggers
  • Journalists
  • Or it could just mean people like page managers in Facebook, people that have access to a Facebook page that can share updates. Those could be social media managers. That could be bloggers. That could even be somebody running the page for the local church or a PTA group. Regardless, those people are probably going to have a lot of contacts, be likely to share things with friends and family or followers on social media.

Higher cost but embedded value

When you start running ads to this type of group, you’re going to find that it costs a little bit more per click. If you’re used to paying $0.50 to $1.00 per click, you might end up paying $1.00 or $2.00 per click to reach this audience. That’s okay. There’s a lot more embedded value with this audience than the typical user, because they’re likely, on average, to have more reach, more followers, more influence.

Test share-focused CTAs

It’s worth testing share focus call to actions. What that means is encouraging people to share this with some people they know that might be interested. Post it to their page even is something worth testing. It may or may not work every time, but certainly valuable to test.

Filters

So the way we recommend reaching most of these users is through something like a job title filter. Somebody says they’re a blogger, says they’re an editor-in-chief, that’s the clearest way to reach them. They may not always have that as their job title, so you could also do employers. That’s another good example.

I recommend combining that with broad interests. So if I am targeting journalists because I have a new research piece out, it’s great for us to attach interests that are relevant to our space. If we’re in health care, we might target people interested in health care and the FDA and other big companies in the space that they’d likely be following for updates. If we’re in fashion, we might just be selecting people that are fans of big brands, Nordstrom and others like that. Whatever it is, you can take this audience of a few hundred thousand or whatever it might be down to just a few thousand and really focus on the people that are most likely to be writing about or influential in your space.

Retarget non-subscribers

The fourth thing you can test is retargeting non-subscribers. So a big goal of content marketing is having those pop-ups or call to actions on the site to get people to download a bigger piece of content, download a checklist, whatever it might be so that we can get them on our email newsletter. There’s a lot of people that are going to click out of that. 90% to 95% of the people that visit your site or more probably aren’t going to take that call to action.


So what we can do is convert this into more of a social ad unit and just show the same messaging to the people that didn’t sign up on the site. Maybe they just hate pop-ups by default. They will never sign up for them. That’s okay. They might be more receptive to a lead ad in Facebook that says “subscribe” or “download” instead of something that pops up on their screen.

Keep testing new messaging

The other thing we can do is start testing new messages and new content. Maybe this offer wasn’t interesting to them because they don’t need that guide, but maybe they need your checklist instead, or maybe they’d just like your email drip series that has an educational component to it. So keep testing different types of messaging. Just because this one wasn’t valuable doesn’t mean your other content isn’t interesting to them, and it doesn’t mean they’re not interested in your email list.

Redo split tests from your site

We can keep testing messaging. So if we are testing messaging on our site, we might take the top two or three and test that messaging on ads. We might find that different messaging works better on social than it does on pop-ups or banners on the site. So it’s worth redoing split tests that seemed conclusive on your site because things might be different on the social media network.


So that’s it for today. What I’d love for you guys to do is if you have some great examples of targeting that’s worked for you, messaging that’s worked for you, or just other paid social tactics that have worked really well for your content marketing campaigns, I’d love to hear examples of that in the comments on the post, and we’d be happy to answer questions you guys have on how to actually get some of this stuff done. Whether it’s targeting questions, how to set up lookalike audiences, anything like that, we’d be happy to answer questions there as well.

So that’s it for me today. Thanks, Moz fans. We’ll see you next time.


Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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четверг, 28 сентября 2017 г.

The Top 11 Live Chat Software Solutions To Skyrocket Conversion Rates

The Top 11 Live Chat Software Solutions To Skyrocket Conversion Rates

It’s a brave new world out there.

Live chat software solutions are an essential part of successfully running a business these days. They allow companies to communicate with their website visitors and customers in real time using chat windows. You probably already know that they can skyrocket conversion rates when used correctly.

This isn’t surprising news. After all, live chat software allows live chat agents and customer service representatives to quickly and efficiently assist customers in acquiring the information or answers they have come for.

However, there are a lot of live chat software solutions to choose from, and it seems like every second minute another platform releases another product onto the market with different fancy-looking features.

So, let’s separate the wheat from the chaff today, and explore the top live chat software solutions on the market at the present time.

Obviously every software has its pros and cons, both for operators and customers, but one thing they should all have in common is an intuitive interface and responsive design. A poorly designed or hard-to-use chat screen is potentially worse than no live chat software at all.

Without further ado, here are the most innovative, scaleable and mobile-friendly options for your business.

1. LiveChat

LiveChat is a premium live chat and help desk software solution for business use. The software helps customers obtain the answers they seek to questions and concerns in next to no time.

By acquiring this software, you will join a community of more than 18,000 companies hailing from 140+ countries who have been using LiveChat for quite some time now. It’s well-established in the marketplace and it offers a plethora of benefits to its target market.

Its chat bot responses are way quicker than an email and even more efficient than the smartest smartphone out there.

2. Zendesk Chat

If you are want to genuinely engage with your customers in real time, then Zendesk Chat is the software for you. The software formerly known as ‘Zopim’ excels at connecting enterprises with their intended audience, enhancing business and brand awareness, and facilitating a personalized experience for each customer.

Its tools allow you to use proactive chat that promotes automation. The automation, in turn, gives you the opportunity to answer your customers even before they ask a question. The impressive dashboard helps you track and monitor your website visitors. The powerful metrics and quality reports generated provide deep insights into customer satisfaction, individual agent’s performance, and potential problems well before complications arise.

3. Cugic

Cugic is a premium live chat and help desk software that serves companies of all sizes. Considered a mighty Zopim alternative, the simplicity and brilliance of Cugic is its ability to effortlessly transform your website visitors into loyal brand customers.

The versatile software helps businesses modify their chat experience more effectively by sending proactive and customized chat invitations, accessing a plethora of reports, acquire admin rights, and much more. It allows agents to chat with a number of customers simultaneously and therefore provide instant responses to a large number of queries at the same time.

The software also offers various types of useful reports, the ability to integrate with your preferred social mediums, and a comprehensive call support service from Cugic staff.

4. Zoho SalesIQ

A hassle-free live chat software that aims to track visitors for your business and boost your revenue growth, Zoho SalesIQ enables chat agents to locate new as well as returning visitors and devise personalized chats for them. It  can help your business understand how users move in real time and enable you to engage in more proactive conversations with them.

As the name ‘Zoho SalesIQ’ suggests, this live chat software also enhances the ROI of your content, AdWords, SEO, and email marketing strategy.

5. Userlike Live Chat

Userlike is a web and mobile support application that caters to industries such as online shops, software vendors and online service providers. This software is specifically used in a large number of online businesses that aim to sell complex offerings through the web.

A customer can come from anywhere, which is why Userlike is compatible across any device. Whether the customer is interacting through a laptop, home system, tablet or a smartphone, this software promises to provide a great user experience for all.

6. Pure Chat

Pure Chat was designed specifically for start-ups and individual sales/advertising teams who are trying to speed up their lead generation process, and acquire maximum sales for their business. Clients can use the live chat and visitor tracking software to engage with their target market with ease.

Rather than asking the agent to spend countless hours on a phone with different customers, the software can be simply used to communicate with multiple leads and customers at once.

7. Intercom

Intercom creates and facilitates the perfect blend of a simple, personalized and friendly messages. The live chat software is a stand-out platform that enables sales, marketing, and support personnel to communicate with users in the most problem-solving manner possible.

That’s because Intercom offers a plethora of features for live chat, on-boarding and retention, and customer support that calls for highly proactive communication with the aim of helping users with their concerns and turning them into a valuable customer base.

8. Olark

Want to know who’s has just arrived at your website and what he/she is looking for? Then Olark is the software you need to use! This easy-to-install software provides the quickest route possible to chat with your customers.

Olark also provides a plethora of customization features that allow agents to use attractive themes, text, and language, and an effective API all to enhance the overall aesthetic appeal of the interface.

9. Drift

Drift is a state-of-the-art live chat software solution that enables businesses to communicate with online users in real-time, convert additional leads, and make subsequent sales without using traditional forms or endless email newsletters.

It’s highly customizable features mean there’s no chance you’ll miss a message, regardless of whether the user is online or not. Obtaining the right help, at the right place, at the right time all falls under the umbrella of Drift.

10. Comm100 Live Chat

Generally speaking, Comm100 Live Chat is useful for any industry that wants more online interaction and engagement with their target audience. It is an enterprise-grade live support solution that works to provide businesses a tool for real time online customer engagement with the aim to facilitate conversions, transactions, and acquire eventual customer satisfaction.

Primarily used by ecommerce businesses, Comm100 Live Chat is often used to spot and convert potential prospects into customers, along with helping sales professionals in registering customers’ concerns in real time and provide relevant solutions in accord.

11. SnapEngage

SnapEngage purposefully encourages sales and support teams to provide a better-than-before support and experience to website visitors and is designed to serve companies of all sizes.

Several key features of the software include a powerful CRM, help desk integration, Call-Me, SMS-to-Chat and a vigilantly personalized chat experience through a creative design studio.

Furthermore, a thorough analytics and reporting tool also allows agents to monitor the performance of the website and their visitors.

Conclusion

In order to communicate with a global audience in a free, personalized and seamless way, live chat agents need to realize the changing preferences and conversion approaches for customer interaction and engagement.

When the purpose is rightfully served using a smart live chat software solution, your business or company will be better able to respond to users’ problems, provide the right consultancies, make healthier leads, and eventually register a higher revenue increase.

Guest Author: Judy Alex is a Senior Research Writer employed at Ingic, a leading Android app development agency. She is a digital marketing enthusiast and a passionate writer with over six years’ of professional experience. She regularly writes blogs regarding development and design items in the digital marketing industry and uses technology to help businesses enhance nd expand their online brand presence. You can connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post The Top 11 Live Chat Software Solutions To Skyrocket Conversion Rates appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.



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Affiliate Marketing Meets Influencers

The crossroads of affiliate marketing and influencer marketing is here. Merchants are testing ways to merge the channels to create sales. The word …

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Esports Entertainment Group Signs World Leading Super Affiliate, Better Collective, Anticipates ...

The Company anticipates this Affiliate Marketing Agreement will generate 50,000 new customers for Esports Entertainment Group in its first full year.

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1 Plugin for Product Affiliate Marketing

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Bitcoin Affiliate Marketing

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Rakuten Marketing Launches Customized Dashboards for Brands; New Feature Creates Branded ...

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Comparing Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Digital River (DRIV)

It provides a range of marketing services including paid search advertising, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, store optimization and …

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The 7 Best Sneakers from Trail Running Brand HOKA ONE ONE

There’s been hype building around stylish trail sneakers of late. Not to be confused with boots, these shoes, just like sneakers, come in a wide variety …

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среда, 27 сентября 2017 г.

20 Amazing Sites That Will Pay You $100+ Per Article

Sites that will pay you header image

Content is more important than ever.

Research from the Content Marketing Institute reveals that at least 55% of companies will  increase their content marketing budget this year.

Whether you’re a writer looking for established outlets to spread the word, or you’re a guest blogger looking to promote your brand and get traffic, you can get paid to do so.

Many sites will pay you to contribute content, while still allowing you to have a bio and retain a link to your site – but very few sites will pay you really well.

Listed below are 20 sites that will pay you at least $100 per article, upon acceptance or publication, and most will allow a bio with a link back to your site.

I also have a bonus for you at the end of this article, so look out for that!

Here we go.

1. A Fine Parent

A Fine Parent - sites that will pay you

Niche: Parenting

Amount: $100 (potential $200 bonus)

Payment Method: Paypal

A Fine Parent is a leading parenting blog that focuses on helping people become better parents.

They are looking for in-depth parenting articles about your own experience, or about other parent’s struggles that you can empathize and connect with.

Every month, they list a topic for articles that you have to write on, and they’ll pay you once your article is accepted.

They expect articles to be around 1,500 – 3,000 words, and they pay $100 per article. You’ll also be awarded a bonus of $200 if your article becomes the most popular article at the end of the year.

2. eCommerce Insiders

ecommerce insiders sites that will pay you

Niche: Online retail/commerce

Amount: $75 – $125

Payment Method: Unspecified

eCommerce Insiders is an authority  about online retail, and they are looking for content that is retailed-focused or commentary on retail industry news and trends.

They pay $75 per article for accepted articles in the 400 – 600 words range, and $125 per article for articles above 600 words.

3. Listverse

Listverse - sites that will pay you

Niche: General

Amount: $100

Payment Method: Paypal/Bitcoin

Listverse is possibly the foremost authority when it comes to lists online, and they boast an audience of over 15 million readers a month.

They are looking for unique lists of 10 items, usually at least 1,500 words, and they pay $100 upon acceptance of your list.

4. The Penny Hoarder

The Penny Hoarder - sites that will pay you

Niche: Finance

Amount: Up to $75

Payment Method: Paypal

The Penny Hoarder is a leading personal finance publication, and they are looking for articles mostly based on personal experience. Especially ones containing detailed numbers, strategies and advice about saving or earning money.

They prefer articles to be 700 – 900 words, and they pay up to $75 per article depending on a lot of factors; you might need to reach out to their editor first to discuss payment.

5. Photoshop Tutorials

Photoshop Tutorials - sites that will pay you

Niche: Photoshop/Design

Amount: $25 – $300

Payment Method: Paypal

They are looking for tutorials related to Photoshop, and they pay anything from $50 to $300 per accepted article depending on whether you submit a “quick tip” or a full tutorial.

6. Treehouse

Treehouse - sites that will pay you

Niche: Design/Freelance

Amount: $100 – $200

Payment Method: Unspecified

They accept articles on a range of topics including anything design related, freelancing or productivity.

They pay $100 – $200 for every article published.

7. The Travel Writer’s Life

The Travel Writer's Life - sites that will pay you

Niche: Travel

Amount: $50 – $200

Payment Method: Unspecified

They are looking for articles about the business of getting paid to travel, whether this is through writing, photography, tours or other means.

They pay $50 – $200 per article depending on the type of article.

8. Viator Travel Blog

Viator Travel Blog - sites that will pay you

Niche: Travel

Amount: $40 – $150

Payment Method: Unspecified

They are looking for articles that share an insider’s view of travel, and they typically prefer submissions to be around 1,000 – 2,000 words.

They pay $40 – $150 depending on the type of article.

9. UX Booth

UX Booth - sites that will pay you

Niche: User Experience

Amount: $100

Payment Method: Unspecified

UX Booth is an authority when it comes to User Experience, and they are looking for research-backed articles on how to create better user experience.

They prefer articles to be in the 1,200 – 1,800 words range.

10. Cracked

Cracked - sites that will pay you

Niche: General/Humor

Amount: $50 – $200

Payment Method: Paypal

Cracked is looking for funny and clever articles, mainly in list format, and they pay $50 – $200 per article depending on the type of article.

11. Tuts+ Code

Tuts+ Code - sites that will pay you

Niche: Web Development

Amount: $100 – $250

Payment Method: Unspecified

They are looking for articles on anything related to web development; this could be PHP, HTML5, CSS3 or anything in between.

They pay $100 for a “quick tip” tutorial and $250 for a regular tutorial.

12. Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine - sites that will pay you

Niche: Design/Coding/User Experience

Amount: $50 – $200

Payment Method: Unspecified

Smashing Magazine is looking for articles related to web design, graphic design, UX design, WordPress or mobile, and they pay $50 – $200 per article.

13. A List Apart

A List Apart - sites that will pay

Niche: Internet

Amount: $200

Payment Method: Unspecified

They accept articles about coding, design, content strategy, user experience and basically anything in the internet industry/business.

They prefer articles to be between 1,500 to 2,000 words and they pay $200 per article within a month of publication.

14. Write Naked

Write Naked - sites that will pay you

Niche: Writing

Amount: $50 – $200

Payment Method: Unspecified

Write Naked is looking for articles related to the writing business; this includes interviews with key writing figures, publishing trends, or success stories from successful indie authors.

15. Metro Parent

Metro Parent - sites that will pay you

Niche: Parenting

Amount: $35 – $350

Payment Method: Check

Metro Parent is a leading parenting publication looking for parenting articles. They pay $35 – $350 per article and they want features to be within 1,000 – 2,500 words.

They have a preference for articles from local freelance writers in the following communities: Livingston, Macomb, Oakland, Washtenaw and Wayne Counties.

They pay via check upon publication of your article, within the first week of the month of publication.

16. International Living

International Living - sites that will pay you

Niche: Living Overseas

Amount: $250 – $400

Payment Method: Unspecified

International Living is a publication focusing on living and retiring overseas, and they are looking for articles about living and retiring overseas.

They pay $250 for 840 words, and $400 for 1,400 words. They also pay $50 for one-time use of your photographs, and they pay upon publication of your article.

17. Sitepoint

Sitepoint - sites that will pay you

Niche: Web Development

Amount: $150 – $200

Payment Method: Unspecified

Sitepoint is an authority when it comes to web development, and they are looking for in-depth articles about HTML, CSS and SASS.

They pay $150 for articles and $200 for tutorials, and they often pay more for articles that are more comprehensive and that they feel will do well traffic-wise.

18. Digital Ocean

Digital Ocean - sites that will pay you

Niche: Linux

Amount: $50 – $200

Payment Method: Paypal

Digital Ocean is looking for beautifully-written tutorials about Linux and FreeBSD cloud hosting and, besides potentially gaining exposure to their millions of readers, you can also make up to $200 per article.

Your article can come in the form of Updates, Simple Tutorials and In-Depth Tutorials, and you can earn $50, $100 or $200 respectively depending on what category it falls into.

19. Tuts+ Vector

Tuts+ Vector - sites that will pay you

Niche: Vector

Amount: $50 – $200

Payment Method: Unspecified

Tuts+ Vector is looking for articles related to Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, CorelDRAW and other vector-related tutorials.

They pay $50 – $200 depending on the nature of your contribution.

20. Tuts+ WP

Tuts+ WP - sites that will pay you

Niche: WordPress

Amount: $60 – $500

Payment Method: Unspecified

Also a part of the Tuts+ network, Tuts+ WP is looking for articles related to WordPress; this could be WordPress 3.7+ tutorials, plugin development tutorials/tips and other WordPress related articles.

They pay $60 – $500 per article depending on the type of article.

Bonus: 110 Websites that Pay You to Write [PDF]

Do you love the above list? Awesome. There’s more where that came from.

As a bonus to Jeff Bullas’ readers, you can also get my report featuring a total of 110 sites that will pay you, most of which pay more than $50 per article, for free.

The report comes in detailed PDF format (like this article) and in spreadsheet PDF format. If you’re a writer looking to get paid for your content, this list is invaluable.

Download the PDF List

Guest Author: Bamidele Onibalusi is a world-renowned blogger and freelance writer. Huffington Post calls him an “ultimate business success story” and he’s been featured in Forbes and Digital Journal amongst others. He blogs at Writers in Charge.

The post 20 Amazing Sites That Will Pay You $100+ Per Article appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.



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How marketers can use FOMO to influence customers and track social proof

How marketers can use power of social proof through FOMO ZDNet Yieldify … A recent survey points to a bright future for affiliate marketing and social …

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New Dynamics…TAG Media launches 'Paid Social' division

Founded in 2015, by industry marketing executive Tom Galanis, TAG Media has become a prominent agency in player acquisition, affiliate marketing …

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TAG Media adds Paid Social department

TAG Media, the leading iGaming marketing & business development … TAG Media is an iGaming Affiliate Marketing & Business Development …

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A blogger's social media idea sparks a retail revolution, and $1 billion in sales

“RewardStyle has been massively helpful in helping to introduce bloggers to affiliate marketing,” says James Nord, co-founder and CEO of Fohr Card, …

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Here's Our Guide to Layering Fall Fashion in Style

Layering for fall is one of the pleasures of the cooler months arriving. Sure, it’s not winter yet, but there are days that are chilly enough to demand more …

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Affiliate Marketing Manager

Develop social/online marketing. Must have Excel or HasOffers proficiency and 2+ yrs’ affiliate marketing exp. Freelance, contract position with …

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The Not-So-Special Story Behind How To Go Viral – Why These Brands Did It Right

The Not-So-Special Story Behind How To Go Viral – Why These Brands Did It Right

Surviving in the world of online content is no easy feat.

Thriving in this world is a Herculean task, and each success has the rest of us wondering how and why.

It seems impossible, yet it happens.

When it comes to going viral, the Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 Rule) is an extremely helpful reference point. It states that:

  • 80% of output is produced by 20% of input
  • 80% of outcomes are from 20% of causes
  • 80% of contribution comes from 20% of the potential contribution available

In other words, if 20% of your time is spent on content creation, 80% should be spent on content distribution/promotion. This may not always be feasible as some content types will always take longer to produce than others, but as a general rule of thumb, it’s a good way to distribute time across your content tasks.

The reason why? Because often 1% of your content gets 99% of the attention. Viral content defies all odds. It’s an Oscar winner; a slam dunk; a home run.

This post will examine the psychology behind what makes content go viral as well as offering actionable tips to help you achieve the holy grail.

Why do we share?

To unravel why content goes viral, we need to understand why content gets shared in the first place.

So what is it that makes us click ‘share’ instead of ‘like’?

A New York Times study narrowed down the motivations for sharing content into five basic categories:

It’s interesting, but not very actionable. Let’s dig deeper!

What makes content go viral?

When looking for the philosopher’s stone of ‘virality’, you will notice that every study and research conducted about this topic agrees upon four main influencing factors:

  • Emotional appeal
  • Value/usefulness
  • Originality
  • Outreach

One of the best-known studies is that of Milkman and Berger who explored what exactly makes content spread like wildfire and whether virality can be achieved deliberately.

They found that content that entices high-arousal emotions (either positive or negative) is more effective than content that doesn’t evoke emotions. This finding reflects the common motives for sharing such as the need to connect, feel involved and support causes that matter to us.

They also found that positive content is generally more successful than negative content. That’s a bit surprising, right? I personally would have thought negative content would rule the scene given the much-sought ‘scandal’ factor of negative news. But then again, when you think about it, the act of ‘sharing’ is intrinsically linked to our personal image therefore we want to appear to provide positive value to others.

Tip #1 – Activating high-arousal emotions

So, the first tip when it comes to going viral is to activate high-arousal emotions.

High-arousal emotions can be positive or negative, and they include awe, fear, joy, anger, anxiety, desire, and surprise.

Let’s go through each of these emotions one by one.

Awe

Awe is the wonder and bewilderment we feel when we experience something remarkable. Something we simply cannot resist commenting on or sending forward. It often arises after we experience something we deeply or strongly relate to, or when we read breaking tips or research.

A great example is one of the most viral articles of 2015, ‘To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This‘, by Mandy Len Catron. The author described her experience of finding an old laboratory experiment that claimed to make complete strangers fall in love, and tested it. Turns out it did, in fact, make her fall in love. Boom! One thing everyone in the world is interested in is love and the article went viral.

It stirred up discussion all over the world and inspired people to either prove or disprove the experiment. This article was an ‘awe bomb’, although it worked on several other emotional fronts including surprise, joy and even anxiety.

Anger

If you poke people with the angry stick, they will work very, very hard to get justice. They will tweet about it, write articles in outrage or rebuttal, and attack you on all virtual fronts to convince the rest of the world that you are wrong.

A great example is an article by ‘The “Content Is King” Myth Debunked’ by Derek Halpern. The old saying that content is king of SEO is widely accepted in today’s world. Derek took this truism and exploded it with data-supported findings. A lot of people tried to discredit his article which resulted in huge amount of backlinks – so the haters actually made him more successful.

Be careful, though, with enticing anger. Using it to your advantage does not mean being deliberately antagonistic or controversial. It means taking a highly debatable topic and finding a logical, well-referenced and original stance on it. It means challenging the accepted status quo using rational, coherent arguments. Also, it’s never advised to base your entire content marketing strategy on this particular emotion.

Surprise/shock

What surprises us? Well, anything that goes against our expectations, really. Enticing the emotion of surprise is all about challenging the accepted status quo. ‘Surprise’ articles are often science-based, revolving around new research findings or simply challenging existing beliefs.

The article ‘Drinking three glasses of champagne ‘could help prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s disease‘ grabbed worldwide attention because not only does it introduce surprising new information, but it justifies a common little ‘vice’ which is the consumption of alcohol for relaxation and socialization.

Joy

The list of what brings joy into our lives and our hearts is long and includes anything that is funny, inspiring or uplifting. This type of content is usually all about personal stories, random acts of kindness, social studies with positive outcomes, and all things cute in life (yes, including cat videos).

For example, the article ‘Penguin swims 5,000 miles every year for reunion with the man who saved his life’ is a cute, heart-warming story that highlights a special relationship between an old man and one of the cutest animals in the world.

Fear/anxiety

Fear is a good one. It’s one of the strongest motivators known to mankind. Even the most rational human beings are bound to succumb to the panic of the surviving reptilian brain and act based on fear from time to time.

Good topic approaches include making people afraid they might be unconsciously committing errors or targeting the ever-present fear of missing out on something (commonly known as ‘FOMO‘).

You can find inspiration for how to entice fear in the article ‘How Images Improve – or Destroy – Conversion Rates‘. This piece emphasizes the importance of images in online content and instills in the reader a momentary fear that there is something they are doing wrong. This fear, in turn, forces you to click… and we all know enough clicks is what makes a piece go viral.

Tip #2 – Making something useful

The next item on the list of viral ‘musts’ is usefulness. It’s simple: content must provide value in one form or another. Content that is useful on a practical level is much more likely to go viral.

Common examples of these type of posts are ‘how to’ guides and informative lists that provide tips and tricks. The only problem with useful content is that there are literally thousands upon thousands of lists and tutorials online already. So, getting yours well-shared is not only about being useful, but also about being more useful than the content that is already out there.

Brian Dean, an SEO specialist and marketer, advises creating a ‘skyscraper post’. The secret lies in finding share-worthy content, creating something ten times better than that, and then reaching out to the right people for promotion.

Another useful tip is, if you are writing an article with positive but vague ideas, wrap up your article with a list of concrete steps that you want your readers to take. Concrete actions lead to results – and results help you be remembered and referred back to.

Tip #3 – Original: to be or not to be?

Regarding viral content, being ‘original’ may or may not be good advice. In fact, the most successful creators of viral content spend heaps of time studying other viral results and mimicking them in their own content. So where does that leave originality?

A good example of originality repurposed is a post from BuzzFeed that used the romanticized inconsistencies in the famous Penguin stories to create their version of the well-received post: ‘A Scientist Says That Story About The Penguin Who Swims Home To His Friend Was Misreported‘.

It’s hard to believe, but when you think about it, it’s true. Originality does not reside as much in the originality of the idea or information, but in the approach and representation. You don’t always have to go elsewhere to look for trends to evaluate, just improve and reuse your own content.

Tip #4 – Reach for outreach

The last (but not least) law of the jungle when it comes to going viral is: no exposure = no likes. Simply creating content, posting it and hoping for the best will not cut it these days. There is too much fluff online already. By the time Google crawlers reach you, you will be retired in the Bahamas. If you want your content to get noticed today, you need to dive deep into social media and reach out to the right people.

Mandy Lee Catron’s love experiment would never have become world-famous if she had stuck to her little blog with its decent but small reader-base. Instead, by guest-posting the article to The New York Times, she got the necessary exposure for her content to become viral.

So, whether you decide to guest post or promote your content piece above and below social media, exposure cannot be overlooked as a necessary step in the process.

Summing up

Making your content viral is not an easy task, but it is not impossible either. With attention, evaluation and practice, your article or video can be the next storm that rushes through news feeds and Twitter streams all over the world.

Guest Author: Passionate about digital marketing, entrepreneurship, growth and travel, Senko Duras is also the co-founder of Diversis Digital and Point Visible. Loves testing new ideas, projects with unclear specifications and fighting pressure with a chilled out attitude.

The post The Not-So-Special Story Behind How To Go Viral – Why These Brands Did It Right appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.



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Affiliate Marketing Infographic Needed

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Scholarships are Available to Affiliate Summit West 2018

Affiliate Summit, part of Clarion Events Group, is sponsoring up to one-hundred “Pay it Forward Scholarships” to folks in the affiliate marketing industry.

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The Top Five Days of Our Lives Moments of 2017

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How to Track Your Local SEO & SEM: A Guide

Posted by nickpierno

If you asked me, I’d tell you that proper tracking is the single most important element in your local business digital marketing stack. I’d also tell you that even if you didn’t ask, apparently.

A decent tracking setup allows you to answer the most important questions about your marketing efforts. What’s working and what isn’t?

Many digital marketing strategies today still focus on traffic. Lots of agencies/developers/marketers will slap an Analytics tracking code on your site and call it a day. For most local businesses, though, traffic isn’t all that meaningful of a metric. And in many cases (e.g. Adwords & Facebook), more traffic just means more spending, without any real relationship to results.

What you really need your tracking setup to tell you is how many leads (AKA conversions) you’re getting, and from where. It also needs to do so quickly and easily, without you having to log into multiple accounts to piece everything together.

If you’re spending money or energy on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, or any other kind of digital traffic stream and you’re not measuring how many leads you get from each source, stop what you’re doing right now and make setting up a solid tracking plan your next priority.

This guide is intended to fill you in on all the basic elements you’ll need to assemble a simple, yet flexible and robust tracking setup.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is at the center of virtually every good web tracking setup. There are other supplemental ways to collect web analytics (like Heap, Hotjar, Facebook Pixels, etc), but Google Analytics is the free, powerful, and omnipresent tool that virtually every website should use. It will be the foundation of our approach in this guide.

Analytics setup tips

Analytics is super easy to set up. Create (or sign into) a Google account, add your Account and Property (website), and install the tracking code in your website’s template.

Whatever happens, don’t let your agency or developer set up your Analytics property on their own Account. Agencies and developers: STOP DOING THIS! Create a separate Google/Gmail account and let this be the “owner” of a new Analytics Account, then share permission with the agency/developer’s account, the client’s personal Google account, and so on.

The “All Website Data” view will be created by default for a new property. If you’re going to add filters or make any other advanced changes, be sure to create and use a separate View, keeping the default view clean and pure.

Also be sure to set the appropriate currency and time zone in the “View Settings.” If you ever use Adwords, using the wrong currency setting will result in a major disagreement between Adwords and Analytics.

Goals

Once your basic Analytics setup is in place, you should add some goals. This is where the magic happens. Ideally, every business objective your website can achieve should be represented as a goal conversion. Conversions can come in many forms, but here are some of the most common ones:

  • Contact form submission
  • Quote request form submission
  • Phone call
  • Text message
  • Chat
  • Appointment booking
  • Newsletter signup
  • E-commerce purchase

How you slice up your goals will vary with your needs, but I generally try to group similar “types” of conversions into a single goal. If I have several different contact forms on a site (like a quick contact form in the sidebar, and a heftier one on the contact page), I might group those as a single goal. You can always dig deeper to see the specific breakdown, but it’s nice to keep goals as neat and tidy as possible.

To create a goal in Analytics:

  1. Navigate to the Admin screen.
  2. Under the appropriate View, select Goals and then + New Goal.
  3. You can either choose between a goal Template, or Custom. Most goals are easiest to set up choosing Custom.
  4. Give your goal a name (ex. Contact Form Submission) and choose a type. Most goals for local businesses will either be a Destination or an Event.

Pro tip: Analytics allows you to associate a dollar value to your goal conversions. If you can tie your goals to their actual value, it can be a powerful metric to measure performance with. A common way to determine the value of a goal is to take the average value of a sale and multiply it by the average closing rate of Internet leads. For example, if your average sale is worth $1,000, and you typically close 1/10 of leads, your goal value would be $100.

Form tracking

The simplest way to track form fills is to have the form redirect to a “Thank You” page upon submission. This is usually my preferred setup; it’s easy to configure, and I can use the Thank You page to recommend other services, articles, etc. on the site and potentially keep the user around. I also find a dedicated Thank You page to provide the best affirmation that the form submission actually went through.

Different forms can all use the same Thank You page, and pass along variables in the URL to distinguish themselves from each other so you don’t have to create a hundred different Thank You pages to track different forms or goals. Most decent form plugins for Wordpress are capable of this. My favorite is Gravityforms. Contact Form 7 and Ninja Forms are also very popular (and free).

Another option is using event tracking. Event tracking allows you to track the click of a button or link (the submit button, in the case of a web form). This would circumvent the need for a thank you page if you don’t want to (or can’t) send the user elsewhere when they submit a form. It’s also handy for other, more advanced forms of tracking.

Here’s a handy plugin for Gravityforms that makes setting up event tracking a snap.

Once you’ve got your form redirecting to a Thank You page or generating an event, you just need to create a goal in Analytics with the corresponding value.

You can use Thank You pages or events in a similar manner to track appointment booking, web chats, newsletter signups, etc.

Call tracking

Many businesses and marketers have adopted form tracking, since it’s easy and free. That’s great. But for most businesses, it leaves a huge volume of web conversions untracked.

If you’re spending cash to generate traffic to your site, you could be hemorrhaging budget if you’re not collecting and attributing the phone call conversions from your website.

There are several solutions and approaches to call tracking. I use and recommend CallRail, which also seems to have emerged as the darling of the digital marketing community over the past few years thanks to its ease of use, great support, fair pricing, and focus on integration. Another option (so I don’t come across as completely biased) is CallTrackingMetrics.

You’ll want to make sure your call tracking platform allows for integration with Google Analytics and offers something called “dynamic number insertion.”

Dynamic number insertion uses JavaScript to detect your actual local phone number on your website and replace it with a tracking number when a user loads your page.

Dynamic insertion is especially important in the context of local SEO, since it allows you to keep your real, local number on your site, and maintain NAP consistency with the rest of your business’s citations. Assuming it’s implemented properly, Google will still see your real number when it crawls your site, but users will get a tracked number.

Basically, magic.

There are a few ways to implement dynamic number insertion. For most businesses, one of these two approaches should fit the bill.

Number per source

With this approach, you’ll create a tracking number for each source you wish to track calls for. These sources might be:

  • Organic search traffic
  • Paid search traffic
  • Facebook referral traffic
  • Yelp referral traffic
  • Direct traffic
  • Vanity URL traffic (for visitors coming from an offline TV or radio ad, for example)

When someone arrives at your website from one of these predefined sources, the corresponding number will show in place of your real number, wherever it’s visible. If someone calls that number, an event will be passed to Analytics along with the source.

This approach isn’t perfect, but it’s a solid solution if your site gets large amounts of traffic (5k+ visits/day) and you want to keep call tracking costs low. It will do a solid job of answering the basic questions of how many calls your site generates and where they came from, but it comes with a few minor caveats:

  • Calls originating from sources you didn’t predefine will be missed.
  • Events sent to Analytics will create artificial sessions not tied to actual user sessions.
  • Call conversions coming from Adwords clicks won’t be attached to campaigns, ad groups, or keywords.

Some of these issues have more advanced workarounds. None of them are deal breakers… but you can avoid them completely with number pools — the awesomest call tracking method.

Number pools

“Keyword Pools,” as CallRail refers to them, are the killer app for call tracking. As long as your traffic doesn’t make this option prohibitively expensive (which won’t be a problem for most local business websites), this is the way to go.

In this approach, you create a pool with several numbers (8+ with CallRail). Each concurrent visitor on your site is assigned a different number, and if they call it, the conversion is attached to their session in Analytics, as well as their click in Adwords (if applicable). No more artificial sessions or disconnected conversions, and as long as you have enough numbers in your pool to cover your site’s traffic, you’ll capture all calls from your site, regardless of source. It’s also much quicker to set up than a number per source, and will even make you more attractive and better at sports!

You generally have to pay your call tracking provider for additional numbers, and you’ll need a number for each concurrent visitor to keep things running smoothly, so this is where massive amounts of traffic can start to get expensive. CallRail recommends you look at your average hourly traffic during peak times and include ¼ the tally as numbers in your pool. So if you have 30 visitors per hour on average, you might want ~8 numbers.

Implementation

Once you’ve got your call tracking platform configured, you’ll need to implement some code on your site to allow the dynamic number insertion to work its magic. Most platforms will provide you with a code snippet and instructions for installation. If you use CallRail and Wordpress, there’s a handy plugin to make things even simpler. Just install, connect, and go.

To get your calls recorded in Analytics, you’ll just need to enable that option from your call tracking service. With CallRail you simply enable the integration, add your domain, and calls will be sent to your Analytics account as Events. Just like with your form submissions, you can add these events as a goal. Usually it makes sense to add a single goal called “Phone Calls” and set your event conditions according to the output from your call tracking service. If you’re using CallRail, it will look like this:

Google Search Console

It’s easy to forget to set up Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools), because most of the time it plays a backseat role in your digital marketing measurement. But miss it, and you’ll forego some fundamental technical SEO basics (country setting, XML sitemaps, robots.txt verification, crawl reports, etc.), and you’ll miss out on some handy keyword click data in the Search Analytics section. Search Console data can also be indispensable for diagnosing penalties and other problems down the road, should they ever pop up.

Make sure to connect your Search Console with your Analytics property, as well as your Adwords account.

With all the basics of your tracking setup in place, the next step is to bring your paid advertising data into the mix.

Google Adwords

Adwords is probably the single most convincing reason to get proper tracking in place. Without it, you can spend a lot of money on clicks without really knowing what you get out of it. Conversion data in Adwords is also absolutely critical in making informed optimizations to your campaign settings, ad text, keywords, and so on.

If you’d like some more of my rantings on conversions in Adwords and some other ways to get more out of your campaigns, check out this recent article :)

Getting your data flowing in all the right directions is simple, but often overlooked.

Linking with Analytics

First, make sure your Adwords and Analytics accounts are linked. Always make sure you have auto-tagging enabled on your Adwords account. Now all your Adwords data will show up in the Acquisition > Adwords area of Analytics. This is a good time to double-check that you have the currency correctly set in Analytics (Admin > View Settings); otherwise, your Adwords spend will be converted to the currency set in Analytics and record the wrong dollar values (and you can’t change data that’s already been imported).

Next, you’ll want to get those call and form conversions from Analytics into Adwords.

Importing conversions in Adwords

Some Adwords management companies/consultants might disagree, but I strongly advocate an Analytics-first approach to conversion tracking. You can get call and form conversions pulled directly into Adwords by installing a tracking code on your site. But don’t.

Instead, make sure all your conversions are set up as goals in Analytics, and then import them into Adwords. This allows Analytics to act as your one-stop-shop for reviewing your conversion data, while providing all the same access to that data inside Adwords.

Call extensions & call-only ads

This can throw some folks off. You will want to track call extensions natively within Adwords. These conversions are set up automatically when you create a call extension in Adwords and elect to use a Google call forwarding number with the default settings.

Don’t worry though, you can still get these conversions tracked in Analytics if you want to (I could make an argument either for or against). Simply create a single “offline” tracking number in your call tracking platform, and use that number as the destination for the Google forwarding number.

This also helps counteract one of the oddities of Google’s call forwarding system. Google will actually only start showing the forwarding number on desktop ads after they have received a certain (seemingly arbitrary) minimum number of clicks per week. As a result, some calls are tracked and some aren’t — especially on smaller campaigns. With this little trick, Analytics will show all the calls originating from your ads — not just ones that take place once you’ve paid Google enough each week.

Adwords might give you a hard time for using a number in your call extensions that isn’t on your website. If you encounter issues with getting your number verified for use as a call extension, just make sure you have linked your Search Console to your Adwords account (as indicated above).

Now you’ve got Analytics and Adwords all synced up, and your tracking regimen is looking pretty gnarly! There are a few other cool tools you can use to take full advantage of your sweet setup.

Google Tag Manager

If you’re finding yourself putting a lot of code snippets on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Adwords, Facebook Pixels, etc), Google Tag Manager is a fantastic tool for managing them all from one spot. You can also do all sorts of advanced slicing and dicing.

GTM is basically a container that you put all your snippets in, and then you put a single GTM snippet on your site. Once installed, you never need to go back to your site’s code to make changes to your snippets. You can manage them all from the GTM interface in a user-friendly, version-controlled environment.

Don’t bother if you just need Analytics on your site (and are using the CallRail plugin). But for more robust needs, it’s well worth considering for its sheer power and simplicity.

Here’s a great primer on making use of Google Tag Manager.

UTM tracking URLs & Google Campaign URL Builder

Once you’ve got conversion data occupying all your waking thoughts, you might want to take things a step further. Perhaps you want to track traffic and leads that come from an offline advertisement, a business card, an email signature, etc. You can build tracking URLs that include UTM parameters (campaign, source, and medium), so that when visitors come to your site from a certain place, you can tell where that place was!

Once you know how to build these URLs, you don’t really need a tool, but Google’s Campaign URL Builder makes quick enough work of it that it’s bound to earn a spot in your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Pro tip: Use a tracking URL on your Google My Business listing to help distinguish traffic/conversions coming in from your listing vs traffic coming in from the organic search results. I’d recommend using:

Source: google
Medium: organic
Campaign name: gmb-listing (or something)

This way your GMB traffic still shows up in Analytics as normal organic traffic, but you can drill down to the gmb-listing campaign to see its specific performance.

Bonus pro tip: Use a vanity domain or a short URL on print materials or offline ads, and point it to a tracking URL to measure their performance in Analytics.

Rank tracking

Whaaat? Rank tracking is a dirty word to conversion tracking purists, isn’t it?

Nah. It’s true that rank tracking is a poor primary metric for your digital marketing efforts, but it can be very helpful as a supplemental metric and for helping to diagnose changes in traffic, as Darren Shaw explored here.

For local businesses, we think our Local Rank Tracker is a pretty darn good tool for the job.

Google My Business Insights

Your GMB listing is a foundational piece of your local SEO infrastructure, and GMB Insights offer some meaningful data (impressions and clicks for your listing, mostly). It also tries to tell you how many calls your listing generates for you, but it comes up a bit short since it relies on “tel:” links instead of tracking numbers. It will tell you how many people clicked on your phone number, but not how many actually made the call. It also won’t give you any insights into calls coming from desktop users.

There’s a great workaround though! It just might freak you out a bit…

Fire up your call tracking platform once more, create an “offline” number, and use it as your “primary number” on your GMB listing. Don’t panic. You can preserve your NAP consistency by demoting your real local number to an “additional number” slot on your GMB listing.

I don’t consider this a necessary step, because you’re probably not pointing your paid clicks to your GMB listing. However, combined with a tracking URL pointing to your website, you can now fully measure the performance of Google My Business for your business!

Disclaimer: I believe that this method is totally safe, and I’m using it myself in several instances, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that it won’t impact your rankings. Whitespark is currently testing this out on a larger scale, and we’ll share our findings once they’re assembled!

Taking it all in

So now you’ve assembled a lean, mean tracking machine. You’re already feeling 10 years younger, and everyone pays attention when you enter the room. But what can you do with all this power?

Here are a few ways I like to soak up this beautiful data.

Pop into Analytics

Since we’ve centralized all our tracking in Analytics, we can answer pretty much any performance questions we have within a few simple clicks.

  • How many calls and form fills did we get last month from our organic rankings?
  • How does that compare to the month before? Last year?
  • How many paid conversions are we getting? How much are we paying on average for them?
  • Are we doing anything expensive that isn’t generating many leads?
  • Does our Facebook page generate any leads on our website?

There are a billion and seven ways to look at your Analytics data, but I do most of my ogling from Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Here you get a great overview of your traffic and conversions sliced up by channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, etc). You can obviously adjust date ranges, compare to past date ranges, and view conversion metrics individually or as a whole. For me, this is Analytics home base.

Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium can be equally interesting, especially if you’ve made good use of tracking URLs.

Make some sweet SEO reports

I can populate almost my entire standard SEO client report from the Acquisition section of Analytics. Making conversions the star of the show really helps to keep clients engaged in their monthly reporting.

Google Analytics dashboards

Google’s Dashboards inside Analytics provide a great way to put the most important metrics together on a single screen. They’re easy to use, but I’ve always found them a bit limiting. Fortunately for data junkies, Google has recently released its next generation data visualization product…

Google Data Studio

This is pretty awesome. It’s very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly. I’d recommend skipping the Analytics Dashboards and going straight to Data Studio.

It will allow to you to beautifully dashboard-ify your data from Analytics, Adwords, Youtube, DoubleClick, and even custom databases or spreadsheets. All the data is “live” and dynamic. Users can even change data sources and date ranges on the fly! Bosses love it, clients love it, and marketers love it… provided everything is performing really well ;)

Supermetrics

If you want to get really fancy, and build your own fully custom dashboard, develop some truly bespoke analysis tools, or automate your reporting regimen, check out Supermetrics. It allows you to pull data from just about any source into Google Sheets or Excel. From there, your only limitation is your mastery of spreadsheet-fu and your imagination.

TL;DR

So that’s a lot of stuff. If you’d like to skip the more nuanced explanations, pro tips, and bad jokes, here’s the gist in point form:

  • Tracking your digital marketing is super important.
  • Don’t just track traffic. Tracking conversions is critical.
  • Use Google Analytics. Don’t let your agency use their own account.
  • Set up goals for every type of lead (forms, calls, chats, bookings, etc).
  • Track forms with destinations (thank you pages) or events.
  • Track your calls, probably using CallRail.
  • Use “number per source” if you have a huge volume of traffic; otherwise, use number pools (AKA keyword pools). Pools are better.
  • Set up Search Console and link it to your Analytics and Adwords accounts.
  • Link Adwords with Analytics.
  • Import Analytics conversions into Adwords instead of using Adwords’ native conversion tracking snippet…
  • …except for call extensions. Track those within and Adwords AND in Analytics (if you want to) by using an “offline” tracking number as the destination for your Google forwarding numbers.
  • Use Google Tag Manager if you have more than a couple third-party scripts to run on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Facebook Pixels etc).
  • Use Google Campaign URL Builder to create tracked URLs for tracking visitors from various sources like offline advertising, email signatures, etc.
  • Use a tracked URL on your GMB listing.
  • Use a tracked number as your “primary” GMB listing number (if you do this, make sure you put your real local number as a “secondary” number). Note:We think this is safe, but we don’t have quite enough data to say so unequivocally. YMMV.
  • Use vanity domains or short URLs that point to your tracking URLs to put on print materials, TV spots, etc.
  • Track your rankings like a boss.
  • Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels is your new Analytics home base.
  • Consider making some Google Analytics Dashboards… and then don’t, because Google Data Studio is way better. So use that.
  • Check out Supermetrics if you want to get really hardcore.
  • Don’t let your dreams be dreams.

If you’re new to tracking your digital marketing, I hope this provides a helpful starting point, and helps cut through some of the confusion and uncertainty about how to best get set up.

If you’re a conversion veteran, I hope there are a few new or alternative ideas here that you can use to improve your setup.

If you’ve got anything to add, correct, or ask, leave a comment!


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