How to Make Website Work – Things to Know Before you make Your Website

Many people are doing successful business these days but they hardly know where to begin. Definitely setting up a business online is very different thing. People design their websites yet feel worried if it doesn’t work according to their expectations. Today, I’ll tell you how to make a website work effectively and bring you more returns.

The first thing you should consider is to plan out and develop what you want. Here is list of things you need to plan.

• Find out your target market and whom you want to serve. Definitely, millions of people are using internet but not all of them can be your customers, right? So you need to figure out for whom your product is.
   
• Find out the devices that your target market is using. What I mean to say here, is to find out if they are using desktops, mobile phones, tablet PCs of other similar gadgets because if they are browsing your website other than desktops, then you must consider responsive web design (RWD) that provides flexibility according to the size of your device.
  
• Decide how you want to present your product. Do you want them to purchase online or just provide information about your product and lead them to purchase your product from the market? Or are you directing them towards a restaurant or your newly set-up pets accessory shop?
   
• Define colors of your business. When you are looking to answer the question on how to make a website, reflect on who you are and the nature of your business. Logos and color schemes are really important part of your website design as they really leave an impression on your customer when they visit your website for the first time.
  
• What information you want on your homepage to show-up? This is really important because the user landing on your website is finding an answer to their queries. You must arrange things on your homepage in a way that keeps user intact, answer what they are looking for or at least guide them where they can find the solution.

If you understand and planned things accordingly, there is no reason that your website can fall behind and not bring you good returns.

Now when you are done planning, you must want to know how to make a website. Here are six simple steps to make a website like pros.

4 Types of Content to Increase your Social Engagement

Writing a great post and posting it over a social network feels like fishing right? You just type something, post it over social media like a fisher throws his rod, and then wait for the target to catch the bait.

Nah, I was just being sarcastic, it doesn’t work that way. :p

If you’re not getting any social media engagement. The problem could be anywhere from your content to your reach and the way you interact.

“What if the problem is in the nature of content?” Have you ever asked this question? What type of content are you producing anyways? Is the idea or concept of your content based on your goals? Are you reflecting what you wish to achieve in your content?

Whoops! Oh well, here are 4 types of content I’ll let you in on. As long as you keep producing your content on one of these types with a clear intention of what you wish to achieve in your mind, you’re going to eventually start climbing the engagement ladder.

1. Inspiring Content
2. Educating Content
3. Entertaining Content
4. Converting Content

1. Inspiring Content

 

I’d like to be sarcastic one more time here. A lot of people over social networks would just superglue Lincoln’s quotes over a snap of Leonardo Di Caprio and expect engagement over the post like moths to flame. It doesn’t work, unless you’re Batman’s official Batmobile supplier.

Anyways, for real engagement, try case studies and real testimonials. Case studies let people relate with the brand sharing the story. People learn a lot from case studies and if it’s helpful, I’m betting my life’s worth of earning they’re going to share it with others. The best part, a portion of your audience will find it useful.

2. Educating Content

Your customer opens her laptop and log onto her Facebook account. As she is scrolling through the posts and feeds, she stumbles upon a post promising to rid her pup off fleas in just 10 minutes – just the thing running at the back of her head. What if this post is from your competitor?

This is why an opportunity to educate people or an opportunity to solve their problems over social channels absolutely cannot be missed. As long as the content is helpful, well-written and share-worthy, it’s going to keep bringing engagement.

 3. Entertainment Content

Inspiring people through content or informing them is great but are you missing out on opportunities to build deeper relationships with your customers?

Brands often post informational posts and act all high because they feel they’re brands, people should come to them instead of the brands initiating interactions. We might go in the books of history as inhabitants of social media era, and this era, brands need to develop relationships at a more social and human level. That is why they are called social channels in the first place. Duh!

Sometimes, a funny post can drive traffic, or encourage people to share your page, even when previous informational posts have failed. You can and should use entertaining posts to fortify the relationship with your customers and become their friend instead of their vendor or service provider.This is how you can have a perfect social media engagement.

4. Converting Content 

You’re writing to build better relationships, entertain them or to help them out. But which one of these types contain a genuine call to action?

Entertainment content aims to target people’s emotion and trigger a response that has more to do with emotions. Informational content does the same, except it targets their rational side. But none of the above have to have a call to action. Sometimes, you have to work out a piece of content exclusively with the intention of getting an action out of your audience. Sometimes, you have to point them in a specific direction.

Content that converts may include newsletters, Mail Sign-Ups and Buy Now actions.

Conclusion?

Here is a good news for you. You don’t have to use them individually. You don’t have to include every element in one either. But you can use them in combination. For instance, you can write a joke on an itchy dog and entertain people. Then make people realize it could be their dog as you near the conclusion of the post and then call them to action. See how you just effectively used three of the four elements in a single Facebook or Twitter post?

That is how you can go out there and come up with posts and comments that will possess the power to captivate, convert and spread the word. I also found this post that looks like a cheat sheet. You can check social media engagement tips as well.

WHY DIGITAL MARKETERS MUST KEEP AN EYE ON ELECTION 2016 CAMPAIGNS

 

Nobody can deny the fact that digital marketing has helped businesses expand globally and because the strategies and trends keep on changing rapidly, we need to keep up with the digital pace to thrive in these global markets.

The most recent and known event this year is election 2016 campaigns and I’ve been noticing that presidential candidates are aggressively following some really successful digital marketing strategies since last year so, I’ve acquired a few here for you.

• “Who are you addressing to?” Is an important question when you are on a digital platform because you cannot address and speak to everyone at the same time. Be specific about selecting your target market and who you intend to serve.
  
  You see how Donald Trump has successfully been able to speak to American workforce who was dissatisfied since Great Recession during election 2016 campaigns.

• Customer’s need is something that you are willing to satisfy and something that you offer in exchange of money (the only way to bring ROI).
  
  Hillary has successfully been able to identify what she can do for America by addressing the concerns like immigrant’s rights and racial issues.

• Strategy is important because when you have got a strategy, you can easily focus on goals that you need to achieve both in short and long run. You must estimate what ROI you can get out of the campaign budget and maximize your earnings.
  
  We see Jeb Bush has failed to cash his electoral campaign and sell himself properly because not all the time spending millions of dollars can make the game. You need strategy for it.

• Building your customer’s trust sounds difficult and time consuming, but if you want to retain your customers make sure you bring honesty and they rely on you to satisfy their needs.
  
  We noticed a how falsified statement of Ted Cruz about Ben Carson has put him in trouble and people started talking about on social media and news channels etc and he had to make an apology for his stance.

Do you find any other useful marketing lessons from election 2016 campaigns and like to share? Comment below I would love to hear what you have to put forward.

6 KILLING CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGIES YOU MUST CONSIDER

There was a time when content marketing and SEO were considered different. That was long, long ago.

Nowadays SEO depends on the quality of content you have written because Google puts more value on quality and the experience your readers are getting from your content and ranks it accordingly.

Today, content marketers are focused on a playing a long-term content game and trends in content marketing world seem to change drastically.

Below are some content marketing tips revealed for the year 2016.

INVOLVE YOUR CUSTOMERS

No content could be better than something crafted for you by your customer.

Have you come across ‘share a Coke’ campaign, where company labeled customers’ names on coke bottles and served it to them?

The reason is that people will find products and services more authentic and trustworthy when it is created by them.

Moreover, people want to know what the user experience of the product is. And what a better idea to get them involved to write content for you?

Using this content marketing strategy will not only enhance their brand association and experience but also help your business build a positive word of mouth.

Many cosmetic companies are leveraging this strategy by asking their customers to write product reviews on their blogs.

INTERACTIVE STORY TELLING

Content which contains elements that get your customers involved are generic these days. Storytelling is one of the most emerging trends in content marketing.

Out-of-the-box and content encompassing visual elements contain images, quizzes, videos, infographics, assessments and graders etc. And thanks to the fast speed internet connection, you don’t need to worry about loading issues anymore. Use these elements wisely.

Take the example of Moma and Babel how smartly they have inculcated content with storytelling.

MAGIC OF EPISODIC CONTENT

So who can’t wait for the next movie from The Avengers, Superman, and Captain America series?

Think of the same idea-splitting a great topic into episodes of content so whenever one ends, your audience is curious and waiting for the next one to arrive.

While using this content marketing strategy you have to understand the time duration and the gaps you take are measured and balanced like tell them part-2 will be uploaded next week etc. so when you write the next content of the series the readers are actively seeking for the next part.

It is important to create a chain to end up content with a cliffhanger such that it creates a desire to know more.

PERSONALIZATION IS A PLAYER

Adding a personal touch is important because of two reasons:

· First; it will help reader recognize you when they skim through your content

· Second; if they like your tone and find your content interactive, they will surely follow you or subscribe for emails

Today, it is being very troublesome for content producers to keep their audience intact because people are getting aware of possibilities and getting immune even to the best-created content.

Adding a personalized touch can help you stand out from the crowd. For instance Doggyloot offers personalization depending on the size and weight of their pet mates.

Designing your website/blog such that the audience landing on your website feels like it is specifically put together for them and speaks their language.

“A personalized content speaks directly to your audience and directs them to exact solution to their queries they are looking for”, says TruConversion.

SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

From small coffee shop across the street near your home to those big multinational giants, you type their name in search engine, and their official website appears along with their social media profiles on Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and whatnot.

Social media is a platform where businesses are taking advantage of and expanding their customer reach globally across potential markets.

But making a social media profile is not enough alone, you need to:

• Keep interacting with them- replying to their messages, posts, comments, tweets etc.
• Keep them reminding of you from time to time-this is especially important because millions of new posts, tweets and pins appear on your audience’s news feed so it is not surprising if you don’t remind them of what you have to offer. They might forget about you if you don’t.

Research what platforms you are going to choose to target your audience. Find out the best suitable timings.

and prepare a schedule to keep reminding them of you.

REMEMBER SEO AND CONTENT ARE INTERCONNECTED

All the digital marketers and SEOs will agree to this fact that trends in content marketing strategies are changing. This is because of SEO and content marketing are becoming more interconnected with each other.

Content works on purpose that caters the demand of SEO so that you are found easily on a search engine page when people look for you.

CONCLUSION

Marketers have identified content marketing strategy for 2016 and started practicing them already from the beginning of the year.

I hope these content marketing tips will help you accomplish new heights of business excellence.

I wish you all make a great year in content marketing!

Digital Marketing Strategies and It’s Perks

As the world is being digitally updated nowadays, we all are being upgraded to use some of the latest and updated tools. This just doesn’t go for any specific industry but it is valid for almost every industry wherever the sale or profit is acquired. Digital marketing has been one of the most amazing tools in this scenario. No other industry can stand by denying the digital marketing strategies’ importance. How come the online marketing became so important?

Online Presence

One of the most essential and unavoidable tools for any business is to create its online presence. It helps the businesses in reaching out to even the remotest areas where they don’t have much opportunities or chances to have a variety of any product or service.

Word of Mouth

Digital marketing definitely helps in creating any business a word of mouth by automatically reaching out to many people around the world with just some clicks. Word of mouth could be both negative and positive so businesses must be aware of what they are giving the customers for their valuable feedback.

Large Audience

Digital marketing strategies ultimately reach out to the large amount of audience which can drastically improve the sales and profits of any business if channeled or marketed properly. Fouls in reaching the large audience can also waste all the efforts, time, and money of any business.

Increased Sales

In contrast to offline marketing, the digital marketing strategies have forced the traditional businesses to become digitally active and take part in the latest online marketing strategies.

By participating actively in the digital world, the businesses get able to maximize the profits by 100% to 500% as they have now reached that audience which they could not have reached by offline marketing.

Customers’ Trust

It is more likely connected with the word of mouth but discussing it further; gaining trust of your customers should be your only priority. Even if it costs you some money to gain the trust, you should spend it on the potential customers, because after the trust of a customer is gained your business could get many referrals by that one customer.

Aforementioned perks can help you in making some of the best digital marketing strategies that could enable your business to earn maximum profit. Just do remember to use the strategies you or your marketing team creates. Those should be used wisely.

8 HACKS THAT WILL INCREASE YOUR WEB TRAFFIC

When you’re starting a new business your primary objective is to attract more customers and gain market share.


Similarly, when you launch a website all you want is to expand your networking and bring more traffic on your website. Don’t you?

But the problem is you hardly know anything much about SEO. Here are some best practices that search engine optimizers use to their advantage to increase website traffic.

1. Social Media Promotions

Social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are ways to interact with your customers. Playing smart and asking people to try out the new product and leave comments on your website to enter a lucky draw is simple thing but expands your reach in no time.

Definitely, people will speak positive about you in the reviews when they want to win a special prize. This way, you can give a big shout-out to your brand and get in the know of people.

2. Get listed on Directories

Many businesses have their industry aggregators but if your industry doesn’t have its specific aggregators, make sure to get your website registered on every directory. This will help you develop your online presence on search engines and will be easier for people to find you on internet when they search you by your company/website’s name.

3. Promote Your Blog

Make sure when you write for your blog, the content doesn’t get wasted. Make a list of social channels where you can promote your blog. For instance: Reddit, Linkedin, StumbleUpon and other social media channels.

4. Write Guest Posts

You must have come across those websites like WikiHow, Business.com or Huffington post when you were searching for something. Have you ever have an idea to write a guest post for these websites? Give it a try – this way you can bring more website traffic.

5. LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups are more often neglected, but they are a greater source to increase website traffic by developing your network and promoting your website.

6. Facebook Groups

Like LinkedIn, Facebook groups are also a great source to interconnect industry experts where the engagement is usually very high in these groups.

7. Email Marketing

Email campaigns are another good example to reach your customer’s inbox if you have a preoccupied data, email marketing is no doubt a proven and effective way to bring website traffic

8.  Try New Channels

Trying new social media channels doesn’t cost you anything and you never know how useful it could turn out to be. So don’t be afraid to give new social media channels a try. Have you been to Snapchat and Fling?

So you must not wait to implement these easy and simple techniques to bring traffic to your website. Don’t forget to analyze and keep monitoring these above mentioned strategies so that you know what suits your website and works best for you.

Get Free Organic Traffic From Google! Follow These Extremely Simple Steps

Organic traffic is the core element for any website. Every business desires for maximum website traffic for obvious reasons: more online visibility and lead conversions. The rising concern now is if organic traffic still holds any importance for Google in the era of growing paid traffic with instant results (PPC).

The answer is certainly ‘Yes.’ Organic traffic still has much value in the eyes of Google and will retain its importance in coming years too. Google puts extreme significance for organic traffic as compared to paid because there is 80:20 ratio of organic and paid traffic.

Organic traffic comes from the combined natural sources of on-page, off-page, content and social media. There should be a good balance of all these sources in order to bring maximum natural traffic to your website.

Here are 5 simple steps to follow for getting amazing traffic to your website.

1. On page optimization

On page optimization is a highly essential element for better traffic and website leads. It includes all basic elements to bring generic traffic for instance, website speed, domain and server issues, crawling and indexing, proper XML Sitemap, Robots.txt, URL optimization, title optimization, catchy meta description as it immediately grabs visitors attention.

Internal linking, image optimization and easy, smooth navigation are also necessary for higher website traffic. Better user experience can lead to better traffic and conversion as well.

2. Off-page optimization

Off-page optimization also plays a vital role in bringing quality organic traffic for website. Proper keyword research and focus on long-tail keywords can bring instant traffic as long-tail keywords better determine the user intent for conversion. Link building is an essential element of off-page which requires quality and relevant backlink building for gaining good amount of traffic for website.

3. Web content

No website can appeal visitors without eye catching and meaningful content. Content is lifeblood for website and it has a power to pull visitors attention and make them stay longer for more readability and time on site. Web Content must be purposeful and should provide some value to the readers especially for the homepage and blog as these two are the most prominent for visitors for finding their required information. The above the fold content with quality call to actions can bring remarkable visitors for the website.

4. Social media

Social media has potential to build strong relationships between customer and the brand. It is also a powerful platform when it comes to traffic generation as it can promote content in a much better way. Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus are all tremendous social platforms for bringing valuable traffic to website and this referral traffic has a better chance of converting into potential customers. It is really good to add social buttons on the above right side on the header for instant content virality.

5. Google Analytics

Last but not the least, tracking through Google Analytics is extremely essential to get to know about different traffic sources from various platforms and determine useful strategies to increase organic, social and referral traffic sources for conversion optimization.

If you’re looking for something more detailed on how to get more traffic to your homepage, check out this post on how to increase your website’s traffic.

5 Simple Tips on Keywords For Better SEO

When you are planning to create your own website, the most important thing to consider is your site’s content because weather you are writing a blog post or any other content, the main thing you want is to get found over internet and bring on site traffic.

Websites are founded over the objective of attracting traffic. But there will be no traffic is the site’s SEO is lackluster and this includes poor research and/or optimization of keywords.

Keyword research is an important element of SEO for those wishing to get ranked over search engines. We know that millions of people are searching for information. From an SEO’s perspective we need to understand search intent of our target audience as right keyword can help you gain revenues. Why? Because 80% of total online transactions are a result of keyword search.

Getting started and doing some keyword research prior to writing content will save your time and help you come-up with engaging content that brings more traffic to your place.

Add Keywords in Title

Title is something that speaks for it and creating a title for your blog post/content that strategically optimizes keywords will help you get found over search engines easily (take notes viewer). Make sure your title looks all natural and not too stuffed with keywords and still is motivating.

For instance, your keyword is ‘free online website’ and you are intended to share some tips that tells some facts people should know when creating a website online. Your topic could be: 5 do knows before using free online website builders

Limit Use of More Keywords

The best way to increase traffic on your blog or your website is to avoid using more than 3 keywords, some experts recommend using just one or two right key words will get the job done because using too many keywords will make your content look cluttered and can be marked spammed by search engines.

Diffuse Keywords throughout Your Content

Try to optimize your keywords not just in title alone but throughout your content, but avoid keyword stuffing because it distracts the reader. If your content is around 400 words, optimizing your keywords two to three time is enough and effective.

Hyperlink Your Keyword

SEO experts are of belief that search engines, especially Google, stress more on hyperlinked text than text without any links, so using a link on your keyword or just beside it, in your content maintaining relevancy will help you rank on SEO in lesser time than with non-linked keywords.

Use Alt-Text

When you upload images on your blog post and along content you can use them to your advantage by adding alternate text for the image that appears when you take your mouse pointer over image. This alt-text make is easy for Google bot to find you as a result of related information search because search engine crawlers are unable to read the images. Try coming up with keywords that are related to images or try adding images that are relating your keywords.

Tried all of these tips already but still no result? You could be making one of these web designing mistakes that kill your SEO you know? If you’re making these mistakes, it’s probably time to make amends while things are still under control.