As of 2017 rolls out, the need to improve on last year’s digital marketing only becomes greater, thanks to the increasing competition for customer engagement throughout the industry. Digital marketers today are faced with the double hurdle of attracting different kinds of customers to their product/service and engaging them until they reach the buying stage.

In trying to take advantage of changing marketing trends, many digital marketers are focusing their energy on the wrong tactics and leaving proven strategies behind. Others are grabbing at too many strategies all at once without maximising the potential of each. Such mistakes led to major declines in sales and conversions for many companies in 2016.

Here are a series of expert tips and solutions to help you and your team steer clear of the common digital marketing mistakes in 2017.

1. Create a strategy for mobile
2. Integrate email marketing with other marketing strategies
3. Monitor the stats from each campaign
4. Set the goals for each marketing campaign before you start
5. Generate better content that is relevant for customers
6. Step out of your social media comfort zone
7. Base your marketing strategies on actual data and statistics, not intuition and gut feelings
8. Target the right audience for your product/service
9. Diversify your content
10. Reexamine your social media marketing strategy
11. Analyse your customer base and understand how different they are
12. Consider only necessary data from analytics when drawing a strategy, not everything
13. Research each new marketing trend before jumping on it
14. Develop a sound reengagement strategy for distracted customers
15. Keep ahead of yourself with upcoming trends in your industry, top news and announcements

Create A Strategy for Mobile

It’s no secret that mobile is gaining a larger share of the market as of 2017, which is why digital marketers that aren’t integrating it into their marketing strategies are seeing less favorable results. A large percentage of customers are now completing their online purchases on mobile devices, right from doing product research and comparison to actual purchasing.

Marketers need to draw a mobile marketing strategy that covers factors including website responsiveness for mobile devices, content creation for mobile users and the option of creating an app if their marketing campaigns are to convert as planned.

 

Integrate Email Marketing with Other Marketing Strategies

Even with the rise of new ‘hotly tipped’ digital marketing trends such as social media marketing, email marketing still remains a formidable and influential player in the field of digital marketing. Without considering the consequences, many digital marketers have turned their back on it, opting for the newer trends with much more promise.

The fact is that email marketing is still the most effective online marketing alternative available with millions of customers making purchase decisions everyday within a marketing email or newsletter. Digital marketers have to understand that and learn to integrate it with other marketing strategies when drawing their strategies for 2017.

 

Monitor the Stats from Each Campaign

It’s surprising to learn that many digital marketers actually pay very little attention to the statistics from their online marketing efforts, choosing not to pay heed to them. Others continue to post various forms of content on different platforms without checking the stats to identify which performs best and when.

Marketers today have to regularly monitor their statistics with the help of analytics tools such as Google Analytics and look out for those patterns that define consumer behavior and interests. It’s these numbers and patterns that determine how each campaign is converting and what needs to be changed before it’s too late. The figures also help marketers to identify which form of content works for which group of customers and at what time of the day.

 

Set the Goals for Each Marketing Campaign Before You Start

A marketing campaign without set goals is like a journey without a destination. Some digital marketers set out on marketing campaigns with rough estimates of the results they want to see without ever putting factors such as their customers’ financial abilities and their competitors into consideration. They never realise that their campaigns are underperforming until it’s too late to turn around.

It’s more than just important to set goals for aspects such as social shares, sign ups, followers, likes, sales, conversions, etc. They are the major determinants of how effective your campaign is and provide a measuring scale for how much ROI and engagement you get out of each.

See Also: Top 10 Free Project Management Software Of 2017

 

Generate Better Content That Is Relevant for Customers

Many digital marketers make the mistake of creating content just for the sake of having something to share and use for marketing their products. In today’s digital marketing world, consumers go to the internet to look for answers and solutions to their problems, not to read for leisure or pass the time. That is why marketers have to put the time into creating content that is when dissected, emotionally viable, relevant, helpful and engaging to read.

Creating such content on a regular basis may prove tedious with all other marketing aspects and time constraints considered, but you can always use the tips below to generate new content for your marketing campaign.

• You can outsource it

Affordable freelancers are always available for hire, with price quotes depending heavily on the content in question. You can also make use of guest bloggers, which is additionally advantageous for your link building profile.

•  You can share from other websites in your niche

Top quality content can be found all over the internet, and in most websites in your niche. Take time to read content on other related websites and share that which you find relevant for your readers. It’s a double win for you; you get good content at a fraction of or no cost at all. Just remember to give credit to the website you shared it from.

• You can re-purpose it

The good thing about content is that you can reuse it after some time without appearing repetitive. Evergreen content can always be updated and republished or converted to ebooks, reports, and whitepapers that you can give out to your readers and subscribers for free.

• Publish user-generated content

See Also: Best Content Marketing Strategies from 9 Content Marketing Experts

Step Out of Your Social Media Comfort Zone

Gone are the days when creating content and posting it on social media was enough to attract traffic to your website, generate enough leads for you and guarantee conversions. Many marketers still stop at posting content on social media and don’t use the channel to the maximum.

Marketers need to reimagine their social media campaigns by;

• Creating actual relationships with their followers and not just posting content, which involves replying to comments, encouraging debate and showing genuine interest in readers’ comments.
• Reaching out to influencers and others interacting with other businesses’ social media pages through shares, retweets, and reposts of their content, which helps when they decide to share their content too.
• Managing their own social media accounts, rather than having someone else promote their brand for them.

Base Your Marketing Strategies on Actual Data and Statistics, Not Intuition and Gut Feelings

It might seem inevitable for some to keep their gut out of making decisions, but it’s the figures that rule when it comes to online marketing. Following gut feelings is akin to gambling, and that exposes the whole marketing campaign to the kind of risk that is wholly avoidable.

For successful marketing campaigns, marketers have to learn to use the statistics from their previous marketing campaigns as the foundation on which their build their next strategies and not gut, intuition or hearsay. They have to get solutions from the mistakes that threatened their earlier strategies and use patterns in the statistics to come up with comparable data on their customers’ purchase mannerisms.

 

Target the Right Audience for Your Product/Service

It’s a common notion among many digital marketers today that marketing campaigns targeted at larger audiences in the same niche have higher conversion rates. While it may sound true hypothetically, the numbers tend to say otherwise.

For 2017, digital marketers have to stop looking wide and target the right audiences for their campaigns to produce more conversions. They should employ A/B testing to gauge the performance of each marketing email or post heading before actually getting it sent or published, and send the versions of each that show more promise when tested.

 

Diversify Your Content

Many digital marketers make the mistake of sticking to one form of content, say either short form or long form articles, throughout their campaigns, which doesn’t always work to their expectations.

This year, digital marketers should embrace the idea of diversified content by leveraging the power of different forms of content including video, images, infographics, long form articles, case studies etc. Mix between long form/detailed posts and shorter ones, with the former being used to target customers making their final purchase decision and the latter catering for those looking for a quick solution to a problem. Take advantage of short informative videos when reviewing products; they have rather high conversion rates. Such varied content makes the customer-to-buyer conversion process much easier and quicker.

 

Re-examine Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media marketing might be one of the most profitable marketing channels right now, but its benefits many never be realized if it’s not maximized fully.

Go back to basics when drawing the social media marketing strategy of your marketing campaign for this year. Pick the social media platforms you intend to work with depending on how each has performed in the past for your campaigns. Identify how to maximise each social media platform by determining which content type performs best on which platform. Consider the different time zones at which content performs best on each platform, and start scheduling your content to go live at that time. Base on past stats and metrics for these conclusions, and use them to come with alterations to each platform’s strategy.

 

Analyse Your Customer Base and Understand How Different They Are

Digital marketers should point out the differences in their customer bases, and strive to develop different marketing strategies based on the varying interests of each customer grouping. They should also use analytics reports to develop rewards and incentives based on these differences.

 

Consider Only Necessary Data from Analytics When Drawing a Strategy, Not All of It

There is a lot of data to collect from consumers about their behavior during any digital marketing campaign, and marketers are faced with the trouble of wading through it all to come up with conclusions and figures that they may need for future strategies. Many digital marketers make the mistake of troubling themselves with every piece of data they collect, thinking it necessary for their next strategy.

In reality, that approach is a waste of time. The importance attached to any sort of data collected on consumer behavior cannot be under looked; nevertheless, not all data needs to be brooded over all night long. Marketers have to learn to pick out only the necessary statistics from the pile of data they collect, i.e. the metrics that clearly define consumer buying habits, and use that to work their way through their next strategies.

 

Research Each New Marketing Trend Before Jumping on It

There is always a new marketing trend in the digital marketing world, and marketers are faced with the temptation of trying out something new before it loses steam.  While these new trends and techniques may sound effective and promise higher ROIs, they need to be researched first to identify whether they are worth investing in. Every digital marketing team should research the pros and cons of each new trend to gauge its effectiveness and determine the costs involved before embarking on using it.

 

Develop A Sound Re-engagement Strategy for Distracted Customers

Many e-commerce platforms experienced the abandonment of shopping carts during the shopping process last year while others faced the issue of customers never opening their marketing emails.

The smart solution to this is for digital marketers to create a sound re-engagement strategy to use for attracting back customers after they are slightly distracted during shopping or otherwise. It might involve sending out an immediate email to customers when they abandon their cart, asking what the problem was, reminding them to complete their purchase or offering an incentive for them to come back and complete the transaction. The success rate will vary, but it’s better than doing nothing at all.

 

Keep Ahead of Yourself with Upcoming Trends in Your Industry, Top News and Announcements

The best way for digital marketers to keep up with upcoming trends in the digital marketing world is by immersing themselves in the industry and keeping track of the latest news and developments. This can be achieved through following and commenting on influencer blogs, forums, and websites, and joining the conversation on social media.

 

In this blog, I am essentially going to discuss Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your wix websites. If you are unaware of what SEO means for a website, it is the process of improving your website’s rankings in Search Engine Results.

Managing your websites Search Engine performance is one of the most important and cost effective ways you can go about promoting it.

Being able to rank for Industry Specific keywords will give you an edge over other competitors in your niche, bringing in a recurrent inflow of highly qualified traffic that is interested in what you have to offer i.e., your core services.

But Before I Talk About Wix SEO…

I would like to clear a big misconception about the Wix vs. WordPress war. WordPress is undoubtedly one of the most popular website building platforms on the Internet, the primary reason for this is, it being an open-source platform, which introduces the possibility of crowd sourcing.

However, this popularity doesn’t contribute to any Search Engine Ranking Factor. To put it clearly, I haven’t come across any clear evidence yet that WordPress websites are given more priority in Search Engines than Wix Websites.

And neither is this fact true that, Wix websites are impossible to rank in Search Engines. I see numerous webmasters complaining about the fact that Wix Websites never rank. The fault, my dear friends, is not in the website builder, it is in the website optimization.

To give you some food for thought, I have found some great websites built using the Wix platform. I will show you the websites, along with some very popular keywords that they rank for…

Here They Are…

The first website on the list is www.bakeuhappy.com

Here is the built report of the website to prove that it is a Wix website.

Now, that you can see the website is using a Wix builder. Let me show you some of the keywords for which it is ranking on the serps..

Keywords	Position In Search Engine
cake jars for sale	3
jar cakes for sale	3
mini cupcakes near me	3
cupcakes santa clarita	4
bakeries in santa clarita	5
mason jar cakes for sale	7
custom shortbread cookies	8

In total, this website is ranking for over 500+ Organic Keywords. And that’s not too bad, is it?

If you have a Wix Website, and are wondering how to get traffic from Search Engines irrespective of your efforts, then you must be doing something WRONG, the thing that these successful businesses have done right.

I am going to walk you through some of the Search Engine best practices that these websites are following…

First and foremost, (refer point 1), Provide Your Contact Information and Business Hours Clearly

Firstly, Never Use Pre-Designed Logos or Text Logos for Your website that are provided in the Wix repository.

By using such images that are publicly available, your website will be lost amongst a pool of thousands of other websites who are using the same graphics for their business as well.

To be found by search engines, you need to differentiate your business from the rest, you need to do what others aren’t doing, and show effort.

Always use Custom Designed Logos for your website, and don’t forget to give an appropriate Alt-text to your Logo Image, which will help search engine robots understand more about your business.

In this case.. BakeUHappy Uses The Alt Text “Bake You Happy – Cupcakes, Cake Pops, Custom Cakes, and Cookies,” which clearly tells search engines that their Business Website is about CupCakes, Cake Pops, Customized Cakes and Cookies.

Takeaway:  Remember to use Alt Text For All Important Images On Your Website, Not Only Your Logo Image. Alt Text Helps Search Engines Decipher the Topic of The Images and add value to the keywords or niche that you might want to rank for.

Secondly (refer to point 2), Link Out To The Most Important Inner Pages On Your Website From Homepage.

You will notice that I have ignored the Main Menu Bar of the website.

I do not consider that as a part of advanced optimization because it is taken for granted, any website, be it Wix, or WordPress or Joomla, Opencart anything, must always have a clear and concise Navigation Structure, with all pages of the site being accessible in not less than three clicks from any location.

With, that being said, I will move onto the second point. BakeUHappy has clearly provided links to all its important inner pages. Some of which ..Cupcakes Santa Clarita, Custom Shortbread Cookies…it is already ranking for, and I can bet my last penny that these Homepage Links are a major contributing factor to those rankings…

Takeaway:  Remember to link to your most important inner landing pages from the homepage that will get home the bacon at the end of the day. As the Homepage is undoubtedly one of the most linked-to pages on your website, sending links to inner pages helps pass the link juice your website acquires overtime to these important pages as well.

Third and Fourth (refer point 3 and 4), Provide Your Location, Contact Information, Email Address and Working Hours (if applicable) on your homepage…

Doing this not only fetches you SEO benefits, but it also helps build credibility for your website in the eyes of your visitors.

When curious visitors who are looking for services that you offer come to your website, your Physical Address, Working Hours, Phone Number and Email Address, work as a trust signal about the integrity of your business operations.

Along with that, this information is also at times picked up by search engines in this form…

Takeaway:  Provide Clear Contact Details and Working Hours On Your Homepage. This builds trust and credibility for your brand, not only in the eyes of Search Engines, but also for your actual visitors.  

Fifth, Provide All Your Contact Information In The Footer Of Your Website,

This maybe a re-iteration of the 3^rd and 4^th point, but there is a slight difference. The above contact Information was provided in the main area of the page, which helped visitors instantly get all the information they need without scrolling to the bottom of the page.

The Contact Information here, is provided in the Footer Section, You can ideally also include your Working Hours in the footer section as well, as skip having it in the main content area altogether.

The bottom line is that you should provide these details on each and every page on your website, not only on your contact us and homepage. So Footer is the best route to go, because putting this information in the footer will help you make it available site-wide.

Takeaway:  You can provide Contact Details and Working Hours in the Footer of your website, which makes it available site wide, so that people can access this information from any part of your website.   

Sixth, Add Social Icons to Your Website to Connect Your Wix Site to All Your Social Profiles…

Doing this not only adds a bunch of colorful icons to your website and makes it visually appealing to visitors, but it also links all of your Business Social Profiles to your website. Meaning, whatever activity you do on your social profiles, contributes in one way or the other to the rankings of your Wix Website.

Being Active on social media is a powerful ranking signal for any website, and it is no difference for your Wix website. Search Engines want to display those types of results where the website owners also care about their visitors, and are not just bent on selling their services.

By including links to your various Social Profiles, you show search engines that your business is based around discussions, engagements and betterments, instead of mindless sales pitches.

Takeaway:  Don’t forget to Add Social Icons To Your Website, preferably in the Secondary Header Menu or your Footer Menu. This not only let’s visitors reach your social profiles faster and be able to interact with your business, but is also a major ranking signal for Search Engines.

Let me show you a few more examples of Wix Websites nailing their SEO Game…

The second website I am going to show you is a bridal boutique… http://www.ladiesoflineage.com/

This website is also made with Wix, here is the built report screenshot.

Another great example of a Wix website,

Let’s take a look at some of the keywords this website is ranking for in the serps..

Keywords	Position In Search Engine
charlotte bridal	3
wedding dress shops in charlotte nc	5
bridal shops in charlotte nc area	6
charlotte nc wedding dress	6
charlotte bridal shops	7
bridal boutiques charlotte nc	8
wedding dress boutiques charlotte nc	8

Pretty amazing, eh? This website too ranks for over 800+ Keywords in search engines..

Apart from the afore-mentioned points that BakeUHappy is following. Let’s take a look at another important point that should be taken into consideration when making your website SEO Friendly…

And this example I will give you with the help of our Bridal Boutique website… Ladies of Lineage.

When you type Bridal Dress Shop in NC, their home page is ranking on the 3^rd spot. Needless to say, they have done a fantastic job at including their Primary Keyword in their Homepage Title.

That is one of the reasons why their website is ranking for such a high qualified Buyer Intent term for customers in NC looking for Bridal Boutiques in their area. Right?

Takeaway: Every page on your website, or at least the most important landing pages on your website should have a properly optimized Header Title, which is also displayed in the search engine results pages. These titles should not target more than one or two Page Specific Keywords.

Now.. moving onto..

And the Last One for Today…

…is a restaurant website… www.chiles-grill.com, apart from doing their Mexican Food right, they are also doing good SEO!

Here are some of the 600+ Organic Keywords that they rank for…

Keywords	Position In Search Engine
mexican food tokyo	3
mexican restaurant in japan	5
mexican restaurants tokyo	10
japanese mexican food	6
harajuku food	7

You get the idea, right?

Now let’s take a look at some more ranking signals, but this time with the help of our Mexican Food search winners!

When we type, Mexican Food Tokyo in Google Search, guess who pops up? You guessed it right.. Chiles Grill,

And they are not just ranking for the term, they are doing it in style. Chiles Mexican Grill is ranking on the 4-5^th spot for Mexican Food Tokyo (a hot search term), which has over 4 Million Results.

I checked their Website and found they have everything in place,

• Image Alt Tags, Check
• Contact Information, Check
• Inner Page Links, Check
• Social Profile Links, Check
• Optimized Header Titles, Check.

Well you can confirm this by going to their website itself. Take a look at the Screenshot of the Search Results page, they have got their Hearder Titles Optimized, and also their Meta Description.

This is what it reads..

“Chiles Mexican Grill – Mexican Food in Tokyo!

Mexican Food in Tokyo. Chiles Mexican Grill brings the fresh and authentic taste of Mexican home cooking in Harajuku. Mexican Food in Harajuku, Tokyo!”

They have properly optimized their meta description for the Keyword Mexican Food in Tokyo, Mexican Food Tokyo, Harajuku Food, and they are successfully ranking for all these terms.

You can do a reverse check for these terms in the Search Engine, but be sure to conduct the search in an Incognito Window, so that Google doesn’t display you results based on your location and tracking.

Takeaway:  You should write a proper Meta Description for all the important landing pages of your website. This not only assures your chances of Ranking Higher in Search Engines, but will also insure a higher click through rate than other unoptimized websites when you do.

Secondly, Don’t Forget To Use Page Specific Keywords, and Target Not More Than One – Two Keywords Per Page…

This above screenshot is taken from their homepage. I have highlighted some terms, which they have used on their homepage, to make their website rank for them.

Takeaway: It is not only important to use your Primary Focus Keywords in the Title Tags and Meta Descriptions of every page, but also inside the content of the page. Don’t over use the keywords, or stuff them in the pages as it might do more harm than good to the readability and rankings of your website. Instead focus on evenly spreading them across the page, in the Titles, H2, H3, H4 Tags, Paragraphs, Bulleted Points etc.

So, that’s about it for my Advanced Guide to On-page Optimization for Wix Websites. I hope you take inspiration from these examples that I have given and use it to better the rankings of your websites.

Before You Go…

Let’s do a quick recap of all the things that we learnt and I will also include some basic things that I did not mention in this post. To be able to properly on-page optimize a Wix Website, you should focus on doing these things:

1. Select right URL
2. Tailor Google Titles for Your Pages
3. Create descriptions for each page
4. Employ anchor text
5. Add alt text to all your images
6. Use right headers
7. Write Quality Content
8. Use Page Specific Keywords
9. Use a 301 Redirect

If you are wondering what a 301 Redirect is, it is a form of redirection that is used to direct (maybe) your old website, to your newer version, to retain its SEO juice. This is primarily used by businesses who change their domain name or delete some old pages of their websites that were essentially getting a lot of traffic or ranking on Search Engines.

You should also know that On-page Optimization is just one side of the SEO Coin. Most of the things in On-page optimization can be done by a webmaster (such as yourself). The other side of the SEO Coin is the Off-page optimization, which holds a little more emphasis in the Search Engine Ranking Algorithms.

Off-page Optimization requires a lot of industry knowledge, depth, research and expertise, all of which my SEO Team can provide for you. In case you have a Wix Website, and are stuck on the SEO process, we will help you get stuck.

You can reach out to me on our Official Facebook Page, or drop a message in the comments section below and I can help you make a complete Online Marketing Plan for your Wix Website, that will help you get targeted visitors and convert them into successful leads of your business.

I hope you have success in your Online Business Venture, till we meet again! Stay Healthy and Have a good day!

When it comes to content marketing, there is always something new to learn. In fact, thanks to the internet, there seems to be a lot more to learn about how to make perfect marketing strategies and how to make existing strategies work that might overwhelm the average reader. For this article, we looked at the top digital marketing experts on the internet and saw what they had to reveal about everything you need to make each Content Marketing Strategies work. And there’s no doubt here; what the experts say is usually what you need to hear.

Who you’ll hear from

1. Jeff Bullas
2. Joe Pulizzi
3. Steve Cartwright
4. Neil Patel
5. Matthew Woodward
6. Sujan Patel
7. Larry Kim
8. Sam Hurley
9. Randy Fishkin

Jeff Bullas

Expert content marketer Jeff Bullas emphasizes the need for every content marketer to watch the data from their content marketing campaigns and look out for particular signals that mean a lot such as;

Time spent on web pages. Discover where people are spending more time with closer scrutiny to the pages having key content pieces and gauge the change in time spent on pages with eye-catchers such as visual links, different formatting, etc.

The bounce rate of each page. Determine which pages are having the highest bounce rates, and correlate the stats with other stats for other pages to highlight the cause of high bounce rates. (could be poor headlines, CTAs)

Monitor your returning visitors, as it translates to rate of engagement and conversion achieved. Dig around to discover why, if the percentage of returning visitors goes down.

Track your referral sources regularly and identify the ones whose stats are higher and more regular. Then engage those referral sources with additional content in the form of guest posts.

Dissect social media metrics and track down major aspects including engagement, number of shares, the scope of followers reached and the sentiment aroused by your content

Watch out for how traffic to your content is converted into leads when you publish content and look for new ways of repurposing highly performing content to make it more converting.

Watch the comments when you get them. See what your readers are saying and take part in the conversation.

See Also: Top 10 Conversion Rate Optimization Tools to Increase Your ROI

Joe Pulizzi

From contentmarketingimstitute.com, digital marketing guru Joe Pulizzi reveals a series of tips you can base on when drawing your content marketing strategy for 2017, based on upcoming trends.

You’ve got to give a reason why readers would need your content or how they would be affected before publishing it.

There is a growing trend of less content and more promotion. That is because marketers have no more room for generating content that no one gets to see.

Our strongest mode of communication is still text-based, which means writing new content is still as necessary as ever.

It’s important to have a steady and sound strategy before going along with a particular technology for your content marketing.

The time for mobile is now. More than ever, marketers need to ensure that their websites are optimized for mobile before publishing any content.

There is immense need nor adequately trained teams and proper workflow for any content marketing strategy to perform.

It’s never been more necessary to start building and marketing strategy for your content based on the video.

See Also: Why Everyone’s Focusing on Content Marketing in 2017 and You Should Too!

Steve Cartwright

Steve from www.website-designs.com approaches to content marketing with a common strategy, one that focuses on how to reuse and repurpose old content for better marketing. He offers the following tips

You can merge many old (and related) articles into a report on the same topic and complete it with an introduction, conclusion and some polishing to make it stand out and look new.

You can always update your old articles including the evergreen ones with up to date factual data and new content.

You can merge related series of articles together to form an ebook. You can also break down free ebooks into smaller articles or blog posts with a little editing

You can group old content into reports or group old reports into sizeable ebooks. You can add value to them by adding work sheets, checklists and flow charts plus an introduction and a conclusion for formality.

Neil Patel

From quicksprout.com, expert digital marketer Neil Patel emphasizes the possibility of making your content marketing successful with a smaller budget and provides a few tips on how to make it possible.

Focus on the content types that are most efficient to produce. He explains that you determine the cost of producing each form of content and evaluate the performance of each based on your competitors, before choosing one to go with.

Focus on producing quality content rather than generating lots of articles in a given period( quantity). There’s only as much quality as any content piece can have, and marketers should learn to avoid going overboard when trying to perfect theirs.

You can always reuse/ repurpose your old content and make it more useful, instead of creating new content from scratch every day with the hassle of research, time and writing.

Learn how to be more efficient when marketing your content, such that you use less time to do more.

See Also: Top 10 Free Project Management Software Of 2017

Skip the sections of content marketing that don’t matter as much. Concentrate your efforts on the marketing strategies and tactic that return the results you need such as traffic, sales, etc.

Specialize on a particular content marketing strategy and a particular audience throughout your marketing campaign.

Start a guest blogging campaign and use it to get free top notch content for your platform.

Learn to make your content promotion more effective by being selective in choosing who you promote it to ( i.e., very interested readers)

Matthew Woodward

Matthew’s strategy is based on finding highly viewed content, digging up the hundreds of people that shared it and contacting them to request them to share yours too. He breaks down his strategy in a few steps

Finding popular content that is similar to yours. You can use tools such as BuzzSumo and top keywords to discover the best performing or shared content in your niche.

Looking for the people that shared or linked to that post. The keyword here is influencers. This involves finding which industry influencers that shared the post with their followers or linked to it because they are most likely yo share yours too.

Finding each influencer’s contact information and sending them a small message to encourage them to read and share your content.

Sujan Patel

At sujanpatel.com, Sujan Patel reveals some really important tips every content marketer needs to be successful. Some of his tips for a successful marketing strategy include;

Making use of social ads to boost content on social media

Build content that attracts the audience rather than forcing it toward the content

Make your posts longer (1000+ words) for better search ranking and traffic

Make use of guest blogging on top industry sites

Always consider shorter SEO optimized headings rather than longer ones

Create a buyer persona first before making promotional content

Post content regularly and share it yourself on social media

Make use of your older content by repurposing it and publishing it

Always refer to influencers in your niche within your content linking to their content

Track your stats with every post you publish

Larry Kim

Larry Kim is another experienced marketer with advice for content marketers as regards social media advertising strategies.

Improve your content’s quality score through increasing engagement rates so as to get a higher ad impression share for a lower cost per engagement but on the same budget.

Target only particular sections of your audience with each post to increase engagement on social media, not everyone of your fans.

Pay for only the result that matters to your business such as views follows, likes, etc. whenever you run a social media content marketing campaign, not everything on offer.

Promote tour best performing videos on social media and make sure they are short enough and can get their message across even without sound.

Consider the custom audiences of each social platform and get your content out on more than just one social platform.

Use both social media ads and paid search ads at once to increase your content’s visibility.

Sam Hurley

Sam Hurley is an expert digital marketer and is Head of Search Marketing at Midas Media. He reveals a few of his content marketing tips and strategies.

Incorporate influencer outreach in your content marketing campaign when using social media and take a genuine interest in your audience because they can see it.

Every content marketing campaign should be well optimized for search engines if it’s to be visible in search engine result pages.

For continuous success in every content marketing endeavor, content marketers should carry out audience research, apply multidimensional content, consider where their target audience can access their content, integrate SEO and social media, track results whenever you publish and promote and repeat the process.

Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin from Moz’s Whiteboard Fridays reveals a couple of essential marketing lessons that every marketer should learn to incorporate and follow. Some of them are shown below;

Metric dashboards should be created basing on three major aspects; on awareness achieved i.e. through social mentions, followers and fans, press mentions and referring links, on first visits and on returning visits

Some old school SEO techniques are no longer that effective such as stuffing meta descriptions with keywords, using unfocused, non-strategic link baits, having several domains that cover a single niche, heavy use of anchor text on internal links and using a single page to target several related keywords.

When you have the wrong page rank for the right keyword, correct the issue by creating a relevant page or making the right page even more relevant, degrading the wrong page and redirecting internal pages to the relevant page or, as a last resort, using a 301 redirect.

Optimize your web pages by considering searcher intent, site speed, user experience, keyword targeting, amplification, snippet optimization and using the related content.

See Also: Top 25 Inbound Marketing Influencers You Need to Follow in 2017

Before you go!

Drawing the perfect content marketing strategy isn’t the most complex thing in the world. These experts have done it, and so can you. If you have been looking to get your content out to the right audience and see your efforts get rewarded, these are the tips you should use.

Happy marketing!

LinkedIn, The popular social platform for employers and job seekers around the world, has started rolling out as LinkedIn User Interface in 2017, complete with both sleek brand new features and glaring omissions.

And while it’s expected to only roll out fully by May 2017, a few LinkedIn users, especially the new ones have already been given a feel of the new site. For some, the downside already lies in the fact that once you are given access to the newly redesigned platform, there is no turning back to the old one.

The new design is notable in its similarity to the mobile app in both placement and naming of some features, which serves to resound the idea that the design overhaul was aimed at making user transition from mobile app to desktop/laptop version seamless and easy.

If you haven’t noticed the changes yet when using the platform, you still have time to adapt before the changes come knocking. With new features being replaced and repositioned all over the interface, it is important to get ahead of the situation by knowing where to find what.

This article shows you the major changes that the team at Microsoft has bestowed upon LinkedIn User Interface and functionality, plus how it’s most likely to affect your activities.

For those that haven’t got the new ‘LinkedIn Experience’ yet, here’s a quick tour by LinkedIn Expert and Author Viveka von Rosen.

Check out the video below:

Summary

The Major Changes

1. Overall Layout of the Homepage

• Positioning of summarized profile
• Redesigned feature Icons
• Repositioning of ‘Publish an article’ and ‘Share an article, photo’ features
• Colour Theme

2. Your Profile (Viewing and Editing It)

• Renaming of section to ‘Me’ section
• Renaming of the Profile section
• Reduced number of characters in Profile Summary
• Bare URLs for linked articles and content
• New ‘Views’ section

3. Your Connections

• Renaming of section to ‘My Network’
• No sorting or tagging feature
• Reduced number of tags to use

4. Search Options and Filters

• The Advanced Search feature is gone
• Deeper filters have been removed

5. The New ‘More’ Section

• Renaming of section to ‘More’ section
• More features in one place

6. Your Notifications

• Bigger space for notifications

7. Other Features

 

1. Overall Layout of the Homepage

When you log into your account, the first thing you notice is its changed layout, whose overall appearance is closely similar to Facebook’s, with its side section that features summarized info about your profile, a middle/main segment that features the latest articles from your connections and a right side section that has the usual LinkedIn ad space.

A summarized section of your profile is positioned in the left section of the homepage, complete with your professional title and name, your profile picture, and the number of people who’ve viewed your articles and profile so far.

In the middle section where you usually view the articles recently posted by your connections, a slight change has been made as regards how you can publish your own article or share a photo, video, or article. The ‘Publish an article’ feature is now directly below the ‘Share an article, photo or update’ feature, and while users may confuse them to serve the same purpose due to their close proximity, they each serve different independent purposes.

Other Homepage Changes to Note

New Menu Bar Icons

Some of the icons on the homepage’s menu bar have been changed, most notably the ‘notifications’ flag that is now in the form of a bell. Similarly, the ‘Inbox’ icon has been renamed ‘Messaging,’ which should be easier to understand.

Colour and Theme

The website’s new interface comes with a darker teal theme, which is quite different from the blue, white, and grey colour theme of the older version.

 

2. Your Profile (Viewing and Editing It)

The first change you’ll notice in the ‘Profile’ section is that it has been renamed the ‘Me’ section. The latter function the same way as before when opened, allowing you to edit your profile, settings, and language preferences or upgrade to a premium account.

Another distinct change you should brace for is the lower number of characters that appear in the ‘Summary’ section. In contrast with the old interface, this feature allows only less than 240 characters, which translates to only two lines of your profile summary being visible to someone when they check out your profile.

What You Need To Do

Make the first two lines of your profile summary catchy and engaging, such that the reader is attracted to read more of it.

For users that always placed customized web links with an attractive call to action on their profiles, the new LinkedIn User Interface has done away with all that. You can no longer customize or gloss them up with attractive CTAs. Now, web links appear as they are (in URL form) with your would-be description appearing next to them in parentheses and a different colour.

While the Education, Volunteer, Experience, Recommendations, Skills, and Endorsements sections are still available, you can no longer reorder depending on which weighs heavier than the other. They are now fixed in place (in their own order).

The Recommendations section has also been repositioned under the “Me” section from its former place above your profile. It still works the same way, with recommendations of people you may know, profiles you should check out, etc.

There’s also a new section titled “Accomplishments’ that you can add to the profile. It is meant to include the honors, awards, courses, publications, etc. that you have achieved over your career.

The other addition to the Profile section is the ‘views’ subsection, where you can see who’s viewed your articles and profile in detail.

 

3. Your Connections

You can still see your connections in the ‘My Network’s new interface, which is cleaner and more spacious. The left side of the page shows your total number of connections while the middle/main section contains the ‘People you may know’ and ‘Received invitations’ subsections.

The downside is that you can no longer sort, tag, or view your connections’ details when you click on them, like before. As of now, clicking on your connections allows you two courses of action; sending them messages or removing them.

Similarly, the old tagging options that you could use to sort your connections according to relevance, the level of acquaintance, profession, etc. have been removed. Only a few tags for sorting based on ‘first name’, ‘last name’, and ‘recently added’ have been left.

 

4. Search Options and Filters

There’s a lot that’s changed with how you can use the search feature. Previously, LinkedIn offered an ‘Advanced Search’ option with additional filters for your searches based on location (with zip codes), title, keyword, etc.

The ‘Advanced Search’ option is no longer available, as are most filters. You can still filter your searches using general location, companies, schools, and by connection level (i.e. whether 1^st, 2^nd or 3^rd)

 

5. The New ‘More’ Section

Don’t get lost or confused by this new section. Its icon is similar to that used in the mobile app.

The former ‘Interests’ section has been rebranded into the ‘More’ section which, in consideration of its sub-features is the perfect name. Click on it and you will access other LinkedIn features including ‘Post a job,’ ‘ProFinder, ‘Lookup,’ ‘Slideshare,’ ‘Learning’ and ‘Group.’ You can also upgrade to ‘Talent Solutions’ or ‘Sales Solutions’ in the ‘More’ section.

 

6. Your Notifications

Within the new LinkedIn UI, your notifications have now been given a bigger section of their own. You can still see notifications of new connections and endorsements, plus those of new features such as anniversaries, profile mentions, profile publications, etc., and easily reply to them.

 

7. Other Changes to Note

There’s been an update to the messaging feature, similar to that of Facebook Messenger for easier chatting and scheduling of events with the integrated Google Calendar.

• LinkedIn posts are now called ‘articles,’ and not all your connections are notified whenever you post a new one as it was before.
• Your recommended background photo size has changed to 1536 × 768 pixels, although smaller ones of 1800 × 300 should work just fine.
• Profiles now appear in summarized form. Just like with the limitations in the Profile Summary, only a sample of a person’s profile is shown. One must click on the ‘See more’ feature to get more and more profile details.
• You can now export your LinkedIn profile connections only on request, not by just copying them into a spreadsheet file.
• The Education button is no more; nevertheless, you can still find it in the Learning section or by searching, especially if you’re looking for a school
• Saved searches and tagging your connections are no more.

 

Finally

For all the changes, LinkedIn’s user interface is still as intuitive as ever and usable once you learn the ropes. One main similarity you will find is that the desktop layout now bears extreme similarity to the mobile app, which should make the transition from either device seamless and easy.

And while some old features have been removed, repositioned, or merged –  the new features are quite easy to navigate and should make your time easier and swifter. If the team at LinkedIn were looking to make the platform better from a user point of view, they are just about to achieve that.

It’s obvious that there will be more changes to the interface as the rollout goes on, and we will be on hand to explain each to you.

With millions of unique, active visitors and up to 70 million uploads every day, Instagram is undoubtedly one of the most popular social platforms on the internet today. It’s no surprise that both individuals and brands are working beyond themselves to maximize its features and benefits, and that many have tripled their sales and engagement expectations with it.

The real deal for any Instagram user is in getting more followers for their account. Whether you want your product or brand to get a wider audience or just want your personal photos seen by more interested people, the answer is in getting more people to follow your account.  The more followers an account has, the more views and likes its photos and videos will get.

That translates to more sales over time in case of a brand account. But how can one get followers beyond their circle of friends of relatives and relatives? Most people are stuck with a handful of followers yet they need to have their photos seen by more people every day.

This article shows you a few Tips you can use to get more followers on Instagram in no time.

In summary

1. Publish content regularly
2. Make use of the right hashtags
3. Make your photos stand out
4. Share your content to other social networks
5. Make use of videos too
6. Repost content from other Instagram users
7. Like and comment on other users’ posts, and use direct messages for engagement
8. Use some cool tools like Websta
9. Post your content at optimal hours
10. Get people to tag their friends

1. Publish Content Regularly

To have your photos and images seen by more people on Instagram, it’s important that you post as much as two times every day. Research shows that people who post content regularly gain more followers over time.

 Here’s how it works: By posting more than once every day, your content isn’t buried under other photos and videos in people’s Newsfeeds. It’s always visible to potential followers, and that increases their engagement and curiosity.

2. Make Use of The Right Hashtags

Like any other social media platform, Instagram supports the use of hashtags, which help users find and organize the content they want to see. They are a simple of having your photos and videos discovered by interested users, who are most likely to convert to followers with proper engagement.

To get more followers for your Instagram, you’ve got to identify the right hashtags that other accounts in your niche are using and put them to maximum use. Just a few hashtags may not produce results. Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post, but you only need 11 to 15 hashtags per post to widen your reach.

Here’s what you should do:  Discover the tags that successful accounts in your niche are using most and add them to your list of tags. Always add some of the most popular/common tags such as #selfie, #love, #tbt, #tagsforlikes, etc.

3. Make Your Photos Stand Out

Instagram is a visual medium. There is a lot of imagery on display, which requires your photos to stand out if they are to be noticed and found engaging. Take high-resolution photos from proper angles and touch them up with the right filters, appropriate effects, and strong, but emotionally appealing captions.

A study carried out by TrackMaven revealed that the filter you apply on a photo actually has a big effect on how many views it will get, with warmer filters such as Mayfair attracting the most people. Attractive photos directly increase engagement, likes, and sharing, which translates to more followers over time.

4. Share Your Content to Other Social Networks

Instagram allows you to connect with other social media accounts where you’re most likely to have more followers, including Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, FourSquare, and even Vkontakte.

That provides you with the opportunity to cross-link your account with these profiles and draw wider viewership to your content by sharing each post you make with your friends and followers on these social platforms. Even if you buy real Instagram followers, for you to keep them, you will have to have engaging content that is fresh and regularly updated to meet expectations. Don’t rest on your laurels, things move fast in this world.

 Make use of the option you’re given to automate cross-sharing whenever you post a new photo or video. Additionally, market your brand on these social platforms by using links to direct people to your account.

5. Make Use of Videos Too

Videos of up to 60 seconds can be uploaded to Instagram too. Draw more followers to your account with simple, relevant videos about your brand or life, and make sure they’re engaging enough to entice people to watch until the end.

Videos have always been known to drive even more engagement, especially if they are funny or show people how to make their lives easier. Remember to add a ‘catchy’ call to action at the end of the video.

 It can be wording that displays your web address, requests users to follow your social media accounts and more ultimately, a request to follow your account for more engagement.

6. Re-post Content from Other Instagram Users

There are lots of other Instagram accounts with large established follower numbers in every niche and large archives of content you can choose from. This tip involves reposting content from such accounts to your page and using the right hashtags so that people can find it.

 You should also look out for posts published by both your followers and random Instagram users and repost them. This method easily drives more viewers to your photos and translates to more followers over time.

7. Like, Follow and Comment on Other Users’ Posts, and Use Direct Messages for Engagement

This is the oldest trick in the book. Reach out to more people, and they will reach out to you. For better results, look out for bigger related accounts and like their photos, and comment on them. 1 in every 4 accounts you like and comment on is more likely to follow you back. You can also make use of direct messages to reach out to the managers of those accounts.

8. Make Use of Some Cool Tools Like Websta

There is a large assortment of tools you can use to make followers run to you on Instagram. Tools such as Websta help you identify your competitors and the most popular tags while others such as Crowdfire help you copy followers from other accounts. Look out for tools such as IconoSquare which tracks the views and performance of each post and Schedugram, which allows you to schedule posts for publishing at certain times.

Recommended: The Most Comprehensive List of 101 Social Media Management Tools

9. Post Your Content at Optimal Hours

It is important to understand your niche’s audience and know what time they usually use the platform, what kind of photos they usually like and the exact time these photos or videos are usually published.

Knowing this helps you to determine the time of the day during which your potential followers are most likely to be online. Research shows that most business people check out business-related content during work hours and everyday content during off-hours.

 Post your content only during those hours to prevent it from being buried under piles of other photos without being seen.

10. Get People to Tag Their Friends

Finally, you should remember to tag different people on every post you make. Besides tagging your established followers, you should request them to tag their families and friends to introduce your content to a wider audience.

Tags are a smart way to attract new people to your content and make one sure way of getting followers when used properly.

Advanced Methods of Getting More Instagram Followers

Unlike the methods mentioned in the former section, the methods listed here are not as easy to use and may cost you a penny or two.

Buying Fake Followers

It’s a proven psychological fact that people will lean toward offers or products that other people have already shown interest in. The fact rings true for Instagram too, where hundreds of likes on a single post is a major draw for others to like it too. To make this work, you can buy new fake followers to act as social proof for unsure would-be followers and attract them to join hundreds of other followers by following your account.

Getting Featured on Established Accounts

This method requires you to pay a fee to larger accounts to have your content featured in their posts. This usually works for brands using Instagram to market their products. The fee varies with the account in question, with bigger accounts charging more and having higher like-follower conversion rates. All you need to do is search for large accounts, look out for those displaying email addresses, and reach out to them.

Before You Go.

Getting more followers on Instagram shouldn’t be difficult at all. By integrating these tips and ideas in your daily posting schedule, you can guarantee more engagement for both your followers and random visitors, and rake in more likes and followers in due course.

To sum it up, take high-quality photos, edit them with the right filters, post them at the right time for your audience and make good use of relevant hashtags every time you post. Remember, the trick is in engaging other Instagram followers well enough with your content to entice them to follow you. Following the above tips above will help you triple your follower count in no time!

Now it’s your turn.

What are your tips for getting more followers on Instagram? Share your thoughts below!

Do you think that Facebook and Twitter are the only channels for Social Marketing? If so, think again because you may be missing out on a little more than “just a lot” of customers, that you could reach if you were to tap the power of Visual Content.

Pinterest, in its entirety, is a Social Discovery Platform that allows marketers to create Image Pin Boards, which they can share with their followers.

Speaking of how effective Pinterest pins can be, they are 100 times more effective than a Twitter tweet, and they annihilate Facebook Posts by a massive margin with the half-life of a Pinterest pin being 16000x timed longer than that of a Facebook Post. Ever since Instagram has been purchased by Facebook, the popularity of Pinterest as an Image Sharing platform has also surged. It is becoming the go to place for marketers from all industry dimensions.

Other than that there are quite a few reasons, apart from these statistics, that should make you want to hop onto the Pinterest bandwagon…

Why Should You Use Pinterest?

The Pinterest community has grown to more than 150 million active users around the globe every month.

Despite this expeditious adoption, I often hear, “I don’t get Pinterest like I get other social networks.” And I too felt the same way when I come across this platform.

But let me tell you a secret. Pinterest is insanely simple and easy to use software that has a great influence on your business.

I am not saying this for the sake of pushing you onto this platform like others. Pinterest is not like a regular social site to have maximum followers or likes. It is different. It is performing really well for driving traffic and leads and uplifting sales.

Before jumping right into the matter, here are some crazy Pinterest statistics to consider:

1. 87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest
2. 83% of Pinterest users would rather follow a brand than a celeb
3. Those who interact with a promoted Pin spend 7x more than others
4. 70% of sales due to Promoted Pins are from new customers
5. 67% of Pinners are under 40-years-old.

Here are 5 reasons why you should consider marketing on Pinterest for your business:

1. Discover Customer Behavior 

Pinterest is a great source of discovering customer behavior. People are open to brands, and their perceptions have a high degree of commercial intent. Thus, marketers have the opportunity to connect with people who are honestly interested in their products and services. I keep hearing people say that Pinterest has changed our mindset of purchasing products.

For sellers, the route to purchase from a social network is no more direct than on Pinterest. ‘See it, like it, buy it’ happens very often. You may notice the path to purchase is not as straight, but you get to see purchase-linking of an item from a social network.

When you see an image of your favorite product on Pinterest, and you are only one or two clicks away from landing on an e-commerce site.

2. Easy To Manage

Brands have a genuine concern for adopting a new platform because of the expenses related to hiring an employee. The coolest thing about Pinterest is that it comes with easy to operate dashboard, which you can manage single-handedly. Except for pinning, sorting, and tagging pictures, you don’t have to worry about anything.

3. Engage Over Visual Elements of Your Audience

Pinterest is all about visual content. So, it attracts the part of the audience, who prefers pictures over texts. This part of the crowd relates more with the images than with written words.

The perk of using visual content is that you can tap a new segment of consumers, who might be interested in your product but never come across it. You can attract people by maintaining a community around your pinned images and encourage them to buy your products and services.

4. Augments Content Reach

Over 80% of pins on Pinterest are re-pins. That means if you are the creator of a pin, your pin is already being repinned multiple times amongst a wide range of users. Most re-pined words on Pinterest are a recipe, DIY, chicken, cheese, cake, step, fashion, etc. Pinterest amplifies your pin reach with a larger audience.

5. Addictive User Engagement

Pinterest is highly addictive. I find myself hooked onto Pinterest for Sunday Brunch recipes on every weekend.

You get to see the latest trends in the market and make your marketing game plan based on popular trends.

“An increase in 94% click-through’s is seen in pins that are related to trending topics.” Observe the popular section on Pinterest and your Pinterest analytics to see what is trending and pin similar images.

These should be reason enough for you to make you want to join the Platform today, but if you are still considering otherwise, check out the strategies that are bound to give even the most off-beat businesses a push from the fifth dimension.

Strategies for Pinterest Marketing.

Unlike others, Pinterest also comes with its own set of rules and regulations. Make sure to check them out before embarking on your Pinterest journey.

Most Important Thing to keep in mind before signing up on Pinterest

“Never, ever use Pinterest as a tool for self-promotion.”

If you don’t want to get your pins unnoticed, then don’t use Pinterest for self-promotion.

Here is our blueprint for promotion on Pinterest.

1. Online Prospectus

For most businesses that have a physical product to sell, an online prospectus/catalog is the most obvious thing for them to create. For example, if you have an apparel business, you can showcase your clothes with a price tag. Don’t forget to link each product to its description page.

2. Create Boards Dedicated To Your Customers

You can create boards devoted to your prospects and where you can boast your prospect’s best pins they love.

3. Create Pins About Your Upcoming Event

If you are hosting an event, then create a dedicated board for the event and pin images related to the event. Users can curate content on topics like conferences, speakers, and highlights of the conference.

4. Create Board On A Product Launch

Pinterest is an open platform for showcasing new products. This is the reason why startups find it a perfect fit for their product launch. You can keep a user interested in your products this way.

5. Optimize Pin Descriptions

Besides creating user-generated boards, you should also focus on pin descriptions. Pin descriptions are frequently overlooked, but it helps users understand the context of the picture. “Pin descriptions of about 200 characters are most pinnable.” – says Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella.

6. Run A Contest

Propose your followers to create boards about your brand on their accounts and pin pictures that resonate why they like you. “Pin To Win” – has been a successful formula for increasing user engagement for many businesses.

7. Integrate Rich Pins

Rich pins come in 6 varieties: Recipe, Movie, Product, Article, Place and App. Applying for rich pins gets you instant information update on your pins automatically. This leads more people to your site if you linked your website to those pins.

8. Cover Your Face

Statistics have proven that images lacking human faces get repinned 23% more than images that contain faces.

Take a look at this infographic beautifully explained by Curalata.

    9. Include Watermarks To Your Pictures

An average image gets repinned multiple times. So, it is quite easy to forget the original creator. If you add your brand’s watermark to your images, the chance of getting unrecognized becomes less. On top of that, your brand name revolves among users, and that simply increases the user reach of your site. I recommend using the Site name because that makes your brand significant.

     10. Install Pin It Button

Have you ever noticed the “Pin It” button on top of images of various websites?

The Pin It button allows users to pin an image from the website making the pinning process quicker, better, and a lot easier. To integrate the “Pin It” buttons, all you need to do is to install the “Pin It” plugin on your website. And voila! Your readers can pin directly from your site, blog, or product catalog This is good for businesses and retailers because it means your pins are more likely to be seen, engaged, or go viral.

5 Tools To Help You Treasure Great Content For Pinterest

Most of us come across great content while surfing the internet daily. However, curating content for your site needs a little push as for pinning. Here are 5 tools I vouch for.

1. StumbleUpon
2. Tumblr
3. Facebook
4. Google+ 
5. Twitter

Final Words

Do not use Pinterest for the sake of using it just like other platforms. Use it if you are ready for it and can benefit your business out of it.

Pinterest is clearly here to stay, and it opens new doors to boost your business. It may not be suitable for all businesses, but if you find yourself a perfect fit for the platform, you have ample of ways to go about marketing on it.

As you intend to scale your business, these 10 Pinterest marketing strategies will help you drive more traffic to your website.

Have you leveraged Pinterest marketing for your brand? How did it go? Which strategies have worked for you? Let me know in the comments below!

Project management tools – So, you are here in search of open source and free project management tools because you are juggling with managing projects with your team.

If you are one of those, who is still struggling with To-Do lists and emails to communicate with clients or team for a project and gets stuck in the middle and all tasks as TASKS become a horrible nightmare, then you are not alone. We all have been through that phase.

Whether you are a small business or an enterprise, a team management tool will help you to complete tasks within the deadline and reach your milestones more efficiently than ever.

So, without further ado…

What Is a Project Management Software?

Project management software is an online platform for collaborating with team members on projects in real time. This workplace is designed to help with better communication with clients and the team and to keep an eye on the progress of each task. It simply provides you an overview of laid-out tasks to the corresponding person.

How does it help?

This will help each member to stay organized and bring a project to fruition. You can track and measure the performance of an individual employee or overall team at the end of the month.

Our Top 10 Free Project Management Tools Picks of 2017 are..

With a vast array of project management applications available online, here are our top picks in the market. These software are free for you for unlimited users and projects. You always get the opportunity to upgrade these tools in future.

So, get your hands on this free project management software to get the most out of your team performance in real-time.

Asana

Asana, created by Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook and Justin Rosenstein, former teach-lead of Facebook and Google, is a project management workspace that lets you break your projects down into small-small listicle tasks along with easy to understand dashboard to track the progress of the tasks.

Features:

• Create a task for yourself or assign task to team members
• Organize tasks into shared lists for your meetings
• Add new workflows with pre-made templates
• Break up the work of a task into smaller parts
• View progress of any project at a glance
• Due dates set the deadline for a task
• Add files from your computer, Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive
• Get team updates
• Compatible with desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
• The free version is limited up to 15 users.

Pricing:

Free	Premium	Enterprise
Up to 15 team members	$8.33/mo No team member limit.	Contact Asana

Trello

Trello is a free project management software that helps in organizing your projects in Kanban boards. You can start out by organizing Trello Cards or Boards containing to-do lists of tasks and break down the project. Trello lets you add tasks, checklists, comments, due dates, and more to shape them any way you like and keep track on the progress of your project to bring a task to fruition.

Features:

• Include comments, attachments, and more to Trello cards
• Manage multiple projects
• Trello Power Ups integrates the app that your team use
• Add voting options on tasks
• Older and completed task gets deleted automatically
• Sync across all IoT devices
• Free for unlimited projects and users

Pricing:

Free	Business Class	Enterprise
$0 Forever.	$9.99/user/mo	Contact Trello

GanttProject

If you need a place for project management, a collaboration of the team, and get your work done in real-time, consider GanttProject. This free open-source platform was created by Alexandre Thomas in 2003 and this platform has been through many developments and recycles phases since then.

Features of GanttProject:

• Create and manage tasks and milestones
• Break down tasks into smaller tasks and work in an organized manner
• Add a lag or draw dependency constraints between the tasks
• Create a baseline to compare between two projects
• Generate PERT Chart for only reading purpose
• Generate reports in HTML or PDF foprmats.

Pricing:

Absolutely free! No Sign-up required.

Freedcamp

This open source platform lets you create tasks, reach milestones, manage events all in one place. You are free to create multiple projects with multiple users with unlimited storage. It helps to stay organized and complete a project on the due date.

Features of Freedcamp:

• Issue tracker helps to solve issues like unique user ID, save searches, extra statuses and perform bulk actions.
• Send invoices to clients
• Create a rich and shareable document
• Use templates to create and differentiate multiple projects
• Organize tasks or to-do lists or a Kanban board.
• Discuss inside a project and include attachments
• Free for unlimited projects and unlimited users.

Pricing:

Free	Lite	Business	Enterprise
$0	$4	$8	Contact Freedcamp

Wrike

Have you ever tried managing projects in spreadsheets?

Wrike is a free and open source project management software that lets you outline your tasks into a spreadsheet. You can jot down every bit of details of a task into columns of spreadsheet and keep an eye on the progress of the tasks.

Features of Wrike:

• Easy to use dashboard
• Mark on-going task status as in-progress, deferred, completed, canceled or any status of your choice.
• Add text notes to tasks
• Collaborate with team members and set goals for company improvement

Pricing:

Free	Professional	Business	Marketers	Enterprise
$0	$ 9.80 / user / mo	$ 24.80 / user / mo	$ 34.60 / user / mo	Contact Wrike

Podio

Podio is a project management tool that lets you create and customize tasks on the simple table to dynamic cardboards and create project reports that keep you up to date on the progress of a task.

Features of Podio:

• Drag and drop style builder
• Visualize your projects in lists, calendars or cards
• Monitor the overall progress of your team
• Integrates with Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, Microsoft Exchange, Zendesk, and many more.
• Sync Podio with your mobile device to track from anywhere you want
• Streamlined communication with team members
• In-built search to find custom apps.

Pricing:

Basic	Plus	Premium	Enterprise
$9	$14	$24	Contact Podio

Meistertask

Meistertask is an online task management tool that offers easy-to-use and customizable dashboard or Kanban boards. Its intuitive interface makes tasks look more fun and even increases the productivity of team members with its task automation features.

Features of Meistertask:

• Integrate MindMeister, a mind-map app that helps to plan a project and drag each step of the project in Meistertask to complete it
• Overview on-going tasks and focus on completion
• Discuss projects, upload files, set due dates, add checklist items, and a lot more into your task
• Integrate with other apps such as Slack, GitHub, Google Drive, etc.

Pricing:

Basic	Pro
Free	$7.5per user/mo

Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is an online project management system that has extensive organizational features to manage and monitor tasks for the completion of a project in an effective manner. Bitrix24 lets you delegate tasks to employees, dedicated a group to a project. It also offers Gantt Charts, listicles task management ad time tracking to reach the milestone in due date.

Features of Bitrix24:

• Perform bulk action in sending emails in one go
• Share editorial calendar and generate CRM reports
• Get notified by email on any update on the assigned task
• The intuitive interface makes file sharing convenient
• Bitrix24’s task automation helps you automate regular responsibilities and recurring work schedule
• Add checklist and breakdown tasks into smaller points
• Aggregate, filter, and sort report data to display them in an organized form.

Pricing:

Free	Plus	Standard	Professional
$0	$39/mo	$99/mo	$199/mo

Zoho Project

Zoho Project was launched in 2006 as a comprehensive project management system, which has been evolved since then and has been adopted by many enterprises to plan, track and collaborate with a team for the completion of a project.

Features of Zoho Project:

• Manage tasks and track time delegated for a task
• Take control of subtasks and recurring tasks
• Gantt Chart provides an in-depth insight of progress of the task
• Collaborate and communicate with team members easily with Collaboration Tools
• Generate invoices automatically from timesheets
• Inspect bugs and track them as they get fixed
• Google Apps and GitHub integration

Pricing:

Free	Express	Premium	Enterprise
$0	$25	$50	$80

Allthings

A great alternative to Basecamp, Glasscube, and Zoho is AllThings. The platform lets you manage your plans, projects, tasks, lists, and meetings under a single roof. You can view project status in many ways and stack, filter, categorize, group and search for tasks and files in Dashboard. Stay up-to-minute using the apps for mobile and tablets, along with the desktop version. Perfect for Startup to Intermediate businesses.

Features of Allthings:

• Free to try, no CC Required
• Task Management
• Work/Resource Planning
• Customizable and Real-Time Alerting
• SaaS Platform
• To-do Lists
• Create Shareable Lists
• No Contracts, Easy and Affordable
• Group collaboration feature
• And more..

Milanote

Milanote is a tool for organizing creative projects into beautiful visual boards. By design, it feels a lot like working on the wall in a creative studio – visual, tactile, and sometimes a bit messy – Milanote is a great fit for designers who work in teams remotely.

Key Features of Milanote:

• Write notes & to-do lists, upload images & files and save things you find on the web
• Organize visually using the flexible drag and drop interface.
• Boards by default are a private place to think, but with a single click you can create a shared workspace for collaboration with your team
• Milanote is filled with hundreds of built-in templates to help you get started with a variety of different projects, from creating a mood board to writing that perfect creative brief.

Pricing:

Basic	Pro
Free (no time limit)	$9.99per user/mo

On The Move..

As you can see from the above list, there is a myriad solution for Task and Project Management. Whether you are looking for dashboard functionality, group collab, search features, category listing, to-do lists, and more, all these solutions are more or less present in every Software. Don’t be confused, based on your budget and feature requirements, select any three platforms from the list above and…

• Google for Product Reviews for the selected Platform. Reading user opinions on these platforms will let you narrow down to the one perfect solution that will best fit your business.
• Try using the Free/Freemium Models to test out the features of the platforms that you have selected. This will give you an understanding of how it’s really like to use the platform. The UI of a certain feature rich platform might be confusing for you, so stick to the one which is easy to follow and understand.
• Once you select a platform, test it out with your team for a few weeks, and don’t be afraid to move onto a better option, if you face problems along the way. After all, the idea of having a Project Management Dashboard is to solve problems and get work done, not to be a problem in itself.

Looking to create your own Digital Marketing Team? Why don’t you join us in our Project Management Dashboard, as we would love to be your Digital Marketing Partner? For any questions, feel free to reach out to us on our Official Facebook Page, and to know more about Digital Marketing Partnership Perks, visit the following page.

Have a good day!

As Digital Marketing continues to grow, so does the quality and the presentation of content. Visual marketing will entirely dominate 2017 as people tend to look for visually appealing content rather than reading a plain block of texts.

So, in order to engage people, we must take care of visual elements in the content we provide. And the first step towards spicing up your content starts with adding relevant images because – “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

You might have noticed the featured image of this post before even reading the headline. We, bloggers, use featured image in the context of the topic of the article and to make the article attract the attention of a casual surfer. This in return makes a marked difference in how the content we provide is consumed by the masses.

When dealing with images online, always ensure that you read the Terms of Service and Licensing rules of the websites before collecting them for your own purpose.

I will not discuss the licensing part as this post is solely dedicated to websites that provide royalty free images. These are my personal favorite sources for image aggregation.

So, without further ado and in no particular order here they are:

Pixabay  

A Creative-Common Zero site that offers over 500,000 images that you can incorporate into your personal and professional use for free. They offer great resources such as Images, vectors, illustrations. As they have no commercial use of restrictions, you can download, change and use them in any way you want.

Freepik

Freepik has a huge database of royalty-free images licensed under Creative Common CC0. So, whenever I’m in a rush to download relevant images for my article, the Freepik comes to my rescue. You just need to put the term in the search box, and Freepik will show you all relevant results, which you can download in a different size. Apart from images, you get vectors, icons, illusions, templates, and a lot more under this platform.

Unsplash

Unsplash offers a vast array of free images in high quality for free. All images are licensed under Creative Common CC0 that simply means that you can download, edit and use for personal and professional purpose without asking for permission of giving credits. They offer quality images snapped from different angles that make images simply breathtaking.

Gratisography

Gratisography is owned by the photographer Ryan McGuire. The images that you find on the site are photographed by Ryan himself and are free from copyright restrictions. You can find pictures categorized into animals, nature, objects, people, urban and whimsical. All pictures are of high-resolution you can use for your personal or commercial projects.

Well, you can take a look at his quirky panache by looking at this snap!

IM Free

IM Free offers a vast assortment of free pictures from around the globe. Their collection includes web templates, people, business, icons, technology, health, food & drinks, sports & fitness, education fashion, beauty, inspiration, black& white, and a lot more. Its button-maker feature makes it unique to stand out from other sites. You can easily create and design a button and implement it in your web pages. Just copy the CSS code at the end of the process and paste it into your page.

Picography

Picography is one of my favorite websites to search and download free images for websites. All photos are licensed under Creative Common CC0. It has an amazing collection of pictures including premium ones where you can purchase brand new collections every month at $15 per month or 120 per year. If you are a photographer, you can submit your photos and showcase your portfolio on Picography as it provides an open platform and if they approve, they will showcase your name and a portfolio link.

Negative Space

Negative Space keeps its users updated with the new stocks of images every week, and all of them are royalty and attribution free. You can sort out free images by their category (including abstract, architecture, street, work, landscapes, etc.), color, and copy space position.

Freestock

Freestock offers really high-resolution image that you can use in the form you want to. All images are released under creative common cc0. You might need to reduce the size of an image before use because every image is uploaded in its original size.

MM Stock

MM Stock is an array of high-resolution images by Jeffrey Betts. You will mostly find pictures of flowers as Jeffrey is fond of these beauties as they full of colors and life. I like to view images in a grid layout, but you can use it as it is.

SkitterPhoto

SkitterPhoto offers a wide collection of free royalty-free images ranging from flora and fauna, landscapes, urban, low light, and a lot more. All of them are licensed under Creative Common CC0. The images can be used for any purpose of your choice. Pictures are authentic and are owned by SkitterPhoto itself. Attribution is not necessary, but they appreciate it if you do. They also provide an open platform to submit your photo to showcase your talent in photography. For more information, please visit the website.

Stockvault

If you are looking for a people picture with a white background for your business, then look no further. Stockvault provides over 40,000 stock images including amazing textures, 3D renders, constructions, people, object seasonal and much more. No login detail is required to download their resources, which is a plus point of this site. You can also upload photos and share with the community over 90,000 designers and photographers and can make money by sharing your pictures. I admit it’s a well-designed platform for photo junkies.

Lock and Stock Photos

Free Stock Photos. Use in Any Way, Anywhere, Anytime.

This is what the site claims. It was a venture started by AJ Montpetit. With a huge stash of free stock images, this website releases images under Creative Common CC0 where no attribution is required. (Credit is always appreciated if given J). Images are categorized into animals, people, sculpture, city life, family, boats, coffee and so on.

Kaboompics

Kaboompics offers a wide variety of high-quality royalty-free photos that can be used for the purpose of your choice.  They provide images of abstract, fashion, architecture, nature, food and drinks. You can search an image by typing keywords, tags or categories.

Pexels

Pexels offers high-definition free stock photos under the CC0 license. They provide a wide variety of images to choose from and allow us to use them commercially. Their upload section lets you submit your own photographs if you have a passion for photography. Pexels also offers a range of video clips mostly based on animals for fun. You can download and share them with your friends anytime.

Life of Pix

Life of Pix offers a huge collection of copyright-free stock-free images of high resolution. They keep their site updated with new pictures every week. You can discover a fine collection of images under the features section. Life of Pix also nominates its photographers as the Photographer of the Week and highlights the top 10 photographies on its website and social networks.

StockSnap

StockSnap offers mesmerizing photos of high resolution. You can sort the images by date, trending, no. of views, no, of downloads and the all-time favorites. It also provides an easy-to-use Graphic Editor – Snappa to modify images according to your choice but the editor has no free plans except for 7 days of a free trial. StockSnap keeps adding hundreds of photos on a daily basis, and all photos are free from copyright restriction.

TookaPicStock

This site offers both free and premium stock photos. It has a huge collection of photos that you can filter by free photos, and the free ones are released under CC0, i.e., no attribution is required but is appreciated if given.

Splitshire

Splitshire is created by Web Designer Nanescu to give life to the photographs that may go into oblivion without any use. It offers an assortment of stock-free photos and free videos released under CC0. The photos are categorized into abstract, cinemograph, automotive, technology, wedding, interiors. Still, life, mock-up bokeh, and a lot more. The website has over 2.000,000 downloads, and over 6,000,000 page views and also been live on Huffington, CNN posts as well as reputed magazines and covers.

Freeimages

Formerly known as Stock.XCHNG, Freeimages has now over 400,000 free stock images contributed by thousands of photographers. Since the site was acquired by Getty Images in 2014 and thus renamed Freeimages and the former URL redirects to the new URL. You can browse by keywords, tags, free photos, and premium photos and also upload a photo if you want.

Imagebase

Photographer David Niblack’s created this site for easy to browse and download free stock photos. It offers absolutely free photos for commercial, education, or personal use. It also offers instant image preview, so you can quickly take a look at the thumbnails before browsing individual pages and downloading them. They keep adding new photos every week to their stash.

Wrapping Up!

Let me give you a quick recap.

I want to reiterate one thing about stock photographs, whether you pay or not, whether attribution is required or not, I would like to suggest if you attribute the site or author or photographer from where you are taking images. And if you have any doubt regarding licensing terms of any particular photo, contact the site immediately. (You don’t want to take down the image that gets traction to your content.)

There is a pool of other websites that provide free stock photos — but these 20 are my picks.

What are your favorite websites for finding free stock photos?

Discuss them in the comments below!

It goes without saying that, if you want to unveil and grow a business, you will have to put a few words on the page, (probably more than a few). Writing a Business Plan is perhaps the most essential, albeit the most difficult task you need to get done, once you are pretty serious that you are going to own a business.

I will discuss it elaborately later on, but Business Plans, to put it briefly and simplistically, require strategy and vision. It is your only chance to make a strong start in the already competitive market. Write a Business Plan that banks cannot resist! Write a Business Plan that makes your friendly neighborhood rivals shake in the boots (okay, maybe at least consider you as the new shark in the waters!).

Now on a more serious note, the question arises as to how am I going to write that one BP that is going to change my life as well as the future of my business?

Well, to be completely honest, you cannot wake up one fine morning and write yourself a perfect little Business Plan that gets you everything you wish for, it does not work that way. It needs patience, forethought, and more importantly a lot of confidence in yourself.

So, I will start with the ‘building confidence’ thing and then move on to the “biz talk”.

LOSING THE “I CAN’T WRITE” ANXIETY

Do you have that dreadful “I am not a writer” syndrome? Do you feel like you know all the right words, but those are always in your head and you cannot translate those onto paper? Do you get major anxiety before writing down your thoughts? Congratulations! You have come to the right place.

• If you are someone, perpetually stuck in a Writers’ Block, the first thing you need to believe is that anyone can write! Yes, I get that your writing will not hold a candle to that of Plath or Hemingway, but nobody expects you to be an actual great writer when you write a Business Plan. Tell yourself over and over, “I am absolutely capable of writing this myself” until you believe it!

• Like I previously said, nobody expects you to be a great writer, so don’t fret too much about the perfect words. In fact, do not wait for the perfect words. Start somewhere. As they say, writing is like cleaning a messy room, you start from a small corner and eventually, you get the whole room cleaned.

• Start with writing disjointed notes, you can always revise later. Use short, smart, personal language. Speaking from experience, once you have completed your first draft, it gives you a lot of confidence which helps you churn out an impressive final product.

• Most importantly, as you sit down to write a pitch deck, make sure you have done research to the core that helps you to convey exactly what you want to. (And then, get off the internet and begin writing!)

Now, another compelling question for you must be, “What exactly is a Business Plan and what do I write in it?” Well, hold on, that is what I am going to talk about here.

 

WHAT IS A BUSINESS PLAN?

Like I previously hinted at, a Business Plan is a written portrayal of the present status of your business, your aspiration for your business’s future, a document that helps you to get your thoughts organized, sets your business goals, and tells you how you plan to achieve it, and why you need support from some other people, and how and how much. Business plans differ in size and scope depending on the type of businesses involved as well as the operating history of the small business.

Business plans are innately planned. You start today, with certain capitals and skills, from POINT A. You want to get to POINT B, a point in the near future when your business will have a different set of capitals and skills along with increased exposure and maximum equity. Your plan shows how you aspire to reach from POINT A to POINT B.

 

CHOOSING THE AUDIENCE

Before you even commence writing a business plan, you should choose who it will be targeted at. Business plans are of two types, externally focused and internally focused. When I assert “externally focused”, I mean it should entice advertisers, investors, money-lenders, and maybe collaborators, people outside of your company.

And when I say “internally focused”, that means it should aim at the people inside the company (e.g. Employees or Managers), people who must understand and share your vision and aspiration. Understanding the target audience of your business plan will help you keep the plan relevant and efficient.

 

KNOWING THE MARKET AND USING BUSINESS ANALYSIS

By analyzing your business by different methods, you discover various internal and external aspects, which might have been overlooked. PEST, SWOT, and STEEPLE are some of the analyses, that will help you to understand and find the missing link in the market. A thorough competitive analysis narrows down your research and helps you understand the market you want to tap in. It also gives you a measure of the scalability of your business and the market share of your products.

The Tech field is viciously competitive, as you already know, and you have to be specific and unique about what you are actually selling and how are you solving a “need” for your market.

 

WRITING AN EXECUTIVE START-UP SUMMARY

• Within the overall outline of the business plan, the executive summary will follow the title page. The summary should tell the reader in brief about what you are going to elaborately say later on in the plan.

• Talk about your total start-up expense (including legal costs, website and logo design, stationery and related expenses).

• Include the approximated numbers for a total start up funding, total funding required, total assets, total capital and liabilities, and total planned investment.

 

COMPANY OVERVIEW

You can add a company overview to the summary or you can keep it separate. For a company overview, you write a short description of your company, a review of your company’s legal structure and ownership (Are you a sole proprietor? Or are you in partnership?), a brief history of the company if it is an existing company and a summary of the business location.

 

BEING REALISTIC, GOAL-ORIENTED AND KNOWING YOUR WEAKNESS AND STRENGTH

A good business plan depends on realism.

You don’t get points for ideas that can’t be implemented. For example, a brilliantly written and excellently researched business plan for a product that cannot be produced in reality is not a good business plan.

It is disheartening for your workers, and you want to make sure your employees do not lose faith in you. The plan which requires millions of dollars of investment, but does not have an efficient management team that can actually achieve that investment, ultimately becomes a joke.

Ask yourself, as you evaluate a business plan: how will I know later on if we followed the plan? How will I track the results over a predetermined time frame and compare them against the plan? Let me tell you this, if you fail to give manifestation to what you promised, you will lose both external and internal commitments.

Engage with your audience.

Maybe, write a short, personal anecdote about why you decided to launch this particular business, what you expect from your employees and how you plan to treat them and manage the business; what you expect from the investors and how you plan to serve them, or how you plan to serve the consumers.

You have to be extremely convinced about your goal that you want to reach, make no mistake.

• Know your strength and weakness, and be frank and honest about it. Focus on your strength, talk about the quality and efficiency of yourself and your employees, and don’t be shy about your weakness, which for most tech-based business start ups, is the fund (or the lack thereof).
• Include your plans for tasks, deadlines, dates, forecasts, budgets, and metrics.

Here are few resources that can help you to get started with your Business Plan and fine tune the existing one:

• Small Business Plan Template
• Writing a Business Plan
• Mistakes to Avoid While Writing Business Plan
• How to Build Billion Dollar Business Plan

 

Ending Notes

At the end, I will say that you better accept the fact that all businesses have competition. The more attractive you make your business plan, the closer you are to success. Make baby steps, and try not to get disheartened even when you face rejections. Make one small victory your stone number one and build on it. Good luck for the adventures in 2017!