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16 NovSEO

Google Featured Snippet FAQs And How to Get Featured

The first few featured snippets were seen in the fall of 2014, ever since then, we have only seen a handful of websites trying to take full advantage of these handy little boxes, that have statistically proven to increase CTR by 20% or more, always.

What Are Google Featured Snippets?

When a user types a question into Google Search, Google might decide to show a special featured search result snippet at the top of the SERPs. This box will include a summary of the answer; that will be extracted from a web page, along with a link to the web page, page title, and URL. This is how it looks.

Who Is This Important For?

If your pages are already ranking on the first page of Google for certain Question type searches, then you can try to take advantage of featured snippets by making necessary changes to the ranking pages.

Pages that do not rank on the first page of Google do not get any benefits from Featured Snippet Optimization. So, ideally, it is only applicable if you have certain relevant question phrases that your website is already ranking for.

How Does Featured Snippet Help?

For one, it helps you stand out of all the other Search Engine Results. With so many different types of results like, Ads, Local Packs, Maps, Images, Schema, Reviews, etc., it is essential for webmasters to take advantage of any tool that gives them an edge over their competition. Featured Snippets are statistically proven to increase CTR by 20% or more, and they also add reputation.

Where Does the Answer Come from In the Featured Snippet?

Till date, I have seen three different types of Featured Snippet Answers.

Lists

Paragraphs

Tables

These are typically extracted from the results on page 1 that Google thinks to be worthy. There is no way around it. You cannot ask Google to put your website in the featured snippet, but you can optimize it to increase your chances of getting featured.

As you may have noticed, there is a small Feedback link that appears under the Featured Snippet Box. Users can use this feedback link to give their opinion to Google about the feature box. Google is constantly trying to improve ways to detect the most useful answers in the snippets, so they sure are open to feedback about what their algorithm is displaying at the moment.

Another question that I have received quite sometimes is,

What If I Don’t Want to Be Featured in Google Snippet?

Google does give the ability to webmasters to opt-out of the featured snippet box. This can be done by simply adding the tag: to your page. If you want none of your pages to be featured in the snippet, then you can add the code in the header.php of your website.

How Can I Opt into Featured Snippets?

The simple answer is, you can’t. No matter what you do, and how much you optimize, no one can assure you a guaranteed 100% featured image box listing on Google. However, there are certain ways that you can use to increase your chances of cracking the Google snippet code. Before I dive into the steps, take a look at some of the examples of featured snippets:

As you can see above, Google pulls the content from the site, showcasing the answer in the SERPs.

This instantly builds high authority for the website, to the users.

Let’s jump onto another example:

If you see in the above example,

Google randomly pulls this particular method from the list, but takes the content, also pulls one image.

Isn’t it Cool?

Now, here is the catch. If you find this answer helpful, isn’t it obvious that you would love to know the other methods as well?

So, moving onto …

How Can You Optimize Your Content for Featured Snippet Box?

Here are the four simple steps that you can implement to achieve Google’s Most Wanted Box:

Find out a simple question related to your niche. [If you are clueless about the questions, I’ll suggest doing a quick Quora search, which has the most basic questions related to your market area.]
Deliver a clear and simple answer to the question, not more than 50 – 60 words. [ Don’t go for a long detailed answer, just write the exact answer without beating around the bush. You can follow that by a long answer, or with other types of content on the page.] The idea is to have the question in one of the Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4) on your page, followed by an answer in
tag
, that should not exceed 5o – 60 words.
Provide value to the readers. [Don’t just write bland answer, offer value through your writing what visitors actually want to read.]
Make your page Google-friendly. [Optimize your page for search engine robots, so that they can easily crawl through your content.]

Ending Notes

The key rule to land a Featured Snippet is to provide solutions to the most basic questions, what your potential customer might ask.

Getting ranked for snippet makes you look like an expert in that particular niche. It builds instant credibility for your brand and website.

I am sure I answered all possible questions that you may have had related to Google Featured Snippets, still, if you want help, you can reach out to me on Facebook, or Shoot a comment in the comments section below.

11 NovSocial Media

Social Media Management For The Future – 2017 and on!

Social Media Management can be a pain in the all wrong places if you do not execute it in an organized manner.

If you are a Social Media Manager, you would know that it takes a considerable amount of time to do the various, small-small activities. Needless to say, that it is super easy to find yourself distracted and waste a lot of time in the process, all thanks to BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and Unilad.

If you are like me, then you spend part or almost all your day hopping from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn and on and on, checking analytics, strategizing and performing one out of your million tasks.

Back in 2014, Snap Chat was closing three years, and still failing to explain to marketers that it was not a sexting application.

News stories had predictions about Pinterest beating Facebook and Twitter in the race to paid advertisements.

Why Pinterest Ads Will Beat Facebook Ads – Mizz Information

How Pinterest can win advertisers and maybe beat Twitter – Digiday

Live Video Play, Face Swapping, and Auto-play, etc. were all on the horizon, lurking to unleash a different mix into the Social Media we once knew, and truly so. Social Media has evolved at a much faster rate in the last 2 years, than in the last 10 years before that.

As you can see from the image above,

With evolution, comes adaptability and us, Social Media Managers need to keep update with all the new skills this job keeps demanding. So, I want to talk about my key predictions for Social Media Management for the future and the most important skills the future SMM needs to have,

The 9 Key Characteristics of Future Social Media Hero’s

What are the ideal ingredients of a Social Media Manager in 2017? If we were making a list for 2014, it would still be a fairly short list. But, Social Media has evolved frantically with the rise of new technology and wider audience, certain top skills can be seen common in the most successful marketers, and they are:

Community Administration:
If you compare all the top brands on Social Media, you will notice that they all have one thing in common – it’s their community. A good Social Media Manager must be able to manage a community, administer it, create connections and also grow the community by connecting the brand to its audience.

Customer Service:
If you haven’t realized how important Social Media is for your customer service, then you are surely doing something wrong. According to research, more than 72% customers who complain to a brand on Twitter, expect a response in the next hour. Not to forget the Facebook Business Pages, which have constantly seen an up in Customer Interaction, thanks to the privacy quotient.

Content Curation:
The end all and be all of Social Media. Content curation is the savior, especially for businesses that do not have the time and resources to create original content for their social media. It is an important skill to have for an SMM as you need to know what to share and what not to share, and when to share what you share.

Relationship Building:
Relationship building is different from Community Management for reasons, because here you need to not only connect with your audience but also with your key influencers. This is a crucial skill, but unfortunately so, this is the most lacking skill for most managers. Proper Relationship building can give you access to, more credibility, larger audience; user generated content, social influence and of course, new leads and customers.

Videography:
If you are thinking 2016 has been a massive year for Video, then just wait for 2017. 70% companies state that video is the most important part of their marketing strategy, and 2 out of 3 companies state that video will continue to dominate their marketing spend in the coming years. You need more reason to get this skill into you DNA? Facebook Live Videos are going to kill it in 2017, go ahead get the camera.

Creative DNA:
22% of customers would unfollow a brand on Social Media if the content were too repetitive and boring. Thanks to lt and BuzzSumo for getting this data together. Social Media Managing needs to be top of the line in the coming years. With the rise of Social Platforms like WhatsApp and Hike, Google Allo and Facebook Messenger, people are becoming wary of the same type of content constantly flooding their news feed from different brands. The scene will soon get saturated to the point where people will stop reacting to the same things over and over again. We need to get more original.

Organization Skills:
I am not simply talking about having a routine or a publishing schedule. With more features being unleashed in Social Networks than ever, managers need to stay ahead of the curve to make the most of the new features. This calls in for a little more than just having a content calendar. Better organization skills can entail having time every day to research and curate ideas for content that is out of the box.

Selling Skills:
Gone are the days when Social Platforms merely used to be a mode of contact between brands and customers. Selling on Social platforms goes way beyond the conventional means of traditional selling. For one, you cannot be a pushy salesman on Facebook, but again you do not want to miss out on a likely customer by being too slow. To be better able to sell in the social realm, you need to quickly find customer pain points and demonstrate how your product or service can give them relief.

Tech Savvy:
Yes! You read that right. The key here is to be tech savvy to the point that you can spot key market shifts and adapt to changes quickly. With new Social platforms coming up, as a Social Media Manager, you do not need to become a pro in all platforms. But, if your audience is adopting a new network, so should you be able to learn the ins and outs of a social network and develop a Social Media Plan accordingly.
Search Engine Optimization:
As Social and SEO get interconnected, SEO is going to be in the top 5 skills for Social Media Managers by next year. With more and more Social content finding its way into the search engine results, Social Media Managers should take the hint and learn basic things like Keyword Research and Link Building.

And lastly, as a Social Media Manager you should allocate time every day to:

Review the day’s content
Provide social media insights for major campaigns
Read industry news
Indulge in Live Q&A with CEO on Facebook
Resolve customer queries
Curate content for staff to share throughout the day
Schedule the content for the coming days
Go home and pass out browsing funny memes on Facebook.

Now, since you know what sets the stage for the Social Media Warriors of tomorrow, let’s take a deeper look at some of the interesting changes in Social Media, that are set to share the Social Verse. I am going to talk about 5 important things that have happened or are soon to happen; that should be on the priority list of Social Media Managers in 2017.

Virtual Reality to Soon Set Foot into Social Media –
Well VR is already in action on Facebook and YouTube with the 360^ophotos and videos, but we are sure to see even deeper integrations in future. Facebook is already integrating Oculus Technology in its 360-degree photos and videos, which allow users to look at a scene from different angles by looking right, up, left and down, allowing for a more captivating experience. It would be the perfect time to start learning how to use 360-degree cameras, as they are going to be huge for businesses. Don’t go about telling me you ain’t a photographer. I ain’t But I love what I do, and I am willing to adapt as times change, as my audience is more receptive to this new form of content in their news feeds.

Takeaway: Social Managers who are keen to stay on top of the line, should learn the ins and out of VR technology and how it can be used better to engage the audience in the coming days. Think about 360-degree event coverage, sneak peek inside company tours to adventure destinations and more…
Social Shopping To Take Off Soon –
In the past two years, all major social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram have released in-line buttons. It is not too long before when YouTube may launch a 360-degree virtual shop for sellers wanting to market their products with a personal touch. The options that we presently have on these platforms are enough for customers to make purchases, without leaving the comfort of their news feeds. What is next? Facebook has recently launched a Shop section for Business Pages. Even though integrating storefronts is possible with third-party applications in the Business Pages already, but this is the Social Giants’ first move to shifting e-commerce right into the social space.

Takeaway: If you have not integrated Shop into your business page, then you should do it at the earliest. Try to measure the insights from any movement in your business page to make data-backed decisions to sell products. Not all products are born equal, so you might as well find out which products your community is more interested in. While, you have been promoting the wrong products all this while.
Live Streaming To Get Even More Mainstream –
We already saw an uprise in the consumption of live streaming media, when Twitter-owned Periscope reported 10 million active users at the start of 2015. Then came Hubspot, one of the best moves from Facebook till date. I am sure that you are aware, but for those who don’t know or have magically skipped all the live videos in the news feed since March, this year – Facebook Live allows you to stream real-time videos from your mobile or desktop, without using any third-party application. This has technically changed how the massive 2 Billion user base of Facebook interacts with each other. And that’s not the end of it; Facebook has also introduced tons of Hubspot that give you eye-to-eye insights about the performance of your live videos.
Takeaway: Integrating Live Streaming goes way beyond the means of standard Social Media Management Suits like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer. At least, for now. If you aren’t already taking advantage of live streaming yet, then the time is now. Take a look at this post on Hubspot for Livestreaming ideas.
Priority Customer Service in Social Media –
Social Media and Customer service have always been key players. Why would people like to wait on the phone, when they can get their query resolved on Facebook or Twitter? According to our study of 500 Sri Lankan retailers, we noted that only 60% of them were using Social Media to answer Customer Queries. And out of that, only 17% were using Twitter and the rest 83% were doing on Facebook. The average time for customer response varied from 24 Hours to a Week, which surely has a lot of room for improvement.
Most businesses do not realize the need to have a dedicated Customer Support in Social Media Channels due to the added costs. Even though customer service falls under the skill of a Social Media Manager, it should be taken more as a supervisor.
Interesting Read: 75 Customer Quotes Facts, Stats, and Quotes
Takeaway: Customer Support is a time taking process, needless to say, it is best served ‘right-from-the-oven.’ If your business is yes to extend full customer support in Social Media, it would be a right time now to start and slowly get a dedicated staff to manage incoming queries at the earliest.

Heard of Community by YouTube Yet? –
Well, if you haven’t already heard about YouTube’s latest endeavor to make the channel a bit more social, then you sure are not keeping up with your industry news. Nonetheless, it is not too late to jump into the YouTube bandwagon if you have been skeptical of YouTube as a one-sided media platform. Recently, YouTube announced a new tab next to Channels, that will allow content producers to indulge in lightweight conversations with their audience. This is what the official announcement from YouTube read.
“do things like text, live videos, images, animated GIFs and more, giving [them] easier, lightweight ways to engage with [their] fans more often in between uploads, in real-time.”
..
So it is self-explanatory right. A community for YouTube is going to be a huge success in the coming days. Not only will it allow content producers to interact with fans more often between uploads and video production, but it will also allow them to get feedback about what type of content their fans would like to see from them in the future.
Takeaway: Having a video streaming channel was a must in 2015, 16, but this move from YouTube is surely going to huge and result in an increase in the -ever-so-exponential- the amount of time people spend on the channel. Hop into the first ever Video Social Network and start building your own YouTube community from now! The time is bright my friend.

There is an interesting book I read on YouTube for Business. Read pages 192 – 225 or 7.

And now, since I have given you a fair insight into what is going to change in the coming days, let’s take a look at some of my Social Media Management Hacks, that are sure to increase your productivity as well…

Social Media Management Hacks for Productivity

I am going to list all the things that I use myself. Some may be tools, some maybe nifty little tricks. And they are in no particular order of importance or anything. Here you go:

Increase Tweet Reach with This Nifty Little Trick:

Use a period before tagging anyone with the @symbol at the beginning of a tweet to increase the tweet reach to your followers as well. Without the period, if you tag someone at the beginning of a tweet, your tweet will only be visible to them and their followers. A small but great hack if you want to include more people in your tweet battles.

Social Buzz Club to get more shares:

I see a lot of startups and new businesses struggling to get shares on their content in Social Media, no matter how much time they spend in research and development of content. Apart from leveraging employees, family, friends and supporters to share your content, you can also make use of Social Buzz Club. In this network, you can share your posts and others will share it in their networks. When you share, other content you get points, and these points can be redeemed into posting your content on this platform. It’s a great tool to build a community of people who constantly engage with your content.

Use Crystal Knows to Craft Better Introductory Emails:

Now, this trick is for Gmail. You can use com to find out how to break the ice with your prospective client or lead. What this tool does is, it analyzes public content in your name, to help you better communicate with them. The tool tells you about the personality, style, and communication and gives even deeper insights like – “this person tends to trust people easily.” Or things like “don’t write too much” .. “use emoticons wisely..”

Use IFTTT to Automate Content Sharing:

I use IFTTT to Automate my content sharing across various web platforms like WordPress, Blogger, Weebly, Tumblr and also have the content shared on Facebook and LinkedIn, right when I click the publish button. I have lots of other IFTTT Recipes, and I find it a great tool, which saves me hours of work, that I would need to individually cut and paste links and titles, and images into various platforms individually.

Use The Reply Button To Create Twitter Threads:

I don’t see many people using it, but it’s a fantastic way to share longer content in the form of tweets. The idea is to have the contents ready according to Twitter’s character count, and post your primary tweet, followed by the rest as replies to your own You can create a complex blend of content, by mixing videos, pictures, links, and text into your tweet threads, making them stand out in other people’s feed.

Use Tweetfull To Drive Twitter Engagement and Traffic:

As Tweets only tend to last for 24 minutes, you at least need 12 tweets to cover the entire day. What I do is, I use Tweetfull to auto re-tweet popular content based on keywords and hashtags that you select, which keeps your Twitter account lively all throughout the day. Even if the automation is good, I would suggest keeping the tweets on a lighter note, since you do not want to look like a spam haven.

Rapportive Helps Me Connect with People Who Mail Me:

Rapportive is also a web app for Gmail, like Crystalknows. What Rapportive does is it shows me all the places I can connect with a person, who has emailed For example, if a person emails me, I can directly send them a Connection Request on LinkedIn or follow them on Twitter, without leaving my email. This is another great tool for Influencer outreach.

Optimize Your Opengraph Tags:

I learned this from the master – Neil Patel. When Neil started paying more attention to Open graphs, his traffic from Facebook increased by 174%. Don’t get baffled by the term, Integrating Opengraph Tags into your website is a matter of 10 seconds, which I am sure you can spare. The latest version of WordPress SEO by Yoast comes with Opengraph Tags integration as well.

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Ending Notes:

On a parting note, I would like to remind you about all the things I mentioned in this blog.

Social Media Managers should have skills like Community Management, Content Curation, Customer Service, Creativity, Analytical Decision Making ability, Creative DNA, Social Selling, Relationship Building, Search Engine Optimization, and Organization.

Top things to integrate into your Social Media Action Plan in 2017, if not yet are, Understanding and leveraging Facebook Live, Getting used to VR technology, Selling Your products and services through social storefronts, using Social Media to master Customer Service, and lastly, join the first ever Video Social Platform – Community by YouTube!

All in all, Social Media Management can be a really time-consuming task, and it can be tough to accomplish if you are not doing it as a dedicated job. Irrespective of whether you do Social Media full-time or part-time, you should always take one full day out for Content Curation in a month. This should be the day when you shut off your distractions and solely focus on collecting the best possible content for your audience, be it in the form of Images, Text, Videos, Gifs, or any other media.

Use Google Calendar Alerts to the fullest by marking important dates for dynamic content sharing like Facebook Live Videos, Q&A Interviews with Staff and HOD, Virtual Reality Casts, etc.

I hope you found my study helpful. If you need help managing your Social Media Profiles, you can connect with me on our Facebook Page, or simply drop a comment below and I will get in touch with you. Thanks for reading.

01 NovDigital Marketing

Top 10 Conversion Rate Optimization Tools to Increase Your ROI

If you have been in the online biz for sometime, you would know that number of visitors on a website mean nothing. What good are a 1000 visitors to you, if you are hardly generating any sales from your website. This is where Conversion Rate Optimization comes into play. Forgive me for beating around the bush if you are aware, but there are tools that can help you enhance the value you are getting from the current traffic on your website.

In simple terms, Conversion Rate Optimization can help you get more bang out of your bucks, without spending an additional penny on marketing.

Spending more to get more customers is the old form of marketing.

Here I have listed tools, some of which will potentially increase the number of leads you capture from your website, while others will work to tell you how your visitors are interacting with your website, which parts of your website are getting the most attention, while which parts need significant improvements in order to convince and convert more customers.

HelloBar

HelloBar is a lead capturing tool that allows you to add a form to your website, which pops up while visitors navigate through your website. This will help you to grow your email list, showcase your services or sale or promote your social media pages. The free version of HelloBar lets you create a CTA that will be visible to every tenth visitor. However, its premium version offers a more advanced setups.

Pricing:

Basic	Pro	Enterprise
Free	$4.95/mo Onwards	$83/mo

SumoMe

SumoMe helps you grow your website’s traffic by offering conversion tools like a ‘Welcome Mat’ popup CTA, scroll triggered box, Contact Us form and a Smart Bar to grow email subscribers. Also, it integrates with major email management software providers like MailChimp and Aweber. SumoMe also offers integrated Google Analytics in your SumoMe dashboard.

Pricing:

Basic	Pro	Enterprise(Customized)
Free	$29/mo – $119/mo	Contact SumoMe

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a research tool, which compiles the most shared content on a particular topic. It gives you insights on the most trending content for a keyword or niche of your choice. Once you enter your keyphrase into Buzzsumo, it will spit out the most viral content on the web based on the traction it received. This can show you what kind of content is working best for others in your niche and help you replicate the strategies that worked for them to get more conversions for your business.

Pricing:

Pro	Agency	Enterprise
$99/mo	$299/mo	$699/mo

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb allows you to compare your website’s traffic with its advanced traffic estimator tool. SimilarWeb allows you to track your traffic sources and determine the most profitable channels of marketing for your business. You can make strategic decisions based on data to pull back the marketing budget from channels that are not that great, and invest in channels that bring home the bacon.

Pricing:

Basic	Ultimate	Custom
Free	Contact BuzzSumo	Contact BuzzSumo

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is an amazing tool to visualize where your visitors click. Its Heat Map functionality shows you what is grabbing your visitor’s attention or what is turning them off. And its Scroll Mapping tool highlights how far down the page your visitors are scrolling. In a nutshell, CrazyEgg provides you a thorough report to understand how well your visitors are engaging with your website and you can boost your conversions from the existing traffic by doing little changes to your site.

Pricing:

Basic	Standard	Plus	Pro
$9 /mo	$19 /mo	$49 /mo	$99 /mo

Unbounce

Unbounce is a robust marketing and A/B testing tool that allows marketers to create, publish and test landing pages. Its drag and drop functionality gives you a clear picture of how your website looks and functions for your visitors. This can help you make strategic changes to things that are not appealing to your visitors, meaning more conversions and money to you.

Basic	Pro I	Pro II	Enterprise
$49 /mo	$99 /mo	$199 /mo	$499 /mo

Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is an analytics tool that integrates with your email service provider to analyze your audience and email them specifically. Kissmetrics helps you conduct A/B testing to figure out your most profitable campaigns and capitalize on them accordingly. It increases your ROI by analyzing your customer’s behavior on your website and helping you make strategic changes to have higher chances of converting visitors into leads.

Pricing:

Self-Service	Growth	Power
$220 /mo	$500/mo	$700/mo

Really Good Emails

Really Good Emails provides you a bunch of ready-made email layouts, which are beautifully crafted to drive the viewer’s attention. Emails are the best way to outreach your audience and Really Good Emails ensure that your messages reach your audience in the best way possible. Their layouts are pretty fab to be honest.

Pricing: It’s FREE!!

Headline Analyzer

Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule analyzes how strong your content headline is and gives you a score between 1-100. It determines the Emotional Marketing Value of your headline. The score is based on common, uncommon words, vocabulary, and characters used in a headline.

(P.S. I am a fan of this tool!) It has helped me drive more click throughs to my old blogs by simply making some keyword changes.

Pricing: It’s Free!!

User Testing

User Testing is an online testing tool that allows you to gather videos of real people interacting with your website. The videos show how visitors react to your site and their opinion on what’s good or what’s bad on the website. This tool conducts user’s studies across demographic groups. It lets you observe your target audience’s experience with your site, and you can change your website accordingly to provide a great user experience to them.

Basic	Pro
$99 /video	Contact User Testing

Start Optimizing Your Conversion Rate Today!

Hopefully, these 10 tools will help you increase your conversions. While some of these tools are free, but their features are limited. You can mix and match some of the free and paid tools to optimize your website for the best retention.

These tools should be more than enough for you to get started. If you are a beginner I would strongly suggest trying Crazy Egg and Hellobar, because they have great documentation and resources online.

If you need any help while setting up a conversion tool for you, feel free to contact me via Our Official Facebook page or quickly drop a comment down below!

Have you tried any of the tools we’ve listed above?

If ‘Yes’ then, which tools you found to be the most helpful for your website? Let me know, I am excited.

25 OctResearch

Top 10 Ecommerce Platforms of 2017 Compared

More than 45% of all online purchases are initiated with a Search Engine Query. Thus making Search Engine Optimization, one of the most important factors for Ecommerce Businesses. You need to ensure that your products are found easily on Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Today, we will be comparing the Top 10 Ecommerce Platforms 2016, not only because of their SEO friendliness but also due to a lot of other factors that we shall discuss each one of them.

Where most online marketers fail to make the right decision is by sticking with the first Ecommerce Solution that comes to their mind, only to realize that the platform they have chosen does not have all the features that they require to sell their products online. There are some Ecommerce software that offers a full array of SEO features, while there are some that offer them at a cost, and there is also a breed of software that does not offer any SEO friendliness at all.

So, without further ado, let’s dive into our Top 10 Rankings for Ecommerce SEO Software in 2017, taking into consideration the Alexa Rankings (which show popularity) as well.

First up on the line is definitely the Magento Platform…

Magento

Magento is an eCommerce platform based on open source technology, which provides online merchants a scalable and flexible online store with full control over the content, look, and functionality of the shopping cart system as well as it offers search engine optimization, robust marketing, and catalog-management tools.

Pros:

Flexibility – The architecture of Magento allows you to customize templates and to develop functionality according to your needs as this is an open-source platform.
Feature-rich – Magento’s community version allows you to manage multiple storefronts, multi-location, multi-currency, multi-language with a user-friendly UI and easy navigation.
Pricing – The community version is free for small to medium-sized businesses. Magento Enterprise costs $18,000 per year for enterprise business solutions.
Community – Magento has large community users, who have developed many plugins and extensions, which will help you in real-time. Apart from that, it has a simple back-end and organized store that can be easily manageable.

Cons:

Hosting – Magento needs a dedicated server that is specialized in Magento. Normal hosting platforms cannot handle it due to its bulkiness and that results in a slow and irritating user experience.
Pricing – The enterprise version will cost you around $18,000 a year, and it’s more for a customized premium enterprise.
Developers – Magento developers are very hard to find because of extremely large database, and if you find one, their charges are exceptionally high.
Time – Even on having a flexible architecture, customization are hard to make because of its loading speed on different platforms.

Shopify

Shopify is an all in one eCommerce solution, which allows you to set up an online store to sell your goods, and provides customers with a great user experience. It features customizable templates, an organized storefront, ‘Buy Button’ functionality, which allows you to use Shopify as a Point of Sale (POS) option and let customers buy your goods anywhere online.

Pros:

Speed and security – Shopify is integrated with payment providers, and its built-in speed checkout allows customers to pay with minimal load time.
Marketing – Shopify allows custom Title tags, meta descriptions on every category page for SEO purpose and also allows you to build customized landing pages for marketing purposes.
Design – Shopify offers multiples free themes and numerous custom-built premium themes along with the option to customize and add features for Developers.
App Store – Shopify App store has all the features that you need to run an online business. It provides various free and paid Apps and adds flexibility for the brands having an online presence all around the web.

Cons:

Pricing – Shopify’s basic plan starts from $29 a month; the average plan is for $79 a month, and advanced Shopify is for $299 a month.
Customization Hacking – Shopify uses a different setup to customize their themes rather than using PHP for their templates. It might be a problem for first timers on Shopify.
Content Marketing – Shopify’s blogging platform is not as great as WordPress as it provides a basic layout for blogging.
Lock-In feature – Lock-in features to delete your online store permanently. Shifting from Shopify to another online store may not be a very smooth journey.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a One-stop solution to build an online store. It provides you customizable storefronts with control of the database.

Pros:

Integrated Knowledge – BigCommerce provides you tons of learning materials (In-depth videos, how to – guides, automatic email series, setup wizard,) that helps you to learn and implement.
Good Speed & Security – BigCommerce allows you to divest the technical issues (without spending $ on developers) and easy POS gives your customers a hassle-free shopping experience.
Distinctive Built-in Features – BigCommerce is integrated with Alibaba, the world’s largest marketplace for wholesalers, which is the intuitive feature of BigCommerce. Apart from that, it has a transparent technical insight, which is a plus for any business.
In-built Marketing Feature – It is integrated with Google Shopping, eBay Store, SEO set up and AdWords ad generator.
Cooperative Customer Service – BigCommerce has support via Facebook, active forums, learning modules and much more that helps you understand the platform.

Cons:

Pricing – For new and Emerging businesses, it costs around $29.95/mo. (Standard) and $79.95/mo. (plus). For fast growing and established brands, it’s around $199.95/mo. (Pro) & for Enterprise, Charges are higher for customization packages.
Lock-in – If you are switching hosting platforms, then chances are high to lose all your content while shifting due to Lock-in feature of it or you would be facing pretty high switching charges.
List Management – List is accessible throughout the screen instead of having it’s a dedicated area.
Functional Customization – It is not an open source platform. So, if you want to do few tweaks to your functionality, it’d be difficult for you.

WooCommerce

NOTE: WooCommerce is not actually a platform, it is a Plugin for WordPress, which is again an open source Content Management System. It is free of cost.

You might not have heard about Magento or Shopify, but you have surely come across WooCommerce. It is one of the leading e-commerce platforms worldwide. WooCommerce Plugin turns your website into a robust Online Store in a matter of minutes.

Pros:

Pricing – It’s free! This is one of the biggest advantages of WooCommerce. All you have to do is to download the plugin in WordPress and build an online store with this toolkit without spending a single penny.
Familiarity – WooCommerce is familiar to those who have been working on WordPress or have a website on the platform as it is just a plugin to be installed to get started.
Customizable Toolkit – WooCommerce provides you various customizable standard templates for free.
Security – WooCommerce is a very secured platform with its updated POS.

Cons:

Frequent Updates – WordPress keeps updating its software frequently to avoid bugs, but the plugins aren’t too quick to adapt to changes. So, the plugins won’t be compatible with the changes and might leave you slow and frustrated User Experience.
Expensive Customizable theme – WooCommerce is an open-source platform that lets the developers play with the themes, and as each theme is programmed differently, it might cost you a lot to hire a developer to get done what you want.

OsCommerce

OsCommerce is a popular eCommerce platform having thousands of community members including developers and support forums. It has an open source technology and is free of cost.

Pros:

Large community – The osCommerce community has over 1.5 million individual posts with hundreds of thousands of members. So, if you stuck at anything, you can always find a way out with the help of this forum.
Easy Modification – osCommerce comes with an easy modification panel even if you are doing it by yourself without any knowledge of codes.
Plugins & Add-ons – osCommerce provides a wide range of plugins and add-ons to enhance the features of your site.

Cons:

Error Prone – osCommerce can be prone to malware and bugs as most of the times, website breakdown while checking out.
Manual Involvement – Instead of having built-in features, it requires manual interference to manage the site. This makes osCommerce more time consuming than other platforms.
Not so scalable – This platform is only good for small to mid-size businesses. Not a great option for Enterprise Businesses.

Squarespace

Squarespace is a drag and drop web development site that delivers riche-imagery and a great user experience to users. All in all, if you want your website to look visually engaging, professional, and classy at the same time, Squarespace is surely a platform to consider. It is not free.

Pros:

Mobile Responsive – All Squarespace templates are mobile responsive across all the devices, which is a huge advantage as mobile usability has increased a lot today.
Professional Templates – Squarespace provides you with clean, elegant, and rich template designs with a sophisticated feel to make your website stand out.
Customizable Features – It provides you extensive styling options to choose from. You can easily do tweaks to your site without even knowledge of heavy coding.

Cons:

Different Design on Mobile – Although Squarespace templates are mobile responsive When you hit the publish button, the design differentiates from the website.
Wide-ranging styling options – Due to the extensive styling tools, provided by Squarespace, choosing a fixed design can be a tough task if you don’t have the creative eye. Basically, you have to go for trial and error method to find out suitable design for you.
Single Integration – Squarespace’s eCommerce platform only integrates with one payment processor (Stripe). Even though stripe is a secure platform, but we would love to see more Payment gateway integrations in the platform in the future.

Volusion

Volusion is also a popular name in the Ecommerce Software arsenal. When you use Volusion, it is more like leasing an online store. As a business owner, you can take care of all the merchandising, marketing, sales and growth, and leave all the dirty work like security, updates, and maintenance to the owner.

Pros:

Built in On-boarding Materials and Training – Paying a little extra for the Volusion Platform totally justifies the cost because not only do they have a library of troubleshooting guides, but every store comes with a Volusion Account Specialist, who will take special interest into setting up the store exactly the way you want.
Speed and Security – When you are hosting your own Ecommerce Website with WordPress and WooCommerce for example, two of the most common challenges you will face is optimizing the Speed and Security. With Volusion, that will never be a problem because their trained staffs will take care of all those factors.
Search Engine Optimization – Through Volusion does have some SEO hurdles to avoid like duplicate pages and wrong HTTPS redirects, other than that it does have a robust array of SEO functionalities inbuilt into the platform.

Cons:

The Pricing Is Ultra Complex – The pricing of Volusion is a pain to figure out as they have multiple point of charges. First, there is the recurring monthly fee that you have to pay for the Selected Package, then there are the platform transaction fees, credit card transaction fees, and your add-ons and extra features fees.
Separate Mobile Site Setup – Volusion Stores mobile version is not the responsive version of your website. Customers are redirected to the m.yoursite.com version of your store, which will not be able to offer the exact same or even close experience as your web store.
Not Many Add-ons Available – Unlike BigCommerce, Shopify and WordPress, Volusion fails to impress in the functionality end. Most eCommerce store owners would prefer to have modern features in their website, but Volusion does not have a massive list of add-ons, unlike its other competitors.

Prestashop

Prestashop surely makes it to our Top 10 List of Ecommerce Software in 2016. We believe that this platform has great potential. With its roots in France, Prestashop is considered the European answer to “Magento.” The platform is open-source, and it also gives businesses the resilience and ease to build an inexpensive but modern and updated eCommerce Store.

Pros:

Official Market Place – Prestashop has an official marketplace with over 3500 themes and customizations to choose from.
Intuitive and User-friendly Interface – Not only does this platform pack a punch of innovation, but it gives users the ability to customize each and every nut and gear on the platform.
Free of Cost – Being an open source platform means it is free of cost, which provides a low entry barrier for online merchants who want to get the feel of starting an Ecommerce Website.
Multiple Currencies and Languages – It supports multiple currencies and over 41 Languages and counting.

Cons:

Expensive Add-ons and Modules – Though the platform is itself open source, you need to pay a hefty sum for getting additional modules and plugins from the marketplace.
Not Scalable – The platform is suitable for Small to Mid-sized businesses as it doesn’t have a multi-store feature, which is the biggest requirement of large projects.
No Options for Cross-selling – There is no option to up-sell or cross-sell, which is a common feature in most other Ecommerce Platforms.

Open Cart

Open Cart is an online software dedicated to eCommerce businesses to make life easier for wholesalers and buyers by providing them open source environment. Its user interface is intuitive and the experience of working in Open Cart is great.

Pros:

Advanced Features – Open Cart offers a good set of features, including organized manner for order processing and robust catalog functionality.
Pricing – It is free to use unless you want to download and install multiple paid extensions, which is easily manageable by small to mid-size businesses.
Documentation – Open Cart comes with its own documentation modules with ‘How to’ guides and step by step tutorials including videos and screenshots.
User-Friendly Interface – Open cart’s interface makes it more user-friendly even for beginners with its easy and simple dashboard.

Cons:

Not Proving Cache – Open cart doesn’t provide you Cache, and in order to improve your website performance, you will need to install extensions.
Complex Customization – Store customization is a complex process in the Open Cart, which might be a big constraint for some businesses.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is an online eCommerce platform designed solely for online merchants. It is based on PHP, MySQL and is an open source technology built by developers, designers, and shop holders for creating a simple solution for eCommerce businesses.

Pros:

Multiple Add-ons & languages – Zen Cart comes with multiple additional features, which are downloadable from the website itself. The Add-ons range from adding various languages to adding extra administrative tools.
Secure Platform – Zen Cart has a great product management system, and its automated features lessen the manual struggle. And, when it comes to security, the Zen cart won’t let you down.
Scalable Software – Zen Cart offers a wide range of professional templates that allow you to customize your website to make it stand out for your customers.
Community support – Zen Cart has a robust forum and community, which supports you in real time with quick response and step by step tutorials.

Cons:

Average Templates – You must be thinking after bragging about its free and paid templates, why am I listing down this as a con. Well, the reason is their templates are not so appealing and do not stand in a competition where Magento and Shopify provide a classy look to your website.
Complex Upgradation – Once you settle down with your website modification you can forget about getting any upgrades shortly. In case you want to do so, you have to start from scratch, thanks to the complex Add-on Integration of Zen cart.
No Formal Support – There is no formal support for Zencart. But users in the forum are pretty active and they will help you out in most cases. Even their newsletter and autoresponders are unreliable.
Basic Reporting – The reporting of Zen cart is pretty basic, which means that apart from the number of products purchased, you won’t have much statistics at the end of the month.

Concluding Remarks

If you are choosing an eCommerce platform for your online business, then you should always tread carefully. While you might think that going with a top class solution like Magento or Prestashop might do the trick, but it might not be a feasible option for your business scalability in the long run.

Take, for example, if you make a hurried decision today and select a platform that is not able to convince and convert your visitors, just because of the limited functionality on the platform, you will be at a point of no return.

WooCommerce is my most favorite Ecommerce Platform because of a variety of factors. It is open-source, most plugins are really cheap, and themes too. So all in all this is the best bet for anyone looking to host a self-hosted store online.

If you need any help with Setting up your Ecommerce Store, you can always get in touch with me through the comment section of this blog, or you can also put up a request on our Official Facebook Page.

14 OctResearch

10 Digital Skills We Must Teach Our Children

Kids today spend more time on screen than ever before. The widespread use of gadgets has embedded in the lives of the youngest members of our society. Digital Intelligence is everywhere.

Gone are the good old days when growing up was memory revolving around bike rides, sports, and many other outdoor games. Gone are the days, when dining used to be fun with the interaction between family and kids.

But, today’s children are trickled down by Digital Media. They are so engrossed in the soft glow of their gadgets that they lack the real essence of life.

It is no longer a surprise that technology has replaced most outdoor games. Even pre-school kids know how to use gadgets moderately before they can even tie their shoes!

Experts are concerned about this rapid increase of technology on a toddlers’ developing brain.

According to Pew Research Center, approx. 70 percent of 11-12 years old use smartphones and this increases to almost 90 percent by the age of 14-15.

Digital Intelligence

This considerable time on screen can affect children’s literacy and language in both positive and negative ways. Technology is changing the way of living of the emerging sprouts of our society. Addiction to games and gadgets is spoiling the moral values of kids as well as their thinking capacity.

So, how does Digital Intelligence impact our social and economic life?

The social and economic implication of technology is extensive and hastening. As the volume of information is increasing in a rapid manner, Experts are forecasting that 90% of the global population will be linked to the web within 10-15 years of time. These changes proclaim exciting possibilities. But, there is also uncertainty since our toddlers will be the epicenter of this dynamic change.

The Impact of Technology on the Growing Child

A 2016 study done at Kaiser Foundation talked about, “the involvement of technology in a child’s growth. How technology impacts the immersion of a child from a few months to a few years of age. Even though there is no concrete evidence on the impact of Media Exposure on children, it is an issue that demands immediate attention from health professionals, researchers, educators, and parents alike…”

The electronic media is a vast expanse of knowledge and entertainment. But, in this fast-paced world, our children are on the edge of many risks like cyber-bullying, scams, obscene and violent content, unethical practices, and the addiction to technology. Children are directly exposed to these problems ever after the existence of child protection and Internet governance. Take a look at this piece of news from 2014, about a child who attacked and allegedly killed his grandmother because she interrupted his online game. (Source)

retard-kid-kills-grandmom-for-computer-game

Of course, there is a difference in the internet usage pattern among children and adults, and children are more prone to face hitches due to this gap. Being an adult, it is our responsibility to make our child aware of right or wrong of the digital world, so that our kids won’t lose their path in this era.

So, how can we prepare our kids for the Digital Age?

Digital Intelligence is the key!

Digital Intelligence is the sum of communal, emotional, and intellectual abilities crucial for digital life. It mainly has the essential skills, knowledge, and ability to get accustomed to one’s emotions and behavior to deal with the confronts and demands of the digital age.

These abilities must be engrained in human values of veracity, empathy, respect, and prudence. These values empower the responsible, and wise use of technology – a trait, which will empower the leaders of tomorrow.

Here are the key elements of Digital Intelligence, which should be imparted to our children to make them better prepared for the time to come.

1. Digital identity: This is the ability to understand, create and manage an individual’s online presence and reputation, which includes the knowledge and skills to build and maintain a healthy consistent online and offline identity with self-efficiency.

2. Digital literacy: This is the ability to evaluate information, contacts, and valuable content on the web as well as capability in computational thinking. It also includes the understandability of the damaging effect of false information and the kind of perils associated with strangers online.

3. Digital rights: This is the ability to understand and sustain personal information shared online and to make individuals aware of legal rights, having the rights to privacy, academic property, protection from abhorrence speech and freedom of speech.

4. Digital emotional intelligence: This is the ability to be compassionate and establish good relationships with others online. It includes the willingness to offer one’s voice to someone who needs help, honest communication with parents, teachers, and friends about one’s online presence, and not being judgmental in the online space.

5. Digital communication: This is the ability to communicate and collaborate with others using digital technology and media and make aware of the determined nature of digital footprints (traces that people leave online) and their real consequences.

6. Digital use: This is the ability to use digital media and mastering devices in order to make individuals aware of Digital Media.

7. Digital safety: This is the ability to manage online risks like cyber-bullying, radicalization, grooming, violence, and obscenity. It includes the discipline to use digital media safely, detect the problem areas and handle them maturely.

8. Digital security: This is the ability to spot cyber threats such as hacking, malware, and scams and handle them wisely, and also to seek elders’ help if the situation goes out of hand.

9. Digital time management: Restricting time for digital use is crucial to maintain a balanced life. Therefore, Digital Time Management is the ability to balance between virtual and physical realities, which further prevent the disease of Digital addiction.

10. Digital privacy: This is the ability to secure online information such as passwords for social profiles and protecting them from cyber hackers.

Above all, these skills and values should be deep-rooted in our future generation, which will build our future leaders.

Certainly, it is high time for us to come together as parents and teachers to prepare our kids for the future since Every child is a Digital Leader!

Our children are the first generation to face this hyper-connected world. It is essential for us to make them aware of their digital rights and cultivate digital intelligence in them to prepare our next generation leaders.

So, what do you think?

How much time should the average teenager spend on social networking sites?

If you are a parent then, Share your parenting tips on how do you develop your child’s Digital Skills. We’d love to hear them in the comment section.

And, If I have missed anything important to include above, feel free to comment down below!

06 OctResearch

The Success Stories Behind 4 Brands Transformation

Increased competition demands remaining up to date with what the customer wants. And that not only makes it difficult for new start-ups to reach a level of stable existence, but also insecurities for the brands which had been successful for a long time. Novelty in terms of customer services, and reaching out to them, are the keys to survive in this sphere where there is no assured guarantee regarding retention of the consumer base.

Here we take a look at four brands that used digital marketing effectively to rebrand themselves and ensure a continuing or increasing demand base.

Coca Cola

It is a hard time for all soft-drink brands, since sales have been declining since the last decade. According to Beverage Digest, in 2014, the sales volume of the U. S. carbonated soft-drink industry fell by 0.9%, the 10% annual decline. Only energy-drink maker Monster beverage Corp. showed some slight improvements. And added to that is the competition from the ever-increasing number of small brands that are launching their drinks.

So it was crucial for the oldest brand of soft drink to do something to give itself a makeover. Its new content strategy, ‘Content 2020’, has received rave reviews from the Content Marketing Institute for its originality.

According to Jonathan Mildenhall, VP Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence, the 24*7 connectivity demands a large amount of content at every given moment in order to keep up with the competition and the demand for novelty. In order to be successful, an advertiser needs to have ideas of substance as the base.

And this has indeed paid off for the company which is still battling industry revenue issues, as it has proved to have a stronger ground than other brands like PepsiCo. Sales have increased substantially this year.

Business 2 Community author Hephzy Asaolu says that this growth is in accordance with the common trend shown by data that there is a direct link between revenue and initiatives taken in the field of content marketing.

Not only that, the company has also focused on Video Marketing campaigns to make its various social initiatives reach the public. In India, it has the Support My School initiative to improve the facilities at local schools. In Egypt, the company has constructed 650 potable water installations in the village of Beni Suef, and also sponsors meals during the holy month of Ramadan for children in the Middle East.

Flipkart

What is today one of the world’s top 10 most visited E-commerce websites started with a puny budget of Rs 4 lakhs after Sachin and Binny Bansal left their high profile jobs at Amazon, the world’s biggest E-commerce website.

In addition to strategies adopted to make it viable through television commercials and mobile marketing, successful brand campaigns like ‘Shop Anytime, Anywhere’, ‘Big Billion Day’, platforms have been developed on social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Flipkart has around 3.3 million likes on Facebook, where the page is devoted to deals and offers, in addition to books, fashion, gaming, contests and other such interactive methods to improve customer engagement. The page also offers updates on new products and queries from the customers, and pays special attention to seasons, festivals, birthdays- events both general and personal. The post response is 40- 50 per post on an average.

Flipkart has over 160000 followers on Twitter, which also functions in a way similar to Facebook. It has multiple channels for different purposes like Flipkart Support for solution to queries, 24*7 Customer Service Channel and Flipkart Offers Speacial channel. Tech@Flipkart is a special channel solely for updates on technology. There are many product or services based contents like AcerA1 and Flipkart Frist.

The portal also devotes a lot of resources to content marketing.

Apart from having its own official blog which keeps everyone updated about the company, the latest technologies it adopts and similar things, the portal also has its very own tech-focused blog as well.

The Public Relations team too has its own pages where it releases information about the company, special events being planned and held to reach the customer base, and updates about exclusive products launched.

These strategies have helped the Flipkart achieve phenomenal success, achieving a Google Page Rank of 6/10 with 10.1 million page views every single day. The company sells 30 products per minute on average, and generates 1.5 cr as revenue per day.

Though Flipkart does not have its own YouTube channel, it has been on the forefront in able to utilize the platform by executing many YouTube Campaigns- Display and Video advertisements, Search Page, and the like.

LinkedIn faced huge problems with the increasing popularity of Facebook in the first stages. However, it is respectably popular as a content sharing platform, especially for Business 2 Business companies. And this turnabout is mainly because of its use of content marketing strategies.

In order to improve its performance, it focused on three main channels as identified by Eliot Schmukler in 2008- SEO results which led to the home page, invitations by email, and homepage views. Schmukler had helped the site grow from 13 million to over 175 million users by identifying and working on these strengths.

It was soon understood that the intentional visitors to the site had 30 PV/session on an average, while those brought to the site through invites had a mere 10 PV/session. Also, the CTR for ‘who looked at your profile’ emails was 5% for the users who were inactive, while for those who were active, it was 20%.

So, attention was paid to those who visited the site organically in order to raise the PV number as it was realized that it was easy to work with those who actually wanted to be worked with, instead of enticing in the uninterested parties.

According to Eliot, the formula was simple- the active user remains no matter what as long as the satisfaction levels are met, whereas inactive users have different reasons to stay inactive.

And this led to the active users being asked to send more invites, as the number of invites sent= % of new users that invite x average # of invites sent/inviter

It has also used tools like TeamLink and Sales Navigator, and the efforts have paid off very well. According to Ralf VonSosen, head of Marketing, Sales Solution for LinkedIn, there has been a 50% increase in the leads to meet the conversion rates.

An advantage LinkedIn has over Facebook and other such advertisement driven platforms is that it depends on these three streams which generate mostly equal revenue- Advertising, premium subscriptions, and software as a service.

Today, LinkedIn has 50 million members. It is telling, since it took sixteen months for the network to gather its first million members, and 12 days for the 50^th million. While the number may seem insignificant in the face of Facebook’s 300 million, it looks different when one considers that there are about 360 million white collar professionals in today. This puts more than 10% of those professionals on LinkedIn, including Alan Sugar and Richard Branson.

My SQL

While today MySQL is one of the best known open source relational database management systems, and had been acquired by Oracle for around 1 billion from Sun Microsystems, the journey has not been so smooth, as open source depends a lot on low Average Selling Prices (ASP).

Though there was a large number of visitors to the website, and a lot of downloads, it was extremely difficult to identify potential buyers from free users. The Lead to Opportunity conversion rate was 1 opportunity to 571 leads.

There was also a big gap between sales and marketing. The company lacked the metrics, alignment with marketing, sales tools and sales processes needed in order to improve pipeline development, lead conversion and measurement of marketing ROI. There was no clear path to move a free user to be a paid user.

In order to counter these, a closed-loop marketing and sales process called ‘Demand-to-Close (D2C)’ was created which describes and tracks visitors and return visitors, in addition to activity from outbound campaign. To all downloads, there has also been call-to-action marketing programs in order to get hold of potential buyers. The lead too was improved by implementing lead scoring to understand which campaign measures people responded to.

In order to get a better understanding of the demographics, there has also been improvement in the inquiry regarding inbound routing and segmentation.

And the results have been such as to lead to the spectacular position as mentioned at the beginning. The sales response times to the assigned leads coming from marketing decreased. Lead to Opportunity conversion rates increased from 6:1 to 3:1. There is an average deal size increase of 18%.

What You Can Learn

Studies have shown that there is a direct link between the effectiveness of content development and marketing, and the generation of revenues. While the easy accessibility of the net makes it easier for the businesses to reach the consumer, it also makes it more competitive, as the consumer struggles with content fatigue. So the mechanisms also depend on effective strategies.

These stories are fascinating, entertaining, enlightening with a motivational touch. They clearly show that no matter what happens to you and your brand, you always have a chance to fix it up. Don’t let your business get stagnant. Making changes and finding new ways is hard but crucial for your business growth.

But what you can learn from these stories is,

The distinction is the base of your business.
Many businesses face a massive decline due to lack of differentiation with other companies.
If something bothers you, change it.
If you think something isn’t working for your business, immediately change it. As sticking with unnecessary things won’t help you in big time. Change is the key for your growth.
Try to think out of the box.
Try something different rather than reinventing the wheel. Don’t be afraid to experiment. You might come up with an idea that might add new dimension to your business.

Entrepreneurial journey is like a roller coaster ride – full of blunders, hardships, and challenges but these stories proved that “giving up” was not in their dictionary.

Keep working hard, look for opportunities and the most important thing, never give up!

16 SepResearch

5 Entrepreneurs Who Rose From The Ashes To Become Success

As they say, success is not easy. While some are comparatively lucky and take on businesses that were already successful, maintaining standards may be more difficult (look at Tim Cook) as expectations are involved. For others, and they are the majority in a world where everyone is hungry for everything, it is a matter of stretching the human limits to the extremes, though they go on to show what amazing creatures humans are. Here we look at five people who started with next to nothing in the most difficult circumstances and went on to build brands that still continue to inspire us with the effort that went into their making and the heights they are continuing to achieve.

Oprah Winfrey

The 62-year-old Oprah Gail Winfrey may today be the most powerful woman in the United Sates, but that has not always been the case for her. Born in Kosciusko in Mississippi to a housemaid and a coal miner, Miss Winfrey had to endure such extreme poverty for the first 6 years of her life while living with her grandparents that she had to wear potato sacks and eat leftovers.

When she went back to live with her mother, she was violently assaulted, something she revealed to her viewers on her show much later, in 1986. At 14 years of age, she became pregnant with her first child, which ended in a premature delivery, much to her distress.

Things got better only when she went to live with her father, a man who was very strict and who was unwilling to settle for anything that he thought was not good for his daughter, in spite of the poverty. She won a full scholarship to the Tennessee State University.

The start to what was later to become one of the most successful careers in history was the job of a news anchor she got at the age of 19 at a local radio station for the black community in 1983.

Since then, there was no looking back for this woman, who found fame as the host of the most popular TV show of the time ‘AM Chicago, which is now known as The Oprah Winfrey Show, and is the most successful chat show in American television.

She changed the course of television chat shows, through what is now known as the ‘Oprah Effect’, by shifting the focus to a confessional mode, often making it a cathartic experience for the participants. The ‘Oprah Effect’ was felt the most in the 2008 presidential elections, where her support drew in 42000- 1600000 votes for Obama in the Democratic primary alone.

Some of the most memorable moments of her show are the coming out of Ellen DeGeneres, another hugely successful chat show host, as lesbian, and the public confession of Lance Armstrong.

By 1988, in spite of the enormous success she had attained, she felt tired of working for others, not being in control of something which meant so much for her. So she founded her own production company Harpo Studios, which today has more than 250 employees, and for which she was named the most powerful woman in entertainment in 2008 by The Hollywood Reporter.

She is also an enthusiastic supporter of philanthropy, having created Oprah’s Angel Network in 1988, and the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Johannesburg, a school spread over 22 acres where she still teaches via satellite.

Steve Jobs; Apple

Born to a Syrian immigrant father and a Catholic mother and given up for adoption to parents who were too scared to love him for the first few years as they thought he would be taken away due to legal complications, Jobs’s success story is truly phenomenal.

And that Steven could be adopted by the Jobs couple only after they promised that they would provide him with a college education, became ironical when they could no longer afford college for the already disinterested Steve.

Jobs’ first job was to be a video game designer with Atari, which he left within a few months to run away to India to seek spiritual enlightenment. A thing called Apple Computer was started by the 21-year-old Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak in 1976 in the garage at Jobs’ place, and it was funded by the selling of Jobs’ Volkswagen bus and Wozniak’s scientific calculator.

Debuting with Apple I at $774,000, the company went on to have a 700% growth with $139 million in Apple II. In 1980, the company was valued at $1.2 billion on the first day of trading as a publicly traded company.

This unbelievable rise was not to last long, however. The next few products failed to cut through the public, and IBM took a sudden leap, something which even the Macintosh of 1984 could not salvage in a world where it was now required to have an IBM support system. This, in spite of being superior in quality and performance when compared to the IBM PCs.

This gradually culminated in the expulsion by the executives, headed by the CEO John Sculley, of the man who had co-founded the company where he had no official position, in the year 1985. Again ironically, Sculley, previously the marketing expert of Pepsi-Cola, had been appointed by Jobs.

Not a man to take defeat lying down, what Jobs did next is a matter of fairytales. He began a new hardware and software venture called NeXT, Inc. In 1986, Jobs purchased an animation from George Lucas which went on to become Pixar Animation Studios, where he invested $50 million out of his own pocket.

Pixar proved to be hugely successful, with the first animation movie Toy Story, and has grossed $4 billion with movies like Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. In 2006, it was to merge with Disney, making Jobs the largest shareholder of the latter. But this was after the fizzing out of NeXT, Inc, which failed in marketing its specialized operating system.

NeXT, Inc. was bought by Apple for $429 million in 1996, and Jobs returned in 1997 as Apple’s CEO at a time when the company was still struggling to gain back its former glory. Armed with a new management squad, changed stock options, and an annual salary of $1, Apple was brought back on track with products like the iMac, good and efficient designs, and effective marketing.

When Steve Jobs died in 2011, he had seen Apple rise to have a record-breaking stock value, and being ranked No. 1 on lists compiled by Fortune magazine. In November 2014, the company became the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization, in addition to becoming the first American company to be valued over $700 billion.

And though it lost the man who made it, the company is worth $586 billion as of May 2016 under CEO Timothy Cook, who took over from Jobs. In May 2015, activist investor Carl Icahn had alleged that the company has assets worth $1.4 trillion, and thus should boost its share buyback program.

Richard Branson; Virgin

Richard Branson, knighted in 2000, and today the 4^th wealthiest man in the UK, started with £300, and now is worth $5.2 billion, with $12 billion in sales.

Branson, with his love for adventure and perseverance, serves as an inspiration to many people worldwide, especially young children, for his fight with dyslexia, which he conquered at a time when people did not even know what dyslexia was.

His first venture was a magazine called Student, which he started as a sixteen-year-old college dropout. The Student was successful, making him earn good revenue, but it was not without its share of trouble. He was arrested for publishing information for treating venereal diseases, which was legally prohibited.

Virgin was started in 1970 as a mail order record retailer from the crypt of a church, with the name being chosen to signify Branson’s being new in business. His first brick and mortar outlet was opened at Oxford Street, and the success he achieved made him sign Mike Oldfield as the first ‘Virgin’ musician. In 1977, Virgin Records added the Sex Pistols to its folds.

Its success notwithstanding, Virgin Records was beset with cash-flow problems, and Branson had to pretend that he was buying records for export in order to get over the excise tax on sales. In 1992, Virgin Music had to be sold to EMI for $500 million in order to keep the airline company functioning in the face of rising fuel costs and recession. Later, he said that after the completion of the deal, he wept at having lost the very first venture of his empire.

V2 Records was created in 1996 by Branson as an effort to re-enter the music business, and he owned 5% of the shares. It was sold to Universal Music Group in August 2007 for $7 million.

The airlines business was started in 1984 with Virgin Atlantic. And it was riddled with misfortunes from the beginning, when birds flew into an uninsured engine during the Government certification flight, causing an explosion. This forced Branson to gather cash from his overseas investments in order to rebuild the company.

This was soon followed by a legal dispute with British Airways, whom Branson claimed was trying underhand methods to steal passengers.

Today, all this is hopefully history, with Branson having ventured into space tourism following telecommunications. Having dabbled in over 200 companies, Branson today is in a position to join Giving Pledge, the $500 billion philanthropy club co-founded by Bill Gates.

The members of this club, which includes the likes of Gates, Warren Buffett, Azim Premji and Patrice Motsepe among others, pledge to give more than half of their wealth to philanthropic causes.

Walt Disney; Disney

Once told to be a man lacking imagination and good ideas by a reporter, it was not easy to gain acceptance for this man who had wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist from a very young age, when he used to draw paid pictures for his neighbors and cartoons for his school newspaper.

Frustrated, Disney decided to tackle things head-on by founding his first cartoon studio as a 22-year-old. It was such a big failure that he was pushed towards bankruptcy.

Having suffered failure, Disney flew off to Los Angeles to be an actor, only to be disappointed yet again. But here, the Disney studios which he founded with his brother Roy soon became a success, starting with advertisements before graduating to animating Walt’s own cartoons.

It was not a smooth transition. Soon after, Disney discovered that Margaret Winkler, the New York distributor who distributed the Disneys’ Alice cartoons and looked into the invention of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, had stolen the rights to the latter along with her husband. She had also been able to take in all of Disney’s animators.

This made the Disney family immediately get into work with Mickey Mouse, whose first animated short films Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho, failed to find any takers as they were silent films at a time when the genre was fast fading.

Soon, Disney created Steamboat Willie, the third film of the franchise with sound and music and having Walt as the voice of Mickey. The cartoon became an instant hit with the audience, and that was the beginning of what was to be the most phenomenal cartoon show of all times.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated film, premiering on December 1937 in Los Angeles, managed to rake in $1.499 million though it was the Great Depression, and won eight Oscars.

Disney did not remain untouched by the war though. During the Second World War, the Disney studios were taken over by the US army and converted to a repair shop for tanks and artillery. All his animators and Disney himself were required to join the war effort. It was bleak after the war ended as well, and the company ran up a debt of more than $4 million due to slow growth in business.

A strike by the animators in 1941 added to the woes, and ended with many resigning. Disney managed the difficult post-war decade with ‘packaged features’ and overseas investments, when the company was recuperating, but by 1950, he was back to his former self with his full-length animations.

Even the opening day of the first Disneyland theme park was not without setbacks. The park which was to be the first of many of Disney’s theme park ventures (to fund which he entered television with shows like The Mickey Mouse Club), was opened by actor and future US president Ronald Reagan, and involved the distribution of thousands of counterfeit invitations.

In 1966, when a new theme park and Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow in Florida was under construction, Disney was diagnosed with lung cancer. When he passed away in December the same year, he had won 22 Academy Awards from the 59 nominations he had received, one Emmy Award and three Golden Globe nominations.

At present, with a price of $94 per share, the company’s market capitalization is at roughly $150 billion.

Henry ford; Ford Motor

Although Ford did not invent the automobile, he was the man behind the manufacture of the first affordable vehicle for the middle class American.

He came from a family of farmers who had immigrated from England and Ireland. He displayed interest in mechanics from an early age when he dismantled a timepiece given to him by his father just to see if he could put it back together. The resulting success made him confident enough to proceed with other people’s watches, and he soon took to repairing.

After his mother’s death in 1876, he refused to join the fairly successful family farm business and instead completed apprenticeships with James F. Flower & Bros., and Detroit Dry Dock Company.

Though initially he thought of partnering with Thomas Alva Edison, he chose to found his own company, Detroit Automobile Company, backed by William H. Murphy, where he could work on his own conditions. This soon proved to be a failure, with the vehicles being produced not meeting Ford’s expectations, and the company going bankrupt.

This did not dishearten him, who re-structured the remnants of this failed venture to form the new Henry Ford Company. Sadly, this too did not last owing to a dispute with Murphy when the latter brought in Henry M. Leland as a consultant. After Ford’s departure, Murphy changed the name of the company into Cadillac Automobile Company.

In 1903, the Ford Motor Company was formed, and by 1918, half of all the cars owned by Americans were the Model Ts manufactured by the company. This phenomenal success, however, prevented Ford from looking into the new features being developed by rival companies for a long time. Finally, it was the declining sales that resulted in the release of Model A, which thankfully was a success.

Though having an ill-repute for being anti-Semitic, Ford introduced many progressive measures like the five-dollar wage and the five-day workweek. When the company almost faced a government takeover in 1945, he managed a turnabout by taking some wise business decisions.

The sales for Ford Motor as of May 2016 are estimated at $149.56 billion, and the company is worth $54.2 billion. Henry Ford is placed no. 9 in the list of the top 10 richest people of all time, with a current valuation at $199 billion.

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As Steve Jobs once said, people don’t know what they want unless they have it in their hands. Yet, we cannot forget that this was coming from a man who had a range of vision to include others in this world where he believed that most could not even look at themselves. True, it may sound dangerous when considering the prospects of exploitation, but maybe men and women like Jobs and Winfrey could find a footing for themselves only by realizing the hard truths. A valuable lesson for us to learn as humans.

09 SepDigital MarketingResearch

Top 5 Digital Marketing Predictions for 2017

We are halfway through 2016 and you must be scrambling for Digital Marketing Predictions for the year ahead.

“What’ll trend in the next season?” or “Which technology will overrule the Internet Market?” are some of the common questions that we all would like to know the answer to.

Some of you may have come here to devise the next best marketing strategy for your business, and some of you may have just come to stay ahead of the curve. Whatever be the case, you will surely leave with some insights that will give you a better grip over the scene.

The biggest misconception that marketers have when establishing a strategy is that they put “TECHNOLOGY” in the middle of everything. They make it a bulls-eye. But, technology is what binds us all together. Technology is the foundation of every organisation. And, technology is merely a means of communication. Therefore, your strategy shouldn’t be Technology-centric, instead, it should be focused more on the people using that technology.

“Digital Marketing is not only about technology, it’s also about people.”

Digital Marketing is constantly evolving. As a business, you should constantly be on the lookout for new technology on the web to try and adapt that feature for your brand’s growth. All this while, taking into account whether or not your consumers are actually a part of it or not.

Here are the top few Trends for Digital Marketing, I think are worth paying attention to in the times to come:

INCREASING ATTENTION TO SOCIAL NETWORKS

It seems to hold true that the potential of social media has fully not been realized by companies out there to market their content. SFB (Statistical Factbook by DMA – Click on Image to Buy The Research Paper) shows that 70% of businesses are still not tuned to social media channels while collecting data regarding consumer interests.

However, things may be looking up on that front like 47% of companies say that they would be investing more on this aspect, while 37% give more importance to emails and websites. 26% think SEO is the most interesting.

According to DMA SFB, the growth of social media will be up by 14% from today’s meagre 10%.

The increasing attention being given to social media is also in line with the gradual recognition of the importance Millennials have in the consumer sector.

“Google will buy Twitter for tens of billions of dollars” …and 24 other predictions for #contentmarketing in 2017 https://t.co/xhkhJmT7y9

— Andy Crestodina (@crestodina) July 5, 2016

The importance that social media holds can be understood by Andy Crestodina’s prediction of Google buying Twitter for some tens of billions of dollars, after which there will be an increased inclusion of advertisements, whose cost will increase as well.

VIDEO TO GAIN PREDOMINANCE

This may not be surprising, considering the concise, precise and driving home nature that the medium employs. However, the preference is more for videos on social media than on TV, whose ad prospects are decreasing.

Moreover, the craze for videos is going to be supplemented by partiality towards Virtual Reality (VR), with many social networking sites like Facebook already having Augmented Reality (AR) and VR support. (Reference: The Verge)

The number of consumers preferring video content is four times more than those preferring text. 69% marketers in the US say that they are going to increase the budget for video content.

However, according to Hana Abaza, digital marketer and VP of Marketing at Uberflip, the focus will also be on the long-form content of substance as writing is not going to die anytime soon.

While this is debatable, she seems to have John Jantsch in her support, who says that a substantial set of 1500-2000 words is what is going to be the best bet.

So it seems that a majority believe in the rule of videos, and good, longish, less frequently generated text content as the trends.

MORE PERSONALIZATION

“Best way to sell something – don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, & trust of those who might buy. –Rand Fishkin

With more than 2 million blog posts being created every day, and with an increasing portion of it being below-par content, it is imperative that there would be a crossing of the saturation point.

Consumers today are just tired of the extent of freedom to choose, they think they are in a world where content is no longer the ending but the beginning of business ventures.

So it is imperative that they turn towards things that specifically apply to them instead of looking at the literal mountains of data that is available to them. This brings forth the creation of niche content, with low volume but high engagement.

According to Arion Agius, interactive content is the key, with professionally programmed content having an interface enabling the viewer to click on the desired option among multiples available to them, and it would be a welcome change from the text-loaded platforms that presently predominate. So user-generated content is the key here.

As will be the promotion through live events, which will attract massive crowds of consumers provided that they have efficient spin-off marketing for them as well.

Also, as Adrian Cordiner points out, the visually appealing approach would be more successful, with gamification and interaction being the driving factors. This is also due to a result of fatigue of the consumer with the faceless, impersonal, yet sickeningly sweet seller at the other end in an increasingly distraught world, and thus personalization is something to look forward to.

Also, there may be an increase in cost per engagement (CPE) post-click options when it comes to buying, to be provided by the home advertising brands, service providers and third parties.

FOCUS ON MOBILES

This is predictable and brings with its share of problems. 80% of millennials use their phone in-store, and 74% of them are welcome to location-based mobile alerts.

According to a 2015 Pew Research Center study, almost two-thirds of the population possess smartphones, and 4 out of 5 American keep at least one smartphone with them every day, which is much above the global average of 3 out of 5.

Moreover, they are not going to be irrelevant any time soon, though they are going to be slower in the bigger picture having more competition and less time.

An increase in the number of messaging platforms is on the radar, as is the bigger entry of advertisement in those platforms.

According to DMA’s SFB, by the end of this year, one out of every four Americans will have a wearable device with them, and this would involve changing of platforms.

Moreover, that means much work for the marketers, who would not only have to keep the various technological nitty-gritty of changing platforms in mind but also have to take into consideration the context, time, place and choices of the individual customers.

Comscore has also published some detailed insights about the rising effect of smartphones all over the Globe.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT WILL RULE

Synopsis of Video:

“In this video, Rand Fishkin – Founder and Wizard of Moz, Sam Mallikarjunan – Head of Growth of HubSpot Labs, Benji Hyam – Founder of Grow and Convert, Larry Kim – Founder of Wordstream and Sujan Patel – Founder of ContentMarketer.io are giving their opinions on ‘How will Content Marketing evolve in 2017?‘. “

This is something that has already been touched upon before. People are no longer willing to jump for click baits and eye-catching headlines that fail to deliver, as they have grown, and justifiably so, extremely conscious when it comes to their inboxes.

The data is going to determine the content in the sense that it has to be proved that the content being created is saleable.

It is going to be difficult for small companies, whose problems with inadequate resources and unsatisfactory content creators are only going to increase by the day when there are new companies and content creators and news every day. Research shows that around 70% of B2B content usually goes to waste.

This was telling when a study by CMI and Marketing Profs had shown that more than 70% of B2B and B2C in 2016 had planned to produce more content than in 2015, but as of yet, it has been seen that only 20% of them had had any substantial success.

It will be good for the bigger businesses and those who are tenacious, though, as the consequent lagging behind of the smaller companies will see them failing when it comes to short-term results.

Also, the almost endless recycling is already creating a standstill, and algorithms are going to increase in their importance, with the focus now gradually shifting to the individual consumer.

Note: These pointers are not in any particular order. All of them hold equal importance.

What do you think about evolving trends in the Digital Industry?

What channels are going to be most beneficial for your business in 2017 and why?

I am inquisitive, I want to know more about what you think.

30 AugSocial Media

The Most Comprehensive List of 101 Social Media Management Tools

Social Media Marketing is constantly evolving. It is an inevitable fact that whether you are an online marketer, offline marketer, local business, blogger or startup entrepreneur, Social Media Marketing will act as a pillar to your business if used in the right way or otherwise become a ‘blackhole of destruction’ for your resources that sucks energy, time and money if you do not have a well-executed strategy.

I had set out to write a post on the Top 20 Social Media Marketing Tools, but when I sat on my laptop, I realized that our Social Media Management division itself uses more than 37+ Tools and Services for Social Media Marketing for our clients.

Upon a little bit of discussion with our Social Media Marketing head Dilan Shan, he explained why it is important to work with so many tools because there is no one-stop solution for Social Media. It is better to mix and match with laser-focused tools that offer fewer features because of their efficiency.

Therefore, I have compiled a list of over 101 Tools for Social Media Marketing in no hierarchical order. I did not rank them for obvious reasons. All of these tools range from Free to Freemium and Premium. So take a good look. If you are responsible for the Social Media Marketing of your company, you should definitely have these, at the tip of your fingers.

1. Desygner

Desygner is a creative drag and drops designing tool which provides numerous free design templates for blogs, social media elements, and marketing materials for business. The platform is mostly free to use. However, you will need to upgrade to a premium account if you want to export files as layered PSD files. Desygner has a massive library of vector elements and stock photos like Canva.

2. Canva

Canva is a drag and drops graphic designing platform, which allows you to design social media graphics and presentations in a matter of minutes with its wide variety of templates. Be it Social Media Headers you want to design, or a banner, or an advertisement image for PPC campaigns. You can accomplish anything in a matter of minutes with Canvas massive library of stock images and graphic elements.

3. Adobe Post

Adobe Post is a designing app that fosters a speedy graphic design experienced even for the newbie design artists. It works in conjunction with some Adobe platforms like Adobe Slate, Adobe Voice and many other popular tools. The utility pulls most of its functionalities from Photoshop and InDesign, however creating stunning graphics with its library of Fonts and High-Resolution images is a matter of few clicks.

4. Buffer

Buffer is a social media management tool that allows you to share messages across different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Its offers three different pricing options for Small to Midsize to Enterprise Businesses and helps in marketing on social platforms with its features like RSS integration, analytics, scheduled posts and much more.

5. BundlePost

Bundle Post is a content management tool and marketing workflow automation software that assimilates your data & manages social media materials under a single dashboard. This software allows you to add hashtags to hundreds of posts and find the right areas of maximum consumer engagement.

6. Babbly

Babbly is a one-of-a-kind Social Media Sharing Tool that literally has the power to make your posts viral. All you need to do is share your link in the Babbly Community, give the number of shares you think your URL Deserves and it will be shared with a diverse and massive audience. going viral is just a matter of time, not luck. The more links you share on Babbly, the more share-love you will receive.

7. MavSocial

MavSocial is a social media management solution that allows you to manage all social profiles from a single dashboard. It has some unique features including campaign planning & management, visual content management, access to approved digital content, social media publishing, reporting and file organisation.

8. SproutSocial

Sprout Social is a social media management tool that helps you to interact with your users across multiple social networks. This tool helps you to monitor brand keywords, indulge in bi-directional communication, track social media messages and complete customer profiles. It also helps businesses to communicate with their clients and increases their social media presence.

9. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a social media marketing tool, which helps you to plot and execute your marketing strategy. Its headline analyzer feature analyzes the strength of your headlines. With CoSchedule you can manage your social media profiles from your WordPress window, leading to a hassle-free user experience.

10. Nuzzel

Nuzzle allows you to discover the latest stories of your friends and families on Facebook and Twitter without skipping any interesting story. What Nuzzle does is, aggregates the shares of connections into a single dashboard and ranks them by popularity (The amount of Likes, Shares and Comments they have received).

11. Feedly

Feedly is a news filtering tool that allows you to arrange, learn, and share all of the content that concerns you and your industry. Do not miss a beat from any of the publications you follow. Screen information about your company, your product, your craft, and your opponents by plugging it with Google Alerts. It aggregates the content material you depend on into a handy-to-read collection.

12. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a product of Twitter itself so it uses the Twitter API to pull data. You can manage all your tweets from multiple accounts in a Single Dashboard and follow interesting and trending stories as well, without losing track of your workflow. In the latest version, it is even possible to schedule tweets with images and organize a timeline of tweets.

13. Cyfe

Cyfe is a cloud-based intelligence application for business. The platform is popular for its Business Dashboard app, which allows users to seamlessly connect with third-party sources and collect, analyze, transform and report data. The application offers a freemium version, which allows users to manage all business metrics on a single screen.

14. SocialClout

Social Clout is a social media monitoring and sharing tool for Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. It aggregates all the data from forums, blogs, and social web pages to check the buzz about your brand or any other keyword you specify. It helps your company to make future forecasts with present and past statistics curated from Social Web.

15. AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse is a social media management tool for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It engages your audience with Facebook managing applications such as quiz, polls, and contest. Its key feature is the automatic moderation tool, which schedules your post to publish and tags your followers. The tool measures your post quality and compares your brand page statistics with your competitors.

16. HootSuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool, which features post scheduling, advanced analytics reports, RSS integration, custom URL, Geo-targeting, message archiving and much more. It helps you to manage your social channels and tracks your brand mentions across the web. Hootsuite screens multiple profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram from its dashboard.

17. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is an analytical tool specially designed for a Twitter profile to search for tweets & bios, maintain a Twitter relationship, compare accounts, and increase your followers. It helps you to reach out to your fans with the right content at the right time eventually increasing traffic and exposure of your brand.

18. Google Alerts

Google Alerts Keep you notified with trending blog posts, news articles on specified key terms from the Google Index. If the stories containing your required keyterms make it to the top list of Google, only then you will be more likely to receive an email. This can help you keep a track of Industry trends or brand mentions and latest news on specified topics of your interest.

19. Brandmentions.com

Brand Mentions is a web and social listening tool, designed to keep you up to date with everything important in your market and anything connected to your company. The tool monitors multiple sources & social networks, and it provides instant alerts straight to your inbox. It also allows you to engage in online conversations in real-time, directly from the app.

20. SumAll

SumAll is a free statistics aggregator that collects data from various accounts like Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Google Analytics and so and forth. This tool stores your data from Web Traffic, Social Media and Sales Metrics to track and analyze social and business metrics. Irreplaceable tool for Marketers depending on the Size of your business.

21. Brand24

Brand24 is social media analytics and monitoring tool that helps you to store your social media conversion statistics under one roof. This software features social search, sentiment analysis, influencer score, topic grouping, automated PDF stats and much more. This is suitable for small to midsize businesses (SMB).

22. Quintly

Quintly is a social media analytics and benchmarking tool that analyzes the performance of your company and your competitors. This software is integrated with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube to provide you metrics and statistics of your followers.

23. CrowdBooster

Crowdbooster is an analytics software that helps you optimize your digital marketing. It has some decent features such as social media scheduler, user access management, customized recommendations, email reports, real-time audience metrics, post scheduling and much more. It integrates with social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

24. Over-Graph

Over-Graph is a social media marketing software that allows you to research, analyze and publish posts on social platforms. It is integrated with five major Social Platforms namely, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

25. Fanpage Karma

Fanpagekarma is a free benchmarking tool that generates statistics data from fans and followers on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It provides comprehensive data insights and analyzes your competitor’s audience statistics that can be used to find ideal market opportunities for your business.

26. Buzzbundle

BuzzBundle is online tracking software that allows you to track your brand mentions across the web. It is a social listening and social influencing software, which features social media coverage, multiple social profiles, scheduling posts to publish and much more. This software integrates with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Forums and can be used to create buzz strategies and counter moves for your brand by monitoring your competitor’s activity.

27. Socedo

Socedo is an automated B2b lead generation tool, that helps you engage and qualify prospects across social platforms. The tool uses bio, location and conversational keywords to search and identify prospects on Social Media to help you reach out and convert them into customers.

28. SocialOomph

SocialOomph is a social media management tool that helps you to improve your company’s productivity. This software’s function includes URL shortening, schedule tweets, filter profiles, track keywords, schedule status and posts update, and more. It is integrated with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and uplifts your online business activity by automating its functions.

29. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a social media monitoring and marketing solution that allows you to schedule your contents across various social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. It helps you to manage multiple social accounts, discover trending topics, automate posts and much more. It is available in three different options such as Free, Professional, and Mobile Application promotion.

30. Qzzr

Qzzr is a quiz creator tool that has myriad free quiz templates, which you can use to create engaging quizzes on your social media profiles to attract more traffic to your site. This tool has a “Custom Share Text” option, which enables the feature to share the quiz on social media.

31. Contently

Contently is a content marketing solution that provides you with a comprehensive content marketing strategy for your business. It features a compilation of ideas, data insights, robust management, and optimised distribution to increase conversion rates of your business. Its advanced features include competitor assessment strategy, content workflow control, reporting and collaboration tools designed by their content experts.

32. Storify

Storify is an online platform that helps you to integrate curated content into your website on social media. This tool allows you to collect and organise contents from multiple resources. You can modify the most trending contents into your post to drive a better traffic.

33. Klout

Klout is a free social media metrics that analyze your social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Foursquare & rates you on your ‘overall online influence’. Klout score depends on ‘True Reach’, ‘Network Score’ and ‘Amplification Probability’ of your multiple social channels and it mainly tracks down your social networking habits.

34. IFTTT

IFTTT (if this, then that) is an automated software to schedule posts on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It allows you to create content involving two applications, 1 for generating and the other for promoting your brand’s activity on a digital platform. It provides sync services, supports multiple social sites and blog services. Even without knowledge of coding, you can send commands to the integrated apps in one go.

35. Twittercounter

Twitter Counter is a social media tool that optimises your tweet timing for maximum exposure among audience and tracks old tweets and their stats to help you discover the type of content connects with your audience. It also gives you an overview of your Twitter profile and shows you how much traction it’s gaining.

36. Twitter Analytics

Twitter Analytics is a useful analytic tool for your Twitter account. It helps you to monitor and analyse any tweet on the web and provides you the valuable data on the recent activity and the user’s perception via Twitter Graph. The graph includes some of the important points like link click, embedded media clicks, re-tweets, favourites, and replies.

37. Crowdfire

Crowdfire is a social media management application that mainly integrates with Twitter and Instagram to drive more traffic. This tool schedules posts for your online profiles and DM them automatically on Twitter. It keeps a track of your competitor’s followers and helps you to increase yours.

38. Plumlytics

Plumlytics is a social media management software having built-in predictive analytic and comprehensive listening features. This tool helps you predict about customer’s thought process about their likes and dislikes & based on the advanced algorithms i.e. it helps you to find out the right time to engage with users.

39. Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is a powerful tool to measure the performance of a Facebook Page in terms of Post Engagement and User Interaction. If you own a Facebook page, you can access it from the Admin Panel, this tool clearly outlines your page activity and the number of active users on your page to understand better your page performance. Facebook Insights will give you data like the best time of the day, the best day of the week and the type of content that works best amongst your fans.

40. Google Trends

Google Trends is free software that shows you the most recent searches and activities on the web. It also allows you to compare the volume of searches between two or more terms. Google Insight, an extension of Google trends allows you to track different words or phrases for in-depth analysis.

41. HowSociable

Howsociable is a free social media marketing tool to monitor your brand’s influence on the web by integrating with 36 most used social media websites. This tool tracks your online activity and shows you, which online platform is driving more traffic for your brand and how you can improve it for a better result.

42. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a free Instagram marketing tool that analyzes your Insta-Stats and provides you with the overall data about your performance and fan base growth on the web.

43. Klear

Klear is a social influencing and organising software that helps you to produce and manage successful online campaigns to influence audience under the guidance of their experts. It analyses the effectiveness of your campaigns by monitoring them for your brand’s growth.

44. Mentionmap

Mentionmap is a Twitter analytic tool that helps you to discover the most trending topics on Twitter and shows the inter-linking of users through the most searched items.

45. NutShellMail

Nutshellmail is a mail service that allows SMB to monitor their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Yelp profiles and manages their online reputation and social media influence and send them statistics through daily mails.

46. Omgili

Omigili stands for “Oh my god, I loved it”. It is a search engine designed especially for forums, opinions, and Discussion groups. It monitors millions of group discussion threads and helps you to find out customer’s opinion, debates and personal experience about a particular topic.

47. Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest analytics is a software that analyses social listening and the social influence of your brand on Pinterest, which is connected with other online platforms as well.

48. Pluggio

Pluggio is a free social media management tool mainly designed for managing Facebook and Twitter profiles to automate every task including automated tweets, friend suggestions and auto follow-up with the users.

49. Kenshoo

Kenshoo is an online marketing solution that provides services like online advertising and search marketing for your enterprise. It allows you to optimize and automate your Ad Programs, marketing investments to increase the productivity of your company. Kenshoo offers various of templates that are easily plugged into MS Excel and provides a simple statistic for measuring your business progress and success.

50. SlackSocial

Slack is an online social messaging platform to communicate with your teammates for business purpose. It has many features such as direct messages, private chats, group conversations, drag-and-drop file sharing and link sharing for effective communication. This app is also recommended by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is available both for desktop and mobile.

51. Tweepi

Tweepi is a Twitter management tool, which shows who is responding to your tweets and who is not. It tracks all the activity happening on your Twitter account and record the metrics that help you to analyze and take action accordingly.

52. SocialFlow

Socialflow is an online social media data-driven software that optimises your business data to schedule your posts to publish. This tool is mainly for big size businesses with a substantial branding campaign, which can actually opt for PPC and paid promotions.

53. SocialBro

Socialbro is a Twitter management tool that optimizes your tweeting schedule, manages your Twitter Direct Message campaign, keeps an eye on your competitors, finds relevant followers and stores up all the metrics of your twitter profile.

54. PostPlanner

Postplanner is a Facebook managing software that helps you automate posts to publish for your Facebook Marketing. It mainly targets your audience, schedules posts and provides a status idea to increase engagement. This tool spies on trending topics and helps you to generate relevant posts. You can also automate post publishing from the RSS feed.

55. Sysomos

Sysomos is a social media analytic tool that monitors social trends, conversions, keywords and engage followers for your social media platform. It has four set of tools including MAP (Media Analysis Perform), Influence, Optimise and Heartbeat, which helps you to manage your social profiles by data evaluation, visualisation and optimisation.

56. Shoutlet

Shoutlet is a social app for social posting and managing your social profiles. It figures out your customer’s requirements and present them professional layout of the metrics. It can easily adapt new updates.

57. Unmetric

Unmetric is a social media analytical tool, which can be used for benchmarking your customer’s presence on social platform compared to your competitors. This is a data-driven tool to organise metrics based on your social activity for a better grasp over social engagement.

58. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is an online content research and marketing solution that allows you to search for the most trending contents on the web under any niche. This tool helps you to strategize content marketing for your brand, based on user’s response to your posts and also promotes your content by providing you the key influences for your digital marketing.

59. Oktopost

Oktopost is a social media management app that organises and schedules your post across various platforms. Its social sharing ability makes you easy to organise emails and posts for social media distribution platform.

60. SocialBakers

Socialbakers is a social media marketing tool that includes Social Media Builder, Executive Dashboard, Social Media Ads, Social Media Listening and Social Media Analytics. This app has some valuable features such as Facebook insights, performance comparison, instant reporting and all in one interface that helps you to generate new leads for your business.

61. Spredfast

Spredfast helps you connect with your team members across the Globe to manage tasks and workflow efficiency for your business. Their support service helps your business to raise conversion rates with their planning, organising and implementing a strategy for success of your business.

62. Cision

Cision is a social media tool that offers PR software, Social Software, Government Relations & PAC Software and Global Insight Consultancy, which has ability to sort out good contents and provides you the right strategy for your business. It is capable of sending multiple emails to bloggers and news media. It helps you to find out the Right News Media contacts and builds an editorial calendar efficiently.

63. GroSocial

GroSocial is a social app, which helps you to build, run and trace social media promotions and contests to your Twitter and Facebook profiles to engage more audience. It records the no. of participants and produces a random winner and follow up with them.

64. Ninja Outreach

Ninja Outreach is an online SMM tool that can be used for content marketing and research, influencer marketing, lead generation, blogger outreach and cold calling & emailing for your small to enterprise-level of business. This software allows you to select from multiple influencers in real-time with effective SEO and social insights under your brand’s niche. It helps you to find the most convinced users from social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

65. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a premium social media listening and influencing app that create reports based on all your social channels and helps you to improve your social conversions with its image recognition and competitive bench-marking feature.

66. Falcon.io

Falcon is a social media app to estimate and implement your social media campaign. It is integrated with multiple social channels. It is a great tool for Facebook landing pages, which influences your audience and promotes brand mentioning.

67. Optimizely

Optimizely is a testing and personalization application that helps you to discover the ways to minimise bounce rates and increases time on website. It aggregates reports on your existing traffic and helps you to engage customers for a longer period by conveying experiences at every interaction.

68. Rapportive

Rapportive is a management app, which stores up your emails and gives you metric about your inbox. This tool provides you a statistic, which shows your nearby clients, about their job profile and company and their activity on MailChimp.

69. Simply Measured

Simply Measured is a social measurement tool that integrates with multiple social channels and analyzes their performance in context of your brand. It also spies on your competitor by tracking their online activity. Reports produced by this tool are easy to understand. So that you can take action immediately to enhance your company website.

70. NUVI

NUVI is data insight tool that monitors and tracks down social media. This tool helps you to get more leads by making your social presence effective and hence your conversion rate increases. It also allows you to see the clients response across the internet.

71. Digimind Social

Digimind is a social media tool that understands your company’s needs, aggregates data insights from your social profiles and implements strategy to maintain your brand reputation, analyze industry and spy on your competitor. This tool is very responsive and flexible making itself user friendly.

72. NetBase

NetBase personalises your company’s dashboard and compares sentiments between two different product of same brand. This tool stores up a huge amount of data and execute these stats through graph, chart and fonts.

73. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is an analytical tool for midsize to enterprise level businesses. It is united with different social media channels for brand listening. You can manipulate social data with this app and extend your brand’s social listening and influencing

74. Social Studio

Social Studio is a social listening and management tool, which allows you to publish posts by calendar view. It helps you to maintain the workflow by notifying others of messages and taking action on it. This tool ties up with Radian 6 to provide you with more features that can be easily accessible.

75. PicMonkey

PicMonkey is a photo editing software that allows you to design, edit, and collage your photos for your social media posting to engage more followers. It has multiple templates to choose from, which helps you to boost your images.

76. Sotrender

Sotrender is a data-driven software for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. It helps you reach out to the customers by effective data visualisation. It presents reports and insights clearly to provide you a detailed summary of your campaigns.

77. Facebook Pages Manager

This tool manages multiple Facebook Pages in one go from your Mobile device. The back end of these pages is different from other pages, which can be easily handled by this app. This app manages your notifications, image uploads, post publishing and many more.

78. Camtasia

Camtasia is a video editing and screen recording software that allows you to record and capture screen, edit and upload videos illustrations, tutorial and review videos for your social profiles. Its advanced features like splitting up and joining the parts of videos, adding your brand’s watermark, annotations, recording highlights and much more to give you results with a professional touch.

79. Sendible

Sendible is a first social media Pinterest integrating tool for small to midsize businesses that helps them to strategize the marketing plans for the exposure on social media. This tool schedules 2000 messages and more for 3 Enterprises over 12 different platforms.

80. ScreenFlow

ScreenFlow is a video editing and screen casting tool that captures the full screen videos, allows you to edit your captures in one go. You can add voice overs, annotations, callouts, add videos, titles, audio filters, chroma key, multi-channel audio mixing and screen recording highlights to give your video a professional touch even without being a pro in this field.

81. ZohoSocial

Zoho Social is a Social media monitoring and managing tool that monitors keywords, handles multiple social channels, collaborates with your team members and schedules unlimited posts from a single panel. It allows you to find and narrow down on the target audience of your business, by measuring, analysing and customising your social campaigns.

82. Any.do

Any.do is a comprehensive task management app that keeps a record of your daily tasks and reviews your tasks to increase your productivity. It has a unique feature called Geo-location reminders that triggers the alert for your next task. This can help you schedule your upcoming tasks and make social media management more streamlined.

83. Flowdock

Flowdock is a social communicating platform that has some unique features like drag-and-drop uploads, quick file sharing, customizable notification sound, videos, image and link previews, private or public messages and many more to ensure an organised communication in a team environment.

84. Hipchat

HipChat is a team communication software that helps teams chat, share files and manage workflow over the Internet. The application also features video calling, screen sharing and enhanced security, which fosters productivity in a team environment. You can create purpose-specific groups so that all members of the Team are not affected by category-based tasks.

85. MeetEdgar

Meet Edgar is an online post filler app that allows you to create categories for your posts for your social networks mainly Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and schedule your posts. When your post become public, it automatically pulls your post down in the library to help you to post it again, when you run out of new post ideas. Its features include social media updates, queue filing, content scheduling, photo update support and more.

86. Gremln

Gremln is a social media app that aggregates your company’s work report from three channels – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These reports are easily shareable in a presentable manner via PDFs or emails. This app monitors your brand mentions, customer engagement and schedules your updates. Gremln allows you to restrict posts that have specific keywords and also keeps an archive of all your posts for three years.

87. Tracx

Tracx is a social analytics and monitoring tool that analyses your community management and social listening data. This tool helps you monitor back end of your business, track ROI, optimise campaigns, spy on your competition and measure individual team member’s performance. A great tool for Mid-Sized Businesses.

88. Adobe Social

Adobe Social is a social management app that monitors, publishes and promotes your content as well as analyses your social conversion data. This software has a unique feature to attach tracking codes to the posts to examine which content is driving more traffic and take action according to the stats of your target audience.

89. Sentiment

Sentiment is a social customer service platform that helps your schedule and publish content via Facebook, Google+ and Twitter through a content calendar. It also helps in analysing and monitoring social conversations and team performance along with driving customer engagement by resolving complaints and capitalising on available market opportunities.

90. TweetReach

TweetReach is a Twitter management tool that recognises your important URLs and hashtags to provide you a brief report on your audience’s response in its regard. It measures the performance of your tweets to understand the influence of your ideas on Twitter. It helps you find key industry influencers and engage with their followers.

91. ViralWoot

ViralWoot is an analytics and promotions tool for Pinterest that helps you promote your pins on the channel and measure your marketing efforts. The tool allows you to gain followers, promote pins and manage and build multiple Pinterest Accounts from a Single Dashboard.

92. BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a digital marketing software that helps you promote your products, content and services through influencers, thereby creating a buzz about your brand. This software helps you prioritise the most significant content by analysing your social media profiles, website statistics and contact information. The program features a single unanimous platform for all team members to collaborate.

93. TapInfluence

Just as the name suggests. Tapinfluence is an automated influencer marketing platform that helps agencies and brands find the best influencers in their industry. You can use it to find popular people in your niche who can promote your products and campaigns and help build a better brand recognition and reputation.

94. Piktochart

Piktochart is an infographic designing software that helps you design and customise infographics from thousands of preset templates. It has point-and-click and drag-and-drop feature, text frames and photo frames to create a presentable infographic, which can be downloaded in PNG, JPEG or PDF formats. This software imports information from Google spreadsheet, and Microsoft Excel and allows you to seamlessly represent your data in a visually appealing manner.

95. ScheduGram

Schedugram is an Instagram Management app that helps you to schedule your posts for publishing. This is an easy to use software that tells you if your post was published successfully or not. It provides you to repost and upload archived posts from your cloud/hard drive.

96. WebDam

WebDAM is a digital asset management software that allows you to connect with creative teams and files. This tool has some useful features such as intuitive folder trees, batch upload, media management, comprehensive format support, archival storage, version control, presentation management and image expiration. Its search feature includes in-document search, metadata support, advanced search and keyword management.

97. Rival IQ

Rival IQ is a data analytics and competitor analytics tool, which tracks your social networks and helps you boost traffic, engage followers and raise your social marketing ROI to your company. This tool allows you to spy on your competitor’s online activity and on their marketing strategy to strengthen your strategy for your brand growth.

98. LikeableHub

LikeableHub is a content curation and automatic publication tool that manages all your social network channels in one dashboard. This tool shares stories with news posts and thousands of content ideas. It can be used to automatically generate leads and manage your brand reputation by keeping an eye on the social web. It measures your brand’s success growth by simplified data analysis.

99. Click to Tweet

Click to Tweet is a link generator tool for Twitter, which lets you write the content you want to share and generate custom link in context of your content. This tools shares your link and keeps track of its activity to provide you with metrics that show you, which tweet has got maximum response.

100. Addict-o-matic

Addict-o-matic is a social media search platform that allows you to aggregate websites for latest blog posts, news, images and videos in your niche and display it in a single page.

101. Keyhole

If you are looking for a hashtag tracking solution, Keyhole is your answer. It works with most social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. You can find the most popular content in real-time for any niche and keyword you specify. This can ideally be used to reach industry influencers to market your products as well.

At Extreme-SEO, we use 37 out of these 101 Social Media Tools in our day to day activities and our most popular option is Hootsuite.

What about you?

Are responsible for the Social Media Marketing of your company?

Then you may have already used some of the marketing software, dashboards or management tools I have listed above. If So?

How was your experience?

Please share your feedback, reviews, comments and questions about the tools in the comments section below.

Your opinion will help the our readers make a well-Informed decision before investing into any of these tools.

20 JulSEO

Siloing – The Art of WordPress Micro On-Page Optimization!

When it comes to doing SEO for your WordPress website, On-page SEO is the first and foremost thing that should come to your mind. However, we have already been talking about On-page SEO since the beginning of the web? So why am I beating around the bush right now? I am not here to show you how to do the basics of On-page optimization. But, this time I will dive into the depth and show you some “micro-optimization techniques” that will take your website usability to the next level.

We are going to look at something that has been a part of the On-Page strategy for a long-long time. However, it has been much overlooked. This blog post will be covering the art of doing Silo Optimization or ‘Siloing’ a.k.a ‘Theming’ on your WordPress Website.

What is Siloing?

Siloing is an On-Page optimization technique, which is used to group relevant pages together. It can either be done manually or structurally through link connections. This in turn will allow you to manage things like, an editorial calendar, or establish a website’s keyword-based theme along with providing an amazing User Experience(UX) for the visitors.

Synopsis of Video:

“In this video, Google’s Former Head of Spam, Matt Cutts, is giving a few tips on Siloing or Themed Architecture. Having a Website Silo Architecture is the main way of plotting a themed framework. Even Matt claims that Siloing, if implemented properly will help a web-master rank for far more keywords with only a few inbound links, as opposed to websites that have a poor structure.”

What are the different types of Siloing?

There are two types of Siloing (theming) you can do to your website:

Physical

And,

Virtual

Physical Siloing: It is the documentation of your website structure, which helps in managing the editorial calendar. In this documentation, all the URL addresses of a website along with their individual page details are mentioned. Each of the pages contains sub-pages that directly reflect its URL structure. Let’s take a look at the URL example of primeone.global,

The above URL address reveals that the page focuses on the main page ‘services’ and its sub-page ‘Enterprise SEO.’ Just like this, every site has different sub-pages, which are placed under a single category page. Like in the case of the above link, you can find ‘Enterprise-Seo’ nested within the ‘Service’ page of the company website. The structure of the URL covers various topics under your site directory. Moving onto Virtual Siloing…

Virtual Siloing: Virtual siloing denotes the linking structure of a site. It mainly separates irrelevant pages, forms a group of relevant pages, and reinforces the initial landing pages of each silo.

Note: Physical siloing concentrates more on theme-related pages whereas virtual siloing is all about hypertext links between theme-related pages.

A virtual silo is stronger than a physical one because search engine robots crawl silently to the links. To exploit this, you should connect the theme-relevant topic to a section of your site by linking to the pages that are associated with that subject.

A site’s ranking will be greatly impacted, based on the internal linking structure with the popular landing pages on the website along with the subpages for each SEO silo.

Inlay man’s terminology, a SILO document is a worksheet that lets you record information about your website at the page level. Let’s take an example of a silo structure from a recipe website.

As you can see from the image below, only four columns are sufficient for any silo document. (Statutory Warning: Don’t scroll down on an Empty Stomach)

Location – As you can see from the image above the number system under the ‘Locations’ tab is linking all the subpages to the main category. This clearly represents the website’s easy navigation system. Pages 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 etc. are all nested under the 2.0 (Category Page). I hope you get the basic idea.

Keyword – Most of your web pages will have at least one bullseye keyword that will mainly target the SEO of the site. You should plant this “bullseye’ keyword in the file name, title tag, meta description, and alt tag of the relevant page(s). Just like this all your content must be optimized for a variety of keywords in a natural way.

Page type – The types of pages will differ from site to site. If you have a business website, you are likely to have a product service category, customer support category, Company catalog, product documentation category and so and so.

Page Name – A page name denotes the topic of the content on that particular page. You can use the main keyword of that page as its page name in the Content Management System, in our case, it will be WordPress.

Thus, the above image gives you the easiest way to plan and connect with the targeted SEO keywords at a page level, without destroying the simplicity of your website. Often, multiple team members are working on a single website like web designers, content writers, PR teams, coders, and many others. The silo document forms the basis of communication between all these individuals.

Pro tip: You can use Google Docs to manage your silo document. The unique benefit of doing this is that you can share your file(s) with your fellow members without complicating the process of transferring data and making multiple versions.

Here are some more SEO columns that you can add to your worksheet to increase accessibility:

File Name
Title Tag
Meta Description

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Introduction to Cross-Linking

The internet is a giant web of interconnectivity where all the websites are somehow connected to each other through links. Cross-linking refers to the method of linking between two or more websites that may or may not have the same owner. Cross-linking allows webmasters to link to similar content on other websites from their website to satisfy their user’s searches or provide more food for thought on content that they find amusing. At times, cross-linking is also used by websites to give a reference, credit, or proof.

In most cases, every subpage of a website will cross-link itself to the top landing page(s). Consider, the silo example (refer to the recipe website silo document image) for cross-linking, which looks like this,

Category pages 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 are placed under 0 (Homepage) target keyword as the main text for that specific page(s).
Going down the hierarchy, you can see 1.1, 1.2, …. 1.10 cross-linked to 1.0
And the same goes for all the other categories and subpages.

Get the idea?

Note: Content management systems (CMS) like WordPress and shopping cart platforms easily organize your site according to your website silo documentation through the use of tags, product description pages, category pages, and more.

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Importance of Keyword Architecture in Siloing

Short, Long, and LSI keywords play a significant role in making your website visible in search engines. It is essential for your website to have organized, supportive content, to back up those keywords. Search engines inspect your site structure to understand what your website is all about. This eventually brings in visitors to your site. However, having a Silo Strategy in place, will not only be good for SERP visibility but will also impact how visitors use your website.

How Siloing Affects Website Rank in SERPs?

From our deduction so far, it is safe to say that Siloing is a great SEO practice. It allows your site to rank in SERPs by improving the significance of your site pages for the desired search keywords. It also handles your content in an organized manner and reveals what the website is all about, not only to humans, but also to search engine robots. Siloing further helps establish your site as an authoritative source for a topic(s) of your choice.

Search engines have always given priority to the website(s) focusing on high-ranking Keywords that provide relevant subject matter along with an error-free framework to match the user’s query. However, this does not imply that you should fill your website with content focusing only on popular search phrases, which don’t bear any resemblance to your niche. Google prefers websites that provide great user experience and quality content rather than those websites that mindlessly stuff content and over-optimize keywords. So, do keep this fact in mind.

One clear ranking signal for Google is the Average time on the Website. When users choose to spend more time on your website, that means that you are providing them with a smooth surfing experience and great content. This in turn tells Google that your website is worthy of higher rankings. Average time on a website plays a crucial role, especially in Mobile SERPs, where users tend to have an even shorter attention span than desktops and tablets.

How Does Siloing Improve Your User Experience?

There is just one golden rule to score well in SERPs, and that is to provide meaningful content to users and value their time. Our only purpose should be, to please human visitors instead of robot search engines. That’s how it works!

So, before jumping straight into the technical things, ask yourself this question, “will this SEO strategy be good enough for my human users?”. If you hear your inner voice saying ‘yes,’ then you are good to go.

Silo organizes your website data in a systematic manner that can retain itself, even after going through changes, which are equally suitable for both human users and search engines.

Nothing upsets the site visitors, more than a poor navigation system. Imagine, how essential, it is to silo and cross-link your website when you are shopping at an e-commerce store. For example, take a look at this image of Amazon.com, which shows results for sports t-shirts under the category of both men’s and women’s clothing, which is ideal for site visitors.

Here, the word ‘sports t-shirts’ is linked to both ‘men’ and ‘women’ apparel page categories. As you can see from the image above, the optimized Silo framework on the website is allowing the users to choose the right category without getting lost.

How To Use Silo Document As An Editorial Calendar?

Silo has the feature to manage all your SEO tactics in a visually representable manner. You can simply add two to three relevant columns and turn your Silo document into an SEO management sheet along with a fantastic editorial calendar. Add ‘writer’ and ‘published’ columns to the silo and keep a track record of your valuable editorial data.

The more you discover the artistry of a silo the more it will fascinate you and take your page optimization to another level!

Here are different ways you can use your silo document:

Determine gaps in the content strategy
Track conversion rate
Track notes for internal or external web designers
Organize a plan for a site relocation
Identify and eliminate outdated web pages
Update old blog pages and remarket them

How to Silo Your Website

You can silo your website by using these four steps:

Determine the theme that will best compliment your website: Figure out your website content strategy. What type of content do you want to have and what is the website all about (or What would you add in the future)? Stick to the overall game plan and select a theme that suits your industry.
Strategize your silo: Pay close attention to choosing a theme for your WordPress website and structure all the main categories and subcategories according to virtual and physical siloing.
Plot your link architecture: I suggest you do it on a piece of paper first. Analyze your internal link architecture starting from your nav menu, and connect your sub-pages systematically. Doing this will strengthen your theme’s framework, thereby helping people smoothly navigate through your website without getting lost.

Note: You need at least five related content pages to set up a silo theme model.

Frame your silo: Focus on the content quality and include relevant keywords wherever possible. Strengthen your top landing silo page with main focus keywords and links from your sub-pages according to the hierarchical framework.

CONCLUSION

Siloing is all about creating an organized and intuitive website architecture that satisfies search engine spiders and simplifies website navigation for us humans.

Hopefully, this article gives you a good grasp of the silo model and WordPress Micro-optimization. If you have any problems getting started with Siloing, then you can leave a comment here, or you can create a new discussion in the Engage Forum.

What Are Google Featured Snippets?

Who Is This Important For?

How Does Featured Snippet Help?

Where Does the Answer Come from In the Featured Snippet?

Lists

Paragraphs

Tables

What If I Don’t Want to Be Featured in Google Snippet?

How Can I Opt into Featured Snippets?

How Can You Optimize Your Content for Featured Snippet Box?

Ending Notes

The 9 Key Characteristics of Future Social Media Hero’s

Community Administration:

Customer Service:

Content Curation:

Relationship Building:

Videography:

Creative DNA:

Organization Skills:

Selling Skills:

Tech Savvy:

Search Engine Optimization:

Virtual Reality to Soon Set Foot into Social Media –

Social Shopping To Take Off Soon –

Live Streaming To Get Even More Mainstream –

Priority Customer Service in Social Media –

Heard of Community by YouTube Yet? –

Social Media Management Hacks for Productivity

Increase Tweet Reach with This Nifty Little Trick:

Social Buzz Club to get more shares:

Use Crystal Knows to Craft Better Introductory Emails:

Use IFTTT to Automate Content Sharing:

Use The Reply Button To Create Twitter Threads:

Use Tweetfull To Drive Twitter Engagement and Traffic:

Rapportive Helps Me Connect with People Who Mail Me:

Optimize Your Opengraph Tags:

Ending Notes:

Start Optimizing Your Conversion Rate Today!

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Concluding Remarks

So, how does Digital Intelligence impact our social and economic life?

The Impact of Technology on the Growing Child

So, how can we prepare our kids for the Digital Age?

Digital Intelligence is the key!

Coca Cola

Flipkart

LinkedIn

My SQL

What You Can Learn

The distinction is the base of your business.

If something bothers you, change it.

Try to think out of the box.

Oprah Winfrey

Steve Jobs; Apple

Richard Branson; Virgin

Walt Disney; Disney

Henry ford; Ford Motor

“Digital Marketing is not only about technology, it’s also about people.”

INCREASING ATTENTION TO SOCIAL NETWORKS

VIDEO TO GAIN PREDOMINANCE

MORE PERSONALIZATION