I’m not going to lecture you on the importance of content marketing. You understand that already. I’m not going to present a bunch of stats that prove content marketing is arguably the only marketing left. And I’m not going to show you how to market your content. But I am going to tell you that if you’re not promoting as much as you’re creating, you’re doing it wrong. In fact, your “promotion to creation” ratio should be 4:1. “In other words, create content 20% of the time. Spend the other 80% of the time promoting what you created.” ~Derek Halpern Think of it this way: Is it easier to create a new article, share it, and get 1,000 sets of eyes on it before it disappears from their feeds and you need to make another one, or to promote the dickens out of one quality piece and get it in front of 10,000 – or more – people? Obvious choice, right? More promotion and less creation makes better use of the finite time you have available. But what’s the best way to go about it? Image via https://www.hawkeye.ai/what-is-content-intelligence/ Dollar for dollar, pound for pound, email is your best bet. Reach out, cultivate relationships, and leverage them to supercharge not just your content, but your reputation as a whole. And it’s easier than you think. Relationships = Bigger Audiences When it comes to audience, bigger is better. Ever looked at someone else’s audience – their email list, social following, or online community – with envy? Imagine sharing with their audience in addition to your own. You can. You need permission, of course, and that’s where cold email outreach comes in. Remember: the bigger their audience (and therefore, the more influence they have), the more people contact them to ask for things. Find a different approach to stand out. Offer them something. Build the relationship, leverage the connection, and you both benefit from increased exposure, backlinks, traffic, and a larger network. I’ll be honest: This takes some time. It’s not the kind of thing you can pull off in a morning after you’ve written something you want to get out that afternoon. But it’s worth it. Step 1: Find Your Audiences Identify the influencers in your industry or niche. Who are the major players? Don’t think about promotion. Instead, make a list of who you’d love to connect, engage, and build a relationship with in your niche. Ask yourself: Who are the experts? The success stories? The ones quoted in industry reports and blog posts? Who’s writing the content with the most engagement? A service like BuzzSumo can quickly identify the most shared content for any keyword or URL address. Once you have names, finding email addresses is usually straightforward: Check their website and/or social media accounts. Or, try an email finder like Voila Norbert. Names and addresses at the ready, you’ve got yourself an email list. Step 2: Reach Out and Engage Send a brief but personalized message introducing yourself. Now is not the time to ask for a favor. Instead: Compliment them on a recent post, event, or award Use lessons from traditional sales outreach to get their attention (since, at the end of the day, what you’re doing is a form of sales) Point out a broken link with an alternative source to replace it Share a resource you believe may help them Simply say “hi” and tell them how much you (sincerely) admire them Ask if you can mention a specific resource authored by them in your article, or if they can propose an alternative The goal is just to make the connection. Simplify the task and use cold email automation at this stage. A service provider like Mailshake can send out personalized messages, save custom templates, funnel those who respond to a special list, and notify you each time. You can then personally write back to those “leads.” Cultivate. Nurture. Build. Don’t ask…yet. Step 3: Help Each Other Once you’ve established a relationship, the opportunities to help each other start to arrive organically. You can harness the relationship for simple asks: A short quote or quick Q&A for a piece you’re working on Permission to profile or interview them If they’d read and give suggestions for your latest piece before it’s published They’ll be more inclined to say ‘yes’ because they know you. That helps you. And they’ll likely share it because it puts them in a favorable light and they’re invested. That helps them (and you). Even easier: Link to their stuff in your content, or include them, their services, or their content in ‘best of’ or ‘how-to’ roundups. Let them know you did, and they’re sure to share it with their audience. Win-win. Notice that you don’t need to explicitly ask them to share anything. Make them look good and/or increase their traffic and reach, and they’ll do it for you. Cold email outreach for relationship-building is a long game, but it pays dividends down the road. “Seasoned content marketers shouldn’t build an epic piece of content unless they know how it will reach a wide audience.” ~Henley Wing, Co-Founder, BuzzSumo Step 4: Keep on Building Once you start the ball rolling on building relationships, the opportunities are endless. Your easiest next step is to leverage those relationships for introductions to other influencers. Priyanka Desai, founder of iScribblers, has leveraged this with great success. “If you are in good terms with one influencer, ask the person to introduce you to the fellow thought leaders,” says Desai. “Trust me, most of them love connecting and this does wonders for you.” As you develop more relationships, you can build on this strategy with something a little longer-term, a little more involved, and with a lot bigger value: a curated community of influencers and content-creators in a similar space who can all help each other spread the word about content. This strategy has worked wonders for Stefan Debois, CEO at Survey Anyplace, who manages a group of over 100 members. According to Stefan, “Developing a community of influencers who genuinely promote each other’s content has been my most sustainable content promotion strategy.” Provide more than you ask for so you don’t become a liability. You want to be an asset. Give more than you take, and you will become one. This is a guest post contributed by Sujan Patel, a partner at Ramp Ventures, makers of Mailshake, Pick, VoilaNorbert, and Right Inbox. He has over 14 years of marketing experience and has led the digital marketing strategy for companies like Salesforce, Mint, Intuit and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies. Is email a part of your relationship-building strategy? What tricks and tips do you use? Share your thoughts in the comments below:
A blunder here and a blunder there on WordPress can be deadly. It can kill your SEO campaign that you’ve otherwise spent good money on, prevent you from ranking, and it can damage your bounce rate. As a consequence, conversions stay low and the sales don’t come. Fortunately, WordPress isn’t the most popular web software on the planet for no reason. These mistakes are easy to fix. With some quick work on your end, you’ll set your site up for success. Let’s check out the biggest blunders in WordPress and how to prevent them. 1. You didn’t change your permalinks This is a mistake people who are in a rush and don’t have a checklist tend to make. It’s a costly one, but it’s also one that’s super duper easy to fix. Permalinks refer to URL structure, and when you first create a new post, the URL structure looks downright horrible. It can look a little like this: http://wp.dev/2018/1/05/SEO-tips-for-2018 Eew, right? Lots of people realize their blunder after they’ve published the post and it’s started crawling. At which point it’s too late to rectify without throwing up an error when people still try to land on the page with the original URL. From now on, always make sure to amend your URL before you press “Publish.” To do this you just need to head into the “Permalinks” menu on your dashboard and change “Post Name.” The best thing to do is to include the title (or the keyword) in your URL and get rid of the date and anything else that looks messy. Change your URL before publishing an article via the Permalinks Settings 2. You’ve blocked search engines You might think that blocking search engines like Google is such a schoolboy mistake to make that there’s no way you’ve made it. However, most of us block search engines while we’re developing our site so that a half-finished version doesn’t show up in the SERPs (also a good reason to use a staging site). And because it’s human nature to forget, some of us forget to unblock them. A year later and with still no signs of a site visitor, we’re driven completely insane. This is easy to fix. Simply head to your “Settings” menu and select “Reading.” At the bottom, you’ll see “Search Engine Visibility” with a box next to it. Uncheck the box if you want search engines to crawl your site. 3. You ignore the SEO plugins SEO plugins like Yoast give you all kinds of valuable insights into your on-page optimization WordPress doesn’t really automatically do SEO for you. Instead, you need to invest time and money in your campaign so that you climb the rankings organically. SEO plugins are super helpful because they add sitemap.xml to Google Search Console, which lets Google crawl your site better, therefore improving the chances of you ranking higher. WordPress SEO plugins also help you optimize your posts and pages for keywords, as well as add open graph tags that encourage more social sharing. If you’re new to SEO, failing to add an SEO plugin means you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. There are lots to choose from, with Yoast and SEMrush among the most popular. At the same time, a plugin shouldn’t be the only weapon in your armory. To properly attack SEO and improve your visibility on Google, it makes sense to download a performance or analytics tool, too. SEO performance tools such as Nightwatch let you track your SEO campaigns once they’ve been implemented so that you can see if they’re working or not. Once you start to refine your SEO with WordPress and your performance tool, you’ll start to climb and climb, and your page views will increase. 4. You didn’t secure your WordPress site Like it or not (and no one does), websites sites get hacked, and the reason could be down to an insecure server. This issue is preventable: you could pay extra for a better server, or look into managed WordPress hosting. Remember, you get what you pay for. For now, there are some simple security measures you can put into place. Here are some recommendations: Set up a lockdown feature so that repetitive wrong password attempts from the same user are banned Implement a 2-factor authentication on your login page so that all users must provide two different login details Change the URL of your login When you add new user accounts, take great care. If you’re working on a team project and need to add multiple authors, use the Force Strong Passwords plugin to cover your back. 5. You are failing to optimize pages and posts for keywords Facebook is now a major direct traffic rival to Google, and it’s possible to get lots of page views by producing awesome content that gets shared on social media. But you can’t just launch a WordPress site and expect it to be seen by all. Google is still number one when it comes to organic traffic, and to climb the SERPs, you need to optimize your posts and pages for keywords. When it comes to picking the right keywords, a little research is required. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to help, while Google’s Related Searches also helps you to pick keywords based around your main ones. Type in a query and check the related searches section at the bottom for keyword variations. Google’s Keyword Planner tool helps you plan your SEO campaigns Alternatively, you could use your SEO performance tool to reverse engineer what your rivals are doing. This means that you check out the keywords they’re using in their campaigns, and adopt the best-performing ones yourself. It’s not enough that you slot a few keywords into your blog posts, however. The major mistake people make when it comes to WordPress is not optimizing their pages. If you don’t add your main keyword to your title, at least one subheading, page URL, meta tag, alt-tags, and images, you’re missing a trick. But SEO is all-encompassing and keyword optimization is just one element. Don’t forget to check SEO metrics to get the whole picture, too. All in all, these are some pretty hefty WordPress blunders that, while big and downright horrible, are also easy to avoid. We hope this article has helped and that you start to climb the SERPs. Good luck and don’t forget to share! This post was contributed by Aljaz Fajmut. He is an internet entrepreneur and founder of Nightwatch, a search visibility tool of the next generation. Follow him on Twitter: @aljazfajmut
We all know what a critical role content plays in getting people to notice your website. Now, with news of the Gutenberg Editor, it’s more important than ever to make sure the content you’re producing is presented well on your WordPress blog. Given the importance of the editor you use for your content, we will go through a number of alternatives for Gutenberg editor as well review of where it stands as of now. When looking solely on what blogging does for a brand, Hubspot found that companies that wrote and published more than 16 posts a month received 4.5 times the amount of leads than those who published less than four posts. And that’s just the blog we’re talking about. Think about what truly high-quality and high-value copy on the rest of the site does for lead generation. It can tell your business’s story. It can create an emotional connection between you and your visitors without ever speaking an actual word to them. It can demonstrate to visitors that you truly understand their pain or what makes them tick. It can give visitors a good sense of your personality and professionalism. Best of all, it can sell your business for you. Think of it like an automated salesperson. But here’s the thing: creating content isn’t always easy. Coming up with ideas for your content is the first obstacle. Finding the right words to use is the second. Then, you find yourself in WordPress, ready to load it up on your site and publish. For non-tech savvy users, this can be especially problematic if you’re not familiar with the WordPress interface or if you’re completely new to the word processing options available within it. Typically, I’d say that WordPress does a good job of catering to a mix of user types when building out features for their platform. Despite how tricky the text editor interface may seem for newbie WordPress users, it’s actually a pretty straight-forward tool that’s easy to get the hang of. Sure, it could use an advanced WYSIWYG plugin to give it some more text formatting options, but, otherwise, it’s a solid tool for writing content. That said, this is all likely to change soon with WordPress’s planned release of the Gutenberg editor in their 5.0 core update. Gutenberg is a visual editor tool, much like the ones you’d find built into some WordPress themes or that come as part of website builder tools like Wix and Weebly. If WordPress goes through with this and replaces their current content creation tool with Gutenberg, it will be interesting to see how users respond to it, as the reviews aren’t looking so great right now. So, let’s see what’s going on with Gutenberg and then explore some possible alternative options for content editors for WordPress. What Is Gutenberg and What Does It Mean for Your Content Creation Process? When talk of the Gutenberg editor first began, the response was mostly positive. WordPress developers and other web development professionals who heard about it seemed to appreciate what WordPress was attempting to do to improve the user experience within the CMS. However, as more people have gotten their hands on the Gutenberg plugin and tried it out on their own webhosts, there are some mixed feelings being thrown around. I think it’s safe to say that the general consensus now is “Why?” Why does WordPress need to replace the current editor with Gutenberg? While the current editor does have some weaknesses, for the most part, it’s a solid content creation tool. You can use it in Text mode and work in HTML, or you can use it in Visual mode and get a sense for how it will look on the live site. Why would WordPress believe that turning this into a visual composer tool is necessary? This article is a good reflection of how people feel about Gutenberg right now. Sure, it may work for some people under certain circumstances when building a site (like when building block-heavy page designs). Realistically, though, Gutenberg should not be brought into the core in the 5.0 release. Users didn’t ask for it and it’s clear that many people feel as though it does nothing but complicate the process of creating content. Here is what the new editor tool currently looks like. Appears simple enough, right? However, it’s not as simple as typing away, word after word, as you would in the current editor tool, even though that’s what this tool would have you think is possible at first glance. Instead, for any change in alignment, formatting (like the addition of bulletpoints), text style, or the insertion of media, a new “block” has to be created using the Insert function. It’s a tedious process and it over complicates what should be a simple task. Type out your content. Add some eye-catching imagery. And voila! You have a new page or post of content. Since the Text editor in Gutenberg currently doesn’t seem to work properly either, this also means that developers and other more advanced users of WordPress can’t default to a more streamlined method of creating content. Regardless of how we (and over 50% of the users who have reviewed it on WordPress) feel, however, it looks like Gutenberg is on its way. As a WordPress user, now is the time to start looking around for alternative options in case you’re unhappy with this changing of the guard. Content creation should be a simple thing, not something that becomes bloated and too difficult to manage simply because of the tool you use. So let’s talk about some alternative options you have. Even if WordPress does go ahead and put Gutenberg into core, you can use plugins to supersede that change and continue to make the CMS a pleasant place to work. 8 Alternatives to Gutenberg Editor for WordPress When it comes to creating content, you have a few options to choose from. There are the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) text editors, the drag-and-drop builders, the theme page builders, and the visual editor tools (which is what WordPress is attempting to give us with Gutenberg). Because there’s almost always a WordPress plugin for whatever it is we hope to accomplish on our website- either on the backend or frontend- it should come as no surprise as there are a number of fantastic solutions for each of those options. It’s simply a matter of finding the one that fits in line with your budget (if there’s any cost at all) and will streamline the process of creating content the most. Here are some of the best alternatives to Gutenberg editor currently available: Backend Page Builders Page Builder by Site Origin While this plugin won’t be ideal for blogging, it most certainly is a great backend alternative to building column-based content for other pages on your site. Since so much of responsive design relies on the compressibility and rearrangement of each element in a website, block- and column-based web designs are ideal (which is why most modern themes are inherently designed that way). TinyMCE Advanced If the Gutenberg plugin does become the official text editor tool for WordPress, then you might not be able to use this plugin for much longer. In the meantime, however, this is a pretty cool addition to the current tool in the backend of WordPress as it adds many more possibilities to what you can do with your content without having to know a lick of code (or to bother switching back and forth between the Visual and Text tabs). Front-end Page Builders Beaver Builder The Beaver Builder page builder tool is a simple tool that combines direct editing of the frontend of your website with drag-and-drop functionality. It also comes with pre-made page templates, so you can save even more time building new content, or you can do it all on your own. The page builder’s tools come in an easy-to-follow sidebar, giving you options to add all the key elements every WordPress site should have. Divi Although Divi is technically a drag-and-drop builder, its strengths really lie in the countless options available for creating totally custom pages for your website. Any element you can imagine has been accounted for here, from bar counters to recent blog post sliders. In addition, Divi also gives users the ability to save design elements or content blocks for later use on other pages or posts; thus, saving the user quite a bit of time in having to recreate the same elements again and again. Elementor Here is a true drag-and-drop builder tool. Because it wasn’t created specifically as a page builder tool for a theme developer (like Divi), it works with any WordPress theme you want ot use. The interface is clean and the drag-and-drop is intuitive. Oh, and did I mention that it’s 100% free to use? Sure, you’ll have to pay for advanced functionality like the form builder and globalized widgets, but the basic tools you need to build your content are free to use. Themify Builder The Themify Builder tool is similar to Divi, though it’s backend and frontend editing versatility adds a really nice touch. Whereas Divi really shines in the backend content creation, Themify does a fantastic job of providing users with an easy-to-use frontend editor. All you have to do is use pre-built modules to load up your page with content and then you can customize as you see fit. Thrive Themes Content Builder Thrive Themes’ content builder tool looks to be what the Gutenberg editor is aiming for. The key difference is that it’s a frontend editor instead of backend. Oh, they’ve created a way for users to build blocks of content without having to go the tedious route of creating a new block for each new style or format change; you can do all of that within a single block. So, for anyone who likes the idea of Gutenberg, but aren’t excited about the execution of it, this may be the right solution. Visual Composer A comprehensive visual editor plugin for WordPress, Visual Composer is one that’s been around for a while and is regularly lauded by top publications and reviewers like Forbes, WPHub, and Vandelay Design. This is because of its flexibility (it’s both a backend and frontend content creation tool), its adaptability (you can use it to edit old content and create new content), and its attention to detail. Summary The whole point in having a website for your brand is to demonstrate the quality of your service or product and convince visitors that you’re trustworthy enough to work with, follow, or buy from. But you can’t do that without high-quality content. If the tools you use to create content begin to weigh you down and discourage you from creating the content you need in order to get the job done, then it’s time you look for something else. The solution isn’t likely outside of WordPress, however. There are a plethora of backend and frontend page builder and content creation tools you can use. It’s simply a matter of finding one that’s the best fit for you. The contributor of this post is Nathan Oulman, he loves his pet squirrel. When he is not busy taking her for walks he writes for his site Dailyhosting.net
Have you expanded your marketing efforts to Pinterest yet? You might think Pinterest is a ‘soft’ social media platform. Full of cupcakes and kittens and moms saving images of the home DIY projects they want to make and ideas for their kid’s birthday party. There’s no serious marketing going on, is there? There is. And the stats are compelling: There are over 150 million monthly active users on Pinterest as of October 2016. Pinterest is responsible for 17% of traffic to eCommerce sites. And, almost 75% of Pinterest users have purchased something they saw on the platform. “So, yeah…” in the words of Gary Vee… “I’d say you should get serious about Pinterest. Now.” With that in mind, here are seven things you can do right now to improve your Pinterest marketing efforts from your WordPress website. 1. Pin It With Me Now Pinterest gives you the ability to create a widget to display one of your boards on your site. Most people put this into their sidebar. But with sidebar blindness only on the increase and many sites going completely sidebar free, why waste your time? So, where else you can put a ‘pin with me’ widget? One thing you can do is put a ‘pin with me’ widget for a related board into your blog posts. Your visitors will see your related pins and be able to follow you on Pinterest by clicking through. It’s kind of like the content upgrades craze, only using it to grow your Pinterest following instead. 2. Using plugins for your pins, and an alternative One of the best plugins for boosting your Pinterest is Social Warfare. Using Social Warfare you can upload your pinnable graphic into a specific field in your blog post backend. Social Warfare automatically opens Pinterest pre-loaded with your pinnable graphic when someone hits the social sharing button. What does this mean? No more weird images shared to Pinterest! If you’re happy with your current social sharing plugin and don’t want to add Social Warfare, you could choose to hide your pinnable graphics in your post. Let’s face it, not everyone wants to see an enormous big pinnable image taking up all the space above the fold. Hiding your graphic is as easy as clicking into the text side of your WordPress editor and typing in this code around your image: <div style="display:none;">Your Image Goes Here</div> What happens now is that when your visitor hits the Pinterest share button, they’ll be able to choose from any image on your blog post. That’ll include images that you’ve hidden. There’s a little bit of trust involved with this method that your audience is going to choose the right image, however, you’ve also got the opportunity to hide more than one pinnable graphic. This could make for an interesting split test between different pin styles! 3. Verify your website & Get Rich Pins SEO algorithms are complex and Pinterest’s is no different. Pinterest’s trust of your website is a factor in how often your content is shown. One way to make sure they trust you is to verify your website. It’s quick and relatively painless — you just need to add your website URL to your Pinterest profile and click Confirm. A pop-up will appear with a code enclosed in a meta tag. If you have one of these plugins: JetPack All In One SEO Yoast there’s a Pinterest verification field for you to paste just the number part of the meta tag into. Another change you can make on your WordPress site is to add rich pins. It helps your pins stand out in the feed. A rich pin: Has the article title in bold. Has a short description pulled directly from the site It makes your pins stand out a little bit more in the feed and look more professional and polished. There are six different types of rich pins as of January 2017, and each is a little different. Follow the instructions provided by Pinterest to get rich pins set up. For Article pins, if you’ve got Yoast SEO installed all you need to do is make sure you’ve got the “Add Open Graph Meta Data” box enabled then head on over to the Rich Pin Validator to validate your pins by following the prompts. 4. Optimize your Pinterest SEO SEO begins at home and, in the case of Pinterest, you can make an impact by: Naming your images using keywords. Including keywords in your alt text descriptions. The first thing you need to know about Pinterest SEO is that Pinterest is a search engine. It’s not a social media platform. SEO rules apply. When you’re naming your pinnable images, make sure you give them a keyworded name. For example, call your image “repurposed-blog-content-example” rather than “IMG104350”. You should also include keywords in your alt text descriptions because that’s what Pinterest will pull as the description of your pin (if you aren’t using a plugin like Social Warfare). 5. Getting descriptive Do you know where the description text for your pinnable graphics come from? It’s actually pulled from the alt text of your image. So, if you aren’t using a plugin like Social Warfare, you’ll want to make sure you fill in the alt text of your pinnable image. This way when someone decides to share one of your pinnable graphics, they’ll have your pre-written description ready to go. And what exactly should you include in your Pinterest descriptions? You need to use keywords to make your pins more attractive to the Pinterest algorithm, the Smart Feed. But at the same time, you need to be writing for the real humans who’ll be pinning, sharing, and clicking your content. Some tips for great descriptions: Write for real people first. Posing a question makes a good opener. Try to work in your keywords as close to the top as possible to avoid cut off. 6. Try the MiloTree app If you’re an avid blog reader, you might’ve noticed a new type of pop-up in town. The MiloTree app. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a small pop-up that appears relatively unobtrusively in the bottom corner of your screen and suggests that you follow the blogger on social media or like their Facebook page. It’s commonly used for Pinterest and can help you grow your Pinterest following by channeling your visitors to your Pinterest profile. Using MiloTree, Kate Ahl of Simple Pin Media increased the number of followers to one of her Pinterest accounts from 15-20 per week to 50+ per week. 7. Make pinnable graphics for your landing pages Got a free download you use as a lead generation tactic? A free course? Or even a sales page for your latest product? If it has a landing page, make a pinnable graphic for it. An attractive pin with a compelling headline can start getting shares and bringing in traffic which will help you make more sales. For the overachievers, make multiple pins in different styles! Wrapping It Up If you’re convinced you need to start taking Pinterest seriously, act on these seven things. Try the MiloTree app, experiment with different ways of sharing your Pinterest boards on your posts, and find the plugins you like to use. Test your results and double down on what works. Over to you — what’s one thing you’re planning to do to improve your Pinterest marketing? Cath Oneissy is a freelance writer for hire, specializing in digital marketing, social media, and all things blogging. She works closely with B2B companies looking to increase their visibility through engaging and actionable content. When not writing, you can find her whipping up tasty treats to appease her picky toddler. Follow her on Twitter @thismamalearns.
