6 Reasons Why Your Blog Needs an Email Newsletter

Do you email your blog readers regularly?

Maybe you put ‘set up email newsletter’ on your ‘someday’ list ages ago, but still haven’t done it.

Or maybe you have a newsletter list, but you haven’t sent one in months.

You might think it’s optional – something you can do once you finish everything else on your to-do list.

You even think email is dead (or at least old-fashioned), and that you’re better off building connections through social media. (Which is nothing new, by the way. I was talking about bloggers having similar concerns nine years ago.)

The truth is, email is still one of the best ways (if not the best way) way to connect with your blog’s readers. And if you’re not using it, you really are missing out.

But before I start talking about the benefits of using an email list to connect with your readers, let’s get one misconception out of the way.

Does it Have to be a ‘Newsletter’?

In the blogging world, you’ll hear people talking about “email lists” and “email newsletters” as if they’re synonymous.

You might think of an email newsletter as a weekly content-rich email complete with feature article, links to your recent blog posts, and maybe a round-up of what’s been going on in your niche.

But that’s just one example, and there are plenty of other ways you can run an email list.

Some bloggers send out their newsletter once a month. Others may email irregularly – an  email every few days in the run-up to a launch, but otherwise only every month or two.

You might decide to send out your blog posts by email, maybe as a weekly digest like we do on ProBlogger. (I’ll be talking about that, plus other options for your newsletter, in next week’s post.)

Whatever you decide, here are a couple of suggestions:

• Email at a frequency that suits you and your readers.
  If they want a weekly newsletter, and you can comfortably manage that, then go ahead. But if you can only manage one a month, then make it a monthly newsletter. There’s no point sending one a weekly newsletter that’s full of careless mistakes because you had to rush to get it finished on time.
• Whatever sort of email list you run, make sure your emails aren’t too infrequent.
  If you don’t send an email for six months, many readers (especially ones who’ve just joined) will forget who you are. They may even mark your emails as spam, which can have a serious impact on them being delivered.

Why Emailing Your Readers is So Important

Some bloggers – especially newer bloggers – find it hard to see why emailing readers is so important. To them, bringing in traffic through good SEO or building their social media following makes more sense.

But here are six crucial reasons why email is still important.

#1: Emails Give You Control Over Your Own Traffic

With a big email list, you can easily drive lots of traffic to your posts simply by sending out an email. If you’re relying on Google, you’re competing against lots of other blogs. And if Google decides to change its search algorithm you could lose a lot of traffic very quickly. (This happened to me way back in 2004, which I wrote about a couple of years later.)

Social media isn’t much better. You probably already know that only a fraction of your Facebook page’s followers will actually see any given post. To reach lots of people you need to either “boost” your post (which costs money) or run a paid ad.

But with email you have full control. Even though they can get caught in people’s spam filters, most of them will get through. And even if only 25% of your subscribers open their emails (which isn’t a terrible open rate), they can still drive a lot of traffic to your blog.

#2: Emails are a Great Way to Build Relationships and Engage with Your Readers

Emails feel personal in a way that blog posts rarely achieve. They’re also private. Your readers can reply to you, and you alone – a far cry from a comment that everyone can see.

So when you write your newsletters, try adding a bit of personal information that you wouldn’t share on your blog. Emails are more ephemeral, so they’re a great place to drop in a few words about your life and what’s happening around you. (You can talk about those things on your blog, but the post could be found and read years later.)

For instance, here’s how I started our weekly post round-up back in July:

It’s a hive of activity at ProBlogger HQ today because we’re less than 48 hours from this year’s first ProBlogger event in Brisbane!

I’m excited to meet those of you who are coming along for the day of learning and our first ever mastermind! For the rest of you – here’s our latest blog posts and podcast episode.

Of course, engagement goes both ways, and you can encourage readers to email back. You may find some readers who’ve never commented on your blog, but are very happy to engage with you by email.

#3: Email Drives Sales of Your Products and Services

While social media can be a great place for conversations, it’s typically not a good place for sales. It may help people find out about your blog and connect with you, but email is a great place to ask for the sale. Brad Smith’s post on why social media sales suck (and what to do instead) on AdEspresso explains how you can use social media to get people to subscribe to your email list.

The cost of an email list can be a bit off-putting when you’re starting out. (We’ll be taking a look at the costs involved in a couple of weeks’ time.) But the power of email to drive sales should make it far more worthwhile.

#4: Emails Let You Point Readers to Where You Want Them to Go

Email is a brilliant way to direct readers to where you want them to go. For instance, you can:

• Link to your blog posts. Not just the recent ones, but also posts in your archive readers may have missed or forgotten about.
• Link to your Facebook group, Twitter account, etc. If you’ve set up a new Facebook group your readers might be interested in, you can promote it in your newsletter.
• Link to a survey or poll. This can be a great opportunity to find out more about your readers, and ask them what sort of content they’d like to see more of. I’ve been doing this since 2010, and it’s been an invaluable way to find out what readers want.

#5: Email Lists Let You Target Different Groups of Readers

When you publish a post on your blog, it goes out to everyone who’s subscribed for updates, via RSS or email.

But with an email list you can ‘segment’ the list into smaller groups.

For instance, you might create segments for:

• People who aren’t subscribed to another list you have. This can help you avoid sending too many promotional messages to the same people (e.g. those who have signed up for both your “newsletter” list and your ‘waiting list’ for an ecourse.)
• People who joined your list at a specific point in time – within the past month, more than a year ago, and so on.
• People who joined from a specific page on your website. If you’re using social media ads or guest posting to drive sign-ups, you can target your messages or promotions to each segment’s interests.
• People who haven’t opened your emails recently (or at all).
• People who’ve looked at specific pages on your site, or who’ve bought a particular product.

#6: Email Can Lead Readers on a Journey

You can design a series of emails to take readers on a journey, whether it’s teaching them something new or helping them come to a better place in their life.

It could be something quite straightforward and practical, such as teaching them how to play basic chords on the guitar. Or it could be something more personal and in-depth, such as  teaching mindfulness and meditation.

You can use autoresponders to send a sequence of emails – say, one every few days for two weeks. (If you’re not sure what an autoresponder is, I explain what they are and the benefits of using one in this episode of the ProBlogger podcast.)

Most bloggers use an autoresponder at the start of their relationship with a new reader (i.e. when the reader first signs up). But you can also create different lists that readers can opt into separately.

It can be a great way to get readers used to opening your emails (they won’t want to miss a step on the journey), and to link to your blog posts or even paid products and services where appropriate. For example, you could “upsell” the reader on a related ecourse or product at the end of the series.

In Summary

If you haven’t set up a newsletter yet, or you never saw the value of having one, I hope this post has been helpful. And if you already have a newsletter list, but haven’t sent anything in a while, I hope you now understand how worthwhile emailing your readers can be.

I know it can be easy to focus on a blog at the expense of your newsletter. A blog is more visible and public, which can make posting there more motivating. But your newsletter may be the key to driving greater engagement and, ultimately, more sales.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be covering what your newsletter should include, how you can set it up, and some fixes to common problems. I know the process of creating a newsletter can be a little daunting when you’re starting out, but don’t worry – I’ll be walking you through it all.

And just a reminder: to make sure you don’t miss the rest of this newsletter series, or any other ProBlogger posts, make sure you’re on our email list, “ProBloggerPLUS”. You can subscribe for free here.

The post 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Needs an Email Newsletter appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

Source: ProBlogger

Learn to grow your business by mastering these digital marketing secrets

Will your website be affected by Google’s new “not secure” warnings?

Last week Google finally started sending out new warnings about the HTTPS security changes. If you got one and you’re an online retailer, now’s the time that you’re going to have to do something about this.

The changes have been a thing for the past year, with Google claiming moving to HTTPS would create some sort of ranking boost for your site. Well, the increase in rank was so minuscule that it just wasn’t worth all the work it took to switch a site over.

What does happen during the switch to HTTPS is a lot of turmoil and aggravation because you’re basically changing all of your URLs. Then, when you’re finally done with all the work, the switch slows your site down because there’s a quick lookup done for the certificate every time someone clicks on a site page. And that can cause your click-through rate to sink through the ground.

What’s scary about this new notice from Google is that it’s saying that if your site has “fields”, like any form to input text, these fields are going to show a “Not Secure” warning. That’s your search bar, the space for customers to enter their email addresses, everything. All showing a lack of security, and all scaring your customers away in droves.

If you’ve got an e-commerce site, this can drive your conversions through the floor. You’ve only got two choices to make here. First, you could just wait until the beginning of October to find out what happens to your site. Or you could start to make the change now. If you value your customer base as much as I do, I know which decision you’re going to make. 

This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au

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Source: SmartCompany

Why It Is A Need To Market Your Business In Social Media?

You may not realize this, but you need to market your business on social media. Social media is now a popular medium for businesses to market in. More than a billion people are now on Facebook alone. Research shows that nearly 2 in 3 adults use social media. Without a targeted social media campaign, you could be losing out on a lot of potential leads and customers.

So, why do you need to market your business in social media?

• Social Media gives you wider reach. With social media at your fingertips, you can reach a much larger audience than you could without it. Social media also allows you to determine the kind of audience you want to reach.

• Using social media helps you boost your website’s SEO. Search engine crawlers know which pages are consistently earning traffic and which are floating out there in the internet void, forgotten and unvisited. A killer content strategy for SEO is the most important part of earning top spots in search engine rankings, which will ensure you will be found online. Driving traffic to your optimized pages via social media will cause them to climb much faster in the search engine results pages (SERPs). That’s true especially if you use Google Plus. Although Google Plus is not a very popular social media network, Google indexes Google Plus searches and gives them ranking credit. If you include your links in a Google Plus post, it’s like getting double the SEO juice.

• Social media marketing is easily sharable. When you post your advertisement or marketing to social media, a user can easily share it with others. This means that once you’ve prepared a post, people can drive it to your target market – their friends and family who need your products and/or services.

• Studies show that a strong social media presence builds brand loyalty. There was a report published by Texas Tech University a few years back that said that brands with active social media profiles have more loyal customers. That is no less true today. When you’re engaging on social media and interacting with your customers or clients, you become less like a corporation and more like what you truly are – a unified group of people who share a vision. After all, that’s what your business is. On social media, people can see you for what you are and they often respond positively to it.

• Social media lets you respond quickly to your customers. When you share content on social media, you can keep track of it easily. This includes customer responses and feedback. You can also respond to these comments and the feedback. When you do, people realize you are an involved and interested company, one that cares about its customers. This will help you engage with your audience better. They’ll keep coming back to your social media profile for more information.

• Social Media can be niche marketed. For example, if you market with Facebook, you can join groups related to your products, industry and customer base. By posting links in these groups, you’ll help influence customers to check out your website. You can also answer questions on Quora as well. You can become the industry expert people are looking for.

As you can see, social media marketing has many benefits for businesses of all sizes and experience levels. You need to market your business in social media to improve your bottom line. Social media is a vibrant, active and interactive location to market yourself. You’ll get feedback in real time and, as long as you are prepared to remain responsive, social media marketing can only be good for you.

Source: SoloSEO

What We Learned From Losing Clients

At Seer, we’re the first to admit that we aren’t perfect.

While we strive to be better partners to our clients every day, we know that no matter how good we get at retention, losing clients is just the nature of being in the business.

When we do lose clients, regardless of our ability to control the outcome, it hurts. But, with hurt comes reflection, and with reflection comes growth. While we love celebrating client wins, we end up growing and becoming a better and stronger company by learning from the losses.

Here are a few things we learned from losing a significant client, as well as a plan for incorporating these learnings into our day-to-day to help move the rest of the team forward.

Developing relationships that go beyond status calls and project plans is crucial. There can be a lot that’s lost in translation when sharing learnings with higher-ups.

If we aren’t able to demonstrate the value and reasoning behind what we are doing and why, it becomes more difficult to set ourselves up for success.

Keep in mind that your main point of contact can cherry-pick what he or she wants to share with his or her boss. If flags are being raised, get on a call early and with all parties. Make sure there are no surprises and that everyone is satisfied with an action plan to move forward.

At the end of the day, our goal is to make our clients’ lives easier.

In order for that to be achieved, we need to have empathy and put ourselves in their shoes. If you’re working with clients in multiple time zones, make it so that they don’t even notice the time difference between your office and theirs.

Let’s say they’re in Europe and you’re in the US, send them deliverables to review by your end of day, so they wake up to something before you get to work that day. Once the time difference becomes relevant, it will create inefficiencies and cause problems.

If there are multiple agencies working with the client, make sure communication is streamlined. Ultimately, we’re all working together with the common goal of helping the client achieve their goals.

When multiple agencies get thrown in the mix, over-communication is critical. Set up a cadence of meetings to ensure that you’re top of mind when working together. For example, if deadlines are set that effect your team, make sure you’re part of that conversation.

Be mindful of the conversations that may be happening when you’re not there.

At Seer, we always say that over-communication is better than the alternative. If a client sends an email and you’ve read it but don’t have an update, simply write them back! Let them know that you confirmed receipt and give them a date when you’ll get back to them.

This builds trusts and lets the client know you’ve got their back.

From the beginning of your engagement with your client, make sure that you’re mutually aligned on expectations. For example:

• Client goals – Are they realistic and attainable? When will they be reached?
• Stages of your process. – For example, we’re not touching our paid campaigns for the next few weeks so we can develop a foundation to ultimately a/b test against to properly measure results and optimize most efficiently.
• Response times – At Seer, we’re jumping from meeting to meeting, and deliverable to deliverable. Some days it’s hard to answer emails in a timely manner. Make sure the client knows that they can expect for example, a response within 24 hours, or to label emails with URGENT for anything that needs immediate attention.

Priorities are constantly shifting, and it’s easy to make assumptions on what your clients’ priorities are. Check in with them every week to ask just that question, “What are your priorities this week?” You’ll be surprised to hear how often they change, and how much you learn by asking that simple question.

Be direct, ask questions, and offer solutions. Make sure we are on the same page and working together as a team, instead of doing just what we think is right for the client.

Establish monthly relationship meetings outside of your traditional status calls to touch base on the status of the partnership. Ask open ended questions that gets the client talking about what’s working well and what’s not.

Think of it as a client therapy session! If you ask thoughtful questions and let the client vent, you’re able to uncover surprises early on and work on a plan to resolve them. You’ve opened the door for feedback.

Trust is built when you’ve proven to the client that you’ve taken that feedback to the team and changes are made.

—-

Have learnings that you’d like to share or experienced similar growing pains? We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below, directly, or on Twitter.

Digging what you’re reading? We’re building out a whole library of client management tips in our LABS section.. Feel free to check ’em out, and let us know what you think.

Source: Seer Interactive

Building a Community of Advocates Through Smart Content

Posted by Michelle_LeBlanc

From gentle criticism to full-on trolls, every brand social media page or community sometimes faces pushback. Maybe you’ve seen it happen. Perhaps you’ve even laughed along as a corporation makes a condescending misstep or a local business publishes a glaring typo. It’s the type of thing that keeps social media and community managers up at night. Will I be by my phone to respond if someone needs customer service help? Will I know what to write if our brand comes under fire? Do we have a plan for dealing with this?

Advocates are a brand’s best friend

In my years of experience developing communities and creating social media content, I’ve certainly been there. I won’t try to sell you a magic elixir that makes that anxiety go away, but I've witnessed a phenomenon that can take the pressure off. Before you can even begin to frame a response as the brand, someone comes out of the woodwork and does it for you. Defending, opening up a conversation, or perhaps deflecting with humor, these individuals bring an authenticity to the response that no brand could hope to capture. They are true advocates, and they are perhaps the most valuable assets a company could have.

But how do you get them?

Having strong brand advocates can help insulate your brand from crisis, lead to referring links and positive media coverage, AND help you create sustainable, authentic content for your brand. In this blog post, I’ll explore a few case studies and strategies for developing these advocates, building user-generated content programs around them, and turning negative community perceptions into open dialogue.

Case study 1: Employee advocates can counter negative perceptions

To start, let’s talk about negative community perceptions. Almost every company deals with this to one degree or another.

In the trucking industry, companies deal with negative perceptions not just of their individual company, but also of the industry as a whole. You may not be aware of this, but our country needs approximately 3.5 million truck drivers to continue shipping daily supplies like food, medicine, deals from Amazon, and everything else you’ve come to expect in your local stores and on your doorstep. The industry regularly struggles to find enough drivers. Older drivers are retiring from the field, while younger individuals may be put off by a job that requires weeks away from home. Drivers that are committed to the industry may change jobs frequently, chasing the next hiring bonus or better pay rate.

How does a company counter these industry-wide challenges and also stand out as an employer from every other firm in the field?

Using video content, Facebook groups, and podcasts to create employee advocates

For one such company, we looked to current employees to become brand advocates in marketing materials and on social media. The HR and internal communications team had identified areas of potential for recruitment — e.g. separating military, women — and we worked with them to identify individuals that represented these niche characteristics, as well as the values that the company wanted to align themselves with: safety, long-term tenure with the company, affinity for the profession, etc. We then looked for opportunities to tell these individuals' stories in a way that was authentic, reflected current organic social media trends, and provided opportunities for dialogue.

In one instance, we developed a GoPro-shot, vlog-style video program around two female drivers that featured real-life stories and advice from the road. By working behind the scenes with these drivers, we were able to coach them into being role models for our brand advocate program, modeling company values in media/PR coverage and at live company events.

One driver participated in an industry-media live video chat where she took questions from the audience, and later she participated in a Facebook Q&A on behalf of the brand as well. It was our most well-attended and most engaged Q&A to date. Other existing and potential drivers saw these individuals becoming the heroes of the brand’s stories and, feeling welcomed to the dialogue by one of their own, became more engaged with other marketing activities as a result. These activities included:

• A monthly call-in/podcast show where drivers could ask questions directly of senior management. We found that once a driver had participated in this forum, they were much more likely to stay with the company — with a 90% retention rate!
• A private Facebook group where very vocal and very socially active employees could have a direct line to the company’s driver advocate to express opinions and ask questions. In addition to giving these individuals a dedicated space to communicate, this often helped us identify trends and issues before they became larger problems.
• A contest to nominate military veterans within the company to become a brand spokesperson in charge of driving a military-themed honorary truck. By allowing anyone to submit a nomination for a driver, this contest helped us discover and engage members of the audience that were perhaps less likely to put themselves forward out of modesty or lack of esteem for their own accomplishments. We also grew our email list, gained valuable insights about the individuals involved, and were able to better communicate with more of this “lurker” group.

By combining these social media activities with traditional PR pitching around the same themes, we continued to grow brand awareness as a whole and build an array of positive links back to the company.

When it comes to brand advocates, sometimes existing employees simply need to be invited in and engaged in a way that appeals to their own intrinsic motivations — perhaps a sense of belonging or achievement. For many employee-based audiences, social media engagement with company news or industry trends is already happening and simply needs to be harnessed and directed by the brand for better effect.

But what about when it comes to individuals that have no financial motivation to promote a brand? At the other end of the brand advocate spectrum from employees are those who affiliate themselves with a cause. They may donate money or volunteer for a specific organization, but when it comes down to it, they don’t have inherent loyalty to one group and can easily go from engaged to enraged.

Case study 2: UGC can turn volunteers into advocates

One nonprofit client that we have the privilege of working with dealt with this issue on a regular basis. Beyond misunderstandings about their funding sources or operations, they occasionally faced backlash about their core mission on social media. After all, for any nonprofit or cause out there, it's easy to point to two or ten others that may be seen as "more worthy," depending on your views. In addition, the nature of their cause tended to attract a lot of attention in the holiday giving period, with times of low engagement through the rest of the year.

Crowdsourcing user-generated content for better engagement

To counter this and better engage the audience year-round, we again looked for opportunities to put individual faces and stories at the forefront of marketing materials.

In this case, we began crowdsourcing user-generated content through monthly contesting programs during the organization's "off" months. Photos submitted during the contests could be used as individual posts on social media or remixed across videos, blog posts, or as a starting point for further conversation and promotion development with the individuals. As Facebook was the primary promotion point for these contests, they attracted those who were already highly engaged with the organization and its page. During the initial two-month program, the Facebook page gained 16,660 new fans with no associated paid promotion, accounting for 55% of total page Likes in the first half of 2016.

Perhaps even more importantly, the organization was able to save on internal labor in responding to complaints or negative commentary on posts as even more individuals began adding their own positive comments. The organization’s community manager was able to institute a policy of waiting to respond after any negative post, allowing the brand advocates time to chime in with a more authentic, volunteer-driven voice.

By inviting their most passionate supporters more deeply into the fold and giving them the space and trust to communicate, the organization may have lost some measure of control over the details of the message, but they gained support and understanding on a deeper level. These individuals not only influenced others within the social media pages of the organization, but also frequently shared content and tagged friends, acting as influencers and bringing others into the fold.

How you can make it work for your audience

As you can see, regardless of industry, building a brand advocate program often starts with identifying your most passionate supporters and finding a way to appeal to their existing habits, interests, and motivations — then building content programs that put those goals at the forefront. Marketing campaigns featuring paid influencers can be fun and can certainly achieve rapid awareness and reach, but they will never be able to counter the lasting value of an authentic advocate, particularly when it comes to countering criticism or improving the perceived status of your brand or industry.

To get started, you can follow a few quick tips:

• Understand your existing community.
  • Take a long look at your active social audience and try to understand who those people are: Employees? Customers?
  • Ask yourself what motivates them to participate in dialogue and how can you provide more of that.
• Work behind the scenes.
  • Send private messages and emails, or pick up the phone and speak with a few audience members.
  • Getting a few one-on-one insights can be incredibly helpful in content planning and inspiring your strategy.
  • By reaching out individually, you really make people feel special. That’s a great step towards earning their advocacy.
• Think: Where else can I use this?
  • Your advocates and their contributions are valuable. Make sure you take advantage of that value!
  • Reuse content in multiple formats or invite them to participate in new ways.
  • Someone who provides a testimonial might be able to act as a source for your PR team, as well.

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Source: Moz Blog

Will your website be affected by Google’s new “not secure” warnings?

Last week Google finally started sending out new warnings about the HTTPS security changes. If you got one and you’re an online retailer, now’s the time that you’re going to have to do something about this.

The changes have been a thing for the past year, with Google claiming moving to HTTPS would create some sort of ranking boost for your site. Well, the increase in rank was so minuscule that it just wasn’t worth all the work it took to switch a site over.

What does happen during the switch to HTTPS is a lot of turmoil and aggravation because you’re basically changing all of your URLs. Then, when you’re finally done with all the work, the switch slows your site down because there’s a quick lookup done for the certificate every time someone clicks on a site page. And that can cause your click-through rate to sink through the ground.

What’s scary about this new notice from Google is that it’s saying that if your site has “fields”, like any form to input text, these fields are going to show a “Not Secure” warning. That’s your search bar, the space for customers to enter their email addresses, everything. All showing a lack of security, and all scaring your customers away in droves.

If you’ve got an e-commerce site, this can drive your conversions through the floor. You’ve only got two choices to make here. First, you could just wait until the beginning of October to find out what happens to your site. Or you could start to make the change now. If you value your customer base as much as I do, I know which decision you’re going to make. 

This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au

Never miss a story: sign up to SmartCompany’s free daily newsletter and find our best stories on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Source: SmartCompany

How to Use Slack to Automate Social Content Curation

Whether you’re on a large marketing team or you’re working solo, it can be tough sometimes to source relevant and informative content to share on social and in your newsletter. Nearly 2 million articles are published every day on the web (according to MarketingProfs.com) and any good social media manager will tell you that this can take up a good chunk of their time if systems aren’t in place to help speed up the process of sorting through all that content!

Here at Inflow, we’ve decided to get the whole company involved when it comes to finding content to share on social and through our newsletter. After all, who better to gauge the quality of digital marketing content than our own team of experts? But how do you get your team to willingingly send you the content they find?

You automate it.

In order to do this, we created a Zap to pull the articles and posts that our CRO, PPC, SEO, and Inbound teams share on Slack and save them to Pocket so that our marketing team can easily find and share that content to our audience.

Here’s how we did it:

(Note: We are assuming that you already have your company’s Slack channels set up as well as a Zapier account and an account with Pocket.)

1. Fire up Zapier and click on “Make a Zap!” For this particular Zap, you’ll only be able to connect one Slack channel at a time (if you want to pull links from multiple Slack channels, you’ll have to go through this process for each one). Your Zap will trigger when a new message is posted to a particular channel. So select the Slack app and click on “New Message Posted to Channel.”

2. Next you’ll connect your Slack Account by either selecting an existing account (if you’ve already used Zapier and Slack in conjunction) OR by clicking on “Connect an Account” and following the steps to sign in and give Zapier permission to pull data from your business’ Slack.

3. Select the Slack channel that you want to pull links from.

4. Next, Zapier will want to test the connection you’ve just created to ensure that it can skim your Slack messages to find specific content. 

5. Now, you’ll move on to the first “Action” step. Here, you’ll tell Zapier what to do once a message is posted to Slack. Since we’re only looking for links that team members have shared, we’ll need to help Zapier understand that we just want it to extract links. So select the built-in “Formatter” app and then select the “Text” option.

6. Under “Transform,” you’ll want to select “Extract URL” and under “Input,” be sure to tell Zapier to examine the “Text” of the Slack posts in order to find links.

7. Now, you might think this is it — that’s all you have to do. Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of automation is that the systems aren’t always quite smart enough to understand how to handle unexpected situations. In this case, Zapier doesn’t know that we don’t want it to save images that team members share to the channel and we don’t want it to save internal, company links to Pocket. So we need to add a couple filters.

The first filter we’ll add is “Only continue if…”Text” “Exists” 

And we’ll add another filter to exclude commonly shared internal files:As you can see, we’ve excluded our Slack URL, any links to our internal Google Drive, and any links to our Trello boards (which we use for project management).

8. Finally, we’re going to set up a second action to tell Zapier to save the external links that team members share to Pocket. 

Select the “Pocket” app and tell Zapier that you want to “Save for Later.”

9. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to set up a template that formats the information that Pocket will save. In this case, we want it to save the formatted text from Step 2 and add a tag to the saved link so that we know which channel the link came from. (Note: adding a tag is optional.) In this case, we’ve added a tag because we save links from multiple Slack channels and wanted to keep track of which links were coming from which channel.

10. Once Zapier has tested the setup, you should be good to go! Congratulations! Now you have a place filled with links to relevant and informative content, saving your social media manager hours worth of time. Here’s how your Pocket account will look once your Zap starts automatically pulling all that sweet content:

If you want to really reach for the moon when it comes to automating your social media, you could set up a scheduling tool like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social and use Zapier to connect it to your Pocket account. Now, when it comes to sharing external content to your social profiles, you barely have to lift a finger!

Assuming you have a social media strategy in place, your marketing team shouldn’t have any issues getting going. If you don’t, be sure to download our Social Media Strategy Workbook with tips and templates to help you develop a strategy for your business!.

Source: Inflow

080: Dana DiTomaso’s Rules, Tools and Tactics of SEO Success [Must Listen]

Dana is exactly the type of guest I had in mind when I named this show ‘Experts’ on the Wire.

The word expert is certainly overused. But to me, an expert is someone who actually has a depth of experience around what they are talking about AND can explain it fluently and clearly with the audience in mind.

I threw all kinds of topics at her – and without skipping a beat, Dana delivers insights, tools, tips, and stories at every turn.

This discussion includes:

• Getting clients to take action
• Engagement as the new ‘ranking factor’ for local SEO
• The best definition of ‘persona’ I have ever heard
• How to do Audience Research at scale
• The myth of ‘surprise and delight’
• Dealing with SEO ‘scope creep’
• Branding in PPC

Buckle up – this is a good one!

Never miss a new show! Subscribe on iTunes.

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BuzzSumo – One of my favorite tools for coming up with content ideas, finding people who share content in an industry, and tons more (like alerts to keep an eye on your competitor’s links). Also, check out their new Q&A tool Bloomberry. Listen to the show for a special code to get 30% off BuzzSumo for 3 months.

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Tools Mentioned

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About Dan Shure

Hi! I'm Dan Shure. I write all of the posts and host all of the podcast episodes you'll find on the Evolving SEO blog. Say hello on Twitter @dan_shure!

Source: Evolving SEO

5 SEO features to make sure your ecommerce platform supports

When choosing an ecommerce platform to power your online store, it’s important to consider search engine optimization (SEO) features in your decision-making process.

No matter how experienced you are with SEO, when you put the power into a platform’s hands, you may or may not end up with ability to control elements of your site that are essential to your ranking success.

Let’s take a look at five core features that your ecommerce platform needs to have, along with examples of platforms that offer each feature. Hopefully this guide will make it easier for you select a home for your merchandise that is capable of dominating search.

Editable robots.txt files

The Robots.txt file allows you to tell search bots which pages and directories to ignore when crawling your site to index it for the search engines. I bet you’re thinking it’s not a big deal if you can’t control this file, but let me show you why it matters.

When a customer makes a purchase from you, let’s say you send them to a thank you page, offering them a chance to subscribe to your exclusive newsletter where they can stay up to date with the most current sales and promotions before the general public finds out. When someone visits this page, it’s an indication that they’ve successfully completed a purchase, a signal that you can use to track, analyze and optimize buyer journeys.

That’s definitely a page you wouldn’t want indexed in the search engines – and unless you block access to it with the robots.txt file, it’ll become discoverable by the general public. Basically, any page you don’t want users to see without completing a certain action needs to be blocked from crawlers.

While many ecommerce platforms don’t allow their users to directly access this file, BigCommerce does.

BigCommerce also allows you to easily integrate your store with Google Shopping, Facebook, and eBay, as well as a range of other shopping comparison sites, so you can get additional SEO boosts automatically, without having to manually submit your product listings to various engines.

Independent page titles and URLs

To avoid issues with duplicate content, and to ensure you have the best chance at ranking for certain keywords and phrases, it’s best to make sure you can control these metadata elements at the page level. Some ecommerce platforms don’t allow you to have this control, meaning you have a generic title in every single page on your shop.

The URLs may be different for each page, but may end up produced like /randomcharacters989j.htm rather than something like /pink-t-shirts.

Chances are you’ll want to use specific keywords for each page on top of the ones you use site-wide. You’ll definitely have long tail keywords to use on each product category page as well. Unless you have the ability to control the titles and URLs at the page level, you’re stuck essentially targeting the same keywords on every single page in your store.

Magento is a robust ecommerce platform that allows users to control the page titles and URLs so they can make the most of their SEO efforts with keywords.

Magento is, of course, not the only platform that does this, but it is a key feature to look for. That said, Magento isn’t the most intuitively user-friendly option available, and unless you’re already an experienced developer, you may find yourself hiring one to make it work for you.

An integrated blogging platform

Because it’s the best way to publish rich, dynamic, link-worthy content on your domain, blogging is an integral part of ecommerce marketing today. Businesses that blog 11 or more times per month receive two to three times the traffic compared to those who blog less often or not at all.

It can be complex to set your shop up on one platform and your blog on another, and then figure out the best way to link the two together – not just for user experience, but also for SEO purposes.

You could have your shop on the main domain, and install WordPress in the /blog directory. That works, but can be a bit of hassle in terms of unified design as well as ongoing management workflow. You’ll have to login to your ecommerce platform to handle products, orders, and general store management. Then, you’ll have to login to your WordPress or other blogging platform to add, edit, and manage your blog content. As you grow, it can be harder to handle that at scale.

Shopify makes it easy by including a blog in the ecommerce platform. This way you can keep everything streamlined. Shopify’s SEO features are solid overall, and the platform also allows for independent page titles and URLs.

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Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs allow your content to be syndicated in various places online, while telling Google to pay attention to only one URL. It helps Google to determine the page you want rank, with syndicates using the tag to convey to search bots that you deserve all the SEO juice. This solution is also useful in cases where you want to use multiple URLs for the same product category.

For instance, if you want people to see a list of all the yellow dresses in your store, the URL could be:

http://www.domain.com/store/dresses/yellow/yellowdresses instead of something like: http://www.domain.com/store/dresses/formal?gclid=98675.

Canonical URLs allow you to tell the search engines that similar URLs are the same – allowing you to have products that are accessible under multiple URLs. For instance, that yellow dress can be found at /yellowdresses, /formaldresses, and of course on its individual product page. It may also be found on other pages depending on the other filters you make available to your customers.

When you choose your canonical URL, pick the page that you believe is the most important. Then add a rel=canonical tag when linking from the non-canonical one to the canonical one. Essentially, this redirects the search engines to the important one, so it is more likely to rank – without directing the users away from any of the pages. If you’re having to do this manually, it can become a painstakingly time-consuming task.

WooCommerce is an ecommerce platform that allows you to convert your WordPress installation into a full-fledged shopping experience. It’s available for free, but the premium version comes with additional features and themes. The support for canonical URLs is built-in to WooCommerce, regardless of which version you choose to use.

Automatic redirect management

If your business uses multiple domains, then you’re going to have to spend some time setting up canonical URLs or 301 redirects to forward users and search engines to the right place. If you don’t, you’ll detract from the user experience and risk losing ranking with the search engines because you’re sending traffic to broken links.

If figuring out your 301 redirects and canonical URLs is driving you crazy, then a platform that use automatic redirects could be a priority for you.

SquareSpace is a hosted ecommerce platform like BigCommerce and Shopify. It will automatically redirect users and search engines to your primary domain and use canonical URLs to help you. It’s the automatic redirect that allows you to use a custom domain without your built-in Squarespace domain showing up in the search engine results.

Which one is the best?

Honestly, what works best for you will depend on what your budget is, and what your ecommerce products are.

The bottom line is that regardless of what you choose, you need a platform that is helpful for SEO. If it’s not set up for SEO-friendly URLs, then there’s not much point in using it, because if you can’t get it ranking to bring in organic traffic, you’ll spend a great deal more on customer acquisition.

Ann Smarty is Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com and a contributor to Search Engine Watch.

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Ever since Google made the announcement that HTTPS is a ranking signal, there has been a lot of discussion around that extra ‘s’. While there are clear benefits, there is also a lot of nervousness around actually making the switch. So is it really worth it?

Source: Search Engine Watch

35 Inexpensive Ways to Promote Your Website

These days, anyone can build a stellar website. Fun fact: there are more than 1 billion websites around the world, with new ones created every second.

Among all that internet noise, your website and ideas deserve to stand out. And that means you’ve got to advertise! Fight to get your name and your brand out there and then draw visitors to your site.

But what if you’re on a budget?

You’re in luck: effectively promoting your website can be done on the cheap. Experiment with these free and inexpensive ways to advertise your site and watch the traffic roll in.

1. SEO Keywords

When you are looking for the answer to a question or solution to a problem, your first resource is probably Google. Google searches can be a powerful source of traffic to your website — if you play your cards right. When your potential customers search for something on Google, they aren’t likely to look down past the top two or three results. So your goal is to get keyword searches related to your website to show up near the top. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.

SEO is the science/art of increasing your website’s visibility in organic search engine results. You can do this by filling your pages with key phrases that people are likely to search for. SEO is a basic but essential method of bringing traffic to your website; without it, your website can get lost among the thousands of voices clamoring for your visitors’ attention.

You can improve your website’s search result rankings by doing things like creating and editing content to include key search phrases and increasing your linkbacks — the number of links your website gets from other sites. Backlinks are especially important to your Google rankings, as they demonstrate the popularity of your website.

Use Google AdWords keyword planner to find keywords related to your website and get stats on how often they are searched in your target market. Use this insider info to plan your content to draw in organic search engine traffic. Learn how to utilize this tool, and you may discover a few new keywords to power up your content.

While SEO can be cost effective — if you do the work yourself, you won’t have to pay anything for it — optimizing your website for search engines is definitely not a quick fix. It can take time to master SEO methods and to optimize your website, and it can take some time to build links, optimize pages, and determine which keywords bring in new visitors. You might consider hiring or contracting with an SEO marketing expert if your budget permits or invest your time in learning the tricks yourself.

If you’re in need of an SEO SOS, check out this beginner’s tutorial.

2. Pay Per Click

Pay-per-click (PCC) advertising is another method to make Google work for you — albeit one that that takes a bit of cash. Basically, instead of leaving your website’s search engine rankings to change, you’ll create an ad and pay a fixed price for every click your ad gets when it shows up on a Google search or website. Your goal is to convert clicks into customers, hopefully seeing a strong return on investment. Google AdWords has no specific spending requirement, so you can easily keep within your budget and focus on your ROI.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is a tried-and-true tool for communicating with your customers and finding and retaining new ones. It essentially involves collecting the email addresses of any and every potential customer and then sharing content — newsletters, promotions, discounts, and information — as a way of building relationships. Email marketing can draw past visitors back to your website by sharing new content or promotions. The best part about this tool: an amazing average ROI of $44 to every dollar spent.

4. Blogging

Integrate original, relevant blog posts into your website. It’s a prime place to include SEO-optimized keywords and build a following of loyal readers who will come back for more. Include videos, photos, and graphics, and encourage readers to share posts they love.

Need blogging tips? We interviewed 2017’s top content creators to get their best advice for aspiring bloggers.

Once you’ve mastered your own blog, look to others in your niche market. Search out blogs that accept pitches from guest writers. Peruse their posts, take a look at their submission guidelines, and polish up a pitch to send over. If your pitch is accepted, make sure to include a link to your website in your bio to send traffic your way.

Last but not least, leaving thoughtful and insightful comments on the blogs you follow, especially influential ones in your field, is a great way to get noticed by blog writers and their readers. Make sure you include a link to your website or share specific content related to the post you are commenting on.

5. Create Your Own Infographics

Infographics are clickable and shareable. They are great sources of backlinks to your site, and they are can be simple to make on websites like infogr.am and Canva. When designing infographics and incorporating them into your site, keep your entire audience in mind; make sure the graphics are accessible to all users.

6. Reciprocal Linking

The more sites that link to yours, the more important search engines will assume you to be — and the higher your website will rank in search results. Including a link to another site in exchange for them including a link to yours can build traffic and post search engine juice, particularly when done with reputable sites relevant to your business and content.

You don’t have to be a professional designer to create a good-looking website.

7. Retargeting

One of the greatest frustrations for small online businesses is seeing the majority of their traffic leave without making a purchase. Retargeting advertising uses cookies to create ads on other sites luring visitors back to your website. After you’ve put so much into getting people to your site, it might be worth the extra buck to get them back.

8. Signature Branding

Create a fun, appealing, and recognizable signature for your email, blog posts, or even photos, videos, and shareable content. This is a great way to get people to recognize and understand your brand — and to draw their eyes to your URL.

9. Facebook Ads

The most effective advertising reaches people where they are most of the time. And for millions of Americans across all demographics, that place is Facebook. If you have a limited advertising budget for your website and are looking to generate a great ROI, Facebook ads are a great bet. You can create a targeted ad that reaches users based on location, age, gender, interests, and even options like friends of current followers or people who like specific pages. Like Google AdWords, you can set a budget and either pay for clicks or pay when people see your ad.

10. Facebook Pages and Groups

It doesn’t cost a cent to create social media accounts for your website or small business. Facebook groups and business pages will help you interact with your followers, build a community, and share your content. Put a little bit of green behind your posts to push them to the top of your follower’s feeds so you can make sure your voice is heard, and encourage sharing by offering competitions, discounts, or giveaways to people who share your posts or tag a friend.

And don’t forget to look beyond Facebook: other platforms will also help you connect and share. It isn’t necessary to have an account on every social media platform; stick with the ones popular with your audience, and don’t be afraid to experiment with newer forms of social media.

11. Instagram Story

Instagram stories appear continuously above users’ feeds. Create Instagram stories to engage your followers — make sure your branding is clear and your message succinct and memorable, as these posts are short and disappear after 24 hours — or use paid ads, which will appear alongside posts.

12. Pinterest

Pinterest is the social network of things and ideas. If your website’s focus is artistic, crafty, style, or anything visual or DIY, you should have been on Pinterest yesterday. Create boards and fill them with pins to share your style, establish your expertise, and find your people — and promote your website’s content. If your audience gravitates to this platform, consider budgeting a little extra to promote your pins.

The right apps can reduce costs and help your business grow. Here’s how to choose the best cloud applications.

13. Create Shareable Media

Memes, videos, listicles (ahem), and more are all fair game for Pinterest and other social media sharing. Brand your content and include a link to your website, and encourage your followers to share with their friends.

14. LinkedIn

Depending on your website’s purpose and brand, LinkedIn might be the perfect social tool to drive traffic. Leverage it by completing an interesting profile and creating connections. Follow influential people in your field and read what they share. Join (or create) relevant groups, and post content from your website’s blog (with links) often. Comment smartly on other posts regularly (any exposure for your name helps direct traffic to your website), and don’t be afraid to send your content to people individually.

15. Connect with Micro-Influencers

Maybe your business isn’t quite big enough for a celebrity endorsement. But how about a “mini-celebrity” in your field? Connect with micro-influencers — people on social media with a small circle of influence and high levels of engagement from their niche followers. Micro-influencers generally charge affordable fees for sponsored posts and may even choose to promote you for free if you send product samples.

16. Google My Business

List your business for free with Google My Business, so when potential customers search local businesses or look on Google Maps, your business will show up, complete with hours, location, reviews, etc. Make sure your listing includes a link to your website. Bonus: registering with Google’s business directory can improve your search-result visibility.

17. Bing Places

Google may be the big kid on the block, but, believe it or not, other search engines and directories exist, and people — maybe your potential customers — use them too. Don’t forget to list your business with Bing Places, another freebie promotion tool.

18. Yellow Pages

The phone book has moved online — and it offers free business listings. Listing with the Yellow Pages can be particularly helpful for location-focused small businesses, such as contractors, doctors, and restaurants.

Small businesses need to be online. Not convinced? Here are six reasons why.

19. Other Online Directories

Every link helps, right? The internet is filled with free online business directories. Once you’ve checked off the ones we’ve already mentioned, go to town with any others. But make sure to never pay for a basic listing — even Google, where you will likely get more exposure, offers directory space for free. These sites will get you started: Local.com, Simply Worthy, eLocal, Manta, Insider Pages, and Moo-Directory.

20. Submit to Search Engines

When you create your website or add new content, within a week or so, it will be found and indexed by major search engines and show up in search results. If you are anxious to be indexed sooner (or want to check and double check that your site is found), you can manually submit URLs for free to Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

If you want to submit to multiple search engines at the same time, including some of the lesser-used sites, a website like Submit Express will submit your website to dozens of search engines for free — and yes, Google is one of them. Here are a few more submission sites to check out: Entire Web, SubmitX, and So Much.

21. Webmaster Accounts

Set up webmaster accounts with both Google and Bing, ideally as soon as you set up your website. Doing so makes sure your site is indexed with them and will be included in their search results, and it will allow them to communicate with you about any problems or recommendations for your website. Also, there’s something satisfyingly ego-stroking about calling yourself a “webmaster.”

22. Yelp

If you own a local restaurant, your website should be the cornerstone of your online presence — and Yelp will help your customers get there. While the site can be useful to any number of local businesses, it is the first choice of foodies on the go looking for good eats. Respond to reviews, post photos and menu options, offer discounts, and link to your website and blog.

23. Backlinks

Whenever another site, especially an established site, publishes a link to your website, it’s more likely that your site will be found by search engines. Links back to your site are called, appropriately, backlinks. Just one link back should be enough to ensure your site is found, but the more backlinks, the more prestigious search engines assume it to be — and the better your rankings. An easy way to get a backlink is to make a comment on a popular blog, ideally a respected one in your field. Most blogs will let you include a link to your own site with your comment.

24. Google+

While Google may be king in just about every other web arena, it’s a bit lacking in the social media market. Google+ may not be as popular as Facebook and Instagram, but create a page for your business anyway. Doing so is really more to help your relationship with Google than with your customers. It will build trust and authority with Google, and you can include a link from your website to your Google+ page, with will instantly index your site with Google. Plus, who knows: maybe one day Google+ will be the new platform of choice for trendsetters. And like any good hipster, you’ll already have been there before it got cool.

25. Yahoo Answers

If you have a question, someone on the internet has an answer. Yahoo Answers is a forum that brings question askers and answerers together. Create an account and start answering questions, ideally ones in your field, and build your expertise. The more questions you answer, the more points you’ll get. Once you score enough points to reach Level 3, you can post URLs in your answers — and authoritatively point people to your website.

26. Quora

Like Yahoo Answers, Quora is a searchable online place for people with questions and people with answers to mingle. Follow, ask, and answer questions in your area of interest, and include the address of your blog in your profile and answer credentials. You can include links to your blog in answers you write, but do so with caution: Quora will block answers filled with links as spam, and blatant self-promotion will garner no respect (or upvotes).

27. Help a Reporter Out

Press coverage of your business will help get your name out there and establish you as an expert in your field. Get media attention by registering with Help a Reporter Out, a free database that connects reporters from legitimate outlets to sources they can interview for their articles. It’s a win-win: the journalists get the scoop and you get press coverage — plus a chance to link to your site if the story is published online. After you register, you’ll receive source requests relevant to your industry three times per day and can then pitch your expertise to the reporter.

28. YouTube

Creating videos and uploading them to YouTube can spread your content (and links to your website) around YouTube itself — and from there, Google will index and make searchable your content. You can embed it in your blog and share on your social media accounts, and so can other users. Don’t stress about the pressure to go viral; while an admirable goal, a video doesn’t need two million views to be effective.

Make sure the description links to your website, and include a call to action in the video — ideally one that takes viewers to your website. YouTube videos can also help you generate a bit of cash. Additionally, if you’re already making videos, consider creating ads to run with others’ videos for a potentially satisfying ROI.

29. Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is sort of social networking for links and website content. Instead of bookmarking a webpage on their browser, users mark it on another web service — Pinterest, for example — and can keep track of content they love. Because you bookmark this content online, it can be easily shared and searchable, and users can find and organize content based on their interests.

How can this help your website? Submit links to your site, as well as to individual pages and pieces of content, to social bookmarking sites to get it into circulation among your audience base and drive traffic to your website. Send only high quality, original content for best results.

30. Reddit

Reddit is probably the king of social bookmarking. The self-styled “front page of the internet,” Reddit allows users to submit stories, images, videos, etc., from across the internet, and other users can either upvote or downvote these submissions.

While the site is a great driver of internet traffic, the Reddit community generally frowns upon users who only share their own content. Become an active user and regularly share and interact with other posts, along with posting your own content. Be warned: Redditors are a tough crowd so don’t be discouraged if your posts flop or garner a negative comment to two.

31. Digg

Another social bookmarking site, Digg helps users find blog posts and other content, as well as share and promote stories they like. Similar to Reddit, users submit web pages by entering the URL and a short description; each submission can be discovered by other viewers who will upvote or “digg” interesting content.

Digg can be a little bit tricky as it is dominated by a handful of influential users who control which stories make it to the homepage and which get lost in the crowd. If your story makes it, it can drive a huge amount of traffic. As with Reddit, it’s essential to become active on the network and avoid digging and submitting only your own stuff.

32. StumbleUpon

Of the major social bookmarking sites, StumbleUpon is one of the best online traffic generators. Users browse, or “stumble upon,” content in their subjects of interest and, again, vote on content they like. Along with submitting your own content yourself, increase the likelihood that your website visitors will stumble your content organically by adding a StumbleUpon badge to your content.

StumbleUpon also has a great paid delivery service, where you can also up the likelihood of your content being discovered with relatively cheap pay-per-click advertising.

33. Product Hunt

Product Hunt’s newsletter is the Skymall of new apps, websites, games, and devices — a haven for techies in search of the next big thing. Being discovered on Product Hunt can be a huge win for your business. Before submitting your product, make sure it qualifies.

34. Medium

While platforms like Instagram are great for photographers and fashion stylists, Medium is the platform for readers. Anyone can write and publish a story or blog post on Medium, and other users find, comment, applaud, and interact with articles and authors. Even if you have your own blog, networking and publishing on Medium (post unique content, not rehashes of posts from your blog) to increase visibility for your business and attract more traffic to your site.

35. Use Expert Sources

To give your content an authoritative boost, contact and interview experts in your field. Your own list of five ways to bug-proof your garden may draw clicks, but up that to ten tips from a long-time organic farmer, and you’ve got a shareable post that lends credibility to your entire site. If your sources include well-known names that boast a sizable following of their own, you may draw their fans to your site. Let your sources know when you publish, and you may get a digital shoutout.

Now you’re on your way to advertising glory. Still need a beautiful and professional website to promote? Get started with Remixer!

— Reporting by Sara Atwood

Source: DreamHost