Tag Archives: Google

Content Marketing Tips Infographic for a Constantly Shifting SEO Landscape

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When things are constantly changing around you it can feel a bit chaotic at times and leave you feeling dizzy and confused. With all of the changes to the Google search algorithm, content marketers can feel like they are not sure where to turn next. Well, today It is my intention to share some tips that will help you feel a bit more stable in spite of it all.

The good news is that there are some things that will never change, and that is the basic fact that Google will always reward you for creating consistently fresh, relevant and well-written content. If that’s the kind of content you produce then you can take a deep breath, wipe your brow and keep on writing.

If, on the other hand, you have been ascribing to the school of cranking out a ton of sub-standard, spun content that’s been written offshore then this blog post has some news for you.

Sekari Search & Social Optimization has come out with a spiffy new infographic that visually illustrates what you should be doing when it comes to content marketing. It covers SEO, conversion optimization, tips for creating highly shareable content and much more.

You’ll discover that Facebook & Twitter are still to most popular social media channels, with Google+, blogging, Youtube.com and LinkedIn following behind.

What you can take from all of this is not really news rather it’s a reminder that best practices still work best despite and all of the changes–you should keep on creating quality content and sharing it in social media, on blogs and on quality content directories.

 

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Pinterest Marketing: 3 Tips for Attracting Pinterest Traffic to Your Blog

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Pinterest featue in Metro - 27th February 2012

(Photo credit: Great British Chefs)

Have you been enjoying the guilty pleasure of pinning images and creating boards on Pinterest, but wish there was a way you could use it to benefit your business? Pinterest is the hottest social media property out there right now. It’s gained faster adoption by users than any other social media platform. For example, the InQbation blog says, ‘Pinterest Most Successful Startup Company on the Web in 2012.’ Lemon.ly created an infographic that illustrates the statistics related to this fast growing, social media platform.

Here are some Pinterest stats:

  • Over 10.4 million users
  • They hit 10 million unique monthly visitors faster than any site in history
  • Pinterest generate more referral traffic to websites than Youtube, Google+ and LinkedIn.com combined. Source: lemon.ly

If you’d like to get some insight on how you can leverage all of that traffic and re-route some of your ideal audience to your blog, here are five tips for attracting traffic to your blog using Pinterest.com:

1. Find out what kinds of images your visitors like to pin

Jessica Kupferman, of Badass Biz, wrote this guest post on Denise Wakeman’s business blog, ‘Top 5 Reasons You Need to Use Pinterest with Your Blog.’

I like tip #4, which shares a link that you can use to find out if visitors are pinning images from your website: http://pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite.com (replace /yourwebsite with the URL to your blog.) This will give you an idea of what your visitors are pinning (if at all) and what they are not pinning from your site. Source: http://bit.ly/HHV5YJ

2. Discover what gets pinned and re-pinned the most

Rather than link to a specific article, I’m sharing a link to an entire site that is a fabulous resource for learning about marketing and selling on Pinterest.com. Marketing on Pinterest, is a website authored by marketing specialist Jason Miles, and it covers topics such as Pinterest traffic tips, infographics, and he offers a 10-part video boot camp.

His, ‘Pinterest Traffic Tip #18,’ asks, “What content gets re-pinned the most on Pinterest?” He also includes an image that captures the main points of the tip that can be shared on Pinterest. This illustrates how you can leverage Pinterest’s visual focus even if you’re selling information products. You can create compelling visual images, graphic book covers or product shots and share them with your followers.

3. Customize the images you share

If they are popular and appealing, photos and images can be pinned and re-pinned dozens of times. But this can lead to the link to your website getting lost when visitors do not follow the custom of pinning from the source as opposed to simply clicking that re-pin button. Create a watermark of your logo and/or your website’s URL to include in each image you share on Pinterest. This will make sure that those who are re-pinning your image know exactly where it came from and how to get to your site for more information.

This comes from tip #4 of Michael Chizbuzor’s article, ‘Pinterest and Twitter: 16 Marketing Strategies to Drive Twitter Traffic.’ In this post, Chizbuzor writes about using social media to drive qualified, targeted traffic to your website for free.  Always keep his tip #5 in mind when you are doing any kind of social media marketing: Don’t waste your time. Invest your time. Get in, post your pins and get out.

*Bonus Tip: Share other people’s blogs

Ken Pickard has started a Pinterest Blog Roll. In his article on the Empowerment Network blog, Ken shares the concept of sharing other people’s blogs, so that in turn, they will share your blog on Pinterest.com in order to get more exposure and traffic.

Basically, Ken has created a content syndication tribe where the members visit each other’s blogs and share one another’s content. You can read his post and join his tribe, or follow suit and create a special tribe within your niche or network.

Source: empowernetwork.com/kenpickard/blog/pinterest-blog-roll/

Please follow me: http://www.pinterest.com/evelynwrites, and be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter where you’ll get lots of insider tips about writing and marketing online that you won’t ever see on the blog.

 

 

 

 

 

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Are You on Google+ Yet?

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A few weeks ago I finally got a much-coveted invite to join Google+, which is Google’s shiny new social media platform that just came out of beta in early July. Now anyone with a Google account can join Google+.  I’ve been having fun playing in this new social media space, getting to know the ‘lay of the land,’ and I’ve been having a great time.

Facebook and Twitter were my first foray into social media marketing, so I am considering Google+ from the perspective of how I use those spaces and what additional benefits it might have to offer me.  What I have observed so far is that Google+ so far has been embraced primarily by early adopters—those of us who geek-out on new tech tools and can’t wait to see what the latest tech gadget has to offer.  So, I have been using it to connect with other business people who are using G+ because, frankly, my peeps—that is my friends and family are not yet on Google+, nor do they show much of an interest in joining.

Here’s a quick overview of what Google+ has to offer, so that you can decide it maybe you want to come on over and check it out.

+Circles

On Facebook everyone is your friend, on Twitter everyone is a Follower, but with Google+ as soon as you add someone to your network you place them in one of your existing circles, or you can create a new one to add them to.  Here’s an idea of some of my circles:

  • Friends—yes, actual friends that I know and have established a real relationship with whether or not we have actually met in real life.
  • Business contacts—colleagues, fellow business owners, collaborators
  • Blogs to watch—As a blogger I have certain blogs that I keep a close eye on for relationship building. I put those in this circle.
  • Clients
  • Acquaintances
  • Relatives

+Hangouts

Hangout is a video and voice chat application that allows up to ten people to do a video chat on whatever topic they choose. You  must install a little plugin, and your laptop must have video and a mic in order to participate in a hangout. You can either initiate your own, or visit, http://gphangouts.com, to find a public hangout that you can join.

+Sparks

This is a colossal feed engine that contains feeds from across the Internet on any topic you can imagine. Just type in your keywords and up pops all of this content that you can read and share with the people in your circles.

Google’s +1 Button

The +1 button is separate from Google+, but there is also a +1 button along with your posts. You can think of it as the Google version of Facebook’s ‘Like’ button. Clicking the +1 button means that you think that site is kinda awesome and you’re giving it the ‘thumbs-up’ vote. But another cool thing about the +1 button is that all of the sites that you have clicked +1 for are listed on a page on your Google profile making it sort of like your own de facto social bookmarking site. People can peruse your +1 page to see what you like and recommend, but you can also keep your +1 page to yourself by making it private.

+Mobile

As an iPhone user it’s more than a little bit irritating that the mobile app for iOS is not yet available. But if you are an Android user you can take all of Google+’s features with you on the go with the exception of hangouts , but they may be adding that functionality to the mobile app at some point in the future.

Breaking News: The Google+ iOS app for iPhone and iPad is now available in iTunes

http://mashable.com/2011/07/19/google-iphone-app/

My G+ conclusions

So, for the moment, I’m digging Google+. I use if for business networking, and research primarily. One of my business colleagues shared on G+ that she was going to ditch all of the business contacts on her personal Facebook profile and tell them to look for her on Google+ so that she could reclaim her Facebook profile for actual friends and family. I am watching and waiting to see how things shake out with Google+. I was on Facebook for years before anyone I actually knew joined, so maybe in time G+ will gain more mainstream appeal.

What are your thoughts on Google+? Have you joined yet? What do you like or dislike about the new social media platform on the block? Feel free to leave a comment.

 

Can You Improve Your Blog’s Alexa Ranking?

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Alexa

I have been learning more and more about Google pagerank and Alexa rankings, and while my blog is now a PR3 (out
of 10), my current Alexa ranking is so high (over 2 million) they don’t even show stats for it on their website.  All this means is that I must continue to work on driving targeted traffic to my blog, because the more traffic a site gets the more their alexa ranking will rise. But there is a bit of a caveat in there. The traffic needs to come from sites where the visitor has the alexa toolbar installed.

So, if you’d like to know how you can help a blogger boost her Alexa rankings, here’s a couple of things you can do. These, by the way, are things that you can also do to boost your own website or blog’s ranking so take note.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar, (it can also be a status bar). Use it to visit your own site daily and you’ll get lots of geeky, techy info about the other sites you visit.
http://www.alexa.com/toolbar

2. Leave a short review of my blog:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/productivepen.com#

Here are the steps I’m taking to nudge my Alexa rankings down as much as I can without breaking out in a cold sweat
or losing a moment of sleep about it:

1. Leaving a review (with a link back to my blog) on the top ranked Alexa sites
http://www.alexa.com/topsites

2. Installed the Alexa widget to my blog

3. Installed the WP Stats and the WordPress.com stats plugins so that I can track all of my relevant stats from

one handy dashboard.

4. Getting listed in web directories such as dmoz.org, which was down today when I tried to log in.

5. Most importantly, work on publishing relevant, useful content that keeps my readers coming back, encourages
them to comment, and share the content that they find useful.

Here I am, unabashedly pimping the all-powerful Alexa because it’s basically the popularly accepted way to determine a website’s value. Do you care about your blog’s Alexa ranking? If so, and you’ve tried some other nifty hacks to nudge your ranking down please share them here.

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