Blogging should be the core of your social media strategy

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Paul Cash, chief innovation officer at OTM, lists 10 reasons why blogs should dominate...

As a planner, thinker and writer I’ve been assessing my own blogging strengths and weaknesses of late and thought it was about time the unsung hero of social media received a little ego boost.

1. Be a goal-keeper, not just a goal-scorerIt’s all very well trying to stick the ball in the back of the net and score a vital goal using social media. However, the best attacks are built on defence and you need to make sure your blogging strategy is integrated with your content marketing and social media goals.

2. Who are you writing for?Blogs often fail to get the right level of engagement because they get written for all. The best blogs are specific in their subject matter, appeal to a defined audience and highlight a current problem that needs resolving. When done well the blog becomes the fuel for other social channels like Twitter and LinkedIn and engages your audience in the conversation. Being controversial can add a well needed level of impetus to a dry subject.

3. Stop messing around with micro sitesFor several technical reasons I won’t bore you with, integrating your blog into your company’s website URL is critical. This really does help inbound marketing and search optimisation.

4. Don’t forget the lipstickEvery blog post is a story that needs to be brought to life. Here you need to get familiar with themes, brand, typography, easy to read layouts. Once you’re happy with the structural mechanics of your blog you can then think about imagery, video and audio to give it that added sparkle.

5. OrgasmicEverybody should know this by now but don’t underestimate your blog’s contribution to SEO A well thought through post using (not abusing) keyword terms will give you a better organic ranking on Google – that’s sexy right? Check your keywords against what your audience is thinking. Use Google AdWords (contextual targeting) and Google Insights for inspiration.

6. Be a story tellerYour blog post will die a horrible death if you blurb out a bunch of facts about how amazing your product or service is. Instead focus on trying to write your blog post from a customer point of view. Make it fun and interesting and in the ideal world try and bring real world stories about you, your team or your customers to life via your blog.

7. Make it easyDon’t be scared of linking your blog posts to appropriate products or services. It’s a mighty leap to assume your readers will leave your blog and actively seek out your product page. Make it easy for them by associating your blog posts with specific products and calls to action.

8. Be great at being foundThe more time and effort that is spent building relationships and distributing your blog content across social media as well as internal media, newsletters, emails the more successful you will be. Don’t leave content distribution to your blog visitors.

9. Think like a publisherYou have to get serious about developing a set of regular columns and other features to provide structure for writers and readers.

10. Track blog resultsDon’t forget to measure your blog’s effectiveness. Track traffic; lead generation and sales as well as reduced search and customer service expense. Remember, blogs provide the best home base for your content marketing, social media sharing and search optimisation.

Author: Paul Cash

Source: http://www.b2bmarketing.net/blog/posts/2013/08/08/blogging-should-be-core-your-social-media-strategy?

Business Blogging Ideas – What to Blog About When You Don’t Know What to Blog About

Business blogging with minimal resources over a long period of time can be a challenge. Heck, for SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) blogging without the experience of writing on a regular basis can be a barrier to even start.

No matter how talented a writer your business blogger or contributors might be, it is inevitable that situations will occur where there is either uncertainty or a gap in what to write about.

To avoid those gaps, the most important thing to do is follow an editorial plan where topics are researched and planned out in accordance to marketing objectives  AND that serve the information needs of your target audience. That’s just good content marketing.

Even then, there will be gaps, perceived or real.  For these situations, I like to keep a list of ideas or tactics to fire up the creative juices and get something good created.  Hopefully this excerpt will be helpful to you as well.

1. Curate – My motto is, “Always Be Curating”. Be on the lookout for useful resources, stats, news, visuals and especially examples. Keep a running list in every major topical category and application your readers might find useful. As you use the web, collect these individual (often tweetable) nuggets and then when you have 5-10 or even more, compile them into a blog post.  I like to use Evernote for this but you could also use Storify or other social search, aggregation, curation and bookmarking tools.

This is how the BIGLIST of Marketing Blogs was created. I literally exported the list of marketing blogs from my feed reader into a text file and used that to create the post.

2. Review – Filtering information for your readers can save them time and boost their advancement of knowledge.  Reviewing information sources is a great way to do that. There are many types of information sources to review from books to software to other blogs in your industry.  Writing an opinionated and tactically useful review of resources that can help your readers do their jobs better is good for everyone.

We do a number of book reviews here and have also asked authors who pitch us to contribute tactical list posts as an alternative to our review. Authors often help promote the book review exposing your blog to a new audience.

3. Interview – There other smart SMEs at your company and certainly in your industry. Help them gain exposure by doing interviews. Start by making it easy and asking just one clever question. Compile answers from multiple people into one blog post. After they see the value in what you’ve created from that effort, industry thought leaders and busy executives may be more prone to do in-depth interviews. Text is convenient for the blogger but video via Skype or Google Hangout could be an option as well.

Interviews are great because there’s a wide array of repurposing and social engagement opportunities that can extend the use of the content and it’s reach.

4. Answer Questions – Mine questions from front line service and sales staff, your web analytics, on-site search, sites like Quora, or through social search tools. Find the kinds of questions that seem to resonate best and answer them in your blog post. This tip really should be the bread and butter of your social content strategy – engaging in social channels and then creating content in response to real time concerns and interests of your target audience.

5. React - If you read industry news, print or digital, then reacting to other editorial or news can be a quick way to add useful, meaningful content. If you agree or disagree doesn’t matter as much as simply having an opinion and backing it up with a position. This does not mean rant, especially on a business blog. In particular, print publications are a great source for this since many do not release digital editions until days or weeks later.

Another angle on reaction is to use real-life experiences, whether they are literal or metaphor. In other words, if you react as a consumer and reflect on the experience (good or bad) offering improvements or acknowledgements it can be a great way to empathize with readers and your target audience. Or, you might have an experience with something that can serve as a metaphor to explain something in your industry.

6. Live-blog Archives – There are numerous webinars archived to the web that you can “live-blog” as you listen and watch them. The vast majority of webinars are not live-blogged by anyone, so even if you do this with a webinar that’s 6 months old (and still highly relevant) you’ll be creating something really useful and unique. Reach out to the speaker and let them know or even ask them for a tip or quote to add to the live-blog post and that speaker might share it with their networks.

Just in case you’re not familiar with it, “live-blogging” means to write a story based on the presentation being given. There are many ways to liveblog an event (real time or archived) so here are some tips on that.

7. Explode Comments – Engaging with industry publications and blogs outside of your own niche should be a regular part of a business blogger and social media marketer’s online activities. Take comments you’ve left on other news and blog sites and expand on them as full blog posts.  You can go back to the source comment and link to the elaboration of your thoughts too.

8. Recognize – Asking people for information or participation and then recognizing that effort is the cornerstone of social network development for business blogs. Make recognition of community members, employees (SMEs), and people in your industry a regular part of your business blogging effort. Who has gone out of their way to be helpful? Who is consistently creating value?

One way we do this is to feature top commenters from our blog both in our Friday news posts and in our monthly newsletter.

9.  Oreo Cookie - If you subscribe to industry newsletters or can do a search on Google News, there will undoubtedly be something new you can elaborate on and give insight about. Write a short intro paragraph to set things up (statement of problem, empathy with audience) then post an excerpt from the news site with attribution and link, close it up with your observations and conclusion. That’s an Oreo cookie post – sandwich a news excerpt with your own cookie of an opinion.

10. Templates – Following a template can make blog post creation a more efficient process but it’s important that business blogs not over-rely on templates. A template provides a structure to follow and even pre-written opening and closing text. Fill in the key points with new content (get good searching Google and Google News) and you have a well formatted post in a lot less time. The key thing is to customize and add flavor.

Template types examples include: list posts, reviews, how to posts, problem/solution and many more. Here’s an example of a business blogging template that we use pretty often and it works quite well.

There you go – 10 ideas for coming up with topics to write about when you don’t know what to blog about. Some of these tips are no-brainers for the experienced business blogger. Others will hopefully get a bit of “ah, I never thought of that” going.

When you align the purpose of your blog with the content plan, there’s no end to what content you can create in order to connect with your audience. If you’re at a block and not sure what to write about, hopefully these tips are useful to you.

Or you can just write a post about what to write about 

Author: Lee Odden

Source: http://www.toprankblog.com/2013/08/blogging-ideas/

Create Your Own Money-Making App

Do you have an idea for an app you’ve been mulling over, but wondering if you have the right skill set to develop one? Even if you’re a complete technophobe you can have a go at the app-making industry, and maybe even bring in a tidy profit. Read on for our complete guide on how to create your own money-making app.

• Coming up with an idea
• Types of apps
• Development
• Costs
• How much can you make?
• Making an app for free

COMING UP WITH AN IDEA

You can’t exactly start working on your app without an idea. For starters, think about what you would like an app for. Chances are, there are thousands of other people who are yearning for the same thing. Think about the community you live in. If you live in a big city that attracts a lot of attention from tourists, for example, then the options are endless.

Also think about your hobbies and interests. Let’s say you’re a frequent traveller and like to visit famous pubs around the world. You’ve acquired a list of your favorite locations. Why not turn that database into a map app for your fellow travellers?

Plenty of famous apps don’t centre around special interests, but they always top the charts. You probably already have them downloaded on your phone – Temple Run, Words With Friends, Minecraft. Gaming apps do tend to earn more money since users are more willing to pay for them, especially if they’re extremely popular among their friends. Lots of apps get their start just from word of mouth.

Don’t despair if you find something similar to your idea while searching through the app store. Learn to think outside the box. There are several apps out there that provide information and maps for all of the hottest tourist spots in London. But is there an app for locations off the beaten path that the average person wouldn’t know about?

Try to come up with an idea that won’t have a lot of competition with existing and favorable apps. But if you’re dead set in taking your idea to production despite the competition, take a look at your rivals and try to figure out what you can do to make your app bigger and better.

Here are some important points to consider while pondering over your app:

• Are you planning on taking on the work of developing the app yourself, or are you willing and able to hire a team?
• Who does the app benefit?
• Will your app require daily management?
• Does your app promote an existing service (such as your company), or does it stand alone?
• Hoe much are you planning to charge?
• Do you want your app to result in a full-time business, or do you want it to simply be a side project?
• What platforms do you want your app available on?

TYPES OF APPS

There are numerous categories that your app can fit under. Here are most of them, with examples of some of the more popular options.

• Games (Words With Friends, Draw Something)
• Travel (TripAdvisor, Kayak)
• Social networking(Facebook, Twitter)
• News (BBC, NYTimes)
• Music (Spotify, Pandora)
• Photography (Instagram, Picstitch)
• Video (Vine)
• Utility (Google Translate, Flashlight)

DEVELOPMENT

Now you have your idea. Great, that’s half the battle! But now what? We’re assuming, like most people, that you don’t have any experience in programming. And that’s fine! There are tons of options.

If you want to take a more expensive but convenient route, look into hiring an app developer. Sites like AppBooker let you enter your preferred platform, country, whether or not your app is freelance or for an agency, and your budget. They then provide a list of developers that suit your needs. By clicking through the companies, you can see a list of their clients and the types of apps they specialise in.

Another great website to check out is The App Developers. You can select if you’re creating an app as an indivudal, a business or an agency. They can create apps for mobiles, tablets and your average desktop computer. To receive any sort of price quote, you must fill out a form detailing your idea before they can get back to you. As we’ll cover later, the cost of making your app depends largely on how intricate you plan to be with the design.

Here are some questions to ask as you’re shopping around for a developer:

• What do they charge?
• Who have they worked for in the past?
• Are their apps successful?
• Will I have full ownership?
• Do they have the skill set to bring my idea to life?
• Which platforms (iOS, Android, etc.) can they build apps for?

COSTS

You have to spend money to make money, as the saying goes. Turns out, that’s not entirely true in the app-making industry. But we’ll get to that later. For now, let’s assume you’ve decided to hire a developer.

Depending on the type of app you wish to develop, the cost can range between £700 to £170,000. This may sound like a lot of money, but bear in mind that the right app will bring in a profit that outweighs the development cost. Also, gaming apps – which will cost the most to develop – are also among the chart-toppers.

You will, of course, run into developers who will offer to make you an all-inclusive app for less than £1,000. Be wary of this, though, as you tend to get what you pay for. We think it’s best to pay a little extra for a quiality product you can be proud of. Why waste nearly a £1,000 on an app that won’t sell?

If you can provide some of your own content (such as the layout and graphics), you can reduce the hefty fees. Another way to possibly shave off some costs would be to offer the developer equity. However, they’d have to really be sold on your idea and you’d have to be financially prepared for such an agreement.

If you want any specifc add-ons, those can cost you an additional £700 or more. Some of the more popular additions include GPS locators and the ability to share content over social media.

It costs approximately £66.50 ($99) each year to sell your product through Apple, who only list prices in American dollars. This cost is well worth it, though, as you’ll get tons of traffic.

HOW MUCH CAN YOU MAKE?

Obviously, the money you earn from your app will depend largely on its popularity and how much you decide to charge, so it’s difficult to say. Unless you’re completely confident with your creation, it’s probably not best to quit your full-time job! A study from GigaOM Pro showed that more than half of their 352 surveyed developers made less than £400 a month. Not quite enough to live off of, but perfect if you’re just looking for a little extra cash on the side.

Of course, you could have the next Angry Birds and bring in nearly £660,000 a month!

In order to make a signigicant amount of money through your app, try following these tips:

• Make sure it reaches a broad audience rather than a niche market
• Start small just to get your feet wet, and then go from there
• Research the most popular apps on the store
• Currently, it’s easier to make money through iOS apps
• Encourage family and friends to leave reviews for your app
• Consider developing your app for the iPad as well
• If your app is for an existing business, be sure to advertise it on your webpage and through social media

When you sell your app through Apple, they take 30% of the profits and directly deposit your sales into your bank account each month.

Making money with free apps

You don’t have to charge your customers to make money. If you want to keep your app completely free, there are still ways for you to bring in a profit. By including adverts in your app, you can keep your app free of charge but still make some money.

MAKING AN APP FOR FREE

Don’t want to spend thousands developing your app? That’s completely understandable! Maybe you just want to toy around with your idea before making a commitment. There are loads of programs online that allow you to develop an app free of charge. Here are some we recommend:

• TheAppBuilder
• iBuildApp
• AppsGeyser
• AppMakr

Author: Hannah Bealer

Source: http://tiny.cc/zjcf1w

What Are The 4 H’s of SEO?

We have now entered the month of July and that means it is time for county 4-H fairs! If you didn’t grow up in a 4-H family and don’t have the 4-H creed memorized by heart, the four “H’s” in 4-H stand for Head, Heart, Hands, and Health.  Let’s see how these four “H’s” can help your SEO.

Head

Probably your best friend in SEO is your head.  Spend a few hours every month coming up with different ideas for your website with your team.  No website is perfect, it could always be improved.  Look at your competitors and see what updates they have made to their website.  Maybe your call to action needs to be a more noticeable or put in a different location? Use your head and come up with a list of ideas to improve your website.  Also use the time to come up with blog topic ideas and see what you could turn into a video, or longer content pieces like eBooks or White Papers.

Heart

Taking shortcuts is never a good idea.  Sure you could buy thousands of links and get a boost immediately in your rankings.  It may even work for a while, but deep down in your heart you know that eventually you are going to get caught, and you will.  Do you really think that can outsmart all the engineers working at Google?

Quick and easy is never the best way to go about SEO.  I like to compare white hat/black hat SEO to food (as I seem to do with a lot of analogies).  White Hat SEO is like going to your grandma’s Thanksgiving dinner.  It takes time to cook the turkey, make the noodles, and peel/mash the potatoes and won’t happen in a couple minutes.  The black hat method is like driving through your local fast food restaurant for Thanksgiving.  You’ll get your food quick and it will taste pretty good, but you’ll be hungry again in an hour.  I don’t know about you, but I’ll take my grandma’s food every time.

Hands

You got to get your hands dirty and do the work to have a success with SEO.  You cannot just sit back and expect it to happen.  SEO is hard work.  You won’t see results right away and you will make mistakes.  But if you have to go in and manually change all of your title tags, or add H1′s and H2′s, you got to do it.  SEO isn’t all fun and games at times, but the hard work has to be done to become successful.  Bust out those blogs you have been dreading for the last month and get into a habit of doing it more frequently.

Health

Once you have used your head, heart and hands, you need to constantly check the health of your website.  Use your auditing software to check and see if there are any broken links, missing H1′s, or alt tags.  Sometimes it is those little things that are holding your website back from a top three ranking.  Use tools like Google Analytics to see how your visitors are interacting with your website and see where improvements could be made.

Be sure to take the time to implement the four “H’s” into your SEO strategy and you’ll see your investment pay off. Take the time to visit your 4-H county fair and look at all projects your local youth have worked on.  While you are there, enjoy a nice brat and elephant ear too!

Author: Thomas Brodbeck

Source: http://tiny.cc/zzpb1w

8 Creative Ways to Connect With Customers on Facebook

Facebook is a not-so-secret secret weapon for promoting your business. That being said, a lot of companies don't take full advantage of what this social media platform has to offer when it comes to making deep, lasting connections with their customers. Ads and pleas to "like this" simple don't quite cut it.

That's why we asked eight entrepreneurs to weigh in on how to best use Facebook to your company's advantage. Here's what they said:

1. Put Other People in the Spotlight

On the MySocialCloud Facebook page, we try to cross-promote with our partners and highlight our customers a lot. For example, we partnered with a company called Free Bike Project that has students ride bikes around its campuses with our advertisements on the sides of the bikes. We then ask the students to take pictures of themselves with the bikes, and we post the pictures on our Facebook page. We've found when we put other people and their friends in the spotlight (rather than our brand or ourselves), people get more excited about our company and engage with us more on social media.

- Stacey Ferreira, MySocialCloud

2. Interact in a Private Facebook Community

We invite our customers into a private community on Facebook where they can interact with us and one another, share war stories and where they can turn for support. It's an amazing way to help them see us as a conduit for them as a united front of crusaders.

- Corey Blake, Round Table Companies

3. Post Video Updates

It's proven that video posts on Facebook highly increase the chance of user comments, shares and "likes." Create a weekly company update keeping your customers in the loop on new products, employees, goals, etc. Remember, talk about your company and product as well as the category you are in. Your customers want to see you as the expert in the industry, and they will continue to come back if you have great advice!

- Torrey Tayenaka, Sparkhouse

4. Offer Discounts and Promo Codes

You can stay connected to your customers through Facebook by posting discounts and promotional codes for your business products and services. But to keep your customers coming back for more, set a limit on the access to a promo code to about 50 people. If a customer sees an expired promo code, they'll likely check back to see when the next one is posted.

- Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

5. Post Unrelated Content

The main purpose of a Facebook page is to communicate company information to customers. However, there’s no reason we can’t make it fun. Posting pictures or videos that have nothing to do with the company tells me a little more about my customers than another promo. Also, it shows the lighter side of the company, which helps customers feel a closer connection to us.


Lots of companies have Facebook pages that offer no real value to those who follow them. Nobody wants to hear about business all the time. They want to be entertained and engaged, and they want to be a part of the companies they follow. What better way than to post content that appeals directly to them? They’ll have some fun while strengthening their ties to the company, which is the entire point of social media.

- Jay Wu, Best Drug Rehabilitation

6. Share Stories

Share stories to build trust and reliability. We share stories and photos of events, charitable contributions, organizational partnerships and the daily activities happening in and around our business.

- Tyler Arnold, SimplySocial Inc.

7. Post Consistently and Respond Quickly

Realty One Group places a premium on being consistent and responding to engagement. We make a point to post every single day. When a customer notices that you are updating your page with useful information, he is more likely to engage.


Perfect example: An agent wrote on one of our photos asking if we had our logo in a certain format to use for printing. She said the format was not available to her in our back office and reached out via Facebook. Not only did we respond to her — we got her email and sent her the format she needed to carry out her business. She expressed such gratitude for us going out of our way to help her, and that alone was reward enough.

- Kuba Jewgieniew, Realty ONE Group

8. Recruit Talent Socially

We have a relatively large Facebook page of over 75,000, and the page has been growing quite steadily over the last year. We've really focused on using Facebook as a recruitment tool for our company. When we have a difficult posting, we usually throw it up on the Facebook page and sometimes give out rewards for candidates that other users can bring to us. The response is extremely positive and usually results in hundreds of new candidates joining our database. Not only does this strategy grow the page, but it also helps us get great candidates placed in amazing positions.

Author: Scott Gerber

Source: http://mashable.com/2013/07/23/facebook-customers/

5 Bad SEO “Tactics” You Should Quit Now

Among the many online marketing practices available to writers and bloggers, search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most preferred, and, in a lot of ways, effective. The trend spread like fire, and those who want their websites to shoot up in the rankings and generate income began learning everything about SEO.

The problem is, SEO specialists and consultants can be a little carried away at times with the knowledge they have acquired, which can lead to carelessness and more damage than when they weren’t applying the techniques.

So whether you’re the one who’s doing the SEO job for your site or you’re hiring the services of a professional, here are five bad “tactics” you need to check so you can prune them right away.

Bad Tactic #1: Content Duplication

One of the most common mistakes committed in the content creation department is duplication. This blunder usually occurs when the SEO specialists attempt to spin a well-written article into different versions without paying mind whether they already sound redundant.

Article spinning might have worked three or four years ago, but not these days. With Google becoming smarter and smarter each day, duplicated content have been subjected to virtual penalties, all of which are detrimental to the reputation of the website. The worst-case scenario, however, is when specialists copy the work of others verbatim—there’s no other word for it aside from plain plagiarism.

Tip: It’s likely you’ve heard somewhere that you need to write many articles about certain topics, as it can help boost your website’s authority. While this is true, it doesn’t mean that you have to write 10 articles on how good a marketing tool social media is, for instance. Instead, find a way to strengthen the topic by writing articles that are based on extensive research and of varying expertise levels. This way, you’ll be able to cover the proficiency hierarchy of your target audience, while not sounding like a broken record.

Bad Tactic #2: Keyword Stuffing

In SEO, keywords and phrases are important. However, peppering your articles with these can compromise not only the quality of your article but also the ranking of your website. The chances of Google detecting it are high; when it does, your website will be in trouble.

Tip: When creating content, the ideal scenario would be for you to come up with keywords that are logical and target-specific. You have to exercise caution during the selection process, and when you weave them into your paragraphs. Also, don’t overdo their inclusion into the whole piece—nowadays, the standard keyword density followed by the industry is 2% of the entire article.

Bad Tactic #3: Buying Links

Links are also important forms of content. Building and sharing them then is part of every SEO specialists’ job. However, there are those who rather take shortcuts by buying links and laying them all over the site without considering its consequences.

Aside from duplicate content and excessive use of keywords, suspicious link activity is another pet peeve of Google. The search engine’s bots are able to detect if the links on your site are being used to simply increase your website’s ranking as well as the pattern of how it’s done.

Tip: Amassing plenty of links that direct to your website is great but only when you do it fairly. And the way to go about this is old-school: exchange links by posting content on relevant sites and have them post on yours.

Bad Tactic #4: Ignoring Tags

Tags play an important role in optimising a website, because they are among the ones search engine bots crawl when indexing a page. Despite this, they tend to be overlooked by SEO specialists, which would rather let automation do the job.

Automatic tags are generated upon posting the content, and are usually hailed from the title of the post or the relevant words within the article. However, those who have yet to appreciate how crucial the role of tags tend to rely on automation more without realising that they can do a better job at it.

Tip: It’s not that automatic tags are not reliable; it’s just that you can make them more effective. For instance, if the title of your article is long, you can condense it into something shorter and much more direct, which you can use for the title tag. You can also use Google Adwords to check whether the tags for keywords you want to use are search engine-friendly, as these ones are ideal for optimising.

Bad Tactic #5: PageRank Fixation

With PageRank being one of the more commonly known means for Google to rate websites, optimising yours shouldn’t revolve around it alone. Sure, a high PageRank classification can land you on the first batch of the search engine results page (SERP), but Google has 199 more means of checking the different websites, so you might want to relax a bit on impressing PageRank alone.

Tip: Before you react in contempt, we’re not telling you to quit working on your PageRank altogether. However, it would be helpful if you devote time and effort on other ranking factors, such as return on investment (ROI), analytics, and relevancy.

Now that you’re aware of the pitfalls of applying the not-so-great SEO tactics to your website, it should be easier for you to evaluate and make the necessary improvements. If you wish to share the results you achieved or tips others may find useful, don’t hesitate to write us a comment in the box below.

Author:  Vincent Sevilla

Source: http://www.businesscomputingworld.co.uk/5-bad-seo-tactics-you-should-quit-now/?