The Undeniable Power Of Search Engine Marketing

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Bing Network. All opinions are 100% mine.

If you could choose just ONE form of digital marketing, what would it be?

I get asked this question from big brands all over the world, and my answer is always the same…

Search engine marketing.

It often shocks people, because social media and content have been such a big contributor to my success. But in reality, search engines are where I continue to get the best return on investment.

In fact, 55% of the traffic for this site comes from organic search alone. And for me, more traffic means more earning potential.

Search engines are the lifeblood of digital marketing, not just because they deliver the most sustainable traffic to websites, but also because they are an essential component of our every day life.

Without search engines, life from a digital sense would inevitably stand still, stop functioning and most likely create widespread panic.

We are reliant on our ability to get answers and information at the click of a button, and that’s why search engine marketing is such a powerful tool for you as a marketer.

But don’t take my word for it, let me show you what I mean…

Powerful search engine marketing stats

There is more to search engine marketing than just website traffic, and to illustrate why you should consider it an integral part of your digital strategy here are some statistics:

• 96% of marketers use search engine marketing to provide content to their prospects
• Organic and paid search engine traffic contribute to more than 60% of total website visitors
• 48% of consumers start mobile research with a search engine
• 18% of local mobile searches lead to a sale within one day
• 81% of B2B purchase cycles start with a web search
• 57% of B2B marketers say SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation
• The highest spenders are most likely to turn to search for purchase information
• Conversion rates are 10 times higher from search than from social media

Of course these are just stats, but they tell a compelling story. Search engine marketing is here to stay, and it’s importance will only grow as the global adoption of mobile devices continues to accelerate.

So how can you make the most of it?

A unique opportunity

A few weeks ago I wrote an article that encouraged you to diversify your search engine marketing strategy; in order to stay competitive and create a distinct point of difference for your website.

The most natural place to start if you’re looking to diversify your strategy, reduce your overall risk and tap into some unique opportunities, is with the Bing Network.

Bing has come along way in the past decade, and it’s much more than just a search box on a webpage. It’s now a powerful connector between technology, information, people and knowledge.

Beyond being your typical search engine, Bing powers over 14 billion searches around the world across the Microsoft ecosystem; from Cortana, Xbox, Twitter, Apple and Amazon.

This means as a search engine marketer, Bing offers a unique opportunity to reach MORE people, in MORE ways and on MORE platforms.

Bing helps search engine marketers reach people at times when they are ready and willing to spend money – in their everyday lives. They connect you to prospects where and how they want to be reached.

More than just keywords in a search bar

Search engine marketing isn’t just about dropping a few keywords into a search bar anymore…

It’s much more than that.

Now search is present in everything we do, from interacting on social networks, to purchasing products, to finding a local restaurant.

As the digital marketing space continues to evolve, so will search, and you need to be prepared to ride that wave and capitalize on opportunities when they surface.

Networks such as Bing help you diversify your search marketing risk and tap into a growing and unique opportunity to reach your ideal customers.

Learn more about Bing Network

The post The Undeniable Power Of Search Engine Marketing appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

http://ift.tt/2ao03QE

11 Advanced Tips To Be A Successful Digital Marketer

How effective is your digital marketing strategy? Would you consider yourself a successful digital marketer?

If that question makes you feel queazy, you’re not alone. Digital marketing is hard to get right, and it’s changing every day.

The only way to keep up with these changes and get ahead of your competition is to innovate. Get out of your comfort zone, experiment, and test new methods to improve the effectiveness of your digital marketing.

If digital is a big part of your business, then you’d be familiar with terms like link building, content marketing, social media marketing etc. These are umbrella terms covering a number of marketing techniques that can really up your game.

But knowing this alone is insignificant if you don’t know how to make the most of each technique with new and interesting tactics. So let’s walk through some techniques that can increase the effectiveness of your online marketing.

1. Guest posting

While you may have heard arguments that guest blogging is being overused as a tool for link building, and losing value as a means of useful content deliverance, none can deny its effectiveness in the marketing world.

Guest blogging is here to stay, so you better make it part of your marketing strategy!

Ironically, the hardest part about guest posting is not the content creation; rather, it’s sourcing the blogs. Thankfully, the internet is a great place where you can find solutions to every problem imaginable.

BuzzStream is one solution to the ordeals of guest posting. It carries out a number of tasks for guest bloggers, such as:

• Prospecting links
• Keeping track of unique projects
• Keeping track of good links
• Analyzing results for you.

2. The Skyscraper Technique

As interesting as its sounds, the skyscraper technique requires that you find the tallest skyscraper content in your niche and improve it with stories of your own.

Once you get going, you will realize the numerous ways you can edit and improve people’s content and make it so much more useful. Also, you will be amazed by the grand attention your content receives through the skyscraper method!

Here are three fairly easy steps to guide your way through the skyscraper technique:

• Dig out linkable assets – topics and content that are already faring well and earning laurels in the niche of your business.
• Make it better. You can make it longer, update it, better design it, and/or add more detail to it.
• Reach out to people to provide you backlinks. The website you choose should have already posted something relevant to your linkable asset, be part of your business niche, and should be ranking higher than your own.

3. The Moving Man Method

This relatively new term coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko has taken marketing agencies by surprise. The method is the marketing equivalent of revamping old clutter to create something way more useful than the original.

This marketing technique requires you to:

• Search for sites that share your market but have moved to a new URL, changed names, stopped offering services, stopped updating resources, or have completely shut down their online business.
• Produce content that is up-to-date, more powerful, and more relevant than what the defunct website had to offer.
• Access the hundreds of people still linking to the old website and ask if they would be interested in linking to your webpage in lieu of the defunct, outdated webpage.

Simple and witty, just like what we expect from marketers of the twenty-first century!

4. Internationalizing SEO

Internationalization is a method not too common but of great significance. You make your website/blog accessible to more people by offering it in languages of more than one country. Makes sense!

Offer translations of your website in multiple languages and localize words to get your fair share of an international audience.

Image Source: Moz

5. Psychological techniques

Many times while implementing your marketing strategy, you will have to think like more than just as a marketer; you will have to think as a psychologist.

Understanding the psyche of your audience and creating content that they can actually relate to are skills possessed by only rare, true marketers. If you learn the art you can conquer the hearts and minds of your audience.

This psychological effect is sometimes created by the use of powerful words. Don’t hesitate or fall short of researching such power words within your niche as they can compel new customers to join your community.

Image Source: Buffer

The second strong psychological effect is that of social sharing and caring. Use social media sites and communication to your full advantage by being humanistic and generous in your approach. Connect with people and other companies as people. When they share your content, always remember to return the favor.

6. Increasing your website’s click-through-rate (CTR)

Increasing your CTR in search engines is a time tested method of improving search engine ranking for websites.

Business blogs and websites have been going through the struggle for a long time. However, it’s really not that hard if you have a systematic approach to it.

CTR can be increased fairly easily by:

• Wise keyword selection
• Quality content
• Eye-catching titles
• Comprehensive, engaging descriptions
• Prompt Calls-to-Action
• Using breadcrumbs in the URL
• A Table-of-Contents plugin
• Getting Google sitelinks

7. Sharing through LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn is a wonderful place to run into new businesses and clients, stir up conversations, offer deals, and market your products in the process. In order to provide value and engage in a conversation with members of your target audience, share content through LinkedIn groups.

• Comment on and share popular content
• Begin conversations by asking a question
• Post your own content (videos, blogs, Infographics, etc.) in the group

Image Source: Soho Tech Training

8. Innovative emails

Who hasn’t tried email marketing in order to address a wide audience? But the process and content of email marketing has become so monotonous and predictable that most companies usually get ignored by email recipients.

It’s about time we start getting innovative with email marketing;

• Instead of blindly sending your emails into the vast expanse on the internet, aim for specific people with certain interests. You can email all the people who tweeted about a certain product in your niche as an example.
• Long gone are the days of pesky looking emails. If you wish your emails to be read by recipients, design and compose them with grace and wit.
• Use less text and more compelling images in emails.

Learn from the geniuses, such as Dropbox which designed this sleek, beautiful email you just cannot ignore!

Image Source: HubSpot

9. Innovative link building

There’s no point in trying to target and build connections with random websites which have no correlation to topics in your niche. You can better spend the effort on reasonable prospects. Companies employ a number of methods when trying to identify and reach to potential websites which can backlink to their content.

One such technique is email marketing to people who have backlinked to relevant content already. Get in touch with these websites which have established positions in the market. Break the ice with them and ask politely for a feature or two of your own website.

10. Using advertorials

Advertorials are the way forward in the present age of content marketing and promotion. They are unique and unlike traditional advertising because the content imitates editorial content but serves to fulfill the goals of a brand.

Following are ways to make advertorials advantageous for your brand:

• Find the right match of magazine/online publication for your advertorial.
• Make sure your advertorial is clearly labeled as ‘advertisement’ as per the FTC’s latest laws and guidelines, or else it may get banned.
• Remember, advertorials are more like blog posts. You don’t directly sell the product; you sell content related to your product.
• Don’t forget to share your advertorials on social media sites.

11. 301 redirects

Redirection is a process of sending both users and search engines to a URL different from what they requested. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which transfers almost all of the link juice to the new page.

A 301 redirect is the most preferable type of redirect because it indicates to browsers, search engine bots, and the users, that the page has been permanently moved. Search engines may take some time to discover your new page but once they do, they will take your new page to the same rankings where your former page stood.

Wrap

The 11 ways of making online marketing more effective are the latest and most responsive of their kind. However, online marketing is a long, on-going process which cannot be summed up in 20, let alone 11 techniques.

Go beyond your threshold, employ all the methods discovered here and you might eventually find what works best for your business.

Guest Author: Junaid Ali Qureshi is a digital marketing specialist who has helped several businesses gain traffic, outperform competition and generate profitable leads. His current ventures include Elephantation, eLabelz, Smart Leads.ae, Progos Tech and eCig.

The post 11 Advanced Tips To Be A Successful Digital Marketer appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

http://ift.tt/2ahxJzj

5 Easy Steps For Creating A Traffic-Driving Expert Roundup

Are you a content creator? Do you find yourself desperately looking for something to share about two-thirds of the way through the month?

I have been where you are, staring at my screen willing an idea, any idea, to come to me. It can feel like everything has been said, and that there are just no more topics to cover.

This is the point in every content marketer’s life when they start getting a little overwhelmed by their editorial plans.

Updated posts, recycled blog posts in new formats, master list posts… these are all pretty standard workarounds for when the inspiration just isn’t flowing.

But I want to point you towards a different route that should immediately become a regular part of your publishing routine: expert roundups.

Expert roundups – The best thing ever

You can probably guess what an expert roundup is, but I am going to explain anyway. An expert roundup is a collection of quotes or interviews of people who are influential in your chosen field. Someone who has authority, and has some advice to provide to you and your readers.

An example of an expert roundup is this one. It is a collection of experts discussing Google’s quality raters’ guidelines.

Creating your own is one of the greatest ways you can freshen up your content. It is also a pretty simple process, just follow these five steps!

Step 1 – Start making your expert list

The first step is an obvious one… you need to know what experts to contact! I try to make a few lists of experts about once every three months, which will encompass several expert roundups using a couple of different media forms. That gives me a better selection to choose from.

So one list will be bloggers and book writers who I think could contribute something special for a roundup. Another list will be YouTube or podcasters that I want to contact.

The third type of list is usually an occasional type. I only put it together when I am going to be attending some kind of event where experts will be. A conference, an expo, a meetup, a party… somewhere that networking is a natural part of the environment.

I use Twitter lists to keep in touch with different kinds of experts.

Once you have your lists it is time to move onto the next phase…

Step 2 – Come up with great questions

Some people will suggest coming up with your topic list first, but I have never found it to be as helpful as putting it second. Having a list (or several) of experts will allow you to start organizing the topics you want covered. It may even give you some ideas to help you along the way.

Coming up with an interesting question determines the success of the future article: A good question prompts the participating experts to come up with detailed answers and directs the conversations to something your audience would be willing to learn about.

SerpStat is a great tool to get some question-inspiration. Type in your core term and it will return the search queries that are questions.

SerpStat is powered by Google Suggest which means it shows you the questions people actually type into the search field (Those are definitely questions they’d appreciate answers to). Here are some more tips on using the tool.

Take a look at each expert and ask yourself, “What do they know best? What can they contribute to my followers?” From there, begin to separate them into groups depending on how long you want your roundups to be. I prefer to make a couple of posts or videos on any topic, and so split those experts up to get more content out of the deal.

It also leads directly to number 3…

Step 3 – Begin contacting your experts

Having a specific topic in mind when you contact your experts will make them much more likely to follow up with you. After all, it doesn’t take that long for someone who really knows their stuff to write a paragraph or two giving a tip, opinion or anecdote. And it is a benefit for them, because it further expands their authority and loops them in with other respected members in the industry.

I would say two weeks are plenty of time prior to the publication date to contact experts for blog bites. However, if you are contacting for a video or other recorded media style, you will need to provide a lot more notice. I try to aim for 4 – 6 weeks, in order to find a good time to get the recording, without having to rush the edits.

If you are in a hurry (e.g. filling in your editorial calendar before you leave for a vacation), use MyBlogU to easily find and contact the experts. MyBlogU scales many steps I am listing here:

• Finding experts to provide their quotes
• Contacting experts to update them of the deadlines and article status
• Creating an HTML output to use as a base for your article

Step 4 – Hype and release

Finally, it is time to start hyping up those readers / viewers / listeners! About a week before you publish send out a social media post alluding to something big and expert-filled on the horizon. Then a couple days before release a teaser with a bit of the info and a promise for more to come.

Work on your promo materials! Your participating experts are your assets: Feature them in your teaser videos and banners.

Tool alert: I highly recommend using Bannersnack for creating your promo materials. It’s an easy-to-use banner creation and hosting platform that lets you make awesome banners and even track their performance through analytics.

If you plan on turning expert roundups into a long-term strategy, Bannersnack analytics will help you A/B test and identify the best-working promo media.

Don’t forget to tag your participating experts in social media updates to engage them in promoting the piece! Here’s a quick checklist on social media tagging.

If you choose to make expert roundups a regular feature you can lessen the hype time and just send out a reminder, but by then people will know the score and get excited all on their own.

Step 5 – Establish your content plan

By now you should have a good idea of what expert advice you will have, and you can start planning the content itself. This is pretty straightforward: design, formatting, presentation, visuals, publishing date, etc.

I like to gather enough advice to make several expert roundup posts and schedule them for a few months, with a quick email to the expert thanking them and letting them know when it will be posted, and that you will shoot off a link to it once it hits the site.

I don’t do more than one expert roundup a month not to overwhelm my readership. Expert roundups are for diversifying your editorial calendar once in a while. When used too often, they may hurt your blog because too much of anything is not a good thing.

Since videos, podcasts and graphics take longer, consider alternating between content formats when you publish. So you can release a blog expert roundup, and then a few weeks later release a video, etc.

Here are different types of expert interviews you can try adding to your editorial plans.

Monitor the performance of each roundup religiously to be able to identfy what works and why. Again, don’t run roundups too often: It’s much more effective to do them right each time than publish them each week.

I use Cyfe to monitor every roundup I do: I monitor social media signals, traffic (using Google Analytics) and rankings of each roundup I do on my blog.

The beauty of doing expert roundups is that you are no longer alone promoting them: Those experts will be there to share, link and comment!

Guest Author: Ann Smarty is the brand and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas and co-founder of Viral Content Buzz, the free platform helping your content reach social media influencers!

The post 5 Easy Steps For Creating A Traffic-Driving Expert Roundup appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

http://ift.tt/2aqhROk

3 Secret Gmail Buttons To Guarantee Your Cold Emails Get Opened

Every Monday morning, you find yourself sitting down to send 10-15 emails to people you’d love to get responses from.

Maybe they are cold prospects, or potential joint venture partners, or press outlets you’re hoping to get coverage in.

Regardless of why you email, to ultimately get what you want the other person has to open and reply to your email, lost in the over 205 Billion emails sent per day according to Radicati Group.

Over the past 2 months, for every 100 emails I sent to influencers, A-Listers, and CEO’s, 97 were opened and 92 were replied to, using 3 nifty secrets built into this tool called Send Later for Gmail.

1. The clock to set reminders

When I send 15-50 emails every Monday morning to new potential partners, the last thing I want to do all week is try and remember to follow up with people who don’t respond.

Enter the Clock.

When I send my emails each Monday morning, I click the clock which will remind me to follow up in some amount of time (tomorrow at 9am) if no one replies.

Tomorrow at 9am, if the person hasn’t replied, the clock will put that email back to the top of my inbox to remind me to follow up.

On average, for every 100 emails I sent, 40% did not get a response by “tomorrow at 9am”. Had the clock not reminded me, I would have lost 40% of my total opportunities. Instead, I followed up and closed many more deals.

If you’re in sales, you know follow up is key. Use the clock if you want to out-sell your competition.

You might wonder what email I sent after Send Later for Gmail reminded me that the person had not replied.

Many times I’d call them, email them with a simple “bump”, or use the double arrow button.

2. The double arrow to automatically follow up

When I’m trying to schedule podcast guests I used to gather all of their emails into a google spreadsheet using EmailHunter.io and then update it every Monday based on who responded and who didn’t.

Here’s what that looked like:

Now, I use the double arrows which will “send email 2 of podcast guest sequence if guest doesn’t reply within 2 days”.

Then 3 days later it’ll “send email 3 of podcast guest sequence if guest doesn’t reply within 5 days”.

Here’s what it looks like:

I think of this almost like one to one email marketing.

Get this: Over 60% of my total opens and responses came after 4 follow up emails!

Everyone always says consistency wins and this was proof.

The problem is folks like you and I don’t have time to keep manually following up.

Use this double arrow icon to set up the auto follow up sequence right from the start. Then go enjoy your family and the pool.

The subject lines that got the highest open and reply rates (sometimes after 5+ automated follow ups) for me included:

“Hey” (92% open, 85% reply)

“quick question” (90% open, 77% reply)

“do you know” (84% open, 75% reply)

Try copying these when you’re trying to get a reply.

3. Smart send to guarantee a new friend

In a recent report by GetResponse, it was found that most emails are opened between 6am and 11am or early afternoon.

That means if you want to maximize the chances of your emails getting opened, you want to send your email in those time slots so you appear at the top of the inbox.

My problem was, I like keeping my mornings to myself to read (Right now enjoying Ego is The Enemy by Ryan Holiday).

So what I now do is I write all my emails at 6pm each day and then use the Send Later button to have them all send at 6am the next day.

This ensures my email is at the top of the inbox when my recipient opens their inbox for the day.

Wrap

Many of you are like me in that email frustrates the heck out of you and sucks up your time.

Try using the auto-follow up button, clock button, and send later button to save yourself time while increasing your open and reply rates by a healthy 40-45%. These buttons are all free to use and are part of Send Later for Gmail which you should be able to find here.

Tools Mentioned:

1. Send Later for Gmail
2. EmailHunter.io
3. GetResponse.com

Guest Author: Nathan Latka Founded software company Heyo.com at 19 and after raising $2.5M and growing to 10,000+ monthly paying customers sold it to his number one competitor. He’s now the host of the fastest growing business podcast, Top Entrepreneurs on iTunes, having passed 2,000,000 downloads in 9 months.

The post 3 Secret Gmail Buttons To Guarantee Your Cold Emails Get Opened appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

http://ift.tt/29ZEZn0