How to Make People Read and Respond to Your Emails

Today e-mail is considered the most popular communication tool in business field. It is quite fast and easy-to-navigate. One of the most convenient advantages of using e-mails is that you can communicate with others while on the go. E-mail usually provides quick turnaround and convenient communication due to its nonintrusive format.

Everyday each of us receives hundreds of e-mails and so do our potential customers and clients. Therefore, the message sent can easily get lost in the e-mailbox.

Here are several tips that can help you to make a good impression and increase possibility that people respond to your e-mails.

·         Your subject line should be specific. Clients or customers evaluate an e-mail’s importance by its subject line. So make the subject line relevant, specific and brief.

·         Keep it short. Most people are time-limited and do not read long emails, so briefly convey the meaning of the message.

·         Use bullet points. Make a list of specific questions and use bullet points. It will help the recipient to read your email easier.

·         Address the person. When e-mailing someone you do not know well, include his/her name in the letter and remind him/her where you met or who referred you.

·         Double check the letter for typographical errors. Before you click the button “send”, check carefully your email for typos, including grammar, punctuation and spelling. If it is a very important e-mail, you may read it aloud to be sure it conveys the meaning you want it to have.

·         Don’t forget to ask permission before sending large attachments. Most people don’t enjoy having their e-mails full of many photo attachments and other junk. So get permission from the client or customer before sending large files.

·         Give the client some time to respond. There are a lot of people that check their e-mail once or twice a day. If you really need a quick response, then just make a call! Or put “URGENT” or “PLEASE READ THIS” in the subject line to help the client easily identify important messages.

Info presented by Rankwinz

Optimize Your Content Strategy with the Help of Social Listening

Today social media has grown significantly and several successful social networks alongside continuous broadening of user base, the data available via social listening can drastically help improve the marketing efforts.

Social listening is the process of collecting Facebook shares, tweets, blog posts, etc., sorting through the data and finding valuable insights and trends related to your products or services.

Actually, social listening can do much more than inform your social strategy. With social listening you can find new keywords to target through paid searches, find new websites or networks to run display ads on, as well as it can help you optimize your content strategy.

How to Optimize Your Content Strategy with Social Listening?

Rich, unique and solid content is a great way to improve your business and audience. Content is crucial when it comes to getting users to your website and make them come back. Once important thing is that you should determine what content should be produced and offered to the audience. And that is where social listening comes.

Every day we can notice millions of tweets, status updates, blog posts, and any other forms of posting that cover a wide range of topics. It could be that they talk about your product or service. By understanding what is said, you can figure out how to develop your content strategy.

When using social listening, you can go to certain blog posts, forums posts or status update. Also, you can look at trending info to understand what kind of conversations take place most frequently. In such a way you can figure out who your most influential tweeters are concerning your product.

Making Recommendations

By writing reviews and creating comparison shopping info related to your product, you offer answers your audience need. Improving your product descriptions and providing insights on how a particular product can help them solve their problem, could help you make users purchase through your site. In addition, you can understand what format your audience prefers content in.

You can apply this type of thinking to almost all businesses. If you understand what your clients say, what they need and how they want to get it, you will be able to create the right content that fulfills their needs.

Publishing amazing content isn’t enough. It is necessary to leverage social listening, content marketing and SEO to make sure your audience reaches your content.

Info presented by Rankwinz

Stand Out by Effective Content Marketing Campaigns

In modern fiercely competitive business situation, you can presuppose that it takes forever to run a start-up. Planning your marketing strategy is quite a complicated task, particularly when your initial brand awareness is limited to beta testers. It is no wonder that 9 out of 10 start-ups fail.

An effective content marketing campaign include knowing your brand/service/product inside and out, understanding your targeted public like they are members of your family and successful execution your marketing strategy.

Firstly plan a detailed content strategy. As a start-up, your existence is similar to the existence of a little fish in a big pond. You are swimming among other start-ups and dreaming about growing big enough to stand out. However, far from everyone knows that content marketing can be low-budget. At an average, content marketing costs 60% less than other ways and generates 3 times as many leads in the process.

Before you develop a content piece, stop and think deeply about your strategy. You should know all the details in advance: how it should sound like, look like, clear goals, convey and prospective results. Consider your brand’s mission statement and try to emphasize its most important values. Then import them into your marketing strategy.

Think about the question on the third hand: what your marketing and your product says about your brand/company. You can even test it with your friends, asking them for feedback in order to help measure the producing results. Find out if your messaging is more appealing by infographics, podcasts or video.

Secondarily, befriend your audience. Developing content without actual realizing who is your targeted audience, makes no sense. Companies with a site content strategy aimed at their audience’s preferences are much more likely to have success.

Study your audience through various online surveys, blog comments and market research to really understand their wants and needs. Find out their product perception and lifestyle habits. Try to get as more information about them as possible.

Don’t forget to establish a workflow pipeline and schedule in order to show your potential clients that you are reliable and always ready to help when they need your products or services.

Determine who is that person that creates ideas, writes them,  approves them, edits them and publishes them to keep a steady flow of interesting news, blog posts, videos, infographics and so on.

You should fully understand that content marketing is not about quick results, but effective. Remember, that getting to know your customers takes a lot of time and earning their respect is a privilege. Show customers you care by creating content that reflects their preferences and their unique needs.

Source: http://rankwinz.com/

How to Figure Out and Handle Low-Value Content?

Today it is more important than ever to check your content, especially with the recent Panda update. Google continues to emphasize the importance of high quality content and user engagement and is only increasing the frequency of Panda updates.

It is crucial to make Panda-proofing your website your priority by regularly auditing the domains for poor content that could have negative impacts upon organic search visibility. Regular auditing of your website should include:

·         Searching for low-value or poor-quality content;

·         Cleaning your low-quality content, i.e. removing it, improving it or not indexing it;

·         Giving priority to publish high-quality, informative and engaging content.

Even if you think you are publishing great content, most websites host legacy content that can be quiet un-amazing. Thus, you need some clean up.

What Is Poor-Quality Content?

Low-value content has several different shades:

·         Poor content – this is content you probably bought for $5 or an article from dollar sites. Also, maybe you used article spinners in order to create  “unique” content;

·         Thin content – when there are pages that are too brief to render useful information. Thus, pages that contain less than a few hundred words can be tricky;

·         Duplicate content – this is content that is similar or the exact version of the same page across different URLs;

·         Expired content – examples of such content can be special offer pages that have expired, or are old job listings, expired real estate listings, etc.

·         Dead content – pages serving 404 error due to content or file that doesn’t exist anymore;

·         Un-engaging content – content users don’t find interesting. Even if it is 100% unique and grammatically sound, it is not necessarily engaging. 

How to Identify Low-Quality Content?

So, what are the methods of identifying potentially toxic content? First of all you should manually review every page on your website and evaluate the quality of your content and its value. Of course it requires a lot of hard work.

Another efficient way is to scale and automate your efforts by leveraging the following tools and tactics.

1. Screaming Frog

With the help of this tool you are able to run a crawl in order to identify three content issues, such as thin content, duplicate content and 404 errors. 

2. Google Analytics

Another method to unearth low-quality content is to analyze user engagement signals in Google Analytics. Usually, poorly written content, low-value content and un-engaging content will show substandard engagement signals, including bounce rater, average time on page, page views, pages per session, and goal completions.

How to Handle Low-Value Content?

Once you have identified low-quality content, you need a plan of action to handle it. This means two things: either you are going to improve it or kill it altogether or probably hide it from search engines. If you decide to keep it, there are some key factors to consider:

·         Does it bring traffic?

·         Does it have inbound links?

·         Does it offer real value?

Thus, before removing any content from your website, be sure to analyze the risks and consequences and evaluate the impact that action may exert.

Source: Rankwinz

Find the Visual Angle of Your Brand

Visual social platforms become more and more popular.

The Internet is full of Instagram and Pinterest images, which are more likely to be shared than text. There are plenty of video syndication websites, including Vimeo and YouTube, that are the major places of activity. According to social researches, 29% of all time spent online is watching different videos.

If you have got products to present to the world, find a visual approach to telling your business’ story. Here are several tips for you to start from:

1. Use existing visuals. Most businesses consider that visual marketing force you to create completely new visual content. Of course, visual media can help you in presenting your new ideas; however don’t forget that there are a lot of ways to use your existing visuals. Probably, your company may already have such digital assets as infographics, photographs, short videos or video presentations that can be successfully adapted for social networking sites.

2. Redirect existing content to visual formats. Another method is to review all the existing material and try to see a different angle. Try to use the content in other formats as the foundation for visual content development. Everything from original data to presentations may serve as a good source.

3. Give visual storytelling a try. It’s hard to engage audiences long term with static photos of products. Many campaigns with a creative approach offer telling the story about a product or company through a visual format.

Another method presents a series of images, which show various ways your service or product is used by customers. Or the video can include customer reviews.

4. The visual pool with memes. If have a Facebook account, you have probably noticed that constant stream of posts with quotes and uploaded beautiful images in the News Feed. These so-called “memes” are easy to make with the help of such websites as Canva.com. Use them.

The more your images and videos fit the culture of a specific site, the more they’ll catch on with audiences. Many businesses and entrepreneurs are not sure of where to start with telling their brand’s visual stories. The key to a successful promotion is to think beyond static images and experiment with different modes of storytelling.

Source: http://rankwinz.com/

Social Media Strategies and Email Packs Digital Marketing Power

There are always a lot of debates about Social Media: about how to use it and when to maximize it, how to grow your followers and earn likes. While social media strategies are useful, e-mails are still on their place, especially when it comes to online marketing power.

According to new statistics prepared by My.com, about 50% of Internet users in the United States spend more than an hour every day reading their e-mails. Moreover, it turned out that ¾ of survey respondents check their e-mail in the morning, ½ check at lunch and almost 6 in 10 said that checking their e-mails is the last thing they do before going to sleep.

So, expanding the list of your potential customer e-mail addresses and sending them business news or special offers must be a high priority for your start-up marketing campaigns.

According to the research, Gmail is one of the most popular e-mail services all around the world: 59% of Internet users have a Gmail account. About 70% of users have 2 and more e-mail accounts. Here we can see that Yahoo ranks second. Moreover, according to the data, 12 % of users still have an AOL account.

Source: http://rankwinz.com/

Now Facebook Makes Possible For You to Save Links, Music, Places and so on

Facebook’s News Feed refreshes constantly on its own. All Facebook users gradually become annoyed about that, particularly when they have got friends, who posts wanted and unwanted links to the stream several times a day. Nobody wants to spend the entire day reading all those things.  Therefore, those links that you want to look through can be lost in the each-minute refreshing stream.

Fortunately, Facebook is acutely aware of those limited timeframes for sitting on the social channel. And today the company has introduced a new Save feature, which helps getting back to that shared content or links you need much more easier. It is rolling out to all users on Android, iOS and the Web.

You will be able to save not just preferred links, but also music, places, TV shows and movies that your friends are sharing with. All of those saved items will be compiled in a completely new section. This section is added to theMore tab on mobile. You can save to the section everything you seem interesting and read it in your spare time. You can even share those links with friends from there.

Saved content can be accessed only being online. Therefore Facebook Save doesn’t replace Instapaper or Pocket. Users cannot make their own lists of saved links, etc. since Facebook automatically move everything to buckets for music, places, links, etc. It is quite plain by design.

Source: http://rankwinz.com/

Hello, new robots.txt Tester Update

The robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster tool has got on the road an update to help detecting errors, which appear when Google tries to crawl your site, allows you edit your file, make sure that URLs aren’t blocked, and make it available for you to review older versions of the file.

In case Google cannot crawl a page of a site, the robots.txt tester, situated under the Crawl section, now allows you to test if there is anything in your file that blocks Google.

To get you through complicated directives, the robots.txt emphasizes that directive, which leds to the final judgment. It allows you to change the file as well as test them immediately.

You just have to upload the new file version of to your server and make the changes work. For instance, when Googlebot sees a 500 error for the robots.txt file, it usually stops further crawling of the website.

John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, noticed that even if you believe robots.txt works wonderfully, it would be better to make sure that there are no any warnings and errors.

He also mentioned that, as a rule, many of these problems remain unnoticed. Therefore, you have to double-check if you are blocking any JS or CSS files from crawling. 

Source: http://rankwinz.com/

How to Improve Readership and Reach?

If you want to drive more traffic to your blog, there are a lot of strategies that can increase your progress greatly. Here are some tips on how to improve blog readership.

Many people start investing in blogging and actually it is a good thing. Blogs are great when it comes to driving traffic, building brand, getting links, rankings, etc. A blog can also help connect with your community.

Today creating a great blog has become a real challenge. If you look at a successful blog you may ask yourself: “how did you do this?” But, if you look to some very old posts, you can see that some of them are really terrible. But, it was the very beginning, right? In other words, if you think about a time frame, take into account that over time, you are getting a different audience. In the past, to start a new SEO blog was pretty easy. Today, we have a huge amount of such blogs and the competition is insane.

There are several useful tactics for blogging properly and achieving great results.

1. If you want to get many people who would comment you, share you, reply to you, send you emails regarding the content you publish; in other words to earn participation, you need to take part first. This means to spend time on forums, comment and discuss various topics all the time. As a result, people will want to visit you, too. People will get the idea that you create thoughtful and nice posts.

2. The next thing you should pay attention to is that you should check the first people who participate, contribute or comment on your blog, to see if they left an email address, or Twitter profile, etc. in order to at least send them a thank you via email or Twitter, or even more, to say that you liked their site. By doing so you are more likely to have them back.

3. There are many people who make a terrible mistake. Never ever use a subdomain to host your blog! Your ability to create authority, to boost your rankings, that comes from the rising tide of domain authority, will be separated if you put it on a subdomain; and will be completely separated if you put it on a separate root domain. The best thing you can do is to put it all in a subfolder.

4. It has already become universal truth that good content is stronger than much content. It seems surprising, because many people believe that the more content you produce the more influential and popular you become. But, it has been recently revealed that those blogs today that are influential can be those that produce content once a week, once every month, or several times a month. Because it is better to produce significant things once a month rather than write every day about things that might not catch the readers.

5. Another thing worth doing is to invest in emails subscriptions. If you create a blog, one of the best ways to get your voice out of there and get repeated engagement is to have people subscribed to your blog via email.

These are few major tactics you can use in order to drive much more traffic to your blog. 

Source: http://rankwinz.com/

Losing Money on PPC and Growing Sales

Numerous marketers view pay-per-click advertising only as a strategy for direct response marketing, because of fully transparent metrics, including conversion rates, cost per click, cost of customer acquisition, etc. What is often required in this strategy is the value in engaging with website visitors, even if they do not directly convert from a sponsored Adwords placement.

Taking Branding Into Consideration

It seems paradoxical to think this way, however losing money on PPC advertising can be a sophisticated plan. Pay-per-click support branding initiatives by boosting website visibility. Primarily think about the real estate on a SERP (search engine results page). Users understandably tend to discover considerably more ads than they do organic search results.

Pay-per-click ad example is actually effective, many marketers worry it cannibalizes clicks to our organic search result, because a lot of brand names go uncontested. However, that’s short-sighted point of view. You would be amazed by how much more value search marketers obtain from branded pay-per-click ads.

Even if you realize that your branded search term cost you more than you have planned, with no doubt, continue to waste money at it, because doing this way you make sure that your competitors have fewer opportunities to steal market share.

A Multi-Sector Approach

Opposed to Marketing 101, Pay-per-click can serve as several touch points. Moreover, it is a lot of help when it is a part of a multi-channel strategy. It’s quite interesting that Pay-per-click feeds SEO conversions because when users search your business and related items again, they will probably convert. Sometimes, the synergy between the 2 can be immensely powerful.

For example, let us take a case study by Melissa Mackey from Search Engine Watch. Melissa Mackey describes a situation, where an anonymous B2B e-commerce company tested Pay-per-click advertising to boost sales. After 10 weeks, the site saw a 17% increase in website visits, but, more importantly, a 136% leap in sales. Of course, Pay-per-click was not the site’s sole marketing channel. That said, Mackey dives deeper into the numbers to reveal the true value of Pay-per-click on sales. She says,

We found purchases that were touched at some point by Pay-per-click had a 21% higher average sale than those not influenced by Pay-per-click.

The advantage of such a diversified approach to marketing is that although certain channels may seem like “loss categories”, your overall marketing performance can skyrocket.

To ensure you make the most of your Pay-per-click campaigns and capture value from site visitors, reel them back in with retargeting, email marketing, or social media promotion.

As an advertiser, you may notice the direct response results from your Pay-per-click campaigns become increasingly unprofitable after you first introduce them. Over time, you will realize those losses are minor investments that ultimately support growth and sales in other areas of your business – making Pay-per-click entirely worth it.

Are you willing to lose money on a single marketing campaign to expand your overall company?

Info presented by Rankwinz

3 Main Questions to Create High-quality Content for a Link Building Campaign

The content quality depends directly on the quality of the material you offer. As a rule, the offered information isn’t perfect, because information providers’ knowledge of their own clients is awfully poor.

Don’t forget that a customer survey is a wonderful endless source of rich content. However, in order to collect information, the customer survey should involve these 3 fundamental questions.

While creating great content, you have to get as much information from your clients as possible. Creative ideas you can come with depend on the quantity of information you can obtain. For obtaining the most useful information, you should prepare a list of correct and detailed questions for your clients. When the clients see that you are interested in the question, the trust begins to build and grow strong.  

Many specialists, including SEO professionals and link builders, have found out that customer analysis is one of the most useful sources of publicity and editorial links.

Here are those 3 main questions that can help you create incredibly useful content.

1. Categorization

The categorization question is a quite simple and general question that offers you the perspective opportunity to develop your content afterwards. The question sounds like that: “To which of the following areas do you belong?” And list the main areas for the client to specify the sector.

This question allows you to make content focused on several certain niches.

2. Customer Story

Then ask the client to tell you a story about the company products he has tried, or how he solves a problem, etc. The customer story question should begin with “Tell us a story about…” Customers will like the question, especially in case they have some recent interesting experiences to talk about.

3. Contact Permission

The information given by clients in a survey is confidential. You cannot use it in your content until you inform people that you are conducting some case studies. If they are interested in participating, you can use the valuable material you’ve got.

Contact permission question allows you to do 2 main things that are considered the key to high quality content:

• 1.      You are informing people that you want to create publicity material, including customer stories, which can draw attention of PR savvy respondents.
• 2.      You are getting their permission to go on with your questions and dip into their opinions.

Source: http://rankwinz.com/

3 Things SEO Clients Should Not Worry About

Of course, you desire your optimization campaign to be a success, however there are some details that have to be left to the professionals! There are several things SEO clients should never worry about.

Don’t Worry About Getting #1 Rankings

SEO is aimed at helping you to improve your business’ online presence. One element of the SEO’s job is making you reach the top of search engine rankings, however  it’s just one little part of the whole work process.

That is not about neglecting rankings altogether, but there is just one tool of all possible, which brings great success. Rankings cannot make it alone.

If you are continuously thinking about when you reach the #1 position in search engines, stop doing that! It is not going to happen as quickly as you want. Therefore, it should not be so eagerly waited.

As a rule, a strong #3 position import more than a #1 position. At the same time, there are websites which are too powerful for you to draw ahead of it without considerably increasing your financial resources, energy and time.

The finances may be better spent bringing other keywords to the first page. Having 80 keywords in the top 10 is much more valuable than a single #1 ranking!

Don’t Worry About Interacting on Every Social Platform

Thousands of social networks are used by Internet users. Some of them are more popular. Do you think you need to interact socially on every platform that exists to succeed? Actually, there are two or three platforms that can have any value for you.

Consult your SEO professional to choose social platforms that are best for you and your business.

Don’t Worry About Google's Panda and Penguin Updates

You should never worry about the next Penguin/Panda Update or other major algorithm change. Your SEO specialist should be in advance of Google to be Panda and Penguin proof before those updates were decided.

Therefore, your SEO’s strategies should be as kind as possible for all algorithm changes that have not happened yet. They need to be looking years down the road to determine how to ensure your website weathers any storm that Google can throw at us.

In case you have been negatively impacted by these updates, it might be quite time to look for a new SEO specialist.

Source: http://rankwinz.com/