VE Digital

Author: hello@ve.digital

  • 7 Tips on How to Write More Engaging Content

    7 Tips on How to Write More Engaging Content

    Here are 7 Tips on How to Write More Engaging Content:

    Content writing is a vital part of any marketing strategy. It’s an easy skill that can be mastered over time, but writing engaging content – this is something you need to pay more attention to. In this post, we are going to discuss a few ways you can do to write more engaging content.

    Check out these helpful tips to guide you on your journey in making your next content:

     

    Structure your Article Right

    The design of your content is as important as how it’s written. Make sure to format your article well by using headings, subheadings, and bullets to emphasize your key points. You can even highlight a quote in the middle of your long article just to spice it up.

    Obviously, to make your content look appealing to your readers is your website must also be designed well. Because no matter how great your article is, if your website is messy, it will deter potential readers to actually go in-depth with your write-up.

    Regarding value over any other

    This is very commonly said but couldn’t be more accurate. Valuable and quality content will always be superior to any type. No bullshit, just value. One characteristic of engaging content is it contains something that’s worth reading.

    Aim to teach something to your readers rather than just spouting facts after boring facts.

    7 Tips on How to Write More Engaging Content

     

    Make conversation with your readers

    A lot of articles we see online are merely long pieces of text that, yes, give us the information we need, but do not really engage with us. As a writer who seeks to educate and inform their readers, we have to keep in mind that we must also seek to stir their minds.

    Keep your content concise

    I know writing long content makes for a healthy SEO when that is what you are going for. But what’s the benefit of that if you are not providing any value for your readers and your article is just a piece of flowery words.

    Keep your content concise and straight to the point and always remember to write with your readers in mind.

    Don’t Neglect Visual Media

    Level out your wordy piece of content with appropriate visually appealing images and videos. Internet users nowadays prefer visual content over text content so don’t neglect this aspect.

    Have a Call to Action

    At the end of your articles, always make sure you include one call to action that will invite your readers to do more stuff on your website. Maybe it’s to visit another blog entry or check out another page of your site.

    Always Edit your Work

    Before hitting the publish button, make sure you have read through the content you’ve written. Check it for spelling and grammatical errors because nothing hurts the eye more than an article sprinkled with a little too much typo. I suggest you use Grammarly or Hemingway App as I do.

     

    Hopefully, you’ve learned a thing or two from this post. Creating engaging content can be a challenge but it’s something you can do with practice, a few reminders, and passionate work. 

    Make sure to visit our blog for more articles like this!

     

  • 10 Digital Marketing Mistakes You Need To Avoid Making

    10 Digital Marketing Mistakes You Need To Avoid Making

    10 Digital Marketing Mistakes You Need To Avoid Making

    The online world is constantly evolving, so it’s never a good idea to compare it with the offline world. Therefore, it just makes sense to employ creative and unique marketing techniques that will attract your audience and potential customers. Does your digital marketing strategy effective at producing a good ROI? Are you sure you’re not wasting your money? Let’s explore some digital marketing mistakes you need to avoid – just in case.

    Not Doing More to Promote Your Website

    Having a website is important for any business, but having it alone is not enough if you don’t make enough effort to promote it and share it across cyberspace. The internet has reached its saturation point, at this time, there are already a whooping 1.5 billion websites hosted on the world wide web. If you don’t promote your website, you cannot expect your target audiences to just stumble upon your site.

    Drive traffic to your website by developing high-quality content and investing in SEO & SEM. You can also advertise in search engines to get more exposure. For more ways on how to drive traffic to your website, read: 

    Targeting the Wrong Audience

    This is one of the biggest digital marketing mistakes a business can make. Some companies target a very broad audience because they want to reach more people, then end up discouraged when they don’t get the response they expected. Other companies think they know their audience, but then end up targeting the wrong people.

    If your metrics tell you that your landing pages have increased their number of visitors, identify whether those visitors are your target audience. 

    Avoid this digital marketing blunder by researching your target audience. Find the right target market by researching and testing. Start by creating marketing personas based on your previous and existing buyers. These buyer personas are fictional profiles that represent your ideal customer based on the data about your target audience such as demographics, interests, buying habits, and more. 

    You can generate more than one buyer persona if your brand caters to a variety of audiences. After establishing these personas, try targeting people with the same traits. Test whether targeting a broader audience or a specific and narrower market provides more returns. When you have narrowed down your target market, your digital marketing campaigns will get more relevant leads and will surely be more successful.

    Neglecting Website Design

    Another mistake businesses make is neglecting their website. The number one priority in designing your website is to put the user’s experience first in mind. Being a user-friendly website is a necessity in this digital age. Your website should be fast-loading, easy to use, and provides valuable content. 

    Put more effort into optimizing and improving your website to provide a positive user experience. Make sure your website is mobile-responsive, quick to load, and easy to navigate. 

    Not Having a Blog for Your Website

    Having a blog is one of the best ways to build and grow your brand identity and authority in your field. But many businesses neglect this aspect. Some abandon their blogging efforts, thinking it’s not working enough, while others don’t attempt to make one at all.

    Blogging helps you in several ways like driving more traffic to your website, improve your site rank and SEO, build a relationship with potential clients, and establish you as an authority in your field. 

    10 Digital Marketing Mistakes You Need To Avoid Making

    Not Using Social Media

    Most people live on social media today, and if your target audience does and you’re not using it, then this is a mistake you need to correct. Not using social media will cause you to miss opportunities such as interacting and building relationships with your potential customers, reaching out to new audiences, increasing brand awareness, and generating new leads.  

    Take advantage of social media marketing. Determine the right social media platform for your business. Focus on the platforms where your audiences congregate. Know when your target audiences spend time on that platform and post engaging content in those times. 

    To take your game to the next level, you can opt to invest in social media ads (like on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). The best thing about social media is it’s inexpensive compared to other marketing avenues. Creating social media accounts will cost you nothing, although you will have to spend if you buy advertisements, it is still less expensive than traditional marketing.

    Not Using Videos

    Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter – these are the first things that come to most people’s minds when they hear the words social media. But you are forgetting YouTube. It may not seem like it, but your business needs a YouTube page as well. Make use of this free website to upload your videos and you can then link them to your other digital marketing platforms.

    Videos are not limited to Youtube, they also exist on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Videos are fun to watch, they are engaging and they capture the audience’s attention. Apparently, video marketing is a thing now, and it is a great strategy to get people to check out your business.

    Learn more about video marketing here: Tips for Video Marketing

    Using Clickbait

    To boost traffic and customer engagement, some marketers tend to use clickbait content. Clickbait is a type of content that spins words in its heading in order to sound more appealing to customers, without really holding any real value for them. A common example is a post that is titled “You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next!” even when the content is very much just the average thing. This is using clickbait to lure audiences into your page without really giving them valuable content, and this will hurt your credibility and reputation.

    Avoid this digital marketing mistake at all costs! Instead of using clickbait, focus on making high-quality content that delivers value to your target market. Your headline should tell the audience exactly what they can expect. This way, your follower won’t ever be disappointed with the actual content of your article.

    Splurging only on Paid Advertisements

    Most digital marketers only spend their marketing budget on paid advertisements. What about other digital marketing techniques that are possibly more effective? As a digital marketer, spending on paid advertisements should only be done if you are aiming for more visibility and awareness for your brand. If your brand already has a relevant number of followers and is gradually increasing, it might be better for you to invest in other forms of digital marketing. Maybe you could look into developing more high-quality content or improving your website or landing pages.

    Spamming

    Do not, I repeat, DO NOT spam your customers. This should not even be an issue today, but some people are spamming their audience without even knowing it. Now, how do you determine if you are spamming? Look at your emails and ask yourself if these emails are helpful, relevant, informative, and/or educational. Your emails need to be relevant to your recipients because the last thing you want is for them to unsubscribe to your email list.

    Give your subscribers options when they sign up to receive your emails. Do they want monthly or weekly content? If your customers choose to only receive your emails once a month, make sure not to contact them every day. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself losing your precious subscribers.

    Ignoring Customer Emails

    When a customer has feedback on your business, they will find a way to send you a message. When you do get these emails, it’s highly important to respond to them all the time. If you ignore these emails, there’s a probability that you will lose potential customers. 

     

    No business is perfect, so don’t be discouraged if you have done any of the mistakes above. The first thing to do is acknowledge the things you’ve been doing incorrectly and when you’ve identified these digital marketing mistakes, take actions that will correct your errors. 

     

  • 10 of the Best Productivity Tools for your Startup Business

    10 of the Best Productivity Tools for your Startup Business

    10 of the Best Productivity Tools for your Startup Business

    Having a startup is gonna get you busy and while that’s a good thing, you’ll need to make that busy-ness into productiveness that will meet your vision and goals. If you are looking for the best productivity tools to help you out, you’re in the right spot.

    There are plenty of great tools available to help you manage your business and reasonably priced as well. The challenge is to find those that will fit and work well for you.

    To save you time from scouring the internet for these, we’ve rounded up a list of 10 of the best productivity tools for your startup business. Check them out below.

     

    10 of the Best Productivity Tools

     

    Asana

    This tool will help your team manage projects, brainstorm ideas, and more without flooding your team with unnecessary emails and follow-up calls. It has templates and built-in to-do lists that you can readily use, and you can assign tasks and responsibilities to your colleagues. Asana has free plan offers for up to 15 team members while the premium (paid) version starts at $10 a month per team member.

     

    Slack

    This is a well-known app that’s widely used among businesses that have remote employees. Slack is mainly used for messaging and document sharing, a great alternative for email. This is definitely one of the best productivity tools out there.

     

    Google Workspace (G Suite)

    This is a great tool for digital enterprise management. Starting at just $5 a month, you can send emails, manage and collaborate on internal documents, share calendars, track website analytics, and more in one place. Whether you’ll be using your computer, tablet, or phone, Google Workspace can make your life so much easier.

     

    10 of the Best Productivity Tools for your Startup Business

     

    Canva

    Canva is an online graphic design tool that’s super helpful for startups to make their own marketing materials such as brochures, social media graphics, powerpoints, and other graphics-heavy documents. It’s available to use for free but the premium version offers more images and templates that will be helpful for your startup business.

    Read: Using Canva for your business

     

    Wunderlist

    If you are the type of person who needs to jot down the important things that you need to do for the next day, Wunderlist is for you. This is a simple app to keep the daily to-do list that you can share with anybody else. It’s both available on Android and iOS.

    Calendly

    This is scheduling software that will help you manage your appointments. People use this tool to make coordinate meetings and connect business relationships. Calendly integrates, syncs, and aligns everything around the user’s meetings. Users just have to set their time of availability and choose what type of meeting they want. The app will then coordinate everything.

    It also sends automatic follow-ups and reminders to make sure you don’t miss anything.

     

    Upwork

    When you own a business, you should know that it’s just not possible to handle everything by yourself. To become more productive and milk your time as much as you can, you’ll need to delegate tasks. If you need to outsource workloads, Upwork is the biggest freelancers platform that you can sign up in to find other people to help you out.

    Upwork connects companies to freelancers of any field, depending on your needs. If you need a designer, a writer, a bookkeeper, a developer, or anything else, this website can match you up with prospects.

    Hootsuite

    This tool will help you manage your social media accounts, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, or whatever. Hootsuite is a helpful tool to manage your content planning, build your brand’s social media engagements, track your analytics, and keep your brand’s online presence alive.

     

    Expensify

    To manage your finances, Expensify is a helpful tool to manage your company expenses. This tool will make it easy to upload receipts track expenses on your credit card purchases.

     

    HARO (Help A Reporter Out)

    This is a helpful daily email that will let you establish yourself an authority in your industry. When you sign up with HARO as a source, you’ll specify your specialty and area of expertise, and journalists will contact you when they need your thoughts and insights for a story.

     

    Once you find the right productivity tools that work for you, you’ll get to focus more on running your startup business. So hopefully, this list will help you through.

  • Conversations on Social Media

    Conversations on Social Media

    Conversations on Social Media

    How do you craft your responses to mentions and replies on your social media that will encourage positive engagements and minimize conflict from your audience? Today’s post will be all about that – conversations on social media. When you interact with your followers, particularly when you’re answering their queries or handling their complaints, you will need to develop skills beyond the copywriting tips we tackled in the previous posts. You will need to have customer service skills in this matter.

    Here are two tips we want to share with you to make your conversations on social media successful.

     

    VARY YOUR REPLIES

    If your brand receives a lot of similar questions and responses from your followers, it can be very tempting to reply to all of them the same way to save time and effort. This is okay, but the problem is that it’s really obvious to everyone looking at your feed and it will make you look insincere. Sometimes, people might even assume that you are using automated bots and that there’s no human being behind your socials. The challenge of having to start from scratch every time is that it will consume a lot of your time and it will very likely have more typos, and sometimes you’re at risk of going off-message especially when you are handling complaints.

    One tried and tested solution for this is to keep your replies varied while also making them free from errors and making your replies quick.

    Here’s an example of what a brand might send regularly for queries or complaints: 

    Send us a DM with your six-digit order number and we’ll look into it.

    And here are some variation: 

    • Drop us a DM with your six-digit order number and we’ll look into it.
    • We’ll look into this for you. Just DM us your six-digit order number.
    • DM us with your six-digit order number and we’ll investigate.
    • Do you have a six-digit order number? Please DM it to us and we’ll investigate.
    • Let us look into this. Please send us your six-digit order number by DM.

    You can slightly vary the wording of your message while keeping the meaning the same. Take advantage of the internet and use an online thesaurus for help. Once you get the hang of the process, it will become easier to do and you’ll become quicker at it.

     

    Conversations on Social Media

     

    When you have your alternatives, you can pick and choose from them for your replies. Your variations can have more or less formal versions of the same message and you can just pick one that best matches the style used by your customer. 

    This is a quick and easy way to make your reply less robotic and more tailored. Another tip is to address your customers by their name. It’s a nice personal touch to include their name on your message and you can use ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ or adding your first name or initials at the end of your message to make it more personalized.

    Example: Hi Kathy, send me a DM with your six-digit order number and I’ll look into it. – Renee

    These personal touches, no matter how small, reminds the customer you’re interacting with that you are human because sometimes people forget that businesses are also run by other people when they’re talking to them on social media.

     

    TAKE INSPIRATION FROM THE PROFESSIONALS

    JetBlue is an award-winning airline that’s recognized for its excellent customer service on social media. Every day, they receive thousands of DMs or mentions on their Twitter account, but despite this overflow, they still managed to respond to their customers with conversations that feel natural and organic. They are always on the lookout for opportunities to add value and connect with their audience, not just to respond to every tweet that comes their way.

    Browse through JetBlue’s Twitter replies feed to get inspiration on how they interact with their customers efficiently and effectively. 

     

    Responding to messages, comments, and tweets on social media, it’s important to take hold and improve your customer service skills. These interactions are as much about customer service as it is about copywriting. Vary your replies, add some personal touches, and learn tactics from successful brands to save yourself some writing time and to make your conversations on social media more effective.

    For more posts like this, check out our blog.

  • 5 Useful Ways to Incorporate Video Marketing into your Business

    5 Useful Ways to Incorporate Video Marketing into your Business

    Incorporate Video Marketing into your Business

    Are you looking for ways to level up your small business’ digital marketing? Here are ways to incorporate video marketing into your business strategy.

    We’ve talked about video marketing in our blog a couple of times. In this post, we will be talking about actionable steps on how to include videos in your content marketing strategy. You don’t need to have a director or a scriptwriter or a film crew. You only need your creative ideas and these video marketing tips. 

    Videos play an important part in digital marketing today. Most people prefer watching videos to reading a long all-text article to help them with their problems or even just gain information from something they’re curious about.

    You can leverage this information to make your brand and company more appealing to your audience. Videos are effective in telling a story, building connections, and tapping into the emotions of your consumers.

    With a solid video marketing strategy, you can build and establish trust with your audience and share your brand’s story in a. elaborate way. 

    Here are five (5) ways on how to incorporate video marketing into your business.

     

    Tell Stories

    A video is an excellent platform for storytelling. Take this opportunity to show off the behinds of what your brand is all about. Be creative and tell stories about the business’s history, your employer’s stories, some problems you encountered, or even a customer’s story. These will allow viewers to connect with you and put real faces behind the logo that they usually see.

     

    Make How-To Videos

    Showcase your products and address frequently asked questions about them in a video. Give your audience useful advice that they can apply to their lives. This is a great way to show your expertise and knowledge about your industry.

     

    Incorporate Video Marketing into your Business

     

     

    Repurpose Old Content into Videos Incorporate Video Marketing into your Business

    Make use of the content already found on your website and make them into several videos. This is a great strategy to maximize the use of your old content. Update them and repurpose them into video format.

    If you have blog posts and lists, you can convert them into video format and make them even more interesting. Make these articles into bite-sized information that is easy to digest and make them into 1-2 min videos that are shareable to generate engagement. Don’t forget to add calls to action at the end!

     

    Create Short Videos for Social Media

    Millennials and the younger generation flock over social media for news and updates so it just makes sense that you branch out your digital marketing to social media as well.

    Make short and simple videos that will resonate with your target audience. People love pleasing visuals and this is the perfect opportunity for you to make engaging and shareable videos to garner views and engagement in social media.

    Use Consumer-Generated Content Incorporate Video Marketing into your Business 

    An effective and affordable way to bring in new customers is by using customer-generated video ads. Nothing beats authenticity and people trust the opinions and reviews of previous customers before deciding that a product is worth a try. Incorporate Video Marketing into your Business

    Ask existing customers for honest reviews about their experience with your products and services. Ask for photos or videos and let them share their testimonials about your brand. You can then use these materials for your video marketing strategy. Upload these on your Instagram stories or reels or IGTV, share them to your Facebook My Day stories, or even Twitter Fleets if that’s where your audience is.

    These short videos will serve as social proof that can garner trust for your brand when people search for feedback from your previous customers. Incorporate Video Marketing into your Business

     

    Breathe life into your marketing strategy and incorporate video marketing into your business. It may be time-consuming and you’ll have to make the effort to make your videos pop, but this is definitely worth your time.

    Videos let your potential customers see what your brand has to offer and what it’s truly about. With this in your arsenal, you will also build an authentic relationship with your audience.

    Still in doubt if video marketing is effective? Read Benefits of Video Marketing For Your Small Business.

  • Copywriting for Instagram

    Copywriting for Instagram

    Copywriting for Instagram

    Over the last two weeks, we’ve shared valuable copywriting tips that you can apply over your various social media platforms. We’ve talked about the best points to target when you are copywriting for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Today, we will talk about copywriting for Instagram. What are the important points to target in this platform? 

    In this post, you will learn another three techniques to make your Insta captions more engaging. These tips will help you create compelling posts on all your social platforms as well. 

    Copywriting for Instagram

    Fast Facts:

    Instagram Audience: Positivity-seekers, influencers

    Instagram users are a positive bunch. They are looking for happy posts with upbeat interactions and good stories. Instagram is a very visual platform and it is also a great place for great copywriting. 

     

    Instagram Post Length: 138-150 Characters

    Instagram captions are longer than any other platform. They allow lengthy posts but don’t get carried away. The perfect caption length here is still just between 130-150 characters. Although this is the case, Instagram is a platform where its users post longer captions, almost like mini-blogs. And some are very successful in doing this. If you want to experiment with longer captions, this social media platform is the place to do it.

     

    Instagram Hashtags: 10-11 per post

    Instagram is the platform to get crazy over hashtags. The optimum number of hashtags you can use is 10-11 and you can use them to highlight words, get on with the trends, and make sure you show up on the search results. Generally, it’s preferable to separate your hashtags from your main caption. Some even put their hashtags on their post’s comment section. Hashtags on Instagram are almost like an additional list of keywords rather than being part of your photo caption.

     

     

     

    Instagram (and social media in general) is really all about engagement. Here are three techniques you can use to make your copywriting for Instagram more compelling, and will help drive engagement on all your social profiles if applied well.

     

    Be VISUAL

    It’s not something new when you see how the photos on Instagram posts often do not correlate to their captions. It’s like having the images and caption being made by different people. Or sometimes, the caption is just a direct description of what you can already see in the photo without adding anything new or relevant, which is basically pointless. To have good copywriting for Instagram, your caption must go hand-in-hand with your image. 

    Example: Canva

    Canva has a very visually and aesthetically pleasing feed, full of bright and detail-oriented photos. What particularly makes their posts stand out is that their images and captions work together. Their images include a little bit of copy that gets the viewer’s attention, giving them a sense of intrigue enough to prompt them to read the captions below it.

     

    Be a Storyteller

    In social media, storytelling is a very powerful marketing tool. And Instagram is the perfect platform for storytelling because it’s very visual and your caption for your posts can be a bit longer than any other. Copywriting for Instagram is made more enjoyable because of this.

    Example: Outdoor Voices

    This brand has a well-curated feed that tells snippets of what they are and what they stand for. Each caption has a relevance that goes along with the images and what’s really noticeable in their feed is that they value their audience. And their posts are varied so you can expect to get fresh content from them. As always, the number one tip when you want to incorporate storytelling in your marketing efforts is to focus on your customers. This is a clever way to showcase your product or service without making it all about you.

    There are several ways to improve your storytelling on your captions. But as long as you make it all about your audience, there’s really no way you can get it wrong.

     

    Make Spaces

    To make your long captions more inviting and readable, format your text and add spaces in between them. A huge chunk of text is boring and intimidating so people will rarely read the whole of it. Space out your sentences, this will make them more accessible and reader-friendly.

    Tool: Instagram Link Break

    This is one of those apps that does exactly what its name says. Type in your caption, add line breaks to space it out and copy and paste it to your post to make it more readable.

    This is a cleaner and more elegant way of typing your posts rather than using dots or dashes on each line.

     

    Instagram may be all about aesthetically pleasing visuals, but that doesn’t mean that you can just neglect your copywriting. In fact, the positive vibe and trend for lengthy captions make copywriting for Instagram fun as you can incorporate storytelling techniques and be more experimental with your captions.

     

    For more posts like this, check out our blog.

  • 10 Effective SEO Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic

    10 Effective SEO Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic

    10 Effective SEO Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic

    In the digital world, the business landscape has become saturated and more competitive than ever. If you don’t make the effort to stay on top of the trends and be visible in search results, it will be a reason for a decline in your business. Here are effective SEO strategies to increase your organic website traffic.

     

    10 Effective SEO Strategies

    Improve Your Headlines

    Appealing headlines are effective to attract viewers’ attention. It is arguably the strongest advertising feature of an article because it’s the first thing that readers will see in the search results.

    You will need to make an effort to write engaging headlines to stand out from your competition and garner more clicks. Just make sure that you optimize your headlines for both the search engines and the users.

    To optimize your article headlines, here are some tips to remember:

    • Keep your headlines under 60 characters.
    • Use a descriptive title.
    • Place the keyword towards the end of the headline.
    • Use eye-catching and powerful words to attract the viewer’s attention.
    • Use numbers in your titles, it increases the chance of clicks.

    Read: Effective Writing: How to Write an Irresistible Headline

     

    Write Longer Content (at least 1,400 Words)

    Google now prefers longer content as it tends to accumulate more backlinks which will translate to better rankings and drive more traffic. However, everyone can’t write 2k+ words in every blog post as it is time-consuming, intensive, and usually not necessary to all content.

    When you’re struggling to generate 2k+ words of content, you can always look back to your old blog posts and refresh and expand them. Old content already has authority and by updating it and adding additional content, you can simply boost its performance in the search results.

     

     

    10 of the Best Productivity Tools for your Startup Business

    Make Your Posts Easy to Read

    Aside from writing quality content, to increase your organic traffic, you’ll need to further optimize your content for readability.

    Make sure you write an enticing introduction that will talk about what your whole article is about. You also have to make sure that there are no typos and grammatical errors. Format your content into bite-sized pieces by writing shorter paragraphs so that it’s easier to read. Mix longer and shorter sentences together to create harmony through your paragraphs.

    Use headers and sub-headers on your article so that skim readers can easily scan what your post is about. When you have a list of facts, ideas, etc, use bullet points to iterate them. Lastly, balance out your text-heavy content with photos and videos so you won’t overwhelm your readers.

    Work on Your Meta Description

    Meta descriptions are influential features in marketing your website pages in the SERPs. Construct your meta descriptions properly and make sure to include your keywords in them.

    Make your meta descriptions precise yet exciting. Make it tempting so that you’ll attract readers, but also make it understandable for viewers to know about your page just by reading it. Write your description in under 180-160 characters.

     

    Link From High Domain Authority Websites

    Including a high DR and high-traffic website with similar audiences to yours will help your site. These links will draw relevant traffic and improve your site’s authority as well.

    You can reach out to site owners to link to your web content or publish your guest posts on their websites.

    This can take some time and effort but having relevant backlinks can help you improve your site’s traffic tremendously.

     

    Increase Website Speed

    Site speed is another important factor when it comes to website performance. It has also become a ranking factor so it’s important for your website to have a fast loading speed.

    Google has many SEO tools to help you improve your website speed. Here are some tools to help your out:

    The best site speed is between 1-3 seconds.

     

    Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

    77% of American’s have a smartphone and 79% of smartphone users purchase online using their mobile devices. Google has also gone mobile and now, it uses its mobile smartphone user-agent to crawl sites. Your website’s mobile version will be crawled and indexed first before the desktop version, so if you want your website to show up on the SERP, build and focus on your website’s mobile responsiveness and experience.

     

    Write a Roundup Post

    Round-up blog posts are popular because they are consolidated data about certain topics. People always turn to the internet to learn what’s the best of something.

    It’s a great way to get different viewpoints and learn new things, it’s also one of the effective SEO strategies to improve your rankings and drive more traffic to your website.

     

    Optimize For Image Search

    Optimizing your website for image search is an excellent way to grab traffic from several sources. Consider taking care of your alt tags, file names, image sizes, image sitemap, and hosting your images on a CDN.

    Here’s a helpful blog that you can read on image optimization. 

     

    Don’t Overlook Technical SEO

    Your site’s technical SEO matters just as much as any other.

    • Make sure that your site runs and loads on HTTPS so that Google can tag it as a secure page.
    • Enable AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for mobile. 
    • Correct your semantic markups as it helps Google understand your website more. Semantic markups are your HTML tags that will help emphasize the important information on your website. This includes your headings and sub-headings.
    • Fix your broken links and 404 errors by redirecting them into working URLs. 

     

    SEO is ever-evolving and digital marketers and business owners need to keep up and adapt fast to keep your website afloat.

    Spend time to learn the fundamentals of SEO, content creation, and copywriting so that you can improve your website performance gradually.

    There’s a lot more to consider regarding SEO, but we hope that these effective SEO strategies we listed will help you and your website.

  • 7 Things You Need To Check on Your Website Regularly

    7 Things You Need To Check on Your Website Regularly

    Things You Need To Check on Your Website Regularly

     

    A website is a business’s storefront, so it’s important to always keep it updated and problem-free. Just like a house, your website needs maintenance and constant TLC. When you fail to clean up and maintain your home, it will slowly disintegrate and lose value. The same thing will happen with your website. We’ve listed seven (7) things you need to check on your website regularly.

     

    Check your website load time

    There’s no certainty that site speed affects your Google ranking, however, it does affect the user experience. It’s crucial to have a short loading time because viewers have a short attention span. If users are not getting a good experience when they visit your website, they will instantly click the close button.

    Make sure that your website loads fast. There are free tools online that you can use like Google’s own page speed insight tool. Aim for a score of 85 or above.

     

    Find and Fix Technical Errors

    Even the smallest technical errors can affect your credibility, so make sure to check your website for these errors. Regularly review your website for the following:

    • False redirects
    • Inconsistent styles or formatting
    • Typos or grammatical errors
    • Broken links
    • Missing or outdated content
    • Missing metadata
    • Test out your forms

    Regularly check all your forms and calls to action. Test your contact forms and your website’s checkout process, too. Just because they are working fine today does not mean that they will be next week.

    There’s a lot of reasons why forms will stop working. It can be caused by bugs, website software updates, different APIs problems, and so on.

    These forms are how customers reach you so you will need to make sure that they always work. Otherwise, you’ll be losing business opportunities.

    Check your forms every other week to see if they are still working.

     

    Build and Improve Your SEO

    SEO or Search Engine Optimization is crucial for websites. It’s how Google finds you. As Google constantly adjusts its algorithms to improve user experience, you also need to constantly update your website’s SEO standing.

    Make sure you have your page titles, header tags, meta tags, alt tags, and sitemap fixed and intact. There’s a lot of things involving SEO so having the basics down is one task off your list. Continue to build and improve your SEO on a regular basis.

    Here’s a free online tool you can use to check your website’s performance, SEO, mobile-friendliness, and security.

     

    Check your domain names

    Make sure that your domain names are renewed annually. You don’t want your domain to expire because this will lead to problems. Put a reminder on your calendar when you have to renew your domain name if it’s not already on auto-renew mode.

     

    Things You Need To Check on Your Website

    Design and compatibility with browsers

    According to HubSpot, 94% of internet users say that a website’s design is crucial for building trust.

    Website design is just as important as everything else. Your site needs to look pleasing to the eyes and a breeze to navigate through. And you shouldn’t only be satisfied with how it looks in Google Chrome, you also need to make sure that it looks great on other web browsers.

    Moreover, your website should also be mobile responsive.

     

    Review contact information

    Check the contact information found on your website and review if they are still accurate. Make sure to have the correct details such as email address, contact numbers, and location. 

     

    In digital marketing, the only constant is change, and so to keep up with time, you need to keep up with the trends.

    To keep your website relevant and up to date, do regular reviews and check-ups to make sure that you don’t have any major and minor hiccups. Of course, there are other things you need to check annually aside from the things we mentioned above, but these are the non-negotiable ones that require your immediate attention.

    For more articles like this, make sure to visit our blog. 

  • Copywriting for Facebook

    Copywriting for Facebook

    Copywriting for Facebook

    To continue with our copywriting series this week, we are going to talk about copywriting for Facebook. In this post, you will learn three techniques that will make your Facebook posts more attention-grabbing than before. These techniques will help your posts stand out from others and this can also be applicable on your other social platforms.

     

    Facebook Fact File:

    Audience: 40+, less web-savvy

    The average Facebook user is relatively older compared to other social media platforms, and these users are likely to be less web-savvy. This is an important thing to bear in mind when writing for Facebook.

    Post Length: 40-80 characters

    Did you know that Facebook users have the lowest attention span? When it comes to engagement, posts that perform the best are those with only 40-80 characters in them.

    Hashtag: 1 per post

    On Facebook, hashtags are not a big deal. You can use them if you want to but just use one per post. 

     

    Copywriting for Facebook

     

    Another important thing to remember about Facebook is it does not like you linking out to content that’s outside the platform. The algorithm is still a mystery but unless you pay for an ad on a post that includes an outbound link, your post will be less likely seen by your followers compared to a post that includes an inbound link.

    Now that you’re aware that Facebook users have short attention spans, you really need your posts to stand out if you want to make an impression. Let’s explore some ways to do just that.

    It’s tough enough to grab your audience’s attention but if you want them to read your post, it’s important that you put these practices into action.

     

    Capitalize First Letters

    Knowing that the best performing Facebook posts are only between 40-80 characters, it’s would be easiest and more helpful to write them as headlines. They have a similar job to do and are about the same length. Headlines are designed to grab the reader’s attention and encourage them to read the content more, this is also what we want to achieve for our post.

    With that said, headlines are usually written in title case when the main words are capitalized. This technique can be effective for social posts as well because sentences written in title case are more attention-grabbing than those written in sentence case.

    Tool: Title Case Converter

    This tool is a great help in converting your text into a title case no matter how it was previously written. It’s quick and accurate, a handy tool that you can bookmark that can make your writing life easier.

    PLEASE DON’T DO THIS. Please, just don’t. Don’t use all caps on your posts. Capitalizing your texts makes you look shouty and desperate. And this will discourage your readers to ignore your post rather than engage in them.

     

    Use Magic Numbers

    What’s a magic number? Well, any number used in a short is magic. Human beings, for some reason, are naturally drawn to numbers. Including one or two in your copy is an easy and cheap way to boost its engagement. Just a little reminder though, you need to write the numbers in numerals rather than words. Talk about hitting birds with one stone, you get to improve your post’s engagement and keep your character count down. It’s a win-win!

     

    Get Personal

    The last technique is inspired by Sprout Social. They are a company that helps people connect with customers on social media, so they really know what they are doing. 

    The majority of Sprout Social’s posts take the reader to their starting point, to their why’s. They mostly don’t talk about themselves or their company or their customers generally. They make a very clear stand on what their concept means for their users and why they should engage in their posts. Making your posts more personal will humanize your brand and this will make it relatable to your readers. 

     

    An important tip when copywriting for Facebook is to make your posts as attention-grabbing as you can so they will make an impact. The three straightforward tips shared above can make your posts stand out. Master making your posts into headlines by using a title case, tap into the power of magic numbers, and make your posts personal and all about the readers.

     

    For more posts like this, check out our blog.

  • Why Content Marketing Actually Works

    Why Content Marketing Actually Works

    Why Content Marketing Actually Works

    We live in a content-driven world, where more and more businesses need to write articles to drive traffic, engage customers and generally get people talking about them. But how do you create content? What should it be about? When should you publish it? And why should you bother in the first place? In this article, I’ll tell you what content marketing is, how to get started, and why content marketing works so well.

     

    What is Content Marketing?

    Content marketing is a marketing strategy that relies on the creation and sharing of valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience. It is primarily used by companies to increase brand awareness, attract new customers, engage, trust, and ultimately sell. It is the lifeblood of your business. It’s what makes you an authority in your field, building trust and establishing a relationship with prospects. It’s also the foundation of inbound marketing strategy.

    Content Marketing can be done in many ways: blogs, videos, social media posts, infographics etc. as long as it has the ability to attract new customers for your business. This marketing technique has been proven to be one of the most effective methods for reaching potential customers and improving relationships with existing ones. It has become so popular that thousands of businesses are using it worldwide today.

    Content marketing can be used by both small businesses and big brands. The more popular forms of content marketing include blogs, eBooks, white papers, webinars, infomercials, podcasts, and other creative ways that may not fall into any of these categories.

     

    It’s Not Always Blogging

    Content marketing doesn’t always mean blogging; in fact, it can also be other types of content like videos, photos, podcasts, case studies, lead magnets, and more. The key is to create or curate content that provides value to your target audience.

    Content marketing is not just about publishing blog posts and hoping people will see them. It’s about creating valuable content that solves a problem for your target audience. It could be an article that helps your target audience learn something new, like this one. It could be a video that helps answer a question they need to be answered. It could be a podcast that speaks directly to their pain points.

    Whether it’s a blog, a video, an e-book, an infographic, or a Facebook post—whatever form it takes, the purpose of content marketing is to bring value to your target audience. So, what should you write about? Where do you get fresh content?

     

    Where Do You Get the Content?

    It’s tempting to think that content is easy. That all we have to do is open our eyes, observe the world around us, and start writing. Many people who want to start businesses ask me where I find my content, and how I find it. The answer is: “I don’t know.”

    There’s really no efficient way to get content but to experiment, take suggestions from readers, and maybe get lucky when an idea hits you. But then, there are ways to get ideas and material for your business blog or website.

    First, you can use your own experience. This is valuable because you know more about your own life than anyone else does. But it’s also tricky because it’s tempting to be self-indulgent or even misleading. It’s not uncommon for people to write about their lives and then go back later and fill in the boring parts with made-up stuff so that their past seems more exciting than it really was.

    Second, you can read other people’s blogs, books, and magazines. The danger here is that you will simply repost articles that you find interesting without adding anything new or personal. It is more work to put yourself into things you didn’t experience first-hand; but if you can manage it, it will make your blog a lot more interesting and helpful to your readers.

    Third, you should read nonfiction books and articles by experts in various fields that are relevant to your business. This is a good way to learn the basics of your field so that you can talk about them–and the people who write these books are usually experts!

    Why Content Marketing Actually Works

    Why Content Marketing Works

    Content marketing works because of the way well-optimized content spreads. The better your article is, the more readers you get, and the more readers you get, the more links you get. And the more links you get, the better your articles perform. It is a virtuous cycle and the hard part is getting into the cycle. Once you’re in, though, it can become self-supporting. You can outsource it, though that costs time and money. It’s usually easier to start with just one piece of great content and then use that as a stepping stone for other pieces of great content.

    As said earlier, content marketing is the practice of creating and sharing valuable online content to attract, engage, and acquire customers. Note that “content” is not just a synonym for “text.” When using it correctly, content marketing involves audio and video production, infographics, webinars, ebooks and white papers—any format that delivers value to your audience.

    This marketing strategy has become the default sales method for one simple reason: it works better than anything else out there. For example, sending email pitches straight into people’s inboxes almost never works anymore. But sending them helpful articles? That works very well indeed.

    Content marketing works because it’s more efficient than other forms of marketing. Instead of interrupting people and hoping they remember your message, you’re providing them with the information they would otherwise have had to seek out on their own. That makes it more likely that they’ll pay attention and remember what they learn, creating a virtuous cycle in which the more useful your content is, the more widely read it becomes.

     

    Final Thoughts

    A good content marketing campaign is a little bit like being on the right kind of diet. If you have the right strategy, you’ll find that it can bring great results. If you don’t, you won’t see those results, and it may even look like poor results when they look at your traffic or engagement.

    With the right approach to content and research, you can create a blog post that brings in readers (and potential clients/customers) and stand out from the crowd.

    The insights above should give you an idea of what content marketing is, why it works, and how to get content ideas to take advantage of this great online marketing tool.

     

    Recommended Reads:

    5 Reasons Why Your Content Marketing Strategy is not Working

    7 Benefits of Content Marketing for Small Businesses

    5 Companies Dominating Content Marketing