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News & analysis on digital marketing & analytics
Want to Pump up Your Link-Building? Create an Infographic
Infographics. Everyone has heard of them, and everyone is trying to use them to enhance their SEO efforts, promote their brand, increase awareness about a particular product, service, cause, industry phenomenon, up-and-coming trend … you get the point.
They’re one of the hottest crazes to hit the search engine marketing industry this year, and there is tons of potential for these visual data representations to grow in power, prominence and influence.
Aside from their aesthetically pleasing way of presenting information, infographics are a fabulous way to pump up your link building efforts. That’s because infographics are fun. They’re eye-catching. They provide information that’s easy to digest. And they’re enjoyable to look at. Sometimes they’re even amusing and entertaining, or they can be used to create controversy around an issue. In other words, they have a buzz factor.
On top of all that, they are a great way to build links to your website, and promote your brand across the web. Instead of using an article or blog post to talk about your company’s products or services, analyze a topic, or provide an industry overview, you can create a unique infographic that will display your information visually, and include an inbound link to your site.
Some of the top benefits of creating an infographic include:
- Promoting your brand in a fun, unique and interesting way
- Representing important information in an easily digestible manner (we all know the majority of online users hate to read)
- Eliciting an emotional response from readers
- Hosting the visual data on your domain (creator’s rights)
- Getting inbound links back to your site
- Requesting inbound links that have specific anchor text for keywords you are targeting
- Promoting your brand/products/message to influential bloggers
- Raising awareness through social media channels
- Increasing site popularity
A good infographic takes time to create – and you’ll definitely need to enlist the help of a talented graphic designer – but the end result is well worth it. These powerful new SEO gems have the potential to create some great results, while really ramping up your link building efforts in exciting new ways.
Comment: Feel free to share your thoughts.
Category: Content Creation, Link-Building, Online Marketing, Online PR, SEO
Six Weapons to Create Credible Content
What separates a good salesman from a bad salesman? How about credibility? If a salesman lacks credibility, you will not consider buying from him. Right?
Well, the same is true when it comes to the content on your website. If your website lacks credibility, how could you ever expect your audience to buy into what you are selling?
The truth is that there is no such thing as a natural-born salesman. Sure, some may make it look easy. But in reality, these salesmen work hard at building and nurturing relationships. In this same respect, your website needs to work hard at developing, maintaining and growing its credibility.
Sound a little overwhelming? Robert B. Cialdini has simplified this process of creating credibility for you. In his book, Influence – Science and Practice, Cialdini defines six “Weapons of Influence.” When used to their potential, these “weapons” will help your website create credibility and turn visitors into customers:
- Reciprocity: The concept is simple enough. Do something for people and they feel obligated to return the favor. Your website can accomplish this by offering free webcasts, samples or trials.
- Social Proof: Ever wonder why you laugh out loud at a television show? Maybe it has something to do with the laugh track? Create this same effect with client testimonials and social media posts.
- Authority: This is a trick that every parent understands. Establish yourself as an authority figure, and your audience will follow. Simulate this authority on your website by citing respected sources, organizations and studies.
- Liking: It is hard to trust someone you do not like. The best way to make your audience “like” you is to be honest and straightforward. Avoid being deceptive about the benefits of your products or services.
- Consistency and Commitment: Establishing a pattern of consistency is a surefire way to build credibility. Adding a blog or resource section to your website shows a commitment to success.
- Scarcity: Want an example of scarcity? A few years ago Nintendo created a worldwide craze by limiting production on their new Wii video game console. The consensus – if the availability of a product or service is limited, it must be “Awesome!” Creative calls-to-action on your website can create a similar effect.
And it is that simple. When you focus on building, maintaining and cultivating your website’s credibility, your internet marketing campaign will experience greater success.
Fathom That?! – Ep. 9 – Learn How Online Video Consumption is Growing
This week’s episode of “Fathom That?!” features Steve Kozak, Director of Video Production at Fathom.
Steve shares some recent stats on how online video viewing compares to TV. He also talks about the different ways you can use online video to help your business.
Then … Stay tuned! Learn about the upcoming 12-episode e-commerce series, “Gear Up For The Holidays.” Fathom will share different tips each week leading up to Christmas on how you can better capitalize on the e-commerce market. Stay tuned!
Facebook rolls out new content sharing, privacy controls
Facebook users have been asking for years, and the company finally listened (perhaps the rise of Google+ had something to do with it), as a slew of new privacy and content sharing controls new privacy and content sharing controls have now been introduced to users.
These new changes are wide-ranging, covering everything from who is able to see your profile and location-tagging to easier overall access to your privacy controls. Making access of the controls over who can see your content easier has consisted of giving users an inline dropdown menu that allows them to make the necessary changes right on the profile.
Additionally, simply posting on one’s profile comes with a number of new options. When choosing to share content or change one’s status, a few extra things are available:
- Friend Tagging: You can now tag non-friends and pages you have yet to Like in your posts, though if you have been tagged by a non-friend, you have the opportunity to approve it before it shows up on your profile.
- Location Tagging: As Facebook Places continues to be phased out, the location feature has been opened up to any status update, whether it’s a simple status update, a photo, or a Wall post.
- Post Editing: As always, you can choose who sees your updates, but now you’ll be able to change who can see your post after it has been sent.
A number of other features have been rolling out as well, which points to a concentrated effort by Facebook to finally provide easily accessible privacy controls for its users. The ability to tag friends (and non-friends for that matter) and one’s location are added features that make content sharing on the social networking giant even more fun and influential.
Privacy control remains one of the biggest battles in the social media world, as users are becoming more aware of what is happening to their information once it is posted. These are big steps (albeit late ones) by Facebook to ensure that users have more control over who is seeing their content.
3 Ways to Use Google’s New Estimated Top-Page Bidding Tool
Recently, Google launched its new “top-of-page bid estimates,” which indicate what keyword bid may be needed in order for your ad to appear above first-page organic listings. The estimate takes into account the keyword’s quality score, bidding competition and several other factors. It can be seen as a column option on the keyword tab.
It’s important to note that this estimate is based on the keyword in exact match and can be helpful when optimizing bidding for strategic keywords based on match type.
For example, you are running a keyword in phrase and have it segmented out by search match type. The data shows that at your current bidding, searches in phrase have been performing well but the exact searches have not. In this case, the exact searches have an average position well down on the page. By having an estimate on what bid you would need to be in the top three positions, you can determine if adding an exact version at or near the estimated bid would be valuable to test or if it is within your current budget to be in the top three positions.
Consider another example: we have a client that is in the beginning of its peak season. Expecting the bids to increase from the slow summer months, bids were raised. However, we still noticed that average keyword positions had dropped slightly. Rather than guessing what bids would be required to bring important keywords back to the top three positions, this tool provided a quick way to determine how much we would need and how much we would be willing to bid to gain those positions.
It also provides additional insight in conjunction with AdWords’ “Top vs. Side Ad” segment or Analytics’ “Keyword Positions” report by using this bidding tool to optimize keywords based on how they perform on top of the organic listings or along the side.
This is a great new feature that Google has provided which can add value to your bidding strategies.
Contact us today to learn more about bidding optimization strategies and our PPC management services.
