Tag Archives: Content Marketing

Useful Instagram Marketing Tactics That Also Have Positive Impact on SEO

Useful Instagram tactics to improve your SEO

Useful Instagram tactics to improve your SEO

Social media is nowadays used as serious business branding and marketing platform rather than a place for chitchatting. This is a known thing to every business owner.

From small to large scale businesses, everyone wants to make their online presence more commendable as well as successful with social media. Various social media websites are there. People genially use Facebook and Twitter for business marketing.

Apart from them, many other social media platforms are there, offering excellent business marketing opportunities. But, webmasters lack skills and technical expertise for business marketing through social platforms.

For example, when it comes to business marketing with Instagram, we generally get stuck with some conventional ideas.

Sharing some product or service-related photos, making some interesting posts and using hashtags meticulously is not just enough. These are important, but they are not just good enough to fetch effective business marketing results with Instagram.

You need to find bloggers or brand influencers on this social media platform.

Getting linked with them will help your business gain more exposure. Such technique of collaboration for business marketing is well known but limitedly practiced by small-scale businesses, especially new businesses.

So, you need to explore this option as a small business owner.

How do you collaborate with bloggers and brand influencers? Well, you can get linked up with them in a few simple steps. Those steps have been discussed in the following section of this article.

Finding Bloggers and Brand Influencers

Finding bloggers for getting collaborated is not a difficult thing, though many business owners do not know this process. As they are ignorant of this process, they perceive it as complicated.

It is a common human trait to consider something as complicated when we lack enough knowledge of it. To omit complications, you should know the process well.

Now, the question is how to find these bloggers or brand influencers? Well, in this world of internet-based communication, do we need to face a hard time finding something? Anything you want to search, you can ask it to Google or search it on the internet.

All you need to do is to search some blogs on your business niche or domain.

For example, if you run a restaurant or home delivery canteen business, you need to search for blogs that are run by foodies. You need to find the blogs that feature information on various home delivery services in a specific area.

Once you have found such blogs, you need to create a list of them. You need to check the popularity of such blogs. The best way of judging their popularity is to check their Google search page ranking.

To learn more, you can check Gramblast.

Now, you need to check the person or group of persons who run these blogs.

You can easily find them, and their Instagram profiles as everyone links blogs with their social media website profiles so that they can get Instagram followers.

Once you have found their profiles, you need to talk to them and give them the idea of collaboration. It would be a mutual business contract. Both would be benefitted with such contracts.

Setting Up Contract Terms and Conditions

To create a professional business contract, you need to create a list of terms and conditions.

You need to make sure that the terms and conditions will protect the interest of your business.

But, at the same time, it should have something beneficial for the blogger as well. The idea is to getting benefitted mutually.

The blogger or brand influencer would have his or her own set of terms and conditions. He may have his own unique pricing policies. You should go for negotiations for terms if required. This is the most crucial step for collaboration.

Taking a rigid stand in such a scenario would not help your business to grow. You need to compromise with certain policies and you have to invest a good amount to get a valuable return. No good thing comes for free.

Running Business Slogan Contests

Running contests or special business events would attract many budding bloggers and brand influencers.

For example, you can run a caption contest on your Instagram profile. Using this contest will help your business to grow.

You shall find that budding, as well as experienced bloggers, will participate in the contest, provided that you have lucrative prizes in offering for winners.

It is not just a caption or slogan for your business; you shall get in touch with many professional bloggers who may show interest in business collaboration.

So, you should never miss out such an opportunity for business collaboration. A lot of other innovative methods are there, and business owners should try them out to get easy collaboration on Instagram.

Involving the Followers through Quizzes

Just like slogan contests, quiz content is also a good idea to find more involvement of the followers on the Instagram business page.

It is to be reminded that these contests should be aimed to spread fun as well as happiness. So, quiz questions are needed to be selected in that manner. Not just that, you also need to appreciate the fans who post the right answers to these quizzes.

A quiz brings an important aspect too. It helps to conduct a survey in a casual way. Through the quiz, a business can get feedback from the followers on its products or services. Overall, customer satisfaction can be judged through these surveys.

Nevertheless, the quiz contests help the followers to enhance social engagement. It leads to spreading awareness on various business aspects. As a result, people get more familiar with the products or services.

Improve your SEO with Instagram marketing

Improve your SEO with Instagram marketing

The SEO campaign of your business will get a significant boost with a tactical use of Instagram.

Today, social media is inseparable from business marketing strategies. Every business wants to enhance online presence so that more people can recognize the business. In this process, the SEO campaign of business can get a significant boost. Overall, it helps the businesses to do well on the aspect of gaining brand value or brand exposure.

Difference between content marketing and inbound marketing

Difference between inbound marketing and content marketing

Difference between inbound marketing and content marketing

I have observed people often get confused between content marketing and inbound marketing. To the extent that they use the expressions interchangeably.

This is because in essence, they both mean the same thing, but their application and implications are different. Both are meant to generate incoming traffic to your website without using traditional advertising which is intrusive and unreliable.

You may think that explaining the difference between content marketing and inbound marketing is more scholarly and less practical, and in a sense you’re right if you think that way.

Content marketing is a subset of inbound marketing.

What is inbound marketing?

What is marketing?

Marketing means promoting products and services so that prospective customers and clients become aware of these products and services, and not just become aware, but also become inclined towards paying for them.

Traditional marketing involves advertising and promotion. You see ads on TV, or hear them on radio, or see them in newspapers and magazines.

You see ads when you watch YouTube videos and videos on social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Traditional advertising and marketing are normally one-sided. You encourage people to visit your store or your website. It’s up to them whether they want to respond to your ads.

Inbound marketing, as the name suggests, creates channels and opportunities for people to come to your store or website on their own. You don’t exhort them into becoming your customers and clients.

You create your presence on various channels where people come across your brand or your proposition and then decide to pay you a visit.

You engage them on an ongoing basis. You make it easier for them to find you, whether on social media and social networking websites, on discussion forums, video hosting websites, events like polls, contests and webinars, SEO for the targeted search terms, and also email marketing.

The basic idea is to let people bump into things that can lead them to visit your website. Every channel is created to generate inbound traffic that is voluntary.

Check out Content writing services for inbound marketing.

What is content marketing?

As I mentioned above, content marketing is a subset of inbound marketing.

Content marketing is done by creating, publishing and distributing content to make it accessible through different channels. This content is helpful, engaging and entertaining. Ideally people should want to have access to this content regularly.

Read: What is Content Marketing? Explained in detail.

Content can come into existence via blog posts, videos, infographics, social media updates, ebooks, case studies, white papers and email updates.

Difference: inbound marketing and content marketing

Inbound marketing is the result of content marketing.

You can use different routes to inbound marketing, and one of the most important routes is content marketing.

In fact, you can easily say that there is no inbound marketing without content marketing.

Should you worry about distinguishing the both?

For the sake of understanding, trying to understand both doesn’t harm, but you shouldn’t worry much about the nomenclature.

With good content marketing, inbound marketing happens naturally.

When you publish relevant content, when you use different (strategic) channels to distribute your content, you automatically start attracting targeted traffic to your website.

Content marketing also has a direct bearing on your search engine rankings. Strategic content marketing in itself is good for your SEO.

Is it essential that your content goes viral for content marketing success?

Does the success of your content marketing depend on your content going viral?

Does the success of your content marketing depend on your content going viral?

How does your content go viral?

Look for this question on Google and you will find many blog posts and articles.

But is it essential for the success of your content marketing?

Depends.

It is understandable that if traffic matters to your website/blog and you earn ad revenue then definitely your content going viral matters to you because when your content goes viral, it means more traffic.

A few years ago, I wrote a political blog post on Medium and it went viral (it was read by more than 300,000 people) and I gained more than 1000 Twitter followers as a result, though, in terms of getting more business, it didn’t help me because it wasn’t related to content writing or content marketing.

Content going viral also helps you if you want to spread a message or an idea within a span of a couple of days. You want one of your articles or blog posts to reach thousands of people. When I wrote the above-mentioned political blog post, I actually wanted it to be read by as many people as possible.

It also gets you brand recognition when your content goes viral. The more people read your blog post, the more people know about you.

Many clients come to me and say that they need an article or a blog post that will go viral.

I tell them that I cannot promise anything. I can put in all the ingredients that are needed for a particular piece of content to go viral, but ultimately, whether that particular piece of content goes viral or not depends on many unpredictable patterns.

Does the success or failure of your content marketing depend on viral content?

I don’t think so.

The purpose of content marketing is, aside from building an audience (a viral blog post does not guarantee that) over a long period of time, is to help people so that they begin to remember you with a positive impression.

Content marketing makes it easier for people to find you.

Suppose you have covered all your topics in your field. For example, I provide content writing and content marketing services so I’m constantly explaining different aspects of these two realms.

Although it is not up to me whether I get good search engine rankings or not for the blog posts and web pages that I continuously publish on my website, the possibility of increasing my rankings definitely improves.

It is like, if you do something and there is 1% chance of success, if you don’t do something, the chance is 0%. So, publishing high-quality content, no matter how meagre or how limited, is better than publishing no content.

So, instead of worrying about making your content go viral, focus on publishing quality-content on an ongoing basis. Aim to help your audience.

If you help your audience and if due to that, you get more leads and generate more sales, your content marketing is successful, whether one of your blog posts goes viral or not.

Valuable statistics to help you formulate a successful digital marketing strategy [infographic]

The biggest quality of digital marketing is precision, and precision can be attained by having the right numbers with you.

I have received this nice infographic from Serpwatch.io that explains 7 trends in the form of statistics that you must follow in order to carry out successful digital marketing. Since the infographic is very long, instead of publishing the entire file here, I’m just using the top portion and you can click the image to go to the actual infographic:

7 trends for implementing a successful digital marketing campaign

7 trends for implementing a successful digital marketing campaign

As a content writer who is often hired for quality content to improve SEO, I find the first portion of the infographic interesting. It says

  • Google is responsible for 94% of total organic traffic
  • 75% people never scroll past the first page of search engine results
  • 80% people ignore paid search results (shows how important organic search engine rankings are) You may read Organic search engine optimization with content writing
  • 57% B2B marketers state that improving the keyword rankings generates more leads compared to other marketing efforts
  • Leads from search engines have 14.6% conversion rate
  • 50% of search queries are 4 keywords or longer – How to incorporate longtail keywords into content writing
  • 70% of the clicks are taken by the top 5 search results – it makes a big difference if you can improve your search engine rankings
  • The first page on Google on an average has 1890 words – the importance of longform content
  • Websites get 300% more traffic from search engines compared to social media websites

Do check out the original infographic.

How to prevent your emails from looking like spam

Prevent your emails from looking like spam

Prevent your emails from looking like spam

One of the biggest reasons why your email marketing isn’t working is because both your recipients and their email clients conclude that your email is spam.

There is still some scope if your recipient decides whether your email message is spam or not, but if the email client (Gmail, for example) itself takes charge, sometimes your recipient doesn’t even realize that he or she is missing your messages.

There are many ways you can prevent your email messages from looking like spam and consequently, being marked as spam both by human and machine.

Here are a few things you can do

Build your own mailing list – patience pays

For successful email marketing, nothing is better than building your own mailing list.

It takes time.

It is like building a house or a building, brick by brick.

One of the biggest benefits of building your own mailing list is that you can request your subscribers to “white list” the email ID from which they are going to receive your email updates.

When someone submits his or her email ID to your subscription form, he or she is taken to a thank you page. On this page, you can instruct the person on how to white list your email ID so that your messages are not redirected to the spam folder.

Another benefit is that when people subscribe to your updates, they are fully aware of what they are going to receive.

When you subscribe to my Credible Content updates, you are fully aware that you are going to receive updates on content marketing and content writing. So, when you get these updates, you are not caught off guard and in frustration, you don’t mark my messages as spam.

At the most, when you don’t want to hear from me, you will simply unsubscribe. Which is much better.

Don’t offer something lucrative to make people sign up for your updates

I have seen that even reputed and well-known businesses, individuals and publications use this tactic – they offer a useful e-book or a white paper in lieu of getting a new subscriber for their newsletter.

If you have an e-book or a white paper or a case study that you think might help your current and prospective customers and clients, just give it to them.

Offer them something for which they would like to subscribe to your updates, as a long-term value, not as an instant bait.

Preferably, encourage them to join your mailing list or newsletter for the quality of your content.

When you offer something lucrative, people simply sign up for your newsletter, download the e-book (or whatever you are offering for subscribing) and then unsubscribe, or simply mark your messages as spam later on when they cannot make out why you are sending them messages.

Make it very clear why they are subscribing – this is one of the best ways of preventing your email from looking like spam.

Avoid using words and expressions that are frowned upon by spam filters

Over the years, spam filters have developed a huge collection of words and triggers that they use to consign messages to the spam folder.

Expressions like “earn extra cash”, “double your income”, “make money”, “online degree”, and so on, automatically get your message marked as spam.

You can search on the Internet to find lists of words that you should avoid using, especially in the subject line.

Provide quality content through your email

Remember that people subscribe to your updates because they expect to receive some valuable information that they can use to improve their lives.

Stick to the theme you promised at the time of the signup. Continue to send quality content that is highly valuable to them.

Be regular and stick to a routine when sending out your email campaigns

Another reason why your recipients may think that you are sending them spam emails is that they lose track of who you are and what business you represent.

For successful email marketing and to make sure that your messages are not marked as spam, you need to be regular and you need to stick to the schedule.

For example, if you send out an email every Wednesday, then make sure that you send that email every Wednesday.

I have often observed with different clients that they send out emails whenever they feel like. Sometimes, they simply send one or two haphazard emails in a month. This doesn’t work.

Making sure that your email messages are not marked as spam involves lots of precautions but your content, and the way you generate your mailing list, are the most important ones.