Tag Archives: Facebook

It is always better to publish content on your own website

Publish your content under your own website.

There are numerous content publishing platforms on the Internet including social media platforms as well as blogging platforms such as Medium and the “Article” section of LinkedIn.

Just a few minutes before writing this post, all Facebook properties were down. Facebook.com and Instagram were not accessible. There was the usual brouhaha on other platforms like Twitter.

A few months ago, YouTube was down. Content creators have spent years building their presence on these platforms and to an extent, there is nothing wrong in that. For example, if you want to upload videos, what could be better than YouTube? It is inexpensive. You don’t spend money on hosting and bandwidth. Sometimes visibility is instant. There is also a vibrant community. There is already a massive audience. With so many advantages, it doesn’t make sense to upload videos under your own domain.

But when it comes to publishing blogs, I always advise my clients to build their own platform – publish all the blogs under their own domain, or under their own website.

Use social media and third-party platforms to network and connect with other content creators. Just imagine what would happen if I published all my blog posts that I publish on my Credible Content blog, on Medium or on LinkedIn?

I would have good visibility. People accessing my blog posts on these platforms would be exposed to my profile. But I would be sending all the traffic to these websites. There would be no search engine traffic to my own website.

You can say that I’m heavily depending on Google and what if Google itself goes down or what if Google decides to remove my links due to one or another reason? It has happened with many websites. Overnight the links have disappeared from Google.

Yes, there is this possibility, but still, all the content that I’m publishing, I’m publishing it on my own website. Whenever I want, I can take backups. Even if Google removes my links, my content remains. On other websites, if they decide to remove my content, I have got nothing.

As a businessperson this may not be a big issue for you, and you can also argue that just as Facebook is down or Instagram is down, even your own website can go down, with all the data gone forever. Yes, such calamities can happen.

But I would assert again, you can instruct your web host to take regular backups. You can download regular backups. You can always restore your data if your website is hacked, or something happens that completely deletes your information from your web hosting company.

But if all your articles vanished from LinkedIn, there is a fat chance you’re going to be able to recover them.

Facebook has launched a Substack competitor

Leave a reply

Substack alternatives from Facebook and Twitter.

Well, a few days ago Twitter also launched a Substack alternative and started urging its users to publish newsletters from the new platform. It’s called Revue.

In case you don’t know what’s Substack, it is a newsletter publishing platform that operates on profit-sharing basis.

It is different from MailChimp. When you use MailChimp for your newsletter broadcasting, you pay for the number of messages that you send. After a while, it can become quite expensive.

Substack doesn’t charge you for every email that you send. It expects you to create so much quality content that your subscribers become eager to pay you. When your subscribers pay for your premium content, Substack takes a part of it. Quite fair.

In particular niches, Substack is quite famous. I came to know of it a few months ago when I was looking for a cheaper alternative to MailChimp because as the number of subscribers increased, and since, at least right now, my newsletter doesn’t get much money, running it was becoming expensive.

Since anyway I didn’t need the advanced features of MailChimp, switching to Substack was an easy decision. All I do is broadcast my blog posts and I don’t need advanced scheduling and analytics features.

Since it has its own unique way of publishing, many alternatives are popping up, and the recent is Bulletin by Facebook.

Compared to Substack, Facebook certainly has lots of money and it has been able to attract high-profile writers in the beginning itself. For example, if you go to the Bulletin homepage, you can see sliding faces of Malcolm Gladwell and Erin Andrews.

Twitter too launch its own Substack alternative called Revue. The company existed before, in the beginning of 2021, Twitter bought it. In the sense of revenue model, it is more similar to Substack – its home page says that it charges 5% of the money that you charge from your subscribers, once they start paying you.

Of course, in terms of packaging Bulletin and Revue seem quite spiffy, but Substack too has its loyal users. Besides, for an established publication, switching a platform is not a casual decision unless there is something overwhelming reason. I mean, I don’t plan to switch.

The newsletter publishing marketing is quite heating up.

How to optimize your content for Facebook’s Paper newsfeed app

Leave a reply

OK, you must be wondering Facebook has just launched its new newsfeed app called Paper, it hasn’t even been used by many people, not many reviews are available online, and I’m already talking about optimizing your content for it. In case you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about and what is this new newsfeed, head to this nice review on ReadWrite.com that says that this app is more about looks and less about the content it plans to broadcast.

Anyway, there is a great buzz all over the Internet and you may have already seen people fervently tweeting about the release. Sadly the app is only available for the iPhone users (well, it remains to be seen whether it is a good thing or a bad thing) and as iPhone users are prone to doing, they are blowing this thing out of proportion.

When you talk of optimizing your content what is the first thing that comes to your mind? What exactly is content optimization? To me it is

Creating as relevant and useful content as possible
Writing in a language that appeals to your target audience
Creating a captivating headline that draws people to the main article
Making your content shareable
Organizing your content – text – under appropriate headlines, sub headlines and bulleted points
Hyperlinking to further bits of useful and related information
Avoiding excessive use of images and videos (unless your content merely constitutes of such media)
Using the correct structured data markup

The last point is very important especially for the apps like Facebook’s Paper newsfeed app. Such apps use the structured data markup to identify the nature of your content and then adjust it in the feed accordingly.

The points mentioned above are the universal traits of content that is optimized for practically every medium whether you are writing for your blog/website or for social networking websites. The same goes for Facebook Paper. Use the right markup so that your content appears under the right section, create captivating headlines so that your content can grab people’s attention, write smaller sentences so that it’s easier to read them on smaller devices and as always, stick to the point.

What is Facebook Graph Search and how to optimize your content for it

Leave a reply

If you are spending most of your time on Facebook you might as well also carry out your daily dose of searches on the social networking website. Almost every individual and every business that is on the Internet is also there on Facebook. So that is why Facebook is coming up with its own search engine called Graph Search. How is it going to be different from conventional search engines like Google?

Facebook is people based. In the name of improving user experience Facebook is able to extract as much information from its users as possible. It knows how old you are, where you live, where you work, which school and university you attended, with whom you are hanging out, who is your spouse or brother or sister, which foods you like to eat, which books you like to read and which movies you have recently seen or would like to see. This kind of detailed information is not available to conventional search engines, although with Google Plus Google is trying to break that barrier. In fact Google is changing its ranking algorithm in such a manner that people will be forced to use Google Plus if they want to improve their search engine rankings as well as search engine traffic.

Anyway, back to the Facebook Graph Search. Facebook is all about wanting to know what your friends and relatives are doing. You trust your friends, at least more than the search engine ranking algorithms. The search results that you get on Facebook will be totally different from those appearing on Google simply because the Facebook search results will be based on the preferences of your friends.

Take for instance, you want to read some sci-fi books that your friends have recently read. On Graph Search you will look for the following:

“Sci-fi books my friends like”

Or if you want to find a good coffee shop in London (I know, quite a broad search) you can search for

“London coffee shops my friends like”

Or if you want to find out something more specific

“London coffee shops my female friends like”

“London coffee shops my friends have been to”

You can replace London with any other city, and you can replace coffee shops to any other business.

The basic idea behind Facebook Graph Search is that it is based on your friends’ recommendations and preferences. It is totally human-based. Most of the data has been submitted by people themselves and hence there is little chance of error.

Optimizing your content for Facebook Graph Search

Relevance and quality, as usual, are always relevant. Content marketing that also involves social media marketing, should also take care of how you create content on social networking websites, in this case, Facebook. What language you use when you post your updates can alter the way you appear on Facebook search results. It is based on natural language processing as you might have experienced in Apple’s Siri.

Remember that your presence on Facebook becomes popular when people “like” your content or share it on their own timelines. For example, in order to find my services people may look for “content writer my friends like”. To make sure I appear in these search results, I need to make sure that enough number of people, and right type of people, like my Facebook page or my Facebook updates.

In order to optimize your content for Facebook Graph search

Use the language people use (if they are looking for a content writer, then actually use this expression while creating your content)
Post relevant content so that people “like” it and share it
Use social buttons on your website so that people can easily post your links on their own timelines without having to leave your website or blog
Encourage people to leave comments on your website using Facebook
Create great content on your website or blog so that people have a reason to promote your links and talk about your website or blog
Establish yourself as an authority

As you can see, the same rules that apply to creating content in general also apply to optimizing your content for Facebook Graph search. Be regular, stick to quality and relevance and give people a reason to appreciate your presence on Facebook.

Is content marketing the only marketing left?

1 Reply

This is something Seth Godin said in one of the interviews he keeps giving on various Internet marketing forums, that content marketing is the only marketing left.

Many people tend to disagree, but they don’t get the import of the thing. They always equate content marketing with something that necessarily has to do with the Internet. Of course a major part of content marketing evolves on the Internet, but it goes beyond the realms of the world wide web.

Content marketing in its truest sense means two-way engagement. Unlike conventional advertising you are not simply broadcasting promotional messages using various channels (print magazines, newspapers, TV, radio and even some form of Internet advertising), you are actually trying to reach out to your target customers and clients. First with the arrival of the contemporary Internet and then with social networking and social media, the dynamics of how people consume content (information, education or advertising) have gone through a paradigm shift. It’s no longer about passively receiving messages. Now people immediately respond to those messages and also create their own messages.

This, is a big difference. People talk to businesses and they talk among themselves. Your business and your brand must be talked about in order to remain relevant. This can only be achieved by engaging content, and hence the relevance of content marketing.

Again, although I mostly deal with writing, content, it can be anything. It can be a video, and info-graphic, an audio, a presentation, a PDF file, your postings on social networking websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. It can be images and videos on Pinterest and YouTube.

The biggest reason why content marketing is the only marketing left is that people “search” on the Internet before doing business with you. People no longer buy your products and services after seeing your advertisements and flyers. They log onto their favourite search engine, and they search for your product name or your service name (and various other combinations involving your product name or your service name), and read and view information and opinions about it. If not their favourite search engine, then they use their favourite social networking website (most such websites like Twitter and Facebook are making search a big part of their offerings) to know what people are saying about your product or service.

Conventional marketing brings you brand awareness. Content marketing brings you brand involvement, and this is what you need in the current scenario. You want conversations to happen around your brand and business, and if possible, positive conversations. This happens when you create and promote content people can share, respond to or react to.

Content marketing also gives you an ability to measure various aspects of its effectiveness. Take for instance blogging. At a particular time, using analytics tools, you can easily find out how many people are reading your blog posts, from which geographic regions, at what particular time of the day, during which days of the week, etc. By actively engaging them in your comments section you can even get more information.

The same holds true for social networking websites like Facebook. The amount of information its analytics can give you is unparalleled.