the 6-month complete guide to marketing your store
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http://www.osiaffiliate.com/ecommerce-marketing-guide/ - This guide will show you how you can increase traffic, leads, and sales for your ecommerce business. It walks you through everything that goes into ecommerce marketing -- from inbound marketing to paid advertising to conversions. So whether you're a mom and pop shop or the next Amazon, our actionable guide has you covered.TRANSCRIPT
THE COMPLETE 6-MONTH ECOMMERCE MARKETING GUIDE
DOUBLE YOUR TRAFFIC AND SALES IN 6 MONTHS
By OSI Affiliate Software
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Hey Ecommerce Marketer,
This guide will show you how you can increase traffic, leads, and sales for your ecommerce business. It walks you through everything that goes into ecommerce marketing -- from inbound marketing to paid advertising to conversions. So whether you're a mom and pop shop or the next Amazon, our actionable guide has you covered.
The guide has been divided into 6 months. Each month will cover different areas of focus that you need to implement for your business.
The sections are:
• Month 1 - Getting your store and website ready for marketing• Month 2 - Start marketing• Month 3 - Setup paid marketing• Month 4 - Start inbound marketing• Month 5 - Review, Calibrate, & Update• Month 6 - Promote, Promote, Promote
We hope this guide will be helpful and that it will help take your business to the next level.
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In month 1 we will show you how to setup your store so that you will easily show up in search engines and also make it easier for your customers to find you. Also, you will learn how to setup analytics that will help you measure the most important numbers that inform you of your store’s health.
The topics covered in month 1 are(click on topic to see full guide):
• Setting up Google Analytics for your store• How to do on-page SEO• Twitter Setup• Facebook Setup• How to find keywords for your store - A working guide to SEMRush• How to setup Google News
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Google Analytics – How to set up, track goals and gather actionable insights.
Google Analytics is one of the most important and widely used web analytics tool that helps you to track and gather intelligence on the traffic and the visitors behavior on your website.
Google Analytics aces other analytics tool in,
1. Features, by features we mean the capability to track a wide range of carefully selected metrics that helps you to gain actionable insights.
2. Clean, simple and easy to use user interface.3. Ability to set up a wide range of goals and funnels.4. Cost – It’s free.
Google Analytics lacks in,
1. Just the one thing, it basically tracks all the page visits, but it doesn’t give you the data of who (which individual visitor) did what in the website. In other word Google Analytics does not map the user details with the page visit session.
Setting Up Google Analytics:
Setting up a Google Analytics account is so easy that all you need is a basic Gmail/Google account. Go to Google Analytics website and click on sign in, use your Gmail/Google credentials to log in to your Google Analytics account.
The very first screen you see after logging in is where you enter the all the basic configuration details.
1. Account Name: Account name is the first and the top most part of an account hierarchy. The websites you want to track is to be added under an account. You can have any number of Accounts and any number of websites can listed under each Account. For instance if you are a marketing consultant taking care of web analytics for clients who belongs to many different niche, then you can arrange them, for instance all ecommerce websites under an account name called ecommerce.
2. Website Name: After deciding on the Account name, enter the name of the website that you wanted to track.
3. Website URL: Enter the complete URL or domain name of the website that you wanted to track.
4. Category: Select the appropriate category that your website belongs to.
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5. Time Zones: Select the appropriate time zone that suits you. This becomes so important when tracking data between dates.
After entering the basic configuration details, you’ll be taken to a page that provides you with a unique tracking code. All you need to do is copy and paste the code snippet between the <head> </head> tag on all the pages that you are intending to track.
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To check and verify if the code has been properly deployed, go to
Admin > Select the Account name > Select the website > Tracking info > Tracking code.
The status on the page should read tracking installed/Receiving data that confirms that your Google Analytics set up is correctly deployed and it has started collecting data.
You could also check the installation by clicking on Real Time to see website traffic being tracked live.
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Administration:
Google Analytics allows you to add others who might be part of your team (managers and analysts) or even your clients with various levels of access control.
Just go to
Admin > Select the account > Select the Website > User Management
And add team members and set the level of read and edit access that the person can have.
Setting Up Goals:
The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. — Benjamin Mays
Goals are the most important and the core part of any analytics solution. Identifying and setting up the right goals is half the work done.
How to select the right goals: The SMART rule.
Specific: Make sure you select goals that are objective and target oriented. Example: Number of sign ups or number of unique visits.
Measurable: Always select goals that are measurable over a period of time. Example: Number of social shares or number of people who has read an article.
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Attainable: Always have goals that can be worked on and achieved over time. Example: Increase the number of purchases per session.
Realistic: Always select goals that are well within the reach of achieving, considering your strength and weaknesses.
Time Related: Make sure you set targets that can be tracked and analyzed over a period of time. Example: Track the number of signups resulted from a social media campaign.
To create new goals in Google Analytics go to,
Admin > Select your website > Goals > New Goal
Google Analytics gives you a list of most commonly used predefined goal templates that you can select from,
The Goal Templates are divided as:• Revenue• Acquisition• Inquiry• Engagement
For instance if your end goal or conversion is a sign up for your software/service, then select Created an account under Acquisitions and click Next.
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The next step is where you tell Google Analytics what URL should it follow to consider it as a goal. In this case let us say once the user has signed up for our service we display him with a thank you page, which is considered to be a conversion or goal. Let us now enter the URL on the Goal URL section. And finally to complete click on Create Goal
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Gaining Insights From Goals:
Having completed setting up goals, you are now ready to track and analyze the results of your goals over a period of time.
Click on Goals > Overview
You’ll now be taken to your Goal Dashboard, that gives you goal related metrics like,
1. Total Goal Completions.2. Total Goal Value3. Goal Conversion RateThe dashboard also has a graph representing the goals achieved over a
period of time.
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Creating Conversion Funnels
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Funnel is a set of path (pages/actions) that a visitor needs to take to complete the conversion or the end goals. Funnels essentially help us to,
1. Exactly pin point where the customers are exiting the path or losing interest or confidence.
2. Helps to analyze and optimize those weak pages to increase conversions.3. Also helps to completely rethink the steps involved in a conversion.
To create Funnels in Google Analytics, click on,
Admin > Goals > select any of the created goals > slide on Funnel.
Add all the steps/path a visitor must take (on a logical/sequential order) to create a funnel.
To check the data collected in the funnel,
Click on > Conversion > Goals > Funnel Visualization
You can now clearly visualize the visitor behavior and how they interact with your website.
You can now,
1. Clearly see how many visitors are moving from one path to another and
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where the exit rate is maximum. You can now work and optimize the page that has resulted in maximum exits to increase conversions.
2. You can clearly decipher the page source from which visitors have entered a specific step and also see where they are headed after exiting this step.
Conclusion
No matter what website you run, be it a small ecommerce website or a big enterprise website, Google Analytics is the one most important tool that you must integrate your website right from the launch day. The amount of data that can be collected and the in-depth analysis that can be made helps you to continuously track and improve your conversions.
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How to do On-Page SEO for Your Ecommerce Business
Did you know you can get more traffic from search engines for your ecommerce business? Yes, it is really simple. You need to check your ecommerce website and see if you have optimized your website to make it easy for search engines to find you. This means that all pages on your website need to be optimized for the keywords you are targeting. Not only that, the page itself needs to be optimized. To do this, you need to ensure that your on-page SEO is good for all pages on your ecommerce website.
On-Page SEO is when you create your website with the goal of the search engine finding that page for the specific keyword you are targeting. For example, if you are selling the iPhone, you will make sure that the page(s) you have on your website will have the keyword iPhone optimized. To put it plainly, On-Page SEO is having your ecommerce website pages ready to be found by search engines. There are steps you can take to make your page and website search engine friendly and we’ll show you these steps below.
It is important to have your ecommerce website optimized for the search engine because this makes it easy for your customers to find you. The whole goal of On-Page SEO is making sure that your website is found by your customers when they search for your product. Making it easy for customers to find you and also to rank in search engines will help your ecommerce company grow. You will get more traffic, visitors, sales, and conversions. This is why it is important to optimize your website. It will help grow your business.
A great optimized ecommerce website will attract the customers you want and will make it easy for you to market your website and business. It will save you money on marketing and it will also increase your revenue.
To optimize your website, you will want to start with the most basic element of your ecommerce website, the PAGE. All the strategies and steps covered below will show the most important things you need to optimize on every page of your ecommerce website. It is important to know how to do this, even if you will not do the SEO yourself.
When optimizing a page, here are the most important elements you need to optimize and make sure they are search engine ready.
Important Page Elements for Optimization
KeywordBefore you optimize your website, you need to know what keywords you need
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to be targeting. In your Google Adwords account, go to the keyword planner and search for the keywords in your industry. Find the great keywords to use for your website.
Page NameOnce you have found the keywords you need to use for your website, the first
thing you will want to optimize is the page name. For example, if the keyword you are going after is iPhone 5S, then your page name needs to be called iphone-5s.html. Check your page names and make sure you are using the correct page names that include the keyword you are going after.
Page HTML TitleSimilar to the page name or file name step mentioned above, you will want to
use your keyword in the page html title.
Meta DescriptionGive your page a good meta description that tells the customer what the page
is about. Also, include your keyword in the meta description. This will help search engines know what your page is about.
Alt AttributesUse your keywords in the alt attributes within the page. This alt attributes can
be found for any images on the page, like your logo or product images. Include your keyword in these attributes and also give good descriptions because this will help make the page easy to use for your customers.
Headings (H1, H2)Use the keywords in all the headings of the page. IMPORTANT: It is very
important to have headings in your page; it is good page design. Having keywords in the headings will not hurt either.
Within the Body of the PageIn the body of the page, make sure to use the keywords. Do not overuse
them. Use them where appropriate and natural. You don’t want to get penalties from “big brother” aka Google.
Those are some of the most important page elements to optimize for your page. Watch the video on this page that covers On-Page SEO.
Things to NoteAs you start optimizing your website, you need to keep up with all the latest
search engine changes and updates. This means you need to start following and
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using resources that will help optimize your website for the good.
Here are some of the best resources that will help you optimize your ecommerce website and make sure you are following the best SEO guidelines.
- Google Webmasters- Moz- Backlinko- Quicksprout
With these resources and following the recommendations mentioned above, you will optimize your ecommerce website and make it easy for customers to find you and search engines to rank you. Get more traffic, sales, and customers by optimizing your pages and ecommerce website.
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Step-by-Step Twitter Advertising Guide: Getting Started
Back in 2010 Twitter released its “Promoted Accounts” feature for the first time, as part of its advertising strategy. Because it required a minimum spend of 5.000 pounds/month, its advertising campaign soon became a self-service platform. In March, 2013, the self-service ad platform was made public, and online businesses now have access to its features.
Image Source: http://www.wikinomics.com/
Initially, Twitter invited some of the biggest names in the industry to test the advertising platform, and requested feedback. This made it possible for them to make enhancements and fine-tune the ad tool, before releasing it. Are you ready to get your hands dirty with some Twitter advertising? Since the product has become available for users in the U.S., small business and even mommy blogs are now able to tap into its powers.
Needless to say, supplementing your organic inbound marketing efforts with relevant promoted ads/tweets or trends is a great solution for boosting traffic and increasing conversion rate. Even if you don’t know how to use these features you needn’t worry, we have prepared a step-by-step guide that will help you set everything up in no time.
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How Twitter’s Advertising Options Work: Twitter uses three main pay-per-click style ads: the promoted accounts,
promoted trends and promoted tweets. Each of them will enable you to target a desired audience, and appear on their feeds. Those who are interested in what you have to offer (content, services, products etc.) will most definitely follow or engage with you.
Keep in mind that promoted tweets distinguish themselves from normal ones, so your advertising should be less expensive than a PPC campaign (in other words you can commit to a Twitter add campaign on a small budget). There is, however, a downside to Twitter advertising. To make sure you do not waste your promoted ads you must log-in manually and change you settings (example: no posting before 10 A.M. or in the weekends).
Now that this is out of the way, let’s see how you can set-up your Twitter
advertising campaign:
Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up a Twitter Campaign
Step #1: Getting Started & Reviewing the CampaignLog into your Twitter account and go to the Twitter Ads page (from the settings
gear). There you will see all the add options available including promoted tweets, accounts & trends, analytics, and tutorials. It is advised to take the “Get Started” test to better understand what you want to achieve with your advertising campaign. Twitter will ask you a few questions, and based on your
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answers it will suggest a promotion strategy. Next, you should set up your first campaign. Once you do this you will be directed to the summary page, which includes data about targeting, tweets promoted and bidding.
Step #2: Promoted Accounts vs. Promoted TweetsThe first thing you need to do is decide between these two types of promotion
strategies. What is it you want for your business? By promoting tweets you will appear in people’s news streams, on the Twitter results listings, whereas by promoting an entire account you will simply appear in the “who to follow” section on the lower left corner.
It’s actually quite simple to choose. Think about what it is that you are trying to achieve on Twitter.
If you simply wish to increase your follower base, build an audience or attract
more visitors to your site, you should definitely choose Promoted accounts. On the other hand, if you are genuinely interested in connecting and engaging with your followers, you should go for the promoted tweets. This type of tweet will also ensure that your conversions grow, because you can create unique content that will appeal to your target audience.
Promoted Trends: There is one more type of advertising method available on twitter. It uses
topics and hash-tags. In other words, people who visit the Trends section on Twitter might also find your promoted trends. They can be easily integrated into tweets and discussions. Promoted trends are recommended for businesses that
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want to start a new trend or hash-tag. Benefits:
• Brand building by association• Raising awareness for product launches or events• Promoting hash-tags and new discussions
Step #3: Customize Your Campaign and Targeting CriteriaThis step is vital to the performance of your ad campaign. Targeting the right
people will help you immensely, so make sure you get everything right. What type of audience is a good fit for your company/website/message? Which people will be interested in clicking on your website or purchasing your products? These are questions you must answer in order to attract targeted audience which translates into qualified leads. Here are a few pointers:
• Targeting: There are several criteria that you could consider. Firstly, you can target your campaign by followers and interests. By doing this you will be able to create a list of Twitter usernames, and target their followers by association. This is particularly useful with the top influencers in the industry (if they re-share the content, you will definitely attract many users). You could also focus on keywords (they only work for promoted tweets). Keyword advertising is also effective, because it shows promoted tweets to people who are interested in, let’s say, social media, SEO, internet marketing etc.. (it will help you target a more qualified audience). There is even a tailored audiences feature which will pull people details from your website or databases.
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• Choose a location: It is possible to customize your campaign also according to location. For example, if you own a bakery shop in downtown New York, you might want to limit your audience to just these people. At the moment, it is not possible to target very specific areas, but choosing a city or “metro area” and focusing your promotion strategies there is more than enough.
• Choose a gender preference: Although Twitter does not ask people about their gender when they sign up, it uses an inexact science to guess it (based on what you share, post, etc.). If you have a breast cancer awareness campaign, you might want to promote it mostly on women accounts.
Step #4: Specify Your BiddingYour campaign is finally set up. The last thing you need to worry about is
money. Twitter will never use more than your maximum bid, but it might spend less. Keep in mind that bidding on the same criteria with your competition might alter the likelihood of appearing in search listings. You can check your reach from the bidding section. Adjust your bid and see the estimated reach on the right. The more you bid, the more your reach will grow.
Step #5: Track Your Results
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To ensure that your Twitter campaign runs smoothly you should always monitor the results. Go to your View Statistics tabs to see the follower growths for unpaid and paid promotion. There are basically two layers of analytics to advertisers which show paid and unpaid activities. Data includes tweets, trends, promoted accounts, follower insights and even traffic and conversions measurement. Checking your analytics is the only way to ensure that your marketing strategy is working.
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An E-Commerce Company’s Guide To Facebook Marketing
The story of the staggering growth of Facebook from a humble college rating website into a full-blown social media behemoth creates nothing but awe and wonder.
In spite of the staggering growth, for the first few years’ analysts were skeptical about Facebook as a revenue-making platform. But now after its phenomenal growth, with the sheer number of active users and the ease of adaptation and proliferation have made Facebook the most sought after medium for companies and brands to reach out to their customers.
Following are the persuasive statistics that explains why as an E-Commerce company should utilize Facebook as a medium for reaching out to their customers.
• 802 million daily active users on average in March 2014• 609 million mobile daily active users on average in March 2014• 1.28 billion monthly active users as of March 31, 2014• 1.01 billion mobile monthly active users as of March 31, 2014• Approximately 81.2% of our daily active users are outside the U.S. and
Canada
Marketing Possibilities On Facebook
1. Brand specific Facebook Pages acts as a medium where you can reach out to customers.
2. Facebook Pages helps brands to initiate conversations and get round the clock feedback from customers
3. Facebook Pages helps to promote new products and services.4. Facebook advertisements help promote your brand through carefully
catered and specifically targeted ads.5. Facebook apps help increase engagement with the brand’s Facebook
Page.6. Facebook Pages helps create awareness, consideration, conversion,
brand loyalty and word of mouth marketing.
Create A Facebook Specific Marketing Plan
1. Analyze and identify the products and services that you are intending to promote on Facebook.
2. Identify your target audience3. Create a value proposition for the target audience
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4. Strategize and come up with tangible marketing goals.5. Create a content strategy6. Identify the Key Performance Indicators (KPI)7. Track and measure metrics that helps calculate the KPIs8. Analyze the results, continuously experiment and optimize.
There are two broader ways to leverage Facebook for marketing, they are,
1. Brand specific Facebook Page2. Facebook Advertisements
Getting Started With Facebook Page
1. Creating a Facebook Page is so simple that all you need is a Facebook account. Log in to your account and go to https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
2. Facebook gives you a list of types of Facebook pages that you can select that closely reflects your brand or company.
The list includes,• Local Business or places• Company, Organization or Institution• Brand or Product• Artist, Band or Public Figure• Entertainment• Cause or Community
3. Now you should select Brand or Product, and on selecting it we will be giving a l ist of choices that exactly matches one’s niche.
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4. Next you’ll be taken through a set of pages where you need to add relevant basic information about your product / service that might help customers understand who you are and what exactly do you offer. The first being area is called “About your product or service” where you must enter a small concise description that best describes the brand. You can add a link to your brand’s website. Next create a unique URL for your Facebook Page so users can use to check your brand. Click on save.
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5. Next you can upload a profile picture that best represents your brand; it might a logo or the pictures of products/services that you offer.
6. The next option is “Add to favorites”, which enables you to access the page easily later. You should go ahead and add it to favorites.
And that’s it, your brands Facebook Page is now live and active. Congrats…that was probably a lot easier then you thought.
Essentials of a Facebook Page
The following are the most important features of a Facebook page that you need to understand as an e-commerce marketer.
1. Facebook Page Tabs includes “Timeline” that lists all the updates and posts you’ve made. Also, there is a section called “about” which lets your customers know who you are. The tab also contains Photos and Videos, which lists all the multimedia content that you’ve shared. There is a tab that also lists all Facebook apps that your page uses to increase engagement.
2. Apart from the tabs, the above-mentioned about us, total likes and apps are also listed on the main section of the page.
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Understanding Facebook Apps
Facebook apps are small widgets that you easily integrate your Facebook Page to help your audience to tangibly engage with your Facebook page.
Some of the commonly used Facebook Apps:• Artists or musicians can use music player apps, which enables audiences
to play music right on the Facebook Page.• Companies can install recruitment apps that help prospective employees
to explore job openings and helps applicants to apply for jobs right there on the Facebook Page.
• E-Commerce Facebook Pages should also have a contact-us app like UserVoice that helps customer to directly contact you or even give feedback on your Facebook Page.
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Other Facebook Apps for Ecommerce worth mentioning are :• Storeya• ShopTab• Vendevor• Email Signup - Mailchimp
Key Metrics that helps you track how effective your Facebook Page are,
Total Reach: As the name suggests the Total Reach gives you a list of updates you’ve made and their corresponding reach (how many people have seen them). Facebook metrics clearly demarcates the total reach count into both organic and paid.
Likes: Likes can be translated, as the number of votes you get, the more the
likes, the more popular your brand. Facebook gives you a detailed analysis of how many likes you got over a period of time, their sources, and allows you to filter out likes that are earned from a paid ad campaign.
Visits: Visits is the total number of times people have visited your Facebook
Page both organically and through paid ads. This is one of the key metrics that helps you to gauge the engagement factor.
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Demographics: Demographics helps you understand how many percentage
of men and women are your fans. Also you can find out the country and the city where your fans are. This helps you to figure out how many of the fans are real and how many are spams.
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These metrics helps you to track how your marketing strategy has worked and it also helps you to further optimize your Facebook channel.
Facebook Ads
To further increase reach and engagement you can run highly targeted (both content and reach) ads on Facebook
Ads can be used to promote:• Page post engagement• Page likes• Clicks to Web likes• Website conversions• Apps• App Engagement• Event Responses• Offer claims
Let us look in detail some of the most important and commonly used ad objectives.
Objectives of an Ad
Increase Page Post Engagement
This helps to promote your updates that you make on your Facebook Page. It helps increase reach, shares and likes.
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1. Let’s say we want to promote our page posts. Go to https://www.facebook.com/business and click on Create an Ad
2. Click on promote page posts and select the Facebook Page and the post you want to promote. Click continue.
3. You can now target your ads based on • Geographic Locations• Age• Gender• Language• Relationships• Education• Work• Interests• Behaviors
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Bidding and Pricing
Facebook allows you to bid for ads on two formats, they are
CPC: By opting for a Cost Per Click scheme you only pay for the number of clicks made on the ad. When you opt in for cost per click, you can now choose from either allowing Facebook to automatically and intelligently to bid for ads or manual mode where in you fix and enter the max price per click manually.
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CPM: By opting for Cost Per Impression you only pay for every 1000
impressions of your ad.
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Select your daily budget and your currency (mode of payment) and place an
order where you need to enter your payment credentials.
Your ads will now be shown for your target audience until your daily budget expires.
Increase Page Likes
Page likes is one of the most sought after metric that in a way states how famous the page is. Customers have a perception that higher the number of likes, higher the brand value.
Facebook now allows you to run ads specifically to increase likes.
1. Click on https://www.facebook.com/ads/create and select Page Likes. Select the page for which you need to run this ad campaign.
2. Upload 6 pictures that best reflect your product or service. The reason for uploading multiple pictures is that, Facebook over a period of time shows only the best performing image (Higher click through rate) to the users, so that you can spend less money on under performing ads and hence can
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s a v e m o n e y .
3. Next comes the Ad Copy where you are giving provision to communicate who you are and what your offers are in a concise manner.
4. The last step being selecting the target audience for your ads and selecting an appropriate bidding and pricing strategy for your ads.
Click to Websites
As the name suggests, these ads help increase clicks to your website or landing page.
1. Select Click to website and enter the URL for which you are trying to increase the clicks.
2. Upload 6 pictures that best reflect your product or service. The reason for uploading multiple pictures is that, Facebook over a period of time shows only the best performing image (Higher click through rate) to the users, so that you can spend less money on under performing ads and hence can s a v e m o n e y .
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3. Next comes the Ad Copy where you are giving provision to communicate who you are and what your offers are in a concise manner.
4. The last step being selecting the target audience for your ads and selecting an appropriate bidding and pricing strategy for your ads.
Website Conversion
Through these ads you can now target specific URL and also run campaigns that persuades people to do certain actions on the website.
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The actions may include,• Checkouts• Registrations• Leads• Key Web Page Views• Adds to cart.
1. Click on Website Conversions and enter the target URL and the type of conversions you are planning to track. Let us for example say we need to track all the sign-ups. Select Registrations, and click on create pixel. A Pixel is nothing but a tracking code that you need to add on the final conversion page i.e. the page that confirms that a user has signed up successfully. This code tracks all the conversions that have been created s p e c i f i c a l l y t h r o u g h t h e F a c e b o o k a d s .
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2. Upload 6 pictures that best reflect your product or service. The reason for uploading multiple pictures is that, Facebook over a period of time shows only the best performing image (Higher click through rate) to the users, so that you can spend less money on under performing ads and hence can save money.
3. Next comes the Ad Copy where you are giving provision to communicate who you are and what your offers are in a concise manner.
4. The last step being selecting the target audience for your ads and selecting an appropriate bidding and pricing strategy for your ads.
Conclusion
Even though Facebook Ads as a platform is still in its nascent stage, the sheer number of active users on the platform is the single most important factor that persuades us to at least try and experiment on this new uncharted potential. Expert advice would be Aim small and miss small, start experimenting on Facebook ads, optimize your strategies and see if it works for you.
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A Working Guide To SEMrush
Keyword research, competitive analysis, Adwords intelligence and backlinks tracking are some of the most important and crucial part of any SEO and SEM process.
One problem is that now a days most of the digital marketing teams use 4 or even more separate tools to track each of these analysis separately. Some times managing 4 different tools becomes a bit tedious and confusing that more often that not our analysis gets lost when we jump from one tool to another. To solve this very problem SEMrush came up with the most comprehensive SEM and SEO research tool that is slowly growing as a one-stop tool for performing complete market research.
The tool can be divided into 5 features according to the function they perform. They are,
1. Organic Research2. Advertisement Research3. Backlinks analysis4. Keyword Research5. And automatic tracking tools
Organic Research
Every Digital Marketer who endeavors to do a market research on any product/service niche or a market research on a particular company must start organically, meaning gaining intelligence and researching using data from search engines.
SEMrush helps you to perform both keyword specific and website specific market research.
Keyword Specific Research
To start with just enter the keyword that matches the best with your intended research, and SEMrush will provide you with the following data,
• A quick keyword summary that lists the competition for that keyword, its Cost Per Click (CPC), Search volume per month and the number of search of search results for that specific keyword.
• A bar chart that let’s you understand the growth trend for the keyword over a period of time.
• A list of other top closely related keywords that people are searching for
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along with their volume, CPC and competition.• A list of top 20 organic results for that specific keyword that helps you
evaluate your competition.• A list of top 20 Adwords results for that specific keyword that helps you
evaluate your competition’s spending power or the investment they are willing to make to gain customers.
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Domain Specific Research
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Sometimes companies that have newly forayed into business might not have an intuitive intelligence about the right keywords, in such cases you can pick your direct competitor as a starting point for your research, on entering the domain name of your competitor, SEMrush gives the following intelligence,
• An overview that highlights important competition metrics like what’s their approximate search engine traffic, their traffic though ads, and amount of money they spend on ads per month.
• A graphical representation of how many keywords for which they rank on the first page over a period of time.
• A list of top keywords for which they rank higher on the search engines. The best part of SEMrush is that, having keywords alone without context is pointless, so SEMrush also gives keywords along with their CPC, monthly search volume and existing competition for that keyword.
Before getting on with the next part, let us take some time in defining certain terms that we will be using through out this guide,
Search Volume: It is the total number of times a particular keyword is being searched per month, the more the better.
CPC: Cost Per Click is the amount of money that that businesses are willing to pay when some one clicks on an ad. If the CPC is high one can assume that businesses are willing to pay more because of the high conversion rate. Usually to play safe marketers would often go for keywords that have a low CPC.
Competition: Competition as the name suggests is the number that says how difficult is it for you to compete with others on that keyword. The competitive index ranges from 0 – 1, where 0 being least competitive and 1 being highly competitive.
Best Practice: It is always good to go after keywords that have good volume, less competition and less CPC to achieve greater ROI and immediate results.
Advertising Research
Nothing converts like Ads, having said that, one has to be extremely careful before and while running advertisement campaigns on search engines. SEMrush will help you with providing you with the data required to create an approximate cost benefit analysis that would help you to assess the risk involved even before you start investing in it.
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SEMrush provides you with the following completive analysis data,
Position Status
• Total search engine traffic.• Total ads traffic.• Approximate total amount of money invested on Ads.• It also gives you the list of keywords for which this particular competitor
ranks higher in the Ad position.
Position Changes
• Gives you the trend of how many keywords for which you have both lost and gained rankings over a period of time. This helps you gauge the efficacy of say a new SEO campaign that you have implemented or even check if you have lost any keywords due to any penalty imposed by search engines for malicious practices.
• It also lists all those new keywords that you have gained recently.
Ads Competitors
Here SEMrush lists the top companies that are competing on Ads with you on the same niche. It lists the competitors with the number of same keywords that you compete for, traffic though Ads and the approximate amount of money that you spend on Advertisement.
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Ads Copies
This section of SEMrush lists all the ads of a particular company. This will greatly useful as a reference for marketers especially Ad copywriters using it as a reference point for writing new or enhancing the existing ads.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the most important and also the most basic of research
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that any digital marketer must start with. A complete keyword analysis will help you with
• Search Engine Optimization on websites• Running Ads• Content Marketing• General market research (Finding our the requirements and needs of your
customer)
SEMrush gives you the following keyword analysis intelligence.
• On entering the keyword on which you want to do the analysis, SEMrush provides you with an overview data of Volume, CPC and the number of results.
• It also provides you with other related keywords along with their volume, CPC and competition.
• It also gives you a list of top websites that currently compete for this keyword both on organic ranking and Ad position ranking.
Backlinks
We all know that the presence of more high quality backlinks play a crucial role in helping search engines in ranking websites. To analyze the quality of your existing backlinks and also to find your competitors backlinks, SEMrush provides a comprehensive backlinks report for any website.
SEMrush’s backlinks data include:
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• Total number of backlinks count.• Total referring domains• Total follow and no follow links• Total number of high authority domains like .gov and .edu.• Total referring domains in all geography.• It also gives you a complete list of all backlinks, that you could export as an
excel sheet for further drill down analysis.
SEMrush
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Tools
Apart from just churning out data and reports, SEMrush also has dedicated tools that help you to track specific metrics and also slice and dice the existing data through complex filters and pivots.
Specific Position Tracking
SEMrush allows you to track a SEO and SEM performance for a single domain. Through this tool you can
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• Track the changes in the count of the number of keywords for which you domain ranks higher up.
• It helps you to lists and track the keywords for which you rank higher up along with all the contextual data like volume, CPC and competition.
• You could also add up to 4 of your competitors on whom you wanted to keep a tab on. This allows you to measure your growth against your competitors over a period of time.
• SEMrush also lists a set of competitors both old and emerging ones so that at any point in time you can be on top of your competitors when it comes to competitive intelligence.
The Chart Tool
The chart tool is so powerful that it helps you to work on existing data using some basic logical filters. For example you can
• Ask SEM rush to list all keywords that are common to 2 or more competitors
• List all keywords that are not common to both or more competitors.
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• List all keywords for which only the first domain ranks where as the others don’t. This helps you find keywords that are unique to a website.
Site Audit
This is relatively a new feature that has been added to SEMrush, which is still in beta. This tool helps you to manage, track and solve all website related issues and errors that might reduce the quality of your website. This tool lists
• Duplicates in content, meta title and H1 tags• Lists both external and internal broken links• Lists HTTP 4XX errors• Lists the images that don’t have alt tags.
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Conclusion
Of all the existing tools that help you perform bits and pieces of digital marketing competitive research, one could now safely conclude that SEMrush is the most comprehensive and a complete digital marketing tool that every company must use.
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The How and Why of Submitting your Website to Google News
A major part of online marketing is increasing the exposure of your website on different search-engines. This can be done by applying ethical SEO strategies, investing in social media and creating compelling content. Did you know that Google is one of the largest drivers of traffic in the UK? Submitting your website to Google News is without a doubt one of the most important things that you should do. This service was founded 12 years ago (on September 22, 2002) and since then it has served as a news aggregator and traffic source for new websites.
According to its developers it “algorithmically harvests” news from more than
50.000 resources, from 72 editions and 30 languages. As a matter of fact, Google claims that it is viewed by approximately 1 billion unique users every week. This means that 1 billion clicks come from Google News itself, while an extra 3 billion come from regular searches. So if you want to bring relevant traffic to your new website you should definitely consider submitting it to Google News. Here’s how.
How to Submit Your Website to Google News Anyone can submit a website to Google News by using this form, but before
you rush into anything you should know that there is a set of requirements that your website must meet to be accepted. It is advisable to Audit it before filling out the form, checking for original/duplicate content, find out more info about the writers on your website and adjust the frequency of your content publishing (among other things). To be included in the news aggregator you must abide by the General Webmaster guidelines, as well as the News specific guidelines.
Before you begin your preparations, you should also check if you are already
listed in Google News. Nobody wants to waste time going through all of Google’s regulations if their website is already included. To check if your pages
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are already visible on Google News all you have to do is go to the “News” section in the search engine and do a site-search. If you appear in the News listings you are already visible in Google News so your work here is done.
Technical Quality Guidelines and other Requirements
Search engines, like Google, must first see your website to crawl, rate and index it. If you don’t appear in Google normal and news searches it basically means that you don’t exist in the eyes of the crawlers. The best way to notify the team of your existence is by submitting your website to Google News. Keep in mind that submitting a website that does not meet Google’s criteria might lead to its permanent removal from the service, and a new request can only be made after 60 days. Nobody wants to wait 2 months to submit a website to Google News. Here are a few regulations and guidelines that you should be aware of before doing it:
• Fresh Content: Google News is focused on newsworthy articles. Only submit your website if you are posting at least 1-2 articles/day. Your posts should include interesting, important and topical information.
• Article Quality Guidelines: Your article titles should accurately describe news topics (make them unique). The post itself should be longer than 250 words, so that it can provide quality for the reader. There should be at least 2-3 different authors, with proper bios on your website.
• Google News Sitemap: it is recommended but not required. Nevertheless, it will improve SEO and facilitate indexing.
• Authority & Accountability: The best news websites write about what they know, and they write with great responsibility and expertise. Each post should be accompanied by a comprehensive author bio and contact
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information.• Focus on News Articles: You can’t submit a How-to or Guide website and
expect it to be accepted on Google News. It is not a marketing service so you should try to remove non-news publications before submitting to the service. If you do not respect this rule chances are that you will be removed from Google News altogether.
• Readability: Even if you are tempted to write long twisted phrases try to contain yourself. All posts must be clearly written and free of spelling or grammar mistakes. Readability is also connected to ads and auto-load videos that will affect the experience of a visitor.
• Technical Guidelines: to help Google’s crawler you must also abide by the technical guidelines. These guidelines include, but are not limited to Article URLs, Article Links (anchor texts with a few words), Article Formatting (HTML articles), Multimedia content (multi-media is harder to crawl) and Robots.tx & Meta-tags.
Techniques to be Avoided at all CostGoogle is very specific about its guidelines and it will never accept unethical
SEO practices. Here are a few techniques that you should avoid at all costs:
• Participating in link schemes• Black-hat practices: Cloaking, hidden text or links, scrapped content,
doorway pages, cloaking• Participating in affiliate programs that don’t provide value• Optimizing your site for irrelevant keywords• Malware• Abuse of rich snippets
Submitting your Website & Sitemap to Google News Once you have ensured that all criteria are met you can think about submitting
your website to Google News. This can be done by visiting the form linked above. Provide Google with your site’s information, address, contributor’s biographies, the type of news that you are posting etc. Double-check the information and click the “Submit” button to send your form.
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Illustration of a Correct Sitemap
You could (and should) also submit a Sitemap via the Google Webmaster Tools after you have submitted the website to Google News (Verify the site -> Go to the Sitemaps section -> Submit Sitemap -> Enter the path of your sitemap -> Submit). This will make it easier for the search engine to understand the structure of your website, and increase coverage.
Google will notify you in approximately 7 days of your submission. If your website isn’t approved you must wait 60 days to try again. Your work here is done!
Improving Visibility After Being Listed on Google News Congratulations! If you have respected the quality guidelines your website has
definitely made it on Google News. Now you should focus on increasing your visibility within the aggregator. Although there are no specific criteria of achieving this, here are a few strategies that might help:
• Time Posts: As you can probably imagine, Google News is teeming with information. Websites that constantly post relevant and fresh content end up having their articles displayed, so post regularly.
• Be Original: It is impossible to always share ground-breaking news so you might want to create a unique voice for your website. Take an original
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angle to make your content more interesting for visitors.• Article Titles: Be mindful about the titles. They should include phrases
and keywords that readers search for. They should also be interesting and relevant to the content.
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In month 1 we showed how you to get your ecommerce website and store ready for marketing. Now it is time to start marketing your business.
Month 2 shows you the basics of how to start marketing your ecommerce business. The topics covered in this month deal with actionable marketing strategies that you can do now, today, and these strategies will help you in the long run.
The topics covered in this month are (click on topic to get detailed guide):
• How to setup email marketing• How to market an ecommerce store using Videos• How to market your business in YouTube• How to use Followerwonk to optimize your Twitter marketing
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Setting up Autoresponders with the Help of GetResponse
Every online business, even eCommerce websites should give something for free on their websites. The reason for this is because it provides a low-commitment, next step choice for prospects that aren’t quite ready to make a purchase. This free service doesn’t necessarily have to be a product. It may very well be additional information, or personalized data. Nevertheless, it will ensure that the visitor becomes more interested without fully committing to the buy. The only way to make sure that the strategy works is by following-up. Many companies have “not-following-up-on-good-leads” skeletons in their closets, and this usually leads to bad results in their campaigns.
While it may have been a bit difficult to respond to emails and prepare
personalized follow-ups a few years, nowadays there are plenty of autoresponder services which will enable you to capture lead information and automatically send out email follow-ups. Most of them require monthly subscriptions, but there are also installable, one-time-payment tools out there. What makes autoresponders different from newsletters you might ask?
First of all, autoresponder campaigns send out template emails on pre-determined dates, and they are triggered by “opt-ins” like completing a form on the site etc. Autoresponders will help you turn one-time buyers into repeat customers because they will help you nourish strong after-sales relationships
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with your prospects. There is no doubt that autoresponders are excellent eCommerce tools which every business, no matter the size, should implement in its online sales strategy as soon as possible.
There is an entire manual for setting up the GetResponse Autoersponder (which you can check out here)
How to set up a Time-Based Autoresponder with GetResponseEven the best planned campaigns fall through if they are not backed by
powerful tools. Contacting people at the wrong time, or failing to contact at all will significantly decrease your chances of success. This is where the GetResponse Autoresponder comes in handy. Its action and time-based messages will ensure that your message reaches the right audience, at the right time. The great thing about this software is the fact that you can set it up in a matter of minutes. All you have to do is edit some information, and the program will run messages for you. Here’s a step-by-step guide for setting up the auto-responder:
1. The first thing you need to do is import contacts and mails into your
GetResponse account. This can be done simply by pasting the emails, or uploading them as a file. Go to the general settings tab and adjust your profile and template emails.
2. Go to your Dashboard -> Messages -> Create Autoresponder. You will see that there are several options in the Messages section (including Create Newsletter). Click on the Create Autoresponder section, and begin customization. You can choose on day if you want follow-ups to be sent at
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specific intervals, from the moment that a contact opts in. The sending day can also be set according to the number of days you wish to wait from the moment that the contact is added. (Day 0 = the day the contact s u b s c r i b e s , D a y 1 = t h e d a y a f t e r t h e o p t i n ) .
3. Additional time-of-day settings: you can also fill up extra details for future follow-up messages. The sign-up option will schedule autoresponders as soon as a contact subscribes, while the delay option will wait 1-23 hours until sending a message. Lastly the custom option will give you full freedom of editing arrival time of emails. (Particularly useful for time travel and delivering at local times for subscribers).
How to Create Event-Based Auto-Responder with GetResponseNow that you know how to create time-based autoresponders it is time to
create event-based ones. You have probably already noticed that in the Create Autoresponder tab you have several options like opened, subscribed, goal reached, data changed etc. These parameters will help you send out follow-up emails more efficiently:
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1. Opened Option: When your subscriber opens message 1, then message
2 will be sent. It can be sent immediately, at an exact time or with delay. Make sure you click the recurrence option to send message 2 every time a subscriber clicks your link. When you are finished with the settings click Save & Publish.
2. Goal Reached: When pages with conversion goals are reached by the prospect he will trigger a follow-up email. Typical subscriber actions include purchasing products, loading files, registering for events and setting up new accounts. Like with the opened option, you can choose your goals, create your personalized message, check the recurrence option and send mails when the goal is reached.
3. Data Changed: This one is a bit tricky. It triggers a message whenever a change occurs in your custom field value. Go to campaign -> custom field -> action and do one of the following: a. when the custom field is changed the program will send an autoresponder, b. custom field is modified manually: mail is triggered.
4. Birthday: Sending thoughtful messages on special occasions is nice, and also good for business. It creates closeness between you and your client. First you have to create the custom field type “date” under Contacts -> Custom Fields. In the “create autoresponder” menu chose your campaign and a custom field. Create a personalized message which will be sent.
5. Clicked Option: The clicked option is similar to the opened one. When a subscriber clicks on link 1 from your message, then message 2 will be automatically sent. For example, if he has subscribed for a service and confirm the email, he will automatically receive a follow-up with a thank you note or account details. You can set up the message and days of the week in which to send them. (delay, exact time and recurrence options apply to the clicked option).
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Types of Autoresponders & Their Benefits:As we already mentioned, autoresponders are excellent eCommerce tools
which can easily be implemented in your online strategy to generate ales. There are several types of autoresponders. The first sale ones occur after a buyer places an order on your website. A follow-up message in which you thank them for the purchase can never go wrong. It will help you earn their trust and create bond. Activity-based autoresponders are sent based on the prospects activity. They can be sent when an order is placed, when new discounts appear, when they read your newsletter etc.
Personalized automation is the future of eCommerce marketing. Not only is it effective, but it also means less work for you. GetResponse has many more incredible uses which can be understood after a little exploring. Once you figure out how it works, you will have it run on autopilot. This way you will be able to focus on the vital aspects of your campaign.
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How to Market an Ecommerce Site With Videos
All ecommerce businesses need to have video. It is very important and very shocking that many businesses do not use video to sell more. How can you not have video in your ecommerce business in 2014? Videos can help ecommerce companies sell more and get more traffic and customers. Not only that, they can help the business explain themselves better and get more customers. Actually, videos increase people’s understanding of your product or service by 74%. Using video, ecommerce companies can get more customers by using the videos to market the business and also to sell more. They can use the video to explain to the customer their products.
When using videos, businesses need to have a goal in mind. Why do you need to have videos in your website? Is it to sell more? To explain the product to the customers? To provide support for the customer? Or as a tool for online marketing? You can use videos to get more traffic to your website and you will find steps on how to do that below.
When a business uses videos it will increase their sales and traffic by 64%. How can that happen? The video can be posted in YouTube because YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. By using the correct keywords and optimizing the video on YouTube for your business, you can get more search traffic and if they land on your website that will mean sales and conversions. Videos, if done well, can also convince customers to use your website over the competitors. Videos are a great tool to show how you stand out from the competition and why customers need to trust you with their investment of time and money.
Some popular methods for using videos for an ecommerce company are:
Product TourYou can create a great video that will show your product and explain all the
benefits of using your service.
SupportHaving support and video tutorials on your website will keep your customers
happy and we’ll also help them choose you over your competitors.
For MarketingYou can use videos for marketing in many different ways. You can use videos
as content posted on your blog. Then you can market that blog post to get more customers.
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Build LinksAs a sub of marketing, creating great videos that help your customers can
also build you links. Other online businesses and bloggers who find your videos helpful will post them on their websites. This will get you links and also expose you to a new market.
ReviewYou can use videos to do reviews or give demos of your product. Like a
webinar, then post the webinar on your resources pages.
Steps to create videos
Here are some quick steps on how you can create videos for your business with the goal of using the videos to get more traffic and sales.
Step 1 – Create a video that will be usefulBecause you are in your own niche and industry, you will need to find videos
that will be helpful to your potential customers. For example, we sell affiliate software and some of our customers have ecommerce business. So, we created a video that shows these companies how to optimize their pages. We added to a blog post and promoted the blog post. We got great results from doing this.
You can do the same for your business. Find the needs of your potential customers and then create a video for it and have it on your website.
You will be amazed by the results you will get from this strategy. Not only will your customers find it helpful, but you will also get people to link to it and this will help with your inbound marketing.
Step 2 – Host your videoFind a great hosting service to host your video. Maybe YouTube, Vimeo, or
Wistia. They all have their benefits so you can research to find which one is the best for your needs. YouTube is always good, because it is free and as mentioned earlier it is the second most searched platform in the Internet.
Step 3 – Embed Video on your WebsiteOnce you have selected the host for your video. Get the code and embed the
video on your website. You can have it in a blog post, in a guide, in a resource, etc.
Step 4 – Promote the VideoThis is the most important step. Once you have created a great video, it is
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time to promote it. You can promote your video in these websites and also do outreach to other people in your industry that will find it helpful. The more you work on promotion the better results you will get from marketing using video.
Best ways to use video for ecommerce marketingHere are some of the top ways that successful businesses are using video for
marketing.
- Interviews- Product reviews- Tutorials- Welcome message- Product explanation
Get more sales and growing your ecommerce business will need different marketing channels working together to bring you customers. Video is one of these channels and is always neglected by many businesses. Do not neglect video for your business. Have more videos for your customers in different platforms and make sure you have links bringing them back to your main website. This way you will get more customers and you will quickly grow and expand your business.
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The Next Level of eCommerce Marketing: YouTube Marketing
How is your eCommerce website doing? Have you already managed to amass a decent number of loyal customers? Is your presence on social media steadily growing? Are you promoting high-quality, compelling and insightful content? If the answers to all of these questions is “yes”, then you should probably think of taking your internet marketing campaign to a whole new level. We are talking about video marketing.
Image Source: cdn2.hubspot.net
Not only is video content the most popular type of content on the internet, but it will also add a new dimension to your marketing mix. According to MultiVision’s study, consumers are 64% more likely to make a purchase after watching a relevant video.
Here’s an excellent example of video marketing success: have you ever heard of Luxury Hair? This is one of the most successful online stores selling hair extensions. In 2010 they created their YouTube account, and since then have amassed over 1,400,000 subscribers and over 173,000,000 total views. They are the epitome of an audience enabled business that relied on alternative channels for promotion.
The reasons for video marketing, especially on YouTube are easy to understand (especially since YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world), but you could read this interview to learn more. Here are a few extra statistics that should convince you to take this step:
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• 60% of consumers will spend at least two minutes on a video with educational value, or about product planning.
• 88% of users will spend more time on a website with videos• 96% of IT decision makers & tech buyers enjoy watching videos.• Videos under 2 minutes attract the most visitors.
Image Source: socialbakers.com
Setting Up YouTube Marketing for your Ecommerce Website Before we start the in-depth guide on YouTube marketing we would like to
mention that you don’t have to create viral videos. The whole point of video marketing is to tell your story, talk more about your products and offer additional information to your loyal customers. In addition to this, you should also focus on engaging the prospect, through behind-the-scenes videos, testimonials and client-shared videos.
Since the introduction of Google Search Plus Your World, entertaining and engaging content has enjoyed even more visibility (all the more reason to invest in video marketing). Keep in mind that the quality and quantity of your visual content will shape the way that your business is perceived in the oh-so competitive eCommerce landscape. Here are a few things that will help you get
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started:
• Set up a branded YouTube Channel: Assuming that you want to post multiple videos in the future, you should set up a branded channel. It looks professional, it will further promote your web presence, and it will make it easier for clients to find you. A word of advice would be to segment your videos according to categories, to increase usability (examples: a segment for the history of your store, tutorials for products, lines of product features, competitions etc).
• Work on your Strategy: what do you want to achieve through your videos? How often will you post? What customers do you want to view your videos? These are only a few things you should keep in mind when working on your video marketing campaign.
• Experiment with your first video: You can’t simply create videos with your iPhone and expect people to enjoy them. Professional equipment is essential for video success.
Integrating your Video Efforts into Your Content Marketing Campaign Now that you have set up your YouTube account, and purchased the proper
tools it is time to start your campaign. In order to create viewable content that communicates the vision of your brand you should follow this step-by-step guide:
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1. Define your Audience The first and most important step to a successful marketing campaign is
understanding the audience. It is of vital importance to create videos that appeal to your audience. While it is ok to create videos which appeal to the general public, and get overall views, it is better to focus on a specific demographic, which are more likely to create a high number of quality leads. So before you create your videos it is recommended to check your Google Analytics account. Think about title/role, gender, age, or location of your customers.
2. Your First Videos Like the blank page of a writer, which seems impossible to fill, the first video
can be the most difficult thing to craft. Where should you start? Experts say that a FAQ (frequently asked questions) video is a great idea. Just write down the questions, sit in front of the camera and answer the questions. Information should include how your products are packaged and delivered, what payment methods work, how you can combine orders etc. Remember that the first video is an experiment, and it will help you get passed the fear of camera.
3. Use Analytics to Monitor Your Performance Your website is not the only thing that you can monitor. YouTube also provides
with a plethora of information and data on your video performance, so why not take advantage of it? By regularly monitoring your analytics sheet you can understand what works, and what doesn’t.
Recommended Read: 10 Ways to Track Video Performance
4. Optimize Videos with Tags, Keywords & Other SEO TweaksOne of the most common mistakes video creators make is to not optimize
their videos for SEO. This means that their content will never become visible on search engines, because the crawlers cannot see the meta-data and tags of the video. SEO for videos is similar to that of written content, here are a few tips that you should not forget about:
• Description: like the meta-description on your blog posts, it should include two lines (140-160 characters) that summarize the content of the video.
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Make sure you also include your keywords in the description.• Title: it is arguably the most important element of your video. It should be a
call-to-action and strong incentive that attracts visitors. If possible, also include your tags and key-phrases in it.
• Closed-Captioning: More and more companies are transcribing the audio of their video to help the search engine make correct associations. Transcribed videos rank better because they allow access to data in different formats.
• Tags: Youtube lets you enter tags, descriptions and a title for your video. The tags should accurately describe the content of your video. We strongly advise you to use “long tail keyword phrases” to attract targeted traffic.
• Categories: you can add up to 15 categories on your Youtube videos. Make sure yours fits in the right one.
5. Marketing Takeaways Your videos won’t always become viral, but by respecting the following advice
you will increase your chances in the market space:
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• Splash intros and exit pages will wrap your content and expand your branding options.
• Qualified URLS should use the first words in your video descriptions, because they show up as clickable YouTube links.
• Be consistent with content production. A beautifully designed YouTube channel isn’t of much use if it isn’t properly updated. Are you prepared to commit on long term? If you decide that YouTube is worth it you must mentally prepare for a long haul.
• YouTube Annotations: while they can be used to suggest products to your viewers, try not to exaggerate.
• Deep Niche Fishing: eCommerce is all about targeting deep niches which are rich in determined customers.
• Videos should be Useful and Informative: don’t turn them into annoying marketing pitches.
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Followerwonk -The most comprehensive Analytics for Twitter - A Guide
"Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine."
~ Peter Sondergaard
Its been just under 8 years and twitter has already transformed itself from a humble micro blogging website to a mainstream mass communication platform. Revolutions are organized on twitter, election campaigns are run on twitter and most importantly business brands started to use twitter to reach out and market to million of people with a single tweet.
When everyone is jumping onto twitter bandwagon and trying to capture that little attention of your prospective customer or fan base, you have to be on the vigil at all times and it has become more than an imperative for businesses to track, measure, analyze your social media channels for changes and further optimization. And this where Followerwonk makes your life easier.
Followerwonk is the most comprehensive twitter analytics tool that in general helps you to track, measure, gather business intelligence and optimize your social media channels for better performance and larger reach.
Who Should Use Followerwonk ?
Well ! Everyone who is active on twitter must use this tool, and below is the list of people for whom this tool might be a lifesaver.
1. Marketing and business analysts.2. Small businesses who are trying to find prospects and leads.3. Business consultants and Market mavens.4. Digital and Social Marketing teams. 5. Niche business experts.
Without much ado lets us jump in and explore the full potential of this tool and let us try and understand its features by considering a scenario wherein you are the marketing analyst of a small ecommerce company and let us see how would followerwonk help you in making sense out of the hidden and intimidating social data.
The features of Followerwonk can be broadly divided into1. Search twitter bios2. Compare users3. Analyze followers4. Track followers5. Sort Followers
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Powerful ‘Bio” Search
"Data are becoming the new raw material of business." ~ Craig Mundie Rather than having thousands of followers who are mostly irrelevant, who
won't use your services in the near future, who are located in geographies where you are not operating or sometimes even bots, it makes more sense to put in a little effort to chose and handpick followers who would interested in your service so that you can help them make their life better.
One of the best way to go about handpicking followers in followerwonk is through the Twitter ‘bio’ search.
Twitter’s equivalent of ‘about myself’ is called a ‘bio’ and its 160 character limit, forces(read as inspires) people to explain who they are, what they do and what they are interested in, in the most precise and concise way possible.
Finding prospective customers
Let us say your online ecommerce business is now expanding to foods and beverages niche and you offer something new that no one in the state does, OK now the big question is how do you reach out to prospective customers ? One easiest and highly efficient way is searching and following the most active and authoritative foodies in California.
Go to search for twitter bios click on more options for advance search now
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enter the search term you wanted to search in this case let us say ‘foodie’, enter the location as ‘California’, set the max followers count as ‘500’ and minimum tweets as ‘500’ this is to filter the inactive users, and hit search. Viola!! There you go, followerwonk lists all the users who falls under this category.
Find experts and bloggers for PR
You can now export this data into an excel sheet and do further data analysis and filtering using pivots. For instance let us say you need to target only the most authoritative food enthusiasts, all you need to do is create a pivot table and filter users who have very high ‘social authority’ index.
Suppose in you want to reach out to all food bloggers for promotional and PR needs, you can search them out using the pivot table.
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Compare Competitors
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
With rapidly changing business scenarios the process of competitive analysis has become more of a science of number or data crunching. Any major changes on the twitter front, both positive and detrimental can be tracked using followerwonk.
Let us consider a scenario wherein you are consultant who specializes in providing and recommending an optimal CRM solutions to businesses. Let us see how followerwonk helps you be on top of some of the CRM solution providers in the market.
Click on compare users and enter the three companies you want to track and click Do it !
Followerwonk will now through easily comprehensible graphical illustration helps you understand how big the brands are and how they are performing on twitter.
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Followerwonk not only lists all the essential twitter metrics like total number of followers, total number of followings but also engagement metrics like total number of retweets, total number of replies, average tweets per week, average followers per day and total URL tweets that helps you gauge on how engaged companies are with their customers which is indeed a sign of social success.
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Analyze Followers Of all the followerwonk features the most important is analyzing followers, be
it your followers or your competitors. Let us see how followerwonk helps you do this.
Click on Analyze followers and enter the name of the account you need to analyze and be prepared to get amazed at the amount, depth and the extent of graphical analysis that followerwonk gives.
GeographyThe first info graphics that you can see is the spread of the followers across
the globe. This is a great data because,1. If you are a business then it helps you manage geography specific
campaigns.2. If you are local business then this chart helps you to see if your social
media efforts are paying off, because there is no point in having followers in Europe when you have your business at California.
3. It also helps you to find where your competitor’s followers are and hence you can ascertain their business markets.
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Twitter Engagement Timings
Social media is all about engagement, especially at a time when supporting customers on social media channels have become a well-established norm.
The most important aspect of any form of engagement is audience and you have to engage and get their attention only at times they are active on twitter. Followerwonk gives you a 24-hour bar chart representing the hours at which your followers are more active.
Followerwonk also gives the graphical representation of when your twitter
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channel is active. For those who have misaligned engagement timings can now optimize your engagement timings based on this data.
Next up, there is an statistically interesting frequency chart that shows how influential your followers are by taking into account the total number of followers your followers have.
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Followerwonk has did a commendable job to specify both the average and median number of followers because as you know average is not always the right metric as you can see in this case if you go with the average number of followers it is too high at 5000 whereas your median is just 195 which is indeed the correct approximation of the average number of followers. Followerwonk also lists a similar frequency chart for the average following count of your followers.
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The metric ‘followers’ is a not an accurate way of measuring the authority of a twitter account, the most accurate way is finding the number of ‘active followers’. This can be roughly calculated by tracking the recency of tweets, for instance those accounts who has not tweeted in more than 6 months can be deemed as inactive and hence the total percentage of inactive accounts can be subtracted from the total followers count.
Track Followers
Track Followers feature in followerwonk allows you to track and keep updated on the followers gained and followers lost count. Followers gained over a period of time can be a better metrics to measure the success of a marketing campaign or a new product or feature release.
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Followerwonk also allows you to track the followers of one other account, may be your competitor to compare their traction with yours over a particular period of time.
Sort Followers
The last and the final feature of followerwonk is a dashboard that helps you to manage all your followers and helps you sort followers based on total number of followers, tweets, social authority, and number of days on twitter
Conclusion and Verdict
Having tried all the other social media analytics tool, one can say Followerwonk is the best and the most comprehensive analytics tool for twitter. Since Followerwonk is acquired by Moz, all Moz users can now, in addition to search marketing analytics that is provided by Moz can now manage and track social analytics all in the same account.
But at the end of the day,
“Listening to the data is important… but so is experience and intuition. After all, what is intuition at its best but large amounts of data of all kinds filtered through a human brain rather than a math model?”–Steve Lohr
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In month 2 you learned how to start marketing your ecommerce store. The strategies you learned in month 2 did not include any paid marketing strategies.
Paid marketing strategies will be covered in this month. Most of these strategies will require you to pay a fee for the traffic you will receive.
Marketing your store online successfully requires you to use all strategies available; paid, free, inbound marketing etc. All these strategies need to work together to create your sales funnel. It is very important to know how to use paid marketing because it affects your bottom line. Learn how to properly setup paid marketing campaigns.
The strategies covered in this month are(click on topic to get guide) :
• Setting up Google Adwords Guide
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A step-by-step guide on how to set up and run ads with Google Adwords.
Advertising has been and it is still one of the primary and the most important part of any marketing corpus. Traditional advertising is mostly concentrated on newspapers, magazines and other public mediums. And after the Internet revolution, digital advertising i.e., advertising on the Internet has become a league of its own.
The reasons why digital/internet advertising has gotten a strong hold is because of its inherent merits like,
1. Digital Advertising is highly targeted, you specifically target only people who search for your service/product or advertise on the niche websites where your potential customers might be.
2. Digital advertising can be tracked accurately and hence the efficiency of the campaign can be studied and further optimized.
3. Since the Internet advertising is highly concentrated and targeted, you can save a lot of money, by not showing ads to non-relevant audiences.
Google Adwords
Adwords is Google’s proprietary online advertising network that primarily places your ads on relevant search results and Google’s Display network.
Pricing Models For Online Advertising:
Broadly there are two types of pricing models that you can chose from for online advertising,
CPM: CPM is cost per impression where you pay a certain amount of money for 1000 impressions (for every 1000 times your ad is shown to the audience)
CPC: CPC is cost per click where you have to pay a certain amount for each time some one clicks on your ad.
Getting Started With Google Adwords
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Getting started with Adwords is so easy; all you need is a Gmail account. Visit Google Adwords and click on Get Started Now.
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In the next page you’ll be asked to enter the Gmail ID you are intending to use and after entering the country and the preferred currency click on save and continue
Adwords Hierarchy
Before getting into how to set up and run ad campaigns, one of the most important and basic things that you need to understand is the Adwords structure,
The structure has an Account on the top, which has a common email id, password and billing details.
Under the Account there is campaigns, you can have up to 25 campaigns per account, for instance if you are running an ecommerce store then you have individual campaigns for mobiles, cameras and laptops.
Below the Campaign you have Ad Groups, you could have up to 2000 ad groups per Campaign. For instance you can have separate ad groups for Nokia, Apple and Samsung phones.
Under each Ad group you have a list of keywords for which the ads are run and a relevant ad copy for those set of keywords. For instance you can have keywords like,
• Buy nokia phones online
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• Buy nokia phones in California• Buy nokia phones cheap
Under the ad group that runs ads for Nokia phones.
Now click on Campaigns → Create your first Campaign
This takes you to the Campaign Settings Page where you can,
1. Set the campaign name; make sure the name is relevant and unique.
2. Chose the type of campaign you are going to run, there are 4 types of campaign that you can run, they are,
• Search and Display network (recommended for maximum benefits)
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• Search only• Display only• S h o p p i n g s i t e s
3. Select where do you want your ads to be displayed, which includes Google search network (Google search results + Google sites like maps and shopping) and Google Display network that essentially includes millions of websites that runs Google ads on their websites.
4. Next you can select or restrict the geographies where your ads should be d i s p l a y e d
5. You could also restrict your ads to certain languages. For instance if you are running an ad in Spanish, you can now restrict your ads only to the Spanish language.
6. Next comes the most important part of adwords, it is that which decides
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how you are going to spend your money on your ads, which is called Bidding. There are two types of bidding,
• The first and the recommended bidding method is automatic, that is Adwords will decide the bids to help maximize the clicks
• And the second bidding method is automatic where you can manually set y o u r m a x i m u m C P C b i d s .
7. The final detail that needs to be set is adding an ad extension; you can now include all the relevant business information such as location, site links and phone number on your ads, which enables your customers to directly contact you.
8. Verify all the information once more and click on save and continue.
Creating Ad group
1. Name the ad group, make sure the name is relevant, follows a logical nomenclature and it must be unique.
2. Now to create an ad, you must come up with an attractive headline, and a two-line description that tells the user what is that you are offering and why should they buy from you.
3. Enter a set of keywords that are relevant to the ad for which you think your ad should be displayed.
4. Click on Save and continue to billing.
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To perform a keyword research, to know what keywords people are searching for, how competitive it is and what is its demand you could use the inbuilt keyword research tool.
Navigate to Tools → Keyword planner → Search for new keyword an ad group ideas.
For a start enter the set of keywords that you think people might search for and click on
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You’ll now get a list of,1. Relevant ad groups that you can select and directly add it to your
campaigns.2. Relevant keywords that people are search for the closely matches the
keywords your entered.
Billing
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The last and the final part is the billing where you have to select the mode of payment and enter a valid billing address.
Ad Auction:
Now, to answer one of the most important question, since there are only 10 ad slots, what if thousands of people are bidding for the same keyword, how would Google decide who would be included on the slot and who amongst them will placed on the top?
This is where Ad Auctions comes in handy and it is based on the formula,
Max Bid * Ad Quality (CTR) = Ad rank
Higher the rank, better the positioning on the ad slot.
Let us consider a scenario where there are four advertisers and each has a Max bid amount and their quality score, when you take the product of both the entities the result you get is the ad rank and the bidder with the highest ad rank get the top slot. Do remember that, the actual amount that a bidder needs to pay is that minimum amount needed to maintain that ad rank position. So
Actual Bid = Ad Rank of the bidder below you / your quality score
Campaign Dashboard
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Now that you have started running ads, the campaign dashboard gives you a comprehensive idea of how each and every add groups and keywords are performing.
You can optimize your ad campaigns by,1. Increasing or decreasing the bid on certain ad groups or keywords based
on the performance.2. Increase the ad quality to increase CTR and hence quality score so that
you pay much less for a higher ad slot position.3. Pause campaigns that you are not sure of now, or on which you are losing
a lot of money without conversions.
Conclusion
Running ads through Adwords is the most easiest and economically viable ways to reach out to your potential customers directly when they search for the products/service you offer. As experienced Ad managers always advise, always keep a tab of the bid amount and always strive to improve your quality score to get maximum results at a much lesser cost.
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To make your ecommerce business easy to find in search engines, you need to optimize your website for inbound marketing.
In month 4 you will learn inbound marketing strategies that will help your business get more traffic.
The strategies covered in this month are (click on topic for guide):
• How to setup your Google Authorship• How to create video Sitemaps• How to promote your business using BuzzStream• How to build links using broken-back links strategy• Finding better keywords using Ubersuggest
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Google Authorship
Internet Search Engine has been Google’s trump card, and ever since its humble inception from a garage setup Google has been continually striving hard to hone the quality of its search results. And the latest addition to this endeavor is the introduction of Authorship Markup. Providing high quality results not only helps Google prevent its users from migrating to other search engines like Bing and Yahoo, but also helps fight scrupulous spammers trying to hack the system to make their low quality content to rank higher over the relevant and quality ones.
What Is Authorship:
Before getting into authorship lets look back at the basics of how a search engine works. When you type in a keyword, what Google does is, it first lists all webpages that are indexed for that particular keyword, then it arranges the webpages in the descending order of quality and relevancy. Quality is usually determined using Page Rank, that is the total number of authoritative external backlinks (votes) a webpage has.
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To further bolster a webpage with authority, Google found a way to link the reputation of the author who wrote the content to a particular page. In doing so for a particular keyword the content written by highly authoritative writers might rank better than other authors, and this process by which the web page and the authors gets associated is called Authorship.
Google patented Authorship way back in 2005 as Agent Rank, in which it states,
The techniques include receiving multiple content items from a corpus of content items; receiving digital signatures each made by one of multiple agents, each digital signature associating one of the agents with one or more of the content items; and assigning a score to a first agent of the multiple agents, wherein the score is based upon the content items associated with the first agent by the digital signatures.
Where agents refer to authors and digital signatures refers to an author profile
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page, which is essentially a Google Plus page.
How Google Authorship will help you as an author?
1. Existing Authoritative authors can retain their authority and expert status and further enhance your influence using Authorship. Authorship essentially helps you to rank better for your niche than those of others who might have used shady SEO techniques to make their page rank higher.
2. One must understand the fact that the internet search is just an algorithm that follows predefined rules and sometimes the algorithm cannot predict accurate results especially when subjective analysis is a better way to analyze webpages, in such cases Authorship can help greatly in preferring one author over the other using social clues, in this case how famous an a u t h o r i s o n G o o g l e P l u s .
3. Since your webpage containing your post is linked to your Google Plus account, it helps readers to both find other articles written by you and also directly find and interact with you on the topic and consequently gain more social authority that further enhances your authorship.
How Google Authorship helps websites/webpages?
1. Webpages having content written by authoritative authors have a higher chance of ranking on the top; this helps removing spam and improves the quality of the results.
2. Since articles with authorship are displayed as Rich Snippets with a photograph of the author, the link to his Google Plus profile page and his social authority metric (total Google Plus followers), the Click Through Rate (i.e., the ratio of total number of times the results is shown and the total number of times people actually click) is quiet higher. This consequently results in higher traffic to the website.
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How to Create Authorship To Your Website:
There are two ways to go about setting up authorship for your website.
Linking Your Website Directly To Your Google Plus Page Using A Verified Email Address:
The easiest, reliable and the recommended way is to directly link your website (domain name) to the author’s Google Plus page using a verified email address.
1. Creating a Google Plus account: To create a Google Plus account all you need is a Gmail account. If you don’t have one create a new Gmail account and the moment you login you could access your Google Plus account by clicking on the +username link at the top right corner.
2. The next pre-requisite is having an email id on the same domain where you are publishing the articles. For instance if you are publishing your posts in www.example.com, then you should have an email address as [email protected]. This is first step in linking your name to the website.
3. Always publish the articles with the name that is the same as your email address. Make sure you have a byline with the your name and a link your to Google Plus page on each and every page where your articles are p u b l i s h e d .
4. The next step is letting Google know that you have set up an Authorship for your website. To do this go to Google’s Authorship Verification page and
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submit your email address for verification. Once verification is done your email address will be automatically added to the work section of your Google Plus profile page. And the website (domain name) you have submitted will be automatically added to the contributor section of your G o o g l e P l u s p r o f i l e p a g e .
5. On the Google Plus page make sure you have a good recognizable headshot of yourself.
6. Have a good and concise bio of yourself stating who you are and what is your expertise.
7. And that’s it, you’ve got yourself Authorship for your website. To check if the Authorship has been successfully installed, just copy the link where you’ve published the article (that contains the byline that speaks about the author) and paste it in the Google’s Structured Data testing tool. If you have installed correctly, you’ll see the result (sample) with the photograph a n d a l i n k t o y o u r G o o g l e P l u s p a g e .
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Second method of establishing Authorship is for those who doesn’t have an email address on the domain name of the website on which your content is getting published.
Since there is no direct way to link the author to the website, we take an indirect method where we manually link both the author’s Google Plus profile page and the webpage where his/her article is published.
And the link must be always established from both ways,
Website → Author’s Google Plus page.Authors Google Plus Page → Website.
1. First to link the webpage to the author, just copy the link (URL) of the Authors Google Plus page that looks like
<a href="[profile_url]">Google</a>
Now to let Google know that this profile URL is linked to a content that has an authorship, we add a? rel=author parameter after the above mentioned Google Plus URL. So the final URL must look like
<a href="[profile_url]?rel=author">Google</a>
And the final link that has to be attached to the byline that talks about the author on the page where the article is published must look like,
<a href="https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202?rel=author">Author N a m e < / a >
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2. Now to link the Google Plus page to the website, all you need to do is go to the About section, and on the Links section click edit and now you can enter the websites name where your articles are getting published by adding it by clicking on Contributor to and add custom links.
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3. To check if the authorship has been successfully established, go to Google’s Structured Data testing tool. If you have installed correctly, you’ll see the result (sample) with the photograph and a link to your Google Plus page.
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Video Sitemap Guide: Create your Own Manually or with Tools
If you’ve been part of the blogging world for a long time you probably already know that sitemaps are essential for SEO (if you are new, it is high-time you found out). Google and other search engines use sitemaps to index and rank written content better. But did you know that the largest search engines can also read video sitemaps for all of your embedded content?
Google’s Video sitemaps provide essential meta-data (including intended audience, running time, category, title, author etc...) about the video. By implementing it you will make it easier for Google to crawl your website and display it in relevant listings within the video search results.
There are two ways of categorizing videos. You can either submit them in the regular sitemap, or you can add them in a separate one. If they are found on Google, they will also display a small thumbnail, and content related information which was submitted within the site-map.
The Benefits of a Video Sitemap
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SEO experts advise webmasters to create video sitemaps, especially if the content is stored on Vimeo, YouTube or any other platform. Why? Because when an internet user searches and finds the video, they will not be directed to your website, but to the source (which is represented by the video platform). The video site-map will ensure that they are directed to your website.
According to recent statistics, video content is the most appreciated and shared content on the internet. Using it to drive more traffic to your website makes perfect sense. In addition to this, having a thumbnail appear next to the video will surely increase its click-through rate.
Other Benefits of a Video Site-map:• Stronger presence on video.google.com searches• Good call-to-action with the picture thumbnail will lead to move clicks• It makes it easier for Google to understand what your content is
Now that you understand the importance of having a video sitemap, let’s find out how you can make one. There are two ways of approaching the problem. You can either create it manually, or you can use a plugin/tool to generate it automatically.
1. Manual Generation for Video Sitemaps Generating video sitemaps manually is recommended for webmasters that
have a newer site, with not too many videos. Have you ever gone through the process of creating a standard XML sitemap? The process is similar. The only difference is that the sitemap crawler needs more data.
Step #1: Creating the Empty XML File The first thing you need to do is to create a file. The name doesn’t matter; just
make sure you remember it. Save it in your root directory (example: www.example.com/sitemap_video.xml). The name and place don’t matter very much. The most important thing is to remember where it is stored before submitting your info to Google Webmaster tools.
Step #2: Create your Template Google has provided webmasters with a useful page about the structure of a
site-map. It should contain several attributes, but most of them are optional (we will discuss them below). The required ones are the title, description, play page URL, Thumbnail URL and RAW Video file location and/or the player URL. Most attributes are self-explanatory. You don’t have to write the XML file yourself because there are plenty of presets available online. All you have to do is make sure that the information in the XML file matches the one from the video. Save your file.
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Step #3: Submit the Sitemap to Google Webmaster It is recommended to submit your site-map through the Google webmaster
tool. Sign into your account, go to your website’s profile, navigate to the site settings -> Sitemaps, click Add/Test a Sitemap, enter its name and click submit. One sitemap can provide 50,000 entries (videos). If you exceed this number you will have to create multiple Sitemaps and link them together with the help of a Sitemap Index File.
Another submission method would be by adding this line “Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap_video.xml” to your robots.txt file.
2. Using Plugins for Video-Sitemap Generation If you are running your blog or website on Wordpress, you might want to
create your video sitemap with the help of a plugin. There is a long list of tools that can help you, but we have found a great solution: the Video SEO for WordPress Plugin by Yoast. With this tool you can simply specify the type of posts (with videos) that you want indexed, and the tool will set everything up.
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Make sure you also have the Yoast SEO plugin installed beforehand.
There are many other tools available that you can use, like the A1 Sitemap
Generator. It’s up to you to decide which tool is better suited for your needs.
Video Sitemap Required & Optional Elements
The required elements should always be included in your sitemap structure. They refer to the URL of the page that the video is embedded on, the thumbnail image, and the file/player that is embedded. Optional tags are not essential but they add SEO value.
Tag Required / Optional Purpose / Explanation
<loc> requiredThe information of a page on which the video is embedded
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<video:thumbnail_loc> required
The image o f you r thumbnail which should be a .jpg or .png file. Idealy, i t should be 1920x1080/1280x720 with an aspect ratio of 16x9
<video:title> required
Self-explanatory tag which should be treated exactly like a page title ( n o m o r e t h a n 7 0 characters)
<video:content_loc>Or <video:player_loc> required
The content_loc tag points to the actual video file URL (.mov/.mp4). If you are referring to an embedded flash player you should use the player_loc tag. Optional e l e m e n t s : “ a l l o w _ e m b e d ” a n d “autoplay” within the player_loc tag to have it embed directly in the search results.
<video:description> required
<video:video> requiredThis tag wraps around the <video> tags in your code, referenced per <loc> tag
<video_tag> optional
Think of this as the meta tag of your video. The only difference is that you Google actual ly takes them into account when generating results. 4-5 tags are usually enough.
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<video_category> optional
T h i s t a g , w h i c h describes the style of the video, can be easily included, and will boost the SEO value of your videos. It will make it easier for Google to organize your content. One- two words a re e n o u g h ( e x a m p l e : wedding ideas, social media etc.)
<video:uploader> optional
It’s always a good idea to claim authorship/give credit to the author of a video. This tag must be mentioned in the <loc> t a g ) . A l s o a d d t h e rel=author attribution to ensure that the video a p p e n d s t o t h e authorship image
<video:publication_date> optional
Adding dates to your videos will help them appear on freshness influenced queries. The fo rmat fo r da tes i s YYYY-MM-DD
<video:duration> optional
It refers to the duration of a video, in seconds. It will be appended in the bottom right corner of the video, which makes it invaluable from a SEO perspective
As arduous and daunting as it may sound to create video-sitemaps, it is well worth the time, especially if your website is heavily reliant on video content. Because video has become so important for the online world, Google rewards webmasters that properly optimize their video sitemaps.
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How to Promote Your Ecommerce Business using BuzzStream
BuzzStream is a great tool that allows you to find opportunities for growing your business. Using BuzzStream you can find bloggers in your niche, find guest post opportunities, find websites to review your business, and much more. BuzzStream creates a database of potential websites and businesses that you can work with to help build your ecommerce business.
How to Use BuzzStream
To create your database of potential partners in BuzzStream, you will have 4 ways on how to find and add them into BuzzStream. These are:
- Using Link Prospecting Tool- Import Websites from a spreadsheet- Add from List of URLs- Using the Link Buzzmarker tool
Step 1 – Using Link Prospecting Tool
First, you need to create a project. Next, click on the dropdown for “Add Websites” as shown below
Move your mouse over the Link Prospecting section and then click on “Create New Prospecting File”
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Enter a profile name and then enter the keywords you want to use for your prospecting Searches. You can enter up to 20 keywords.
Your keywords will depend on what your goal is. You can also include footprints in your prospecting searches.
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After you finish, click SAVE and BuzzStream will collect the metrics, contact information, and site information for you. All of this will be added in your database.
FOR A DETAILED TUTORIAL ON THIS TOOL GO HERE
Step 2 – Import Websites from a spreadsheet
Create your project.
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Next, click on Add Websites dropdown as shown.
Next, click on “Import from Existing File”
Select from the options provided of where to import the list. You can import a
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custom CSV file or you can import from Moz, ahrefs, MajesticSEO, and Citation Labs.
Step 3 – Add from List of URLs
Click on Add Websites dropdown as shown.
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Next, click on “Add from List of URLs” as shown.
Next, enter the list of URLs of web pages you want to partner with.
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Next, click Add Websites.
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Step 4 – Using the Link Buzzmarker Tool
BuzzStream has a plugin you can add to your browser toolbar called the Buzzmarker Tool.
Go to the Settings section then click on Setup Buzzmarker.
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This tool allows you to quickly add websites as you stumble upon them.
It looks like this.
Unfortunately, you can only add one website at a time. However, just like all the previous methods, BuzzStream will pull all the information you need to create your database.
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Once you have your project and your database, it is time to do some outreach.
Outreach
This is the other half of how BuzzStream is powerful. BuzzStream makes it easy to do outreach. It keeps you organized and makes creating opportunities for your ecommerce business easy. Here are the steps you need to take to make outreach effective.
First, you want to connect your email with BuzzStream. In your settings section, add your email address so that BuzzStream is connected.
By doing this, BuzzStream will keep track of your outreach and replies. Whether you send from your email or from BuzzStream, every communication will be tracked in BuzzStream and you will see the whole history of your communication with bloggers and other influencers.
Next, you want to create templates.
Create TemplatesBy creating templates you are making it easier to communicate with others.
Anytime you find a potential partnership use the templates to shoot out an email fast. This way you don’t have to have create a new email every time. Also, BuzzStream will still allow you to personalize the email even though you will be using the template.
Lastly, do not use the templates for all your contacts. Some businesses and
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influencers will need the extra attention. Keep that in mind as you send out emails. Determine if they need the template or will you need to establish a relationship before working together.
Add remindersAnother great feature when reaching out in BuzzStream is adding reminders
when you send out emails. You can add reminders to let you know when to check if your contact got back to you. Here is how the reminder feature looks like.
Add TasksYou can also add notifications if you sent out the email via the website’s
contact form or from your email. Since you did not send email via BuzzStream, use the notification feature to manually add your reminder.
Those are some of the powerful features you can use in BuzzStream to grow your ecommerce business.
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BuzzStream keeps you organized and keeps all your contacts and database in one place. This makes it easy to track your outreach.
Be more effective in creating opportunities for your ecommerce business by using BuzzStream.
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Broken Link Building – Demystified
One of the most important, highly effective and also the most controversial process in the realm of Search Engine Optimization is increasing the total number of backlinks a website gets from other authoritative web pages.
It has been confirmed by Google and also experimentally verified that the backlinks count is one of the single most important metric that helps a website to gain more authority and hence rank higher up in the search engines.
There are various ways both legitimate (in the eyes of search engines) and shady ways to gain more backlinks, listed below are the some of the White Hat ways of building backlinks,
1. News and PR: Natural PR and news coverage of your website for the product and service you offer is the easiest way to build backlinks.
2. Guest Blogging: Guest blogging about your website in other authoritative websites or blogs has twin advantage of reaching out to people and solving their problem and also getting good quality backlinks.
3. Forum and blog commenting: Getting back links by commenting on various relevant forum discussions or blog comments can be an effective way of building backlinks.
4. Partnerships: This is highly prevalent among online software companies that gets partnered/integrated with other software companies and gets listed on each other’s websites.
The fifth most commonly used tactic to increase backlinks is through finding more broken back links in relevant websites.
How does finding broken back link works??
Internet is changing at an alarmingly untraceable speed; every day millions of websites are getting created and thousands of websites are getting closed. A website article or a blog that is referring to a webpage might not be existing now and hence it gets the status of a broken link. Taking advantage of this you can do two things,
1. Lend your help in finding such existence of broken links in websites.2. Offering them an alternative (in most cases your website) link in the
place of the non-existent one.
Why should anyone be worried about broken links in their website?
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Broken links are in a way indirectly bad for SEO. The existence of broken links are a sign of negligence and also doesn’t help your reader, This might lead to increase in the exits rate and hence increases your page bounce rate and also decreases the amount of time spent on your website (less engagement)
How do I find such broken links spread across the Internet?
Well, basically there are two broader ways to find broken links, they are,1. Highly relevant keywords.2. Targeted authoritative websites.
Highly relevant and targeted keywords:
This is a much broader, comprehensive and in some cases brute force method of finding broken back links,
Let us consider a scenario where in you are a CRM consultant who runs a blog and you wanted to find more broken back links. Listed below are the logical steps involved,
1. Find the top 5 niche keywords for your website. You can use Google Adwords keyword analysis tool to do a keyword research on the topic you are interested in. Let us consider a limited scenario where in your are specializing on consulting people with best practices involved in building and managing a CRM software, You can now do a small keyword research and find the top 3 keywords in terms of volume searched.
2. Type in the keyword in the search engine and find the top 3 blogs that rank for that keyword.
3. Select a website that you are interested in and use tools like ScreamFrog to find the external links that are broken. You can download ScreamFrog for free and once installed you can enter the domain name that you need to crawl. After ScreamFrog has crawled the website you can click on
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External Links ! Filter by HTML ! and search for 404 (page now found). Now you have the list of all external links that are broken on the website, you can now manually go to each page and check for a relevant opportunity.
The other tools that you could use to extract broken links are:1. Xenu Link Sleuth (One of the oldest and the best tools in the
business)2. Link Extractor3. Internet Marketing Ninjas4. The Official W3C Link Checker.
Finding Opportunities among the Broken Link List:
Finding the right opportunity among the collected broken links the most important task, you should select broken links that are,
Highly relevant or is a direct alternative for the lost one. You can look at the content for the lost page using tools like Web Archive.
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Select only lost pages that can truly add or enhance the value of the page, both for the webmaster and also for the visitor
Select only good quality websites, both in terms of quality of the service and the traffic they get. You can easily get the quality by using the Alexa Rankings and you can estimate the traffic to the website using tools like SEMrush.
Creating Valuable Content:
Now that you have found out opportunities for replacing broken links, the next most important and crucial process is creating a top-notch alternative page.
How to create an alternative content?
As mentioned earlier use tools like the Way Back Machine to find how the original content was.Create a persuasive and well-researched content that should add value to the page.Add substantial research and statistics.Add sufficient graphics for the content to become more appealing.
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You can add necessary call to action buttons to boost conversions.Internally link the content with other relevant pages on your website to increase engagement.
First Contact:
Having identified the opportunity and the alternative, the next step is contacting the respective Webmaster to request replacement.
The following are the steps one must proceed to communicate well,
1. K.I.S.S ! Keep It Short And Simple.2. While communicating with the Webmaster always try to answer the
question ‘What is in it for me?’ Standing in the webmasters position. Address what is his loss and what is his gain succinctly.
3. Don’t try a shady marketing pitch, just ask him directly and plainly to include yours as a worthy replacement, having stated the reasons at the start of the communication, you’ll be surprised that more often than not he’ll be more than happy to accommodate your link.
Example Pitch,
Subject Line: A Heads Up On The Broken Link On Your Webpage.
Hi,
This is _______________________ , a research analyst with example.com, I was reading this article on your website www.example.com/post/example , On the second paragraph where you talk about the research, the link to the source is broken, meaning it is no longer found. It looks like they have closed down their website.
Since I too was researching on the same topic, I found this alternative source, www.yoursite.com/post/yourpost that is well researched and supports your stand, and you could very well add them as a replacement.
I thought this might help you and many such researchers like me to find to lead to proper materials.
Thanks,Your Name.
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Target Authoritative Websites
The method discussed above that uses keywords is a bit tedious and mechanical, there is a second method that works like charm in limited scenarios, and in this method, rather than finding the needle in the hay stack, one can how select highly authoritative sites and limit their broken like building to few of those sites.
How does one finds niche specific authoritative sites:
1. Industry experience: If you’ve been experienced on a specific niche, then you might well know the top websites that cover/follow your industry.
2. Backlinks: Another easiest way is to run and get a backlink report for the industry leader or your competitor. You’ll get a list of top authoritative websites that follows them, you could now very well use this a starting point for finding broken links.
Conclusion:
Final words of advise. Tracking broken links and suggesting a replacement is a tedious task. Industry experience states that this method of increasing backlinks might not work for all websites/niche/industry. Before diving deep and allocating time and resources into the project, start with a small team and a small goal and see how it works.
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UberSuggest: The Easiest SEO Keyword Suggestion Tool
Irrespective of the way that Google, Bing or Yahoo! might change in the future, keywords will always be a major part of search engine optimization. Since the release of the Hummingbird algorithm, long-tail keywords have become more effective and helpful for small businesses. Internet marketers no longer focus on highly competitive keywords because they can win the smaller, easily accessible markets faster. Every website or project should start with keyword research. If it is not done properly it could compromise your entire campaign. The best way to do this is by using tools such as Google Adwords, SEMRush or Hittail.
Is UberSuggest Useful?
Today we would like to share with you an awesome tool, developed by an
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Italian SEO expert. The tool is called Ubersuggest. In many ways it is similar to Google’s suggestions tool (from which it draws results), only on steroids. The software can be accessed from its official page, and requires no payment. It is completely free.
Newbie bloggers and internet marketers will find this tool particularly useful because it quickly pulls out an impressive list of relevant keywords for their niche. It is true that there are other hardcore keyword research tools out there, but this one will appeal to individuals who prefer to focus on high-quality content, while also being mindful of SEO.
Ubersuggest uses Google Suggest to find keywords. Rand Fishkin mentioned
its importance on “Whiteboard Friday”
Here are a few ways that the software can help you:• It can help you generate keywords for your PPC campaign• It can help you optimize your pages and blog posts for search engines• It can help you come up with ideas for guides, profitable niches or topics to
write about.
How to Find Relevant Keywords with UberSuggest
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Keyword research is extremely important for bloggers. It may not be the most exciting thing on the blogging checklist, but lucrative SEO techniques are essential if you want to take blogging as a profession. The Panda algorithm punishes websites with thin content and irrelevant keywords severely, and the best way to maintain authority within a niche is by writing niche related articles. (The Panda 4.0 refresh rolled-out a few days ago).
After you have brainstormed 30-50-100 ideas it is time for the UberSuggest
tool to do its magic number. Some people never quite manage to wrap their head around hardcore keyword research tools that show keyword traffic, competition, CPC etc. The UberSuggest tool will simply search through relevant keywords and give you the best results. Here’s what you should do:
1. Go to UberSuggest and type in your target query. We will use “luxury car brands” and select a target country and market. These fields are invaluable because they will make it easier for you to write for your audience.
2. Hit the suggest button and wait for the results to appear. Each keyword can be expanded further (by clicking on the key-phrase). Each key-phrase provides 4 additional results. This will provide you with more long-tail keyword ideas for your article/website.
3. Once you have found a relevant keyword you can use the plus to add it to
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your list. Add as many keywords as you need to your right sidebar. 4. When you have enough keywords simply press the “Get” button, and a
Copy & Paste pop-up will appear. With it you can transfer your keywords t o a n e a t X C E L d o c u m e n t .
5. UberSuggest works best when it is used with other keyword planning tools. Once you have found the desired key-phrases you should upload them to another tool. Overlay your data with the following metrics: monthly global & local searches, average CPC, monthly traffic volume you currently receive, competition and position on SERPs
Note: The UberSuggest tool could be used with GoogleDrive and Excel files in the past, but since it has introduced Kaptcha protection the data can no longer be imported automatically. Nevertheless, the Copy & Paste Tool will make importing data extremely easy.
How to Find Long-Tail Keywords with UberSuggest & Google Keyword Tool
All SEO experts know that their efforts would be futile without the help of some incredible tools. A handyman needs his handy tools, but he should also know how to use them. If your SEO campaign involves quick wins, productive work, and finding longer, targeted keywords for which you can rank easier, and convert better, the UberSuggest tool is an ideal choice. Here’s how you can find relevant long-tail keywords with the software:
1. First you must find ideas. For this step you will be using the Google
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Suggest tool. Open your browser and type a relevant phrase. Google usually autocompletes them with the most-searched phrases. It is a great starting point if you are not sure what you are looking for.
2. You can also hit the search button in Google, go to the bottom of the page and choose from the Searches related to <keyphrase> section.
3. Now go to UberSuggest and type in the same phrase. Unlike the Google Suggest tool, which only shows a few results and is, therefore, time consuming, the UberSuggest tool will automatically extract the best key
phrases and suggestions related to your query. 4. When you find a relevant result press on the plus to add it to your
“basket”. You can also compare these keywords with the ones on Google Suggest.
5. Click on the “Get” button, copy your desired results and paste the contents in another keyword planner tool.
6. Search for your long-tail keywords data – traffic volume, competition, monthly searches etc. –
7. Download the results and save for later.
Wrapping UpConsidering that it is a free tool, UberSuggest is an extremely powerful
keyword planner. It will help you find keywords for your blog and website in no time. The great thing about it is the fact that it displays results according to what people are searching for on Google. This means that you will actually bring targeted traffic to your website, and make money in the process. There are many great keyword tools available online, but none of them seems as intuitive and
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user-friendly as Ubersuggest.
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This is the MOST IMPORTANT month and MOST IMPORTANT step in ecommerce marketing.
In month 5 you need to review and measure your traffic, conversions, and marketing to see analyze how you are performing. From this review process, you will better understand what changes you need to make on your ecommerce business so that you can take your business to the next level.
The topics covered in this month are (click on topic for guide):
• How to use Ahrefs Site Explorer & Backlink Checker
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A Complete Guide to the Ahrefs SEO Suite
In this day and age online marketing is vital to the success of a business. While we cannot stress enough the importance of dedication and consistency, knowledge is the key ingredient for online supremacy, and the wisdom to use it is what gives brilliant marketers the edge. Irrespective of your talent as a writer, persistence or creativity, your business has no way of surviving as long as it does not know how to utilize the resources put at its disposal.
To ensure that your website is on the fast-track for online success it is paramount to gain a firm grasp on the performance, demographics, back-links and SEO issues of your website. Ahrefs is a tool that was designed with this exact purpose in mind. According to developers, it contains “the largest index of live links”. Today we would like to take an in-depth look at its features, strengths, weaknesses and teach you how to use it.
Getting Started with Ahrefs
Let’s start with the basics. Ahrefs offers a whole suite of tools (including the Site Explorer, Keyword Analysis, Domain Comparison, Competition Analysis, and Backlinks Analysis tools) which will make external and internal benchmarking a whole lot easier for you. What it does is collect, analyze and provide you with the freshest data updates on your website and that of your competition.
Its key selling points are its incredible speed (for data analysis), user-friendly interface, freshness of data and superb charts, tables of figures and graphics. The company offers 4 levels of access, and one of them is free. The other four have a price range of $49-$499/month.
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Professional Plan: $79/month – Site Explorer PDF Export, 100 backlink report, 20.000.000 raw backlinks exports, SEO Reports, Domain Comparison, Batch Analysis & Social Metrics
Elite Plan: $179/month – Site Explorer PDF Export, 250 backlink report,60.000.000 raw backlinks exports, SEO Reports, Domain Comparison, Batch Analysis & Social Metrics
Enterprise Plan: $499/month – Site Explorer PDF Export, 500 backlink report, 200.000.000 raw backlinks exports, SEO Reports, Domain Comparison, Batch Analysis & Social Metrics
1. The Site Explorer
Ahref’s site explore is like Majestic SEO, only on steroids. Granted, Majestic SEO is a fantastic tool, which can provide with an incredible amount of information but it can easily become overwhelming, especially for a novice. Ahrefs feels easier to control, it provides with fresher data, and it also presents it in an appealing way. Although its database is roughly 4 times smaller than that of Majestic SEO, it receives 48 updates a day, 7 days a week. In other words, if your goal is to track a large amount of back-links, and closely monitor your link-building strategies, Ahrefs is better designed for the task.
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From the moment you log your Ahrefs account, you will be encouraged to enter a link. In only a matter of seconds from doing this the tool will provide with a plethora of information regarding the it. In the overview tab you will have access to the following information:
• Referring Domains (including .gov, .net, .com, .org, and .edu)• Anchors• CTLDs Distribution• Referring IPs• Linked Domains• Backlink Types (including do-follow, no-follow, sitewide, not sitewide,
redirect, image, form, governmental and educational)
You can click on each of these categories for additional information. For example, by clicking the do-follow backlinks number you will be presented with a list of all do-follow links to your domain. If your domain is huge, and you are having trouble handling links to your site, this tool can greatly help you because it will enable you to drill deeper into the lost links, anchor text, crawled pages and new links data. All the backlinks are sorted according to their ALR rating (which means estimated number of visitors following that link each month).
But the options don’t stop here! On the left of the screen is the dashboard which offers even more vital tools. On it you can view the following:
• New/lost• Anchors
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• Referring Domain Breakdown• Linked Domains• Site Issues• Raw Export of Data (an invaluable tool for creating comprehensive SEO
reports)• Pages Crawled on Site• SERP Position
Raw Data Export tool: Depending on your subscription type you can export data in .XLS format or .PDF format
Because the Site Explorer is the most important tool in the Ahrefs suite (it can give you an idea of your backlink profile, or how natural your competitor’s backlink profile is), we would like to focus on it. For this purpose, we have broken down, and explained the most important features.
New & Lost LinksThe New & Lost Link tabs are invaluable for your online campaign. The
process is extremely simple. You can work inside a month, week or day. Click on the dates you want, then “all backlinks” and Ahrefs will provide you with a detailed list of links. Each Referring Page URL shows details about the Domain Rank, last HTTP code, link anchor, social metrics and date.
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By using it properly you will be able to foresee a major link push by a competitor, do a reverse link-building campaign or simply evaluate the quality of back-links to your website (an unnatural link growth due to an over-optimization filter might result in a penalty for your website). Once you are done playing around make sure to export the data to Excel or .CSV format.
As far as the lost links are concerned, it is typically used to manage the drops in inbound links. Additionally, it can be used to report or find links that the competitor has lost.
Anchor Text
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At this point you probably already know that keyword research is vital for every online campaign. They are not only used for on-site SEO optimization and content optimization, but also for generating relevant back-links. The anchor text tool does exactly what you would expect it to do: it creates a list of anchor texts for all external links. It will also provide you with data related to the number of occurrences. By monitoring it you will be able to determine what keywords convert better, or if you are using the same keyword for back-links too often. (Anchor text, phrases and terms data is also available in the Site Explorer Overview tab)
Referring DomainsReferring domains and pages are basically the places from which visitors are
directed to your website. With the referring domains tab you simply take your data, analyze it and get out. With it you can access the links from each domain by simply clicking on the expand button.
2. SEO Report Tool
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The latest addition to Ahrefs (the SEO Report tool) has brought the software one step closer to becoming a complete, multi-purpose suite. During the past few months the company has added many incredible features. One of them is the “Generate Site SEO report”. Here are a few things that you can check out by using the SEO Report tool:
• Big pages• Uncompressed pages• Slow pages• Meta-tags and titles• Duplicate titles• Missing meta descriptions• Long SLUGs• Pages with too many external and internal links
After Ahrefs is done collecting data from your URL the report will be ready. It can be exported to .csv format for later use. Most of the SEO issues signaled here are relevant to On-site SEO and they will enable you to improve the overall performance of your website.
3. Backlinks Report
Some might argue that the graphics-heavy interface of Ahrefs is not very comfortable to work it, but it is extremely useful for beginners. Take the backlinks report tool as an example. It will provide with data that is extremely easy to understand at first glance. When accessing this tool you will see an overview screen of referring domains, anchors, target pages, TLDs and subdomains broken in beautiful graphs and sections. If you are a data-junkie the probability of getting lost in the immensity of data is very high, because virtually all information can be further accessed for more details.
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One thing we really enjoyed about this data is the social signals displayed along with it. Other details include Ahrefs rank, number of back-links, number of no-follow links, IPs, subnets and number of linking domains. If you are not content with the default sorting (it’s alphabetical), you can sort the data according to your own criteria.
4. Compare Domains
Finally, we can present our favorite tool in the Ahrefs suite. As we already mentioned, one of the most important aspects of online marketing involves understanding the competition. Ahrefs knows this, and after months of testing it has come up with the perfect tool. We know there are 3 or 4 relevant competitors that you are always spying on, and now you can do so more effectively with the Compare Domains tool.
All you have to do is insert the name of the websites and you will obtain incredible amount of data about their social stats, referring domains, backlinks, no-follow links, redirects, images etc.
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5. Batch AnalysisLast, but certainly not least, we have the Batch Analysis tool. Based on your
subscription, Ahrefs will pull-out important data for a number of URLs that you have selected.
It will display information and metrics in a single, complex table that you can easily export. Metrics displayed include the total number of inbound links, social signals, Ahrefs rank, Domain rank, types of links and referring domains.
Similar to the Domain Comparison tool, the Batch Analysis will provide you with interesting information about your competition, and give you a better idea of your current situation.
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Additional Tools
Before we wrap up we will mention three more tools that you will not find in other suites, and which offer outstanding metrics:
• Breakdown of TLDs (domain name extensions) for external links• Site-wide and not site-wide links (site-wide links can be found on every
page of a domain, while not site-wide links are only referred to specific pages)
• Social stats for every back-link, anchor and URL (includes Facebook, G+, and Twitter metrics)
Wrapping UpAll in all, Ahrefs is an excellent tool for external benchmarking, link-building,
off-site SEO, monitoring performance and finding new link opportunities. The graphical representations and user-friendly dashboard are perfect for both beginners and experts. We have to hand it to the developers for creating such a speedy and complex tool. Also, even if it seems simple and to the point, it offers almost every piece of linking information that you will need. We recommend new users to play around with the tools to determine what features appeal to them the most. Each website has its own issues and goals, so you might want to focus only on some of the tools.
DISCLAIMER:
For the purposes of this article we have chosen www.lifehack.org as a test subject, and excluded the Ahrefs API tool from the guide.
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Month 6 is also a very important step.
To get the traffic, leads, and sales you want, you will need to promote your ecommerce business.
This month covers the many strategies you can use to promote and get the word out for your business.
The topics covered in this month are (click on topic for guide):
• How to host a webinar• How to promote your business using reviews, testimonials, and in forums• How to promote your business using an infograph
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Host a Webinar
A popular strategy that helps businesses establish trust with their customers and also attract customers and increase conversions is hosting webinars. A webinar is an online presentation where a business can teach customers the value of using them, showcase their products, answer customer questions, and build an audience for your business.
How can you grow your ecommerce business using Webinars?By hosting a webinar for your company and business you will have the
opportunity to expose your business to potential customers and partners. This exposure can be a new channel you can use to market your products and company. Many businesses use webinars to showcase their products and provide value to their customers and potential customers.
We suggest that you use the same strategy when hosting a webinar for your business.
A great way to see how webinars are getting used is to check some of your favorite companies. Find the companies you admire and search on their website to see how they use webinars. Also, look at your competitors and see how they employ this strategy.
After doing your research of how the most popular brands and your competitors use webinars you will have a better idea of how you can create and host a webinar for your business.
How often should you have a webinar?This entirely depends on how much time you have to invest in coming up with
a webinar and marketing the webinar. If you are a big business, you can have daily webinars. If you are small or medium business, you might not have it often. However, it is good to have one so schedule it. Again, you can build a lot of trust with your customers using this strategy.
Additionally, many of the popular applications that allow you to host webinars have a feature where you can schedule webinars ahead of time and not present them live. If you are really busy, you might want to look at this option. It is good because you can still host webinars that are previously recorded and then spend your time working on other parts of your business.
Examples of big brands using webinarsHere are some screenshot examples of how some of the top brands use
webinars.
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Google teaches customers how to use Google Ads with webinars
Microsoft has live and on-demand webinars.
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Amazon also has webinars they provide for their web services customers.
Software to useThe top applications for creating webinars are:- MeetingBurner- GoToMeeting
We have used both applications and they have worked great for our business. They’re probably other applications that allow you to host webinars. We are not familiar with them. These are the two we can recommend.
Tools needed to create great webinarsWhen creating a webinar, the most important thing to work on is your content.
Depending on your goal for the webinar, it is important that you spend a lot of the time coming up with your content. The content is important because it is what will attract attendees and also it will help you run the webinar smoothly. You do not want to come off disorganized. So, get your content ready and be prepared. Some of the tools you can use to create your presentation for your webinar are:
- PowerPoint or Keynote – Use these presentation applications to create your webinar presentation
- Adobe Photoshop or any photo editor – Use photo editors to create beautiful images you will use for the webinar
Best strategies for using webinarsHere are some great ideas you can use to create webinars for your business.
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- FAQs – You can create a webinar with the goal of answering most of the frequently asked questions your customers have.
- Giving tips – Another great idea is to give tips to your customers. For example, if you are a golf shop you can have a webinar for golf tips. This is a great way to target golfers and get them to your website.
- Showcase your products - You can have a webinar that shows how your products help customers solve their problems and why they need your products.
- Teaching your customers – Create a webinar where you teach your customers. The “giving tips” above will fall under this category. You can find other ways how you can teach and give value to your customers.
How to promote your webinarHere is another important step in your webinar process. Promoting. Just
because you created it does not mean people will start signing up. You will need to spend a lot time promoting your webinar. Here are some suggestions on how you can promote your webinar.
- Do a press release – Write a press release and submit it to the top press release websites. This will not only get the word out about your webinar but you will also get citations for your business on the web.
- Create a blog post and market it – Write a blog post explaining your webinar and what you will be covering and then promote the blog post. This will also get then word out about your webinar and also get more citations for your business in different parts of the web.
- Advertise it on your website – Add a link on your website for your webinar. Actually, create a webinar page and advertise all the webinars you will be giving. Include the date and time of the different webinars.
- Submit it to event websites and directories – Find event directories and submit the webinar there.
- Write your community – If you have been following the other strategies in this guide by now you are a member of a community. Announce it and promote it there.
- Ask influencers to promote it – Approach different influencers and have them promote it to their networks.
Hosting a webinar will help your business create trust and increase your conversions. Ecommerce businesses need to use all the channels they have to market and get customers and webinars have been show to increase conversions for many businesses. Invest the time to host a webinar for your ecommerce business and start to see your conversions and audience increase.
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Get Product Reviews
A great way to market and advertise your business is getting product reviews. Getting product reviews for your ecommerce store is great because you will get feedback about your service, the reviews will include links back to your website, positive reviews will attract more customers, you will get more traffic and you will get more conversions.
To get product reviews you need to do the following:
Find the top bloggers in your industryFind the top bloggers in your niche or any website where your customers
hang out. Approach these websites and try to get a review from them. In return you can:
- Give your product(s) for free- Offer discounts- Give them an extended free trial- Also, you can pay some of the top influencers to review your product
Product reviews will help your ecommerce store grow because you will get feedback, get new customers, get more traffic, and build relationships.
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Recommend other Companies
Another great strategy for growing your ecommerce store is by giving testimonials of the products you use and love.
Testimonials are great for building relationships with companies you love and admire, getting citations of your business in these companies blogs or websites, getting links pointing to your business, and expanding your reach to a new audience you did not have before.
The KEY here is review companies that you love and use. In your daily business operations, what tools do you use that make a difference in managing your business.
Once you find these tools, contact the companies and let them know you want to give a testimonial. They will be happy to get one and when you provide your testimonial, you will get a citation back to your business. This could be a mention of your brand in their website. Even a link pointing back. This is great for your business and it will help towards your search engine rankings.
Make sure your love for the company and your testimonial is genuine.
Testimonials will help you build relationships and get your company in the radar of your customers, other companies and influencers.
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Become an Authority in Forums
Marketing in forums will help your ecommerce business grow. Find the forum where you customers hang out and start participating.
NOTE: This does not mean selling or overselling your business in the forum. Many ecommerce businesses make this mistake and eventually get banned from the forums.
Forum members do not like businesses selling in the forums and not contributing to the discussion.
With this in mind, your goal in joining forums should be to help people. Show your expertise in the industry and answer questions that members have asked. Solve their problems.
Your target audience and customers hangout in the forum and if they find your solutions valuable and helpful, they will be curious about you and want to find out more. Fortunately, forums give you a way to tell others about yourself.
Add a description of your business and who you are in the forum profile section. Also, add signatures. Many forums allow you to have a link in the signature pointing back to your business.
Additionally, you can buy ads in the forum. Contact the forum administrator to get information on their media package if you are interested.
Lastly, forum threads show up in search results and you might get customers from any threads you were involved in.
Forums are great because you build relationships with your customers and you can also learn a lot about your industry and all the latest trends and things you need to know.
Invest time and build relationships in forums. They will pay off.
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A Complete Guide to Creating & Promoting Infographics
Internet marketers and bloggers should always be open to new ideas and unusual strategies for online promotion. Since the new Panda 4.0 algorithm rolled out, more and more writers and digital agents have been focusing on high-quality, compelling content. But content doesn’t always have to come in written form. With so much talk about alternative content in the past few months it was only a matter of time until a guide about infographics would be requested.
What is an Infographic? Should I Create One? An infographic is basically a type of visual content which is designed to make
difficult terms or topics easier to understand for untrained readers (they do not require heavy reading either). The internet is teeming with all sorts of infographs. Some are data visualizations, others present educational facts in an interesting way, and there even some that were simply designed for a couple of laughs. Needless to say infographics are extremely interactive, engaging and likely to be shared by visitors. In addition to this, they have also emerged as a sure-fire white-hat strategy for generating high-quality backlinks.
Image Source: http://visual.ly/infographic-infographics-0
A couple of years ago, when infographics first burst onto the online scene, online marketers rushed to make their own. Back then, creating a beautiful design was more than enough to ensure thousands of likes. Nowadays, it is more difficult to make your infographic go viral. So how exactly can you do it in
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such a crowded market?
How to Create a Share-Worthy Infographic Modern infographics are all about intelligent conceptualization, compelling
stories and targeted marketing. The whole point of an infographic is to make it easier for people to understand something. The first thing you need to do is to find an in-demand topic. Do not confuse this with a hot topic. In-demand infographics usually revolve around evergreen topics. You could conduct a keyword research beforehand, to find out what the “big thing” in your industry is. Checking out Google Trends could also help. Choose the topics that are growing in popularity. Here are few criteria you should consider before you start working on your infographic:
• Is your concept data-driven? You must find an interesting story in order for your infographic to be effective.
• Do you have enough information for a single infographic? When choosing a topic you must make sure that the story can be told on one single page.
• Lastly, is the visual part interesting? Your message should be conveyed in a visually appealing way.
If you have met all of these requirements, it is time to build your infographic.
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The best way to start is by outlining the process. Knowing exactly what it is that you will be writing about will save you a lot of time wasted on research and design. Here are a few key-points that you should be aware of:
• Compelling Title – Titles are essential for three reasons: they are attention grabbers, they convey your message from the beginning and they help you optimize the content for search engines.
• Finding your Narrative Thread – Have you asked yourself what you people will walk away with from your infographic? Simply slapping on some charts and statistics isn’t going to make it go viral. You must find your narrative thread, or story.
• Find your Visual Hook – In written works, there is usually a leading fact or hook that grabs attention. The same rule applies to infographics. By identifying your visual hook you will be able to make the entire design come together.
Everything You Need to Know to Promote your InfographicYou should know from the start that most infographics have the potential of
going viral because they are highly visual and engaging. While this is promising, you should still try to optimize it and submit it to proper directories. Here are a few strategies that will get your infographic noticed:
1. SEO and StructureAs we already mentioned, the biggest selling point of infographics is the fact
that they can organically generate valuable inbound links for your site. This something every internet marketer should consider, especially since creating infographics is a great effort. To make things work you must optimize it from a structural perspective:
• Set up the Embed Code: It is common knowledge that infographics are easily shared with the help of embed codes. It can be found in the HTML code. Include minimum data, a preview display, author credits, source cred i ts , re levant l inks and a l ink to the fu l l in fographic .
• Use & Optimize for a Relevant Keyword: When researching an infographic topic you must be aware of keywords. Once you have chosen
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one make sure it appears in the Title, body copy, URL, H1 tags and description.
• Set Up your Page: Host your infographic on a preview version of your website, because that’s where all the links will go.
• Add your Link to the Visuals: Some people use infographics without giving credit to the source. In order to avoid this, you should write down your link on the image itself.
2. List of Infographic Sites/Directories Submitting your infographic to a specialized site or directory will significantly
improve your chances of being discovered, or who knows, going viral. Before submitting, you should collect a large amount of sites and take notes of their performance. This includes domain authority, requirements for submission, overall quality and web design, cost and already posted infographics. We have compiled a list of 20 best directories (according to quality, number of subscribers and followers) to get you started:
1. http://vizualarchive.com/2. http://onlineinfgraphics.net3. http://chartporn.org/4. http://visual.ly/5. http://www.infographicsshowcase.com/6. http://www.pdviz.com/pages/submit-127. http://submitinfographics.com/8. http://www.infographicsarchive.com/9. http://mediacaffeine.com/infographics/10. http://nerdgraph.com/submit-infographics/11. http://dailyinfographics.com/12. http://www.loveinfographics.com/submit-infographics13. http://www.coolinfographics.com14. http://iheartinfographics.tumblr.com15. http://infographicsbin.tumblr.com16. http://bestinfographics.co.uk17. http://nfogfx.com18. http://infographiclove.com19. http://discoverinfographics.com20. http://pureinfographics.com
3. Using Facebook Sponsored Stories to Promote your InfographicStart by logging onto your Facebook account. Go to the Ads Create Tool
(https://www.facebook.com/ads/create). Link your infographic in the “Clicks to Website” menu. Facebook will ask you to upload 6 images which will become
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thumbnails for your infographic. In many cases, a thumbnail of it will not look good so you should consider posting only the title, or an attractive part of it.
Image size should be 1200 x 627 ideally. Also include a 600 x 315p one for the new Facebook format. Next, you must add the Title (headline) and the short description. Make it compelling to ensure that the Facebook user is enticed by it. Lastly, choose the type of ad you want it to be (on the News feed, right column etc.) and post it.
4. Accompany your Awesome Infographic with Awesome Content In most cases, great infographics speak for themselves, but a compelling
summary will drive even more traffic to it. You don’t have to write a lot. A 150-250 word description is more than enough to show the world why the infographic is important. Statistics show that readers are more likely to notice a back-link when the infographic also has content.
5. Other Outreach StrategiesNow that you have all the structural SEO and designing details complete, you
can focus on your outreach strategy. Besides the four methods described above, there are several other opportunities that you can take advantage of. If you want your infographic to garner the right kind of attention, not simply create some visual noise, you should consider the following tricks:
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Image Source: http://visual.ly/most-popular-infographics
• Submit it to Relevant blogs: The vast majority of bloggers love infographics, especially when they are relevant to their website. Do a quick keyword research, identify the best websites on your desired niche and contact the webmaster. Niche blogs are a major source of online momentum.
• Harness the Power of Social media: Google+, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Pinterest & Reddit are only a few examples of social networks where you can promote your infographic.
• Contact the “linkerati”: The next step in your infographic promotion campaign is to contact the movers and shakers of your industry. They are the ones who will send tidal waves of traffic to your infographic. Remember, when contacting them you should be as friendly, and personal as possible. They will sense a template-message from a mile away, and probably not even gratify you with an answer.
• Optimize it for Google Images and Other Search Engines: Last, but certainly not least, you should go to Google images, search for keywords relevant to your infographic, see where you are placed, and take a look at the other results. Link opportunities might arise from these newly found links.
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