First, think of how vast the internet is, and how impossible it is to reach every crack, corner, and crevice.

Now, imagine a place where millions of people endlessly sift through this vastness, promoting what’s worthy of the front page and removing what’s rubbish.

That’s Reddit.

If you’ve spent only a few minutes redditting, you may be thinking it’s a place for cute cats and ridiculous memes…

However, Reddit is also a place for the president, for customer support, and just about anything else you can imagine. Reddit pulls at least two billion unique visitors a month and normally powers thousands of active communities per day, ranging from science, music, and politics to specialties like tech support and homebrewing.

If you are not paying attention to your niche subreddits, you don’t know your audience.

But there is more to Reddit than its own huge audience you need to be listening to. Reddit is getting a huge visibility in Google’s organic search.

Reddit is becoming an inevitable part of just about any buying journey. Just about any brand triggers [PRODUCT/BRAND NAME REDDIT] suggestion in Google’s Autocomplete results:

[Reddit] comes up in many brand-driven Google’s Autocomplete suggestions prompting consumers to search it even if they didn’t initially intend to.

There’s also a new SERP feature for Reddit called “Discussions and forums”:

Not being on Reddit means missing this huge organic search opportunity and failing to control this narrative.

Four More Reasons to Use Reddit for Digital Marketing

1. User-testing and New Product Feedback

Do you have a new website or product coming out soon? Is there anything in the beta stage? 

Reddit is a great place to get quality (and free) feedback.

Continuing from the previous example, find the proper subreddit relevant to your business. Make sure you are operating within the subreddit rules and guidelines before submitting anything. If you’re unsure, consult one of the moderators by sending them a private message.

Here’s an example:

Further down the comment section, we see real feedback:

Boom! Redditors are happy to help each other in more niche subreddits – pretty cool right?

2.  Extend Customer Service Reach

In the same vein, we can extend our customer service efforts by researching threads where our business or product is mentioned.

Be optimistic – sometimes Redditors are complimenting your service! Find them, thank them, and contribute to the positivity. This ties into increasing brand reputation as well.

A word of caution: do not jump head-first into the comment sections, especially if you’re representing a company. Instead, get your feet wet by observing how people talk about brands and how a representative responds. 

Practice reddiquette (which is often different from subreddit to subreddit) and combine this with your observations. There are many stereotypes about redditors, but these only apply to the masses. 

When you’re in a niche subreddit it’s much easier to identify the tone of voice and sentimental atmosphere. Plus, we’re able to target potential customers who have already expressed interest in our industry.

3. Community Building

Creating a subreddit (a sub-community) is practical for many reasons. We can create private subreddits for an internal office team or an exclusive community for your clients. Public subreddits allow anyone to view content and comment if you allow it.

With an active subreddit, businesses can provide useful information (such as resources, advice, guides, and feedback) to current and new customers. Expect to see a detailed post on creating and maximizing a subreddit from me in the future.

4. Increasing Awareness

While not every business will adopt a whale and host a naming contest, Reddit is a vast opportunity mine.

Take note of which content gets upvoted the most and ask your team, “Can we do something like this?” If the answer is yes, go for it.

There’s even a subreddit for small businesses where you are allowed to promote your business.

Step 1: Start Monitoring Reddit

Products and brands are being talked about in every corner of the internet. Identifying all of these mentions is a pretty simple process; it just takes a bit of time to set up.

Reddit is an excellent medium for providing current social monitoring tactics to aid in brand management and data collection.

I constantly see social media marketers saying they don’t “get” Reddit. They always say it’s too confusing or a place all businesses should avoid. If you call yourself a social media marketer and you don’t at least acknowledge the value of subreddits, you’re doing something wrong. It’s one of the top 50 websites in the world. The branding, social monitoring, and community benefits are undeniable.

Reddit is a medium that doesn’t have everything spelled out. So, some users give up easily after having a bad experience which could have been avoided if they had invested enough time to learn the social norms and history of the platform. By dismissing the platform, they’re dismissing target audience groups that are:

• already bunched together
• already talking about relevant industry topics
• asking questions YOU know the answer to

There are inside jokes, thematic content (i.e.; weekly contests), in-depth quality discussions, beginners looking for help, and much more. A local business – a plumber or an HVAC, for example – can be incredibly useful on subreddits. It’s an extension of customer service.

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The challenge: Social media marketers and business owners need to be flexible when experimenting with new platforms. Becoming a community member in a subreddit is the perfect way to get started. It’s such a simple concept but it gets twisted when you try to approach it from a traditional marketing perspective.

The benefits of being a contributing member include being able to extract social data, learning more about potential customers, the market, the interests, and demographics, and once you’ve gotten your fill, putting it all together in an accepted form of advertising. Or a contest. Or a game. 

Every subreddit is different.

Take advantage of free tools. Here are some useful options:

• Google Alerts and Search Operators + Google Sheets/Excel
• Buzzsumo Alerts

Start off by opening up your preferred spreadsheet program. I recommend Google Sheets because it’s free and in the cloud, but Excel is also fine.

Let’s say your business is a homebrewing supply store – a local business with a large enough operation to handle online orders.

Run searches using site:reddit.com “keywords” in Google. Record each thread link on Reddit that you can contribute to, such as offering expertise, solving a problem, asking your own questions, or being a part of an event/evolving discussion. Then make a column to keep track of which threads you haven’t responded to yet. For more collaboration capabilities, consider using tools like Slack to make Reddit marketing a cross-marketing strategy.

The tools you can use are:

• Google Alerts
• Buzzsumo

Here’s a screenshot of creating a new alert using Buzzsumo:

Step 2: Create a Brand-Driven Subreddit

Owning a subreddit is your first step to owning a brand-driven narrative. Luckily anyone can create and moderate a subreddit.

If your customers are going to discuss your product on Reddit, they’d better do it in a space you can control.

Here comes the SERP management benefit of that: This should help you control [your product name+Reddit] results better. Some brands are doing that very well, e.g.:

• CloudFlare subreddit
• Comcast subreddit

Comcast-driven search triggers “Reddit” suggestion at #2.

As a result, Comcast owns those search results thanks to their official subreddits:

Controlling your brand-driven SERPs is the only way to ensure your customers will end up buying from you. It is your ultimate digital business card.

Additionally, they also successfully show up in Google’s AI snapshot (SGE) answer:

That’s your goal.

It takes time and effort to maintain a quality subreddit but your customer support team will likely enjoy it because it has a rewarding community-building aspect to it.

Make sure you set up your GA4 correctly to be able to measure the traffic from your new subreddit.

Step 3: Participate Outside of Your Subreddit

After you do some thorough reddit monitoring, set up your brand-driven subreddit and learn to talk to your customers in that space, you can start participating outside of it, in other relevant subreddits.

Reply to questions, make comments, and be genuinely active. Consider hosting an AMA (“Ask me anything”) to tell your story, use Reddit for content brainstorming, and learn more about your target audience.

Reddit is great for link building once you get a feel of it and understand what your niche reporters and bloggers are looking for when monitoring Reddit. It is great for competitors’ evaluation, product gap analysis, email marketing strategy and so much more. Stop ignoring Reddit as a marketing tool but approach it with care.

Results

We have been doing all kinds of Reddit analysis and strategy implementation for clients. We managed to control [brand name reddit] search results within 2 months of setting a brand-driven subreddit. For another client, our Reddit-driven viral marketing campaign brought in hundreds of clicks, links and shares, as well as positioned it as a trending search in Google:

Our client was a brand-new startup that barely produced any results for brand-driven searches. Google associated our client’s brand name with the biggest brands in the industry within a week of the Reddit-driven marketing campaign. This is the strongest signal you can build.

Reddit is one the most powerful tools you can use for brand awareness and beyond!

The post Mastering Reddit for Brand Awareness & Reputation Management appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Search engine optimization is becoming incredibly challenging and unpredictable. As search engines are integrating generative AI and learning to surface more diverse results, creating a strategy to rank your pages in the top 5 takes a lot of trial and error.

Video marketing is almost equally challenging. Gone are the days when you had to invest in professional equipment and hire an editor to be able to create a video. These days anyone can create great videos at home and edit them using affordable software. The competition is insane.

So where is the opportunity here?

It’s in combining these two marketing channels.

Let me explain:

• Videos rank incredibly well in Google (they have their own sections in search results, so you are not competing with giants)
• Not many video marketers are optimizing their videos for organic Google search, so it is actually doable.

Video opportunities we are targeting here

Videos are very search-friendly if you optimize them the right way. In this post, we’re going to look at the ways you can optimize your videos on the top networks, YouTube and Vimeo, for increased search rankings and views.

When it comes to organic search, there are two distinct opportunities we are targeting here:

• Video rich snippets (these are usually earned when you embed your Youtube code on your page)
• Video carousels (or video packs): These are separate sections within organic search results, and they are pretty easy to capture. All you need is a traditional SEO.

Here is how to best optimize your videos on YouTube and Vimeo for better search rankings and increased views.

Titles

The title is one of the primary elements of optimizing your video for search as it is equivalent to the SEO title for the video page on YouTube and Vimeo. Therefore, the standard rules apply.

Keep it under 65 – 70 characters, including the main keywords you want it to rank for, and make it appealing for visitors to encourage more views. Think of your video title just like the headline for your blog posts – eye-catching and SEO-friendly! Keyword stuffing is not advised. Using ChatGPT to brainstorm better video titles is a great idea.

If you are using videos as a way to boost your personal reputation or the reputation of your business, be sure to include your brand name.

Descriptions

The description of your video is important for a couple of reasons. For starters, the first 160 characters count as the meta description for your video page on YouTube and Vimeo. While meta descriptions don’t necessarily help with rankings, they do come up in search results in both the major search engines and the networks’ own search results.

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The descriptions also come up as a snippet when you share the video on Facebook and other social networks. This makes the description highly valuable for encouraging views.

As an added bonus, you can include links to your website in the video description. You just need to try to include your links earlier on in your description as most of the description gets cut off at a certain length on both YouTube and Vimeo, and visitors will need to click on the See More / Read More to see them if they are past that point.

Transcription

Is it important to say your primary keywords, name, and business name in a video? It just might be. YouTube automatically transcribes your videos. This means they can make search results for videos more accurate by indexing the video content itself.

On a side note, if you’re curious about any verbal ticks you might have while speaking during a video (like using a lot of um’s), they will be more noticeable in the interactive transcript.

Thumbnails

Take advantage of the ability to choose a thumbnail for both YouTube and Vimeo videos. A good thumbnail could encourage a view the same way a bad one could discourage a view, especially when your video is jumbled in with others in search results.

Embedding

If you want to increase your video views, allow your videos to be embedded. Better yet, add a Creative Commons license to them in the Advanced Settings on both YouTube and Vimeo. This will encourage more people to share them, and potentially increase the links to them as well. It is a good idea to use Youtube gallery plugins on your site to showcase your video content on your site.

Channel optimization

Many people will click on your channel to check out who is the video is coming from. So make sure it is optimized for those user journeys:

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• Complete the about section of the channel
• Add your links
• Set up the “Welcome” video
• Add a Youtube channel header image
• Set up a channel @username so that it’s is easier to type. This tool is great for coming up with memorable names.

Pinterest

Take advantage of Pinterest for more than just image sharing. Pin your videos in order to increase traffic and views from Pinterest to your video content. As an added bonus, Pinterest will give you a link back to both the video and your YouTube / Vimeo channel.

Videos pinned from YouTube will automatically start playing when someone clicks on your pin. Videos from Vimeo will be pinned as the thumbnail image with the ability to click through to the video.

Analytics

Want to know what is working (or not) with your YouTube and Vimeo videos? Be sure to use the video insights to find out where your video has been linked or embedded, the keywords that drove traffic to your video, and much more.

Create a sales journey from each of your videos

Once your video starts generating views and interactions, you want those viewers to go to your site and engage with your sales funnel. So keep that in mind when creating and uploading your videos to Youtube or Vimeo:

• Mention your product or service in the video content
• Use end cards with your contact details and QR codes to direct people to your site. Using IVR technology will help you funnel these calls better, that’s what we were doing.
• Include important links in the video description (and invite your viewers to check the description below the video to click the links)

Make sure to use URL parameters to segment traffic from Youtube and Vimeo. This way you can clearly see the source of each lead and personalize your follow-ups. Using CRM solutions will make segmenting your traffic easier.

Using the strategy above, we were able to create a powerful traffic generation strategy in which video was the second most effective channel for us!

Snowball effect

Videos with a lot of views tend to rank higher than others. Therefore, part of your optimization strategy should be focused on getting more views of your videos. Promote your videos just like you would your blog content. Share them on social networks, include a link to them in your email newsletter, create a blog post around them, or even create a page on your website devoted to all of your videos.

The more views you receive, the better your video will rank in search results within the video networks. As you receive more views, you will receive more shares, embeds, and links back to your video from other websites. Thus, the video’s ranking in main search engines will increase as well.

So as soon as your videos start generating clicks from Google, they will start ranking better on Youtube as well, so you will have more and more visibility for your video content.

This strategy will work even better if you collaborate with Youtube influencers to publish your videos to their channels in the form of interviews or podcasts. This way Youtube will learn to associate your name and content with popular Youtube creators, so your videos will show up in more recommended videos. Hari Ravi is a great example of implementing this strategy well.

Inexpensive Ways to Make Videos

Excited about the possibilities of creating videos, but not sure how to get started? Here are some quick ideas of ways to create a video without having to spend a lot on professional recording hardware or software.

• Host and record live videos on Youtube, Facebook, or Instagram. Gain extra views by inviting industry experts for regular panel discussions to capitalize on searches for their names.
• Record interviews on Skype or Zoom.
• Use Screenflow or Camtasia to record screencasts and tutorials.
• Use tools like VideoScribe to create animated videos.
• Ask customers to make quick testimonials at your business, at conferences, or other places you interact with them.

Ready to take your content marketing to the next level? Then video marketing combined with organic search optimization is the answer.

The post Rank Higher and Capture Leads with Video SEO appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Businesses come and go. But your personal name, that’s another matter altogether. In the social business world, your name can be leveraged as your personal identifier across myriad social media sites as well as your monetized business brand. 

In creating a new business or online presence, one of the toughest decisions you may make is whether to establish your social business brand by your personal name or a fictitious “DBA” identity, such as a catchy word, phrase, or slogan.

It’s hardly a trivial decision, especially considering your online identity eventually will sprout hundreds if not thousands of backlinks which will need to be well-tended if you decide to do a digital makeover at a later date.

Confused on what to do? Join the club. Do you drop whatever you are doing right now, rush over to GoDaddy, and immediately reserve your-personal-name-dot-whatever, or stake your branding claim on a hot potential digital DBA?

Luckily others have already been down this path. They can offer a variety of business perspectives and advice on the question of building a business brand based on a personal name vs. a domain that can grow and expand into a free-standing business that extends beyond the individual and might someday deliver a lucrative buyout offer that tracks with a business plan exit strategy.

From Startup to Digital Enterprise: DBA Scales

The biggest advantage to going DBA or brand versus your name is that the blog/brand/company can evolve into something much bigger and more valuable than one person’s perspective.

It can grow into a company, media outlet, etc., that can be monetized, bought, sold and so on. Mashable has grown into a powerful media outlet. It wouldn’t have done that if it were just its founder’s personal name, as an example.

The Business Persona and the Person

If you work for another business, you’ll have to consider the delicate balance of marketing your personal brand alongside your business.

I started out with a blog name that combined the industry and my own name (SEO and Smarty). I’ve certainly thought about the potential for a more topic-focused name over the last few years, but ultimately this started out as something for me, to explore my interests and help me learn, and I’ve been thoroughly happy with the way that it has worked out.

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What if your business fails? The hard facts are that, depending on the study, 50-60 percent of new businesses close in the first year; upwards of 80-90 percent go under within five years. You can dispense with a DBA given a few forms and some signatures. Not so easily done if your brand is your personal name and now a business liability.

From personal experience, it has always been important for my marketing strategy blog to be tied directly to my personal brand. I’ve launched several startups over the last 20 years and my work through the blog has really helped to build my personal brand through thought leadership and has resulted in continued trust with my community. As a result, every business I’ve developed has become a trusted resource, based on my personal brand and reputation.

People Buy from People

The social web offers a unique opportunity to humanize your brand and create a personal connection to customers. How do you create engagement and attachment to a logo? Be human.

Perhaps a morphed version of your personal name and a DBA is the digital sweet spot. If you’re still not sure which way to go, personal vs. DBA for your social business objectives, pay heed to this action list:

1. Lock Your Personal Name Now

Even if you never plan to use your personal name, it’s still prudent to reserve your domain just in case. Locking your personal name everywhere is also important for privacy and online identity. Read any of Hari Ravichandran’s books to get a better understanding of privacy issues these days. He has gone a long way in protecting his personal brand, so he knows what is talking about.

With an open or public profile, your personal information becomes easily accessible to anyone, potentially leading to identity theft, stalking, or misuse of your data. By locking your profile, you regain control over who can see your posts and interact with you, ensuring that only trusted individuals have access to your personal information. 

This precautionary measure helps maintain a safe and secure online presence while allowing you to enjoy social media without compromising your privacy.

2. Consider the SEO Implications

If your goal is to grow your personal brand name, register your domain name as well. Search rankings are enhanced if your real name matches your domain name. On a personal branding level, you have a greater ability to influence what people see when they search for your name. My personal site has long been neglected, and yet it still ranks for my name on top of my more actively maintained columns on more powerful domains. That’s the power of domains:

Additionally, a personal name domain is great for authors in pursuit of book deals and speaking gigs, even though it may not scale to an enterprise-level application. Who are we hiring?Your decision will rely on your plans for your future venture. It is a good idea to find a business name that has something in common with your personal brand. Namify is a great tool for that type of decision-making, and it has very cheap domains, so it is not going to be a huge investment.

It is also a good idea to research your niche associations and keywords when you come up with a business name because it needs to trigger topical connotations, so it’s not just your personal name it relies on. Your potential customers and leads need to quickly guess what your business is about by looking at your brand name or domain. Text Optimizer is a great tool for that:

Consider the Future

If you brand your business venture in your personal name, clients may expect to always work with you, not members of your team. 

Part of your job will be to continually sell trust in your associates. Bait-and-switch doesn’t work; you will have to show up at the table. This will reflect on your customer relationship-building strategy in a big way. When you try scaling it, using technology like AI chatbots or IVR, you will inevitably face an issue of your customers willing to talk to you personally because that’s exactly how they discovered your company. It will be exhausting down the road.

It’s All About the Balance

Over the course of a career, you may transition from a consultancy based on your personal brand to a full-time corporate job and then back to a solo business. You never know when an opportunity may completely change your career course. It’s important to create a plan for your personal marketing and make sure you’re in sync with your business or employer.

The consensus on personal name vs. DBA probably errs on the side if you can never have enough domains in your basket of brands. 

If you rely on your real name, you may never be able to sell your flagship site, but you will be able to leverage your personal identity to project the all-important “human” side to every new business venture you launch under your personal umbrella.

On the other hand, if you start with both (your personal brand and a matching business entity) and have the energy to develop both alongside each other, you may end up with a stronger presence and more visibility. That’s the route I once took and I have no regrets!

The post Striking the Right Balance Between Business Branding vs. Personal Branding appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Building a powerful and talented team is the most essential step to creating a successful business.

Hiring the right people is the most important part of that process.

But there’s one huge dilemma in finding the right new employees: All the great ones are already hired, and more often than not valued in their companies, simply because they are awesome.

How to find them and lure them to join your brand?

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about a successful hiring strategy, it’s that they tend to be super organized. Disciplined too.

Here are a few new tactics and trends to help you attract the right talent:

Using Social to Proactively Recruit

However, something else has been happening for ages too. Over a period of decades, headhunters have carefully nurtured their networks and positioned themselves to proactively approach candidates when the mandate is right. 

This allowed them to reach out to a hand-picked shortlist of candidates – and so put forward for consideration candidates that companies missed when relying on recruitment advertising alone.

One of the less talked-about aspects of social recruiting is the degree to which social media and social networking sites have made it possible for ANY recruiter to now source candidates this way. So in this article, I want to share with you 3 things you ought to investigate if you have any aspirations of attracting the right people to your company:

• Using Twitter lists to create targeted candidate pools
• Making use of LinkedIn contacts as your comprehensive recruiting database

Using Twitter Lists To Create Targeted Candidate Pools

Twitter lists have always been a powerful way of organizing the people you want to engage with. But for the purposes of recruiting, they’ve always been limited by the restriction of only being allowed 20 lists and a maximum of 500 Twitter accounts on each list.

The good news is, Twitter increased these limits, enabling you to create 1,000 lists and add up to 5,000 Twitter accounts to each list. That’s a massive change – and one that empowers you to really use Twitter as a proactive recruiting tool.

In all likelihood, there are specific companies that your company would ideally like to poach staff from. Imagine now that you can create lists of potential candidates for each and every specific skill/location/ company combination you might want to target in the future. By using a tool that searches Twitter users’ bios, you can quickly find and add candidates to relevant candidate lists. 

There are many out there, Followerwonk is one that I’ve been having a lot of joy using. By searching to find who’s been tweeting niche content in your sector, you’ll be able to add many more who don’t have this information in their bios but who you then come to learn about (and can populate the missing data by researching elsewhere). 

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You could also have lists of people who have expressed an interest in working at your company with particular skills/locations/company profiles.

Twitter lists also allow you to better target your daily engagements. You can create lists for niche experts that you really need in your team, and engage with them daily.

Just like with general branding, employer branding can take a lot of touchpoints before your dream candidate remembers your brand and starts considering it as a possible future workplace. You can also slowly but surely make them aware of your company culture and milestones.

You can also share your Twitter list with your current employees and let them interact with those experts as well. Not only will it help them to better understand your niche, but it will also demonstrate to your dream candidates that your whole company works as a team.

There are quite a few business phone apps and productivity apps that make this type of cross-team collaboration possible.

In your day-to-day Twitter activities, you now have a means of filtering who you’re engaging with and prioritizing those you can see your business is most likely to be targeting in the coming months. But now imagine that each time you start a new assignment, you can dig into your Twitter lists to identify candidates you’d like to approach.

Some you may see also appear on your lists of people who want to work at your company. Bingo! Others you can approach knowing already that they’re in your prime target market.

With 1,000 lists to play with, the possibilities here are huge. So if you’ve made Twitter part of your social recruiting activities, start getting organized with Twitter lists and position yourself to be ready to pounce as new requirements land on your desk.

Making Use of LinkedIn Contacts As Your Comprehensive Recruiting Database

Have you ever wished that you’d been organized enough that every candidate and client you’ve ever come into email contact with you’d added as a LinkedIn connection? Just think how powerful a database of headhunting contacts (and client prospects) that would be! Well with the new LinkedIn Contacts, this dream is in part fulfilled.

Alongside your existing LinkedIn connections, you can now import anyone whose email address you have. They’ll then appear as searchable contacts on LinkedIn, with their name and current occupational details populated from their LinkedIn profile. 

This is immensely powerful (and free!). Whereas your candidate database and Outlook address book are full of out-of-date candidate information, by importing those contacts into LinkedIn Contacts you now have a database – searchable by Company, Job Title, and Location – which references their very latest details. If their LinkedIn profiles are up to date, so too is your candidate database. It’s therefore more comprehensive than anything you could maintain in-house.

From within LinkedIn Contacts, you can track your activity with those candidates (or clients), plus set yourself reminders for when you should next contact them. So it’s also great as a candidate relationship management tool. The potential is immense for any recruiter wanting to more proactively source candidates in the future.

Another tool that consolidates several social media networks to help you participate in relevant discussions and find the right people is called Ddevi which is a browser extension that scans your Linkedin feed, Facebook Groups, Reddit, and Twitter discussions for your keywords to generate one consolidated feed for you to engage with.

You can then use the built-in AI writer to post replies to relevant discussions. This is a great way to build stronger relationships with niche experts who you hope will join your team.

Concluding Remarks

A lot of the current media focus has understandably been on the visible side of what can be achieved with social media. How to engage, how to interact, whose messages are being best received, and so on. Hopefully, with this article, I’ve awoken you to the fact that there’s a whole other side to social networking. 

A side that – through preparation and organization now – can position you to proactively source candidates in the coming months. Good luck!

The post How to Use Social Media to Find and Hire the Right Talent appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Creating niche content is something all brands should do in order to catch their audience at various stages of their buying cycles.

Content diversifies your rankings, builds your brand’s recognizability, and helps create more conversion funnels throughout the site.

But there’s one huge problem with publishing new content on your site: Time.

Few brands can afford writing teams, and relying on freelancers brings in new risks like inconsistency in voice and lower quality.

How to teach your in-house writers to create more content faster and more productively?

Here are a few tips:

Stop Agonizing About Word Count

Somehow “long-form” content became the best content creation tactic at some point. Just about any content strategy started evolving around “the more words the better”, and writers became stressed with producing 4000-word articles.

This slows down the process a lot.

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Don’t get me wrong, some content topics do require lots of words to cover. But these are very few topics.

When you need to address a popular question on your site, get to the point quickly. If you think about it, people looking for answers online, don’t need your long intros and definitions. They need an answer.

Stop demanding long-form articles from your team. All you need is to ensure your content serves the user right. Encourage your team to search for every search query they are tasked to target, and read a few high-ranking articles. Chances are, those articles will be very well-focused to provide value right away.

Word count is not one of SEO priorities, as confirmed by Google. How well your content addresses the readers’ needs is.

Make Good Use of Artificial Intelligence

I don’t recommend using ChatGPT (or similar AI-driven tools) to write content for you. While the AI-generated content may sound fine and even be useful, it lacks voice and expertise. It is also detectable.

And yet, AI tools can greatly improve the productivity of your writing team if they:

• Prompt a tool to create an outline for your future article
• Ask it to create takeaways for your written articles
• Prompt it to suggest popular questions to cover
• Ask it to write an introduction or a summary to your article
• Prompt it to suggest related keywords or concepts to cover, 
• Ask it to proofread your article and suggest improvements,
• Prompt the tool to optimize your content for search engines, 
• Ask it to compare your article to high-ranking competitors, 
• Prompt it to suggest related Q&A, etc.

There are also lots of interesting integrations for ChatGPT that will be helpful for writers. For example, Text Optimizer generates semantically-optimized answer to any question you type:

Steal Your Competitors’ Ideas

Looking at what your competitors are doing is a great way to understand what’s working. Like I suggested earlier, make sure you or your team actually searches for your target keywords and read some of the content that’s ranking on top of Google. 

This will give you an idea of what your content should look like and how to make more productive and focused decisions when writing yours. WebCEO allows you to analyze your competitors’ content and creates a detailed keyword map informing you where your article is probably missing. This makes your team’s job much as easier as they write and optimize their articles:

Based on your blogging platform, there may be more ways to ensure your content is as well optimized as your competitors’.

Share A Commentary

Don’t believe the myth that you can’t cite articles published elsewhere. Nothing can be further from the truth. Just keep in mind that if you reference an article, you need to accompany it with your own opinion or commentary.

Example: Forbes writes an interesting article related to the uptick in millennials in your industry. You copy and paste a large statistical finding and explanation from the article into a blog post. 

This content takes up the majority of space you would normally fill yourself. Essential to the success of the article, however, is that you then write your opinion regarding the information that you referenced. Tell us why you think the article is correct, incorrect, or perhaps reference your own statistic as a comparison.

Create Seasonal Content

The yearly calendar provides ample opportunities for seasonal content creation inspiration. Between the numerous holidays, people celebrate and the seasons themselves, you can easily increase sales using creative content marketing.

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For example:

• Focus content on the holiday spirit
• Tie holidays back to your products, services, or markets
• Cover local holiday events

Try putting together pieces focused on these calendar-related areas:

The change of seasons – Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall

Popular Holidays

• New Year’s Day (January 1)
• Valentine’s Day (February 14)
• Daylight Savings Time Starts (March 13)
• April Fool’s Day (April 1)
• Mother’s Day (Second Sunday in May)
• Father’s Day (Second to last Sunday in June)
• American Independence Day (July 4)
• Women’s Equality Day (August 26)
• Labor Day (First Monday in September)
• Halloween (October 31)
• Thanksgiving (Last Thursday in November)
• Winter holiday round-up (Last week in November)

Wacky Holidays

• Trivia Day (January 4)
• Send a Card to a Friend Day (February 7)
• Old Stuff Day (March 2)
• International Moment of Laughter Day (April 14)
• National Chicken Dance Day (May 14)
• World Environment Day (June 5)
• Embrace Your Geekiness Day (July 13)
• International Left-handers Day (August 13)
• National Good Neighbor Day (September 28)
• World Vegetarian Day (October 1)
• World Kindness Day (November 13)
• National Cookie Day (December 4)

The following year, make sure to look back at your past seasonal content and update it for the next upcoming season. It’s not about always creating new content, it is also surfacing your old content. This saves lots of time!

To make this tactic even more productive, use one of the WordPress calendars to easier plan your seasonal content. Some of the WordPress alternatives have editorial calendars built-in.

Content creation requires a lot of time and effort but the more you experiment with topics, the faster you produce successful content. This skill won’t come quickly. Steal the above ideas to create content quicker!

The post Time-Saving Effective Content Creation Tips appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Conversions are your bottom line. You can have the best SEO, the best relationships, and more social shares than you’d ever thought possible, but it all won’t mean much if no one is converting. 

For many companies, conversions mean making a purchase, but the term can go far beyond just monetary value. The term “converting” to you may mean completing a form, becoming a lead, calling your team, and more. 

Whatever your end conversion goal may be, it’s crucial you get there if you want to continue to grow and evolve.

1. Work on Those CTAs

A call-to-action is what drives people down your sales funnel. Make sure you take them seriously.

There are hundreds of different ways that a company can create a call to action. Consider some of these tips as you create your own call to action on your website:

1. Size: You want your call to action button to be easy to see, but not overwhelming. Websites with large call-to-action messages and links can seem like spam to many site visitors, but small calls to action can get lost (and potentially confuse a reader looking to follow through).
2. Frequency: It’s important to have your call-to-action buttons and messages dispersed throughout the page. Many first-timers only include one call to action section, but it’s best to give site visitors ample opportunity to follow through on your website. Do not be overbearing, but have at least three different ways someone can make a purchase or become active in your company.
3. Location: Make sure you put at least one call to action above the fold. This will ensure that people see the next steps they can take (especially if they don’t read the content).
4. Images: Images always make content more exciting. This is where a reader’s eyes are typically drawn, so you absolutely want to incorporate an image into your call to action. The image can be small and next to the text or be part of the text, just make sure it isn’t too overbearing and visitors can still read the page content.
5. Color: The most important thing to remember about color is that the text can still be read. Make sure the background is in direct contrast with the text of the call to action button. Also, make sure that this button is a different color than the rest of your website (while still matching). This will help draw attention to your call to action.
6. Linking: You ideally want people to click on your call to action button, but there will always be people who click on an image or your logo. Make sure that these aspects of your website also send site visitors to your call to action page.
7. Voice: Try to avoid passive voice. Tell your site visitors what you want them to do in a clear and straightforward manner. If you have a deal that won’t be around forever, let your site visitors know. Give as much information as possible in as few words as possible and you’re sure to get more clicks.
8. Mobile Considerations: You should always consider that your website or email marketing message might be viewed through a mobile phone. Make sure that your call to action button is large enough for those clicking with their fingers, and make sure that your images can be loaded quickly and clearly on a mobile phone. There are quite a few CTA plugins to make this step easier for you.
9.  Secondary Call to Action Buttons: Many site visitors are not ready to buy right away, so it’s a good idea to have another option for these people. If there is a change that someone would need more information, have a “more information” type button and put your primary call to action button on that page.
10. Use your CTAs across all your channels. Consistency is key when it comes to conversions. People see the same colors and wording in two or three places, and they feel much more confident taking an action. Use your CTAs as end screens on Youtube, on your social media, and, of course, in your reps’ email signatures when they reach out to your prospects. Have your salesperson create an email signature including your main CTA and branding, and you will notice your company’s emails convert much better.

You can also use AI-powered tools to come up with some ideas for creative CTAs if you feel stuck:

2. Shorten Your Sales Funnels

Do you know why you lose most of your site visitors or prospects?

Your conversion funnel is too long.

Email back-and-forth, waiting time spent waiting for a reply, manual invoicing, conflicting schedules – all of that can get lots of people to give up on your brand.

The solution: Shorten your sales funnel.

Automate what you can automate and let your site visitors convert instantly.

Here are a few ways to do that:

• Scale your phone support using technology like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) which would interact with your prospects, collect information about customer inquiries, and even help them make a purchase right away
• Use instant appointment scheduling option: Let your site visitors set up a meeting with you right away by clicking a link and choosing a day and time that works for them. There is online booking technology you can use for it, and it will even manage payments and reminders for you to immediately convert your site visitors into clients.
• Automate your invoicing process allowing your site visitors to pay instantly without waiting for your team to get back to them with an invoice. Depending on the nature of your business, tools like Quickbooks or PayKickstart can help you do that.

Something that can be considered an umbrella for many of the things we have already discussed is that your checkout process should be optimized. This extends beyond length and speed –  it should appear secure, be intuitive, easy to use, and require as little information on their end as possible while also giving you the data you need for future marketing.

Optimize checkout in every way possible! Make it easy for people to make a purchase with you.

2. Use Youtube Remarketing

While there are several powerful remarketing channels available to businesses these days, Youtube is often overlooked. And that is unfortunate. YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine with billions of active users each month. Perfecting your marketing strategy for such a large platform can have enormous benefits for companies, and what many are realizing is that the remarketing aspect of YouTube has huge potential.

Youtube presence is a great way to generate more quality leads to help you drive your business growth forward.

The reason YouTube is so great for remarketing is not only the fact that they have a large audience, but the platform (or search engine) itself allows you to create remarketing lists of target audiences based on the type of content a viewer generally watches – even if that content isn’t yours. This offers you several different benefits, many of which are either weaker or simply don’t exist when thinking about remarketing on Google:

• Better ROI. Remarketing almost always has better results than simply putting out an advertisement to hook new consumers. You can also optimize for cost-per-view as opposed to using impressions or the number of times your video displays in order to yield a higher ROI.
• Longer ads. Unlike social media where you only have a few sentences to get someone’s attention or an ad where you have a character limit, Youtube gives you 30 seconds to make your case in a video as opposed to a static ad and image.
• Better engagement. The average Internet user spends more time on a website with video. With more and more people interested in watching videos over reading articles, there is a good chance you’ll reach an entirely new and relevant group of people (in addition to the large number of visitors discussed earlier).
• Location targeting. YouTube is very helpful when it comes to location targeting, much like other remarketing campaigns you may run on other platforms.
• Brand Awareness. In other words, traditional remarketing benefits. This includes staying on a viewer’s radar and capturing their attention frequently. It helps build brand awareness and gives targeted users more repeated options to engage with your brand, YouTube or otherwise.

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So what does this have to do with leads? For starters, all of the points mentioned above will help bring people back to your page and hopefully help people engage with your page. Because of the nature of YouTube and the enhanced features of AdWords remarketing, you can remarket to anyone who shares your video.

Don’t Forget Your Existing Customers!

Obtaining new customers tends to remain a top priority for many e-commerce companies. While this is important, it is really critical that you don’t forget about your current and returning customers. These consumers are much more likely to make another purchase from your site than a new consumer is likely to make a first transaction.

Offer incentives to returning customers at the time of check-out or send emails with rewards after purchase. Always remember the importance of returning customers.

The post Three Ways to Turn Prospects into Instant Clients or Leads appeared first on DigitalMarketer.