Researching keywords for your SEO strategy involves contending with and delving within the adaptive intelligence of search engines like Bing and Google.

These companies employee genius AI and algorithms to match people with what they’re looking for and send them where they’re looking to go. To gain any meaningful results in such a stormy sea, you have to pay close attention and do your best to measure the waves and tides to bring your ship into harbor successfully (if you’ll accept all the nautical themes).

How SEO changes both for your business, your competitors, and the internet at large is something the clever content marketer will keep an eye on at all times, as it both directly and indirectly relates to his own SEO marketing strategy. Since so many companies are optimizing for their own keywords left and right, the keyword rankings are constantly changing.

Here are some critical research points to hit in the quest to find the right keywords and successfully rank for them.

Which are the right tools?

There are plenty of tools out there for keyword research, but starting off with the right one can make all the difference in determining your success.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner has been one of the most trusted and well-known keyword analysis tools among digital marketing and SEO professionals for a long time. The main purpose of using the keyword planner tool is to access the average monthly search volume of relevant keywords. This helps you determine the profitability of your targeted keywords or key phrases. Here is a screen shot of the Google Keyword Planner dashboard.

SEMrush

SEMrush is considered one of the most comprehensive all-in-one SEO tools. Competitor based keyword research option along with the traditional approach will help you find out not only what success you are having, but if your competitors are as well. Just add the URL of your competitor and it will show all the keywords that are ranking for your competitor’s website. Here is an image of the search function in SEMrush. Along with keyword analytics, you can also see domain analytics to track the authority of your pages and your competitors.

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool has become one of the most popular keyword research tools because of its user-friendly interface and the amount of data it provides. The best part is you can make a list of your target keywords directly from its dashboard without maintaining an excel sheet which saves you a lot of time. Here is an image of an Ahrefs keyword search. You can see all kinds of data like related question keywords, what the cost per click is, what the seen vs conversion rate comes out to be, etc.

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a question-based keyword research tool which provides a long list of prepositionally sorted keyword suggestions. This tool is also helpful to generate topic and content ideas. Here is a picture of me searching for the keyword “unbiased journalism”.

These are just a few of the tools available, and certainly make for the most popular. Next let’s discuss who, what, and how to go about your keyword research strategy.

Keyword research

When coming up with the keywords to try and implement into your SEO strategy, it’s worth following some best practices to get a head start over your competitors.

1.) What kinds of keywords are people looking for?

• They could be looking for the answer to a question, such as “How to get rid of weeds without pesticides?”
• They could be using a broad term to generate a variety of results, for instance “1980 Iran Iraq War”.
• They could be searching a specific website name or URL proper, or something with a location-specific tail because they want to find a brick and mortar location near them like “Lebanese food near me”.
• Finally, people sometime search for what’s known as long-tail keywords, like “Chart showing the effect of climate change on Eskimo population”. These are obviously harder to rank for because of their specificity. However if your website does rank high for them, the return in significant, also because of their specificity.

When conducting broad-spectrum keyword research to find where it’s necessary to start, it’s worth trying to figure out what are the most relevant keywords for each of these five categories in order to collect maximum search results.

1. Question
2. Location-specific
3. Broad or vague
4. URLs
5. Long-tail keywords

If you’re just starting out, pick two questions, two location-specific keywords, etc. etc. and set up your website to try and rank for that set. See how you do, and change them to another set after a week or two weeks goes by.

2.) Can anyone help you come up with ideas?

Why yes!

If you ever watched Family Feud in your life, you’ll remember the host going “survey says…” that’s because before each episode, the staff of Family Feud would ask the questions which would be featured on the show to the audience members. They would rank order the answers based on how many times over they were given, and then the game would happen.

So what you can do is survey your office mates, friends, or team members and apply the same practice.

Try and set your knowledge of your own product or service to 0 and have you and your team search Google like you would be if you didn’t know anything about it. See what comes up.

This is a tactic that will likely be more of a benefit the more people in your operation participate, as it will more closely reflect the reality.

So if everyone in your office, while pretending they didn’t know anything about the company, types something in Google, and 7 of the 16 office workers all came up with the same idea, that’s a good keyword to start off with.

You could even go beyond your place of work and ask family members friends and other acquaintances to do the same thing. In fact you ought to, because they will truly have no idea what exact products or services you offer, so it’s a more realistic survey.

3.) Your competitors are not your enemies. What can you learn from them?

At least, they may be of help when it comes to your keyword research strategy. Since you’re sharing the same niche, you may use some of the keywords your competitors use.

If you’re starting out a keyword research or SEO strategy, here’s what to do.

• Start with putting your seed keyword into Google and looking at what sites rank for those keywords. Those are your competitors.
• Check them in advanced tools like Ahrefs or Moz to get the list of their keywords. This can be extraordinarily useful because of the Family Feud analogy we used earlier – more minds = a better chance you’ll find the right answer.

4.) Click’s aren’t always correct, as my colleague from Relevance explains:

“The first metric that website owners often wrongly pursue is the search volume. The main thing you should remember about search volume is that it doesn’t equal clicks. In simple words, people don’t always click the search results they get for a particular keyword.”

“Consider this example: Google now has the “Answer box” in the search results where it shows the instant answer for the questions that it defines as “simple.” Usually, those are questions about the date or quick info about an event or person (e.g., “Donald Trump age”). If people were just looking for the date of the upcoming Oscar 2019 ceremony, they might not click any of the results on the SERP.”

(An example of the answer box)

“That’s why you should always check other metrics like the number of clicks or the traffic estimations to get the whole picture of the keyword. Dig deeper beyond the search volume and explore the context and the characteristics of a keyword to find rare gems. Only this way you get valuable and highly-targeted traffic.”

5.) What if my keywords aren’t working?

If your seed keyword isn’t ranking you very prominently, don’t be married to it, or for that matter, be afraid to branch out and try to rank for others.

For example, just because your seed keyword is something like “unbiased news sources,” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try something else if it isn’t coming along. You could tweak it to something similar like “factual news sources,” “unbiased reporting,” etc. etc.

Remember that variety is the spice of marketing life

Always be on the lookout for synonyms or easy next-door keywords from the ones you’re ranking for.

As an example, consider what my colleague points out, it’s hard to tell whether someone will search coat over jacket, or as I just mentioned, unbiased over factual.

What are some great and easy ways to see what synonyms people are using on Google? Google it!

PICTURED: This is a list of related searches that are attached to the bottom of the page of every Google search. These are a good place to start.

A keyword calendar

If there’s something about your keywords or meta-description that isn’t doing well, try and organize a scheduled change to see if a week or two weeks of something different works better. You can only get good data back on your keywords if people are searching the internet and landing on your domains.

A calendar or schedule will help keep all the relevant staff aware of what keywords are being worked on during a given period, whereby clear data should emerge that you can take action on. A simple addition like Google Calendar would suffice.

If you remember at the start of this article, I mentioned picking a few keywords from the 5 keyword categories which are:

• Question – “How to make samurai sandals from scratch?”
• Broad-based – “Samurai sandals.”
• Long-tail – “Samurai sandals worn during the Toyotomi-era”
• Location-specific – “Samurai sandals near me”
• URLs – “www.smauraisandals.biz”

Once you’re happy with the ones you’ve picked work them into your SEO strategy and see what you can come up with. After 2 weeks, log the results in the calendar and change the set of keywords.

Compare the following set’s performance with the earlier one, ,and keep in touch with your staff via the calendar.

In Conclusion

So here you have all kinds of information about how to jump start your keyword research strategy in a way that’s intuitive, creative, and thorough. You should have a decent set of keywords by two weeks’ time once you’ve selected a keyword planning tool.

Remember to always pay attention to keywords similar to your own that you aren’t ranking as high for – those a prime targets to expand your ranking and reach.

The post Creative and Thorough Keyword Research Strategies appeared first on Relevance.

Many reasons exist as to why this strategy should be added to any content marketing strategy, and by the end of this article you will have leveled up your ethical, organic marketing skills and wisdom.

Author’s Note: At the bottom of the article, we’ll also go over some great strategies to increase organic traffic and improve the loyalty of existing traffic that you probably would not have thought of.

There are a number of strengths that organic traffic possesses which other kinds of paid traffic do not.

Templates for different growth strategies for your business can include paid media, shared media, owned media, and earned media. Optimizing organic traffic is one part owned and one part earned.

• Owned traffic is growth you’ve earned with your hustle, energy and effort, and consists of things like a well-developed SEO content marketing strategy or keyword ranking, as well as personal brand outreach and development like email marketing or in-store promotions.
• Earned traffic comes from things like getting the word of your content out onto the plates of influencers, authorities in a domain, review sites, blogs and other media outlets.

Where does organic growth and traffic fit in the marketing picture?

The strategies for growing the interest in your platform, content, physical store address, or blog, are in theory numberless. As there are now 7,400 possible platforms, apps, and tools available to the content marketer, segmentation of growth strategies are endless.

There is one that is evergreen however, as it represents the world’s oldest content marketing strategy, and maybe even the world’s oldest profession (no, not prostitution). It involves capturing loyal, returning, organic customers or visitors and building a relationship with them like the vendors at the community farmers market would do.

PICTURED: It is in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk, reckoned to be the second-ever city in the world, where pottery was likely developed en mass. Some artifacts still carry the ancient potter’s “maker’s mark,” stamped onto the wet clay with a cylindrical seal bearing his name – the world’s first form of branding.

While we’re on the subject of historical content marketing anecdotes…

Did you know?

The Canadian rock band Rush famously produced 2112, an album with a twenty-one minute single in an era where radio singles were limited to around 4 minutes in length. They were determined not to let record companies infringe on their creativity, and it is generally considered that the album’s incredible success, since it wasn’t played on the radio, was due to loyal fans organically telling people about it.

The last part in this series we’ll go over some unique and exciting ways you can enhance your organic growth strategy by making sure your customers feel they are entering an ethical business or platform.

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Just quickly, I want to lay out some easy things you can do to increase organic traffic before I explain why the case for the oldest content marketing strategy is so strong.

• Put continuous, unerring effort into making your product and processes as memorable, factually correct, and high-quality as possible.
• Be honest and explanatory in every interaction you have with your customers, viewers, readers etc.
• And lastly stress in all things that what you’re offering is valuable and not just some useless data taking up space on the internet.

I’ll be making an operational, moral, and financial case for organic traffic since I’ve already made a historical one, though not so much as to say other forms of traffic aren’t worth chasing – as they most certainly are in some circumstances, and for certain reasons.

An Operational Case For Maximizing Organic Traffic

“What could be better for operational capacity than steady, expected, daily traffic which doesn’t have to be found, herded, or paid for?”

Yes, depending on the success you have in attracting good quality organic traffic to your website, platform, or physical address of business the less pressure on your marketing, writing, or content teams to succeed.

If you have a physical address, the cost of doing business is often higher than simple e-commerce sites, and so having a revenue source you can count on is all the more important.

In the world of digital or content marketing, few things are certain, therefore having something that is can change your situation, and shift pressure away from certain departments, campaigns, or individuals.

PICTURED: Squarespace analytics of a typical website’s traffic, where the lightest shade of grey represents organic, owned, returning traffic and the darker shades are shared, paid, and earned traffic.

Organic traffic gives you wiggle room

In order to give yourself or your employees the niceties afforded at other offices – such as sick days, paid or unpaid leave, having organic traffic which you can expect to be there can make up for that lost time.

New projects, for instance the launching of a new platform, the expansion into a new social media domain, the implementation of new software, or the launch of new marketing campaigns can be carried out slowly, methodically, and thoroughly – without the need to rush through them if you have that background traffic source which you can rely on.

Finally organic, returning traffic that values your content or products represents the perfect sample study for any new products, processes, or services you want to roll out.

Including them in a free trial, sample, giveaway or other promotional event will help increase their loyalty and make them feel they are respected and appreciated while also providing you with good quality and actionable data on any new products you launch.

Thus we have a case for the benefit of operational capacity and possibilities by optimizing organic traffic.

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A Financial Case For Maximizing Organic Traffic

As mentioned above, steady financial input is something that doesn’t just improve the earnings column in your taxes, it allows for the wiggle room which is responsible for almost all innovation in business.

[bctt tweet=”“Organic traffic is the grease between the gears of innovation and growth.”” username=”relevance”]

Maximizing organic traffic and growth in 2019 is vital for a team to be able to make appropriate estimations and guesses on what kind of changes and innovations you should or could or would be making.

Exploring the avenues into which a run at optimizing organic traffic would benefit you can be really important for tapping into unorthodox forms of income.

Here are some unique ways organic traffic boosts your ROI

1. If you’re a non-profit, organic traffic is going to represent the kind of people who make donations and recurring donations on Patreon or PayPal.Such funds are not going to come through people who read one article which shows up as an ad on their Facebook wall or Google search. If you plan to monetize a project in part through donations, organic traffic is a must.
2. One of the most overlooked and hardest to track forms of traffic are the clicks and purchases that come from personal, word-of-mouth recommendations between friends. Remember our example with Rush and 2112 from earlier?And if you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize the only time one does this is when it’s a product one truly believes in or appreciates.
3. Organic, returning traffic is the only kind of traffic which can consistently work as 4^th party marketing nodes out on the market landscape, distributing information about products, services, offers, or content to other people with whom they have a personal relationship with.

This is perfectly summed up with the enthusiasm found within the sub-Reddit  /r/buyitforlife, a forum of people sharing their favorite brands and products which are both indestructible and always reliable.

PICTURED: A typical post in /r/buyitforlife where this poster has literally bought this chair based on free-exchanges of information between like-minded consumers. These are traffic sources that are valuable, free, and almost impossible to track.

A Moral Case For Optimizing Organic Traffic

James Otteson, author of Honorable Business: A Framework for Business in a Just and Honorable Society, outlines that all the wealth in the world has been at some point, extracted out of nothing through one of two ways.

1. The 1^st is through what is sometimes called a non-beneficial transaction, also sometimes called extraction. This would be something along the lines of robbery or taxation – a kind of transaction that isn’t mutually beneficial or agreed upon.
2. Markets, says Otteson, are made stronger by repeat action of the 2^nd way value is generated; a mutually-beneficial transaction, in other words, capitalistic acts conducted by consenting adults who both stand to improve the overall value in their possession.

PICTURED: Author James Otteson, speaking at Notre Dame.

Optimizing organic traffic isn’t just good for ROI, it’s the right thing to do

[bctt tweet=”Businesses perform best in an environment where people have as much incentive and capacity for mutually-beneficial transactions as possible.” username=”relevance”]

Even in the situation where no monies are being exchanged, as is often the case with online enterprises, services and goods of non-descript value actually are, in fact, being exchanged.

Take for example the journalist.

What the loyal reader might acquire for free by reading his column in The Atlantic allows the journalist to make money through his employer.

Furthermore, of what intellectual value is that freely-offered property (the column) to the reader?

Since being properly informed on current events these days is tantamount to a skill set, there actually is a fair bit of value going from writer to reader, even though no monetary value is being exchanged.

This is a favorable exchange for the reader, and so it becomes easier for him to become part of your organic traffic – which is best achieved in a favorable environment for business – i.e. a climate where those visiting your platform are incentivized to make a mutually-beneficial transaction that leaves them feeling positive about taking the action.

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What a marketer ought to do: Methods of Growth

It is precisely creating this environment on your platform that allows for the maximal acquisition of organic returning traffic. Holding a standard of business ethics and morals towards those visiting your platform or physical address will give you the best chance of enticing them into return again or tell their friends about you.

Paid or low-quality traffic has no reason to get to know your platform as an ethical business practice or source, and so exists as an unlikely target for many useful advertising, monetizing, or growth strategies.

Here is the first creative and unexpected way you can make certain these values are imparted onto your visitors.

Be an identifiable person

• Pick an individual from your team, or yourself if you operate the entirety of the business alone, and begin to use pictures of their (your) face across your platform for different purposes.
• If you have a newsletter or send out marketing emails, put a professional headshot as a lead in, with actual words that person has said.
• Have a section on each page of your website with the selected headshot, and a word for word explanation, welcome, or other kind of dialogue next to it from that person.
• Include a regularly-checked email or phone number for visitors to reach out to. Whether they do or not, you’ll always be able to maintain a strong semblance of personability with your visitors.

This way, an actual business person is guiding the visitor through the website experience, setting precedence for honorable conduct to come, and making such they feel they are interacting with an ethical business platform.

Neil Patel’s blog is a shining example of this practice. His big ears and jolly face are everywhere you look, and it reminds you there’s an actual person out there.

In the establishing of a solid, morally positive source of organic traffic, one can reap all the benefits listed in the previous chapters, while also maintaining that part of you which is grounded in the desire to treat people with dignity and justice while conducting business in as honorable a way one can while pursuing the goals of amassing value and capital.

Create an ethics or mission statement page; make it easily visible

Here is the second method that can help your audience organically grow by practicing honorable business.

• Create a stand-alone page on the ethics and values you promote through your blog, business, platform, or brick and mortar store. Make sure it’s one of the primary pages in your navigation menu or bar.
• Create a call to action on your home page with the label “Our Values” or “Read the Mission Statement”. Don’t be afraid to create a moral code as a way of driving organic traffic.
• Create specific referral links to products, articles, or services FROM your values or mission statement page. This provides a dual purpose of helping those reading about your goals along to becoming converting leads, as well as letting you know how many people are inspired by your values into taking an action, and how many people would take them regardless.

Strive for perfection

If you aren’t set up for success, you won’t be in a position to capitalize on any strokes of good luck which come your way.

We walked about rocks bands earlier, well there’s a saying amongst rock and roll musicians that’s something to the effect of “You’re here to put on a show, whether for 10 people or 10,000 people.” Some other ways I’ve heard that are…

• Perform for the bartender and you’ll never be disappointed by a small crowd.
• Always pretend there’s a record executive at the bar that night.
• Perform the same way no matter the size of the crowd.

Simply put, if a person organically stumbles upon your website, and you haven’t been making an absolutely effort into providing quality products, services, or articles, then you’ve lost the chance at earning some organic traffic.

• Whenever you write an article on anything, write this on a post it note next to your computer and make sure you believe it: “When this is finished, it will change at least 1 person’s life”.
• Put every effort into making sure your content is of the highest quality. One of the ways you can do this is by constantly asking for feedback.

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Know where the best places to attract organic traffic are

One more quick method for maximizing organic growth and traffic is to understand where high-quality traffic is most likely going to be spending their time on the internet.

• Find high-quality blogs and publications that place equal value in content quality and ethics within your field or domain.
• Try and publish articles off-platform, meaning on these high-quality blogs, to lend your own site more credibility and traffic.
• Avoid using the social media platforms, or spaces within those platforms, frequented by poor-quality traffic or saturated by people who are more interested in conflict, low-engagement content like gifs and memes, and poor-quality shopping experiences.

In conclusion

Now you know and have a good grasp on what is required to make an excellent effort at increasing organic traffic.

Remember the moral, financial, and operational capacities for optimizing organic traffic, and build a solid predictable and reliable base to build your platform or business on.

The post Optimizing Organic Growth: Methods, Merits, And Management appeared first on Relevance.

Hundreds of millions of people across the world do most if not all of their shopping via the internet. More often than not online outlets like eBay, Amazon, and Overstock just offer more for less, which is really all the average consumers cares about.

However there’s still nothing the online shopping experience can do to mimic the atmosphere and person to person contact of a brick and mortar location. Shops like:

• Williams Sonoma,
• Lululemon,
• REI,
• Bass Pro Shops,
• Whole Foods,
• and the neighborhood coffee shop.

These have unbeatable atmospheres which make people want to partake of more than just the products these stores offer, but of the hobby or interest to which their goods relate; and make the customer want to keep coming back.

Pictured: The interior of a Denver REI, complete with indoor rock climbing wall.

Brick and mortar stores are a feast for the senses

Retail stores engage more of the senses than just sight. For example,

1. You have the smells of freshly opened shoe boxes, or scented candles, ground coffee and industrial fibers.
2. You have the sense of touch – incredibly important if you want to buy clothes; to try them on, to feel the fabric against your skin.
3. You have the sounds of other people and specialized machinery like a cappuccino machine or in-store music.
4. The sense of taste is indulged in specialty food found in gourmet bakeries, cheese shops, cafes, farmer’s markets and wineries too.

If you’re a content marketer with a physical location, these sensory experiences are your biggest ally, and part of marketing your content will be to also market this phenomenon.

By the end of this article, you’ll have a comprehensive knowledge of how to expand both an online and brick and mortar marketing operation by using the pair in tandem to support each other.

Utilizing email marketing software

To be honest, the competition within email marketing software is so meaningful that it’s hard to pick a bad one. Any plans you have for an email campaign or newsletter, I’m certain you can do with Active Campaign, Aweber, Constant Contact, MailChimp, Mailer Lite, or Drip.

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MailChimp might be the best of the lot because the postcard feature would be especially relevant to a physical store, as it adds a personal touch to any correspondence that’s particularly reminiscent of the postcards that veterinarians, dentists, orthodontists, and doctors’ offices send out to their patients when it’s time for them to come in for a cleaning or checkup.

You can ship them out fairly inexpensively, and it’s something which people expect from a physical store but that delivers an enchanting sense of inclusion to the recipient.

PICTURED: A typical MailChimp postcard campaign.

TOP TIP #1

It isn’t super necessary to buy the best email marketing toolkit and you’re probably better off just picking the least expensive option (which is also probably MailChimp) considering the overhead of running a store. 

Email content marketing for a physical location

Over the internet, content marketers promote their goods and services with content, a broad-spectrum word which could include such varied mediums as

• Videos or vlogs,
• Blog articles,
• High quality custom images like infographics,
• Podcasts,
• Product reviews,
• Newspaper-style editorials,
• Listsicles
• eBooks,
• And anything else that is both engaging and that offers viewers a chance to come closer to the product or service thus offered by the business.

From behind the counter of a retail location, the content marketer has much more content at his or her disposal.

For example, along with a web presence that could contain any amount of things listed above, they have the capabilities to engage walk-ins with the décor of their store, the atmosphere, the music, conversation, and more.

“The physical store has the opportunity of expanding on content marketing strategies online by inviting online guests to visit the location – thereby exposing them to both channels; and it’s this strategy that retail stores use to flourish.”

Utilizing both channels – Digital and Physical

Whether it’s at the front desk, on a podium near the entrance, or part of the checkout process, leave a physical way for those who are really enjoying visiting your shop to sign up for your email newsletter or mailing list (whatever you want to call it). Now you can engage them through both channels – online and in store.

If you run a boutique or apparel store, you could offer those on your email lists your thoughts and commentary on how you put an outfit together, what you look for when you bring items into your store, and news related to special offers, new inventory, store closures, and more.

In the same vein, if you run a local coffee roasters your emails could explain,

• How you select beans,
• What traveling to coffee plantations across the world is like, (if you are so lucky)
• When people can come to see you operate the coffee roaster in store,
• Special offers, and even if you are hosting any traditional extra-café activities like open mic nights poetry readings, etc.

Through utilizing your email content marketing plan, you engage the customer on the first channel. With any luck, your content will get them to partake of the second channel whereby they are almost certain to make a purchase of some kind.

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TOP TIP #2

One way to do this is to offer through email, something the customer can bring into the store that you might verify their place on your mailing list (for instance a MailChimp postcard) and that entitles them to a special deal, reward, etc. This could be a printable coupon, or something else like a password, a random unguessable phrase that when spoken grants them some kind of reward or discount.

Being part of a group or club is something that all humans, on a primal level, yearn for. How could a coffee connoisseur resist visiting a local café after being given a secret club password?

What else should I do?

Make sure to have an email signup sheet everywhere you go. If you are attending conventions as a store, or a local craft or farmers market, bring one with you.

PICTURED: Most websites have an easy way to change slugs. This is the page edit screen in the Squarespace design interface, reachable simple by clicking the gear next to the page name in the page menu.

Put a signup sheet up on your website with an easy to remember slug like /subscribe, /signup, or /newsletter so you and your employees can recite it easily from memory if the signup sheet is full, or not responding if maybe you use a tablet.

In store exceptionalism

If you have it within your means to make your retail outlet just scream out at people to make a purchase from a combination of touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing, you should make every effort to do just that.

The content marketer in a brick and mortar location should take every aspect of planning a store into account.

On the internet, digital marketers use advertising “funnels” to channel prospective customers through a series of pages that will result in them making a purchasing action. Every effort by the digital marketing team is brought to bear in attempt to make the funnel as “water tight” as possible, meaning that once a prospective customer embarks on the advertising funnel journey, they won’t leave at any of the steps.

The retail content marketer must imagine their store like an advertising funnel.

They should imagine that a native ad or Facebook ad is the equivalent of their front door.

As soon as someone enters that door, they should have a latent path they are likely to tread – a physical funnel – taking them from point to point to point where each point has a view of all the products available if they just get their wallet out.

Here’s the way top interior marketing designers make their stores water-tight

The REI near me is a perfect example of this. As soon as you open the door, you see a great single isle painted to look like a hiking trail that bisects the showroom.

Aquatic items hang from the ceiling on the far right side, whereas bicycles hang on the far left, insinuating a split between water-born and earth-born hobbies.

The store is telling me something; it’s a call to adventure.

The cheese shop I worked in as a youth was much the same. As soon as the customer opened the door they saw a massive refrigerated case running along the left hand side of the showroom, and handmade wooden shelves stocked with all the accompaniments cheese deserves. I can still remember the look of wonder on the faces of first time guests.

Having gone through the process of engaging with your content on the internet, going in store will hopefully confirm the guest’s impressions of your exceptionalism, taking them in to the last stage of the funnel, browsing your products and picking out what they like.

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Conclusion

Engaging your audience via email marketing is always important for any online enterprise, but when you have the added option for in store participation, you have so much more potential for driving ROI and conversions.

Always include signup sheets everywhere, add the address, or better yet, a Google Maps link to your store in any email correspondences you send out.

Likewise in your physical location, include signup sheets and make sure your staff is encouraging people to join your mailing list. Add incentives for them to do so like special offers and updates to in store events like classes, talks, shows, sales or tastings.

TOP TIP #3

1. If you marry an email content marketing strategy based on driving in store sales,
2. With an in-store funnel to drive people onto your online presence,

You stand to marry the best of both worlds, boost your ROI, and run a profitable physical business that can remain part of your community for years to come.

The post Best Email Marketing Practices For Retail And Brick-And-Mortar Stores appeared first on Relevance.

As such, it can be difficult for a person entering this sphere for the first time to catch up on that history – the mistakes made and lessons learned in the past – in order to understand what they need to do now.

Take for example the lead magnet – a strategy which was no doubt revolutionary at one point, but that is now such a common place tactic that a new content marketer might not hear of it for months due to its perceived obviousness.

Think of this article as a content marketing history lesson, comprised of the best bits of age-old knowledge especially relevant to anyone starting out today.

Often going forward means looking backward for the novice content marketer. Evergreen strategies of the past can be more useful to him than new innovation.

PICTURED: For more than a thousand years, star gazers believed the planets and the sun revolved around the Earth until Nicolaus Copernicus deduced that in fact it was the earth that revolved around the sun. No one talks at great length in modern astronomy classes about this fact; it’s so well-ingrained within the zeitgeist.

Let’s go over some need-to-know factors about tried and tested content marketing strategies similar to Copernicus’s cosmos-altering discovery, which a new marketer would do well to know…

Talking ads…

If you’re planning to launch some paid campaigns either through a search engine, or a social media platform, there is a basic template of checkboxes you need to know in order to save yourself the trouble of falling into one of the classic advertising ditches.

Don’t launch any significant advertising campaign until you’ve…

• Made certain your ad copy and images are the right ones. Put a little bit of money into some preliminary A/B or split tests to find out which copy and image perform better. If you’re planning to spend several hundred dollars on ads, make sure you have every advantage visually.
• Just like copy and images, you’ll want to make certain your ads are targeting the precise audience in terms of gender and age. Again, an A/B or split test will help you figure this out.
• If your ad involves a checkout process, make sure you have all the necessary email marketing tools set up. You should have emails for sign up, order confirmation, and most importantly, abandoned checkout. Once you’ve created all that, test them to make sure they work correctly.
• You’re certain that all of your links are appropriately set up for tracking purposes. If a bunch of good traffic comes your way and you have no way of seeing where it came from, half the point of your ad is lost.

A lot of this can take time, and may lead to frustration, but the window of success is so small in most online ad campaigns, that unless you take the extra time to take care of the basics,

1: You’ll be at an even smaller chance of success, or

2: Any success you do have will be hindered by poor follow-up capabilities.

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The kind of content determines where you should look

Where you should look, that is, for conversions. Is your content the kind of thing that could drag someone away from what they were doing and convince them to come and look at your landing page? What kind of content would fit that criteria?

On the traditional social media platforms where one might place an ad like Facebook and Instagram, people generally spend a few uninterested seconds at most looking at things that they aren’t familiar with.

It’s important to remember that most people are on these platforms to interact with their friends and favored organizations, or kill time at the DMV (or something like that) not to look at your ad, so you’ve got to understand what capacity your ad has for pulling them away from what they were doing.

Here’s how you can do this.

1. Some of the ways you can improve this likelihood is to target people who have interests in organizations similar to yours, rather than for example, hobbies. This is because most large organizations are very active on social media.
2. If you are, for example, advertising some software for SEO, target audience members who spend their time reading articles on websites like Relevance or eData Source, rather than audience members whose interests include content marketing.
3. Another example is those who are advertising package tours for adventurous travel. Target people who, for instance, read National Geographic, or watch travel channel, rather than those who simply list traveling or adventure among their interests.

By targeting specific organizations like a sports franchise or National Geographic for instance, you can target people who not only like something as broad as say, basketball or “adventure” but people who actually take action to pursue those things.

You know they’ve taken an action because they took the time to like or follow basketball teams and National Geographic on social media!

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Search engines

On the other hand, advertising on search engines like Bing or Google have the benefit of offering something to people who have directly searched for it.

THIS IS A CRITICAL LESSON FOR MARKETERS

Say you have a chemical-free sunscreen or something rather specific; you’re going to have better success on a search engine because most people don’t buy chemical-free sunscreen.

People who are looking to buy chemical-free sunscreen however, are going to take matters into their own hands and go and do it, they’re not going to come across it on Facebook and make the decision there.

On the other hand…

Fashion is something that most people are always up for purchasing and the picture of a stylish dress or pair of shoes is exactly the kind of thing that will distract people from what they’re doing.

A simple reason for this is that fashion doesn’t have nutrition facts, signup terms, subscription pricing, or system requirements. If a shirt is a beautiful shirt that someone would like to have, that’s all it can take for a link click.

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Good traffic and bad traffic

The old line about how any publicity is good publicity doesn’t quite fit into the modern marketing ethos. You can dump hundreds of dollars into campaigns which yield a steaming pile of nothing.

Bad traffic is everywhere, and it can confuse an internet marketer into thinking they’ve created a successful campaign, when really they are just entertaining people. How can one tell if they are managing to reach only bad traffic?

With no information, bad traffic normally comes as a result of native ads, uneducated Facebook ads, or other kinds of untraceable and un-interactive viewers.

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Some examples of good traffic are…

Good traffic is people who sign up or give out a lead, returning or trackable customers. Good traffic is a person who comes upon your content purely out of organic interest, hence why it is also known as organic traffic. It’s this sort of person which an internet marketer should try and set up to find.

Something to note – a follower or a like on a social media platform, while maybe seeming like a good kind of lead, can often be a bad kind of lead if the person doesn’t organically interact with your page. The amount of conflicting things fighting over space on the average Facebook user’s wall will generally mean nothing you post will get seen.

While the other kinds of traffic represent people who have to be retrieved by the marketer, the organic traffic visits on its own.

• This is also useful for understanding your place in the internet, because organic traffic is considered very highly by search engines for the sake of Domain Authority scores and ranking.

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How can I increase good traffic and decrease bad traffic?

You can target these people who make up your good traffic by really refining your audience on Facebook ads, setting up a website and tracking where people are coming from, or offering a signup feature – either for a newsletter or some free gift – often called a “lead magnet” – which we mentioned earlier.

Another kind of good traffic are those people who, as mentioned above, just walk right into your online presence and start taking actions. To these people one should behave as a 5-star customer service representative. Let them know and feel that you are a real person offering something of real value.

Decreasing bad traffic on the other hand…

One way you can decrease the amount of bad traffic you receive is to stop any ads sending to any platform that isn’t collecting useable reports on the people interacting with it – which can happen for a number of reasons.

1. It could be because the website’s compliance regulations prohibit data collecting and tracking.
2. It could be because your traffic is coming and going through Google or Amazon, who give very little information about their traffic to you.
3. It could be because you don’t have the proper tracking links and programs set up.
4. Finally, it could be because the ad is performing badly, and there isn’t any data because there isn’t any response.

Another way to decrease bad traffic is to generally avoid paid media until you have a really clear idea of how to reach your audience, who they are, and where on the World Wide Web they spend their time.

Another way to decrease bad traffic is to send emails to any new lead you get specifically asking them if they wish to receive emails from you.

A “YES” means that they are generally interested in what you have to say/sell.

A “NO” – equally useful to the marketer – means that they were never going to be interested in what you have to say/sell and would therefore skew the reporting on your email campaigns due to their inherent lack of interest.

Maximizing good traffic and minimizing bad traffic is the key to any internet marketing strategy.

The post Lessons From The Past: Digital Marketing Must Knows And Mustn’ts appeared first on Relevance.

But if you have no experience sourcing images, I know exactly what you are feeling in terms of the hesitancy and worry about whether your actions violate copyright restrictions or not.

From this article you can expect…

• To go over some startling statistics regarding the success of content that contains images vis-a-vis those that don’t.
• To learn how to go about legally sourcing images from around the internet and what you have to do in order to avoid liability for infringement.
• To discover some great websites and databases of free images and stock photos to use and how to use them.
• To find out just how much more effective images with factual information and human faces than those don’t contain these things.

So stick with me for a bit, and you’ll have finished a crash course in how to beef up your content posts with high quality images in a safe and sound manner.

1. The Necessity of Images

2. How to Select the Best Images for you Posts

3. Photo Licenses

4. Paid and Unpaid Sources of Images

5. Making your Own Images

Take a look at these findings from a study by Skyword and you’ll discover that:

• Content containing related images get more views and tend to perform better across all content categories.
• On average, total views increased by 94% if a published article contained a relevant photograph or infographic, as compared to articles without an image in the same category.

If we look at social media platforms we see much the same effect.

• Images were more often shared on Twitter, while tweets that contain images get a much larger bounty of retweets than those that don’t
• 87% of the top posts on Facebook contain images, and image posts receive more likes, comments, and shares than text posts.

Finally, searches on the internet are very often image-related.

• Ecoconsultancy research shows that in 2013, 100 billion images were captured and posted online in places like Getty, AP, Shutterstock, Wikimedia, Flickr, Facebook, etc. etc. etc.
• Google’s search load was about 5.7% through Google.images, while 5.7% of all internet searches are image-related queries.

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Images are an unavoidable part of the content marketing puzzle

There can be no doubting this, especially reviewing the sources above. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone really, since a picture is worth a thousand words as the saying goes.

Many people throughout the world rely on news and social media communications for entertainment, maintenance of social bonds, and information gathering. Tragically however, people are also growing progressively less-inclined to read large amounts of text without images.

I can’t assume it was this way for you, but growing up, my friends and I ranked the difficulty in the task of reading a book by the amount of pictures in it. If it was big and had no pictures at all, it was a book for grown-ups as far as I was concerned.

Image by Wolfgang Eckert

Ironically, grown-ups these days are more dependent on images to engage their minds than ever before, which is why I’ve included this stock image of a child reading a picture book!

A break in text with a high-quality image is almost like the breath of air taken after one surfaces from underwater, and before one goes to dive again – a break – a bit of respite.

This helps readers to stay engaged because it helps them see what their mind cannot image.

A good example is war journalism. War reporting and the associated images were a huge reason for the change in American opinion during the Vietnam War.

Lastly, many of us just plain don’t know what things look like. In war this is often the case, but also in other areas of interest like science. Can the human mind create an image of two galaxies colliding together without images from the Hubble Telescope?

PICTURED: A galactic merger, where two galaxies are smashing together. Could you have imagined this yourself?

Making sure the images in your reader’s heads are the ones that will most likely cause them to share or convert is the key when selecting images.

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How to Select the Perfect Images for your Posts

Selecting the right images for your content is key to standing out among your competitors.

Simply inserting any old image between paragraphs or as the featured image in your post won’t guarantee you any success since images are highly topical in nature.

If you’re discussing growth strategies and you feed in an image of faceless business people in a board room, you’re not giving yourself any real advantage.

If you want your content to drive engagements and shares you need the right kind of imagery. Adobe Spark’s free photo editor can help you turn ho-hum photos into stunning shots.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Yet another example from Pixabay shows that, unless you are writing about how to make your workplace for diverse, this won’t do much to stimulate readers.

THESE photos are the best

The best kinds of images to add into your content pieces to drive engagements and shares are as follows.

• Images with human faces in them
• Images with human faces looking at something
• Topical images, i.e. if you’re writing a content piece on Skyscraper content, choose an image of a skyscraper.
• Data driven images like infographics containing pie charts, graphs, and more visual displays of arithmetic.
• Screen captures.

Images with human faces

This is marketing 101, journalism 101, writing 101, and advertising 101, images with human faces perform better than those that don’t. Images of the African savannah do better when the people who live or work there are in the shot.

This is particularly true for two groups of people – beautiful people, which in the scientific world is defined as those with symmetrical features; and young children.

If you want your content to be shared as the statistics at the start of the article suggest, you must utilize facial imagery.

Let’s talk evolution.

We are hardwired to look in people’s faces for different reasons, but they all lead back to the simple fact that we are social primates, and faces are what we focus on to determine intent and more besides.

We as social primates evolved to look into the eyes of the other individuals around us for three powerful reasons.

1. To see where other sets of eyes are looking can increase the chance of detecting danger. (You can do a fun experiment on yourself by going into a crowded place, face a friend, and ask them to focus their eyes just beyond your shoulder – observe the sense of fear or concern that grips you.)

2. Seeing where others are looking helps detect if they are interested in mating (or fighting) with you. (This is obviously not particularly true today, but in primate society it’s an important evolutionary trait to have.)

3. Identifying a set of eyes helps the monkey or primate determine whether they belong to predator or something more harmless. (Mammalian predators have forward-facing eyes to help them focus in on their prey, while mammalian prey animals have eyes on the side of their head to help them see more areas of danger.)

One of these wants to eat you.

If you can get an image of a symmetrical-shaped face looking at something that’s relevant to your article, you’re in business.

This article from Orbit Media talks about the results of a marketing research study that compared where the model’s eyes are looking and how much more successful the image performed in which the model was looking at the product.

However you might not always be writing such conventional marketing pieces as would be found with this product, so there’s another trick you can use to benefit from this effect.

That is the topic of our first Pro Tip.

PRO TIP#1: Just like the authors of their favorite books, audience members like to be able to list their favorite writers within their business domain. Consider using your OWN face as the image to make your content feel more personable.

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Infographics

Another class of images that do noticeably well for shares on social media are infographics. Infographics are shared 3x as much on social media because they make things like math easier to digest.

PICTURED: This slide I pulled from a colleague’s article on Relevance demonstrates how much faster and easier information can be transmitted visually than through written words.

Without knowing anything other than that the vertical is value and the horizontal is time, Domino’s Pizza is shown immediately to be the most valuable pizza company in America without the need of the author to type anything out.

PICTURED: In this slide, the traffic sources for a Squarespace website are displayed as a graph in the analytics and reporting tool. I used this slide in another Relevance article to demonstrate the value of publishing stories off-platform by adding a visualization component.

The darkest shade of grey is clicks that came from other websites onto the Squarespace platform. This slide was taken shortly after the proprietor published a story on another news website.

Screen Captures

One of the most useful images you can utilize in your content is screen captures. These are great assets for connecting with audiences because it helps give a tutorial of sorts, helping the reader figure out what to do, where to go, what to click, how to use this or that feature, etc.

PICTURED: This is a screen capture I took using Convert Kit email marketing software to demonstrate how you can upload images.

It was as simple as placing the screen capture in Microsoft Paint, and using the circle tool to highlight the option my readers needed to find.

Here’s how to do a screen capture with your computer if you don’t know how

If you use a Mac… Press shift + command + 4. When you see the screenshot icon, press the spacebar. Then hover over the browser with the web page open and left click.

If you use a Windows… Press the windows key and the PrtSc key which on my Acer laptop also says SysRq, and is just to the right of F12.

If you use Linux… Depending on desktop environment you use with Linux, pressing the PrtSc key on its own or combined with either shift or alt will do the job. Here’s a quick overview on how to do it.

Now that you know how to take a screen capture on your computer it’s time for our second Pro Tip.

Pro Tip#2: After you take a screen capture you want to use in your article, simply open your computer’s default photo editing software. I use Microsoft, so all I do open the screen capture in Paint, and crop the image to what I want to show, and use the simple highlighting tools to denote instructions. This allows me to walk my readers through sometimes complicated procedures or software features.

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How To Navigate And Comply With Photo Licenses

There are tens of billions of images online, but not all of them can be used freely.

Image licensing is a multi-million dollar industry as photographers go out into the world at ply their trade, they must make a living as well.

As a result, the rights to use a single image can sometimes cost up to 35 dollars.

Whether you will have to worry about image licenses or not comes down to what your content is regarding. The closer you get to mainstream journalism or covering topics wherein photography is a real effort such as war, wildlife, or coverage of individual people, the more and more you will come across barriers to use.

On the other hand, if you write content marketing pieces that don’t require extremely topical visual elements, you’re most likely in the clear, and 5 more minutes of reading will get you everything you need to know.

The 4 most common licenses

The 4 most common image licenses are as follows.

• Royalty-Free
• Rights Reserved (or sometimes called Rights Managed)
• Creative Commons
• Public Domain

Royalty-free licensing means that you cannot acquire any royalties from use of the image. If you want to use a royalty-free image it must be for non-profit, educational, or reasons of a similar nature.

Rights Reserved licensing is used by professional photographers who need the money from their images to sustain their livelihood. Almost always this means you must pay for the rights to use this image, however reaching out with an email and asking permission for use, especially in a not-for-profit scenario never hurt anybody.

Creative Commons licensing is where many people make their name as photographers, and represents a very cool and supportive means of acquiring images. For the CC license 3.0 and 4.0 you are free to share and redistribute the image, as well as edit or build upon the image, so long as you:

• Indicate if any changes were made
• Provide a copy of the license the image is under
• And attribute the author (providing a link to their web presence is especially respectable behavior)

Here is a copy of the Creative Commons, or CC 4.0 license which you must attach to an image with 4.0 licensing.

Public Domain licensing is most commonly-found within the public sector i.e. government departments and agencies like the CDC, Congress, the USDA, CENTCOM, etc. etc.

Public Domain licensing requires no special rules of any kind, and you can use images with this license to your heart’s content.

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Other Examples and Tricks of the Trade

It’s very likely these are the licenses you’ll most commonly come across through your work. If you really want to use a particular image, you can always call or reach out with an email to ask permission, as this is common practice among reporters and news agencies.

Often the only thing you’ll be asked to do is credit the image in some significant way like saying “image originally published at so-and-so (link)” or something of this nature.

Here in this National Geographic article, the image is marked with “PHOTO BY PAUL COLLEY, COURTESY OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF BIRDS”

This is undoubtedly the result of Nat Geo asking permission to use this photo from said society.

Another thing you’ll want to keep in mind is sometimes there will be watermarked images, usually displaying the © symbol next to the photographer’s name.

If you are asking permission to use this photo, or have bought the rights to it, DO NOT remove that watermark.

PICTURED: a watermarked image of Barabaig men from Southern Tanzania by Victoria Shelly. Photo credit lionguardians.org. 

Paid and Unpaid Sources of Images

If you have the money, the easiest way to acquire images is through a paid service.

Since images are so important to creating content that is shareable and deeply engaging for your readers, many content marketers will feel a subscription to a paid image library is justified.

There are huge benefits of having an account somewhere like Shutterstock or Getty. For employers and managers of marketing divisions, the $40 cost for 10 image downloads a month on iStock by Getty Images could easily represent $100 worth of savings from labor costs of manually searching the web for images, sourcing and applying CC licenses, reformatting if necessary, etc.

With a service like Shutterstock you can find thousands of different takes on your search terms, each with different photographic expression, and after you download them you can edit right there in the program with cropping, color, and lighting tools.

You can also download them, at least with Shutterstock, in any format you want in case you and your website prefers PNGs over JPEGs.

• Shutterstock offers plans priced monthly for a certain amount of images for, instance $30 a month for ten image downloads, all the way up incrementally to 750 images a month at $199.
• com has the exact same pricing options as Shutterstock, only you can also buy one time use credit bundles that you can redeem for audio and video clips as well as images. 40 credits will cost you 40 dollars.
• iStock by Getty Images is a bit different, offering a premium library of images and an essential library, with subscriptions for the former costing less than the latter. They also offer a credit system like 123rf.com.

Free image sourcing

At the end of the day, a paid image library is an asset that will be the obvious choice for those who can afford it.

The real trick is knowing how far you can extend your image game while using only public domain and CC licensed images, and avoid paying for anything at all.

For this purpose, you’ve come to the right article. In this next piece you’ll learn how an independent journalist gets his hands on the best images.

Google Search Tools

The first step to finding free-use images is a Google Image search.

Here is a screen capture of an image search for Kanazawa, Japan. The first thing you should do is click the “Tools” button highlighted in this slide with a red square. A drop-down menu will appear, and you can then select “Usage rights” which I’ve highlighted with the red circle.

I’ve moused over the “Labeled for reuse” option, which will refine the search results to show only those which are either under Public Domain or CC licenses.

Flickr

Here I followed one of the Google Image search results to a massive photo database called Flickr. Flickr is a great place to find CC images, especially of highly topical fields like travel or politics.

In this page, you can see who the author is (Andrea Schaffer) as well as a link to the CC license which I’ve highlighted within the red square. If you think this is a good photo you can click the download button and go through the CC process detailed above.

Wikimedia Commons

Here is the same Google Image search with the “Labeled for reuse” filter applied. On this slide I have selected an image of Kanazawa castle from commons.wikimedia.org  – Wikipedia’s photo archive.

Wikimedia is a great source for CC and Public Domain licensed photos for topics like…

• Travel and destinations
• Political figures and world events
• Animals

In this slide, I’ve clicked through the Google Images link shown in the previous slide to the Wikimedia page and scrolled down just below the picture to the image details. Here you can gather all the information and resources you need for appropriate attribution.

Highlighted with a red circle is a link to the author’s Wikimedia profile page. The red square is the licensing details, which, if it were CC, would have the appropriate links to the license page. Finally highlighted in the yellow rectangle is a very nice option Wikimedia has which allows you to download the image in different sizes.

Pixabay

We’ve already used 2 Pixabay images in this very article, but here is a link to a picture of Kanazawa on Pixabay that I saw through the Google Image search. Pixabay is very, very simple. Highlighted in red is the license, and just above is the download button.

Unsplash

Unsplash is primarily a stock photo library, meaning that if you were looking for something specific like a world leader, you’d be better off checking Flickr or Wikimedia Commons.

That being said, Unsplash carries an incredibly rich bounty of beautiful stock imagery to choose from and is definitely worth checking out. Designed to help creative photographers get their name out and build a web presence, Unsplash requires no attribution, though it’s considered polite.

In this slide, I’ve simply pulled up the travel tag, and clicked on this beautiful image of Santorini, Greece. The green download button instantly adds the photo to your download folder, while a message pops up saying:

“Crediting isn’t required, but is appreciated and allows photographers to gain exposure. Copy the text below or embed a credit badge.”

Some lesser known free image libraries include Foter.com, and the built in Squarespace image library if you host your website there.

Between these four catalogues, you should be able to find a great image that will perfectly fit your article.

Making Your Own Images

Memes and other homemade images can help you reach your audience in a creative and humorous way that increases your chance for shares and engagement.

When it comes to utilizing images that evoke a sense of curiosity or interest, a photo editing software allows you to add the perfect touch of personality to an image that will drive social media shares and engagement.

Many free photo editing tools exist that you can use to take your images to and make simple, yet robust changes.

Let’s say for example you write content on travel, digital nomad lifestyle, responsible tourism, etc. Why settle for this image: Photo by Harley-Davidson on Unsplash

When you could use a free tool like Pablo and use this image instead.

Adding text and filters to a images is ridiculously simple with Pablo. Pablo is a free image editing website that uses the Unsplash image database to allow users to quickly and effortlessly create powerful or humorous images with basic editing aspects like adding text and color filters.

They allow you to download the image in the resolution to fit whichever social media platform or website you plan to use it for.

In this slide, you can see how simple it is to make an engaging meme or image. All you need to do is…

• Enter a search keyword in the red square or upload your down just blow
• Select the size option that best fits the social media platform you plan to share the image on, highlighted in the blue circle,
• Choose where the text will appear on the image highlighted in yellow,
• And click share and download highlighted in pink.

This is a great way to boost shares, since posts with images get an overwhelming amount of shares on social media and across blogs.

That’s a ridiculously one sided infographic if I’ve ever seen one. But that’s because images are still so popular since they convey so many more thoughts, feelings, and emotions than blocks of text will. This tidbit leads perfectly into our final Pro Tip.

Pro Tip#3: In a long form blog post, you should really consider using an image ever 150 words or so. When I used to right for tabloid science publications, they gave me a template for every story “Header-copy-image-copy-header-copy-image-copy…etc.

There’s a whole list of different programs you can use to build exactly the kind of custom image you think is best. Let’s go over some of them right now.

1. Imgflip.com is a free site that allows you to make salty memes to engage a more youthful demographic. It’s free, easy to use and includes all the classic meme imagery.
2. Grizzlylabs.com provides a tool called Genius Scan that’s meant for scanning in documents, but that can easily be used to scan in graphics or drawings made in your own home with a pencil and paper.
3. Canva is an easy way to add text to images, without Photoshop or the help of a designer. You can start with a template they provide or you can create your own custom dimensions. Then add an image from their library (or upload your own) with loads of pre-formatted text that overlay nicely on top.
4. EZgif.com allows you to take a simple MP4, WebM, AVI, MPEG, FLV, MOV, 3GP or other video files and covert them to a gif. Gifs are another aspect that appeals a lot to young people.

These are just a few great apps you can use to create custom images of any flavor.

It should be noted that memes, gifs and other visual elements should probably remain within consumer marketing strategies, rather than be deployed for serious B2B marketing or anything found in a more professional domain.

In Conclusion

In this comprehensive guide to using images on your platforms, you’ll have learned how to:

• Source images responsibly and legally comply with licensing laws,
• Use a variety of different image editing tools to make engaging visual pieces that will drive shares and other forms of engagement,
• How to search the internet for images if you run a blog on travel, health and fitness, photography etc.
• Why images are so important in content marketing,
• How to take screen captures on every computer system,
• And which images work the best for different kinds of articles, topics, and more.

If there are any tools you use for image editing, leave a comment below and let us know!

The post The Ultimate Guide To Image Use And Boosting Engagement Through Images appeared first on Relevance.

• Improve your domain authority
• Improve your keyword ranking
• Improve your lead generation
• Improve your search engine ranking,

You would want to make sure that a rich variety and network of content is available through your blogs, email newsletters, weekly reviews, YouTube channel, or whichever media applies to your content marketing strategy.

It wouldn’t seem sensible to take the content you worked hard to create and ship it off to some other site, right? How could it?

Indeed the critical point of content marketing is to make sure your content is more richly detailed, numerous in publication, broader in consumer interest and response, and varied in media than your competitors elsewhere out there in the marketplace of ideas.

But you’d be wrong…

Why would you be wrong? Where are other avenues of growth?

In this article and in many other cases, I strongly believe that cross-disciplinary experience is a great way to grow your perception of what possible methods of success and growth are out there.

In this topic I feel, as I do in other topics, that journalism is a medium from which the content marketer can divine a lot of good habits, skills, and ideas from.

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Why Journalism?

The reporting of news and current events is one of the only other kinds of writing as widely used as content writing; the other being technical writing.

There are a number of good lessons from journalism that any marketer could really gain a lot from, but let’s start going over the one that we’re discussing today; one that leave you with buckets of know-how such as to allow your platform to surge past your competitors.

Guest publishing and publishing off-platform

Have you ever been watching the news and seen a guest come on, who’s preceded with an introduction that sounds something like this… “A writer, whose work has appeared in The Globe, The Sun, and the Herald…”

This sits squarely in the theme of today’s article – namely that even though, let’s say for arguments sake, you own a website, that doesn’t mean you can’t publish on other journals or platforms to increase your skills, portfolio, and authority.

Let’s go over some of the benefits and reasons why a self-employed content marketer would do such a thing.

Why wouldn’t you just publish on your own platform?

Many reasons would dissuade the content marketer from publishing off-platform, for example:

• Managing editors of other publications might have different standards, guidelines, especially involving things like conversational tone, which you must meet for them to accept your article. If you are the managing editor of your own platform, you know exactly how your articles should read.
• It involves putting one’s work out in the line of critical fire, which may be frightening for the content marketer. This should not be embarrassing, as it’s a natural fear that most people have in some way or another.
• It takes more time, as you have to write to the editor or publisher of the publication you’re writing for, pitch your story, see if they like it, then read their guidelines, all before drafting and submitting it for editing. You, the content marketer, know everything about what kind of content you like, and don’t have to jump through so many hoops.
• Finally, you are giving your hard work over to someone else to potentially increase their growth and profits, rather than your own.

Any one of these reasons are enough to make the content marketer feel that the only garage; the only home; the only place to park their content is on their own platform.

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Diversifying your publishing portfolio grows your business in ways that cannot be obtained through other means

Google isn’t only interested in how well your publication is bringing people in to read, watch, learn or listen; they’re also interested in your authority within a space, i.e. how many people are other platforms bringing to your platform.

For example, let’s take someone like the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.

Aristotle has a lot of authority in the moral philosophy space, because it’s not just Aristotle going around telling people about Nicomachean Ethics or what have you that bring people to read it, it’s the thousands of philosophers across 2300 years of history which bring people to read Aristotle.

Aristotle has a high domain authority score in Google, because so many people talk about him.

But where am I going with this?

Publishing off-platform brings people from off-platform onto your platform through a metric which all keyword, SEO, and authority algorithms check – Backlinks.

Here’s how to earn backlinks to increase your authority, ranking, and growth

Backlinks, also called referrals or referring links, are hyperlinks from one website to another. They are used in programs like Google Keyword Planner, Arhefs Keyword Planner, and SEMrush to see all the back channels which lead people off-platform onto your platform.

In academic publication, the best published papers are those that receive the most citations, which in today’s online world, is another way of saying backlinks.

Here are some images to help illustrate the point.

PICTURED: The backlinks reporting tool within SEMrush, where the content marketer can look at all the referring domains and links leading back to his platform from elsewhere. In the middle of the slide you can see the breakdown of where the links are placed, and along the bottom you can see the rankings of each link, which platform they’re on, and how they’re performing.

Backlinks denote authority, because they represent a publisher referencing your content as means to prove a point.

PICTURED: The traffic source reporter on a typical Squarespace website admin page, wherein the traffic sources are denoted in the shades of grey. From lightest to dark it follows thusly: direct organic traffic, social media traffic, search engine traffic, email campaign traffic, and finally the darkest shade is referral traffic, which as we said early is another way of saying backlinks.

This website has a gotten a lot of referrals – that’s because it has just published an article off-platform with backlinks in place that send readers to the content marketers website.

The only reason any of that traffic arrived at that website was because someone managed to either

A) Get some content published off-platform

Or…

B) Generate such good quality content and earn the favor of so many people through other means that they naturally become an authority within a given space.

Can you generate that much traffic on your own? Are people singling you out as a master based on your own merit? That’s a very difficult thing to achieve.

But for those just starting out, getting content off-platform helps expand traffic avenues and domain scores within search engines.

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More and more reasons to publish off-platform

Forgive me for being blunt, but does your website, platform, blog etc. receive a larger click-through-rate than say, the American Conservative? What about the Home Depot blog? Moths by NPR?

The obvious benefit of publishing off-platform is you run the chance of tapping into much vaster sources of traffic than you ever could pushing your own content along on your own platform.

Furthermore, you can add a name like those above on your professional CV in case of future employment opportunities.

Finally, you can use the success of being published on a large platform as a bit of a celebration to re-engage existing readers by reinforcing your role as an authority on a topic in their minds.

3 easy steps to getting published off-platform

STEP 1) Notebooks out; now open any old keyword ranking software like SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner and open a keyword research tool. The slide below is the keyword overview tool in SEMrush.com

PICTURED: In this slide you can see the results for a “B2B Marketing” keyword overview search in SEMrush. Below useful metrics like how much traffic this keyword receives, and the performance of related keywords, you get a list of which ads and platforms are ranking well for that keyword. This image features the top twenty, but you can see increments of 20 going up to the 100^th ranked platform.

STEP 2) Write down all the different platforms which rank well for the keywords you entered AND where you think you’d have a chance of having an article accepted. It doesn’t have to be an industry blog like blog.hubspot, but rather see if you can find magazines or news publications as well.

You can scroll back down the results to reach smaller platforms that will be more interested in hosting guest posts.

STEP 3) Write a solid article and shop it around to the websites you wrote down that accept guest posting or freelance writers.

Have a good pitch, like “I found this article on your website which did very well. You could use this one as a follow up to keep your readers engaged”. And by the way, you can use SEMrush to determine which of their stories or articles have done well.

Another great pitch is look through their articles within the last few months and see if any of the information contained therein is out of date.

“Hello. You have an article here on how to do proper SEO that doesn’t include *this major development in the field. I penned a quick draft that explains how important it is. Can I interest you in it?”

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In Conclusion

Journalists, especially freelancers, live and die on their reputation. This isn’t as true today as it once was, but an inexperienced journalist who gets something majorly wrong is going to find it way harder to find work.

Content marketers can take a leaf out of the freelancer’s desire to ever expand their portfolio and CV and reputation by publishing stories across many different networks.

As we’ve said before, this can help by seeding the alleyways and gardens of the internet with links back to the content marketer’s own platform, as well as increasing the likelihood of tapping into much greater reserves of internet traffic by investing time onto platforms larger than one’s own.

Finally, it will please the Google-y overlords by seeing that you are considered in high regard by off-platform publishers, and will reward your knowledge and authority with higher rankings in the search engines.

The post Grow Your Authority, Ranking And More By Publishing Off-Site appeared first on Relevance.