Category Archives for "Content Marketing"

0 Crucial SEO Tips from Content Curation Experts

When you curate content the right way you should never get in trouble with Google or your readers. It should do the opposite: improve search rankings and delight your readers and followers.

Read the full article at: blog.scoop.it

Curating content, done the correct way, will benefit your Google search rankings AND delight your readers and followers.

Let’s be clear: Curation is NOT about simply reposting other people’s content on your own website. If you do that, you won’t benefit your Google search rankings OR your readers.

Wikipedia defines Content Curation as:

“The process of collecting, organizing and displaying information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. Services or people that implement content curation are called curators. Curation services can be used by businesses as well as end users.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_curation

Content Curation is all about finding your own perspective and sharing your thoughts and ideas on a topic. It should save readers time, by providing concise information about a particular topic. It rounds up the ‘best of the best’ content to share.

Here are some tips for helping your search ranking using Content Curation:

1. Don’t copy large chunks of text into your content. Preferably use less than 200 words.

2. Always add comments or insights to personalise your curated content.

3. Use a new title when curating content.

After all, you are creating a new piece of content, even if you are linking to another person’s content.

4. Include a link to the original source.

This is something I hear people say often: ‘Why should I share links to other people’s content’? ‘They’re just going to disappear off to another site’.

Yes, that may happen some of the time, but studies have shown that the overall net benefit of becoming an authority that shares content far outweighs the loss of traffic. 

Remember, as cheesy as it may sound, sharing is caring. The art of digital curation is your ability to curate and share highly relevant information with your audience. Become an authority on your subject and people won’t question working with you.

If you’d like to read more about Reasons to Start Curating Online, have a look at the link to my post on the subject. http://www.dickiebird.co.nz/reasons-to-start-curating-content-online/

0 Conversion Copywriting Strategies for NZ Businesses

Conversion copywriting strategies focus on creating a customer comfort zone. This post examines how to overcome causes of discomfort that kill conversion.

Read the full article at: feldmancreative.com

Barry Feldman redefines the term ‘convert’ and points out in a humorous way that it’s not really ‘converting’ people, it’s giving them a solution to their problems and allowing the relationship with the reader to deepen – nice perspective and a lot more endearing than the term ‘conversion’!

Some highlights from this post:

1. Discomfort destroys any chance of ‘conversion’ – compel your readers to want more.

2. Use a variety of material and devices: images, bulleted lists, blockquotes.

3. If you’re trying to get people from an ad to a landing page on your website, make sure the connection is visually obvious (use the same branding / look and feel) – so many times it’s not and that’s why people leave!

4. Keep the language plain and simple. Don’t talk marketing babble such as ‘incredible’ ‘amazing’ ‘revolutionary’.

5. Use a strong headline and build your article around the headline.

6. Distraction: Keep your reader focused and make sure your call to action is clear.

7. Keep readers engaged and emotionally invested – see the attached ABCDE infographic.

The road to good, strong conversion copywriting is long and varied. If you apply just a few of these, I’m sure you’ll be a step ahead of most businesses on the web.

0 7 Tips For NZ Businesses to Take Advantage of LinkedIn (My No.1 Social Network)

Linkedin Marketing: Effective ways to communicate:LinkedIn is a professional social network and hence an opportune place to share content and effectively

Read the full article at: www.virtualsocialmedia.com

It’s no secret that Linked in is my favourite social network. Why? Because I learn useful information AND it gets people referring work to me! 

Fact: 4 out of 5 LinkedIn users influence purchase decisions.

Here’s how you can make LinkedIn work better for your business:

1. Provide useful insights and information that help other business owners.
2. Keep it brief – who has time for long posts? If writing a long post, try using the ‘publish post’ feature.
3. Use images in your posts – even us business folks appreciate a good image.
4. Consider using video – LinkedIn plays YouTube videos directly, so viewers don’t have to leave the page, unlike Facebook (on FB you must upload direct to FB or let the link take you to another page).
5. Respond to posts and have conversations online with fellow LinkedIn members. you never know where conversations might lead.
6. Use a content tool on your blog or a tool such as Scoop.it that brings users back to your website – this helps SEO.
7. Most importantly, check what’s working and what’s not. That’s how you will become better at LinkedIn. 

0 3 Top Things You Need To Know About Keywords – Website SEO

“There are a lot of questions that come to mind when we talk about keywords. How should we use them? Where should they be placed? What’s too much and/or too little? Are long-tail keywords or short term ones more effective? Does Google even take them into consideration anymore?”

Read the full article at: www.getspokal.com

A lot of people ask me about keywords and how to improve their rank on Google. It’s worth noting that 90% of website users don’t look for results beyond page 1 – page 1 is the place to be if you’re in business.

As you’d know by now, there are tons of factors that Google takes into account to get your page ranking well. Stuffing your page with your keywords is a no-no, and it might have the opposite effect of decreasing your ranking.

These 3 points can be summarised as follows:

1. SEO is still a vital part of content strategy

According to Google’s CEO, Erik Schmidt, “every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation up until 2003” [source here]

To get search engine information relevant and organised, we need search engines to categorise and rank this data to make sure we get relevant results when we search. 

It’s a mammoth task, and from what we can see, it’s not getting any easier. Keywords help users get more relevant results.

2. Placement is as Important as Frequency

Search engines are complex beasts, and they get smarter all the time. Simply producing lots of content doesn’t mean your content will rank higher.

Ideally, use your keywords in your heading and title tags. But use the terms in the body of your content as well. 

3. Don’t be too Specific

Google uses synonyms instead of keywords for up to 70% of searches. This means you can use variations of terms.

For example, if your site is all about they keyword ‘children’s activities’, you could also use the term ‘activities for children’.

It’s vital to optimise more for meaning rather than a specific phrase. Ask yourself ‘what kind of language would my customers use when searching for my product or service’?

Summary 

SEO is complex, and with the ever increasing complexity of the internet, it’s not going to get any simpler in terms of SEO. Just remember, keywords are still relevant when it comes to SEO and getting found on page 1 of Google.

If you’d like to know more about the basics of SEO and search, sign up for my free course ‘Be Remarkable’ – cut through the noise online dickiebird.co.nz

0 5 Habits Guaranteed to Help New Zealand Businesses Improve Google Rankings

It is possible to build daily habits that guarantee to give your higher ranking and greater marketing success. Here are the habits you should cultivate.

Read the full article at: www.searchenginejournal.com

It is possible to build daily habits that guarantee to give you higher ranking and greater marketing success.

Read the full article at: http://blog.scoop.it/

In this article by Julie Gauthier, she highlights 5 daily habits described by Neil Patel that you can start doing if you want your rankings to go up and get more results out of your content marketing efforts:

1. Write and publish one article – 1 hour per day for 1 to 2 articles per week.

2. Update one old article – 10 min per day.

3. Post a link to an article on every social media platform – 5 min per day.

4. Interact on one forum – 10 min per day.

5. Reply to one Tweet, Google+ update, Facebook post, and LinkedIn discussion, etc. – 10 min per day.

Neil explains exactly why you should get these 5 habits to ensure you greater results in your content marketing strategy and then gives you practical insights on how to master those habits.

This list is great and I try to work with these points every day. My experience has shown that there’s a sixth practice that can also work wonders for SEO and improve content marketing ROI.

6. Curate an article

This action takes no more than 20 minutes. For one blog post. No kidding!

20 minutes a day would give you one article a day. Not bad at all?!

You don’t have to do it every day, but since it takes in average 4 hours to write a full article (that’s the average the team at Scoop.it have observed, and some people can write much faster), if I spend an hour a day writing an article from scratch and the last 3x 20 minutes I have in the week to curate 3 blog posts, that means I can publish 4 articles per week.

Of course, just like writing, it’s not going to take you 20 minutes right away or every time. But practice makes perfect.

The benefits of content curation

It keeps you posted on what is being published on your domain by experts, magazines, competitors, etc. You know what your audience likes to read (given the number of shares of the articles) and you can curate accordingly to answer questions your audience is asking.

– it allows you to interact with the actors in your domain. Just like Neil Patel explains in his point #3 to interact with others. And it’s what I’m doing right now! I hope that curating his article and letting him know that I wrote it by commenting his blog post will engage us in a first connection that could grow with time. Who knows, maybe he’ll even publish a guest post for us one day!

– it makes your google rankings go up. Bruce Clay proved it in a study to calculate the validity of claims that content curation was bad for SEO. He conducted an experiment with the objective of learning whether curated content was able to reach the same SEO rankings as original content. Here are the results:

– it’s a great way to publish more content, especially if you find yourself buried in marketing tasks and don’t have enough time to write a complete blog article every week. And since “businesses with websites of 401-1000 pages get 6x more leads than those with 51-100 pages” (Hubspot report), publishing more content is important. Almost as important as publishing good content.

As Jason Miller, Senior Content Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, puts it, “content curation not only alleviates the pressure of having to devote valuable time to creating original content, but it also adds credibility and third party validations to your efforts.”

How to start curating today

If you don’t have a curation tool, it may take a while to find the appropriate content to curate.

Fortunately for you there are very good free tools that allow you to automate the content discovery part to find for you content that fit exactly your needs.

Not just an RSS feed that gives you all the articles a company blog publishes. Rather, a powerful search engine that will narrow down your search within the blogs you like to the keywords you’ve set (long tail is always more efficient, for obvious reasons). Those tools also allow you to link your social media channels and schedule your messages for you:

And of course, if you want to step up your game, you can upgrade your tool to get a more complete platform, allowing you to:

– integrate with your blog,

– set publishing goals for your blog and your social media channels,

– schedule all of your social media messages on your channels,

– analyze exactly the results of each action you’ve set (views, visitors, leads generated, and the same view per blog post).

Just in case you were wondering, curation is not duplicate content. Here is an article that explains why.

And if you’d like to see how content curation can help you improve SEO, you should get in touch with me by commenting below or email [email protected] for a free ebook on content curation.

0 Content Marketing and How it Relates to Personal Branding

It’s easy to neglect one’s personal brand, or even the very idea of it. From childhood we are conditioned to dislike the idea of being self-promotional.

Even our popular culture reflects the negative perception that we have about selling ourselves or being boastful. Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, The Devil Wears Prada, or the modern classic, Jerry Maguire portray the dark “promote at all costs” perspective that most of us are repelled by. But nowhere does it say you have to create a personal brand that is distasteful or something you can’t be proud of.

You have to remember that your personal brand already exists. People Google you when they are considering hiring you, or they look for references online when they are thinking about buying from you. If nothing exists, that can have as much of an impact as having the wrong information show up. Just like the clothes you wear, how you communicate, the ideas you share, and the things you create, your footprint in the world represents you regardless of what you think. This infographic was a collaboration with our friend Barry at Feldman Creative.

Read the full article at: www.slideshare.net

Personal branding might sound cliche, but having a good personal brand is essential for business, whether you’re a business owner or work for a company (you might need a new job someday).

Some sound advice here with regard to Content Marketing:

– Graphic Design: Present yourself well and use continuity.

– Blog: An insightful website is the engine of your personal brand. Your blog is the fuel.

– Define your audience: focus on their needs and their pain points. Find out what they need and deliver it! 

– Email list: Email is your ace. It’s private, permission-based and pervasive. Commit to an email list and using it.

– Photo: Hire a pro and make sure you have a good image.

– Examine: Establish what’s working and what’s not. Look into Google Analytics or other tools to inform you of the behaviour of visitors to your website. 

A beautiful infographic illustrates these points and more.

0 Win the small business email marketing game with these 5 tips [Video]

With all of the hype around social media, you might find it quaint to be talking about email marketing. After all, there are so many other more flashy tools.

Read the full article at: www.youtube.com

We all know that email marketing can be very powerful, but not everyone knows that it’s far more powerful than Social Media in terms of return on investment. Hence why most content marketers continually encourage businesses to grow their email list (doing this well is a subject for another post).

This short 4-second video supports the importance of email marketing with this nugget: “Research by McKinsey & Co shows that targeted email marketing is over 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined”.

Does your business use email marketing? If not, I’d love to know what holds your business back? Leave a comment below.

0 Scoop.it ranks best content marketing software app by GetApp

We’re proud to be ranked best content marketing software app in GetApp’s Q2 2015 GetRank of the top 25 content marketing solutions.

GetApp is the largest cloud­-based business apps marketplace. In the four different categories evaluated, Infusionsoft took the top spot in Marketing Automation, Mailchimp in Email Marketing, Scoop.it in Content Marketing and Hootsuite in Social Media Marketing.

The goal of the ranking is to provide valuable data to businesses looking to make a first assessment w

Read the full article at: blog.scoop.it

It’s great to see that Scoop.it has been ranked as the best content marketing app on the web. I have used the application for years, and it has been one of my most valuable (and favourite) tools for a number of reasons.

Dickiebird uses the latest, professional application of Scoop.it called Content Director. Content Director has taken Content Marketing and Content Curation to a new level for me and many of the businesses I work with. It works as a natural way of improving SEO rankings and offers a host of features such as Mailchimp newsletter integration and scheduling. Not only that, it actually finds content based on keywords!

Dickiebird is able to pass on a significant discount for Content Director. Please get in touch or leave a comment if you would like to know more.

0 Reasons to Start Curating Content Online

There are so many content curation pros that it can seem too good to be true. This one time, your suspicions just might be wrong. The below content curation pros are getting results for thousands of companies. It’s a somewhat new idea for content marketing, but the principle is old and has worked for a very long time.

Read the full article at: blog.scoop.it

If there’s one effective practice most busy business people can do online, it has to be Content Curation. Curation is finding and sharing content across social media (and hopefully, also your blog)!

The main benefits of content curation (my points as well):

– Industry Awareness: Curation demonstrates you know what’s going on in your industry

– Top of mind: Curation across Social Media gets your thoughts in front of colleagues and prospects

– Save money: Share your thoughts and have a conversation instead of spending money on advertising

– Third party content is proven to be more believable than your own content

– You can use curated content in your blog and email newsletters (one less online task to do)!

– Learn which kind of content people respond well to, and what doesn’t do well: Do more of what interests your audience.

– Curation stretches a small marketing budget a very long way, especially when compared to the cost of producing your own content

– It’s great to share interesting articles, but putting your own spin on things makes content more valuable.

Do you use Content Curation? What has been your experience with Content Curation tools?

0 8 LinkedIn Profile Photo Mistakes That Make You Look Unprofessional [Infographic]

In the age of selfies, bad photography runs rampant. Duck lips, bathroom pictures, too close close ups — the list of photography faux pas is seemingly endless.

A poorly angled selfie or two (or 100) might not be so bad on Facebook. But put those same pictures on LinkedIn, and watch your connection accept rate take a nosedive.  

The following infographic from Sales For Life visually depicts the top eight LinkedIn profile picture no-nos, from using an out of date photo to posting a snapshot of your cat. (Note: Photos of your cat are acceptable on all other places on the internet.)

While it’s important to have a picture — your profile is 11 times more likely to be viewed if you have a photo — it’s just as important that it’s not one of these.

Read the full article at: blog.hubspot.com

In this day and age of selfies – bad photography is rife! To be clear, it’s the number one thing that can make or break your LinkedIn profile. Your profile is 11 times more likely to be viewed if you have a profile photo!

Like many professionals, I don’t connect with people that don’t have a LinkedIn profile. To me it says they aren’t serious about using the platform. 

This infographic says it all, in a humorous light.