Website traffic is a vital indicator and fuel for business growth. Traffic sheds light on intriguing consumer habits that can reflect on the effectiveness of your marketing tactics, and how they can be fine-tuned. Today, we introduce methods of ushering in much-valued traffic, thereby spreading a wider net that captures your target group more effectively, to garner more leads and churn out more revenue.

1.    Pay Attention To Your On-site SEO

Avoid keyword stuffing, a technique that is easily seen through by both your audience and search engines alike. Repetitive and poorly-allocated keywords present an unnatural read that is likely to turn audience away. Avoid keyword stuffing with high-quality content that provides information that your audience are looking for. Concise meta descriptions that sum up your message in a nutshell would also grant a significant boost. Establishing a sturdy internal linking structure keeps readers on your page for a longer period of time as well.

2.    Be Listed!

Create a business profile on online directories and review sites. Thereafter, state your website link under your profile. This would increase the exposure and reach of your website.

3.    Hashtagging

Use hashtags to highlight keywords, and get discovered by users searching for your products and services!

4.    Utilize Landing Pages

Instead of asking customers to call or e-mail in, creating landing pages specific to your offers. This streamlined approach would collate all your leads in one place, and also grant your audience greater convenience in registering their interest.

5.    Leverage A Variety Of Social Media Channels To Promote Your Content

The nature of each platform calls for specific types of content to be disseminated. Twitter works best in the publication of short taglines and links. Google+ promotion shows your company in more personalized search results, making it suitable for companies with B2B niches. On the other hand, Pinterest and Instagram are ideal for image-heavy content.

6. Offer A Variety For Greater Readability

Provide a mix of shorter, news-based blog posts with long-form content and video, as well as colorful infographics. Photos are always a good idea as posts with images receive 120% more engagement as compared to posts with no photos. They would also get 53% more likes! Moreover, having a variety of content lengths caters to a wide variety of readers with different lifestyles, allowing you to connect with millennials with short attention spans and those who prefer a detailed and insightful read.

For image-rich posts, check your Facebook and blog sites metrics to analyze the success of your full-sized images. Replicate this format across all your posts. Using a shortened link would give your post a neater appearance too. Google shortener is a good tool for this.

7. Email-Marketing

Despite the proliferation of youth-targeted social media platforms, traditional methods still have value in them. Try blasting out EDMs (electronic direct mailers) to reach groups who are less engaged on social media, and depend more heavily on e-mails. Keep EDMs short and insightful, within a page. Update only with more major updates rather than fine details.

8. Technically Optimized Pages

Technically optimized pages are not only easier to read, they also portray a professional image of your company. In an age of instant gratification, consumers have neither the time nor mood to wait for snail-paced loading content. In fact, slow loading processes often bring about high bounce rates. Look out for vital components that would affect your page’s speed, such as the image file sizes, design adaptability and functionality of plugins.

9. Set People Thinking

For captions, ask short, intriguing questions that would encourage people to share, think or comment.

10. Get People Talking

A cluster of thinking individuals are the building blocks of a community at your site. Fostering a robust commenting system can expand the reach of your business through word of mouth, increasing traffic to your site. Moreover, a forum dedicated to Q and A allows you to interact actively with your customers. The downside of an online community is that it necessitates a referee to screen out spams and undesirable energy.

11. Examine Your Analytics Data

Do you know about the magic of google analytics? It engenders you to track your most popular pages, and be in the know about the visitor demographics. Armed with this information, you can now modify your promotional and advertising tactics.

12. Be Online, Be Responsive!

To present your page as a happening and bustling space, post regularly and be prompt in answering queries. Each new post flags offers something new, earning you the precious attention span of new and returning readers. Regular postings that engage also counts towards healthy interaction with your audience. Garnering a loyal readership can translate to more leads! Friendly and approachable personas at the helplines building a stronger relationship with your audience as well. They connectivity and availability you project would tie in the associated notions of reliability!

 

With the plethora of information made available through the web, making oneself seen and heard on the web can be a challenging endeavor. This proves to be even more difficult for companies reaching out to millennials whose attention span for ads lasts for a mere 5 seconds. How then can you differentiate yourself from the sea of voices shouting for attention? The secret is in writing highly relevant, value-adding and interesting copies. Here are 8 tips to get started with that super copy.

1.     Have a strong voice that conveys your brand’s personality

Adopt a conversational tone that offers a unique point of view. Avoid convoluted sentences that are unnecessarily complex, as they would require longer processing time. This deters your audience from reading on. On the contrary, try using a variation of sentence length. Simple syntax structures with strong words is a good rule of thumb.

2.     Write to connect

Writing academically is very different from writing on social media. While you may have impressed your high school professors with obscure adjectives and complex sentence structure, such techniques do not work well with the digital natives of today. The fast pace of life and climate of instant gratification has cultured a generation of readers who want information that is immediate and direct. Therefore, it is best to identify your target audience, understand their needs and preferences, and thereafter fashion your writing to connect with them.

3.     Be concise

Be short and sweet. Deliver what you wish to say; nothing more, nothing less. See if you can shorten your copy by canceling out superfluous words that do not add value to the sentence. Have more than one similar adjective describing a single noun or verb? Choose just one. Repetitive sections? Strike them out.

4.     Create value-adding material

There is nothing more frustrating than being enticed by an interesting or thought-provoking article title, only to plow through paragraph and paragraph and receive- nothing. Reward your readers with information promised by the title, thereby making their time and effort worthwhile.

5.     Capture interest with a compelling title

Creating an interesting and attractive title is the first step in casting the net. According to David Ogilvy, an advertising tycoon and founder of Ogilvy & Mather, 5 times the number of people read the headlines as compared to the main text. As such, after you’ve written your headline, 80 cents of your dollar have been utilized. Therefore, go straight to the heart of the matter!

6.     Steer clear of grammatical errors

Any article less than being grammatically accurate compromises your brand image as a reliable and professional firm. Leverage grammar checking tools online for impeccable copies that make a strong impression!

7.     Diversify with a variety of adjectives

Instead of filling your copy with vague and overused descriptive words poised at the elementary school level, include words that conjure an image or paint a scenario! Swop “happy” for “blissful”, “sad” for “gloomy” and “surprised” with “awestruck”.

8.     Always proofread

Writing under time constraints often results in an array of grammatical and spelling errors overlooked by the eyes. Avoid such situations by reading with fresh eyes. Set a few hours of rest between the completion of your copy and proofreading process. Reading aloud engages your ears to spot those errors that your eyes have gotten used to as well.

No system is perfect, and that includes the social media platforms of today. Inevitable loopholes within these systems allow for the execution of exploitative strategies, as marketers think of tricks to entice viewers to click-through to boost their metrics. These dubious practices have been rampant, considering that each click brings in revenue for the company.

In other cases, the marketing tactics do not abuse the system, but are simply inappropriate, causing irreversible damage to the company’s reputation and brand name.

1. Faux Videos
Video content typically garners better responses than static content. Sneaky marketers have thus devised a way to integrate slight moving shadows onto static images to pass them off as videos. This grants the static image to leverage on the reach advantage previously exclusive to legitimate videos.

From a thumbnail, it is not easy to differentiate a real video from a faux one. As such, the chances of viewers clicking on the play button in anticipation of a video is high. Each click counts as a form of engagement, leading to higher engagement rates for such faux videos, and hence greater reach on the social media platforms. Moreover, with the increase in video consumption on Facebook, such videos can be easily propelled to popularity despite not playing by the rules.

Paradoxically, the success of such trickery in bringing in view would raise Facebook’s awareness about it. This brings about short-term benefits that ultimately do not pay off well in the end.

Facebook’s newest adjustment in the News Feed algorithm will identify such faux videos and limit their reach on its platform. It’s ‘motion scoring’ system, which effectively detects movement in videos to determine the legitimacy of files uploaded as videos. This filtering effect would hence downgrade the ranking of such faux videos.

2. “Live” Webcasts
These refer to static images or recorded videos in the guise of live webcasts. Usually, these webcasts are easily differentiated, due to the lack of interaction between the uploader and viewers.

Similar to its treatment of faux videos, the upgraded News Feed algorithm will be able to detect reaction surveys posted as live videos and similarly restrict their reach.

Photo Credit: https://www.jeremysaid.com/blog/psychology-behind-clickbait-titles/

3. Outrageous Click Bait headlines
These headlines are often misleading, distracting or salacious. A good title has a creative way of framing a banal story. A bad title sets up an expectation, only to let its audience down with irrelevant and often poorly written content.

The consequences of improper click bait headings have far-reaching consequences. For one, it leaves a bad taste in the viewers’ mouth. Secondly, it reflects the company as unprofessional. It’s inability to deliver in terms of crafting congruent titles and content may cast doubts on its aptitude in delivering upon its promise.

In comparison with dishonest advertising plans, strategies that possess both legitimacy and creativity undoubtedly require more time and effort in devising. However, the pay off would be tremendous and sustainable. Every article of quality content made available to your audience speaks volumes about the value of your company.

In order to generate content that rides on uppermost waves of a search results page, digital marketers should first understand the inner workings of a search engine and how to best leverage it. Today, we teach you some tricks that will deem your content as trustworthy by Google, granting your page boosted site exposure!

1. What kind of content will put you in good stead? Well-organized long-form content with distinct paragraphing, headlines and lists are qualities of a legitimate and reliable website. Having these elements would gain you favor in Google’s eyes.

Photo Credits: http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-create-beautiful-long-form-content-in-wordpress/

2. Backlinks have been credited to be equally, if not more powerful than SEO, in gaining wider content exposure. Create strong content and striking visuals (pie charts, graphs) to garner backlinks to your page. (Backlinks are links from external pages that lead to pages on your domain, creating greater exposure for your content and company.) Backlinks are also votes of affirmation given by these external sources in recognition of your webpage. This reflects your webpage as legitimate and reputable source.

Photo Credits: https://www.business2community.com/seo/importance-backlinks-seo-0652995

3. Title tags are the most salient keywords for SEO. Avoid keyword stuffing, an attempt to manipulate your site’s ranking in the search results page through repetitive usage of keywords that do not fit well in its context. Not only can your viewers see through that, Google will too.

Photo Credits: http://www.foretechnology.com/TechoPost/2015/February/Keyword-Stuffing.html

4. Google prefers brands that have a high-user engagement and user-experience in mind. Social media platforms are great avenues for you to lend your content greater exposure, and to engage with your audience on a more personal level.

5. Content is more important than you think. What you say and how you say it matters. As such, informative and engaging content that is well-crafted and complemented with resourceful research would naturally garner a wider reach, carrying your brand name further. It’s the quality content that shines through in the end.

Congratulations! You’ve now completed SEO 101 for beginners.

Many recognize Facebook as a site for instant connection between social networks segregated by geographical barriers. For business owners, it is also a rent-free platform that allows one to put their business in front of a global audience.

To fully utilize Facebook, learn how to leverage the obscure tools that even most business owners do not know about! This can provide you with astute insights into your business and valuable business opportunities.

1. Don’t try to beat the News Feed Algorithm

How does Facebook determine the quality of content? It analyzes the amount of time viewers on average spend reading your content, before factoring this into the ranking, amongst other aspects.  Longer reading periods mean greater audience engagement and thus a better ranking!

2. Understand your Audience on a deeper level

With the Facebook IQ Audience Insights, once anonymous information of your users are now accessible to you. This includes their areas of interests from viewing the pages they’ve liked, demographic details and even their shopping habits. This facilitates the process of customizing your posts and advertising to the preference of these audience groups.

3. Guard the access to your company’s account

Corporate Facebook accounts are often permanently logged in for the daily convenience of the company’s staff. In the event of stolen phones and company laptops, your corporate image could immediately fall into the wrong hands. In anticipation of such unfortunate occurrences, Facebook allows one to view the devices that are presently logged into the company’s account, and is able to end these sessions remotely!  Victims of hacking can now minimize the damage done.

4. Keeping extra copies of your Facebook data

On a related note, it’s possible for hackers to delete years of Facebook content painstakingly accumulated over the years. It is hence prudent to use Facebook’s function of downloading a copy of your Facebook content into archive folders.

5. Securing your correspondences

Facebook Messenger ‘Secret Conversation’ function codifies your conversations, confounding intrusive external parties aside from your intended recipient. Similar to Snapchat, Facebook also has a timer feature that allows you to control the length of time in which the message will be available after being accessed.

With the plethora of safety features and analytical tools to gain insight into your company and audience, Facebook is indispensable for a successful business in an age where the world has migrated online.