10 content marketing tips for beginners

Content marketing is at the center of every digital marketing campaign. A website with good content is bound to succeed even without any SEO or social media promotion but the combination of top quality content and Internet marketing will bring faster and better results.

Before getting into the 10 content marketing tips, it is better to provide a few quick definitions about basic terms related to content marketing so that we are all in sync.

What is content?

In our context I would say that content is everything that can be published on the web. For example text, videos, images, infographics, graphs, audio, pdf, podcasts, slideshows etc. It is in other words information that can be made available in digital format.

What is content marketing?

There are many sophisticated definitions of Content marketing but my own simplified version is the following:  Content marketing is the process of creating content for the purpose of increasing your web traffic, getting new customers, making more sales or simply increasing brand awareness.

What are the advantages of content marketing?

Content marketing has many things to offer to an online business as content is the start and ending point of any online campaign. In particular the benefits of content marketing are:

More targeted visits from Search Engines – the more content you publish the greater is the number of organic visits you can get

More visits from Social Media – Good content will be shared on social media which in turn will bring more visits to your website

User engagement – User can engage with your content by providing comments, reviews, ratings, answering to other user questions etc.

It’s good for SEO – Good quality content is the heart of SEO. Websites that combine good content with proven copywriting tips are better off than websites who fail in any of these aspects.

Increase brand awareness – Content can help users spread the word about a brand and this word of mouth affect will eventually lead to better brand awareness.

More sales – Content can generate more leads and increase sales

10 Content marketing tips

1. Publish related content

When you start publishing content on your website or blog make sure that it is related to your niche and area of expertise. For many this maybe obvious but some people still get it wrong. If you are running a tech blog for example you cannot publish a post about cooking just because you liked it. Nobody will punish you for doing so but the chances of getting any benefits from that post are minimized.

The best approach is to publish related content that is aligned with the overall goals of your website. For example if you are selling coffee makers online then besides providing all the technical information about your products (specs, photos, reviews, videos) you should also provide a blog with articles related to coffee (making, drinking, recipes, advice etc). This is related content and studies show that more than 50% of consumers enjoy reading related content from brands.

2. Publish lengthy content

When it comes to text content like blog posts, various studies identified that lengthy content (above 1500 words) ranks higher in search engines and it is more likeable in social media.

The lesson we can learn from these studies is that it is better to publish a long detail post that covers all aspects of a topic rather than publish 2-3 smaller articles. Since lengthy content is more share-able in social media this means that by proving for that type of content you are not only fetching food to search engines but you also give users what they want.

3. Publish shareable content

You need to search social networks and find what type of content people like when it comes to your niche. If you are promoting fashion items maybe they like more images and videos, if you are promoting gadgets may be they like more reviews. You need to find that they want and provide them with that content. By doing so you are also increasing the chances your content to go rival on social media and benefit from the extra visibility.

Some ideas for shareable content that are suitable for all niches are:

Top 10 lists…

Best of lists…

How to …

10 ways to…

Most popular ways…

Best tips for…

4. Publish good content that looks good too

Good content provides for original, well researched and unbiased information about a certain topic. Even if your content meets the above criteria, it still needs to look good as well. By good looking content I mean text that is beautified by the use of paragraphs, bold, italics, headings, good font size etc.

Taking care about the formatting of your content is also good for SEO and a sign that you are trying to create a high quality website. In general if you can try to combine different content types together (i.e. text, images, videos) then this makes the user experience better which will generate a number of other benefits.

5. Publish content on a steady basis

Besides proving for up-to date and accurate content another tip you can use is to ensure that you publish content on a regular basis and if possible on fixed dates and times. Having a pre-defined publishing calendar will help you organize your time better and will also help you build a list of loyal fans.

Do not forget that new content is also an incentive for:

Search engines to visit your website

Get more visits from your newsletter and RSS feed

Get more visits from social media

6. Publish content under a good title

The title you give to your content is very important for many reasons. This is SEO 101 but it is worth mentioning that a good title will:

Help search engines understand what the content is about

Help social media sites understand what you are sharing

Attract or not users attention and encourage more clicks to visit the particular page

So, before hitting the publish button make sure that your content has a suitable title that will help you take advantage for all the above benefits. This is where the Google keyword tool can assist you in choosing effective content titles.

7. Publish better content than competitors

Content marketing sounds nice and a great way to increase sales etc but that’s only the good news. The not so good news are that you are not alone and if you want your content to perform good it has to be better than the competition.

Before starting creating your content search Google, Facebook, twitter (or the network that is closer to your target audience) and see what type of content comes in the top positions. Notice things like length, quality and format and try to make your content better in all aspects.

Content that is not better than competitors cannot generate the buzz you expect in search engines or social media so better spend more time and make the content better than rushing into hitting the publish button and lose your time.

8. Bring your content in front of customers

Don’t expect that your potential customers will search to find your website, make a visit and buy your products. When you produce a piece of content you need to go out and promote it so that it gets the attention it deserves.

There are many ways to promote your content without exaggerations and without taking any risks so the next immediate step after hitting the publish button is to do a good promotion. Your best bet is social media because results are extremely fast and immediate but never underestimate the power of email and RSS.

9. Organize your content

When you do content marketing consistently for a number of months (or even years) you will end up with lots of content and if it is not organized correctly then you will get lost. The best strategy is to organize your content into relevant categories and use tags, keywords and descriptions for searching purposes.

10. Create content that converts

Last but not least, don’t forget that the main reason you create content is to increase conversions. Depending on your case, conversions can be different things from more email subscribers, to more banner ad clicks to more product sales.

If your content does not produce good results then you need to change your content strategy and think of alternative ways to produce and promote content. Hiring a professional company is always one of your best options not only for getting better results but also to give you more time to concentrate on what you are doing best.

15 Social media mistakes to avoid (mainly for beginners)

Beginners to social media are likely to get confused when starting out because there are so many things to learn and do on the various social media platforms and sometimes you just don’t know from where to start, what to do and what not to do.

From my experience, most beginners make the following mistakes and if you can manage to avoid them you will save money, time and frustration. In addition, you will get good results faster without spending your time on useless tasks.

1. Concentrating only on Facebook

Although the word Facebook has become a synonym to social media, it is not the only social network you can use to promote your website. Maybe for personal use Facebook is all you need but for SEO purposes and more web traffic, you need to engage on other social networks as well. If you are short of time then Google+ is your next best choice.

2. Working on too many social media platforms at the same time

While you should not only concentrate on Facebook, if you try to engage on too many platforms at the same time it will be very difficult to achieve good results. This is one of the mistakes that many people do and at the end they quit believing that the whole social media marketing is useless and not rewarding.

So instead of trying to get followers on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn at the same time, you can start with a couple of networks and then once your profiles are mature you can move on to the next.

It is worth noting that after some point your social media profiles will grow organically and the effort you will have to put on each network will be less.

3. Your social media profiles are not SEO optimized

Besides the traffic benefits and visibility gained from social media, there are also some hidden SEO benefits. You can SEO your social media profiles and boost your presence both in social media and search engines.

Doing so it not that hard, basically you need to treat your profiles on the different social media networks like your website. Special attention should be given to the titles, urls and descriptions you use and try to be authentic in what you say and share.

4. You don’t have the social media buttons on your website

A secret for social media success especially for beginners is that you need to give your users easy ways to share your content on social media. This means that social media buttons should be made available in your website or blog in prominent places and in the right size.

There are many combinations that will work but in my opinion for optimum performance it is recommended to:

Place a ‘Facebook like box’ in the sidebar, above the fold

Place an ‘Add to Circles box’ in the sidebar

Use large social media buttons for sharing the content and try to position the buttons above the fold and in areas visible by the users.

Do not forget that a number of your readers are using tablets to view your pages so make it easier for them to share your content (another reason to use big buttons that are easily clickable by finger).

If you are using an image in your post make sure that the Pinterest button is available and configured correctly.

5. You share only content from your own websites

Unless you are Seth Godin or Danny Sullivan you cannot share content from your own websites only. The primary purpose of social platforms is to network with other users and sharing interesting content from a number of websites is the suggested way to get noticed and increase your followers.

Do not forget to follow the leaders in your niche, share their content consistently and interact with them by posting comments or mentioning them in your posts.

6. You try to increase your followers too fast

All membership websites have rules and social media networks are no exception to this. If you fail to obey their rules, you risk losing your account and all the time you have spent building your profiles. If you don’t want to read the policies of each network then the best thing you can do is avoid exaggerations and you will be fine.

For example, do not start adding and removing tens of new people per day but follow a more moderate approach. I would say that adding/removing 10-20 people per day (on each social network) is enough to grow your profiles steadily and keep you under the radar at the same time.

If you follow a more aggressive pattern then you may get a number of penalties (for example Facebook may disallow you from adding new friends for 30 days, Twitter will suspend your account, Google+ will give you a notice etc) and this will slow you down further.

7. You want to be followed but forget to follow back!

This is another common mistake most beginners do with social media. They put all their efforts in following new people or removing those who are not following them back and forget to follow back those that are already following them.

If you don’t follow people who follow you, some of them will stop following you and this is why you see fluctuations in your followers count. There are many tools to use to monitor this and although you don’t have to follow back anyone that is following you, it is suggested to do so especially at the beginning.

8. You don’t know the difference between a personal profile and a business profile

Almost all social media networks (maybe with the exception of Twitter) have different versions for personal and business profiles. Facebook has the Facebook Business page, Google+ has the Google+ for business and Pinterest recently introduced Pinterest for Business.

For Facebook and Google+, a business page is owned by a personal profile so you need to first create your personal profile and then create a business page. Each network has its own rules and what is important is to create a business page to promote your web site. You can use the business profile to promote posts from your website only and your personal profile to promote posts from other websites as well.

9. You are either on auto-pilot or completely manual

As I mentioned above, there are many tools you can use to automate almost all social media tasks but this is not recommended. Personal contact where possible will produce better results rather than using auto-replies or anything that is not human.

On the other hand, you cannot do everything yourself. If you are active on more than one network, you will need a lot of time to make frequent posts, write comments and engage with your followers so maybe you should consider using a tool for some tasks but not all.

I use buffer to schedule some of my tweets so that I free up some time to work on Facebook and Google+.

10. You forget about engagement

Social networking is not only about connecting but it’s also about engaging. Don’t forget that one of your goals when using the social networks is to find new customers and more followers so besides following people you also need to engage with them. Personal contact is the most efficient way to promote your business offline and this is true in the online World as well.

11. You neglect the fact that people may LIKE or +1 your post without reading it or visiting your website

This is something I noticed for some time now and I am sure people who have experience in social media, may have noticed this too. Many times when I post on Facebook a URL from my website, I notice that there are a good number of Facebook likes but not that many visits from Facebook for the particular page. This means that people see the post in their timelines and they click the LIKE button just by reading the intro and seeing the image published with the post without visiting the website.

I am giving this example to raise the importance of using good images in your social media posts together with attractive titles and catchy descriptions. A post can go rival if you get this two things right and if you manage to push the message at a time you have most of your followers online.

12. You believe that your posts are seen by all your followers

This is another misconception that disappoints a lot of people. Let’s say that you have 2000 people as fans in your Facebook business page. When you make a new post using your Facebook business account, it will only be seen by aprx 200 people i.e. only 10% of your fans will see the post in their timelines. The other networks have similar rules and the easiest way to increase the number of people who see a post is to use advertising.

13. You don’t know that you can promote your profiles through advertising

Taking the lead from the previous point, it’s good to know that if you want to:

Get more Facebook fans

Get more Facebook likes on your posts

Get more tweets

Get more twitter followers

Get more Google+ followers

Get more 1+s

…then the fastest way to do this is by utilizing the advertising options of the different platforms. Facebook has the Facebook ads, twitter the promoted accounts and tweets (only available in the US for now) and Google+ has the Adwords express platform. They are easy to use, they don’t cost much and the results are more than satisfactory.

I like to use the Facebook advertising options for getting more likes to my business pages and so far this has been generating some very good results with minimum cost.

Note: To clarify a misconception, you are not buying Facebook likes or tweets but what you are paying for is for more views for your posts. If what you are posting is good your followers are more likely to like it or tweet about it.

14.  You don’t use images with your posts

Many studies have shown that posts that use nice images will get more likes, tweets, Pins etc. This is true for all social networks including twitter (which some people believe that it is about 140 characters only). So every time you want to share something on social media make sure that it is accompanied by a good quality image.

15. You don’t use hash tags

A hash tag is the easiest way to follow a discussion on any platform. For example during the NBA finals you can search for #nbafinals on twitter or Google plus and stay informed about the latest stories on that subject. A few weeks ago Facebook started using hast tags as well (Twitter and Google+ were using hash tags from the beginning).

Usage of hash tags is straightforward, just use the ‘#’ followed by the keyword you want to use. For example the tweet for this post is like this:

15 social media mistakes to avoid #socialmedia #socialmediamistakes

Conclusion

Social media is a very important component of a digital marketing campaign and it is a must for every marketer who wants to compete online. Beginners to social media may have difficulties understanding how each social network works that’s why it is very important to avoid doing the 15 mistakes outlined above.

10 Social Media Marketing Tips for beginners

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of building awareness about you, your products or services through the various social media channels. The ultimate goal of any social media marketing campaign is to drive traffic to a website, increase the visibility of a product, gain more social media followers or find more customers.

The most popular social media networks today are: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Tumblr and Linkedin.

Why is social media marketing important?

Social Media marketing is important because:

It’s the fastest way to spread the word about a new product, service or news item – A tweet can go rival in minutes and spread a message around the Word faster than TV or other traditional media

It’s a trend – Millions of people spend a good amount of their time on social media networks so if you ‘need them’ you know where to find them

It’s the new marketing – Back in the old days marketers found out that many people spend time in their cars driving so they thought of the billboards on the roads. Today people are spending time on social media so as a marketer you have to start thinking this way too.

It’s the new influencer – more and more studies indicate that social media is turning into business as well with more companies stating that they have found customers from Facebook or Twitter.

Social Media Marketing tips for beginners

How can you take advantage of social media? How can beginners build a proper social media presence fast? Read and follow our 10 tips below and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest!

1. Decide which social media platform(s) to use

As a beginner to social media you have to choose one or two social media platforms and concentrate on those rather than trying to work on all platforms at the same time. This is a mistake that many beginners do and at the end they quit without having any benefit.

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A nice way to find out which platform is best suited to your niche is to find the influencers and analyse where they have success. For example find out the leaders in your niche and check out the number of Facebook fans, twitter followers, Google+ followers, Pinterest followers etc.

If they have 100,000 Facebook fans but only 10,000 twitter followers then this is a good indication that FB is more suitable for your niche than twitter. It is also a sign that you are more likely to have success with FB than twitter so you can use your time more efficiently and engage more on FB rather than any other platform.

2. Optimize your social media profiles

Once you decide which social media tools you will use (at least for the beginning), the next step is to optimise your profiles on those sites. By optimizing your profiles you increase your chances of getting more followers and it is also a good way to boost your SEO efforts.

Some general rules that apply to all sites are:

Use a real photo, showing your face – avoid using animals, places or anything that is not real. Social media is about connecting people and if you want to have a trusted profile you need to get out of your cage and put your face on the web!

Write a good description about yourself or your company – What is your background or expertise? What are you proud off? Mention this is your profile.

Give an indication to users what type of info you will share – Although this is not necessary, I like to read in profiles what kind of info to expect from the particular person.  For example in my twitter profile I wrote: “..tweeting SEO, social media, internet marketing tips and advice”.

Include a link to your website (where applicable) – On Facebook include a link in the ‘About section’, on Twitter and Pinterest in the ‘Web site Section’, on Google+ in the ‘Contributor to’ section. In other words, do use your social media profiles for SEO purposes as well.

I suggest you read SEO boost your social media profiles article which includes more examples and instructions on what you have to do to each social media site for more exposure.

3. Connect your website or blog with your social media pages

After you have your social media profiles ready the next step is to connect your website with your social media pages. There is a certain procedure to follow for each platform and it is very important that you do it correctly.

A correct binding between the two means that search engines and social media websites know which website corresponds to which social media page. For example when I created the Google+ page for reliablesoft.net, Google+ did not know that this was the official page of the site until I have added the publisher verification code on my site.

For Facebook you can follow these instructions

For Google+ you can read this

For Pinterest you can verify your website using this procedure

For twitter you follow this

4. Add social media buttons on your website

Besides connecting your website with the respective business pages on social media, you also need to add social media buttons on your website so that readers can easily share your content.

Depending on the platform there are many ways and plugins to do that, I suggest you search Google using “how to add social media buttons to xxxxxx” – replace xxxxx with the platform your website is based. For example if you are using wordpress search google for “how to add social media buttons to wordpress”.

As a general rule of thumb, keep the buttons above the fold to increase exposure and have in mind that larger buttons get more clicks than smaller buttons.

5. Find and follow the influencers in your niche

So far we have selected the most appropriate social media tools for our niche, optimized our social media profiles, connected our website with the social media pages and added the buttons on our pages for more interaction. The next obvious step is to find people to follow but most importantly to gradually build our tribe of followers.

I would say that there are 5 basic steps to follow to get more followers and these are described in points 6-10 below. Before getting into that, you should first find and follow the influencers in your niche.

It is almost certain that they will not follow you back because you have a new account with no followers but doing so is important for 3 reasons:

Social media platforms will use this information to make suggestions on who to follow so by following popular people in your niche is like telling them that you are also in that niche.

 When you follow popular people who are likely to get followed by others as well. A trick many people use is to follow the followers of a popular person because they know that some will follow them back as well.

They will most probably share important and useful information about the niche so you have a chance to learn something new and re-share that with your followers.

6. Keep a balance between following and followers

Once you start following people you should always have in mind that it’s better to keep a balance between the number of people you follow and the number of people they follow you back. This is important especially in Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest and the reasons are a lot:

Software applications are using this ratio (followers/following) to make suggestions on ‘who to follow’ so if you have a very high ratio you minimize your chances of getting new quality followers.

It is a matter of trust – Who do you think has a trusted profile: someone with 1000 followers but following 2500 or someone with 550 followers that follows 510?

A balanced profile is better for SEO – SEO’s have been talking the last couple of months about the importance of social media for SEO and how things are changing and although it is not yet confirmed, it is more likely that people with strong social media profiles are in better position that those with weak profiles.

A strong profile in this case is someone that has more followers than following and someone that is followed by people who are considered influencers in the niche.

7.  Share interesting content (text, images, videos)

This is the foundation for having a successful social media marketing campaign. When we talk about publishing content we always say that ‘content is king’ and this true in social media as well. If you share interesting and useful content you can get more re-shares, more visitors to your website and under some conditions more customers as well.

What is interesting content? From my experience (and certain studies) this is a combination off:

Articles/Stories/Pages related to your niche but not only from your own website.

Interesting statistics about your niche

Motivational Quotes related to your niche or otherwise

Research studies

Images and Videos

Funny stuff- whatever your niche, you can share once in a while a joke, a funny image or video to make your followers smile.

Don’t forget about hashtags – hashtags (#) can make your content more searchable so don’t forget to use hashtags in the networks that support it (Twitter, Google+).

8. Post many times per day but don’t overdo it

A common question by people who are just beginning on social media is “how many times should I post per day?” The answer depends on the network. There are many studies analysing the effect of posting frequency and some best practices are:

Facebook personal page – As many times as you want

Facebook business page – No more than 1-2 times per day and no more than 7 times per week. There are studies that support this guideline.

Twitter – The more you tweet the more exposure you get.

Google+ Business page and Google+ profile page – as many times as you want but don’t overdo it because this may create the opposite results.

Pinterest – a few times per day is enough

9. Don’t forget to follow back

Most people concentrate on how to get new followers but they forget to follow back those who have already followed them. Every day you should create the habit of viewing the people who are already following you and decide who to follow back. If you don’t do this on a regular basis then most likely some will un-follow you and this is why you may sometimes notice a decrease in the number of followers.

10. Follow the rules and be patient

Social media networks have rules to keep spammers away. For example there is a limit on twitter on the number of people you can follow per day; there is also a limit on Google+ on the number of people you can add/delete from your circles, Facebook has its own rules etc.

This means that it may take some time to build thousands of followers so you need to be patient and not try to rush into results either by breaking the rules (your account will be suspended) or by spending your money in ‘buying followers or tweets’ or anything similar.

Try to spend your time in creating a great social media profile that will stand over time and why not become one of the authoritative profiles in your niche.

Conclusion

When it comes to social media there are 2 important pillars. The first one has to do with the setup of your social media profiles and the second one is about usage i.e. how you use your social media account.

For the first pillar it is important to engage in the networks more suited to your niche and to have a proper connection between your social media pages and website. For the second pillar it is important to follow the right people, be followed by the right people and share relevant and interesting content always by adhering to the rules of the different social media networks.

Best Google analytics reports for beginners

Best Google analytics reports for beginners

Google analytics can give you a tone of information about your web site and if you are a beginner you can easily get lost in the reports. My goal in this post is to explain and demonstrate those 6 best reports to help beginners understand some basic information about their web site. These are the absolute essentials for any webmaster looking to answer the 4 w’s (‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘who’).

1. How many visits do I get per day and from where?

This is a report I run on a daily basis. You can arrive at this report by selecting ALL Traffic from Traffic Sources 

What this report shows is the number of visits and their origin for the selected period. You can see how many visits are coming from search (i.e. organic), how many visits are direct etc.

Pages / Visit: the pages per visit, i.e. how many pages on average your readers are viewing before they leave your web site – the greater the number the better

Avg. Visit Duration: How long (on average) your visitors stay on the site – the greater the number the better

%New Visits: What percentage of the visitors are new readers

Bounce rate: The percentage of people who left your web site without viewing other pages within your site. – the lower the number the better

2. What keywords do people use to find my site in Google?

While you are viewing the above report click the Google/Organic link. This shows you the total number of visits from Google. Next, click the Secondary Dimension drop down box and select keyword.

This will show you the different keywords people use in Google to find your web site. This is a very useful report for every Internet Marketer. You can group the different keywords together and understand the terms people use to find your site.

3. Which are the most popular pages of my site?

To find out which are the most popular pages of your site select All Pages from Site Content. You may find out a number of surprises like that your most popular page is not your home page or which of your site’s categories are more visited etc.

4. Which pages do people see first (landing pages) when they visit my site?

The landing pages report shows which pages are first seen when people visit the web site. You can combine this report with keywords (select Keyword from secondary dimension) and get an accurate picture on the keywords people use and the page you enter your site. To view this report select Landing Pages from Site Content.

Remember that you can always use different combinations using the secondary dimension feature and see a whole new set of reports.

5. How many people are viewing my web site right now?

This is a very useful report that shows in real-time the number of visits. You can find this report by selecting Overview from Standard Reports / Real time / Overview.

6. What do people click when they browse my web site?

Besides the different reports, another very nice feature of Google Analytics is what is called the In-Page Analytics. What in-page analytics can tell you is what links do people click when browsing your web site. This is good to know for many obvious reasons and can really help you analyse and optimize your web site. Maybe you should move some content above the fold or see what your readers prefer more (text or images) and many other useful information.