8 SEO Hacks To Implement This Holiday Season To Boost Sales

8 SEO Tricks You Should Implement NOW To Increase Profits Over the Holidays

October is upon us, which means now is the perfect time for businesses to kick off their holiday marketing campaigns. Seeing as how the months around Christmas have been found to account for at least 19 percent of all annual sales between 2000 to 2014, anyone would be remiss not to put out all stops during this time of the year.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, digital marketing can work wonders for any traditional marketing campaign, augmenting its reach, effectiveness, and ability to build brand awareness. This is especially true when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), which can help retailers reach out to more shoppers and increase profits over the holidays.

The only catch is that it usually takes time for any effects made by implementing SEO to kick in, which means that NOW is the best time to begin any SEO campaign for the holidays.

Below are 8 ideas business owners can start integrating into their own SEO campaigns.

1. Churn Out Holiday Content Today

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Now is the perfect time to capitalize on incoming holiday searches by publishing holiday-themed content on your site. Sure, you’ve probably tried making cosmetic changes to your homepage before, maybe even offered some kind of holiday-exclusive product or service package, but what about the written content on your blog?

Naturally, people’s search habits change at different times of the year. During the holidays, most people are in “shopping mode”—between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas, it’s no surprise why.

Writing content that’s optimized for the holidays allows you to get these searchers on your site. For example, a consumer electronics store can reach out to shoppers by writing blog posts about the following:

• The best smartphone to buy this Christmas
• The best video game console to gift someone
• Best 4K TV to buy on Black Friday

In other words, content geared towards attracting people with buying intent has a higher likelihood of generating more views and conversions. And although people don’t usually start shopping until mid-November all the way to the end of December, you want to start publishing content today to give search engines time to crawl your content assets.

2. Zero In On Holiday Gift Keywords

Of course, you can’t just create holiday content without taking the right holiday and gift keywords into consideration. If you’re a small to medium enterprise (SME), it will be difficult to rank for generic holiday-specific search terms like:

• “great Christmas gifts”
• “holiday gift ideas”
• “husband gift ideas”
• “gifts for mom”

What you can do is focus on long-tail keywords specific to your niche and category. Again, back to the earlier example: you’re a consumer electronics store.

You can target keywords such as “holiday iPhone 7 (insert your city)” or “holiday discount Playstation 4.”

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If you don’t know what search terms to play around with, this is where Google’s Keyword Planner tool comes in. You should also consider Google Trends to see trending search terms relevant to your industry.

Once you have your keywords, it’s simply a matter of integrating them across your landing pages and holiday-themed content assets. This shouldn’t be new to you by now, because you’re simply optimizing your site with the holidays in mind.

 3. Run a Holiday PPC Campaign

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PPC campaigns are perfect for seasonal promotions. If you want to fast track any gains in visitor traffic and conversions, you can run a PPC campaign on Google AdWords, with your adgroups and ads tailored towards holiday searches, of course.

Nothing will have changed about your target audience or demographic. To continue the previous example, you offer consumers electronics to a target audience made up mostly  of young professionals—nothing about this changes during this holidays.

However, your PPC ads also allow you to reach out to a new set of target buyers who appear only during the holidays. These people give away your products as gifts. Think of parents buying gifts for their kids, or wives looking to buy the latest gadgets for their husbands.

4. Emphasize Great Shipping Options

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Try as we might to avoid it, many of us still take part in the annual last minute holiday shopping rush. And you can bet that your customers do the same thing. Everyone knows the holiday season gets hectic, mainly because we’re all trying to beat the clock in some way. Not surprisingly, this mad rush often creates problems with product supply and shipping delays.

SEO best practices can turn this problem into a marketing opportunity. For starters, you can change your homepage company to emphasize that your company also offers in-store pickup, free shipping (perhaps for a minimum value order), and guaranteed shipping among others.

As the holidays get closer, shoppers will be more concerned about time. Your job is to be proactive and show them you’ve got their back. However, the key is to put information about shipping options on your site now to reap any SEO benefits in time for the holidays.

5. Optimize Your Top-performing Pages for the Holidays

If this isn’t your first time doing SEO on your website, you probably already know what your top-performing landing pages are. If not, visit your Google Analytics Landing Page Report to see which pages generate the most views and conversions.

When optimizing your site for the holidays, you want to return to these landing pages and give them a spin for the holidays. For example, if you have an ecommerce site, consider embedding holiday keywords on your bestselling products.

This can be done by including the product in a “holiday gift ideas” page, or better yet, by offering some kind of holiday promotion for the product to generate even more shopper interest.

6. Set Up a Landing Page for Holiday Gift Ideas

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One of the easiest ways to generate clicks and conversions on your most popular products is to set up a new section within your site completely dedicated to holiday gifts.

Whether you create a new landing page within an existing category or create a new category altogether, a holiday gift section can serve as the perfect platform for putting holiday-related keywords to work, putting your holiday-optimized content front and center. Having a section that’s highly visible and easy to access is just waiting to be crawled by search engine spiders, which can only be a good thing for your SEO efforts.

Besides making good SEO sense, creating a separate section for holiday gift ideas helps your potential customers find what they want in as little time as possible. In fact, most holiday shoppers don’t even know what they want to buy. Your job is to tell them what to consider, which is exactly what this landing page allows you to do.

7. Upload Your Products on the Big Ecommerce Sites

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This may seem like a common sense tactic, but you’d be surprised at just how many online retailers ignore the value of uploading their products on Amazon and eBay.

Leveraging these two ecommerce giants offers two main benefits.

• First, many marketers often forget that these two sites actually have their own search engines, which are just as influential as Google. As you may have figured out by now, these two channels are incredibly popular during the holidays, so it makes perfect sense to take advantage of the opportunity to siphon traffic and sales from these sites into your own.

• Second, increasing the visibility of your products on Amazon and eBay helps to boost your online authority, which in turn improves your ranking on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

 

• Conduct an SEO Audit to Check Your Site’s Health

The holidays can also serve as the perfect time to conduct an SEO audit or health check of your website.

In the wake of Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates, many sites that relied on now-outdated linkbuilding strategies were penalized and took a hit to their rankings on Google’s SERPs.

If this is your first time hearing of these updates, now’s as good a time as any to check your website health, which is as easy as visiting Google’s Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools will tell you if you have issues with the following:

• 404 errors
• HTML glitches
• Duplicate pages
• Broken links
• Crawl and index problem
• Slow page speed issues

If you can identify these problems sooner than later, your site should have improved visibility in time for the holiday season.

Conclusion

Although there will always be people who deride the commercialization of the holidays, there’s no denying that the last few months of the year see a disproportionate amount of spending among consumers and businesses themselves. Implementing an SEO campaign early on gives you the advantage of being one of the first movers in your niche. This also gives you more time to prime your site and buyers as they begin mulling their purchase decisions for the holidays.

Remember, with SEO, timing and content are everything. Aim for relevance when creating your holiday-themed content, and always remember to solve your buyers’ problems.

To learn more visit Submit Press Release 123 to drive traffic and conversion to your website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

4 SEO Hacks Designed with Human Behavior in Mind Explained by Qamar Zaman a Dallas SEO

Dallas SEO Expert Qamar Zaman explains 4 SEO Tactics that Optimize Your Site for Real People

When it comes to SEO, one mistake that many marketers tend to make is missing the forest for the trees.

What am I talking about? I’m referring to the tendency of many SEOs to get bogged down by analytics data, clickthrough rates, bounce rates, conversions, and all this technical mumbo jumbo that should not be the be-all and end-all of search engine optimization.

Like any digital marketing strategy or school of thought, SEO is about marketing and promoting your brand to people—people.

Keeping track of hard data is one thing, but focusing only on numbers and stats won’t mean a thing if you don’t understand how your target audience thinks and behaves.

• Why do people visit your site?
• More importantly, why should they?
• What kind of information appeals to them the most?
• How can you help solve their problems?

These are just a few of the questions you need to ask yourself before you even optimize your site for search engines.

As you’re figuring out the answers to these questions, here are a few more hacks to help you create an SEO plan based on your customers’ behavior.

1. Figure Out Who You Should Reach Out To

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If you don’t know who your customers are or what factors will turn ordinary people into your customers, you won’t get anywhere with any kind of marketing campaign.

As a business owner, you should be able to figure this out quickly. Otherwise, you need to sit down and think hard about just who will benefit from your brand’s products and services. Very rarely will any business have just one kind of target customer.

This is where buyer personas come in.

This HubSpot write-up offers a succinct definition of what a buyer persona is: “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

The best way to start is to simply talk to your current customers. What do they like about your brand? Your products and services? What problems do your products and services solve?

But how is this relevant to SEO? By understanding who your customers are, it becomes easier to adjust your content and keywords to their specific needs and motivators, which in turn helps speed up the conversion process.

2. Check What Your Competitors Are Doing

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Another common practice among almost all consumers is the habit of comparing brands and products before making a purchase decision.

This in itself should give you enough reason to check out what your competition is doing, what tactics they’re employing, and what strategies seem to yield the best return on investment.

• How does their on-site SEO look like?
• What keywords are they using on their landing pages?
• Are they running any PPC ads? Check their copy for keywords and calls to action.
• Do your competitors have a blog? How often do they update it, if at all?

Moz.com’s Open Site Explorer is a powerful tool that helps you determine how well your site is doing compared to others and vice versa.

    3. What Do Your Customers Want?

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Once you’ve created your buyer personas, you then need to make sure your SEO campaign reaches out to customers across the different buying stages.

As search engine algorithms continue to evolve in sophistication, gone are the days of simply relying on keyword research to identify potential search terms and phrases your audience would probably use when making search engine queries, and ‘sprinkling’ these keywords across your landing pages and content assets.

For the most part, this helped users find search results they actually found useful. Still, it was far from perfect.

Thankfully, search engines have become smarter and more efficient at determining what search users want—in other words, what their buying intent is. Besides keywords, Google now takes into account the following:

• Device the search query comes from
• The time of day the query is made
• The location of the search user

The goal, of course, is to deliver the most relevant search results possible to users. And this is where your market research and buyer personas come in, helping you optimize your content for users in the different stages of the buying process, also known as a funnel.

For example, you may have someone who has committed to making a purchase, but is still weighing their options about where to best spend their money. Considering this information, you can optimize your content to reflect a bargain for customers that buy from you—it can be a discount, free shipping, or future deals on repeat purchases.

4. Know What Challenges Your Customers Face

Modern SEO has gone from simply cramming in keywords into landing pages and content assets, evolving into a process of solving people’s problems.

More than anything else, customers want information—your job is to give it to them. But you can’t just give them any kind of information. It has to be something that actually solves their problems and concerns, something that’s obviously related to your products and services, of course.

Notice how I keep going back to problems and concerns.

Part of developing buyer personas is knowing what your customers’ pain points are.

These are the issues, concerns, challenges, problems, and desires your customers face—or don’t even know that they’re facing. Once you’ve identified these pain points, you can then work your way towards presenting your products and services (through SEO and content) as having the power to overcome these pain points.

For example, let’s say your business sells used tires.

• One group of customers may be concerned about the quality of used tires—you can work on creating content that promises a warranty or some other strategy to allay their concerns about this issue.

• Yet another group may be concerned about shipping costs—you can perhaps weigh the cost-benefit ratio of offering free shipping, adjusting your content and PPC ad copy as needed.

To put it simply, the goal here is to optimize your content to address the different pain points of your buyer personas.

Conclusion

As mentioned earlier, these SEO tactics all revolve around a common factor: optimizing for people instead of search engines. If you optimize your site and your content with the goal of helping your potential customers, your rankings should improve in time.

Focus on helping your customers and providing them with the information they need. If you’re successful, you not only help solve their problems through your products and services, you also enjoy enhanced visibility on the Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

 

Qamar Zaman Dallas SEO Consultant

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Google’s “Possum” Update Shakes-Up Local Search Results

Earlier this month, on September 1 to be exact, the search giant has unleashed another algorithm update that left some businesses scratching their heads because they can’t find their Google My Business listing in local search results anymore.  But, their listings are not actually gone as some have thought.

According to Joy Hawkins in her blog post on SearchEngineLand.com, those Google My Business listings are not gone.  They were just being filtered when the search giant  rolled out their newest update.

So, what really does this newest animal-themed update bring into the most-talked-about search algorithm worldwide?

What is Google “Possum”?

Before we’ll discuss that, we need to clarify first that “Possum” is not the official name for this filter update. This name was just being suggested by fellow digital marketing experts who felt that it’s a fitting name because of what it currently does.  A possum, by the way, for those who are not familiar, is a tree-dwelling Australasian marsupial that typically has a prehensile tail.

The Google “Possum” update tends to filter spammy listings off from local search results (Google Maps Results).  According to Hawkins, the main purpose of this filter update is to help diversify the local results and to eradicate spams from showing up in Google Maps search results.

However, since this is just a filter update, you should not expect to get any types of penalties.

How Google “Possum” Works?

It is quite obvious now that Google Possum specifically targets redundant or spammy local business listings and filter them out so that only the most relevant ones will show up in the SERPS (search engine result pages).

As of this writing, the search giant hasn’t released any official statements yet about this update, thus the following observations from fellow search engine experts and enthusiasts may shed some light on how this newest roll-out has affected how business listings appear in local search results.

“I noticed a big move up for a client which I’m sure is related to this local algo change. Four days ago, according to my Brightlocal ranking report, they were at #30 in maps. As of yesterday, they are at #1 for the same keywords. That’s the first time they have ever been that high in a year of tracking. – Scott ClientClicks

Where before I said organic didn’t seem significantly affected, I have to revise that. I’m now seeing noticeable upticks in organic rankings yet ironically, maps rankings still either down or disappeared for same businesses. – danieljc

“I have found some very strange behavior. Specifically, if I search “nokomis florida mortgage broker” I get a single listing for Gulfside Mortgage Services, but if I look for “nokomis fl mortgage broker” I get a 3 pack (with only two listings, one of which is Gulfside Mortgage Services). A week ago, the first search showed the same findings that are now gone. If I use “nokomis florida mortgage lender” I get the same 2 findings as “nokomis fl mortgage broker” but then add one more to complete the 3 pack.” – Hammer

You can read the rest of the observations here.

Joy Hawkins has also specified the top 5 changes Google Possum has done so far.  They are the following.

• Businesses that fall outside of the physical city limits saw a huge spike in ranking.
• Google is now filtering based on address and affiliation.
• The physical location of the searcher is more important than it was before.
• Search results vary more based on slight variations of the keyword searched.
• The local filter seems to be running more independently from the organic filter.

You may read the rest of Hawkins’s analysis here.

How to Avoid Google Possum?

To avoid your listing getting filtered out by this latest algorithm update, you should make sure that it has no duplicates and it has consistent information across all pages.  Make sure that the details about your business are complete and accurate.

But, before that, the best thing you can do is to register your listing in Google My Business.  This can surely help make it more relevant than the unregistered ones (if there are any) and can lessen the chances of it being filtered out.

Inserting your Google Map address (and embedding the actual map itself) when you publish new content can also help you gain more authority over your listing.

How about you? What are the specific precautions that you are doing now to avoid this latest algorithm update from Google?  You may share them at the comment section below.

 

Media Contact:

Qamar Zaman

OneseoCompany.com

Did Google roll out a Brand Bidding Algorithm Update Last Week, Or Was it Part of Penguin 4.0?

How to Prune Links after Google Penguin?

Google Penguin vs. Google Panda: The Ultimate Google SEO Bout?

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Local Marketing Tip – How Law Firms Can Get Testimonials from Your Clients

1. Get all the personal details of your client.  Know your client first and identify the following data about him or her:

• Demographic – Your client’s age, ethnicity, education, household composition, and employment status.
• Type of Occupation – In what sector of the economy your client belongs.  Is she/he jobless or not.
• Psychographic Information – Your client’s personality, values, opinions, interests, and lifestyles.

2. Next, you need to identify what kind of injury he/she suffered.

• Type of injury
• Problems she/he was having before coming to you
• Legal solution that you offered
• Length of time it takes to get the results
• Results from the legal team in-charged

3. Identify the process flow before letting him/her write a Google Review

• Ask the client for a review before paying him/her the settlement
• Make sure she/he has a Gmail account – If the client has, then teach him/her how to write review in Google.  If the client has no account, help them create one in your office.
• Take a photo of your client with his/her permission and have him/her sign a release letter
• Take a video of your client with his/her permission and have him/her sign a release letter

Once you got all the necessary information, you can now proceed in writing a story about the client’s case.  Here are the steps on how to do it.

Steps How to Create a Story

1. Copy your client’s Google Review into Microsoft Word.
2. Add/insert your client’s photo.  Make sure the photo is positioned properly.
3. Upload your client’s video on your YouTube channel.  Make sure you optimize your video post as much as possible by using the right keywords.  Don’t forget to put a personal touch at the description area.
4. Make sure you added the personal information of your client.  But, in case he/she prefers not to have his/her name publicize, then you can just create an alias

5. Don’t forget to also add your client’s injury details in the description area.

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

Unison between SEO and Content Marketing

Capturing the interest of your target audience and gaining advantage from your competitors in organic search need a dynamic internet marketing strategy.  This can be done if you incorporate SEO into your Content Marketing.

“Think of SEO this way: If a customer-focused content marketing program is the sandwich, then SEO is the mayonnaise. It touches nearly everything and enhances the overall flavor of the sandwich, but on its own, it’s not very appetizing.”| Michele Linn – Content Marketing Institute

Although producing content doesn’t require much technical skills compared to running an SEO campaign, the need to incorporate these two strategies is crucial if you want to achieve your digital marketing goals.

In order to achieve your marketing goals, you should know how to use Content Marketing and SEO together.

How? You will learn this in the later part of the article, but first, you must understand why content marketing is a very crucial part in internet marketing especially for small businesses.

5 Reasons Your Small Business Needs Content Marketing

“Constantly clamoring to grab the attention of prospective customers, small businesses are competing with a lot of noise. Consumers are cutting through clutter by fast-forwarding television shows, subscribing to ad-free digital radio, installing ad-blockers to browse their favorite websites sans-ads and customizing what’s in their social media feeds.

To avoid getting skipped over or ignored, savvy digital marketers must craft messages that their target audience wants to see. When small businesses communicate with their customers by providing information instead of offering a sales pitch, the consumer will listen. The message and the brand is no longer an interruption, but a valued information provider.

There’s a name for this tricky tactic — it’s called content marketing. Content marketing means consistently creating and distributing information that is valuable and relevant to those people within a small business’s target audience. Ultimately, the goal is for your content to entice a consumer to do business with your company.

http://entm.ag/28NtMSQ

But, what’s the use of your content if your target audience can’t even find them? These days majority of internet users use search engines to find information about the products, services, and other things they want to know more about.  If you are not visible in search, then you are losing a big chunk of traffic to your competitors.

SEO helps you gain more visibility in organic searches.  This increases the chances of getting more leads and ultimately, getting more conversions.

Why SEO Is Actually All About Content Marketing

“There’s a bit of confusion over SEO and content marketing. The confusion comes over how SEO and content marketing fit together. Do they fit together? Are they at odds with each other? If so, is it possible to force them together?

In a previous post, I explained why SEO and content marketing are like PB&J. They go together. They just fit. They work well together.

Now, I want to share exactly why that is — why SEO is actually all about content marketing, and vice versa.

Before I share the why of this article, let me be clear about the what — the problem I’m addressing.

The Problem: SEO and content marketing are not integrated.

The crux of the problem is that SEO and content marketing are separated, as if they were two very different things. The truth is, however, that they go together, overlap, cohere, blend.”

Some people think that content marketing eliminates the need for SEO.

http://bit.ly/28LcPKA

The truth is, SEO and Content Marketing work hand in hand with each other.  SEO cannot function without content and content cannot gain wider visibility without SEO.

SEO Is More Than Just Traffic, Conversions & Revenue

There are 4 key elements to an SEO plan developed around a content marketing strategy:

 

• Find out what people want and give it to them.

• Use retargeting lists to communicate with them, even after they leave your site.

• Make special price offers on your product or service if prospects act now.

• Evolve a smart content marketing plan to build content that pulls in your target customers.

 

If you look carefully, there’s nothing there which is “click/traffic” focused. All those tactical SEO elements exist, but grow really powerful when integrated into a bigger plan.

Source: Search Engine Land

We should think of SEO and content as pieces of jigsaw puzzle that fit well together. When integrated well, these two become a powerful tool that can help propel your business to the top.

There’s No SEO Without Content |Business.com

Graham Charlton tells us more about how content and SEO are interrelated in his article:

8 Ways Content Marketing and SEO Can Work Together

“How Content and SEO Can Work Together

There is a school of thought, or at least the perception exists in some quarters, that SEO is merely about creating good content for the search engines to index.

While I’m all for the quality content part, there’s more to it than that. If you haven’t ensured that the on-site SEO groundwork has been done, your content efforts will be wasted.

For example, if your site has a penalty, or Google isn’t indexing pages properly, then you’re going to need some SEO expertise, great content or not. This is why the SEO experts and content teams need to work together. As the stats below show, this isn’t necessarily happening all the time, but there is a desire for closer collaboration.

http://bit.ly/28LcR52

Closing

It is very important that early on in your internet marketing campaign, you already know the crucial roles played by content and SEO in your overall marketing plan.  Integrating them together and incorporating them as a unit can help you in achieving your business goals.

If you wanted to learn how to effectively incorporate Content Marketing and SEO together, you may call Qamar Zaman, a web marketing expert in Dallas.  He has over 15 years experience in helping startups and entrepreneurs grow their businesses through cost-effective digital marketing strategies.

You may call him at 972.437.8942, or visit him at Submit Press Release 123 for an affordable press release distribution.

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

The Basics in Starting Your Own Business Blog

If you think you don’t have the talent in storytelling, then you can always hire someone to write or blog on your behalf.  As long as you know which part of your business’ story can capture the interest of your prospects, then blogging about it won’t be a problem.

“Good content is not storytelling. It’s telling your story well.”| MarketingProfs

These days, blogging is one of the most inexpensive ways in promoting your business online without becoming too salesy.  It has been proven very effective as a tool that can help you communicate and engage with your target readers.

So, what is holding you back? Learning about how to start a blog and how to write a blog post is easy as loads of information how to do these are openly available online. This blog post from Amy Lynn Andrews can help you on how to start your own blog:

How to Start a Blog

“So, are you wondering how to start a blog? I’m so glad you’re here! My goal is to explain the necessary steps to get off to a good and successful blogging start, no technical experience required.

I created my first blog in 2004 with zero computer experience. It took me forever to figure it out. (Let’s just say I googled until I nearly lost my eyeballs.) This guide contains what I learned along the way and is especially for those who want step-by-step instructions in an easy and simple format.

http://bit.ly/28LcOX1

Always remember that when you blog, you put the interest of your prospects as the priority.  It should answer common questions about your business and provide solutions to the needs of your target audience.

In blogging, you need to put your customer as the center of your topics as your business is all about satisfying their demands.

“blogging can be an effective, arguably the most effective tool, to increase website traffic, generate leads and develop long-lasting, happy customers. But blogging enthusiasts often forget to answer a critical question: why is blogging important for my business… they just say that it is.” | Manish

Now, if you are still hesitating to start blogging, these reasons enumerated by Wishpond may help you convince you to decide:

4 Reasons Why Blogging is Important for your Business

“There is some debate out there as to whether blogging is still relevant in today’s social media marketing environment.

Regardless if you are a small business, or a multinational company, blogging is integral to your online content marketing strategy.

Here are 4 reasons you need to blog:

• Drive traffic to your website
• Increase your SEO/ SERP
• Position your brand as an industry leader
• Develop better customer relationships”

http://bit.ly/28NtNWQ

Now that you know how easy it is to start your very own blog, you must also equip yourself with the basic knowledge on how to make your blog posts more visible to your target audience.

• Use SEO to increase the visibility of your blog post in organic searches
• Share your blog post on popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook
• Include your blog post in your weekly or monthly email newsletters

Samuel Pustea of JeffBullas.com shares 50 ways on how to promote your blog:

 

50 Ways to Promote and Market your Blog Posts

“The angels are singing, the sun is shining and a torrent of traffic is about to turn up. It is the best article you have ever written and it deserves some attention.

It’s your baby.

You spent time agonizing over the headline, the introduction is a sizzler and the structure is written for web skimming readers.

Nothing happens. The visitors don’t show.

The reality is very different to the imagination that started with a dream of thousands of fanatical readers, advocates and viewers turning up to your web front door. The adage of “build it and they will come” does not work on a web where you are competing with hundreds of millions of websites and over 2 billion internet users who still don’t know you exist.

Dream shattered?

No, it’s just time to roll up the sleeves and build traffic one marketing tactic at a time. It will involve some social media marketing, old fashioned blogger networking and also understanding the nuances of Google.

You don’t need to do all of them but just start. Pick three to five marketing methods from this article that catch your attention and work on those.

Here are 50 ways of promoting your articles on your blog.”

http://bit.ly/28LcPdp

 

Closing

Now that you know how to start your very own blog,  you can now see its potential in helping you attract more prospects and ultimately, increasing your sales in the long run. But, there is still too much work to do because you don’t only need to write and publish.

• You also need to build a blogging strategy
• You also need to develop blog marketing strategy

If you think you cannot do this on your own, it is recommended that you seek the help of a professional.  You may talk to Qamar Zaman, an internet marketing expert in Dallas.  He has over 15 years experience in helping startups and entrepreneurs grow their business through cost-effective digital marketing strategies that deliver epic results.

You may call him at 972.437.8942 or visit his website www.qamarzaman.us.

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog

How to Create Content that People Love to Read and Share

We are often told to be creative, original and only produce high quality content. But, this is not enough.  We need to drive the right people into it so that it will become useful. We need audience, we need interested prospects who, after learning about our business and products, will eventually come to our website and engage with our brand.

This is how successful inbound marketing happens online wherein content is the forefront of every customer-oriented activity.

Once you published a new blog post, the very first thing you need to do is to syndicate it to the right networks.  Make it visible to its target audience.  If you did the right thing, your can eventually see engagement from your readers and if your content is really get, you’ll see it go viral.

But, most blogs that we come across are uninteresting.   This is one of the challenges faced by website owners and marketers these days.  How to create content that people would love to read and share?

Here is a write-up from Social Triggers that discusses the secret on how to create contagious content:

Creating Viral Content? The secret is “Get Contagious...

“What Makes Online Content Go Viral?

There’s an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business who specializes in discovering what makes ideas and products go viral. His name is Jonah Berger (follow him on Twitter here).

He’s been featured in many of the prestigious marketing research journals and publications like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Economist and more.

So, suffice it to say, when he talks or writes, I listen.

Most recently, Jonah Berger co-authored a research paper with Katy Milkman called “What Makes Online Content Go Viral?” and in it, there are insights that you absolutely can’t overlook.

Here’s the highlights:”

http://bit.ly/28NtRpB

 

Readable content always requires proactive writing that gets the readers involved. Providing facts, stats and infographics help in keeping people’s interest.

Driving traffic to your content is difficult if you don’t have a plan or strategy at the very beginning. How could you attract the right readers if you haven’t done any research about them? How could you create a compelling blog post if you don’t know the needs and demand of your target audience?

So, what smart marketers do to stand out? Let’s hear it from Sam Oh from his article published on Entrepreneur.com:

Smart Content Marketers Are Succeeding With These 5 Proven Strategies

“Content marketing isn’t a fad. Engaging and building relationships with customers is the smart way to drive profitable action for your brand.

It is predicted that 88 percent of B2B marketers will be using content marketing while 76 percent of marketers plan to produce more content this year.

With over 2 million blog posts published each day, you need to do more than write a 500 word article on why one should choose your company.

You need to provide exceptional value, fulfill the visitor’s intent and create content the “smart” way. Here are five strategies you can use to take your content marketing to the next level.

1. Find key influencers before you create your content.

Influencers in your industry have a larger reach to your target audience than your current list. A common way people contact influencers is to write a blog post, send a tweet or email and ask them to share it. They don’t owe you anything and acting like they do won’t work well for you.”

http://entm.ag/28LcSGc

 

What must you focus on when you sit down to build content?

The first thing you must do is focus on solutions instead of products.  The second thing that content creators must address is to put action in their words.

You need people to come to your blogs, stay there, read and share your content.

Dominique Jackson has more to tell about how to get more people to read your blog posts:

How to Get People to Read Your Blog

“Let me ask you a question: If 50 people Tweeted your latest blog post, but none of them actually read it, does it matter?

For years online marketers have stressed the importance of social shares, but do you really know how to get people to read your blog?

Don’t get us wrong, social shares can be absolutely helpful. However, how often do you stop to think about if anyone is actually reading or engaging with the content you put out?

Don’t Always Assume People Read Your Blog Because of Shares

http://bit.ly/28NtPh7

 

 

Qamar Zaman, an inbound marketing expert in Dallas, makes it simple for business owners to market their products and services online. Call him to request for advice in developing and deploying the right content marketing strategy that fits your business.

Qamar Zaman
Chief Visionary at One SEO Company. An Internet Entrepreneur SEO & lawyer Internet marketing professional & Starbucks Lover.

from Dallas Internet Marketing Blog