Think of your web content like good food, something that users want to “sink their teeth into.” Your visitors are looking for valuable content online all of the time. If you can provide something of true value to your viewers, they will reward you with increased visits and loyalty to your brand.

What is “snackable” content?

The question about what makes up snackable content comes up when there is a discussion on how to serve up good content. Snackable content is content that is satisfying and to the point. The Halo Group explains it as, “short, sweet, but extremely filling.” In other words, it is content that people can digest quickly and easily, but that offers them immense value due to its unique perspective, links to other resources, or other value factors.

Does it resonate with your viewers?

One of the most important questions to ask when you are trying to create snackable content for your visitors is to whether the content resonates with your target audience. People want relevant content that will help them with something that they want to learn about or use in their lives.

When you create content that resonates with your audience, you are giving them something of value for free in exchange for the possibility of getting their business in the future. Knowing your customers and what their “pain points” are will help to decide what type of content to offer.

Does it solve a problem?

Another litmus test that your content should meet up to is whether your content solves a problem. If your customers need more time to do their work and your company creates productivity tools, why not offer some tips on how to use their time more wisely. Even if your content doesn’t completely solve their problem, this is content that helps you align yourself with what your company is offer when it comes to your content and reminds them of the tools you offer that help them even more.

Qualities of Snackable Content

If you’re still vague on what type of content qualifies for snackable content, read the list below to get some ideas.

1. Content that keeps your attention– The attention span of the average adult online is less than a goldfish’s. That’s about eight seconds. (Statisticbrain.com) They go on to show some of the specific attention span statistics that give you even more insight into how the human brain only pays attention to specific things in certain ways. For example, only 28% of the content served up on a website is read by the average visitor.

This means that you need to find a way to increase their level of engagement and retention to get all of your content in front of the potential customer.

2. Content that features media– When you add podcasts, audio, or video to your content, it will increase your visitors’ attention span to some degree. We know that 65% of viewers who see a video on a product make a purchase shortly after that. So some of what you do in producing content for your site should be dedicated to increasing the level of engagement and retention for your content.

3. Content that answers a question– When you answer the important questions that your viewers want to know, you are helping them solve a problem that they have. Even helping them with one aspect of their problem can go a long way toward keeping their attention and increasing their interest in your brand.

4. Interesting wording– Using interesting or unique wording in your content can make it more snackable.

5. Unique perspective– When you write from a unique perspective, such as from the viewpoint of an insect, dog, or tree, you will entertain your audience while making your point. So use your imagination when creating content and make sure you are creating content that users will find original and unique.

6. Funny or emotive content– When you use comical or emotive content (content that incites emotions), you will be able to reach them on a more personal level. People want to connect to content on a personal level that transcends information and crosses over into the affective domain.

7. Informative content– Most of all, what you want to do is to create content that is informative and useable to your primary audience. Don’t just use the same information that you have sent them in email campaigns or that they can access on your blog. Providing new, fresh, informative information is the single best way to keep their attention and provide snackable content.

8. Mobile-friendly content– When you are creating content for your audience, you need to keep your mobile users in mind. Mobile users are the most important group of content consumers that want snackable content. Why? For one thing, they are in a hurry. If they are using their mobile devices to read your content, they may be “on-the-go,” or they may be limited in how much of your content they can read.

For this reason, you should always make sure that your content can be read in around five minutes or less so that mobile users will be able to get the most important crumbs without having to eat the whole meal.

Make it relevant

Keeping your content relevant to your website and your purpose as a brand is also a very important aspect of content creation. It should resonate with your brand’s purpose and echo the ideas of your company within the content. While no informational content should be solely for the purpose of sales, you should learn to lead your customers to the conclusion that your brand is the answer to their problems.

Start with a great website that gives you a place to place your content. Your website should be considered the “home base” of your brand and a place that you establish your business on for your online customers.

Getting a professional website created is the first step to establishing your online brand presence. Once you do that, you can focus on producing various types of content that will appeal to your audience.

Let Web Design Team Create Your Best Content

At webdesignteam.com, we understand that you need a great platform to have a great website. We also know what it takes to create a website that will attract and keep the attention of your target audience.

Some of the success of your brand online is due to the ability of your website designers to set up your virtual business in the sky. We can help you with this at webdesignteam.com. Contact us today to learn more.

The post How to Make Snackable Content Work for Your Brand appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

Advantages of Podcasting in Business

If you are wondering what the advantages are in podcasting, consider these benefits to business owners that podcasting provides.

1. Podcasting is easy to produce and consume.– One of the main reasons you should look into podcasting as a digital asset that you should have on your site is that it is easy to produce and consume. First, from the perspective of a business owner, you can produce a podcast quickly and easily, provided you have the right software, tools, and equipment. Producing a podcast just takes around 15-30 minutes, depending on the length of your show and the complexity of it. Several tools around now make this process easy such as Blogtalkradio.com, that allows you to host a live show on their platform that is topic and keyword based, then download the show as a podcast to use on your site.

2. It increases your audience.– Podcasting increases your audience by allowing people to engage with your content in a variety of different contexts. People can take your broadcast along with them on their portable devices and listen “on-the-go.” This puts you on the radar of your target customers more often and helps you spread your message on more platforms. If you publish your podcast on iTunes, you have an additional audience of over 500,000 people just by being on their platform.

3. It helps your brand stand out.– By carving out a niche with your podcast material, you will make an impact with people that you might never reach otherwise.

4. It engages your audience on a different level.– The brain takes in information in a variety of ways. Some people respond to recorded audio better than others. But many studies suggest that audio recordings are so effective to retaining information that we can even learn while we sleep. (Smithsonian Magazine)

5. It appeals to aural learners.– Aural learners (learners who learn better by listening to recorded speech) have stronger memory retention when listening to audio recordings. Audio also allows you to reach people while they are engaged in another activity such as cooking, working, or driving.

6. It helps build trust with your audience.– Your online website is in text format, for the most part. You communicate everything that your brand stands for and everything you do as a business through text. Whether it’s on your blog, your website, or in your product descriptions, you create meaning for your audience through the written word. Adding podcasting to your digital assets will increase the level of interest in your communications. It also increases your trustworthiness with your audience because they can hear your voice rather than just see your words in text form. This can clearly be seen through any of the top marketing podcasts in the world today.

This makes a more personal connection with your listeners, much in the way that landline radio DJ’s have done for years by connecting to their audience listening at home through the power of the human voice.

Invite influencers as co-hosts

If you are a startup business or a business that is trying to expand, it would be a good idea to use the social influencers in your niche to help you boost your brand. You can connect to some of these people by listening to their podcasts and other media online, then follow them on Twitter or Facebook and send them a message, asking them to come on your show.

How to Choose the Best Influencers

Keep in mind that the more famous they are, the less likely it is that they will be able to give you their time and you may have to offer to pay them for doing so. But some mid-range influencers who have a book about a topic that they are wanting to promote may offer to come on your show free, in exchange for the publicity they get from doing so.

If you offer to promote them with your podcast on your website, it will also promote their book, and they may be willing to help you in return for this free promotion.

Make sure that you vet your influencers before inviting them on your podcast. Make sure you agree on the important things that define your brand and that you are okay with allowing them to express their views on something that they feel strongly about.

Consider anyone that you bring on your show as a cheerleader for your brand. If they do not have at least a passing interest in your brand and your ideas for your website, they should not be on your show. In fact, you could run into some influencers who tend to make it all about them and will not even talk about your brand or the topic you want to get across. Steer clear of these self-absorbed “gurus.” They are only using your platform to toot their own horn.

It’s fine for them to promote their work if you invite them to do that. Just make sure they have a mutual respect for you and you for them if you have them on one of your shows.

Building a podcast takes time, but it is the essence of making your podcasts work for your brand. Just like any other digital asset that you own, your podcasts should always keep your target audience in mind and work toward promoting your goals and ideas for your brand through everything you put out to your audience.

Getting Audience Feedback

Do you have a way to engage your audience with your podcasts? This is also very important and can serve to improve the way your audience reacts to your podcasts and your brand. Have a plan to increase your audience engagement by finding out how they are responding to your podcasts. You can do this in some different ways.

1. Creating and distributing surveys and polls.
2. Asking listeners to call in.
3. Looking at customer reactions in chats and social media.
4. Create a chat system that runs “live” when you are broadcasting.
5. Ask customers to write reviews on the podcasts.

All of these techniques may serve to help you increase the level of engagement and interaction that customers do with your brand. If you do “live” show, you can see the reaction of your listeners in real time. This can help you to monitor and adjust your responses to what customers want to know and increase your engagement levels.

With recorded shows (podcasts) that do not allow you to be present with your audience when they are listening, ask them to send you email responses to what they heard or to write comments on your blog about it. Placing your podcast on your blog is a great idea since this makes this process simple and natural.

Encouraging comments and reactions to your podcasts, creating top-quality rich content, and running your podcast on a variety of platforms can all serve to boost your web presence and your brand.

You’ll attract people you didn’t before with text alone, create a following through the recorded material, and widen your influence across more platforms.

How Web Design Team Can Help with Your Podcast

If your website needs work or you want to know how to best integrate your podcasts with your website, contact us. We are the web design experts at webdesignteam.com.

The post How to Use Podcasts to Improve Your Brand’s Impact appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

Many businesses know how to do everything else but they don’t seem to know what kind of tools to use to generate more leads and attention for their business. In this post, we will point you to seven tools that you can use to generate more leads for your website.

Leads Refractors

First of all, it helps to know what the leads refractors are. These are things that deter from the building of leads for your business. One such refractor might be a negative experience on your website. If you do not offer interesting content and other assets on your page, your bounce rate may increase. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your page before they get a chance to take in the most important aspects of it.

The higher your bounce rate is, the fewer leads you will generate because your visitors will leave the page too soon before they can do anything to interact with it.

The following tools should help improve your bounce rate and also offer your visitors something unique that will get them more interested in your brand.

7 Tools to Improve Your Website Leads Generation

1. Unbounce– Unbounce is a great tool for generating leads because it helps you build leads and conversions at a faster rate than you could do normally. It is a platform that allows you to build custom landing pages and even use overlays to increase your conversions.

Unbounce also lets you integrate your website with your email marketing campaigns and increase your marketing automation and optimize your site. This all helps improve your ranking in Google which results in more leads and lets you easily access many of your marketing tools in one place.

2. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions– If you want to really give your ads and leads a boost, try the LinkedIn tools such as the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions application on the LinkedIn site. It allows you to connect your LinkedIn profile and presence to your target audience by created sponsored content, emails, and in-text ads that draw the attention of your specific audience.

There are other options too regarding dynamic ads and display ads that boost your content through your LinkedIn account.

3. Slideshare– Slideshare is a unique tool that allows you to create original slideshows that you can share online to a specific audience or invite people to see via email and other options. It resembles PowerPoint in many ways but it allows you to host it online without having to have people download the file like you do with PowerPoint. You can include all sorts of marketing material and you can even embed the slideshow into your blog post or web pages.

4. Padiact– Padiact is a unique tool that allows you to collect new email subscribers for your ad campaigns. Their motto is “convert visitors into leads.” It is a UK-based company that allows you to launch multiple email campaigns that will help you maximize your ROI and leads generation.

All you need to start a campaign is to have five lines of javascript on your website. Of course, you do not have to know the code yourself to achieve this. You just let the software do it for you. You can start an account with them for free and add to it if you want to include more campaigns and features.

5. SalesGenie– SalesGenie is a robust tool that allows you to tap into one of the largest databases of sales leads available today. You can use it for 3 days and get up to 150 free leads during that time to test drive it. Then it is priced according to the level and number of leads your want for a year after that. It’s not a cheap solution but the power it brings businesses online is too good to pass up.

6. Facebook Ads– Facebook Ads of the most simple ways to create new leads for your website is to create a Facebook ad that is specific to your target audience. By specifying your audience and who you would like to include in your ad group, you can increase your leads through targeted ads. You can spend as much as you want on the campaigns and you never pay until you get the specific result that you asked for in the campaign. Facebook Ads are based on a “pay-per-click” model and this allows you to monitor and adjust your ad campaigns or change them quickly and easily.

You can even specific the exact cost you want to pay for each action and there are multiple actions to choose from such as visiting your website, clicking on an ad, or purchasing a product.

7. Lead Forensics– Lead Forensics is a great tool for business if you want to drill down deeper into the specifics of how leads are generating. This tool uses a powerful research and database-scouring technique that lets you dig deeper into your database of potential leads to uncover a goldmine of prospects.

This tool is based on a mobile app so you can use it from any mobile device or smartphone that you use for working on your business. The mobile-readiness aspect also means that it is easy to apply to any of your websites or pages that you want to create leads for anytime.

How to Use the Tools with Your Website

Keep this arsenal of leads generation tools handy when you are working on marketing your website and increasing your leads. You may only want to use a few of them or one of them. But remember that 20% of your effort is what leads to 80% of your results!

That being said, you should always remember what you are leading them to!

Your website, good, bad, or indifferent, is what you are trying to get people to come to. If it is not up to par, you will be wasting your time leading your customers to your content. Also, you may want to use your website to generate leads such as including videos or a call-to-action on your main page. How will you know if you are drawing people to your site or bouncing them to somewhere else?

The best thing to do is to start with a great website. A site that is full of rich content, interesting articles, videos, and other media, is the best way to know that you’ll attract the people you need to attract to your content.

We can help with that part. Web Design Team is a professional web design firm specializing in high-quality web design. We can include all of the elements you need so that generate leads and conversion for your business.

Visit us today at webdesignteam.com. You may see that the only thing standing between you and hot leads and sales is your design.

The post 7 Must-Use Tools to Generate Leads Using Your Website appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

Blogging is an online activity that was first introduced in 1994 by a college student who thought it was a good way to record personal events and log vacation time. At that time, a blog was just called a “personal home page.” In fact, the term “blog,” (meaning “web log”) didn’t come around until about 1997 when the idea started to catch on with other platforms.

Blogging has come a long way since those early days. Now, it is not just used for people to record their family events and vacations. Blogging also serves as a way for online web owners to promote their business.

The question of whether a business should have a blog is pretty academic to our current day. Blogs are now considered one of the most important aspects of promoting an online business. You can start a blog on your website platform if that feature is available or you could start an off-site blog that exists on another server off of your main page.

Many different platforms feature a blogging option, and most web servers now have this function available to site owners. Many online web servers offer a blog as one of the pages that you can create at no extra charge.

Some of the most popular off-site blogging platforms are mentioned below.

Blogger.com

Blogger.com is one of the most popular blogging platforms. It is owned by Google, and this gives you an advantage over the other platforms since it is automatically promoted in the Google searches. This means that, once you make a post public, it will automatically go live and be featured in Google searches with any keywords that you have optimized in your entry.

Google also uses an abbreviated form of their Analytics engine to allow you to track the success and popularity of a post. You can view this in real time on the Blogger.com site.

Blogger’s platform also makes it easy to include Google Adsense campaigns within your blog post. At one time, Google allowed users to decide which ads to run. Now, they have simplified this process by automatically inserting the appropriate ads into your blog entries. They match up your content as closely as possible with the ads that run, increasing the chances of you earning revenue from the ads.

WordPress.org

WordPress.org is another equally popular blogging platform that is off-site. It allows you to create original web pages or blogs in a format that captures your branding and style. WordPress is most popular for its themes that you can choose from a variety of different styles and looks.

See some examples of the WordPress themes here.

Either Blogger or WordPress are excellent choices to place your blog with. However, you may also want to consider having an on-site blog.

Advantages of an On-site Blog

You may ask what the advantages are to an on-site blog. For one thing, it is more convenient and simple to write a blog post when it is located on your web server site. You may create more posts if it is easy to access and post new material. However, there are also many disadvantages to free hosting blog sites as well — such as not having complete ownership over your content, the inability to customize the look and feel or your site, and also that it comes off unprofessional.

As long as your blog is related to your business site content, creating a tab or a page that users can read on your site gives them easy access to your content.

If you announce something new on your blog related to your company, you may be able to create additional excitement for the new feature or increase the level of hype that you can generate for your brand.

On-site blogging also enhances the amount of traffic that you can receive on your site since it becomes a part of your website that is “crawled” by Google. Your pages are all indexed and crawled separately so it’s possible that new users may find your page through your on-site blog who may not have located you otherwise. This is the best reason of all as to why you should have an on-site blog, even if you also have an off-site blog.

Integrating Your Blog into your Marketing Plan

Once you have a blog, you have the capability of using it as an integral part of your online marketing plan. By posting new blog posts on your Facebook or Twitter accounts, as well as emailing new posts to subscribers, you can create a great deal of interest in your brand. This keeps you in touch with your target audience while generating interest in new ideas and products.

Using Your Blog for Branding

Another thing you need to do when creating a blog for your business is thinking about how to integrate it within your branding. You need to match your blog with your brand and your website as much as possible because it is a part of your overall branding.

Below is a list of tips on how to do this effectively:

• Consider an on-site blog within the framework of your website.
• Use the same theme for your blog as your website to help with branding.
• Create an easy-to-use website that is simple to access.
• Blog often.

All of these tips are great ideas to follow if you are trying to increase your impact with your target audience and promote your company through your blog. You should keep in mind that your blog does not stand alone. It is just another practical tool that you should use in conjunction with the many other tools that you utilize to promote your brand.

What’s different about blogging?

One of the things that is different about blogging is that you can speak to your customers’ needs in a casual, informal way. It puts you on the same level of your audience who might otherwise just see you as a corporate executive. This can help your credibility and trustworthiness since you are coming out on your blog to address the customers directly.

Getting Started with Blogging

If you need a professional-looking website that allows you the freedom to use either on-site or off-site blogging platforms, see us. We are the Web Design Team, and we understand the importance of having choices. We allow you the freedom to create your blog either on-site or off-site and integrate it within your other assets. That way, your blog becomes an integral part of your marketing platform.

We can create and design a professional site for your business today and help you integrate your blog with your website. Whether you use WordPress, Blogger, or one of the many other blogging platforms, we can help you create a business presence online that is sure to turn the heads of your target audience.

Check out our site at webdesignteam.com and let us know how we can be of help to you as you build your blog and your brand. Blogging is essential nowadays to communicate with your customers and to create more leads and conversions. Why not start with a great website? Call us today to learn more.

The post Blogging for Business – Should Your Business have a Blog? appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

Your website is important to your online business. It is a platform to place your web content on, and it serves as a tool to advertise your products and services. The ultimate goal of your website is to make your business more successful.

What are your goals?

Your business goals may be to increase your revenue and to get more people to join your mailing list. A mailing list is a good way to grow your potential audience and increase your market reach. Ultimately, you should want to use your website as a tool to increase your leads and sales.

Whatever your goals for your business, you need to think about what you want your website to say about your brand and have a purpose for your site. You can have more than one use for your site, but there should be an overriding theme for your website that helps you grow your business.

The most important component of your website is not your web design. It is the content that you provide to your customers and viewers. Your regular customers will likely check your website at least once a month or so to see if you have new content.

If you don’t, you may disappoint them. Many customers look for a blog or an infographic that will tell them the latest happenings with your business or some bit of wisdom that might help make their lives better in some way.

Some Ideas to Help You Create Quality Content

If you are stretching to find ways to create content that your customers will love, check out the following tips and see if it will help you improve your web content.

1. Make sure you have a blog.– If you want to encourage positive interaction and help your prospects and customers keep up with your business activity,

make sure you create a blog. A blog is a necessary component of a good website because it gives you a platform that is less formal that your main website and allows you to get comments from your visitors and increase engagement. Your blog can be either on-site or off-site depending on how you want it to affect your search engine ranking.

2. Read up on your industry topics and share valuable tips.– Remember that, as a business owner, you are considered an expert in your chosen field. Your customers tend to think of you as a professional in your industry so you can provide quality content and informational articles that deal with your industry to draw more people. Read up on the latest news within your industry and rotate different topics out each week to vary your content.

3. Ask customers what they need help with.– There’s no better way to show customers that you care about them than to ask them what they need. You can do this via surveys or ask them to email suggestions before your next edition of your blog. Consider including some video tutorials that teach a particular skill that they have expressed an interest in. This shows that you are going the extra mile to provide them with quality content.

4. Offer something free for their email contact.– Everyone likes to get something free once in awhile. Offering something like a free ebook or video download can do wonders for a website that is in need of a shot in the arm. You can find free ebooks that are in your niche area on some websites. Just make sure and check the license to see if it can be given away as a free item. Better yet, create the ebook yourself or consider outsourcing it to an eager writer who wants nothing more than credit in exchange for some coverage of their ideas.

5. Hold a contest.– People love contests, so this could be an interesting way to draw more people to your website. You can make it simple like a word game or mystery that you ask them to solve. If you feel more creative, consider having them write a story or a song about your business that reflects their feelings for your brand. This can be very enlightening as a business owner because it can tell you a great deal about how your customers view your business. It will also increase your leads and visitors. If you are active with social media, you can easily run a contest with Facebook applications.

6. Do your research.– A well-researched article that is rich in information will be considered more valuable than a more shallow, basic one. Focus on creating high-quality content that your customers will value. For example, think of information that could save them time or money or teach them a new skill. People value what something can do for them more than they value the thing itself.

7. Create a video series or weekly podcast.– Video and audio are very popular with people who are online looking for something new. You could create a video that addresses the needs of your viewers and readers on a weekly or monthly basis. When you create a video series, you are going to have more positive reactions to it than if you just do a video once in awhile. This gets your regular viewers, or web subscribers used to coming back to your site for more content and gets you more returned visits which may improve your rankings in Google.

It’s your turn!

Once you have looked over some of these ideas, you can start creating some of your own. Most business owners have a good idea of what they want to do to improve the quality of their website content. Just use your imagination and let your creative juices flow. Think about what motivates you but also focus on what drives your customers. What do your best customers care about? What are their pain points? No matter what format your content is in, address the needs of your customers, and you will never regret it.

For the technical end, we can help with that. We provide top-quality professional web design services that you can count on to provide the framework so you can focus on creating stellar content.

Once you have the technical side of your website worked out, you can work on the establishment of a regular schedule of blog articles, videos, and podcasts that will inspire and delight your customers and increase your leads.

Check out our portfolio and contact us for more information. Some of the services we offer include:

• 2D and 3D animation
• Infographics (static and video)
• Web graphics design
• Web design and development

No matter what you envision for your site and your brand, we can help take care of the technical aspects and build your site according to your specifications, complete with coding language and additional assets that will allow you to provide the best positive experience for your customers.

Contact us at webdesignteam.com and share your vision with us.

The post How to Create Content Your Audience and Customers Will Love appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

There are plenty of leads-generating tools out there that you can use to try to draw attention to your website, but sometimes business owners overlook the most important one: your website, itself!

If your site is not functioning as a leads magnet on its own, how will using outside tools that drive people to your site help you? The answer is: it won’t.

Your website should be the most compelling thing about your online business presence to increase your leads and conversions.

So how do you do it? Here are a few ideas through the use of content creation and inbound marketing.

Create compelling content.

Google reminded site owners on January 10, 2017, that they still feel the same way about great content: it’s number 1! The quality of your web content is the most important thing you do, not only for Google but the benefit of your business. Your customers will appreciate the high-quality content, and it will make them come back for more. Poor content drives them away, and you may lose many potential customers for lack of quality content.

What is quality content? It is content that has value. The value can be a real value (such as monetary value by offering $5 off by using a coupon code that you provide), or it can be “perceived value,” (a customer feeling that you have solved a problem they had until they read your content). Either way, you win when the customer feels that they have gotten something of value from your content.

Your content can come in any form including blog posts and articles, podcasts, and other forms of media like we discuss in one of our points below. Regardless of the type of content, you should always have nothing but the highest standards when producing your content, and that includes your web design and content as well.

Create a mobile-friendly website and custom app.

Google reminded us of another important concept on January 10 of this year. Along with their reminders about having high-quality, meaningful content, they also reminded site owners of the importance of making sure their site is “mobile-friendly.” This includes your navigation and other components. But it also includes avoiding things like interstitial (popup ads) and other aspects that may lower the quality of your user’s experience on your site.

You also need a mobile app for your business if you can create one or have one created by a professional design team. Having a customized native app developed for your business that complements your website and branding will assure you that your customers will always be able to find your site on their mobile devices without a problem and that your site is mobile-friendly.

Include contact information in obvious places.

If you want to use your website to increase your leads, you will need to make sure that customers can contact you. By including your contact information in an obvious place on your site, you will be able to achieve this.

One good place to put this information is on the left margin. Studies show that people tend to look for your logo on the upper left-hand corner. So putting your contact information near this area can help you leverage this power. Another location some people look for contact information is at the very bottom of your site. You could also place it below your logo or in the center of the landing page in smaller print beneath your website title.

You could experiment with different styles of fonts and colors for effect but don’t overdo the hype. Just make sure your contact information is in a logical place on your website where people can find it easily and contact you to increase your leads.

Post forms on every page.

Most business owners place a form on their landing or sales page but not every page. Kissmetrics, a well-known marketing site owned by Neil Patel, recommends having a form on every page. A simple easy-to-use form is best and having it on each page will increase the likelihood that customers will use it to contact you.

Use photos, videos, and infographics, to name a few.

The use of digital media cannot be stated enough. People love media of all kinds, and while video is the most efficient statistically, other forms of media also work well in turning your website into sales and lead magnet.

You should typically have a compelling video that is changed out regularly in the middle of your page, as well as other media available such as podcasts that you do on a regular basis, infographics, photos, and more.

Avoid a cookie-cutter approach to anything.

You should never use a cookie-cutter approach to anything, and that includes your website. Just as your content should be original and unique, so should your website itself. If you have a custom-made website that conforms to what you want for your business, you will make a better impression than if you just have a website that looks like other websites in your industry.

Some online website servers allow you to use their templates, including WordPress, which is a well-known platform for web design. There is nothing wrong with WordPress or any of the other pre-templated websites that allow you to create a website on their site using their various templates and add-ons. But this is not always the best way to build content for your business.

If you can make it unique enough to set yourself apart from others in your field, fine. But to have total creative freedom to create whatever you want with your website, you need a custom designed website.

Reinvent the wheel with creative ideas and innovative thinking.

You may have heard the old saying, “You can’t reinvent the wheel.” But you can certainly try. By that, we mean that you should always be looking for ways to create something original and unique that will set you apart from the rest.

If you are in the flower business, for example, what is it about your site that stands out to your potential customers? Is it your photography of your inventory, your logo, or your website design? You need to have something that pulls in your audience so that you can get them to take action when they come to your site.

If you need advice on what to do, call on us.

At webdesignteam.com, we are in the business of creating unique, customize sites for businesses. We can incorporate any of the other platforms that you are currently using, even if you are on a server like WordPress or others.

We will get with you and discuss how you want your site to appear and what you want to focus on. Then we will include any components that you want on your site so that it works with your internal systems and other third-party integrations so that you will have a site that will do everything you want it to and bring you leads and customers.

See us at webdesignteam.com for a free estimate and to check out our online portfolio. We think you’ll be excited.

The post How Business Site Owners Can Use Their Website to Increase their Leads appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

This is where many site owners and brand marketers get it wrong. With content creation being one of the most effective ways to provide value and drive traffic back to your site, it’s not enough to just ‘create’, you also need to ‘promote’ it.

To help with these process, we reached out to some of the best content creators and brights minds in the world of online marketing and branding. We asked each of them what their best content creation and marketing tips were, and how they are getting exposure for their best content once it actually goes live on their sites. We ended up with 60 different answers and methods for you to implement into your business, to further see improvement and higher numbers across the board.

60 Experts Answer the Question “What is the first thing you do after publishing content to the internet?”

The first thing I do after publishing a new blog post is open up my blog post promotion checklist.

I’ll add the post title, URL, shortlink and a few different descriptions for the post – then start working through the list.

It includes things like:

• Add relevant keywords to my rank tracking tool
• Add internal links from my older content
• Email the post to my email list
• My main networking groups & contacts to reach out to
• Key social networks to promote my post
• Social bookmarking & content curation sites to leverage
• Niche bookmarking sites to submit my post to
• Additional promotional activities such as Q&A sites, guest posting and other outreach

I run a few different sites, and my promo checklist varies slightly between them. For example, I’m testing Push Notifications on several sites, but not all of them.

Adam Connell – Adamconnell.me

—

The first thing is to organize a Social Media Strategy.

Once the blog post has gone live I first slot it into my re-post schedule, especially if its evergreen content that will last a long time. Once its in the schedule I know it will be appearing on a regular basis. I have a spreadsheet that contains all my content and it gets uploaded to Hootsuite so I have at least one created-content post go out every day on social media.

The next thing is to decide which social media networks the article is best for. I usually post to all straight away but I might want to focus a bit more time on LinkedIn or Facebook.

The final job is to decide if I want to spend some money boosting or advertising the post on social media to get better reach. If I do boost things then I always make sure there are decent Calls To Action within the post to help generate leads. I may also want to target the post at different audiences so I may get less reach for my money but better quality clicks and leads.

Jon Tromans – Jtid.co.uk

—

It seems like I’m asked this question on almost a daily basis — which means I should have a good answer for it, and I do!

If you want to stand out from the crowd and build a real following for your brand or business, you need to really sit and thin about the type of content you want to create. If you are thinking ‘general audience’ topics, quit right now. You MUST niche down as much as possible. This will allow you to create content for your exact audience, while also knowing exactly what they are looking for. A good example of this is if someone was searching for “how to start a wordpress blog” versus “blogging”. With the first keyword phrase, you obviously know that they want to start a blog powered by WordPress. The other keyword of “blogging” is so generic and hard to rank for, you simply would have a hard time monetizing it.

At the same time, marketing also comes into play. If you are trying to become an authority in your space, you can actually accomplish both of these feats together. Through the use of expert round up posts (like this one) and guest blogging, you can get massive exposure to new audiences, and also gain powerful backlinks to your site in the process. While all of this is going on, I will actively be promoting content through my social media outlets and if relevant, linking to it as a resource within future articles on my others sites as well.

Follow both of these methods and you should have no problem with building a solid following and content creation/promotion plan.

Zac Johnson – ZacJohnson.com

—

You might be surprised by this. It’s something that very few bloggers do. But it’s simple…

As soon as I publish something new, I link to it from something old.

There are lots of reasons to do this:

• Guide visitors from older, sometimes high traffic pages, to your latest work
• Reduce the bounce rate on your old posts
• Increase your overall average pages per session

And there’s a big, hidden SEO benefit…

• If you’ve optimized the new post, you can link to it from the old post with the exact target phrase as the anchor text in the link.

That’s an instant keyphrase-focused link. Yes, it’s on your site, but it’s still a good signal to send for search. How do you find these exact-match link opportunities? Google! Just search using the operator “site:” to see pages on your site, and include the target phrase.

There they are! In this case, I found 34 pages that use the phrase “content promotion.” If I write a new post on the topic, I’d choose a few of these to link to the new post.

This is one of three internal linking strategies I use. The others (including one for conversion optimization) can be found here. Enjoy!

Andy Crestodina – Orbitmedia.com

—

Firstly, I share it on social media. Obvious, right? I share it in our private Facebook group. I share it in other relevant Facebook groups. I share it on my personal Facebook. I share it on LinkedIn and then on Twitter too.

With most of these platforms I share just once, but with Twitter it’s a lot more. On Twitter I use a tool called Social Jukebox to add my blog to a ‘Jukebox’ called blogs. This jukebox constantly feeds out my blog content onto Twitter. I’ll keep the last 10 blogs added to this jukebox. This keeps my new content going out on Twitter to all my followers.

I also email the content out to my list; choosing optimum times, subject lines and first lines to help with open rates.

I all do this all at once (unless it’s a dead time of the day) as this generates a mini tidal wave of content noise to help it take light.

Graham Todd – Spaghettiagency.co.uk

—

The first thing to do is let your current followers know. I share it on all my social networks, blogs, platforms, etc. This includes platforms where your content has immediate visibility such as LikedIn Posts. On all of these sites, I don’t simply post the content and wait for interactions; I provoke interactions – It’s always a good idea to publish your content in a provocative, attractive and intriguing way, which encourages people to participate, comment and share your interesting contents. This obviously allows you to not only reach your current followers but also the followers and friends of your followers, steadily increasing your reach.

Iñigo Etxebeste – Glocmedia.com

—

I promote all my articles to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn immediately upon publishing. Then I schedule about 3-4 RTs of that article over the course of 2-3 days with different images and headlines.

Michael Brenner –  Marketinginsidergroup.com

—

The secret is relevance to your audience. So that entails 2 things: First, know your audience, where are they, what are they concerned about or interested in, what is their previous level of knowledge and what can they relate to. Second: Make sure your content is targeted to your audience, what topics or information provide the most added value to them. Once you figured this out, make sure that your messages are simple and easy to understand.

Karsten Böhrs – mysimpleshow.com

—

The secret is relevance to your audience. So that entails 2 things: First, know your audience, where are they, what are they concerned about or interested in, what is their previous level of knowledge and what can they relate to. Second: Make sure your content is targeted to your audience, what topics or information provide the most added value to them. Once you figured this out, make sure that your messages are simple and easy to understand.

The first thing I will always do when releasing a new blog post is to make sure it as added to my social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linked In, and this is the basics of what happens every time.

If I get the time (for my own blogs), I will then go about sharing them to the best of my ability and then seeing how much engagement they get and how successful they are.

If the blog post is of a good length or of a guide type, I will often run a sponsored (paid) campaign on it, just to build up authority and brand awareness within the areas I am targeting for my business.

The blogs will also go out on my newsletter but not immediately, as they will go out once a week as I say, on the usual schedule.

Ian Spencer –  Isdigitalmarketing.co.uk
—

I’m a big believer in marketing automation, so I’ve set up my sites to automatically promote across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I also pull my latest content into an email newsletter that is published every week. That covers the basics, but from there I do more manual outreach to make sure my content is reaching the right people.

Ben Matthews –  Montfort.io
—

My post 79 of the Most Effective Ways to Get Free Blog Traffic details 79 free methods of blog promotion. Which of those methods do I take first?
I post to my Facebook page, I put my link and a short description of the article in many Facebook groups that allow promotion threads, I “flip” my article into my applicable Flipboard magazines, and I schedule my link to tweet in my Buffer queue.

Janice Wald – Mostlyblogging.com

—

The first thing I do after publishing a blog post is schedule multiple posts on Twitter and Facebook. But that’s not the most effective promo method for me. What’s more effective is sending out a newsletter featuring the article. Email engagement is much stronger than social media so it’s important to ask users to subscribe every chance you get – via subscribe form, when a user posts a comment, submits a contact form or makes a purchase. There are handy WordPress plugins for all these things. I also find popular blogs and newsletters with similar content that share quality articles on a regular basis (such as a weekly roundup) and respectfully ask if they will consider sharing mine this go-around.

Steven Gliebe – Churchthemes.com

—

There are two things I do right away after publishing new articles:

1. Share with my existing readers via email.

2. Share across my main social media accounts: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus. If the content includes visuals, then I’ll always share on image-based social sites like Pinterest and if it contains video, then I’ll syndicate across video sharing sites.

These two promotional activities are my first calls to action within minutes of publishing new content to my website.

Stuart Davidson – Stuartjdavidsom.com

—

The first thing I do after publishing my content is to read it again so that even if there is something I missed, I can correct instantly.

After that, I share the content on my social assets. First, I share that on my blog’s official Facebook page, Twitter handle, and Google+ Brand page. After that, I share that on my personal profile, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, and a few other social sites.

Once these are done, I send the content to my email subscribers and Push subscribers to let them know that there is a new post for them to read.

Atish Ranjan – Techtricksworld.com

—

The first thing I do is to share my new post on all my social media accounts. That at least gets the word out to my followers and shows a share count on the social buttons plugin, making it more likely that others will share.

But that’s boring.

The second thing I do is head over to ViralContentBuzz, JustRetweet and Triberr. At VCB and JRT, I list the post…and I take the time to share some other people’s posts. That’s what this is all about, sharing each others’ content so that each of us reaches a wider audience.. At Triberr, I refresh the RSS so that my listing shows up quickly, then I make sure it looks good (which often means adding the image manually). Here, too, I take the time to share a lot of other people’s posts, mostly on Twitter, but usually some also on Pinterest, StumbleUpon or LinkedIn.

David Leonhardt – Thgmwriters.com

—

In a nutshell – we promote it. The specifics of that promotion will depend upon the content itself, the audience, the client and any other variables specific to that piece of content. Typically the very first thing will be sharing that content out via the relevant social media channels and in most cases utilising the paid promotion tools of the given network to ensure the content has maximum reach with the target audience.

It really does depend on the piece of content though – is this just a run of the mill blog post or is this something epic? Are we just going to do some social ads or are we going to do ads, outreach and email? Are we looking to generate more search engine traffic with this post then if so we may need to optimise the post and certainly track the rank for the targeted keywords. Will we use content distribution networks like Taboola and Outbrain? There are so many reasons why content marketing efforts fail and a failure to promote the content effectively is certainly a big one.

It’s so hard to answer these questions in a general way as for us each job tends to be different and as such each content promotion strategy tends to be somewhat different. Certainly, before we publish a piece of content we have a strategy to promote it so the most general answer here would be that after we publish we promote according to the strategy we have mapped out.

Marcus Miller – Bowlerhat.co.uk

—

My content promotion schedule is quite long, but depending on how important the piece is, I sometimes do a short version.
Here is the main things I do:
– mail my email list
– use social media (Pinterest, Twitter – multiple times, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram)
– contact people I have mentioned in the post
– share on relevant groups (I don’t spam groups like I used to, but sometimes it is relevant)
– use Triberr, ViralContentBuzz, JustRetweet, Empire Ave – places to get social shares

There are some other sites I also mention things on depending on the topic – Inbound, Growthhackers, some slack groups I am in.

Ashley Faulkes – Madlemmings.com

—

The first thing I do after publishing an article is share it to all the major social media platforms including Google Plus, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

Following the introduction into these platforms, I then include them in group sharing sites such as Viral Content Buzz, Justretweet and copromote to get even more traction. By sharing into these platforms my content is seen immediately by a number of influencers both in and out of the real estate industry.

The exposure these sites provide is incredible. I would highly recommend them to anyone interested in spreading a wide net.

Bill Gassett – Maxrealestateexposure.com
—

Syndicate, syndicate, syndicate… share your content via all social channels always including Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, which also makes it easy for others to share. And don’t be afraid to do it more than once periodically sharing old posts via your social channels, especially those that were well received. Also let others freely repost your content with a link back to the original post.

Ted Rubin – Tedrubin.com

—

First things first, I schedule the article out through HootSuite to Facebook and Twitter – once for some time that day, another a week and a half later, and another post about a month later. The sad reality of social media today is that most of your following is never even going to see your post even once, so sometimes you’ve got to be a bit excessive to make sure everybody that wants to see what you have to share actually has that chance.

If the post has a direct opportunity to lead to revenue, I’ll usually pay to promote it further. I work mainly in the parenting / childcare market, so Pinterest is one of the biggest traffic drivers here. We’re still getting traffic from promoted pins that ended months ago – and even if the advertising cost just breaks even, we’re still left with more regular readers and customers to market to again down the line.

Finally, I head over to our discussion forum and open a thread on the topic, adding my thoughts and linking up to the blog post. Not only does this send forum members to the blog, but the discussion generates a lot of new long-tail keywords to be found for in Google, which of course funnels traffic to the article. This is the same reason I love and recommend cultivating a community on your blog – the comments section alone can generate lots of organic traffic.

James McAllister – Helpstartmysite.com

—

The first thing that I do after publishing content to the Internet is share it across all social media, in a manner that is consistent with the needs of each platform. When we help clients manage their social media, we urge them to participate in LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram at a minimum, but also strongly urge that they participate on Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+, as each one has their place, whether they are the best platform for social proof, backlinks, or sales leads. As a B2B service provider, LinkedIn is at the core of our social media strategy, so sharing content in all of the groups that the content is relevant to is my top priority.

Brittany Bearden – AtlargePR.com

—

After the post goes live, I tweet it, pin it on different group boards and my own boards on Pinterest. Then I share it in several Facebook groups and I let my subscribers know that I’ve published a new post.

Minuca Elena – Minucaelena.com

—

The first thing? I typically do a few key things, but I guess the first would be to pin it. Pinterest has been huge for my traffic and blog growth so it’s important for me to pin my posts and share it there. I use the Social Warfare plugin (which is absolutely fantastic!) and make sure all my posts have a vertical graphic that works well on Pinterest. I also include a custom description with a few keywords and a call to action to click through to my blog.

Beyond that, I share it on my other social networks and with my email list. I also email or tweet any bloggers I’ve mentioned in the post. Many bloggers miss this step, and reaching out can be an easy way to have other popular bloggers share your post for you. All you have to do is mention them as a good example of something or as a case study.

Corinne Kerston – Corinnekerston.com

—

I share it on all social media accounts of mine, tag any persons in the posts on social media who were mentioned in my blog post, and republish on LinkedIn Pulse. I also manually email anyone who was mentioned in my article and let them know they were mentioned and ask them to share the post with their audience as well. Sometimes, I will also share the post to relevant groups on Facebook to get an extra boost if needed.

Rafi Chowdhry – Chowdhurysdigital.com

—

The first thing I do is to use the share button placed on my page. Yes, I press it and post the news about the new post on my Facebook, twitter, Google+ LinkdIn, Pinterest, Digg etc. with a note. Though I have accounts on almost all major social nets works this is the first thing I do after pressing the Publish button.

Philip Ariel – Pvariel.com

—

I use CoSchedule to set up all of my social media promotion and then add my pins to Tailwind and various travel sharing threads. Pinterest and Facebook are my main sources of traffic, so I need to be sure I’m sharing regularly.

Jane Mountain – Myfiveacres.com

—

The first thing I do after publishing a post on the web is to check it and then check it again! It’s easy to get blinded to errors when you’re working for hours writing and editing an article so after it’s published I will go through the post again to check for any errors or omissions, double check all of the images and links are working. The next step is to share it across my social media platforms. Using WPBufferPro my post automatically gets shared to Facebook, Twitter and Google+. I have also tweaked the social share options on my theme to allow me to upload a custom image that’s formatted for Pinterest and add the article to Stumbleupon which I do manually.

Katy Whitton – Flippingheck.com

—

Currently, my promotion plan is to publish the blog post, then share it on my social outlets and drive paid traffic to the social posts/blog posts.

Drew Burks – Onlinelifestyle.info

—

The first thing I do after publishing content is send email newsletter to my subscribers because it is the easiest way to get really quality readers for my article. This people previously subscribed to my blog newsletter and I know that majority of them will read the post from beginning to end. The next thing on my promotion list is social media promotion because people there are very targeted to my blog niche.

Evgeniy Garkaviy – Morak.com

—

Excellent question. This really varies depending on if I am doing it for myself, or my clients so I will just answer for myself. I have a small list of subscribers, so I normally start by a small email “blast” just notifying people of my latest post. From there, I’ll let about 10-20 people know on Skype of our latest post, including a few Skype groups. By then, it’s about 1 hour deep and if it’s a good post it will have already hit social media and or other websites like Reddit etc. If not, I’ll do some promotion on my own. Again, if it’s a big post I’ve been working on for a while I’ll do some paid promotion on Facebook / Twitter, and of course post on all the other social networks including LinkedIn, Google+ and a few others. I normally loop in a few other people (kind of like what you are doing here) and I’ll notify them as well or @ tag them in the post.

Patrick Coombe – Elite-strategies.com

—

I create a few descriptions for my newly published post to let readers know what benefits it offers to them. In my descriptions I try to raise questions and invite people to think why they are not achieving something. Then I share my post on different social media with different descriptions. It works because people need an appealing introduction of a post and if it is written differently for each of my three top social media it brings more visitors to the post.
Meanwhile I also take part in relevant discussions in online forums and while commenting on other blogs’ posts related to the topic of my newly published post and try to link the discussion with the topic and subject matter of my post.

Mi Muba – Beamoneyblogger.com

—

I hit Tweetdeck-and Re-Tweet articles from several people…usually influential folks in the small business space. Then I share my new content. After Twitter, I share it to LinkedIn and Facebook. I rarely share it on Pinterest unless I remember. Google+? Not anymore. I then repeat the same steps later in the day.

Joel Libava – Thefranchiseking.com

—

We replace thousands of dollars of advertising with online lead generation growing our business from local to nationwide.

I’ve always used content to market by business. Way before the internet and “content marketing” as a buzz word. Informing people interested in whatever, knowing that sooner or later, they’d need our products and services and would call the people they know, like and trust.

Today, my content goes on the internet, usually first in a larger publication. I tweet about it, share on social media sites, and tweet those links.

Warren Whitlock – Warrenwhitlock.com

—

After we post any content, we share across social media platforms. We automate the original post to go out to certain platforms, but we don’t stop there. For each piece of content, we create at least 10 different plugs with hashtags and share those over the next 30 to 90 days at various times of the day. This helps reach more people and gives us much more insight into what resonates with our audience.

Brenda Stoltz – Ariadpartners.com

—

When I publish content on my own site, I immediately start promoting it as much as I can. This includes posting it on my own social media pages, telling friends about it, posting it on sites like BizSugar, doing blogger outreach (reaching out to bloggers who might be interested in my content), and sometimes repurposing it on sites like Medium and HuffPost. Some promotion strategies work best for a certain type of content, so the exact strategies I use depend on my goals. While content promotion is time-consuming, it’s one of the best ways to get your content in front of other people if you’re just starting out. After all, promotion is key to growing your blog.

Camilla Hallstrom – 99smartideas.com

—

After I publish content on our blog, the first thing I do is send out a tweet, make a facebook post and put part of it on Medium.com and then link back to our blog for the full article. There are many places to promote content online, but you’ll get 90% of the traffic by promoting in just those three places. You can spend hours promoting it on the other 10%, but you’re better off just using that time to create another article or blog post and promoting it again on the top 3: Twitter, Facebook and Medium. If you are in the business-to-business market, I would add a fourth place: LinkedIn.

Tim Bourquin – Afteroffers.com

—

After I publish anything to my website, the first thing I do (right after emailing my own subscribers) is reach out via email to 100-200 bloggers and influencers in my niche.

The email I send goes something like this…

“Hey, I know you’re interested in topic X,

As it happens I just published a post about X, wanna check it out?”.

This approach gets your content into the hands of those who are most likely to share it, and assuming your content is share-worthy will give your traffic a powerful boost.

What’s more of your content is REALLY good, many of those bloggers will link to your content which will bump up your search engine rankings too.

James Reynolds – Seosherpa.com/

—

Once the post has published on my blog, I’d go through my list of content promoters. This list created during the content creation process, allows me to identify influencers and niche bloggers who’d willing to share the content piece.

Creating the list of initial content promoters isn’t rocket science, follow these steps to have one for your next content asset:

• Find bloggers and niche content creators who created a similar post of your topic. Do a Google search for your target keyword/topic to find them.
• Plug in their page URLs into Ahrefs to identify pages that linked to them.
• Go through each page in their list and look for their email addresses.
• Reach out to them, sharing to them your newest industry content. You don’t have to be aggressive here. If your post has a unique value, easy sharing from influencers is possible.

Venchito Tampon – Sharprocket.com.ph
—

One of my favorite methods for coming up with great content ideas, is to simply look at the keywords and search phrases people are using to access my sites. This is key for multiple reasons. The first being that I will better understand what my audience is looking for before they get to my site, and also that I can improve my content based off these search results as well. For example, if I see a lot of people searching for a topic that I didn’t cover, but they still ended up on my site, I can then write a detailed article on it and have all of my bases covered.

When it comes to marketing and outreach, I’m a big fan of creating very long form content and creating an original infographic to go along with it. I will then reach out to sites and see if they can help promote it, should they share it with their audience.

Brandon Johnston – BlogReign.com

—

The first thing I always do after publishing something new online is to promote it on my social media channels. I’ve grown a loyal and engaged following over the years, so social media always drives quite a bit of traffic back to my blog, even immediately after posting the update.

McKinzie Brocail – Mckinziewrites.com

—

Usually the first thing I do is schedule it to be shared on my personal social profiles. I’ve been working hard to build up a good social following and I’ve found that sharing my articles, no matter which website I’ve published on, is the easiest way for me to get initial traction behind them.

William Harris – Elumynt.com

—

I automatically have the content sent out via all my social media and then I make sure that the content is put into my queue to be reblasted out in the next few days.

John Sonmez – Simpleprogrammer.com

—

After I go live with content on my site (which is usually an infographic), I will start by sharing it through all of my personal and business social media accounts. This will give it a fresh boost of traffic. Since they are infographics, this usually helps with the engagement and CTR, as it’s a visual that grabs more interest than a typical blog post.

When I publish a new blog post, I have an extensive checklist of promotional activities (https://www.thesocialmediahat.com/article/how-promote-blog-post) – over 30 steps that I take to ensure that every piece of content is seen by as many potential readers as possible. It’s a process I’ve been improving and experimenting with since 2012.

Currently, my first and one of my most important first-steps is to tweet out the article. That first tweet includes the main article image, relevant hashtags, and perhaps even an @mention if appropriate.

First, that tweet is a call to my Twitter followers that I have new content.

Second, that tweet is used later on as I employ other services to help increase the virality of tweets.

Third, whenever you want to attach an image to tweeted content, you need to include a link to the image that’s already been shared to Twitter. For instance, you might want to embed a Click To Tweet, or make sure that shares via Triberr include your featured image. In those cases, that first tweet of the article, with the article’s image, would provide that important image link.

Mike Allton – Thesocialmediahat.com

—

I walk away, haha. I really don’t do much after publishing content in terms of promotion…unless of course I’m running Facebook ads and then I put together the strategy, and work my my team to crate the images, copy and get those ads up and running.

Stephanie Nickolich – Stephanienickolich.com

—

The first thing I always do after publishing something new online is promote it on my social media channels. I’ve grown a loyal and engaged following over the years, so social media always drives quite a bit of traffic back to my blog, even immediately after posting the update.

Lilach Bullock – Lilachbullock.com

—

Posting an article is just the beginning. The first thing I do is to like my own stuff and share it across my social networks. There’s no shame in liking your own stuff it is an important first step because it goes to your personal connections. These people are those who should be your greatest supporters and hopefully they end up sharing it. My goal often is have the people in place who will be interested in what I have to share and will be likely to share it with others. It doesn’t take a large group, but it requires a dedicated fan base and followers. The real trick with all of this is to build loyalty. This means sharing their stuff too and commenting on and liking their posts. The goal is to create a core group of influencers. Once all of this established you will see the simple and effective power of liking your own stuff. Remember if you can’t like it, how would you expect anyone else to like it.

Allan Pollett – Allanpollett.com

—

We have an internal checklist of websites and social channels to promote our content on. Out of respect we don’t push it across all of them every time we release a new piece, we’re a bit more selective. The obvious ones being Facebook and Twitter, and websites such as Inbound and Growthhacker.

Furthermore, we will always be running paid ads to our blog content over Facebook, no sales push, no selling of any sort actually – purely informational.

We do try a little on Twitter and LinkedIn from time to time, but ultimately our skills allow us to get clicks for pennies on Facebook – so it’s often our go-to paid medium. Quora can be useful for placing a link when answering a question, again we do it sparingly instead of trying to slot the same content in to many answers. I don’t like spam, no one does, so we don’t abuse the system.

A quick tip would be to find likeminded people on Slack and join their groups, I’m in several where we share each other’s content to help increase its reach. It’s a virtual backrub of sorts.

Oh… and one thing I’m underutilising is my own contact list. I’ve been featured in over 100 blogs/articles (much like this one), but I rarely tap in to that list asking for promotion assistance. So, don’t be like me, use your contacts!

Ed Leake – Midasmedia.co.uk

—

After hitting publish, I use a checklist to make sure I get as many eyeballs on my content as possible.

It’s a long list, so I’ll give you the condensed version:
1. Send out promotion campaign to my email list.
2. Post it all over social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Medium, etc.)
3. Ask fellow experts and thought leaders to share and promote it.

Ben Austin – Stopstartdo.com

—

The first thing I do after publishing new content is sending out a new email message to my mailing list subscribers. They are my most important readers since they took the time and showed enough interest in my work to actually committing and subscribing to receive my updates in their inboxes.

But informing my subscribers about a new post on the blog is just part of promoting my content. I also share it on the social networks and personally contact several other bloggers that might be interested in learning more about the topic I just wrote about. Linking from my most popular posts to the fresh new one — as long as it is related — is something that I do as well.

Louie Luc – Buzznitrous.com

—

The majority of our content is published to our blog (www.ShortStack.com/blog) and once a post is live, we do the most important thing: promote! We publish links to the post on our various social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and, when appropriate, Instagram. We also send an email with the post to our list of blog subscribers. If the post is about a new ShortStack feature, we will also send the post to what we call our “big list,” which includes the 110,000 people who use our platform. We also occasionally run Facebook ads against our blog posts.

Dana Kilroy – Shortstack.com

—

I have a huge content promotion checklist I go through, but the first thing I do is send the new content directly to my audience via email. They deserve to see it first.

Arman Assadi – Armanassadi.com

—

I send it out to my email list and ask them to read and comment. I love being in touch with my followers and love to read their thoughts on my points in my blogposts.

Maj Wismann – Majwismann.com

—

After publishing content, we go through a fairly consistent schedule. First, we publish using Co-Schedule, then we apply the sharing templates to trigger new shares over 60 days. Following this, we then do manual shares across all relevant networks. After that, depending on the popularity we might create opt-in guides from the content.

Ben Fisher – Steadydemand.com

—

I immediately share it on social media: Facebook (if applicable; I only have a personal account), Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

On Twitter I’ll also schedule a ‘From yesterday’ style tweet to go out the following day, and an ‘In case you missed it’ style tweet to go out a few days later.

I use Followerwonk data (https://moz.com/followerwonk/) to try and get an idea of when best to tweet, depending on the active times of my Twitter followers.

Also, if the content is about someone (whether an individual or a company), I’ll be sure to @mention them so that they’re alerted and to increase the chances of retweets, etc.

Steve Morgan – Seono.co.uk
—

Share on Twitter, Facebook and email list. I also boost some Facebook posts because their algorithm is ever limiting organic reach.

Ben Wynkoop – Benwynkoop.com

—

The first thing I do is promote it to the intended audience. This can be done a few ways- paid Facebook promotion to existing fans of the business page or using it to engage new ones (interest-based targeting). I also leverage other channels owned by the site itself, like Twitter and email campaigns. Getting it in front of influencers is a bit harder but is also worth doing if there are easy wins like established relationships or existing business partnerships.

Harris Schachter – Optimizepri.me

–

All content that is published on my own blog is syndicated immediately through both my own accounts using dlvr.it and the accounts of many influential collaborators. Some also feed content I contribute on other sites automatically.

Then my virtual assistant (VA) schedules each of the media (images,
videos, SlideShares, infographics) as a separate social share using
MavSocial. Every post must have at least one compelling image which I
source via MavSocial. Sometimes I create custom images using images from MavSocial and Canva.

The shares from MavSocial go out in the first day or two to my accounts at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. They are then scheduled to go out once a month for up to two years using perpetual sharing. My VA will also pin images, videos, and infographics to Pinterest.

The featured image that is standard in WordPress is used when content is shared using the social sharing buttons in my blog. I use the inexpensive premium plugin Social Warfare which allows me to send an additional, different image to Facebook and LinkedIn, and a third image to Pinterest. It also allows me to add Click-to-Tweets to the content that readers can choose to share.

Then content is added to ViralContentBuzz (VCB) and JustRetweet (JR). On both of these platforms, anyone can share content for others to earn credits to ask that their own content be shared. What I have mentioned so far is standard promotion for all content.

If I want to promote a particular piece of more important content, I keep adding more credits on VCB to bump it back to the top where it will be shared more frequently. If it is extremely important to get even more shares, my team of influencers can be hired to comment, share, submit and vote on content.

Gail Gardner – Growmap.com

–

I have a lot of things I do to promote my content.

I write a newsletter to send out to my list that includes exclusive content but also a snippet about my new content I published and a link for them to go check it out.

I also write 5 different tweets and schedule those to go out on the day the content goes live using MeetEdgar.

I create 1-3 different quotes images using content from the blog that can be pushed out on Twitter and Instagram.

Then lastly, I will either write a post about it and publish on Facebook or do a Facebook Live Video about the topic where I teach on the concept I wrote about in the my content and then tell the viewers the link to the full article is in the comments below.

Aj Amyx – Ajamyx.com

–

After publishing content to the internet I do what I call ‘amplify’. I share that content on other platforms and in other formats. For example, a blog post might become a SlideShare presentation or short video tip or short Facebook live tip. Because there’s so much noise out there and our audience is in multiple places and platforms it’s important to repost and repurpose the content to ensure that it gets seen as well as to get the maximum exposure and value from creating it.

Jane Tabachnick – Janetabachnick.com

–

The post 60 Experts Share their Best Content Creation and Marketing Tips appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.

In the past, Google had publicized that it was important to take care in how much you posted on other sites and they began looking out for bloggers who posted on sites that weren’t relevant to their own business.

This is still true, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t post on other sites. It just means you should use sound business practices as well as savvy blogging techniques to capture the attention of your target audience.

What is guest blogging?

First, let’s define what guest blogging is. Simply put, guest blogging involves writing guest posts for other business blogs that are not your own. One of the key factors of success as an online business owner is to establish yourself as an expert. By getting your knowledge out there among other readers and platforms, you increase the chances of establishing yourself as an expert in your field or industry.

Benefits of Guest Blogging

There are many benefits of guest blogging that will enhance your business by posting content remotely on other sites. A few of the most important reasons to guest blog are listed below.

• Establish yourself as an expert.– As mentioned above, one of the most important reasons to do guest posting is to establish yourself as an expert in your field. It’s one thing to post content on your own site. But when you also post on other similar blogs or websites, you are increasing your reputation as a guru in your industry among industry peers. Many people in specific industries will visit more than one site or link on a topic in a given day and chances are, they will see your article on guest sites in addition to your own. If you guest post regularly, they will likely find your articles in several places. All of this helps you become recognized as an expert and influencer in your niche area.
• Increase your credibility.– If you want to increase your credibility on the web for your niche area, post on other sites. By sharing ideas and content on other similar sites, you will gain a following among people who have an interest in your niche and you may increase your revenue and bottom line this way as well.
• Increase your SEO.– When you write on other sites as well as your own, your SEO results will also increase. Search engines (especially Google), pick up on similar and relevant content automatically. They do this by finding keywords as well as terminology that is used in particular industries or business types. High-quality content is the most important, though.
• Add to your content.– When you post on other sites, you increase the amount of content you are putting out for your target audience. This can lead to more interest in your own site and brand. You also help the business whose sites or blog you are posting on and help develop more positive relationships in the B2B community.
• Create backlinks.– One of the best benefits to writing on other sites is to create more traffic via backlinks. By placing a backlink to your site within the content you share with your business friends’ sites, you will help your ranking in Google and improve your image on the web at the same time.

Tips for Making Ethical Posts

It’s important to remember that you’re a guest on your business friend’s site. Use polite etiquette at all times and thank them for letting your guest post on their site. Stick to the procedures and expectations that they expect on guest sites and follow their regulations for posting.

1. Don’t overpost.

This can make you appear spammy or overeager to make sales. Remember, the rule of blogging is to appear as though you are offering information that is valuable without expecting anything in return.

You want to receive increased traffic and conversions as a result. But you don’t want that to be the focus of your posts.

2. Watch how many links you create back to your site.

If you overdo the number of links, you will be penalized by Google and may drop in the rankings. Not only that, the site that you posted on could be penalized too, which could damage your relationship with the guest post site.

3. Stay relevant.

Make sure the sites you post on are relevant to your niche. Google takes a dim view of sites that try to infiltrate other sites that have nothing or little to do with their own brand or industry. For example, a lawn care service site that has a backlink to lawn care products may be appropriate. But a lawn care service business with links to Avon.com would not be appropriate. Google would see such situations as an attempt to trick the search engines into diverting traffic to your site and this would not result in anything good.

White Hat Techniques Only

Black Hat Techniques are out. Using diversion tactics like redirecting your page to another site, (unless it is your own), stuffing your posts with too many keywords either on your site or another site, and other similar tactics are regarded as unethical by Google.

You should look at your guest blogging as a venture that should carry the same weight as anything else you do in your business. It should be something you do with ethics and transparency with the goal being to win a customer that comes back, not just make the sale.

SearchEngineJournal.com has a series of tips on how to do guest blogging in an ethical but beneficial manner for those who wish to maximize their impact as a guest poster.

Biographies for Guest Posters

Google came out with some recommendations recently for guest blogging that they like to see among those who offer guest posts on other sites. One of the recommendations was to include a biography of the guest blogger so that people who know who is writing the post.

What about ghostwriting?

Ghostwriting has its place among content sites which involves purchasing full rights for articles that business owners do not have time to do. Professional writers can offer a unique approach to business topics and information that may appeal to more readers.

But when you post on another site where you are acknowledged, a biography adds a nice touch and meets the preferences of Google on letting readers know who you are. This also helps you as a business by telling people more about you. It may increase your sales and revenue as well.

Seth Godin: The God of Blogging

If you need blogging advice, you may want to follow Seth Godin. Seth has made a fortune blogging and has some pretty great tips for building success with blogging over time.

Web Design Help

If you need expert web design, see the Web Design Team at WebDesignTeam.com. We are expert web designers, bloggers, and engineers who can perform magic for your website or blog.

We also have a good grasp on the industry of online business and they can brainstorm with you about great blogging topics and steer you in the right direction regarding how to guest post on other sites.

For information on how Web Design Team can help, contact us. Just hit the “contact us” link at the top of the page.

We look forward to helping you maximize your profit with blogging and web content.

The post How to Guest Blog Your Way to Success and Expert Status appeared first on Web Design Blog - Web Design Team.