While doing research for my last post on Content Marketing for your Business Website I came across this great infographic from Contnet+ (contentplus.co.uk). It has great statistical data for online user behaviour and the benefits of content marketing; some of the highlights:
Blogs on company sites result in 55% more visitors
Blogs give 97% more indexed links
70% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads
Blogs are 63% more likely to influence purchase decisions than magazines
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
I'm sure you have heard of "Content Marketing" it is the new trend and terminology for online marketing. What it is? According to Wikipedia:
"Content marketing is any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. Content Marketing’s basic premise is to “provide some valuable information or entertainment – “content” – that stops short of a direct sales pitch or call to action, but which seeks to positively influence a customer in some way.”[1] This information can be presented in a variety of media, including news, video, white papers, ebooks, infographics, case studies, how-to's, Q&A’s, photos, etc."
Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling.
If you business has a website and/or a blog you are already doing content marketing, maybe not as well as you could be but you are there already. The good thing is that getting better at it takes only: discipline, strategy and lots of tracking.
Discipline - Create consistent content
In order to create consistent and good quality content you need planning and discipline. Having an editorial calendar will help you achieve consistency, and it doesn't have to be just one person doing all this; your entire business staff can contribute to content creation. Although most of your content will end up as blog posts this is not the only channel you have for content marketing, as the Wikipedia entry describes there are many different avenues to distribute your helpful and valuable insights, shuch as: product descriptions, comparison tables, how to guides, etc. You also need discipline to stay focus on message and avoid the sale pitch, which could be very hard for a lot of marketeers.
Keep in mind that content marketing is a process that takes time, you need to build your audience before you start to see results. The results will come as long you constantly keep providing good quality content for your audience.
Strategy - Define what you will say, how you will say it and when you will say it
The content you create should be focused on what your audience wants and how you and your organization can add value and solve problems for that audience. Defining what you will talk about (content categories) how you will say it (tone and voice) and how often you will create it (you need to be consistent, if daily isn't realistic, but twice a week is, keep it to the same days each week) is very important. And as stated above, you need to stay focused on the strategy and related messages that you have defined. Get you team involved in the production of content. Tips, best practices and guides on the industry that your business operates in are always good topics for people that want to learn more about what you do. The more valuable your content is for your audience the more of an authority you become in your field and this could prove very beneficial in generating good leads.
Tracking - Review data and modify accordingly
There are many tools to help you track the impact your content has on your audience. Google analytics can track the referral traffic that shared content can produce. When sharing your own content in Social Media networks be sure to use a url shortener such as bitly.com or HootSuite's ow.ly, which then tracks the click throughs to your post. All email newsletter systems such as: MailChimp or ConstantContact have tracking for how many people open the emails and how many click on the links from the email body. As you can see there are many ways to measure who's reading, viewing, sharing and referring back to your website. This is great feedback to see what works and what doesn't and make changes accordingly.
Content Marketing is great for brand exposure through all the sharing you and your visitors can do. There is also an educational factor with all the good quality content you provide to your audience, which can positively influence them to share or become the next lead. Every new and original piece content you create provides great benefits for SEO (search engine optimization), Google and other search engines like fresh and up to date content to add to their index. Add cross links (explain) and make sure the content is original and your website search result page position will improve.
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
You must have had heard about social media, and for sure some friend, associate and/or family member has told you that you need to do or be in social media. They are right. Both you and your business need a presence in social media.
Ideally, you business blog is your content hub where you post periodical new entries; social media is your distribution system. You should be sharing your content in multiple networks, and you should create opportunities for others to share your content as well. The idea is to bring the unexpected visitor back to your business website and try to turn them into a lead by solving their problems with good tips and advice.
Using social media to curate and share content (created by you or by others) that is relevant to your potential customers helps establish you as a leader in your field.
All this sharing and good will spreading is called Inbound Marketing (WikiPedia Inbound Marketing) a term coined by HubSpot (blog.hubspot.com); themselves great creators of quality original content. This is the new way to market your business online, spreading the word that you and your business are good at what you do and sharing good videos and pictures of your product and or services. Luckily customers will comment and/or tell their friends about your business; in a way it is like word of mouth, the best marketing possible, but on a bigger scale.
Don't just jump in and start creating accounts in every possible network out there, you need to pick the right social networks where your audience (possible customers) are active. And even if you aren't active in social networks you should have the appropriate share features active so your customers/visitors can share your content.
What social media network is best for your business
The breakdown by network
There are hundred of networks where you can share links of your website or blog, I’m just going to concentrate on the ones that I believe are more popular and useful for your business website. One thing you should keep in mind when choosing which social share plugins to use is that unless the content is appealing to the reader it doesn’t matter how many plugins you add to your site, your pages won’t get shared.
Google+ (plus.google.com)
Google finally got it right with Google+ after a couple of failed attempts. As I mentioned in previous posts, having a Google+ account is of extreme importance since Google made the Google+ network part of the algorithm for search results.
Facebook (facebook.com)
Facebook is the biggest social network in the world and it happens to have the most plugins. Like Button and Like Box are the most commonly used plugins and has good advertising opportunities for any type of business with great demographics data to chose from; so your ad gets delivered to the right person.
LinkedIn (linkedin.com)
Linkedin was launched in 2003 and currently has about 200 million registered users. The most popular plugin from this network is their share button. Of all the share button out there, LinkedIn’s share button has the best interface, which allows you to share in different parts of LinkedIn: the updates stream, Groups, Send to individuals or all three. They also have a Follow my business page button, but these business pages still need to prove if they are of any use. In my experience LinkedIn groups are where the action is.
Pinterest (pinterest.com)
Pinterest is the newest and hottest network today. For the last month Pinterest has generated a lot of buzz and has a huge active user base andstill growing. They have the one plugin, the pin button, and I’m sure there will be more to come once they get out of beta. The pin button is tricky, it needs an image to pin, so it makes it ideal for product page display and/or blog posts with images.
Reports say that Pinterest is generating more referral traffic than LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter combined. This could lead to a rethink of how content is presented on websites; I predict we will see more interesting imagery on website pages in response to Pinterest.
Twitter (twitter.com)
The king of microblogging (only 140 characters), Twitter is highly popular partly due to how easy it is to use. It is a great network for distributing your new content. They too have a sharing plugin and a feed plugin, which can be used on your website. The feed plugin can have your tweets (posts) or you can also choose to populate it with your favourites tweets.
Looking for more insight into Social Media? Check out a few of these posts.
Already a YWD customer and ready to active social sharing features onto your site or blog - check out the how to.
Looking for a web solution that "gets" social media and has all the right tools integrated already? Well then YWD is the solution for you - check out LiveBuild and find out how you could have yours new web site up and running in one hour.
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
I was supposed to do my weekly tweet roundup, but due to the fact that it is a short week and nothing outstanding has happened in the online business world I decided to start a series of blog posts that I thought of during the break. This came about after conversations with clients and other business people I have talked with in the past. The usual questions come up: Do I need a website when I can have a Facebook Page? I'm not on Facebook nor Twitter why do I need to share links from my Website? I heard I need to blog, how do I do that? Well I hope to answer these and many more questions regarding doing business online.There are many misconceptions regarding social media, blogging and websites in the business community. My goal will be to clarified them with these weekly posts.
For a small business, having a website has become an essential part of doing business. During the past year, online marketing (or better known as inbound marketing) has emerges as the new method to promote your business products and/or services. Even though social media and blogging has revolutionized and to some point evened the playing field; most small businesses still don't have a website let alone a strategy to integrate the marketing efforts both online and off line.
Fortunately the biggest impediment is the unknown and lack of understanding of what all this new internet stuff does. Therefore you can learn and surpass the challenge, you don't need to become an expert in the field but you should be able to have a clear understanding of what your business needs when it comes time to hire help for your online marketing plans.
For this I plan to have a series of weekly posts looking in detail at different parts that make an online marketing strategy, in which your website becomes the central focus. Whether you are selling products online or just trying to promote your services your website needs to work for you. The days of having this static online brochure are gone, if your website is not generating leads or dollars to your business then it is time to change it and start working at it.
There are many thing you can do so your website can be an online success and this is the list of thing you will need to work on at some point:
Website
The place where visitors will land and learn about what you have to offer. Keep it simple to the point and free of information irrelevant to your audience. And since you want more people to learn about your website make sure each page of it is search engine optimized and has the social media pluggins for easy sharing. Also keep in mind that whatever is being said about your business visitors will find the true message on your website.
Blogging
Do you want visitors to keep coming back? fresh new content is the best way to have repeated visitors. Stay on topic, make it relevant to your audience and your business will gain credibility. Solve a problem for your visitor and you will get loyalty. It is a winning formula and for maximum effectiveness make sure it is search engine optimized and it is sharable to multiple social media channels.
SEO
Search engine optimization, the thing that determines how far up your business ends up on a search result page. Today SEO and Social Media are entangled, one helps the other. The more your content is shared the better your ranking will be.
Mobile
With unprecedented growth a mobile website has became imperative for any business. This means your website needs to fit in your visitors phone screen, not only that, they need to get to what they are looking for fast. Miss any of those points and they will move to the next website; your competitors most likely.
Social Media
Make no mistake, this is your content distribution channel and the most effective way to get more visitors to your website. Having a good presence in the social networks where your audience is can increase your website traffic with the right audience.
Email Marketing
Probably the most mature online marketing technique. Now that opt-in for newsletters and special announcements has become standard there is big benefit in nurturing those email lists. These are people that want to hear from you and want to be notified when you have something new to share.
The list is not that big, but each item has its own intricacies. In the following posts I will try to explain how to best use them and best of all the gains that your business will have when these are set in place. So make sure you register for the weekly updates and you won't miss any of them.
Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
We often get requests from clients on how to set up an email subscription on a blog and as is typical with YWD, it is easy to do.
Benefits of email subscription Blog subscription or email sign-up on a blog is a great way to collect email addresses of your fans/customers and a great tool for keeping them up-to-date.
How it works Users submit their email address and then as your blog is updated, your customers or fans will get an email update in their inbox containing a summary of your blog. As the owner of the blog, you can determine how frequently your users get updated, whether it is each time you post, once a week or once a month. We recommend weekly updates.
What you need For this simple solution you obviously need a YWD site, you also need to use an email marketing services such as MailChimp, Constant Contact or iContact. Here at YWD we are long time users of MailChimp which integrates with YWD forms. If you don’t already have a MailChimp account, you will need to set one up.
Step 1 - Set up a mailing list with MailChimp (follow the how-to info on their site).
Create a MailChimp account.
Create a mailing list.
(Optional) Create a campaign and join it with a list.
Create an API Key. This is done under the account dropdown.
Get mailing list's unique ID. This is found under the list's settings icon.
(Optional) If using the "send mailchimp welcome" - the welcome form for the list should be customized. If this value is set to "yes" when someone subscribes using the form tool, mailchimp fires off the welcome email.
Step 2 - Access Forms Manager
Log into YWD admin (http://admin.yourwebdepartment.com/), select “edit content”, then select the “tools” icon. Once you are in YWD Tools Manager, you need to select “Forms Manager”.
Step 3 - Setup Form Properties
From the top navigation in Forms Manager, select the “New Form” icon and complete all the required fields. At the bottom of the set up form select “Yes” next to “Integrate with MailChimp.
Step 4 - Integrating with MailChimp Once you select, “yes” to integrate with MailChimp you will be prompted to add your MailChimp API key and your mailing list unique ID (see Step 1). We also recommend that you say “yes” to MailChimp’s welcome email which you will need to set up in their system.
Don’t forget to select save!
Step 5 - Create form fields
Select “Add Form Element” icon from the top of the page. To create the fields to collect your subscriber’s name, you need to select, “text”. For the “Form element ID”, you need to use the same field tags and capitalization as MailChimp. Their default for email is EMAIL, first name is FNAME and last name is LNAME. You will need to create form elements for each element you want to collect. For blog subscription we recommend collecting email address, first name and last name.
Don’t forget to publish the form (use the “publish form” icon in the top navigation).
Step 6 - Add the form to your blog
We added the registration form into the right column of our blog so it is visible at all times. To add a form to the right column of your blog:
Go to the page you'd like to insert the form, click 'Add content' (icon in the top navigation) and then select 'Forms Manager' (from the middle column).
Select the form from the dropdown list.
Layout: select single column
Content block position: select “Right col.”.
Step 7 - Define the frequency of your mailings
To set up how often your customers will receive emails from your blog, you need to set up a campaign in MailChimp. From the top nav in MailChimp select Campaign and then select, Create Your First Campaign and then select, “RSS-Driven Campaign”. You will need to input your RSS Feed URL (simply select the RSS feed link on our site and copy the URL). And then select when you want it to send, as we mentioned earlier, we suggest you send weekly at the most.
You have now completed all the steps to create an email subscription to your blog using MailChimp. You still need to set up the look of your emails in MailChimp, but by now you will see that using MailChimp is super easy.
Get ready for all your new subscribers by making sure you have fresh content for them to read!
Don't have a Your Web Department website? Get started now, don't pay until you go live. www.yourwebdepartment.com
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
Ever wonder why some people’s faces are showing up in search results?
For instance, if I search for that blog post I wrote a while ago, the result looks like this:
Stands out, doesn’t it? It’s more prominent and more credible (despite my silly face staring at nowhere, got to remember to change that)
How you can do it
1. Signing up for Google Authorship
If your email address (for example, mary@abcmary.com) on the same domain as your content (abcmary.com), you can follow the steps below. If not, you can still link your posts to your Google+ profile using a new feature within the Your Web Department platform (see item 2).
Assuming you already have a Google+ account, edit your profile and click the “About” button. Scroll down to “Contributor to” and click on it. Add the name and URL of the blog/website you’d like to link to your Google+ account. In my case, I added this blog i.e. blog.yourwebdepartment.com.
You need to have a good, recognizable headshot as your profile photo.
After a few days, you should receive an email from the “Google Authorship Program” asking you for verification. It will look similar to the one on the right. Click on the link they provide to verify your email, and afetr a few more days, your search results should start displaying your photo and the link to your profile.
2. Adding a footer to your blog posts
Don't have an email address on the same domain as your content? With YWD you can now insert a footer at the bottom of all the author's posts, including your short bio and links to your personal pages on Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
My own blog footer looks like this: (you can see it at the bottom of all my posts, including this one)
If you are a site Administrator, you can enter the footer in your User Information. Or you can do that for people who are just blog contributors – but do not have access to the website’s back-end – by editing their user info in the Blogs Manager tool.
Make sure you add a text link to your Google+ profile page and that it includes your name. In my case, it reads “Flavio Mester on Google+”.
Now, add this piece of text to the link to your Google+ page:
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
"Content marketing is any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. Content Marketing’s basic premise is to “provide some valuable information or entertainment – “content” – that stops short of a direct sales pitch or call to action, but which seeks to positively influence a customer in some way.”[1] This information can be presented in a variety of media, including news, video, white papers, ebooks, infographics, case studies, how-to's, Q&A’s, photos, etc."
Ideally, you business blog is your content hub where you post periodical new entries; social media is your distribution system. You should be sharing your content in multiple networks, and you should create opportunities for others to share your content as well. The idea is to bring the unexpected visitor back to your business website and try to turn them into a lead by solving their problems with good tips and advice.
For a small business, having a website has become an essential part of doing business. During the past year, online marketing (or better known as inbound marketing) has emerges as the new method to promote your business products and/or services. Even though social media and blogging has revolutionized and to some point evened the playing field; most small businesses still don't have a website let alone a strategy to integrate the marketing efforts both online and off line.
For this simple solution you obviously need a YWD site, you also need to use an email marketing services such as MailChimp, Constant Contact or iContact. Here at YWD we are long time users of MailChimp which integrates with YWD forms. If you don’t already have a MailChimp account, you will need to set one up.
Create a MailChimp account.
Once you select, “yes” to integrate with MailChimp you will be prompted to add your MailChimp API key and your mailing list unique ID (see Step 1). We also recommend that you say “yes” to MailChimp’s welcome email which you will need to set up in their system.
You have now completed all the steps to create an email subscription to your blog using MailChimp. You still need to set up the look of your emails in MailChimp, but by now you will see that using MailChimp is super easy.
If your email address (for example, mary@abcmary.com) on the same domain as your content (abcmary.com), you can follow the steps below. If not, you can still link your posts to your Google+ profile using a new feature within the 
Now, add this piece of text to the link to your Google+ page:
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