10 Actionable Ways to Build Whitehat Backlinks

Lately, it feels like Google is cracking down harder on blackhat backlinks. The days of ranking by spamming blog comments across the web are over. You need to focus on building in-content, contextually relevant backlinks on high DA/PA sites. By “in-content”, I mean a backlink that’s within the article itself (not a comment or sidebar link).

Relevancy is also important, which is why you should always seek backlinks from sites that are in the same niche as yours. If you’re wondering why you’re not ranking in Google, then it’s probably because you haven’t built enough relevant backlinks. In this article, I’m going to show you 10 actionable ways to build whitehat backlinks to your website.

#1: Write “Blogger Roundup” Style Articles

Have you ever read articles with titles like “42 Experts Give Their Advice on….” or “10 Bloggers Share Their Favorite….”? This is an example of a blogger roundup style article. It’s when you gather the opinions of all the experts in your niche about a specific topic. You then publish this information as a single value-packed article. How does this get your backlinks? Well, chances are that at least some of the people you interviewed are going to share a link to the post on their own site. The more people you interview, the higher the chances of getting more links!

#2: Outreach (A.K.A. Guest Posting)

No matter how new you are to internet marketing, you’ve probably heard of outreach. Basically, this is when you reach out to bloggers in your niche and ask them if you can submit a guest post with your link in it. It’s a win-win for both parties: you get a link back to your site and the site owner gets awesome content for their audience. Of all the link-building strategies out there, blogger outreach is considered one of the safest in terms of not getting a Google penalty. Just make sure that you’re not posting on obvious link farms and you should be okay.

#3: Submit Testimonials

Companies are always looking for testimonials to put on the homepage of their site. Well, guess what? You can be that person who gives it. A lot of the time, companies looking for testimonials will publicly announce it: they’ll put it on their homepage, saying something along the lines of “Email us to have your site featured here” (or something similar). In other cases, they may actively email you asking for a testimonial (I’ve had both happen to me). The point is, submitting your testimonials can result in some powerful links, so don’t overlook this link-building strategy.

#4: Give Away Your Product/Service to Bloggers (For Free)

Do you have a product or service that you’re willing to give away for free in exchange for a link? If so, bloggers all around the web are willing to take them and write a review. Simply email a blogger that’s in your niche and ask them if they’d be willing to review your product or service. If they agree, they’ll write the review along with a backlink to your site. It’s fast, free, and efficient way to get a lot of backlinks to your site in a relatively short amount of time.

#5: Create an Awesome Infographic

While the popularity of infographics peaked between 2015 and 2016, they’re still very popular today. But you need to focus on making the infographic good, catchy, and memorable. On average, expect to spend a minimum of $400 on a good infographic. You’re probably thinking, “That’s a lot of money!” I agree- that’s a lot of money, but the link value you’ll get in return (if you do things right) is priceless. Once you create the infographic, submit it to bloggers in your niche and watch the backlinks flow in.

#6: Write Something Controversial

Want to get thousands of shares and/or backlinks to your site in a short amount of time? Then write something controversial. When I say controversial, I don’t mean write something spiteful, hateful, or discriminatory. I mean write something that goes against the grain. If all the bloggers in your niche agree with X, then write about why you think Y is better. For example, if you go to YouTube, you’ll notice that all the “Flat Earth Theory” videos have millions of views. Why? Because these videos are extremely controversial and provoke discussion.

#7: Broken Link Building

Broken link building is when you contact bloggers who have broken links on a specific page, and then you ask them to replace that link with one back to your site. The reason this works is because you’re helping the blogger- if you didn’t tell them about the broken link, they may have never known. To return the favor of you helping them, they’ll typically agree to replacing that link with one back to your site. It’s a simple, yet, highly effective way to build whitehat backlinks.

#8: Join HARO

HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out. This is a site where reporters go to find sources for specific stories. You can sign up and then be the person who provides sources and information for reporters. If the reporter likes your respond, they’ll use you in the “Sources” section of their article, which will often include a link back to your site. One drawback is that HARO costs money to join. Still, it’s a powerful way to get backlinks from high DA sites like CNN.com, HuffingtonPost.com, etc.

#9: Turn “Mentions” into Links

Don’t you hate it when a site “mentions” you but doesn’t take the time to create the link? For example, they’ll write “Check out yoursite.com” but won’t physically insert the hyperlink. Fortunately, there’s a way to easily turn this around: simply email the site owner and ask them to add the link. Most of the time, they’ll happily do this. You can use BuzzSumo.com to see what sites are mentioning you but not physically linking to you.

#10: Do a Scholarship Giveaway

The last actionable way to build whitehat backlinks is to do a scholarship giveaway. Here’s how it works: you come up with the scholarship requirements and giveaway amount. You then contact universities and tell them about your scholarship. The universities will then link to your scholarship from their website. Since Edu links are very powerful, you only need a few of them to increase your rankings and traffic.

Bottom Line

I hope you enjoyed this post on building whitehat backlinks. Remember that building backlinks is all about persistence and patience. In other words, it’s about long-term success- not short-term gain. Whitehat backlinks typically have far less risk when it comes to getting penalized, so you can confidently build them without worrying about losing your rankings during a future Google update.

Original post: 10 Actionable Ways to Build Whitehat Backlinks

This post is courtesy of: http://www.dailyblogtips.com

6 Ways to Energize Your Content Marketing Team (and Your Content)

Nearly half of B2C businesses have small content marketing teams supporting the organization. Yet, 73% of businesses will produce more original content in the coming year, which means content teams will spend more time keeping the engine running with little time or headspace for innovation.

While boosting the size of your team might seem like an obvious solution, it’s expensive. If you really want to improve your team’s ability to produce quality content, you better protect their opportunity for creativity.

Here are six ways to help your team create more amazing content and improve your content marketing program in unexpected ways.

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1. Aim for more creative, less standardized process

Adobe’s State of Create 2016 survey confirms that 73% of workers today feel increasing pressure to be productive versus being creative at work. Of course, there are always deadlines to meet, but if your team members don’t have space to think, experience diversity of thought, or have the ability to engage in new experiences, their creativity will suffer.

A recent study showed that unfamiliar experiences can contribute to a 50% increase in creativity. Even small changes in one’s environment can provide a boost including lowering the lights, adding some ambient noise, or even just taking a walk. As the leader, you want your team knowing they have the freedom to do what’s needed to conjure their muse. Remember, your team will follow your lead, so show them how you change your environment to fan your own creativity.

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Boost your content team’s creativity: Lower the lights. Add ambient noise. Take a walk, says @dholstein.
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2. Encourage more risk-taking

When you’re focused on getting the next piece of content to market by deadline, it’s easy to shy away from trying new things. Untested ideas carry the risk of your team not hitting goals, so it feels safer to go with the tried and trusted. Yet, churning out the same-old, same-old does not fuel your creative team.

Adobe’s Kickbox project is one great example to spur innovation. Adobe employees with an idea can take a bright red box with curriculum for a six-step process, from ideation to small-scale test, Post-It note pads, pens, a Starbucks gift card, and a $1,000 prepaid credit card. One of the experimentation projects led Adobe to an $800 million acquisition of online photo-and-graphics marketplace Fotolia.

Most of us can’t go that big because of budget constraints, but remember that it costs nothing to use words that encourage your team to be comfortable thinking outside the box. For example, say  “Yes, and …” instead of “Yes, but…” when brainstorming and see what that simple little word change can do.

3. Be inspired by your vendors

Taking an interest in how your contractors and vendors do things can lead to productivity breakthroughs, as these smaller businesses are more likely to be early adopters of innovative processes and technologies simply because they don’t have people to throw at the problem.

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Take an interest in how your vendors do things to discover #productivity breakthroughs, says @dholstein.
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Digital agency Drake Cooper learned this lesson when a freelance photographer introduced the agency’s social media team to a new collaboration tool. Because it improved the process of viewing, commenting on, and approving hundreds of images the photographer was sending, the agency was able to launch new social content for a project in a fraction of the time. The tool was so helpful that the agency quickly rolled it out for other projects and clients.

4. Focus on telling great stories

When creating content, it’s easy to get bogged down by the supposed rules and best practices of a specific format or media type. No doubt there are benefits to knowing that 30 seconds is the optimal length for a social video. but your focus should be on telling a great story first because that is ultimately what engages people the most.

Within two days of releasing a 93-second YouTube video, Dollar Shave Club generated 12,000 new orders.

And destroying the notion that we all have short attention spans, TED Talk videos run as long as 18 minutes and its subscribed audience is 6.5 million.

Encourage your team to learn and know the best practices, but to feel comfortable breaking the rules in the pursuit of telling an amazing story. Because, who knows, their innovation for your brand may rewrite the rules.

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Encourage your team to break the rules in the pursuit of telling an amazing story, says @dholstein.
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5. Distinguish between discussion and direction

When providing feedback on creative work it’s always good to engage in debate and discussion over the direction and details. In many cases, you might share an opinion but be prepared to leave the final decision to the expert designer, video producer, or writer you’ve empowered to create it (discussion).

That said, be clear when something is not up for discussion (direction). Polycom’s Tim Rose suggests using language like, “This needs to be …” as a way of noting your comment as a directive, not a starting point for a conversation. Transparency and clear communication saves both parties a lot of time and added stress.

6. Review your work in different environments

When creating new content, you probably experience it in the perfect environment. You view images on top-end monitors and listen to the music on high-fidelity speakers. But that’s not how most of your audience will experience what you create. For example, audio engineer Chad Wahlbrink listens to his mixes through an iPhone because that’s how many people will hear the music.

Don’t just review copy in a Google Doc or a Word file. Read the text and view accompanying images on your site. The layout often has a dramatic effect on how and what you want to say.

By following these six tips, you can free your creative teams from the burden of too much process. Encourage them to be bold. Ease the pathway for better collaboration. It’s better than staying safe, and you and the team will help your organization by consistently delivering engaging content that drives business results.

Let your team take their creativity to new places for a fresh perspective. Encourage them to attend Content Marketing World this September in Cleveland, Ohio. Use BLOG100 to save an additional $100. We also offer discounts for teams sending many members. Register today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 6 Ways to Energize Your Content Marketing Team (and Your Content) appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Why You Need Content Strategy Before Editorial Planning

Editor’s note: You may have missed this article when CMI first published it. We’re sharing it now because businesses need to put content strategy before editorial planning today more than ever.

“I got this content strategy thing,” you may think. You know your voice and tone, you know what formats and channels you’re going to create content for, and you know how often you’re going to publish or share content.

Great! Except that’s not a content strategy. It’s an editorial plan.

Don’t get me wrong. Content marketers need an editorial plan, especially if they’re regularly creating new content. At the same time, you need to figure out lots of other things before you plot your content ideas on a calendar.

Enter — you guessed it — content strategy.

What is content strategy, then?

Here’s how I define content strategy:

Content strategy helps organizations provide the right content, to the right people, at the right times, for the right reasons.

When any one of these strategic components is missing, your editorial plan likely won’t get you the results you need. Examples:

• Not the right content. If your content isn’t right (not useful or irrelevant) for the people you hope to reach, those people won’t read it — let alone act on it.
• Not the right people. If you haven’t defined and prioritized your audiences, you can’t get your content to the right people because you don’t know who they are or where to find them. (Hint: The general public is no one’s audience.)
• Not the right times. If you don’t understand your audiences’ questions or tasks, you don’t know when they need your content.
• Not the right reasons. If you can’t articulate measurable business goals as reasons for producing or sharing content, you’re probably wasting your business’ money. (“Engagement” alone is no reason to produce content; it’s rarely defined well enough to tie to meaningful business goals.)

At Brain Traffic, when we create content strategy, we consider these four aspects, as shown in the image below:

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4 elements of your #contentstrategy: substance, structure, workflow, governance, says @meghscase.
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• Substance: what the content is about
• Structure: how the content is organized and displayed
• Workflow: what people and processes are needed to support content creation and management
• Governance: who will decide what over time to keep content on strategy

All four aspects of this framework are anchored in a core content strategy statement, a statement that helps your content team determine where to focus its efforts. A core content strategy statement answers the following questions:

• What is the organization’s mission?
• Who is the target audience?
• What are the business goals?
• What are the content objectives?

You don’t need a core content strategy statement to come up with good content ideas, but it sure helps. (Are you wishing for an example of a core content strategy statement right about now? Patience. I have my reasons for holding back. We’ll get there.)

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‘Black cat’ SEO: A story

To convey the value of a core content strategy statement, I have a story for you. A year ago, I interviewed a client stakeholder during the discovery phase of a project. His team was responsible for SEO, including creating content to drive search traffic to the company’s website. The client was a large retailer that sells, among other things, pet food. I asked a question about SEO. The following (paraphrased) conversation ensued.

Client: “Our SEO consultant recommends that we publish content in October to try to rank for the term ‘black cat’ because it’s something people Google a lot before Halloween.”

Me: “When those people get to your page, what’s your call to action?”

Client: “Buy our cat food.”

Me: “Can you put some spin on black-cat folklore that would motivate those people to buy cat food?”

Client: “No.”

Me: “So…”

Client: “We just want them to buy our cat food.”

Me: “People who search for ‘black cat’ at Halloween probably don’t care about cat food.”

Client: “I guess not.”

Henry Ford once said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.” Sadly, that SEO consultant wasn’t thinking. He or she probably wasted thousands of my client’s dollars. That “black cat” SEO strategy might have temporarily boosted my client’s search rankings, but it probably didn’t boost cat-food sales or cause black-cat searchers to buy my client’s cat food in the future.

If only a core content strategy statement had guided the SEO effort (an example statement is coming, never fear!), my client could have created meaningful content that could have boosted its search rankings and helped.

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A core #contentstrategy statement helps you create meaningful, effective content, says @meghscase.
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Put strategy before tactics

One of the primary functions of content strategy in general, and of a core content strategy statement in particular, is to help organizations say no to content ideas that fail to serve the audience or the business — ideas that put tactics before strategy, like optimizing for “black cat” at Halloween in a misguided effort to sell cat food.

Let’s walk through an example that puts strategy before tactics. In the sections below, I generate and refine some content ideas for a meal service I use called Origin Meals, which sells fresh-cooked meals based on the paleo diet. In this walk-through, we’ll consider all the questions that a core content strategy statement answers (see the list above), but instead of having a statement to guide us, we’ll bump along without one, taking one question at a time.

Here’s what we’re about to do:

1. Generate content ideas based on the Origin Meals mission
2. Narrow the list based on the target audience
3. Further narrow the list based on the business goals
4. Refine the list based on the content objectives

I think that you’ll find this walk-through a helpful — if protracted — way to appreciate the value of a core content strategy statement (and to appreciate the statement example when I finally get to it).

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1. Generate content ideas based on the organization’s mission

Here is the Origin Meals mission:

We believe a healthy diet should be full of real food, packed with nutrients, and free of potentially irritating ingredients that don’t serve the functions of your body (in short, a paleo diet).

Knowing only what it sells and its mission, I brainstormed a bunch of content ideas that could drive awareness and promote its products. This image shows the resulting list.

Click to enlarge

Nice little list of cool stuff that could be done. Which ideas should we choose to develop? It’s a safe bet that not all of these ideas will appeal to the target audience, so next we need to consider that audience.

2. Narrow the list based on the target audience

Let’s say we’ve just learned that people in the target audience have these characteristics:

• They are single.
• They are busy.
• They believe in the paleo philosophy.
• They eat paleo when they have time to cook and prep meals.
• They work out regularly at a CrossFit gym or another small, locally owned gym.

What does that information do to our list of ideas? It eliminates the items that will have little appeal for this audience. These folks aren’t looking for tips on going paleo, information on feeding a family paleo-style, benefits of eating paleo, or other information for people new to eating paleo. (The next image shows these ideas crossed off the list.) We can’t expect these readers to care about the crossed-off topics any more than we can expect people searching Google for “black cat” at Halloween to care about cat food.

Click to enlarge

Now that we’ve homed in on the content ideas with the most potential appeal for the target audience, we’re ready to consider business objectives.

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Narrow your content ideas to ones relevant to your target audience, says @meghscase. #intelcontent
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3. Further narrow the list based on the business goals

Next, let’s imagine some business goals on which Origin Meals might focus:

• Increase first-time orders from partner-gym members
• Increase recurring orders from partner-gym members

Our original list continues to dwindle, as shown in this image, leaving us with only those content ideas that support these two business goals.

Click to enlarge

Now that we’ve sifted out the content ideas that have the most potential appeal for the main audience and that support business goals, we’re ready to layer on content objectives.

4. Refine the list based on the content objectives

A content objective is the thing you want a piece of content to accomplish. For our scenario, here are a couple of possible content objectives:

• Demonstrate how Origin Meals helps athletes eat to perform.
• Help athletes choose the meal options that fit their lives best.

These content objectives enable us to refine our three remaining topic ideas, as shown in this image.

Click to enlarge

Bummer, you might think. All that effort, and we have only three ideas to show for it. In fact, three strategically sound ideas beat a slew of ideas that fail to connect with your target audience, your business goals, and your content objectives. Still, it did take a lot of effort to arrive at these three ideas.

Enter, at last, the core content strategy statement.

The core content strategy statement: A shortcut

What if we had had a core content strategy statement from the start? Might our initial list have looked more like what we ended up with? Probably.

As noted earlier, a core content strategy statement answers these questions:

• What is the organization’s mission?
• Who is the target audience?
• What are the business goals?
• What are the content objectives?

For our Origin Meals example, the answers might look like this:

• Mission: to promote the paleo lifestyle
• Target audience: busy, single paleo-minded athletes
• Business goals: to increase new and recurring orders
• Content objectives: to motivate people to eat paleo and show them how this way of eating fits into their lifestyles

So for Origin Meals, what would a core content strategy statement look like? Here, finally, is the example you’ve been waiting for:

Core content strategy statement: At Origin Meals, we help increase new and recurring orders by creating, distributing, and managing motivating content that shows busy, single, paleo-minded athletes how Origin Meals fits into their lifestyles.

Try it for yourself. Brainstorm some content ideas based on this core content strategy statement.

If you started with a core content strategy statement like this, the ideas would be more likely to accomplish the following:

• Make strategic sense for the company
• Make better use of the company’s time and money
• Provide information the target audience can use
• Positively influence client acquisition and retention (make more money)
• Give content producers better direction when they’re creating content

Yay!

Of course, as we saw earlier in our process-of-elimination brainstorming exercise, you don’t need a core strategy statement to come up with good content ideas that support an organization’s mission statement, business goals, target audience, and content objectives. I find, though, that distilling those fundamental bits of information into a memorable statement helps in a couple of ways. First, it helps get stakeholders on the same page. Second, it gives content creators an easy way to remember what kind of content they want to create and why.

For more tools to help you develop a core strategy statement and use it to make content decisions, see Keep Your Content On-Strategy With This Single Statement [Templates].

Summary

Next time you’re brainstorming content ideas, walk through the four-step process outlined here to arrive at focused ideas quickly. Or take a stab at creating a core strategy statement to guide your brainstorm. Either way, put strategy before tactics. You’ll get better results for your business or client — and for your audience.

I’d love to hear how you brainstorm your content ideas. Please share in the comments.

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Want more on content strategy for marketers? Sign up for our Content Strategy for Marketers weekly email newsletter, which features exclusive insights from CMI Chief Content Adviser Robert Rose. If you’re like many other marketers we meet, you’ll come to look forward to his thoughts every Saturday.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Why You Need Content Strategy Before Editorial Planning appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

How to Create a Brilliant Newsletter People Want to Read

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but newsletters are hot right now.

They receive far less attention than the latest whizzy technology, like live video, personalization, and interactive content. But that doesn’t mean they’re not incredibly popular and incredibly powerful.

Take for example theSkimm, a newsletter with a daily roundup of interesting articles. Launched in 2012, it has amassed over 4 million subscribers.

Newsletters work for business-to-business brands too — with AppSumo, an email list offering regular deals, having over 700,000 active subscribers.

The blog you’re reading right now — Content Marketing Institute — is ticking toward nearly 200,000 subscribers, a huge number that helps it to continue engaging readers on a regular basis.

Even The New York Times, one of the most venerable media establishments in the world, is big on newsletters, running no less than 33 (and launching more), with an average open rate of 50%. If that doesn’t legitimize newsletters as a major force, then I don’t know what will.

Why are they in vogue?

For readers, newsletters offer an easy way to stay in touch with their favorite brands or media sites. No searching on Google and no having to scroll through overly busy social media feeds packed with ads.

Newsletters are delivered regularly to their inboxes. With simple filters in popular email applications, all the rubbish is kept out of the way, so what people want to read is easier to discern these days.

For senders, newsletters are a powerful way to stay top of mind with readers, providing a direct route to getting their attention. The best newsletters — the ones readers value the most — get an almost automatic open because readers want to see what goodness is inside that day.

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The best newsletters get an almost automatic open — readers want to see what goodness is inside. @jfdimark
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How can you create a newsletter that gets opened every time you send it? Consider these eight strategies with best-in-class examples.

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1. Go super curated

One of my absolute favorite newsletters is ReadThisThing, a super-curated daily email that highlights just one piece of brilliant journalism. It picks from a wonderfully diverse range of topics, sources, and formats, so each day is genuinely a nice surprise.

This element of surprise is one of the foundational principles of Hooked, the psychological model (and book) by Nir Eyal, for building loyal audiences. He refers to it as a “variable reward.”

But don’t be fooled into thinking curation is easy. Even ReadThisThing tried to include more content because it found it too difficult to leave out so many great pieces of journalism. But after reader feedback, ReadThisThing reverted to its one-story-only model. Curation done well really is a service to readers that they’ll thank you for. Remember, less is more.

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2. Let your personality shine

Newsletters feel inherently more personal — like a personal letter. Don’t waste that unique ambience by sticking to impersonal corporate speak.

A brilliant example is CB Insights, which sells expensive business intelligence to corporate venture capitalists and other senior business leaders. You would expect straight-laced content, but it’s far from that.

Each newsletter is signed off with “I love you,” and is generally packed with irreverent and sometimes cutting commentary, directly calling out critics or offering random observations.

Does it work? Well it now has over 240,000 subscribers, a thriving business, and from my personal perspective, it is one of the highlights of my inbox every single day.

3. Offer value

Finimize (Finance for Our Generation) is a newsletter I recently signed up for. It’s a great example of a newsletter that offers value because it succinctly explains to me the two biggest business or economic news stories of the day before I reach the office.

It only takes three minutes to read, but it explains what’s going on, what it means, and why I should care. I feel like I’m up to speed without having to leave my inbox — very handy on a crowded commuter train with sketchy roaming data.

4. Make it personalized

The company I work for, Eventbrite, recently updated its newsletter to offer personalized event picks based on the recipient’s preferences and order history. It’s algorithmically generated, meaning it can scale to all recipients. It’s spot-on with what it picks each week, even with relatively limited data. (My event attendance history is sparse right now. I’m a dad, so I don’t get to go out that much anymore.)

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.@Eventbrite newsletter personalizes event picks based on recipient’s order history, says @jfdimark.
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5. Keep it fresh but focused

Every Friday I receive “Your Friday Five” from a small London digital agency called Zone Digital. I always find something that’s different and has otherwise escaped my attention despite religiously reading dozens of articles a day the rest of the week.

Zone Digital keeps its sources fresh, which means I’m never 100% sure what I’ll see in the newsletter each week. However, I do know it will be centered on digital innovation and future technology so it’s always going to be right up my street.

6. Go niche

Newsletters, perhaps more than any other format, allow you to go really niche.

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Newsletters, perhaps more than any other format, allow you to go really niche, says @jfdimark.
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Take for example Disturbances, a super niche newsletter that meditates on the nature of dust and how it can be “a method for seeing the (end of the) world – from space dust to sandstorms, the domestic to the digital.”

You see, you don’t need huge audiences for your newsletter to be valuable, you just need the right people — those who care and who are engaged.

In fact, HubSpot removed 250,000 from its newsletter database to ensure that it was only sending it to those who actually wanted to receive it. Otherwise, what is the point?

For smaller businesses, niche has another advantage — most email service providers offer free use of their software for smaller databases (2,000 for MailChimp), so your niche audience newsletter might not cost any money at all.

7. Be exclusive

Speaking of money, one way to keep people opening your newsletter is to get them to pay for it. Most people tend to be more committed to things they’ve made an investment in, particularly a financial one.

This is an approach taken by Ben Thompson, the author of Stratechery, who offers his readers the chance to receive an exclusive daily email with his take on the most important news of the day. He charges $10 per month or $100 per year.

8. Keep it pure

I’m saving the best for last. For those of you who love writing, newsletters could really be your thing. You don’t have to write with SEO in mind or in a click-bait way to rise above the noise on social media.

This is your chance to have a pure, honest conversation with your readers, and if they appreciate it, they’ll reward you by opening up your newsletter each time it’s sent — no reliance on Google’s black box or Facebook’s ever-changing algorithm.

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Newsletters are a chance to have a pure, honest conversation with your readers, says @jfdimark.
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You send; they receive. And if you follow some of the tips above, then you’ll build up a loyal audience of readers — and that’s what every content marketer wants after all, isn’t it?

Want to be one of the 180,000+ subscribers to the CMI daily newsletter or weekly digest, which includes an exclusive letter from founder Joe Pulizzi? See how well we follow these tips. Subscribe today. It’s free!

Cover image by Viktor Hanacek, picjumbo

The post How to Create a Brilliant Newsletter People Want to Read appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Avoid Content Obscurity With 5 Traffic-Boosting SEO Steps

If you are creating stellar content, distributing it across the most appropriate channels on a consistent basis, and still aren’t getting the traffic results you expect, it’s probably time that you faced a harsh reality: If your content isn’t appearing on the first results page for relevant search queries, your target audience may never know it exists.

Fortunately, just because audiences haven’t been discovering your content on their own doesn’t mean you need to scrap everything and go back to the drawing board. Chances are the content you’ve created still holds plenty of value — and with a few simple steps, you can save it from obscurity.

In the top-rated presentation he delivered at Content Marketing World 2016, Vertical Measures CEO Arnie Kuenn shares some of the proven techniques he’s used to improve the traffic his clients’ content generates through search. The following are highlights from that discussion, along with tips to jump-start your own optimization efforts.

What’s sinking your SEO?

Considering all the semantic and contextual factors that can affect search engine rankings, SEO can get complex and intimidating. It’s completely understandable that some brands chase search success by churning out more content and cramming in as many keywords as possible. However, not only is this method going to put a major strain on your time and resources, it’s usually not necessary if your goal is to increase online traffic to your business.

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Churning out more content to increase online traffic to your business usually isn’t necessary. @joderama #SEO
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Before you take any other step, it’s worth checking for a few easy fixes. As Arnie discusses, any of these simple mistakes could be keeping your content from reaching those highly coveted first-page SERP slots:

1. Unintentional duplicate content: Syndication, poor tagging, or an incorrect CMS set-up can all result in multiple URLs being generated for the same content, causing Google to flag it as deceptive.

Try this fix: Check out Randy Apuzzo’s post for tips that will help you address this problem.

2. Sluggish page-load times: According to Kissmetrics, even a one-second delay in page-load speeds can reduce your conversions by as much as 7%. Reducing the resources required to process non-essential images, scripts, and files on your page might just give your content the caffeine kick it needs to boost its rankings.

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A 1-second delay in page-load speeds can reduce your conversions by as much as 7% via @kissmetrics.
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Try this fix: Website speed can be tested using a variety of free tools. Aaron Orendorff offers a rundown of some of them here, along with tips to improve your results.

3. Poor HTML: If your content isn’t appropriately categorized, lacks informative meta descriptions, includes broken links, or suffers from other coding shortfalls, Google can’t accurately gauge the page’s relevance for search queries.

Try this fix: While you may not be able to catch every technical glitch, learning to apply metadata correctly is something you can do to ensure that searchers’ needs are satisfied when they click on your content. Check out Michele Linn’s Metadata 101 post for a handy tutorial.

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Applying metadata correctly ensures searchers’ needs are satisfied when they click on content. @arniek #SEO
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4. Lack of mobile friendliness: According to Moovweb, mobile-friendly sites dominate the top spots on Google’s SERPs — which makes total sense considering that studies have found that nearly 60% of online searches are now being initiated on mobile devices.

Try this fix: Google offers a free tool to rate the mobile friendliness of your site, and suggests how to fix any problems it finds.

Learn More:
This 15-point checklist will help you identify — and overcome — other SEO-related traps that could be holding your content back from reaching its full ranking potential.

5 steps to stimulate your traffic

Once you overcome the most obvious traffic traps, you should start to see performance improvements for the new content you publish. But if you are looking to make more significant gains in your organic search rankings, you should do what you can to enable your existing assets to work harder for you.

That’s where a content gap analysis and semantic keyword strategy can come into play. By getting a better handle on the content you have, how it maps to your personas and business objectives, and how to position your keywords to increase its relevance, you can improve your content’s rankings and drive more of the right traffic to your business.

Here’s the process Arnie recommends for accomplishing this:

Step 1 – Audit your content

It’s not easy to keep tabs on every single piece of content your business creates, especially if your program has been in place a while, you produce a high volume of content, and/or you distribute content across multiple platforms. A thorough content audit will give you a clear view of:

• Which assets you should focus on enhancing
• Which pieces need to be updated or replaced
• What topic gaps you might need to fill with fresh content
• Where the best opportunities lie for you to increase your competitive rankings and expand your keyword footprint

How to do it: Conducting a full-scale content audit can be immeasurably valuable for your business on many levels; however, the process can get involved. To scale it to more manageable proportions, Arnie suggests using onsite SEO tools (like this one from Screaming Frog) to get an accessible snapshot view. After the tool has crawled your site, sort the data it surfaces from high to low. Then, review your top-level pages, looking for the following conditions:

• Pages that exceeded prior performance expectations and would likely retain their relevance and impact if you were to republish them
• Pages that could be easily updated for accuracy or freshness
• Content that should be removed or replaced because it no longer matches your audience personas or aligns with your strategy
• Pages with broken links, missing code, or other errors that need repairing
• Pages that should be redirected to drive traffic to content that is more relevant

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
How to Stop Worrying and Love Content Inventories and Audits

Step 2 – Conduct a rankings audit

Like a content audit, a rankings audit helps you take stock of your assets and their best opportunities for success. Specifically, you should be looking to see which pages are ranking fairly well in general, where your highest-converting pages are ranking on relevant SERPs, and which terms are contributing to those rankings. Tools like SEMRush, Google Search Console, Moz, and AuthorityLabs can help you with this process.

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Conduct a rankings audit to take stock of #content assets & their best opps for success, says @arnieK.
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Step 3 – Research keywords and ideation

In Arnie’s opinion, the difference between success and failure of content marketing teams often lies in the ideation stage. This is where you explore the competitive search landscape, collect input from your sales staff and other client-facing team members, analyze the information you gather on popular search topics and terms, and then align your findings with the optimization efforts you pursue.

Complementary to the rankings audit, the ideation research process looks at the most relevant keywords your content is not ranking for, revealing valuable terms you should consider including in your optimized content. It also surfaces topical areas in high demand in your industry, uncovering informational gaps that you can fill by strengthening (or repositioning) your existing content, or by creating new content pieces that answer the questions your audience is asking.

Watch Arnie’s video for full details on ideation research process and how to apply it to your optimization efforts:

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
How to Create Content People Actually Search For

Step 4 – Explore the potential in proof terms and semantic terms

Once your ideation research reveals any critical content gaps and keyword opportunities for your business, you’ll likely discover some content pages to focus on in your first round of optimization efforts.

According to Moz, over 70% of the traffic you earn for any given page will come from keywords you didn’t try to optimize for. If your most important content pages aren’t ranking where they should, it’s worth looking at the secondary terms that might help strengthen their contextual relevance.

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70% of the traffic you earn for any page will come from keywords you didn’t try to optimize for via @moz. #SEO
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For example, if your content addresses the topic “fall 2016 TV lineup,” you might optimize your content to target a keyword like “TV shows.” However, a professionally written article by an industry expert would also include semantic terms (such as “TV series,” “episodes,” or “sitcoms”), as well as related terms (like “binge-watch,” “Netflix,” or “drama”). Since Google does an excellent job with semantic search, this gives you many more opportunities to show up on page one of the search results for terms similar to “TV shows.”

Step 5 – Enhance and optimize your priority pages

Beyond adding relevant contextual terms, you can also optimize your search performance by adding new content or refreshing your existing page content to make it more accurate, more timely, more detailed, or more in tune with user intent.

Arnie outlines three ways to approach these page enhancements:

• Refresh: Keep your URL intact, but update the contents of the page — i.e., add fresh text, include additional backlinks, add images where appropriate.

• Reposition: Keep the same URL and page copy, but rewrite your page title to focus on a variant of your target keyword (as long as your CMS can be configured to allow this).

Example: Old title – “Cleveland New Home Community”; new title – “New Home Development in Cleveland”

• Consolidate: If your top page requires more than just some minor updates and additions, create a new content page for your target keyword. But to make sure your new page (with its new URL) won’t be competing for search traffic with your outdated content, use a 301 redirect on the older page.

Bonus tip: To make sure your new and/or revised pages get crawled by the search engines and earn fresh backlinks, support your efforts just as you would any brand new content you publish — for example, by posting about your pages on social media, or by driving traffic to them with a small paid promotion investment.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

• Where Should You Spend Time on Your Website? 5 Data-Driven Opportunities
• 4 Analytics Reports Every Content Marketer Should Use

Next steps

After you’ve put your pages through this process, you will want to benchmark and measure the impact your efforts have had on your organic search traffic. To accomplish this, Arnie recommends tracking the following key performance indicators (KPIs):

• Organic traffic to your improved pages
• Organic traffic to all your pages
• Engagement metrics, including average session duration, bounce rate, time on site, and conversions
• Number of semantic keywords added

While your organic rankings may not improve for every page, you should see the needle start to move in the right direction, overall.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Simple Tips for Sleuthing Your Site Performance Using Google Analytics

Conclusion

Search success isn’t always about creating new content. If you can identify and plug the SEO holes in your existing content and expand your keyword footprint, you have a good chance of grabbing rankings share from your competitors and squeezing more ROI out of everything you publish.

Arnie Kuenn will be offering more great advice at this year’s Content Marketing World. Register today and use the code BLOG100 to save $100 off early-bird rates.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Please note:  All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team.  No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

The post Avoid Content Obscurity With 5 Traffic-Boosting SEO Steps appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

4 Tips to Improve Your Website SEO

If you are not working on SEO, you are doing it wrong! SEO will probably give you the highest possible ROI online. That is because once your website starts ranking well you will get thousands of free visitors to your site. Not only that, those will be relevant visitors, and they might keep coming for years!

Below you will find 4 tips that you might not be using yet.

1. Optimize for mobile

Optimizing your site for mobile devices is a must today. Some large websites like eBay already get more visitors and business from mobile users than from desktop ones! On some cases, the mobile part represents 70% of all traffic and sales!

The first thing you need to do in this regard is to make sure that your site is mobile friend. Google offers a very useful and free tool that can help you identify and fix any problems that your site might have.

2. Optimize your content

Content is a big pillar of SEO, and you need to optimize it if you want to maximize your returns. There is a service called WebTextTool you can use to get real time recommendations to optimize your content and find keywords that will bring more traffic to your site. The difference between a bad and a good keyword can literally be tens of thousands of visitors every month.

If you use a CMS like Drupal or WordPress you can install their plugin and get the recommendations directly in your text editor. This will both save you time and make sure that you don’t forget to do that optimization part.

3. Get links to your content

Writing great content alone is not enough. Unless you get high quality and relevant backlinks, no one will find your great content. You can use Ahrefs to get an overview of the backlinks to your site.

Social media and social news sites represent a great way to get those initial, high quality backlinks. For instance, you can get links from YouTube, Medium, Reddit, Instagram and so on.

4. Track the progress over time

You can’t improve what you can’t measure! Make sure to track how many visitors you are getting from Google (with Google Analytics and Google Search Console), overall and for each of your popular articles.

Identify the articles that are performing better, and try to understand what you did different on those. Identify those factors, and replicate them on future articles to make sure they will attract a lot of visitors as well.

Good luck!

Original post: 4 Tips to Improve Your Website SEO

This post is courtesy of: http://www.dailyblogtips.com

Google’s Featured Snippets: How to Get Your Content to Appear

 In the rush to get on the front page of Google, a major SERP opportunity stands out as the most useful and most relevant available: featured snippets.

The bits of text at the top of many informational searches in Google, featured snippets can drive a ton of attention toward your site and can be an invaluable weapon for marketers.

How can you create content that has the chance of ranking in featured snippets?

While many marketers assume featured snippets are the territory of SEO masters or brands with million-dollar marketing budgets, that isn’t true at all.

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Google’s featured snippets are territory for all marketers, no matter budget or #SEO mastery. @JulieEMcCoy
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In fact, it’s easy to rank for featured snippets with organic content only. You just need to know how.

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What are featured snippets? 

Featured snippets are the informational content that shows up in Google’s SERPs immediately after the ads and sponsored posts (if available). This search for “how to show ROI for marketing” features a snippet from Marketing Mo:

If there had been sponsored ads around this search term, they would appear above the snippet, which ranks as the top organic result. Google shows what it considers high-quality content in this space because it’s focused on fulfilling user intent.

5 tips to create featured snippets

The good news is that, as a form of organic content, the featured snippet box is available to everybody who knows how to optimize their content accordingly. Yet, it’s tough news — you have to work hard to gain it.

How do you make your content fit? If you can’t buy the space, how do you take proactive steps to ensure that your page earns the top spot?

Here are a few simple steps I’ve used to create content that ranks in the snippets.

1. Create content specifically to answer questions. Provide in-depth answers.

Featured snippets are informational in nature. In the words of Neil Patel, “If your content doesn’t answer questions, it won’t get into the featured snippet. That’s all there is to it.”

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If your #content doesn’t answer questions, it won’t get into the featured snippet. @neilpatel #SEO
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Google’s algorithms search through countless sites to find the content that will best answer a user’s questions. When the crawlers find it, they display the content in the form of a featured snippet, which makes it easier for people to locate the information they’re looking for.

With this in mind, you need to understand which questions your audience is asking, and how you can tailor your content to answer those questions accordingly.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Does Your Content Answer Searchers’ Questions?

2. Know the questions your readers are asking.

According to a 2015 article by Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting, 19% of searches using a question result in a featured snippet on the first SERP. Typically, these inquiries fall into the following categories:

• How does
• How do
• How to
• What is

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19% of searches using a question result in a featured snippet on the first SERP, says @stonetemple. #SEO
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They may also include “why” questions — why do, why does — and “what” questions, like “what is the gestation period for a giraffe?”

With these primary categories in mind, it’s time to think about how they might apply to your users and, more importantly, how you can tailor your content to suit these question formats.

For example, instead of targeting the general keyword “marketing,” consider extending the keyword to the long-tail “how to do marketing research.” While the first query is too broad, the second mimics a question one of your readers would likely type into Google. As such, the content that follows is more likely to earn a spot in the featured snippets box.

One easy way to find these types of searches is to go to the Google search box and type a question your target audience members would enter. You’ll see some ideas pop up. Any one of those can be excellent topics for your content that’s more likely to rank in the snippets:

Another site, Answer The Public, is a great way to find questions your audience might be asking. Look what happens when I type “marketing” into its tool.

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.@AnswerThePublic site is a great way to find questions your audience might be asking, says @JuliaEMcCoy.
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3. Create truly high-quality content.

The primary thing you need to understand about featured snippets is that they do not bypass Google’s complex ranking system.

They are among the topic organic results for a query. Because of this, it’s critical to keep all the standard ranking requirements in mind as you create featured content.

This means your content needs to check these points:

• High quality
• Comprehensive
• Entertaining (to engage the reader)
• User-focused

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Your #content needs to be high-quality, entertaining, & user-focused to rank, says @JuliaEMcCoy. #SEO
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While you can’t overly obsess about how your content ranks (because Google relies on a series of complex ranking factors and “snippable” content isn’t all Google considers), it’s critical to ensure that your content remains of high quality and relevant to your users.

This enhances its chances of landing in a featured snippet and becoming available to a wider base of readers. Don’t cut corners: Your content must be high-quality and user-focused to win in Google.

4. Work to provide the best answer.

You’re not going to land a featured spot unless you’re the best at responding to a given question.

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Be the best at responding to a given question to land a @Google featured snippet, says @JuliaEMcCoy.
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With this in mind, take a walk in your readers’ shoes. They’re going to want answers that provide detailed information, and include relevant keywords and phrases.

You can’t afford to skim the surface with your featured snippet content. Work on hitting these three cores:

• Dive deep and go in-depth with your content — cover every question that could come up on the topic.
• Break down each step in the answer and use visual content to back it up, from videos to infographics and screenshots.
• Remember to tailor your content to suit beginners in your niche.

By outperforming your competition, you can ensure that your content goes the distance and ranks well in featured snippets across the web. What’s more, readers who find your content via a featured snippet will likely return to your site again and again now that they see you as an authority in your industry.

Time, resources, and patience will be required here. It took me roughly three weeks to brainstorm for my post that made it into snippets, and about eight months for it to show up in Google. But here’s the gold mine: Without a penny spent on ads, it’s still ranking well three years later!

5. Use question-and-answer pages.

Q-and-A pages on your site can be a great way to provide value to users, consolidate questions, and increase your chances of making it into a featured snippet. Because these sections already address user questions in virtually the same wording searchers would use, they’re ripe to be picked up as featured snippets, and can seriously boost your chances of getting on the front page.

For best results, be sure your Q&A page features all relevant questions, and each is well-formatted with a complete answer.

If you’re structuring your Q&A page correctly, it should help all your readers find simple, complete answers to their questions. Resist the urge to be long-winded or to keep your answers so short they don’t provide much value.

Don’t hesitate to provide links in the answers to offer background information or context. When you format this page for readers first, you increase the likelihood that Google will pick it up as a featured snippet down the road.

Featured snippets, a path to online exposure 

As Google focuses on user intent and user experience, featured snippets will continue to gain importance. Relevant, convenient, helpful, and accessible on virtually every platform, featured snippets are the answer to many of the content concerns of today. What’s more, they stand to shift and change accordingly as the web adapts in the coming years.

By understanding what you can do to create content that’s ready for the featured-snippets box, you can boost your online engagement and make it easier for users everywhere to find and interact with your site. And by providing ready-to-consume, in-depth content, you can brand yourself as a go-to authority in a crammed digital environment.

Want answers to your content marketing questions? Sure, you can search Google, but you also can subscribe to CMI’s free daily or weekly digest newsletter.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Google’s Featured Snippets: How to Get Your Content to Appear appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.