The Blog Post Checklist for Cranking Your Search Ranking

SEO has hit the fan, man. Hmm. What?

I mean, if you think you have foolproof tactics up your sleeve and magic linking techniques in your back pocket for optimizing your content, I’m sorry to inform you that your sleeve and pocket are see-through.

In 2016, you can’t hide your tricks. The search gods see all. And they don’t look kindly on your 2010-era SEO.

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The search gods see all and they don’t look kindly on your 2010-era #SEO says @FeldmanCreative
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Google and the other search engines you care about are now good at sniffing out evidence that shows readers get value from your pages.

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Focus on 3 tactics that work

I learned most of what I know about optimizing web content for search from (1) listening to my mentor and friend Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media, and (2) practicing his lessons.

With Andy’s permission, I’ve revisited his remarkably helpful post, Web Content Checklist: 21 Ways to Publish Better Content, and produced an infographic based on it.

As you’re about to see, Andy delivers 21 tips to cover the three ways you can optimize your content and crank your rank.

1. Indicate the relevance of your article to the search bots.
2. Tap human psychology to increase clicks, reads, and social shares.
3. Feature compelling media to improve the quality of your content.

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3 ways to optimize #content: Relevance, tap human psychology, & feature compelling media says @Crestodina
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With a huge thank you to Andy, a 2016 Content Marketing World keynote speaker, and my partner in design, Visme, I present the 21 Point SEO Blog Post Checklist: Cranking Your Ranking.

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Conclusion

As you can see, the first five tips focus on the more technical (traditional) tactics around SEO. Six years ago, that list would have been longer, referencing keyword frequency and much more. Today, though, search engines are smarter – they look for content that truly fulfills what searchers are looking for. That’s why it is equally, if not more important, to ensure that you focus on the 16 other tips that relate to content quality.

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Search engines look for #content that truly fulfills what searchers are looking for says @FeldmanCreative #SEO
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A Nutshell Guide to Proper Keyword Research

Make plans today to hear the originator of the 21-point checklist, Andy Crestodina, and other insightful experts at Content Marketing World 2016 this September. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post The Blog Post Checklist for Cranking Your Search Ranking appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Top 6 Ways to Generate More Mileage from Your Content

There are triggers that are guaranteed to make your content perform well on the web. In the online world, there are several million pieces of content added each day to the already billion pages of content that already exists on the web. In order for your content to stand out, it needs to have compelling elements that will allow it to break through the noise. Most web marketers struggle to execute this with their campaign.

Deliver content for a specific audience.

By addressing a core topic for a specific audience, your content will have a much better chance of gaining traction on the web. Don’t try to develop a content piece that appeals to everybody. Instead, find out the needs, wants, desires, problems, frustrations and fantasies of a specific audience group. For example, WordPress developers that want to use plugins that will improve their website’s performance. Or basketball players that want to know how they can improve their vertical leap ability.

Use compelling headlines.

Powerful headlines should be used to sell your content to the audience. They need to sell the worthiness of the content to be clicked, liked and shared on the web. Epic content will fall short if the headline fails to convince a potential viewer to engage with it. Upworthy content writers are required to write 25 headlines before publishing their content. As a result, they create unique and compelling headlines that allows their content to perform well across the web.

Use compelling images.

People love to engage with image content. The featured image that you use for your content can double the amount of traffic to your website. When the content is supported by more compelling images, it will create more opportunities for your content to get liked and shared across the web. Spend time creating good quality images that have a high-resolution and that tell a compelling story to your audience.

Make sure your content delivers value.

No matter what type of content you publish, it must deliver value for your target audience. Take the time to support your content with value by providing:

-Quotes from credible sources.
-Statistics from primary sources such as surveys.
-Embedding valuable content such as infographics, videos or audio files.
-Linking to other credible websites that support your content.  

Keep your content interesting by telling a story.

People love stories. So it is important that you find an angle that will allow you to develop a compelling story for your content. Consider telling a story that:

-Captures the human-interest angle.
-Highlights major announcements.
-Marks the passage of time (such as a 5, 10 or 25 year anniversary)
-Reacts to a current story, event or trend.
-Solves a problem.
-Is honest.

Promote your content on platforms where your target audience hangs out.

Implementing the right promotional strategy will allow your content to gain exposure, traffic and shares from your target audience. It is important that you identify where your audience hangs out online. Some methods for finding your audience online include:

-Searching for discussion threads on forums.
-Searching for question and answer websites like Quora for relevant discussion -topics.
-Searching for blog posts and adding to the commentary.
-Searching for topic groups on social media platforms.
-Searching for influencers on blogs, media or social media platforms and sharing -the content with them.

You can even use tools like BuzzSumo or Buzzstream to find people that have engaged with similar content and promote your content directly to them.

These are proven methods that will get your content likes and shares across the web. Amplify your website’s content by implementing these tactics today!

This post was contributed from SoulDigital.com.au, a digital marketing agency in Australia.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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

The Secret to Content Marketing ROI

Questions about content marketing ROI are probably the ones I hear most from marketers who are struggling to build their own business case internally.

We know our customers are turning out advertising. And we know that as consumers, we are all consuming more information online. We are looking to get informed and we are looking to be entertained.

We don’t care where the content comes from. But we aren’t sitting around waiting for it. And we won’t go too far to find it.

But building the business case is often a tricky proposition. We can’t point to the advertising guy and make it all about him. It is also important to remember that everyone inside the business creates content. And creators love their content like a mama loves her baby. Although the content may stink, we can’t call anyone’s baby ugly.

How do we build the business case for content marketing and answer the ROI question before we even really get started?

It starts by building a strong business case that doesn’t just directly attack people, their teams, or their budgets.

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What is the ROI of content?

Let’s start with how we answer the ROI question before really even getting started. I point out that content marketing ROI is higher than the average marketing ROI in every place I’ve looked. At Content Marketing World, Julie Fleischer, former senior director for data, content and media at Kraft, said content marketing ROI was four times greater than their most targeted advertising.

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At @KraftFoods, #Contentmarketing ROI was 4X greater than their most targeted advertising says @jfly
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The first step in responding to the content marketing ROI question is to ask for the baseline: What is your company’s average marketing ROI?

Then address each of these three components of ROI:

• Cost
• Utilization
• Performance

Content cost: Conduct a content audit, or at least a sample of the content you produce. Apply some average costs and extrapolate to really gain a sense for how much your content costs.

Consider factors such as the cost to create the content including copywriting fees, design services, and don’t forget to estimate the cost of the time for project management.

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Content utilization: Sirius Decisions has reported that as much as 60 to 70% of content goes unused. Any content that never gets used is 100% waste. You need to not only track content production, but also usage.

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As much as 60 to 70% of #content goes unused according to @siriusdecisions #contentmarketing
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If you use an agency for your content creation, look at a sample of the content it delivered and then audit your external channels for any metrics of usage. If you use internal resources, ask the campaign managers for usage reports.

If you’re like most companies, don’t be surprised at how challenging it can be to track content usage.

Content performance: Most people start by talking about page views, social shares, and clicks. But it’s important to first tie your content performance to the business case that got you started in the first place.

For awareness and thought leadership content, it’s important to go beyond traffic metrics to look at engagement rates. Anyone can buy traffic. But engagement is the key in today’s attention-starved world filled with so many choices.

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Anyone can buy traffic. But engagement is the key says @BrennerMichael #contentmarketing
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For lead-generation content, it’s important to look beyond leads to measure both the quality of the leads (conversion rates) as well as engagement.

How do you answer the content marketing ROI question:

• Ask for your overall or average marketing ROI.
• See if your business understands the cost of the content it produces.
• Find out how much of it gets used. Ever. I’ve never seen any business over 50%!!!
• Promise to build a business case and measure the return.

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Build the content marketing business case

If you’ve survived long enough to want to learn how to build the business case, there are a couple of ways to create it.

Goal: Reach early-stage buyers. Most marketing content is overly promotional (and we tune it out) and is pushed just too early in the buying process. Your business needs to get people to know your brand, like your brand, and trust your brand enough to want to buy from you. That starts with a significant amount of early-stage “dating” content. It needs to be non-promotional and not overly creepy. You don’t want to push too hard at this stage because you want to get to a second “date.”

Most companies have a significant opportunity to reach more early-stage prospects. You can use these concepts to build the business case for content marketing in the early stages:

• Your fair share of the conversations – What percent of online conversations on your product category are branded? What percentage of those conversations is from or about your brand? How different is that from your market share? If there’s a gap, it means your competition is wooing your prospects before you. For example if you have 25% of the sales in a product category, but your digital content only represents 5% of branded conversation online, you are not reaching your online fair share. Your SEO agency or even some of the SEO tools like SEMrush can provide you with your online fair share.

• Unbranded search traffic on your website – How many of your early-stage prospects find your company website? You can identify this by looking at search traffic from brand terms vs. unbranded search terms. If you’re like most brands, you promote too much on your website and you need to build a brand publishing capability. If you write more about the trends in your industry, you will not only be seen as an authority, you will attract more unbranded search traffic.

• Banner effectiveness at driving brand visits – If your company spends marketing budget on digital display (banners), test the effectiveness of this approach at delivering traffic to your website vs. content marketing.

• Cost of advertising / search landing pages with low organic and social traffic – While advertising landing pages are built to deliver on the advertising message, measure the bounce rate of these pages and the amount of organic search or social traffic these pages get. Consider building a content marketing experience to serve as the landing page for your advertising. This will deliver “free” search and social traffic on top of your paid ad traffic.

• Cost of organic and social website traffic vs. paid – Content marketing allows you to gain additional reach, engagement, and conversion without having to pay for it. You can literally earn your audience’s attention without buying it. One simple way to calculate this is to look at your average cost per click from paid search. Apply that number to your organic and social traffic to get the value of these visitors.

• Cost of content that goes unused – While this business case applies to any buyer stage, it is often one of the biggest marketing expenses. And any content created and not used is just pure waste.

Goal: Engage new prospects with your brand: If you are not connecting with potential customers at the top of your funnel, there are a few ways you can quantify the opportunity to reach and convert them:

• Time spent, bounce rate on content- vs. advertising-landing pages – This comparison should reveal how content marketing helps your brand reach early-stage visitors, engage, and convert them to sales.

• Repeat visits, and time engaged with your brand – Repeat visitors came to your site once and then they came back for more. Measure the impact of these visitors by looking at their conversion rates vs. first-time visitors.

• Value per subscriber – Quantify how many prospects you literally bring into the brand fold so you can start to market to them. You can quantify their value by looking at revenue or lead value from your email list divided by the number of emails you have in your database.

Goal: Conversions you would have never reached: Finally, you need to be able to measure content marketing in quantifiable ways that your business can understand such as leads, sales revenue, and retention:

• Leads and sales from subscribers – Every lead you generate from content marketing can be valued. Anyone who registers for one of your white papers or events can be valued. Every subscriber you generate to build your list can be valued.

• Content marketing ROI vs. overall marketing ROI – Once you’ve identified the previously detailed data, calculate the ROI of generating these subscribers, leads, and sales vs. the brand’s overall marketing ROI.

• Retention and lifetime value – Measure customers who engage with your content marketing and determine if they spend more or stay longer as customers. Content marketing can serve to deliver more engaged and profitable customers.

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Conclusion

To answer the content marketing ROI question for your business, you need to build a solid case based on a deep understanding of your business.

What is your business’ average marketing ROI and how can content marketing achieve a higher return? The answer comes down to understanding your content costs, usage, and performance.

From there, you have a few paths to building a solid business case that will allow you to reach new customers, engage them with your brand in a meaningful way, and then convert them to new sales and long-term relationships that provide real ROI.

Learn more insights and practical tips from Michael Brenner in person when he presents at Content Marketing World this September. Register today, using the code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post The Secret to Content Marketing ROI appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

How to Match Key Metrics With Your Content Goals

If your goal is to lose weight and you want to measure your progress, you use a scale to track pounds or a tape measure to track inches. You would never measure your weight loss by tracking your height.

If you did that, you’d never know how far you’ve come — how many pounds or inches you’ve lost — and you wouldn’t be able to objectively see whether something you’re doing to lose weight is working. It’d be nearly impossible to hold yourself accountable, and it would be a waste of your time, energy, and resources.

It’s common sense. You wouldn’t record your height to measure how much weight you’ve lost. Unfortunately, some content marketers lose that common sense when it comes to tracking the success of their content efforts.

Some marketers aren’t clear from the beginning about what their goals are or what success looks like, and others mistakenly track the wrong metrics. Too often, we hear fellow marketers set lead generation as the No. 1 goal of content, yet they can’t seem to look past the number of social shares a piece of content earns to measure its effectiveness.

And it’s that confusion that leads to ineffective content marketing and other challenges that keep you from achieving your organization’s content marketing goals. In fact, in its 2016 B2B content marketing research, Content Marketing Institute found that only 30% of marketers say their organizations are effective at content marketing.

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Only 30% of marketers say their organizations are effective at #contentmarketing via @cmicontent #research
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Now, this goal-tracking confusion could very well be a simple misunderstanding on the part of marketers – after all, many factors play into content’s success, and just as many metrics exist to measure it. But this misunderstanding, as simple as it is, has serious consequences for your content efforts.

The trick is uncovering your team’s key performance indicators and matching those goals with specific, measurable metrics to ensure that the content you’re creating and distributing is effective. The following guide will help you match metrics to goals, measure success, and become a better, more effective content marketer.

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Uncover KPIs & match goals to measurable metrics for effective #contentmarketing via @Kelsey_M_Meyer
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If your goal is lead generation

When lead generation is your most important organizational goal (85% of marketers say it is), measuring social shares isn’t enough. To appropriately measure how your content is working for lead generation, you need to head to the bottom of the funnel to check out these metrics:

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85% of marketers say that lead generation is their most important organizational goal says @Kelsey_M_Meyer
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• Click-throughs: Every article should include a clear call to action. If your content is published elsewhere as a guest contribution, the desired action could be a click-through to your site or blog. If it’s a blog post on your platform, the desired action could be a download of gated content. Either way, the action should be clear and compelling, and measuring the click-through rates on those links is critical to understanding how your content is generating and converting leads.

• Conversions: Take this a step further by comparing how many of those leads are qualified and can be converted into clients. We have a team member whose job involves combining information from our marketing automation system with her own individual research to learn more about each lead who comes through our site. She looks at everything from a lead’s LinkedIn account to his company website and even his Twitter account to determine whether he would be a good prospective customer. From there, she reaches out to the most qualified ones to advance the sales process, and our marketing team compares leads generated to qualified leads generated to better understand our progress toward achieving our goal.

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If your goal is sales enablement

While lead generation is a fantastic goal – one that my team sets for itself each month – it isn’t complete without sales. Using content in the sales process is incredibly valuable, and to track how your content is affecting your sales enablement, you should monitor sales for leads who receive your content versus those who don’t. In particular, consider:

• Sales conversion rate: Ideally, you’ll find that sending content to leads builds trust by directly addressing their objections, pain points, and questions. As a result, they should convert at a higher rate.

• Sales cycle length: If your content is working, it should help your team decrease the length of your average sales cycle. If leads who receive content continue to close at a faster rate than those who don’t, you’ll know your content is effective.

• Contract size: Because each piece of content should help overcome or minimize a barrier, it should be easier to sell more to the lead. Compare the contract size of clients who were nurtured with content against the contract size of clients who weren’t.

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If your goal is brand awareness

Despite a 7% decrease since last year, brand awareness remains a top-level organizational goal for 77% of marketers. While I wouldn’t consider brand awareness a KPI (it’s difficult to accurately measure without performing an expensive brand-lift analysis), it is a goal that content marketing can help achieve. To measure your progress toward this goal, track the following:

• Social shares and following: Measure your social following and average shares per article by benchmarking where you are and tracking your progress. Our marketing team uses HubSpot to schedule and track social media engagement and consistently reviews it to see what types of content, formats, times of day, days of the week, etc., work best for us and our audience.

• Article views: This is easier to measure if you only focus on owned media because you can access your own analytics. It becomes a bit more difficult when you contribute content to external media, especially if the publisher doesn’t list the number of views on the page itself. The more people are viewing your content, the more they are aware of your brand.

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If your goal is audience engagement

Beyond awareness, though, lies engagement. Many marketers — my team included — lean more toward genuine engagement and interaction than general brand awareness. To track your progress toward your goal of audience engagement, monitor these metrics:

• Social shares: Look beyond the number of social shares, and closely examine who is sharing your content. It’s great when a piece of content goes viral or earns lots of shares, but if no one in your target audience or no one who influences your audience is engaging, those numbers aren’t as meaningful.

• Comments: Ignore trolls and spam messages. Identify the individuals who are contributing to your content and who care about your industry, and look for the types of content that engage them most. You can reach out to them personally or on social media to continue the conversation and engagement.

• Click-through rates: Sharing and commenting are solid metrics, but when your content prompts a reader to click, you can find out more about how and why he or she is engaging. By tracking the number of people who click and what kinds of content they’re clicking to see, you can learn even more about your audience members and how to engage them.

We know that 79% of marketers with the most effective content marketing know what success looks like for them. But we should also recognize that content’s effectiveness doesn’t rely on the clarity of our content goals alone.

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79% of marketers w/the most effective #contentmarketing know what success looks like says @Kelsey_M_Meyer
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Part of the effectiveness of our content depends on our ability to identify the correct metrics and measure our progress toward achieving those goals. It’s not enough to simply set those content goals. Without a system to track and measure them, you’ll never know whether you achieve the goals you set. Or worse, you’ll never be able to improve ineffective efforts because you won’t know what works and what doesn’t.

As content marketers and consumers, we all benefit from better, more effective content, and it all starts with clear goals and effective measurement.

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Want to ensure that you’re measuring what matters? Stay updated with the latest tips, trends, and insights in Content Marketing Institute’s free daily or weekly blog.

Cover image by cohdra, Morguefile.com, via pixabay.com

The post How to Match Key Metrics With Your Content Goals appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

This Week in Content Marketing: The Future of Television Advertising Is Native

PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose can be found on both iTunes and Stitcher.

In this episode of This Old Marketing, Robert and I discuss Facebook’s dominance in digital advertising and predict how it will fill the biggest gap in its business model: Content. Next, we roll our eyes at yet another prediction of the death of content marketing, but acknowledge the author’s point that influencer marketing is more important than ever. We then turn our attention to new research from Google that “proves” advertisers should spend a lot more on YouTube ads, and we praise NBC’s decision to incorporate sponsored content into its popular Saturday Night Live TV show. Finally, we’re disappointed with an opinion piece from HBR that laments the glut of digital advertising, but doesn’t offer a solution to the problem. Rants include two beat downs on questionable native advertising practices. This week’s This Old Marketing example of the week is from Schneider Electric’s Energy University.

This week’s show

(Recorded live April 25, 2016; Length: 1:01:55)

Download this week’s PNR This Old Marketing podcast.

If you enjoy our PNR podcasts, we would love if you would rate it, or post a review, on iTunes.

1. Content marketing in the news

• Facebook’s scary new world for media companies (6:23): Facebook has created a scary new world for media companies, according to Business Insider. Their distribution — which controls how many people see your stuff and thus affects how much you can command for ads — is now in the hands of Facebook and Google, which may control as much as 85% of online ad revenue. Robert and I agree that the missing piece Facebook needs is content; that’s why it’s aggressively courting advertisers to host their content on its platform. We discuss several ways Facebook could easily fill the content gap, and what this could mean to brands and publishers.

• The death of content marketing – why brands must become cultural currency (14:59): Content is quickly becoming a commodity, warns David Armano. Because of this, it lacks cultural relevance to the audiences it’s supposed to influence. His solution? Brands should partner and collaborate with influencers in the niches they serve. In this way, they have the potential to make a bigger impact with customers who are members of these communities. Robert and I aren’t quite sure what Armano is trying to say in this article. Influencer marketing is very important today. But it has nothing to do with the supposed death of content marketing.

• Google says YouTube ads are 80% more effective than TV (22:00): In a new report that is sure to anger the TV industry, Google says that YouTube ads were more effective than TV ads 80% of the time. Fifty-six case studies from Google and its research partners show that advertisers should be spending six times more of their budgets on YouTube advertising than they already do. Robert and I agree that this is a self-serving study with dubious data. But we believe brands ought to consider devoting a small percentage of their ad budgets for paid distribution of their digital content – or doing something more innovative than jamming their existing TV ads into YouTube pre-rolls.

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• SNL will decrease ads by 30% next season (27:28): NBC’s Saturday Night Live (SNL) plans to cut about 30% of ads out of the sketch comedy show next season. In its place will be six pods of custom branded content per year, produced by the SNL cast. This is part of a move by TV networks to make the viewing experience more consumer friendly by reducing commercial interruptions and weaving in brand messaging that more closely resembles the content viewers tuned in to watch. Robert thinks this is a genius move by NBC. I predict this is what advertising will evolve into during the next five years.

• Social cost of bad online marketing (33:43): Alexandra Samuel’s opinion column on HBR.org points out that relentless advertising and marketing have polluted the web to the point where independent voices have been pushed to the margins. Robert and I agree that this article is too focused on Samuel’s wishes for a pure, altruistic online world, but doesn’t offer a solution. She also ignores the fact that content marketing, if it’s done thoughtfully and strategically, can share information and educate – without being obnoxious about it.

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2. Sponsor (42:02)

• Marketo: No matter what rumors you’ve heard – email is not dead! It continues to be a top performing marketing channel – as long as you stand out. Check out Marketo’s Highly Effective Email Marketing Lookbook to get inspired with nine new email types to stay front and center with clever, catchy, and bold content. Download the Lookbook here: http://cmi.media/pnr128 
  

3. Rants and raves (44:39)

• Robert’s rant: Robert was recently interviewed by a newspaper for an article it was producing about the evolution of marketing. The interview went well, and covered a lot of great information. However, when it was published on the newspaper’s website, it contained a call to action at the end for the newspaper’s content studio. The reporter never disclosed to Robert that this article was actually a native advertising piece. That incident points to the need for full transparency in sponsored content.

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• Joe’s rant: A publisher friend of mine in northeastern Ohio was involved in the launch of a print and digital magazine. The publisher’s top management decided that it would run native advertising as if it was unpaid editorial, which violates FTC guidelines. I advised my friend against this decision and encouraged him to follow best practices for native advertising. The print magazine arrived this week, and sure enough, it contained at least 10 articles that appeared to be native ads. If the FTC decides to take action on this case, the brands running the ads will be at risk, not the publication.

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4. This Old Marketing example of the week (54:30)

• Energy University: Ten years ago, Schneider Electric launched Energy University, a free online educational resource that provides an extensive library of training videos about energy usage, technical developments in various industries, management solutions to energy consumption challenges, and other energy-related topics. It contains almost 500 courses and has over 500,000 subscribers, who have taken over 750,000 courses since the website was launched. The courses are translated into different languages, giving Energy University a global reach. Its impact includes acting as a source of new business for the company, providing insights into customer needs in regional markets, helping Schneider recruit new employees, and, of course, educating people about developments in the field of electrical engineering. It’s an excellent example of This Old Marketing.

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For a full list of PNR archives, go to the main This Old Marketing page.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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The post This Week in Content Marketing: The Future of Television Advertising Is Native appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

7 Less Obvious Tools to Improve Your Visual Content

You really can’t have enough tools for your visuals to make your content stand out. New tools bring more inspiration, creativity, and more ways to get your images in front of relevant audiences.

The more tools you get to know, the more you are able to experiment, and the more varied your visual marketing tactics become. Therefore, I share some newer, less-discussed visual marketing tools to help you improve and diversify your visual content marketing strategy.

You see lots of image-creation tools repeated from roundup to roundup. Here’s one of the most popular. I bet you haven’t heard of these tools – to create, to plan, and to promote visual content.

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Create visuals

1. Haiku Deck Zuru: Turn your slides into awesome visuals

The newest feature of well-known app Haiku Deck Zuru is a great way to repackage your presentation into lots of awesome visuals.

Upload your presentation, let Haiku Deck Zuru work on it for awhile, suggest some related tags and images (to help the app), and generate a collection of much more beautiful slides.

The visuals turn out better when you don’t have too much text on the slides so I usually end up deleting or skipping text-heavy slides.

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2. Bannersnack: Analyze how your audience interacts with your visuals

Bannersnack is an easy banner-management app that can be used as effective image-creation and analysis tool. Its new analytics feature shows how your audience has been interacting with your image via a nice heatmap:

This tool also has a handy editor, which enables you to create any size image or a banner and export it:

3. Datawrapper: Create cool charts

Datawrapper is by far the easiest way to visualize data. Using visuals to reflect numbers-related content can be useful in so many ways – presentations, infographics, etc.

Cool charts and stats visualizations are popular as social media posts so you may find yourself using this tool every day.

Export your information, customize with a couple of clicks, and then embed or share the visual anywhere you like.

The tool offers line, bar, stacked-bar, map, donut, and table charts as the basic templates. Upgrades enable you to check out the gallery for more options.

You can download completed charts in PNG formats if you want to take them offline as part of a presentation.

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Plan campaigns

These two tools will help you scale, plan, and semi-automate effective sharing of your visual content.

Note: I am sure you can name many more tools to accomplish this, but I am only listing two of the newest ones.

4. DrumUp: Co-manage multiple social media channels and schedules

DrumUp is a great way to re-share visual quotes across social media channels and schedule repeated shares.

DrumUp supports LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Plus, you can link to your Facebook Business pages and LinkedIn Company pages.

I recommend sharing manually the first time to make sure all social media tagging is done properly and schedule a few re-shares weeks (or even months) ahead.

5. Later: Plan and scale Instagram content management

Later is the only reliable Instagram scheduler I am aware of. The thing is, Instagram isn’t allowing post scheduling through an API. If you see any Instagram schedulers, they essentially break Instagram rules by using workarounds.

Later is different: It forces you to confirm each scheduled update before it goes live. I use this tool not to schedule, but rather to engage my team in our company’s Instagram-managing process.

You can add contributors to your Later account. They can submit photos, then you can put them on the schedule, and publish. I have found this to be the most reliable way to keep our corporate Instagram account constantly active (and thus quickly growing).

You can also add multiple Instagram accounts and get your team to contribute to any of them.

Promote visuals

Finally, if you’ve spent hours putting together great visuals, you want to make the most of their promotion. These tools can make your image promotion more effective and likely expand your reach.

6. Tweet Jukebox: Promote visuals on Twitter

Among the major social media platforms, Twitter’s updates have the shortest life span (about 18 minutes if you have a solid following). Therefore, sharing one update a few times on Twitter is a valid and wise tactic.

That’s where Tweet Jukebox comes in handy, as it allows you to scale for multiple tweet-sharing, including visual tweets. You can organize your updates in boxes and manage each box based on its own separate schedule. Once set up, a box lives its own life, promoting your updates again and again.

7. Viral Content Buzz: Promote visuals on Pinterest

Viral Content Buzz is the only social media promotion platform that has a strong focus on quality and supports Pinterest.

Using this free tool, you can create a project, enable Pinterest, and see how it works. Your article must have a good image in order for Pinterest promotion to work.

What other visual marketing tools are not receiving the coverage they deserve? Please share in the comments.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Content Distribution Strategies and Tools to Drive Traffic

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).

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Cover image by Viktor Hanacek via picjumbo

The post 7 Less Obvious Tools to Improve Your Visual Content appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Try Infolinks to Boost Your Website Earnings

The vast majority of bloggers and webmasters monetize their sites with banner ads (such as AdSense or CPM ad networks) or with affiliate marketing deals (where they earn a commission for every customer they refer to affiliate partners). These two are very efficient ways to monetize your traffic, but you should rely solely on them if you want to maximize your earnings. In fact, the more revenue sources you have on your site, the better. First of all because many forms of advertising are not mutually exclusive, meaning that you can use them at the same time and both will generate revenue. Second because you won’t be putting all your eggs on the same basket. Should one of your income sources die you will have others still going.

The key aspect here is to find monetization methods that integrate well with the ones you are currently using. If you are using banner ads or affiliate offers, there is one monetization method that you should try in combination of those: Infolinks.

Infolinks is the leader in in-text advertising. They basically transform words from your blog posts and web pages into relevant ads. If you have a blog post about cars, for instance, they might transform the word “BMW” into an ad for a BMW dealer, for instance. Such a monetization strategy has several benefits:

1. It integrates perfectly with your site, reducing the ad blindness of your users and increasing your click-through rate and revenues. Many studies confirm that users tend to ignore banner ads completely, so in-text ads will help to solve that problem.

2. In-text advertising is complementary to Google AdSense, banner ads and so on, so you can use it along those networks. This is a huge benefit because you will be able to increase your revenue without affecting your current income streams.

3. The ads will always be related to the topic of your posts, and this will increase the chance of your visitors finding value from the ads. Again, studies show that ads that are relevant to your content vastly increase the chances of your visitors noticing and clicking on the ad.

Singing up is very easy. You just need to provide the URL of your website and follow the steps. You can even signup with your Facebook account if you prefer. The approval may take up to 48 hours, but usually you will get approved on the same day. Right after approval you will be able to integrate their code and start showing in-text ads on your site.

If you face any problem during signup and integrating, just contact the Infolinks support department. They tend to answer to queries very fast, and their support employees are very friendly.

The technical part is pretty simple too. All you have to do is to copy and paste some code into your HTML. If you are using WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, it is even easier. You will just need to install a plugin and it will do all the work for you.

If you are not using Infolinks yet, give it a try, as it can certainly increase the revenues your site is generating right now.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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