Tag: Marketing strategy

The Ultimate Guide to Guest Posting

Posted on | by Jennifer Spencer

Over the coming weeks, we are going to be bringing you the Ultimate Guide to Guesting Posting, and giving you an insight into aspects of guesting posting like:

  • What it is?
  • What are the benefits?
  • How it can help your business?
  • How you can make a post?

So, to start it off…

What actually is guest posting?

Guest posts or, guest blogs are content published in the form of an article on someone else’s website. It really is that simple and it can be a key tool to growing your business and online presence!

Guest blogging is a content marketing tactic that involves writing content to publish on an existing website and include links back to your own website. Depending on where you publish your article, there will be different requirements as to what is accepted, including whether the post is tagged to say who it was written by, the amount of words and links that can be included in the article and whether it remains on the site permanently. These are all important things to check before making a guest post on a website.

A guest post can not only help marketing based roles, but any company wishing to boost its online presence, promote a product or process or reach new audiences.

How does it work?

Within the guest posting world, there are site providers who have sites readily available to publish your content, and then the opposite, those looking for somewhere to post their content. It is a mutually beneficially exchange between the two sides and ensuring you find the correct match for your content; it can be very successful. The guest posting process is all about finding either the right content to match your site, or the right site to match your content! It is a positive element to add good quality content to your own website, or vice versa, to publish on a good quality website to build your brand awareness. With many guest post transactions there can be a money exchange and this will also need to be discussed between the two parties involved, before making your post.

During the upcoming articles in our Ultimate Guide to Guest posting, we will be delving into the actual benefits but here is a quick diagram from SEOCZAR of the 10 most beneficial elements…

To adopt this marketing tools within your own work through the form of guest posts, there are many platforms available that allow you to process a guest post on their sites and some contain multiple domains to choose from. Platform with multiple domains, do some of the hard work for you and make it easy to find somewhere suitable for your content and ensure that you will get the best results from guest posting.

Look out for the next article where we will be sharing more information on our own guest post site, AI Guest Posts and other platforms.

How to Use Content Marketing Help Grow Your Business?

Posted on | by Jennifer Spencer

Content Marketing is a key marketing driver for many businesses to grow their income and to engage a wider audience in a targeted manner. Here are some of the main ways in which good content marketing can help grow your business:

Research

It is a good suggestion to start by collating a good amount of research around your business that is going to help grow and improve growth on:

  • Exposure – What your current online and social media presence is like?
  • Audience – Who is your target audience and are you successfully engaging with them?
  • Content – Is the content across your business cohesive?

Gaining answers to questions like this will be beneficial when deciding how to apply content marketing, and which methods to use. It will also tell you a lot about your current customers and how you can develop what is currently working within your business and monopolise on their buying habits.

Delivery good quality content

When implementing a content marketing strategy, the goal is to deliver interesting and informative content that your audience will want to engage with and then maximise the potential return on investment in this content through promotion across different channels. Thinking about things like brand awareness, SEO benefits, traffic and sales, and combining this with the interests of your audience, should help you to produce exciting content for your audience.

By sharing good quality content and on a regular basis will keep your audience interested in your business and allow them to invest not only time but also money into your business and grow your sales.

Using a range of channels

With social media and digital services now readily available to help grow your communication channels it can have positive affect and in turn grow your business. Good content marketing will use different formats of digital marketing and target certain audiences to engage with them about your business, encouraging interaction. Judging on your own audience and your content market research you will have understanding of which methods will resonate best. This includes, podcasts, infographic, videos, and blogs.

There are also ways to gain exposure through guest posts, which is publishing your content on another successful website that is relevant to your brand. By gaining exposure to the audience they have already got, will instantly grow yours and enable you to reach customer that you previously would not. Take a look at AI Guest Posts, a platform that has multiple websites to choose from and see which would be most suited to and effective for your content.

After focusing some time to try and improve these areas is a good checklist to help your business. By combining these simple elements and implementing them into your existing business will help to grow your sales, exposure and then hopefully customer base. You do not have to struggle your way through this though, there are useful tools like SEMRush and Hootsuite that can help you plan your content more easily and ensure you are getting the most out of your content marketing to improve your business growth!

Advantages of Having a Content Marketing Plan

Posted on | by Jennifer Spencer

A content marketing plan is an important tool to help grow your business and increase sales. Having an effective plan will ensure your approach to marketing is targeted, cost effective and driving that essential return on investment! 

Sets the four P’s

Product, place, price and promotion. Creating a content marketing plan will give you a strong basis to see how you are going to meet all of the ‘four P’s’ within your marketing. How will you promote and find a suitable place for your product, whilst reaching the appropriate audience? This asks questions like:

  • What is it you are selling? A product or a service?
  • Where are you going to sell it? A shop, online shop, through a platform?
  • What kind of value does your product hold? What kind of profits will you make? Is it a competitive price?
  • What kind of platforms will you use to promote it, social media channels, website, guest post articles?

It defines your target market

Having a plan set in place will help you to define your target market, and customers. By concentrating on what you are actually selling and how you are going to do this, it is a great way to gain understanding of your business and analyse what really puts you above others in the market. It will raise your awareness of other competitors and what you need to be successful. It is important to know the reason you are selling your product and in turn will make you more aware of your target market and what they are looking for when buying your product.

By gaining this understanding of your target market, you will be able to understand exactly what your buyers are looking for and therefore allow you to gain trust and develop loyalty with them. This can then have a positive influence on both sales and generating leads.

Helps create measurable goals and objectives

It can also help you to set targets and goals to make sure you are maintaining the key aim of the business. If you set goals and objectives, it is easy to track how you are going to make and maintain sales, aiming to hopefully increase these sales and then asses how close to your goal you are. This method is a great help to help you focus on which aspects of your business is working and what needs improvement. With the targets you set you can measure how your business is performing and see what aspects are working well or need more attention.

Allows for a cohesive message

With a content marketing plan in place, it will ensure that everyone working on the marketing and sales of your business will be on the same page and working towards the same goals. Having set goals for each area of your business like product, place, price and ways in which you are promoting your business, means that no matter if it is just you working on it or a whole team of people there is set guidelines on the style of your work. It is effective as it is clear how the products translate through your website, shop (either physical or online) and social media.

Planning is essential in all business, and content marketing in no different. With the benefits listed above, getting the initial structure of your plan together first, will be a great start to your planning and guarantee you follow this as it could be crucial instigator in leading your business to success.

How to Use Article Marketing to Improve SEO?

Posted on | by Jennifer Spencer

Included in article marketing should be useful, informative content, created with its online audience in mind. When a specific topic in the article is searched for in a search engine, such as Google, it shows in the web pages, along with blog posts and other sources related to that topic that it is listed in.

Article marketing is a content marketing technique that combines writing and posting articles across different platforms, with the aim to promote the desired business or website through its backlinks included in the article.

The highest-ranking pages are bought to the top of a search engine, this means they have good SEO. So, when an article is being written you can adapt the content and optimise it to help you reach the top of the search engine. Optimising your content can be a very important aspect of your marketing as it can lead to a huge increase in traffic to your website and business.

Article marketing is not only a strategy to improve your SEO; it can also generate traffic through many different channels, such as social media. With businesses growing their reach across different audiences, they can adapt their content with their posts to suit the platform. Here are some of the platforms listed below:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • Other blogs
  • Guest posts
  • Email campaigns

When starting your article marketing it can be easier to create bitesize steps to establish what best fits your business and the users you are trying to reach. These are some of our recommended, simple steps for you to get your content exactly how you would like:

1. Choosing Your Topic

Firstly, you will need to choose a topic that you know will be of interest to your audience. Create a list of these areas which you think will be the most effective whilst thinking about the key parts to your business that are most enquired about e.g. cost, designs, content, service?

2. Research Your Keywords

Now you have your topic and aspects that are going to be included, you will need to plan the keywords that are relevant and will be most searched for in a search engine. There is no use including words that are not used in your field or are never searched for.

To help with this step, there are many tools like Semrush that will be useful in this stage of the process. By doing some research into specific words and if they will be effective to your SEO.

3. Writing Your Content

With your research done, you can now start taking on board what you have learnt so far and begin writing your content. This is also a good time to analyse your content and make sure it has great SEO, helping it to rank higher in the search engine. Some of the aspects include the following features:

  • An interesting title and clear headings throughout your text.
  • Ensure your content is interesting.
  • Adding internal and external links.
  • Using a good URL structure.

Another feature that would be beneficial to add at this time would be different types of media. Add some creativity into your article with images, videos, digital tools and PDF’s which will attract a larger audience and improve your SEO!

4. Publishing Your Content

Now your content is ready to go you will need to find a platform that will publish your work. It is important to find a platform that has the right audience for your content, and provide the best results. There are many platforms and blogs, that will host your article on their site and include a link back to your website to drive more traffic. Look at useful platforms like AI Guest Posts and FAT JOE, that will publish you articles for a small fee and you will benefit from their large audiences and reach across popular industries.

Now the hard work is done, watch the results of your article marketing and see how successful it will be to your SEO and bringing traffic to your website.

The Types of Content Marketing

Posted on | by Jennifer Spencer

Content marketing is the creation of information and content and how this can be shared across different materials and formats, such as videos, blog and social media. The main idea is to entertain or inform the audience, whilst delivering a business goal. Here is an example of some of the variety of content marketing that is used across different businesses:

  • Blogging
  • Video
  • Podcasting
  • Infographics
  • Email
  • Visual content
  • E-books
  • Newspapers
  • Presentations
  • Quizzes’/tools
  • Checklists
  • Courses
  • Webinars
  • Free apps
  • Social media posts

When thinking of content marketing, the two most popular ways, which have grown hugely, are blogging and podcasts. The statistics for blogging have increased globally, but in the U.S. the number of bloggers between 2014-2020 increased by 10 million!! Similarly, the global growth for podcasting is expected to increase by 31% for 2028. With huge markets like these, is it understandable how content marketing has become so varied and can appeal to larger audiences.

Here is a more in depth look at some of the most popular types of content marketing:

Blogging

After being around for such a long time, blogging still accounts for a large percentage of the content marketing that is out there. With most blogs being written about products or services relating to a business, it is easy to see the results made from creating the blog and why they are so popular. Alongside this, blogs also carry a non-expensive price tag – ideal for small businesses or those on a tight budget. You can find free options or choose platforms to post your blog that you know will reach a much larger audience.

Blogs are also a great form of content marketing to use whether your business is small or large. If you have a small business and you begin posting a blog, this will entice the following you are looking for or alternatively, if you are an established business, the personal touch of a blog will add a genuine nature to your business and show your audience you are a trustworthy brand.

Social Media

Like blogging, social media is also huge in the content marketing industry. There are now so many different channels to engage with your audience, and this element does set social media apart from other types of marketing. By creating a social media post, the ideal result is to be seen and engage with your audience with an almost instant reaction or feedback from them.

Like blogging, this is also does not take much funding, unless you are looking to push this further and track your results and analytics. By tracking the results on your social media content, you will be able to see what is working and generating the most traffic to your site.

Podcasts

With podcasts, the initial cost of equipment and set up is a little more to take on than blogging but the potential audience for this could be huge. It is important to plan what you are going to say in your podcast to make sure it is not just ‘off the cuff’ and meets the reason of why you are doing the podcast. After all, the main aim of the podcast is to raise awareness of your brand and target those areas that are harder to reach with other types of content marketing.

Like with social media, there are lots of celebrities who have also joined the world of podcasting as a way of creating a relationship with their fan, just like businesses can do with clients. Podcasts can be found on many popular apps like iTunes, Spotify, and many radios stations and websites. They are convenient for people to listen to on the move, and they can do this at any time.

Conclusion

Whichever type of content marketing you choose for your business, remember you need to create a clear and well-documented plan. When creating your content marketing strategy, you should:

  • Consider who your target audience is
  • Define your brands identity
  • Understand your buyers’ journey
  • Know the benefits of your products and services
  • Identify measurable goals
  • Create an action plan

Creating a content marketing strategy sounds like a daunting task, however if it’s done right, there is no reason why you shouldn’t start seeing some immediate results!

What is a SERP (Search Engine Results Page)?

What is a SERP (Search Engine Results Page)?

Posted on | by root

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. This is the page that a search engine displays to the user when they submit a search query. For example, if you go to Google and type in ‘what is martech?’ and press enter or click the search emblem, the search engine results page (or SERP) will be the pages that are returned to you.

You will notice that the search engine will most likely not return only one single results page, depending on your search term but quite likely it will return thousands or even millions of results pages.  Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques allow businesses and their marketing teams to rank higher on search engines. Obviously, page one would be the ultimate goal for businesses, the fact is that most users will not go beyond pages 2 or 3 to find the content, business, service or product they are looking for.

Where a business ranks on search engine results pages is an important factor for most businesses, particularly those that seek to increase organic traffic to their website. According to stats published on Expand Digital website, ‘businesses that show up on the first page of results get 92% of consumer traffic’. Here you will also find other useful stats that will aid in your SEO efforts.

Google is the most used search engine, who typically have around 90%+ market share. It is however worth considering that Google is not the only search engine used, others include Bing, Yahoo!, MSN Search, AOL, Ask.com and Yandex, amongst others.

What is a SERP (Search Engine Results Page)?