So if you’re reading this, you’re interested in getting your Business on Social Media, which is good. It also means your Business should be! It also means your Business isn't on Social Media right now, and it should be! However, it can be really hard to choose...
Continue ReadingConnecting your business to new opportunities through Social Media We are all very much witnessing (and living through) the rise of social. Whether you’re a business trying to increase sales, or simply someone looking to gain a larger following through social; we’re all familiar with the...
Continue ReadingSocial Media etiquette guide for businesses: Do you ever observe poor social media marketing and wonder “what was that person thinking”?! Well, being a social media marketer that occurrence happens frequently in my life (yes I like to go wild on Fridays). My amigos, it’s your lucky...
Continue ReadingOne new addition to Google+ that I've been particularly pleased about is the introduction of the new 'Dashboard' feature for Google+ Pages. The dashboard allows you to view all of your recent notifications, an overview of your followers, all the managers of your page, any...
Continue ReadingOutreach seems to be the buzzword of 2013 so far and we have seen countless articles about how to source outreach opportunities. With this in mind I have been trying to find slightly different approaches toward carrying out effective outreach and ways to identify individuals to build relationships with. I have talked a lot through the latter stages of 2012 about the importance of building niche-specific relationships with influencers in order to create a sustainable link-building campaign. What I am now going to show you is how to actually identify who your current influencers are and how you can benefit from building a relationship with them.
Let’s start with what I mean by an ‘influencer‘ of your website: An influencer is someone who actively reads, shares and/or engages with your site’s content. This could be through sharing your blog articles on social media, linking back to your content or generally talking about your website/brand in one way or another. For the purposes of this article I will be concentrating more on content influencers as opposed to general brand evangelists, mainly because if I start getting into complete brand influencers then I could be writing for some time!
Last Thursday, the 6th of December, Vic Gundotra announced Google’s latest attempt at toppling Facebook/Twitter to sit atop of the social media macrocosm, Google+ Communities. The introduction of this LinkedIn/Facebook Groups amalgamation will allow Google+ users to join or create social groups, public or private, which allow them to interact with their peers and like-minded folk in their chosen area(s). Whether it is sports, photography, gaming or pictures of cats, this new feature offers a permanent home to all niches. These groups are user-governed so to speak, with people given the role of moderators to help steady each community.
During this announcement, Vic Gundotra also mentioned how Google+, something which has been often maligned in the past for being a ghost town, is the “fastest growing network thingy ever”, boasting roughly 500 million users, with 135 million of those being active.
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Everyone is talking about creating ‘killer content’ in order to get shared online and talked about. What I’m here to tell you is that ‘killer content’ isn’t always the answer. What you should be focusing on is building long-term relationships that are likely to result in regular sharing of your material. Create content around topics that invoke conversation and trigger an emotional response from the people who view it. By doing this you will be able to sustain a flow of social shares for your content in the future and expand your total reach.
One of the biggest problems with link building is the mindset that people get in when they embark upon it. If you get too wrapped up in trying to squeeze as much as you can from others then it can leave them feeling like the relationship is a bit one-sided. Add value to other peoples’ content and help them to achieve their objectives and you will most certainly reap the long-term benefits.
An important and often overlooked part of any SEO campaign is actually the search engine conversion aspect. What I mean by this is getting people to actually click through to your website when you appear in the search listings. Obviously, ranking high in the results page helps toward this, but there are also many other factors that play a part toward getting that all important visit to your website. One of these factors is content authorship.
Google have been making many changes to the way that the search results are displayed with a variety of different blended result formats. One of these changes was to display additional information on content authors.
A fantastic article from Cyrus Shepard on the SEOmoz blog looked into the effect on click-through rates after changing the Google+ profile image that is shown next to the search result listing. The results showed that with an improved profile image there was an increase in organic traffic by 35%. This indicates that there is clearly an advantage to be gained by having your author image displayed next to your search listing. It also tells us that making sure you use an appropriate image is just as important!