7 Types of Content to Get Traffic, Links and Social Exposure

I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently working with clients on their content strategies for 2012.  Its something I’ve been keen to evangelise and get them to invest resource into, some clients have been harder than others to convince!  I can see why its sometimes a hard thing to buy into, but I firmly believe that having a solid content strategy in place is essential for the majority of sites we work with.  Tom wrote this post on content marketing yesterday which I’d urge you to go and read.

Why companies struggle with content marketing

Two of the common problems that many companies have with content production are -

• Resource to create content – many do not have time or specialist writers in-house
• They lack ideas of what content they can create or their industry is “boring”

There are more, but these are probably the consistent ones that I hear.

I am hoping that the rest of this post helps solve these problems.  I’ve given the following examples for a few reasons -

• Most of them can be used across most industries – boring or not
• They don’t all require hours and hours of resource to get done
• They will help you get traffic or links or both

Getting Inspiration

Before diving into examples, I wanted to give some pointers and tools for how to get inspiration for your clients content. It can be difficult at times, particularly if you have a client in an industry that doesn’t seem particularly interesting at first glance.

Brainstorming internally and with the client

First step should be a bit of a no brainer. But remember some key points to running a good brainstorm session and don’t overlook the opportunity to brainstorm with your client if that is an option. This can have lots of advantages, one of which being that the client can veto or approve edgy ideas straight away. So the outcome will be a list of ideas which you know you can get sign off for which makes the time you send researching more focused.

Non-competitor analysis

You all know to look at what competitors are doing, again thats a no brainer. But make sure you look outside your vertical too and see what cool stuff other people are doing, sometimes you’ll come across an idea that can be easily applied to your own niche or a concept that can be applied to your own content.  For example, with the right data, could you become the Ok Cupid of your industry?

Spezify

I’ve mentioned this before but its worth mentioning again. I love Spezify. If you are ever in a jam and have a bit of brain freeze, plug a keyword or two into it and leave it for a few minutes. It will go off and aggregate loads of tweets, images and all sorts of other results to give you an idea of what is being talked about right now.

For some extra fun, plug a friend or colleagues name into it and see what it finds 

So what here we go with seven types of content you can produce for traffic and link building.

Video Content

This is something which is getting bigger and bigger within Google SERPs at the moment and I think that websites that get on board with this now can dominate in the future. For me, there are two ways you can leverage video content to help your website.

As a link building tool – I’ve written before about getting links using your YouTube videos which is something I’d highly recommend. The other way you can leverage videos is to create your own and use them as link bait – but this is hard. If you have the resources, then go for it and create your own videos.  Just take a look at Zappos who have over 50,000 product videos!

This leads me onto the second way you can leverage video content.

To increase click-throughs from SERPs - Take a look at this result from Zappos:

This puts them a step ahead (see what I did there) of their competitors.  If they can get to a point where their product pages are ranking well and have these snippets showing, then they will most likely see an increase in click through rate from search results because they stand out so much.

We’ve been doing some testing lately on a client site where we are trying to get a video showing in SERPs which when clicked, go straight to the client site rather than somewhere like Vimeo or YouTube.  So far its been working well and I’d recommend using something like Wistia to help you with this.

Infographics

I’ll say it, I don’t really like them that much.  The reason being that I see so many terrible ones that can’t even be classed as infographics.  I also think there are sometimes easier and more efficient ways to get links.  That being said, they can (and do) get links.  If you have the time and resource to do them well, then infographics can be a good way of getting links.

I’ve stolen a few principles from Mark which I’m going to put here.  Really, infographics should do the following if they are to be successful -

• Answer a question or solve someones problem
• Be based on real data that can be backed up
• Make data or facts easier to digest than written content
• Show the user something they didn’t already know

If you do have a good infographic to promote, there are loads of sites out there which are dedicated to just infographics, I published a list here of the ones which I know of.

I know what some of you are thinking, infographics are mega expensive to produce.  Yes they can be, but they do not have to be.  Take a look at this one which Mark did on his personal site which attracted 115 linking root domains.  All he used was a camera and some nice cake mix!

Interactive Content

This excites me a lot more than static infographics.  For me, the companies who find a way of bridging the gap between their product and interactive content will win in the long term.  Lets take a look at an example.

I love this World Cup planner by Marca.  Imagine if you were a retailer of tickets for the World Cup and you produced this.  Imagine you could click through and purchase tickets for the game of your choice, but rather than the standard way of finding them, you use this interactive selector?

This is a perfect use of interactive content because it attracts people to your website for being genuinely useful, but it doesn’t end there, you can convert these people into buyers with the right integration and calls to action.

The next step of link building and content marketing is the integration of this interactive content onto product and category pages – solving the age old problem of getting links to ecommerce pages.  Do this and you’ll win the internet – its hard though!

Q&A Content

If you are tight on budget, this can be a great one to use.  Chances are that whatever product or service you sell, you get common questions about it.  If you have email support staff, they probably have standard copy and paste answers that go into emails – is that content on your website and indexable?  If not, get it on there.

The beauty of this type of content is that it has the ability to attract traffic as well as links, in particular in technical fields.  Also, it is obvious that Google are moving towards becoming a better place to get direct answers to questions, searches such as this prove it -

The trend for users searching using a question rather than a keyword is growing too, look at the insight data for “how can” and “does the” -

If you can position yourself as a site where you provide direct answers, you will not only get good long tail traffic, but you will also move towards becoming an authority in your field.

Make sure you take a look at the Wordtracker Question Tool which can give you some ideas of what people ask related to your keywords.  Also look at your keyword data in Google Analytics and filter for keywords which include things like “how” “what” and “can” etc.

Bonus for ecommerce sites – if you can tie Q&A content into your product pages, you have a massively scalable way of getting good quality, relevant content onto your product pages.  Here is an example of how Jessops are doing this -

I don’t believe this content is currently crawlable, but if it were, long tail traffic would most likely increase.

User Generated Content

You’ve all read about customer reviews as user generated content, but what about other forms of content such as images or videos?  Amazon have been doing this for a long time now but smaller retailers are doing this too, even this retailer that sells garden sheds -

You may need to add an incentive to get customers to go to the effort of this, but even if its just a 10% off voucher, some will do it and you have another sale.

Pro tip – make sure you are asking these customers if they have a blog, Facebook or Twitter accounts.  If they do, send them appropriate calls to action to get them to share the images once they are live on your site.

Guest Blogging

I bet most of us have spent time guest blogging to get links for clients, but how many of you have invited guest bloggers onto your blog to write for you?  It has two main advantages -

• Allows you to get good content if your own resource or time is short
• The writers will naturally share it and link to their article

You will need to dedicate some time to quality control, but this will not be anywhere near as much as you writing the content yourself.

Taking things a step further, you can also use a few principles of gamification to motivate your guest bloggers.  For example you can reward bloggers who get the most traffic, most links or social shares with a random prize.  The key is to make this reward publicly visible and be super transparent about how bloggers can win these prizes.

Competitions

Don’t dismiss this one.  If you can get creative enough, this can not only be a content win but also a link building one.

If you can find a way of coming up with a competition which involves people producing content in order to win, you are onto a winner.  Here is an example of this on PostGrad which involved getting entrants to visualise a piece of data.  The best visualisation won the competition and was featured on the blog.  This not only got links but provided great content for their site -

You can be pretty flexible on the type of content you ask for -

• Written content such as a blog post
• Images – e.g. baiting photographers for their best photos
• Videos – e.g. record a video of yourself singing a song

Some thought it needed to make sure the barrier to entry is low but the quality of the output is high, but this is definitely possible across most industries.

To wrap up, I know that producing great content is not easy.  But you need to at least make a start on the path to getting it right, online brands who are not investing in content are going to get left behind.
Written By: Paddy Moogan Source: Distilled.net

Top 10 WordPress Plugins Every Blogger Should Know in 2012

How can you wow your readers when they visit your blog, so that they never want to leave again?

With over 900,000 new blogposts that are freshly published every day, the competition is fierce for each and every author.

Yet, making your articles the ones that readers want to come back to check out isn’t so hard. On each and every occasion I would argue that providing amazing content is absolutely key.

For this post though, I want to focus on how you can greatly improve the number of shares and awesomeness of your blog, with some of the latest WordPress Plugins.

Here are my top 10 picks for you, to increase Social Media sharing of your articles and blog performance:

#1 Digg Digg – Powerful and simple social sharing buttons

The first plugin I want to introduce is the well known Digg Digg sharing bar, which recently received a major face lift. Social Proof of sharing is one of the most important things for blogpost I found. From BrightEdge’s research, it has proven to increase Social sharing by up to 7 times if included.

Digg Digg makes it super easy to add a floating share bar to your blogpost, just like Mashable for example. You can also choose to add buttons either before or after your posts with the plugin.

Best part: Digg Digg also features the latest sharing button options such as Pinterest andBuffer.

#2 Hello Bar – Convert more readers with a powerful call to action

Another very powerful plugin every blogger should know about is called Hello Bar. It adds a simple line above your articles that you can fill with any message you wish. Personally, I have been using Hello Bar to promote products, events or simply evergreen blogposts.

The plugin is used and trusted by some of the biggest bloggers out there, including Tim Ferris or Eric Ries. It also offers some great customization options, to be either displayed at the top of your page or at the bottom.

Best part: What is most impressive about Hello Bar is the analytics options, allowing you to track exactly how many clicks you are getting on your promotions.

#3 WP Touch – Make your blog mobile friendly

As we are going forward in 2012, not having your blog optimized for the millions of iPhone, Android and other smartphone users is definitely not an option I found. One of the best solutions out there is definitely WP Touch.

Within a split second of installing this plugin, anyone arriving at your blog from a mobile phone will have a wonderfully formatted site in front of them. It gives you some great customization options so you can truncate titles, hide excerpts and other things that are a pain to get working on your mobile normally.

Best part: What I like best with WP Touch is that it has advertising options built in right into the plugin, so you can capitalize more on mobile traffic.

#4 Sexy Bookmarks – Easy sharing of all social bookmarking sites

An awesome plugin solution to add a ton of different social bookmarking buttons to your blog is Sexy Bookmarks by Shareaholic. Especially if you are looking for a plugin that covers some not so well known buttons, this one will be providing them for you.

The plugin also comes with the option to be installed for a great number of other blogging platforms such as tumblr or as a standalone for any website. It is overall a most solid solution for your blog.

Best part: What I like best is the customization option to add a small line of text, that adds that extra amount of personalization to your blog.

#5 W3 Total Cache – Make your site 10 times faster than before

To be quite honest, I have always forgotten about the importance of performance plugins for my own blog. Yet, some great research from KISSmetrics, showing how loading times can affect visiting times of your readers. In fact, half a second of longer loading time would lead to 20% traffic decrease for Google.com.

With W3 Total Cache, you have one of the most powerful caching plugins out there, that will increase the loading time of your blog up to 10 times. It will cache each and every element of your site and readers will be able to read your posts in a split second.

Best part: What I like best is that you are able to individual turn on or off Object Caching, Database caching and other options so performance is absolutely optimized.

#6 The Slide – Suggest related posts to your readers

There have been many attempts of products that aim to keep readers on your site after they have read one of your articles. The Slide is a simple plugin that slides into your page, halfway through an article, just like the New York Times has for example.

What I like about this plugin is that the article suggested is not just any article. The Slide uses a sophisticated algorithm to pick the most relevant and related content for your readers. You can also check out a related plugin called upPrev, as The Slide is currently in private beta.

Best part: An amazing part is that the Slide also allows you to place sharing buttons right on the widget and get more social traffic for your blog.

#7 Twitter Follow Button and Facebook subscribe buttons

Of course, strictly no wordpress plugins, the Twitter follow button and Facebook subscribe button are two of the most indispensable things for bloggers still though I believe.

Although mentioning the two buttons is quite an obvious tip for many, as they are quite well known, there are still a lot of blogs, who don’t make use of them. Both can easily be implemented by copy and pasting the code snippet into a sidebar text widget on your blog.

Best part: What I like best about the two buttons is that the process of following or subscribing is so seamless and doesn’t cause the reader to leave the page.

#8 All in one SEO Pack – The only SEO plugin you will need

Although there exist a ton of great SEO solution out there, one of the most reliable and well maintained plugins is the “All in one SEO Pack”. Especially if you aren’t too familiar with any SEO tactics, this plugin makes it dead simple to understand the most important ones.

The plugin automatically generates Meta tags, optimizes your post titles for search engines and helps you to detect and avoid duplicate content. Even if you have very little SEO knowledge, this plugin will be of great help for you.

Best part: A goodie to mention from this plugin is that it enables you to manually include META tags (title, description and keywords) for each page and post on your site.

#9 Social Metrics – Track how well your posts perform on Social Networks

Another handy solution every blogger should know about is a plugin called Social Metrics. It gives you a slick dashboard inside your WordPress interface, and allows you to track and compare how well each of your posts perform on Social Media.

By being able to track each of your posts in comparision to each other, I found that I could focus a lot better on improving my content. It is also interesting to see, that some posts perform better on different social networks.

Best part: What I like best about Social Metrics is that there is no setup involved for you and you can start tracking seconds after you install the plugin.

#10 Social Media Widget – Display all your Social profiles in one place

A lot of the times, you might want to display larger amount of your different Social Media profiles, especially as Pinterest and others are being added to the mix and official buttons aren’t available yet.

With the super easy to handle Social Media widget, you will be able to do exactly that and display any Social Networking profile you can think of.

Best part: What is super handy with this plugin, is that you are even able to create your own icons of Social Media accounts and personalize the look and feel much more.

Those are the 10 most indispensable WordPress plugins for 2012 I believe. Each of them has definitely given my blog a huge boost. I hope some of them are helpful for you too. Which plugin is your favorite of the above?
Written By: Leo Widrich Source: JeffBullas.com

Avoid 5 Common Mistakes When Writing For The Web

Writing for the web is a unique style of writing. It’s easy to make mistakes that drive the audience away and you only have a very small window of opportunity to grab their attention. People skim when they read online, so online writing needs to be punchy to draw attention. Here are 5 common mistakes people make writing online. If you can avoid these you’re on the way to web success.

1. Not Grabbing Attention

You need to grab the attention of your audience when they visit. Sounds simple but when you are dealing with a few seconds to accomplish this, the task becomes a bit more difficult – and even more important.

Short and Sweet

Keep your paragraphs short and pack every word with value. Your titles and subheadings need to catch the eye and speak directly to what the section deals with. Whatever you do, don’t sacrifice content in favor of short blurbs. You want your reader to read them and come away knowing something new, not wondering what the point was.

For emphasis in content paragraphs, make things stand out. Use bold tags for keywords. If you’re using links, give them descriptive text instead of just a hyperlink. All of these are ways you can grab the attention of your readers and hold it while they browse your content.

2. Not Utilizing Formatting

Formatting is important in web reading. There are a number of mistakes that can be made in formatting. Make sure everything is aligned properly in different browsers. You don’t want your text to create a horizontal scroll bar. Make sure everything wraps properly.

Create Breaks in Content

Use line breaks for paragraphs. Break up long paragraphs into multiple smaller paragraphs. List information in list format with numbered lists or bullet points. White space in your text is just as important as the text itself. If you have giant walls of dense paragraphs, the average reader’s eyes will glaze over and they’ll skip over the page.

3. Not Being Relevant

Your content above all needs to be relevant. Think about your audience. Who are they? Make sure you’re writing content that your readers will actually want to read. That’s what separates online journals with blogs. Journals are personal information that means nothing to anyone else, blogs are of public interest and relevancy.

Stick to the Subject

You need to be honest with yourself about your writing. You can’t delude yourself into thinking your content is important when it’s not, or that your readers care when they don’t. However, that doesn’t mean you need to write everything in a far-off impersonal tone. Write personally, directly to the reader, and entice them.

4. Not Obeying Grammar

Grammar rules are incredibly important online. It seems like everywhere you go you spot people writing with u instead of you and other chat shortcuts. That might be fine for texting, but web writing is entirely different. The more work your readers have to do to read, the less likely any of them will. Write properly.

5. Not Being Specific

This comes back to knowing your readers. If you use business terms, specific medical terms, acronyms or other esoteric words, define them. If your readers don’t understand what you’re writing, you’re not writing well enough. Anything that might not be commonly known to your readers deserves a definition.

Once you realize that writing for the web is almost the opposite of academic writing, it all falls into place. Every word needs to be important to your readers. Put some effort into it, know your readers, and your web writing will succeed.
Written By: Brendan Schneider Source: Business2Community.com

Content Marketing Wisdom: “Any Content…Has to Be More Than Just an Occasional Exercise.”

Weidert Group is a full-service marketing firm that has established its employees as thought leaders in the field of inbound marketing via the Whole Brain Marketing Blog. The Weidert team also develops content marketing strategies for its clients, covering a range of industries that include alternative energy, healthcare, food service, and various others.

We recently spoke with the crew behind Whole Brain Marketing—editor Sean Johnson, account executive Frank Isca, and creative director Meg Hoppe—about how their content marketing program has progressed, as well as their advice for companies looking to develop their own content programs.



We blog five days a week. For this we have five regular contributors and a part-timer. When blogging so frequently, burnout is inevitable. We prevent this by having weekly meetings to talk about ideas and themes to keep the content fresh and moving. We also ask our sales department about the questions that are frequently asked by customers and compile the answers into a blog.

In the beginning, we were blogging because it seemed like it was something that should be done. We weren’t very dedicated to it and, not surprisingly, we didn’t see a lot of feedback from the blog. Now our goal is to publish information that answers a need, and to create opportunities to convert prospects into leads and eventually into customers. We regularly review our content to see what types of posts are driving reader responses.

We keep our topics to a 70/20/10 rule. Seventy percent is informational content on inbound marketing, 20 percent is geared toward tools and how-to, and the last 10 is content designed to promote us. Our content integrates a call-to-action, which we leverage through HubSpot, in order to gain new leads and new business.

We’ve had steady growth in our blog’s readership since we committed to publishing each business day. There are some topics, such a Pinterest, where we see large spikes in readership, and others that do not get much traction. We review those results regularly and are always trying to refine how we present information in our blog. We want to make sure we are providing information that is useful, as well as links to additional and more detailed information.

Content marketing and inbound marketing need a commitment if you expect to see positive results. Any content, whether it is a blog or tip sheet or a Facebook post, has to be more than just an occasional exercise. You need to provide quality information on a regular basis to keep prospects interested and see any benefits in your search results.

A good blog can support many other things—from tip sheets to e-books to content for your social media—and it can function like a backbone for your content marketing.
Written By: D.T. Pennington Source: Business2Community.com