#but this specific post is about the images that give a web weave kind of feeling

[basil-daisy]

OMORI (2018 DEMO) / OMORI (2020) by Omocat | The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

[mintacle]

So you want to make one of those neat little posts with the images and the texts that read like a poem and have an overarching theme, but you don't even know what they're called, let alone how to do them. This post is your sign from God (me) to make one because I love them so much and also some tips on what I do.

1. What are these things even called? these are called web weaves or web weavings and as far as I'm aware their pretty much only on tumblr rn.

2. What kind of things can I use? Literally anything. The more various your scources, the cooler. You can use peoms, books, lyrics. Paintings, Graphics, photos, stills. Messages, posts, asks, comments. I especially love to use posts or messages etc. that someone posted in a very mundane manner and elevating it with the web weave and acknowledging the poetry in our everyday life.

3. How do I put it together? I first gather all the material I want to use into one draft, then I rearrange over and over again and see what effect it has on me. The main method I use to judge whether I am satisfied with my web weave is if it has an effect on me. If not, then I rework it again and again.

4. But how do I even start my first one? So, I have a folder with close to 300pics of potential material for web weaves. My advice is to start gathering your own stuff, take screenshots of literally anything that makes you feel stuff. Keep your eyes open in the real world for graffiti or bathroom stall scribbles that make you feel something. Poetry is just words that mean more than just their content and that is present everywhere.

5. Should I title my webweave? I prefer to give my web weaves a title or short caption, because it makes it easier to understand the theme. Themes can be anything, from vague concepts like "love" or "guilt" to very specific things like "I wear headphones all the time because I was screamed at so much, I never want to be screamed at again, I need a voice screaming at me all the time." Art speaks for itself, but titles often still help your audience understand the register of your art to even know how to listen.

6. Sources. I'm really bad at this one. Try to take screenshots in which you include the source you got it from. It's good practice to list all the sources in order at the end of the webweave. But often I end up with webweaves of which there are at least half of the screenshots I don't even remember where I got from. The oy thing I think is absolutely inacceptable is using someone else's post or art without asking for permission and crediting them.

Ok, I can't think of anything else rn, but ask box is open (as always) and if anyone wants some pointers do not hesitate to message me either, I am crazy about web weaves and will absolutely support anyone who wants to try their own hand at one.

[findinstagramfollowers]

Instagram: All about Using It for Services

Is your brand on Instagram? What are you doing to reinforce your brand there? Are you still figuring out ways in which you can boost your presence there? Today we will certainly be taking a look at ways in which Instagram can be used for services.

Instagram Stories

First things first. Instagram's "Snapchat-like" stories are the current buzz in the world of social networks. We will certainly speak about that very first. Instagram Stories refer to a collection of videos and photos that can be posted to a various feed from your normal one. These stories go away after 24 hr. Meanwhile, the tale remains to be shown chronologically when you include content to it. There is range to edit your web content with enjoyable emojis, finger paint and also message. The video clips and images on this feed cannot truly resemble or discussed but you will be able to send a message from the Stories on the slideshow to your customer. You can even share parts of the tales on your regular feed.

Currently, the concern is just how specifically a Social media site Monitoring Business can take advantage of this function to improve brand understanding? We will discover exactly how.

Instagram Stories are a terrific opportunity for safeguarding interaction online. Any kind of sagacious advertiser would certainly understand that. Firstly, it can be a terrific means with the help of which you can give your customers a sneak-peek of what's happening behind the scenes. Speak about weaving tales as well as there's absolutely nothing far better than telling them that you're - past your product and services. Tease them with glances of the approaching changes to your website or present them to your group using video clips. These are a few fantastic ways in which you can construct buzz and also involve customers.

Instagram Stories make a particular degree of exclusivity to your web content. Capitalize on this exclusivity to acquire more fans on this system. Use this platform to safeguard even more registrants for webinars or for Facebook video sessions.

Instagram's Formula: What you require to know

The recent formula modification presented by the system has attracted the focus of B2C companies. Previously, your blog posts appeared chronologically on the feed. In the wake of the modification, nevertheless, just blog posts that are most likely to garner the greatest degree of focus or interaction in the form of likes, comments, as well as shares, appear at the top. Instagram, from now on, will certainly try to evaluate the sort of passion a post will certainly be able to produce. Discuss Artificial Intelligence!!

Services, because of this, are required to change their social media sites methods due to the fact that they would certainly intend to get their latest blog posts show up first. If they don't then there's hardly any point of sharing them at the starting point. There is a need to react to this change with significant immediacy. Ask your fans to activate their notification, use appropriate hashtags to bring in discussions on recent topics as well as reinforce concentrate on the production of shareable as well as click-worthy material. Make certain you're picking the right marketing tools to measure the success of your web content- shares, clicks, audience development, as well as click-through.

[shorthaircutsmodels]

25+ Trendy Korean Short Haircuts - https://shorthaircutsmodels.com/trendy-korean-short-haircuts/ - Trendy Korean Short Haircuts, At the point when we talk about Korean hairdos for ladies the main idea that rings a bell is popular and slick short Korean haircuts. Korean ladies like to wear short hairdos rather than conventional and customary long haircuts. You can go for a couple of hair styling choices while doing short hair. Short hair is increasingly lighthearted and time free so you can without much of a. Stretch accomplish your preferred short hair with no exertion and keep up it in your every day working condition. Trendy Korean Short Haircuts, Another promising component rousing Korean ladies for short haircuts is their physical appearance. Design forward Korean ladies receive short haircuts to look up-to-date and saucy. Short haircuts work best for Korean ladies in view of their flexibility and dynamic methodology. Korean ladies wear any short haircut dependent all over shape hair type and hair surface. Bounce hair styles are certainly staying put and not only for useful reasons. Trendy Korean Short Haircuts Trendy Korean Short Haircuts, Perhaps you may have unearthed a post via web-based networking media. Giving you incredible hair style thoughts for your next hair escape. Else you may be perusing this post since you need another and New Look this year for 2020. Well one thing's without a doubt. You've gone to the opportune spot and now you're in for some treatment. Why you ought to consider getting a Korean short hairdo this year. 2020 ought to be looking crisp so far and to do so you'll likely go to the. Closest salon and ask your most believed beautician to give you another hair style. A lady trimming her hair is going to transform her. Short Haircuts Trendy Korean Short Haircuts, Korean short hair has been around for a long time currently welcoming ladies to simply complete it for themselves. This universal hair style pattern began from one of the most inventive nations on the planet with regards to the excellence of the peaceful South Korean region toward the beginning of the day. This hair style is generally excellent in light of the fact that numerous big names are taken in Korea to have worn that see one point in their vocation and pulled it off as easily as it should. You can tweak this hair style to coordinate your character with huge amounts of present day and new takes. Korean Short Hairstyle 2020 Trendy Korean Short Haircuts, Short bounce can have an incredible haircut whether you are brimming with a rocker disposition or the young lady nearby to say something. On the off chance that you've constantly imagined about volume yet your straight and slim hair isn't doing the stunt you ought to decide on certain waves. WOB wavy bounce is the correct decision for you. A wavy weave. In the event that your hair is long enough do a few twists and leave medium-term. You will adore the outcome when you unbraid them toward the beginning of the day. She combined her WOB haircut with a red lip. Be an attractive miss lackey. Charming Short Asian Hairstyles For 2020 Trendy Korean Short Haircuts, Some have been one of the dull steeds of this current year as far as short hair inclines yet I can genuinely say we sort of observed this coming. Following quite a while of super-long augmentations on top blasts and waves and twists it was surely prime time for a palette invigorate the extent that the eye can see. We originally played with the idea with some blast that we had the option to play with length without truly giving up such a lot. Korean Short Hair 2020 At that point came the now dissipated La throw all over the place. At that point came a least layered static edge of 90s revival and afterward here we are at gruff bounce focal. Also you can clearly accept that South Koreans are exceptionally quick pattern connectors one of the first right now bounce train. In case you're in the very same circumstance or need to change your hair yet don't have a clue how to begin our communicate today will take care of your concern. Cute Short Haircuts For Asian Girls 2020 In case you're especially inspired by Korean dramatizations and K pop shows you can see that Korean entertainers and icons consistently look in broad daylight with a stylish and appealing hairdo regardless of how we weave to make a straightforward bun even Korean young lady haircuts consistently look extraordinary. So today Bequeenhair will show you a rundown of Korean hairdos that will rouse you. In case you're searching for a short hair style the accompanying Korean short hairdos will be actually what you're searching for. Korean Short Hairstyle Female 2020 Asian haircuts all in all particularly Korean hairdos specifically have just experienced huge change each year and are step by step asserting their situation on the rundown of the world's best rundown of in vogue haircuts. Best Kpop Short Hair images The straightforward yet appealing short hair style that follows the Korean style is getting progressively famous. The short dull wavy bounce is a standout amongst other Korean short hairdos for round appearances. Best Korean Short Hairstyle İmages This hair style can without much of a stretch work out in a good way for various hair shading and outfit style. The hairdo that is famous for somebody 2020 is a popular perfect and simple style. Would you like to blur or undermine short to medium or long hair there are astounding trims and styles to look over. Korean Short Hair Men The Korean entertainer hairdo is a positive choice to attempt in 2020. Korean on-screen character hairdo 2020 is the best haircut to attempt now. See the most recent hair patterns to discover the haircut of exemplary and present day style trim hair relying upon the kind of hair. Korean Short Hairstyles 2020 Female The data we can send is identified with hairdo 2020 article with the title 25 + propelled Korean on-screen character haircut 2020. The rise of k fly over the most recent couple of years has brought an exceptionally fascinating and drawing in look in the realm of style and design. We are discussing the styles of Korean men obviously. They have gradually become well known and have become a part of the Backstreet Boys and the East regarding pattern. I was increasingly inquisitive. Short Hairstyles For Korean Women That'Ll Blow Your Mind Look down to see the full rundown and press the game at the base for a snappy recap. first. Basic Korean men's hair styles we should begin with an extremely basic however current hair style that Korean men have been embracing. Short Korean Hairstyles Male A brush with a side piece with a tricky surface with basically no layers. Hair sparkle specialist is discretionary. The eternity stylish hairdo keeps on being mainstream and whether you have more slender or thicker hair there's an excellent weave haircut that suits you. Trendy Korean Short Hairstyles That You Must Try Today Try not to trust us. She is the agent executive of Japan's Tricca salon's hair expert Toshihide Mori and the Ambassador of the Shiseido Professional Beauty inventive group who share her recommendation on short hairdos for Asian ladies. Many have the discernment that it is hard to keep up short hair. So it's ideal to attempt a sway trim with a confided in beautician who suggests Toshihide who has over 20 years involvement with the hair business. I accept wavy bounce will keep on being well known in 2020 as it gives independence and presentations one's regular twists relying upon the surface of the hair. The Most Fantastic Korean Hairstyles 2020 For Girls I concede I've likely known about the pattern of hair styles including none other than Korean short hair in design for ladies. I comprehend it's wherever via web-based networking media and on the web. In case you're searching for another hairdo or need to get a smooth hair style to change your. Trendy Korean Short Hairstyles To Try in 2020 Style then you'll adore this assortment of the best haircut 2020. It's not to say that sways is the main Korean short hair making the hot circuit at the present time: a few cycles of the edited trim have gone fiercely popular thanks to some extent to Asian big names models brandishing a look and ulzzang's top facial influencers. Korean Short Hairstyles For Round Faces Look through to check whether this drifting look is one you'll before long be bookmarking. These days you need a quick and low-support haircut to stay aware of the high-beat network. Indeed even conventional Asian style patterns have experienced colossal change in the previous scarcely any years. Aside from trendy shapes and styles similarity is additionally a factor to consider. Today how about we investigate 12 beguiling short Asian hairdos with our magnificent photographs beneath. Images For Trendy Korean Short Haircuts Short haircuts can give ladies an easily cool look. Individuals of all age gatherings can have an appropriate short hair to make an appealing style in the city. Layers can assist with encircling the two sides of your face. A delightful since quite a while ago layered hairdo can make. Asian young ladies look excessively adorable with glad jawline length. Snappy side impacts will likewise accomplish this impact for you. In the event that you need to do a short hairdo remaining in. The group simply spot yourself with a flawless gruff blast. Korean Short Hairstyle 2020 Rae is tired of your present haircut and is searching for some hair that is in vogue and stunning. On the off chance that you need to trim your long hair all the time there is no better time presently to ride the short hair wave. The K Drama industry is dropping liberal clues about the rising prominence of short hairdos. It's not hard to comprehend why shorter hair is agreeable is low support and in particular adaptable enough for the vast majority. It doesn't make a difference whether you're a self observer or outgoing individual out of control or coy there's a style to each character and hair type. Korean Short Hairstyles Female 2020 We've even added some style thoughts to make things simpler for you. The grass is constantly greener on the opposite side. Everybody realizes that young ladies with straight hair incline toward. Twists and young ladies with wavy locks attempt to fix them. In the event that you have normally straight hair and. Would prefer not to style your hair with warm devices in every case straight. Hair can be very alluring contrasted with different hairdos. Beautiful Korean Short Haircuts You can discover stunning short straight hair styles and styles whether you are thick or flimsy hair type. The most significant thing is you can put off an additional half hour since straight hair is the simplest hairdo. Bounce's hair style was constantly cherished and increased in value by many. The ones hone the highlights and make them look smooth and alluring. Weave is an immortal haircut that can be worn by anybody.

[laurelkrugerr]

Schema.org is hard, Yoast SEO makes it easy for you

Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk is the founder and Chief Product Officer of Yoast. He’s a digital marketer, developer and an Open Source fanatic.

Getting a Schema.org implementation right on a website was always enormously painful. There was not enough documentation and no good tools to help you to make it truly simple. For years, even the best implementations were still just a fragmented mess. In the spring of 2019, we fixed that with Yoast SEO 11.0 — and we’ve been improving ever since. So, how did we get here and why is it so important to get Schema right?

Table of contents

Structured data front and center

Over the last couple of years, structured data has become one of the main focal points of Google and, therefore, the SEO Company community. Schema structured data drives many of the most recent rich results and there is no end in sight. Structured data gives search engines more insights into how your pages are built and how you describe your content.

In addition, Schema makes it possible to optimize for entities — i.e. people, places and things — and how they relate to each other. This makes a lot of sense for search engines, as it allows them to weave that web of data we’ve been talking about for so long. Schema is an invaluable building block for the Semantic Web.

But, when we started looking at how to improve our Schema implementation, we didn’t find any of those coveted connections on all the sites we researched. We only found individual blocks, without any way for a search engine to find out how everything connects.

That needed to change!

What we found

The best Schema.org implementations we see ‘in the wild’ often look something like this, when seen by Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool:

Fragmented Schema.org markup, showing disparate, unconnected entities

There are seven Schema pieces on that page, but they’re just that: seven pieces without context. It is not clear what their relation to each other is. To a search engine, this page is still a puzzle which needs solving.

In our implementation, which we released in Yoast SEO Company 11.0 and expanded and improved in subsequent releases, all of the pieces “stitch together”: we form them into a nested structure. Without this nesting, a search engine doesn’t know how all these pieces relate to each other, and what the most important piece on a page is. Our implementation also clearly and explicitly defines the “main thing” on that page. This removes all of the guesswork and adds a lot of context for search engines.

Let’s look at an example: a post here on Yoast.com. This post is an Article. The article is the main “thing” of a WebPage, which is part of a Website. This Article is published by an Organization and written by an Author. Both the Author and the Organization have social profiles attached to them. These separate blocks are now all woven together: it’s simply a nested structure.

The @id is the glue

The secret of our delicious graph is one simple “thing”: using @id to connect graph pieces to each other. We output separate pieces but by using those @id references, we connect them to each other. We have been advocating this for a while, and in July 2020, Google also updated it their developer documentation explaining this was the way to go.

Because we can nest them like that, it doesn’t have to stop at that simple structure: the WebPage has a position within the site, outlined by its BreadcrumbsList. The Author, the Organization and the Article have images. Etc. etc. etc. All of that data is combined.

Why did we develop this?

We didn’t just start implementing this for the fun of it. We are solving a real-world problem: as more and more people implement Schema.org markup, the situation shown in the screenshot at the top of this article is no longer unique. Lots of pages, with lots of separate Schema blocks, are a problem. An example? WooCommerce, for instance, puts out pretty good Schema, but when there are related products on a page, it’s almost impossible for search engines to find the main product. Our implementation solves that and many other problems.

On every page, we output the entire graph for that page, and we clearly mark the mainEntity, so Google, Pinterest, and others are no longer left guessing. Every relationship is made explicit.

What does this mean for you?

This change has short-term implications: you have a higher chance of getting:

Correct info in Google Knowledge Panels and full support for Rich Article Pins on Pinterest, due to better Schema output from Yoast SEO Company.

Showing up in a News listing or carousel if you use our News SEO plugin, due to the new NewsArticle support.

Higher chance of product snippets in Google Search results if you use our WooCommerce SEO plugin and full support for Rich Product pins on Pinterest, due to better Product support in it.

Higher chance of good local listing snippets, due to better LocalBusiness schema in our Local SEO plugin.

Getting rich results for your FAQ pages and how-to articles thanks to the free Yoast SEO Company structured data content blocks .

Long term implications for the web

These changes also have long term implications: we weave a web of data. This type of machine-readable data makes it possible for platforms to build much cooler things. We’ve always dreamt of a web connected by entities and its relations — a true Semantic Web. We want to get rid of those loose blobs of data that don’t have meaning.

By making connections, we can start building knowledge graphs for a lot of things. With knowledge graphs, knowledge and understanding come within reach for machines — in return, we get access to information in revolutionary ways that makes it a lot easier to digest for us.

An open standard

Working on research by our resident SEO Company expert Jono Alderson — with input from Google engineers, among others, making it a true community effort —, we set out to rewrite how to best approach implementing Schema markup, and how WordPress can use this efficiently.

Of course, we wouldn’t be Yoast if we didn’t do this all out in the open. We have a full set of developer documentation with all the background you’ll ever need, plus a lot of examples to interact with our Schema API. Everyone can integrate with this, everyone can build upon it; in fact, we encourage you to do that! We’ve also documented all our output, so you can learn from it, copy it, play with it. The specification document explains it all more in-depth and explains all the fantastic research that Jono has been doing in this.

Some more background on how we got here

Looking at the history of Schema, you’ll notice a lot of openness, starting with the birth of the web. The road leading up to Schema was littered with initiatives by different people, companies and standards bodies. This led to a less than optimal adoption of all these Semantic Web building blocks. Seeing this, Google, Bing, Yandex and Yahoo took matters into their own hands and came up with the Schema.org project — or, a structured data vocabulary that everyone can use.

At Yoast, we are part of the Schema community. As we see the enormous impact Schema has, we try to do our best to lend our hand wherever we can. We’ve actively suggested improvements on GitHub, gave feedback on proposals and weighed in on discussions.

Since we’ve been building our own Schema framework for Yoast SEO Company, we had a lot of thoughts on how to deliver the best possible Schema implementation to our users — which in turn would make search engines happy. We’ve shared our findings with the Schema community and proposed improvements that would enhance the code we output on millions of websites.

It’s paying off: Yoast SEO is a serious driver of Schema adoption

Recent research by Rick Viscomi, Sr. Web Developer Programs Engineer at Google and core maintainer of HTTP Archive, shows the impact structured data generated by Yoast SEO Company has. He looked at 1.7 million WordPress sites and found that 73% of those (on desktop) contain at least some kind of structured data. Digging deeper, he found that:

Surprisingly, almost all (99%) WordPress pages that do have Yoast installed use at least one of the structured data formats. Also, these results show that Yoast is found on 37% of all WordPress pages. Only 58% of pages that do not use Yoast use structured data, so Yoast appears to be a big driver in adoption.

Rick Viscomi

That’s incredible, but we’re still only getting started.

This is only the beginning

Today, however, we’re still talking about Schema at a smaller scale, but there’s so much more on the horizon. While adopting is speeding up, it’s still early days for Schema. Google is pushing structured data hard, so expect this to grow for years to come. Almost every pretty new thing is powered by structured data.

This is a big chance for sites, so if you describe your contents with Schema you’re helping search engines like Google make sense of your content. In the future, it can also become the main driver for new (social) platforms and tools. Hopefully, powered by the Yoast SEO Company Schema framework!

We’re deeply excited about all of this and think we’re on to something really big.

Read more: Yoast SEO 11.0: Structured data awesomeness »

SEO Company by DBL07.co

source http://www.scpie.org/schema-org-is-hard-yoast-seo-makes-it-easy-for-you/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/09/schemaorg-is-hard-yoast-seo-makes-it.html

[riichardwilson]

Schema.org is hard, Yoast SEO makes it easy for you

Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk is the founder and Chief Product Officer of Yoast. He’s a digital marketer, developer and an Open Source fanatic.

Getting a Schema.org implementation right on a website was always enormously painful. There was not enough documentation and no good tools to help you to make it truly simple. For years, even the best implementations were still just a fragmented mess. In the spring of 2019, we fixed that with Yoast SEO 11.0 — and we’ve been improving ever since. So, how did we get here and why is it so important to get Schema right?

Table of contents

Structured data front and center

Over the last couple of years, structured data has become one of the main focal points of Google and, therefore, the SEO Company community. Schema structured data drives many of the most recent rich results and there is no end in sight. Structured data gives search engines more insights into how your pages are built and how you describe your content.

In addition, Schema makes it possible to optimize for entities — i.e. people, places and things — and how they relate to each other. This makes a lot of sense for search engines, as it allows them to weave that web of data we’ve been talking about for so long. Schema is an invaluable building block for the Semantic Web.

But, when we started looking at how to improve our Schema implementation, we didn’t find any of those coveted connections on all the sites we researched. We only found individual blocks, without any way for a search engine to find out how everything connects.

That needed to change!

What we found

The best Schema.org implementations we see ‘in the wild’ often look something like this, when seen by Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool:

Fragmented Schema.org markup, showing disparate, unconnected entities

There are seven Schema pieces on that page, but they’re just that: seven pieces without context. It is not clear what their relation to each other is. To a search engine, this page is still a puzzle which needs solving.

In our implementation, which we released in Yoast SEO Company 11.0 and expanded and improved in subsequent releases, all of the pieces “stitch together”: we form them into a nested structure. Without this nesting, a search engine doesn’t know how all these pieces relate to each other, and what the most important piece on a page is. Our implementation also clearly and explicitly defines the “main thing” on that page. This removes all of the guesswork and adds a lot of context for search engines.

Let’s look at an example: a post here on Yoast.com. This post is an Article. The article is the main “thing” of a WebPage, which is part of a Website. This Article is published by an Organization and written by an Author. Both the Author and the Organization have social profiles attached to them. These separate blocks are now all woven together: it’s simply a nested structure.

The @id is the glue

The secret of our delicious graph is one simple “thing”: using @id to connect graph pieces to each other. We output separate pieces but by using those @id references, we connect them to each other. We have been advocating this for a while, and in July 2020, Google also updated it their developer documentation explaining this was the way to go.

Because we can nest them like that, it doesn’t have to stop at that simple structure: the WebPage has a position within the site, outlined by its BreadcrumbsList. The Author, the Organization and the Article have images. Etc. etc. etc. All of that data is combined.

Why did we develop this?

We didn’t just start implementing this for the fun of it. We are solving a real-world problem: as more and more people implement Schema.org markup, the situation shown in the screenshot at the top of this article is no longer unique. Lots of pages, with lots of separate Schema blocks, are a problem. An example? WooCommerce, for instance, puts out pretty good Schema, but when there are related products on a page, it’s almost impossible for search engines to find the main product. Our implementation solves that and many other problems.

On every page, we output the entire graph for that page, and we clearly mark the mainEntity, so Google, Pinterest, and others are no longer left guessing. Every relationship is made explicit.

What does this mean for you?

This change has short-term implications: you have a higher chance of getting:

Correct info in Google Knowledge Panels and full support for Rich Article Pins on Pinterest, due to better Schema output from Yoast SEO Company.

Showing up in a News listing or carousel if you use our News SEO plugin, due to the new NewsArticle support.

Higher chance of product snippets in Google Search results if you use our WooCommerce SEO plugin and full support for Rich Product pins on Pinterest, due to better Product support in it.

Higher chance of good local listing snippets, due to better LocalBusiness schema in our Local SEO plugin.

Getting rich results for your FAQ pages and how-to articles thanks to the free Yoast SEO Company structured data content blocks .

Long term implications for the web

These changes also have long term implications: we weave a web of data. This type of machine-readable data makes it possible for platforms to build much cooler things. We’ve always dreamt of a web connected by entities and its relations — a true Semantic Web. We want to get rid of those loose blobs of data that don’t have meaning.

By making connections, we can start building knowledge graphs for a lot of things. With knowledge graphs, knowledge and understanding come within reach for machines — in return, we get access to information in revolutionary ways that makes it a lot easier to digest for us.

An open standard

Working on research by our resident SEO Company expert Jono Alderson — with input from Google engineers, among others, making it a true community effort —, we set out to rewrite how to best approach implementing Schema markup, and how WordPress can use this efficiently.

Of course, we wouldn’t be Yoast if we didn’t do this all out in the open. We have a full set of developer documentation with all the background you’ll ever need, plus a lot of examples to interact with our Schema API. Everyone can integrate with this, everyone can build upon it; in fact, we encourage you to do that! We’ve also documented all our output, so you can learn from it, copy it, play with it. The specification document explains it all more in-depth and explains all the fantastic research that Jono has been doing in this.

Some more background on how we got here

Looking at the history of Schema, you’ll notice a lot of openness, starting with the birth of the web. The road leading up to Schema was littered with initiatives by different people, companies and standards bodies. This led to a less than optimal adoption of all these Semantic Web building blocks. Seeing this, Google, Bing, Yandex and Yahoo took matters into their own hands and came up with the Schema.org project — or, a structured data vocabulary that everyone can use.

At Yoast, we are part of the Schema community. As we see the enormous impact Schema has, we try to do our best to lend our hand wherever we can. We’ve actively suggested improvements on GitHub, gave feedback on proposals and weighed in on discussions.

Since we’ve been building our own Schema framework for Yoast SEO Company, we had a lot of thoughts on how to deliver the best possible Schema implementation to our users — which in turn would make search engines happy. We’ve shared our findings with the Schema community and proposed improvements that would enhance the code we output on millions of websites.

It’s paying off: Yoast SEO is a serious driver of Schema adoption

Recent research by Rick Viscomi, Sr. Web Developer Programs Engineer at Google and core maintainer of HTTP Archive, shows the impact structured data generated by Yoast SEO Company has. He looked at 1.7 million WordPress sites and found that 73% of those (on desktop) contain at least some kind of structured data. Digging deeper, he found that:

Surprisingly, almost all (99%) WordPress pages that do have Yoast installed use at least one of the structured data formats. Also, these results show that Yoast is found on 37% of all WordPress pages. Only 58% of pages that do not use Yoast use structured data, so Yoast appears to be a big driver in adoption.

Rick Viscomi

That’s incredible, but we’re still only getting started.

This is only the beginning

Today, however, we’re still talking about Schema at a smaller scale, but there’s so much more on the horizon. While adopting is speeding up, it’s still early days for Schema. Google is pushing structured data hard, so expect this to grow for years to come. Almost every pretty new thing is powered by structured data.

This is a big chance for sites, so if you describe your contents with Schema you’re helping search engines like Google make sense of your content. In the future, it can also become the main driver for new (social) platforms and tools. Hopefully, powered by the Yoast SEO Company Schema framework!

We’re deeply excited about all of this and think we’re on to something really big.

Read more: Yoast SEO 11.0: Structured data awesomeness »

SEO Company by DBL07.co

source http://www.scpie.org/schema-org-is-hard-yoast-seo-makes-it-easy-for-you/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/628865687769710592

[scpie]

Schema.org is hard, Yoast SEO makes it easy for you

Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk is the founder and Chief Product Officer of Yoast. He’s a digital marketer, developer and an Open Source fanatic.

Getting a Schema.org implementation right on a website was always enormously painful. There was not enough documentation and no good tools to help you to make it truly simple. For years, even the best implementations were still just a fragmented mess. In the spring of 2019, we fixed that with Yoast SEO 11.0 — and we’ve been improving ever since. So, how did we get here and why is it so important to get Schema right?

Table of contents

Structured data front and center

Over the last couple of years, structured data has become one of the main focal points of Google and, therefore, the SEO Company community. Schema structured data drives many of the most recent rich results and there is no end in sight. Structured data gives search engines more insights into how your pages are built and how you describe your content.

In addition, Schema makes it possible to optimize for entities — i.e. people, places and things — and how they relate to each other. This makes a lot of sense for search engines, as it allows them to weave that web of data we’ve been talking about for so long. Schema is an invaluable building block for the Semantic Web.

But, when we started looking at how to improve our Schema implementation, we didn’t find any of those coveted connections on all the sites we researched. We only found individual blocks, without any way for a search engine to find out how everything connects.

That needed to change!

What we found

The best Schema.org implementations we see ‘in the wild’ often look something like this, when seen by Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool:

Fragmented Schema.org markup, showing disparate, unconnected entities

There are seven Schema pieces on that page, but they’re just that: seven pieces without context. It is not clear what their relation to each other is. To a search engine, this page is still a puzzle which needs solving.

In our implementation, which we released in Yoast SEO Company 11.0 and expanded and improved in subsequent releases, all of the pieces “stitch together”: we form them into a nested structure. Without this nesting, a search engine doesn’t know how all these pieces relate to each other, and what the most important piece on a page is. Our implementation also clearly and explicitly defines the “main thing” on that page. This removes all of the guesswork and adds a lot of context for search engines.

Let’s look at an example: a post here on Yoast.com. This post is an Article. The article is the main “thing” of a WebPage, which is part of a Website. This Article is published by an Organization and written by an Author. Both the Author and the Organization have social profiles attached to them. These separate blocks are now all woven together: it’s simply a nested structure.

The @id is the glue

The secret of our delicious graph is one simple “thing”: using @id to connect graph pieces to each other. We output separate pieces but by using those @id references, we connect them to each other. We have been advocating this for a while, and in July 2020, Google also updated it their developer documentation explaining this was the way to go.

Because we can nest them like that, it doesn’t have to stop at that simple structure: the WebPage has a position within the site, outlined by its BreadcrumbsList. The Author, the Organization and the Article have images. Etc. etc. etc. All of that data is combined.

Why did we develop this?

We didn’t just start implementing this for the fun of it. We are solving a real-world problem: as more and more people implement Schema.org markup, the situation shown in the screenshot at the top of this article is no longer unique. Lots of pages, with lots of separate Schema blocks, are a problem. An example? WooCommerce, for instance, puts out pretty good Schema, but when there are related products on a page, it’s almost impossible for search engines to find the main product. Our implementation solves that and many other problems.

On every page, we output the entire graph for that page, and we clearly mark the mainEntity, so Google, Pinterest, and others are no longer left guessing. Every relationship is made explicit.

What does this mean for you?

This change has short-term implications: you have a higher chance of getting:

Correct info in Google Knowledge Panels and full support for Rich Article Pins on Pinterest, due to better Schema output from Yoast SEO Company.

Showing up in a News listing or carousel if you use our News SEO plugin, due to the new NewsArticle support.

Higher chance of product snippets in Google Search results if you use our WooCommerce SEO plugin and full support for Rich Product pins on Pinterest, due to better Product support in it.

Higher chance of good local listing snippets, due to better LocalBusiness schema in our Local SEO plugin.

Getting rich results for your FAQ pages and how-to articles thanks to the free Yoast SEO Company structured data content blocks .

Long term implications for the web

These changes also have long term implications: we weave a web of data. This type of machine-readable data makes it possible for platforms to build much cooler things. We’ve always dreamt of a web connected by entities and its relations — a true Semantic Web. We want to get rid of those loose blobs of data that don’t have meaning.

By making connections, we can start building knowledge graphs for a lot of things. With knowledge graphs, knowledge and understanding come within reach for machines — in return, we get access to information in revolutionary ways that makes it a lot easier to digest for us.

An open standard

Working on research by our resident SEO Company expert Jono Alderson — with input from Google engineers, among others, making it a true community effort —, we set out to rewrite how to best approach implementing Schema markup, and how WordPress can use this efficiently.

Of course, we wouldn’t be Yoast if we didn’t do this all out in the open. We have a full set of developer documentation with all the background you’ll ever need, plus a lot of examples to interact with our Schema API. Everyone can integrate with this, everyone can build upon it; in fact, we encourage you to do that! We’ve also documented all our output, so you can learn from it, copy it, play with it. The specification document explains it all more in-depth and explains all the fantastic research that Jono has been doing in this.

Some more background on how we got here

Looking at the history of Schema, you’ll notice a lot of openness, starting with the birth of the web. The road leading up to Schema was littered with initiatives by different people, companies and standards bodies. This led to a less than optimal adoption of all these Semantic Web building blocks. Seeing this, Google, Bing, Yandex and Yahoo took matters into their own hands and came up with the Schema.org project — or, a structured data vocabulary that everyone can use.

At Yoast, we are part of the Schema community. As we see the enormous impact Schema has, we try to do our best to lend our hand wherever we can. We’ve actively suggested improvements on GitHub, gave feedback on proposals and weighed in on discussions.

Since we���ve been building our own Schema framework for Yoast SEO Company, we had a lot of thoughts on how to deliver the best possible Schema implementation to our users — which in turn would make search engines happy. We’ve shared our findings with the Schema community and proposed improvements that would enhance the code we output on millions of websites.

It’s paying off: Yoast SEO is a serious driver of Schema adoption

Recent research by Rick Viscomi, Sr. Web Developer Programs Engineer at Google and core maintainer of HTTP Archive, shows the impact structured data generated by Yoast SEO Company has. He looked at 1.7 million WordPress sites and found that 73% of those (on desktop) contain at least some kind of structured data. Digging deeper, he found that:

Surprisingly, almost all (99%) WordPress pages that do have Yoast installed use at least one of the structured data formats. Also, these results show that Yoast is found on 37% of all WordPress pages. Only 58% of pages that do not use Yoast use structured data, so Yoast appears to be a big driver in adoption.

Rick Viscomi

That’s incredible, but we’re still only getting started.

This is only the beginning

Today, however, we’re still talking about Schema at a smaller scale, but there’s so much more on the horizon. While adopting is speeding up, it’s still early days for Schema. Google is pushing structured data hard, so expect this to grow for years to come. Almost every pretty new thing is powered by structured data.

This is a big chance for sites, so if you describe your contents with Schema you’re helping search engines like Google make sense of your content. In the future, it can also become the main driver for new (social) platforms and tools. Hopefully, powered by the Yoast SEO Company Schema framework!

We’re deeply excited about all of this and think we’re on to something really big.

Read more: Yoast SEO 11.0: Structured data awesomeness »

SEO Company by DBL07.co

source http://www.scpie.org/schema-org-is-hard-yoast-seo-makes-it-easy-for-you/

[brianobrienny]

The Ultimate Guide To A Content Marketing Strategy That Delivers ROI

Content marketing, when you peel away all the layers of techniques, trends, and possibilities, is a business opportunity. At its core, it’s a tool businesses can use for growth.

Content marketing is the kind of marketing that delivers ROI you can measure. And that’s important – now more than ever.

Unlike other methods of marketing, content marketing stands out because it is completely sustainable. It funds itself. And then some. It delivers revenue to the bottom line. It delivers a return on investment to the business.

This is not true for most marketing programs. But it is what marketing was always meant to be: a conversation between your company and your target audience that attracts new customers.

Effective content marketing strategy offers the benefit of exponential growth, higher brand awareness and trust, winning over prospects and convincing leads, and endearing your customers, helping to build a loyal base of brand advocates.

It also provides your company with a platform to activate employees, to publish thought leadership, and to tell more human brand stories that also attract better talent and keeps your employees motivated.

Once you get your content marketing strategy going, it’s that positive snowball effect in action. Your brand presence gets bigger and more impactful. It becomes easier to achieve your marketing goals with future content because you already have a foundation in place – a vast content library of written, visual, and experiential content, all designed to resonate with your target buyers.

This is in contrast to traditional marketing. Advertising, even with today’s sophisticated digital ads, can create overexposure. Audiences become saturated with brand promotion that offers no genuine value to the people you’re trying to build customer relationships with.

As I said a few years ago, content marketing is, “the vehicle that can deliver us from the throes of the ‘death by SPAM’ illness that still persists in many marketing organizations.”

It’s the solution to the dwindling impact of traditional marketing techniques. Take advantage of this business opportunity and you have a lot to gain.

The Business Advantage of Good Content Marketing

So, what exactly does a business have to gain from throwing their weight behind content marketing?

Increase in website traffic. Content marketing leaders see 8 times higher year-over-year growth in unique site traffic.

More leads. Content marketing garners 3 times as many leads as paid search for every dollar spent.

Thought leadership. Brands who offer relevant, useful content are viewed as thought leaders in their industry, which helps to build brand trust and authority.

Higher conversion rates. Organizations who use content marketing see 6 times higher conversion rates.

Leaner budget. According to DemandMetric, it costs 62% less to launch and maintain a content marketing campaign than any other type of campaign.

More attention on your brand. People use the internet to consume content.

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All of these advantages lead up to more sales, an increase in revenue, and more sustainable business growth. But, in order to get a competitive advantage from content marketing, you need to have a strategy. It’s not just about pouring buckets of content out, on and offline. It’s about using a holistic approach, using different content channels to support one another and maintaining a meaningful brand story throughout.

Take Demandbase for example. They managed $1 million in new business, not from tons and tons of content, but from a logical content bundle that included a white paper, infographic, webinar, live presentation and Slideshare. The bottom line is that most people think marketing is just about doing stuff (ads, campaigns, social shares, content.) But content marketing delivers business results. Here some more visual proof:

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What Content Marketing Isn’t

It’s important when using content marketing to understand what content marketing is, versus what it isn’t.

What it is.

It’s an opportunity for growth through offering quality content that offers value to target buyers. It requires a clearly defined audience and an ongoing analysis of how effective content is at reaching this audience.

It isn’t is more ‘stuff.’

Where a lot of brands go wrong with content is they fail to get the strategy part, unleashing content campaigns without the direction of where it should take the business to and an understanding for who the content is for.

Without strategy, you may end up with a promotional video, for example, that looks a lot more like a promo ad for your business than content. A promo video, as high-quality as the video production may be, isn’t a piece of useful video content designed to resonate with a target group at a specific stage of the buyer’s journey, and that is connected to the other content within your strategy.

Content marketing isn’t just a business blog.

Content goes far beyond blog posts. It also goes far beyond the digital world. Content is information, but it can be delivered through myriad channels (video, graphics, live events, apps, social media posts, emails). What differentiates this information as content is that it is designed for a specific audience, for a specific purpose.

It’s not meaningless.

Think about it. What problem does your Facebook ad solve? How has your company’s last AdWords campaign made a positive difference for your customers? Content is supposed to solve a problem. It’s this genuine intent to help your customers that offers the authenticity that consumers are so attracted to. Take this one step further, from providing value to your buyer to providing value to society, and you’ve landed on the future of content marketing – purpose driven brands.

It’s not rented space.

Where content stands out is that a brand owns the distribution channels – the website, the in-person events, the social media profiles, the eBook series. Advertising, on the other hand, is rented space – you have to constantly purchase a media channel in order to market.

How the Experts Define Content Marketing

Joe Pulizzi’s Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Neil Patel takes this definition a little deeper:

“[It’s] a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is very relevant to them on a consistent basis.”

Here is Rebecca Lieb:

“It isn’t advertising. It isn’t push marketing, in which messages are sprayed out at groups of consumers. Rather, it’s a pull strategy – it’s the marketing of attraction. It’s being there when consumers need you and seek you out with relevant, educational, helpful, compelling, engaging, and sometimes entertaining information.”

I define content marketing this way:

“Customer-focused content, consistently delivered, on a platform you own, in order to reach, engage and gain new customers.”

So, if you can weave together the endless list of possible content choices and channels, with the strategy that speaks to your audience in the voice of your brand, you know exactly what content marketing is and how to make it grow your business. 

1. Why Content Marketing Is Important

Content marketing is important, not just because it works for building trust, generating leads, and cultivating customer loyalty, but because it has become the new normal from the consumer side. It is, in itself, helping to evolve what customers expect from the brands they interact with.

Neglecting it is way more risky than investing in it.

What travel, food, or fashion brand can exist today without a vibrant Instagram page, videos, and a few influencer campaigns? Software companies have become tech teachers with how-to videos and eBooks. Even the financial industry has come up with apps, online knowledge centers, and other tools to help both individuals and business customers better meet their financial goals and to do it with a level of transparency and convenience that was unheard of 15 years ago.

Great content, especially the dynamic, well thought out strategies, are showing consumers they deserve more.

Content Marketing Is Too Valuable for Both Consumers and Brands to Ever Go Away

The number one reason that content marketing is important is that your customers appreciate it. Content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as outbound marketing, drives six times higher conversion rates, and has the potential for a 7.8-fold boost in web traffic.

The reality is, content marketing has fostered the customer-centric reality we’re now operating in. From well-researched white papers to podcast series listeners can’t live without, content is changing the relationship between the brand and consumer.

Take, for example, Cisco’s content hub, The Network. It has everything anyone interested in or who works in the tech industry could be interested in:

A monthly online magazine, FOCUS

Live@Cisco Facebook videos

Blog posts on tech news

Biographies of Cisco’s leadership team

They even have an innovative portal for marketing the company’s best asset, its employees. Meet Our Millennials serves the triple purpose of empowering employees, attracting new talent, and humanizing the brand for consumers.

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Cisco has been pushing content for years. Under the leadership of CMO Karen Walker, Cisco brought on 200 content marketers back in 2015 and they haven’t looked back.

In the B2C sector, content marketing is just as important. Look at brands like Nike, which has become way more than a company. Nike has become a way of life that has inspired generations.

Or Sephora, who have mastered brand community with their content, inviting their audience into an engaging, educational, empowering environment.

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Through offering value and meaning, and through giving people an entire ecosystem to tap into for information, guidance, and human connection, content marketing has formed a bridge that consumers want to walk across in order to connect with the brands they like.

There’s no going back.

Content marketing started as the alternative to the ad age. Something of a much-needed respite from the over saturation of magazine ads, promo posters, television commercials, and digital advertising – by 2014, the average person saw 5,000 ads in one day!

But today, almost all marketers use content marketing – 91 percent of B2B marketers and 86 percent of B2C.

And (no surprises here), consumers like it.

Brands who neglect the importance of content marketing today will have to play catch up tomorrow. On the other hand, those who have a content marketing strategy in place are already on the next level – honing their content with better customer data, better technology, and a better developed network, either in-house or outsourced, of content producers.

Content Marketing Teaches Us Lessons On Who We Are Marketing To

Another reason content marketing is so important is, it is the secret to understanding our customers. The data we’re seeing as people move along the customer journey – engagement rates on social media posts, which videos people watch, which eBooks people download, the blog posts they read all the way through and then share with their networks – this is incredibly powerful information for marketers.

By tracking which content is the most successful, we’re learning more about our consumers. This gives brands who are heavily invested in content marketing – and who are adept at making sense out of their marketing automation tools and CRM – a huge advantage. With the insights gained, it’s possible to:

Create better buyer personas

Develop more accurate buyer segments

Improve personalization – which I truly believe is the foundation of a better customer experience

Hawkeye, a platform that focuses on analyzing content data, calls it content intelligence.

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It’s taking all the data you get from your content analysis to make a better strategy, and then rinse, cycle, and repeat so you are always improving what you offer, and boosting the impact of your content marketing.

Without the constant influx of data that is specifically related to your brand and your buyers (because it comes from your content marketing strategy), you’re missing the philosopher’s stone of modern marketing – the knowledge of what resonates with your buyers, right now – the how, who, why, where, and when.

Your Competitors Are Already Using It

And the final reason content marketing is ridiculously important for marketers today – chances are, your competitors are already using it.

If your target audience is already enjoying personalized email messaging and already know they can go to your competitor’s site to look up the information they need when they have a question – you’re in trouble.

Here’s the thing. One of the reasons content marketing is so powerful is that it can be used to establish your brand as a trusted authority in your industry. Which means, it takes time to get your content marketing strategy to make an impact because it takes time to establish a trusted presence.

If your competitors are already sitting on huge online blog libraries, vibrant social media profiles, and are known for their knockout video tutorials and annual marketing events, you’ve got some catching up to do.

Content marketing is essential to everyone from global organizations with dozens (or hundreds) of content marketers, producers, and analysts on their team, to small companies focusing on their local business. It’s not just important. It’s critical.

Where should you start?

Here’s a look at the types of content experienced marketers focus on:

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Start with the resources you have. Create a strategy and commit to a high level of quality and a focused brand message. And then, keep growing your content strategy as you learn more about your customers, engage with them, and build the bridge between your brand and the people your business exists for. 

2. How to Gain Buy-In for Content Marketing

You know how powerful content marketing is for brand awareness, lead nurturing, and building lasting relationships with your customers. So do the 91% of B2B marketers who are using content marketing today.

But, chances are, your organization’s executive team isn’t as excited about your content marketing efforts as you are. While content marketing budgets have been blossoming in recent years – the industry reached $300 billion in 2019 – in-house marketing professionals still struggle to get the support they need.

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It’s not just about securing the budget and resources you need. Just as important are factors like:

Internal cooperation across departments

Room to experiment and make mistakes without fear of your content marketing budget getting slashed

The engagement of the company’s internal experts – bringing employees into your content marketing strategy is a rising trend in content you don’t want to get left behind on

So, how do we gain the buy-in for content marketing that we need with all of our internal stakeholders?

Start with a Strategy

To convince your customers they will benefit from your product or service, what’s always your first step?

You have to educate your buyers about the value of what you are selling with a smart content strategy. Take this same approach when selling content marketing to your organization’s decision and budget makers.

Educate them on the importance of content marketing – with content.

So, get in the shoes of your audience just like you would when you create your buyer personas.

What are the pain points, hesitations, and goals of your organization’s executive team?

What information – relevant statistics, industry examples, in-house content analytics – do they need to see to understand the value of your content marketing?

What channels will resonate the most, for example, what presentation format will work? How can you quickly update upper management on the worth of your content with ROI analytics on an ongoing basis to keep them motivated?

When are they going to be the most open to paying attention?

The secret to gaining buy-in for content marketing is to demonstrate its worth with a solid strategy rather than a pile of stats and examples that aren’t really connected. Think through how all the information you present builds your case and works together to make your point.

Here’s what you may want to include in your strategy.

Show the Potential of Content Marketing with Examples

Don’t expect every member of your organization’s leadership team to fully understand just how intense and dynamic content marketing can be, or even how it works.

There are still people who assume content marketing starts and ends with blog articles and social media, which makes it difficult to be inspired by your content marketing efforts or to be motivated enough to up your budget or encourage employee engagement company-wide.

So, take them on the content journey:

Demonstrate the different types of content.

When C-suite sees the full range, from thought-provoking blog posts that establish your brand as an industry thought leader to experiential campaigns that can change the perception of the brand in the minds’ of consumers, they’re more likely to be interested in offering support.

You can use industry examples of some of the best interactive videos, brand communities, user-generated social media campaigns, white papers, live events, and other types of content you already use or plan on using. To be more illustrative, have plans ready to show what you already do with various types of content as well.

Put it all together.

The best content marketing threads together all the moving parts with cohesive messaging, consistency, and a holistic strategy. Each piece builds up, supports, or furthers the rest, creating in sum, a content marketing machine.

When convincing C-suite, explain how all your content works together as part of an overall strategy. Give them an example of a brilliant strategy in your industry. Also, map out the one you have ready so they walk away with a clear idea of how sophisticated and effective your content marketing can be.

Then, Give Them the Data to Back-up Your Examples

When you are vying for at least 40 percent of the overall marketing budget – which the Content Marketing Institute’s research reveals is the baseline for successful B2B marketing – you’ll need to offer some solid numbers to verify all the potential you just demonstrated.

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This means sharing key industry statistics to show how effective content marketing is at achieving marketing goals at each stage of the buyer’s journey:

Increasing website traffic and generating leads – companies that blog at least 15 times per month get 5 times more website traffic than companies that don’t. Companies with an active blog generate 97% more leads on their site than businesses who don’t have a blog.

Boosting conversions and sales – Conversion rates are 105 percent higher for consumers who interact with ratings and product reviews. Leads who receive email marketing messages spend 83 percent more when making purchases.

Building customer relationships – 70 percent of consumers prefer getting to know a company with articles instead of ads. 78 percent of consumers believe brands with custom content are interested in building relationships with them.

You also want to clearly demonstrate the historical ROI of your own content marketing. What are your organization’s marketing priorities this year? Focus on these goals when using your metrics to show how effective your content marketing has been.

Make Technology a Part of the Conversation

Tools that make once budget-prohibitive tasks like video production and personalization possible have really evolved the scope of what content marketers can do today. It’s definitely worth including the power of technology in the content you present to upper management.

Marketing automation. Interactive user interfaces. Cost-effective tools to help with content creation, from high-quality live video streaming to eBook creation and infographics. Defining a martech stack that works for your company can make things much more efficient.

What content marketing tools are you using now? How have they allowed you to reduce costs and do way, way more? How can investing in new technology empower your content marketing strategy even more?

Blow Them Away

Let’s be honest. Content marketing is pretty magnificent. When you look at how much this field of marketing has evolved and how much it has changed relationships between brands and buyers, and now, between employee, company, and customers with the thrust towards employee activation, the argument for content marketing goes much deeper than how effective it is, or how much it’s worth to a company.

It’s the way your brand comes alive to customers. Your organization’s content marketing strategy defines your brand to your audience.

So, to get C-suite to support your strategy and goals, make sure they know that by supporting content marketing, they’re deciding the role your brand plays in the future of your niche. Hero, teacher, helper, guide – or generic business. It’s content that makes the difference. 

3. How to Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Build a plan. Create your content. Publish, measure, refine, repeat.

Seems straightforward enough. But this is the bare bones of content marketing. It’s creating a plan, not a strategy and it’s missing out on the impact potential of a goal-focused, personalized, purposeful approach to your brand’s content.

It’s one thing to have an appealing, educational lineup of blog posts, video content, infographics, white papers, and social media content. It’s a whole other science to make all these pieces come together and take on a life of their own, manifesting a walking, breathing force that is able to impact your marketing goals and drive business growth in the long term.

Once you get going with content marketing and finding your stride, you’ll want to up the sophistication level of your strategy to get more of an impact. Use these principles, the 3 P’s of effective content marketing, to evolve your strategy from ‘well, it exists but why haven’t we boosted our revenue yet?’ to ‘wow, what’s next?’

Priorities

In order to reach the right target at the right time with the right content, you need to identify what’s driving your content marketing strategy by identifying the why behind your strategy.

Define your strategy’s driving force, focusing on one or two priorities. Sure, every business wants their content marketing to increase website traffic, generate quality leads, boost brand awareness, improve customer loyalty, and every other marketing goal in the book. The inevitable mindset with this ‘all of the above’ approach is to create great content and then achieve a little bit of everything as a result. You may get some of your KPIs to hit their targets, but the real and sustainable impact isn’t there.

With effective content marketing, it’s the priority goals that drive the strategy. The “plan first, results later” approach gets turned inside out. You need the desired results – the most important why or why’s of your content marketing strategy – for fuel, inspiration, and direction. They drive the strategy.

This is how you get that magnificent self-perpetuating achievement you see with brands like Dropbox, Blue Apron, and Zendesk.

So, what should you focus on?

Don’t look for the priorities that will yield the most impressive content marketing ROI numbers, but rather the ones that are aligned with business goals. Of course, all points along the buyer’s journey matter all the time, but you need to hone in on which one is the most critical right now based on business needs. Where is your organization struggling? For example:

New service or other change you want customers to know about? Generate web traffic and fire up your social media platforms.

A growth plateau? Then focus on getting better quality leads.

Limited market reach? Then look to brand awareness and thought leadership.

Plagued by low engagement numbers? How is your content working to improve the customer experience?

Not getting repeat business or is your brand advocacy limited to an army of one? Your strategy should focus on customer loyalty and retention.

Here’s the thing. When you laser focus on one part of the buyer’s journey, you aren’t neglecting the rest. What you’re doing is laying the groundwork for the other priorities.

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Then, when you come around to the beginning of the funnel again or when you tailor your strategy to focus on one stage to the next, you’re already set up to create an even more effective strategy because your organization has more content marketing experience and (hopefully) resources.

Better quality content production

More sophisticated use of technology

Better informed metrics

And, more confidence – and organizational support – to push boundaries and be a content marketing innovator in your industry

Personalization

In 2015, Gartner predicted that companies heavily invested in personalization would outsell their competitors who lack personalization by 20 percent. Today’s content marketers need to be thinking personalization when developing their strategy. Personalized email offers, content sequencing, product suggestions, landing pages, and other types of personalized content are what customers expect today.

With the help of the right marketing automation platforms, marketers are using machine learning and predictive analytics to tailor content for both individuals and buyer segments, which creates a better experience.

Let’s face it, customers are more likely to walk away and write your brand off in their minds if they are exposed to one or two pieces of content that aren’t relevant to them. With so much content out there today, only what really matters to them will get any attention. In one Marketing Insider Group and OneSpot survey, 45 percent of consumers said they won’t spend time with a brand that’s not relevant to their interests. 42 percent are less interested in a brand’s products or services if the brand’s content isn’t personally relevant.

Write personalization into your content marketing strategy. This means looking at your marketing technology to make sure you are capable of offering better personalized content. It also means getting personal and taking the time to understand customer needs through both customer data and old school feedback.

My friend Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at Marketing Profs shares a great example of a small business that’s mastered content simply by asking their customers questions and creating content specifically for his audience.

She says, “Yale Appliance redeployed almost all of its marketing budget away from advertising. His [Steve Sheinkopf] content strategy has been extremely effective, and he’s done it by simply answering his audience’s questions … The reason why he’s killing it is he looks at his data, he figures out what his audience needs, and he creates content that meets his audience’s needs.”

Purpose

And the final P for effective content marketing – purpose. Why does your brand exist?

I talked about this concept years ago, sharing Simon Sinek’s amazing Ted Talk on how important the purpose is of your business to your customers, something a lot of brands overlook.

You need to get this higher purpose across in your content.

What purpose does your business have – how is it impacting society?

What are the values of your brand?

How can your products and services make your customers’ lives better?

How does your vision differentiate your business from your competitors?

And – where is it headed? What role will your business play in the future of society?

Here’s an excellent video of Steve Jobs talking about brand purpose for Apple.

He says, “But even a great brand needs investments in caring if it’s going to retain its relevance and vitality.” He goes on to explain how the way to do that isn’t to tell people your mission statement or your brand vision, but rather to evoke awareness of who you are through your content. Like Nike, “They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are.”

What is the core, the archetypical belief that drives your brand? It’s there if you don’t know it already. You may have to dig deep for it, do a little organizational soul-searching. But, that’s what your customers will not just be motivated to connect with, but will desire to be a part of. And that’s really effective content marketing.

4. How to Build a Killer Content Marketing Team

Those spellbinding content marketing strategies – the ones that have catapulted startups into industry dominance and made decades-old brands more relevant than ever – they are not the product of a single creative genius.

Nope. It’s not a brilliant content creator or a flash of wisdom few of us can ever hope to attain.

It’s a hard-working, experienced content marketing team. A group of experts, each who excel in their area of content marketing and, at the same time, who understand how the whole puzzle comes together.

That’s how you get what Jolie Miller, content strategy and acquisitions leader at LinkedIn, calls great content. The stuff that “has the power to change people’s lives for a second or for days or forever.”

So, who should be in the starting lineup for your killer content marketing team? Here’s what you should look for when putting together your brand’s dream team and some content marketing job descriptions.

The Content Marketing Editor (Storyteller + Strategist)

When it comes to pulling off a revenue-boosting content marketing strategy, you’ll need an editor with experience and acumen in both refining content and in content creation. They have to be better at content creation than your copywriters, illustrators, and video producers in order to know how to improve what your creators are making.

Ideally, they’ll have copywriting experience and will have at least worked with other types of professional content creators. This will have helped them develop an eye and understanding for what premium content entails.

A content editor is also tasked with making sure content is high-quality and strategic. So, they’ll need to balance an eye for detail and an ability to see the overall picture, ensuring each piece of content is playing its part correctly within the whole.

Think of your content editor as a conductor in an orchestra. You may have a stage filled with skilled musicians. But the conductor is the one who brings out the magic in each of them. Good editors know how to do this with all of your content, ensuring each piece fits within the orchestra with the right tone of voice and staying true to the brand story. While also conveying the right message.

With a strong content marketing editor, your organization’s content will be:

Consistent – in style and tone

Top quality – this includes in the eyes of customers and search engines

Strategic – your editor will work with the rest of your content marketing team to make sure each piece supports and is supported by the rest to create a seamless experience for customers

Content Marketing Manager (Business Strategist + Visionary)

Your content marketing manager is the one who brings your content strategy down to earth, from brilliant creation to relevant, effective revenue driver. They know how to translate content into growth.

This is the person who’s in charge of aligning the strategy with business goals and keeping everyone on task with reaching your designated key performance indicators. And, they know how to do it within a budget.

Here’s the thing. There are as many content opportunities as there are stars in the sky. Influencer campaigns on LinkedIn or Instagram. Live events that invite customers into your brand’s community. Customer profile videos. Educational blog series.

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Deciding which content is the most appropriate for the brand, based on business objectives and budget, falls on the shoulders of the content marketing manager. They can look ahead and see how plugging all the different types of content, style choices, campaigns, and other factors into the equation will yield a solid ROI.

This individual knows the strengths and weaknesses of each channel and works closely with your content analytics head to ensure your strategy is pulling its weight and is knocking your content marketing goals out of the park.

Use this detailed look at the job description and job requirements for your content marketing manager hire to help you find someone with the right background.

Content Distribution Manager (Channel Master + Workflow Organizer)

Today, the way to effectively resonate with your target buyers is to get the right content to the right target, through the right channel, at the right time. Which is a nice way of saying a lot of thought, research, data, and calculation goes into every single distribution maneuver.

Easier said than done.

Don’t panic. This is your content distribution manager’s bread and butter. They are the ones who will:

Manage the content calendar

Have the content ideas set up or create them themselves

Ensure the content creators are getting everything done on schedule

Your distribution manager will also be manning the controls – your marketing automation software, content management software, and any internal workflow tools your organization uses.

Content Analytics and Optimization (Data Scientist and SEO Wizard)

Here’s your content marketing team’s data guru. The greater the background they have in data science, not just SEO, the better.

Your analytics expert will keep track of what content is performing well and what’s falling short. This is the individual that makes sure all the other people in your team aren’t working in the dark because they have accurate, in-depth data analysis to offer-up those must-have ROI and content performance insights.

Ideally, they’ll also be able to help your team get more out of your marketing software. Your brand will benefit from someone who knows how to use AI to get your team to the level where you are using predictive and prescriptive analytics to inform your marketing decisions.

They’ll also be in charge of staying up-to-date with SEO trends and making sure your content is as search-engine friendly as possible. Technical SEO is still the backbone of your content marketing – unless you don’t want anyone to see it.

Tap into an Endless Sea of Content Contributors

And, the final essential for your content marketing team – your advocate army. Your target buyers are some of your most powerful content creators. As are your own internal experts. These people have their own social media networks. But, more importantly, they aren’t your brand.

Only about 22% of brands are trusted by consumers. But 83% of consumers trust their peers over a brand’s messaging.

Your customers and your engaged employees offer something your branded content can’t ever pull-off, no matter how well-intentioned. Authenticity.

You can bring on the most experienced and skilled team of content managers, editors, analysts, SEO experts, and creators. But your content marketing strategy won’t have much mojo if you don’t have a plan for motivating and inviting your brand advocates to be a part of your team as well.

Pull all these elements together – your internal content marketing management team, content creators, and brand advocates – and your organization is on its way to the type of content marketing that has made this industry the $300 billion dollar industry that it is today.

5. How to Define and Measure the ROI of Content Marketing?

There are two huge pitfalls when it comes to establishing how your organization will define and measure the ROI of your content marketing.

One, getting lost in the numbers, focusing on too many key performance indicators and making it hard to get a clear picture of the impact your content is making.

Or, two, focusing on the wrong indicators to measure ROI for your business.

A lot of marketers struggle with ROI tracking. According to a B2B Content Marketing Report published by the Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn, 38 percent of marketers cite measuring content effectiveness as one of their greatest challenges. Only 8 percent consider themselves very or extremely successful at tracking ROI.

However, being in that 8 percent offers a powerful advantage. When you can successfully define and measure content marketing ROI you are armed with the information you need to keep improving your content marketing strategy so it’s always working.

Here’s the tricky part – there are a lot of moving pieces involved in a great strategy. A lot of these factors change over time, putting your content marketing in a constant state of evolution. Customer preferences. SEO best practice. New technology. Video trends.

In order to optimize your content marketing strategy and maintain enviable performance levels, you’ll need continual feedback and analysis of your content. But more than that, you’ll need clarity from your numbers.

Define the Purpose of Your ROI

Before identifying your top priorities and defining your metrics, you need to look at the purpose behind the work.

Why are you measuring content marketing ROI?

The answer to this question is often the root of a misguided tracking strategy. If you are defining your ROI metrics solely to demonstrate results and to justify your organization’s content marketing budget, you may get a confusing picture when you try to look at your analysis to determine what’s working, what’s not, and how you can make your content marketing strategy better.

When there is a lot of pressure on content marketing managers to demonstrate value, there’s the risk of honing in on vanity metrics. Take web traffic as an example. In the same survey mentioned earlier, of 600 B2B respondents, 63 percent measure web traffic to gauge content marketing success. Only 26% look at subscriber growth and 21 percent look at revenue. Web traffic is a useful number to look at if you are trying to build your audience. It can also be an impressive figure to show off to budget decision makers.

But if you aren’t looking at how many of those website visitors are converting into leads or customers, your web traffic numbers create a very blurry picture. You know people are visiting but you don’t know if your content is compelling enough to motivate action so you don’t know if or how it needs to change.

Yes, there’s pressure on content marketers to prove the resources invested in case studies, videos, blog posts, infographics, social posts and other pieces of your content puzzle are well spent. But you don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to uncover those hidden gems that will paint a crystal clear picture of what your content marketing is doing.

When you are using your metrics to inform your strategy more than your budget, you’re going to get the insights you need to keep making it better.

Simplify the Value of Content Marketing for ‘Outsiders’

Instead of measuring content just to justify it, you can use cost tracking to make the value of your content marketing black and white to C-suite with one simple analysis. Then, you can spend more of your ROI bandwidth on metrics that matter.

Keep track of how much each piece of content you product costs. If you’re outsourcing, you may have straightforward expenses for some of your content. Don’t forget to also include the time spent by your team editing, managing, and promoting the content.

If you don’t have the resources for this type of heavy cost analysis, you can audit some of your content. For example, what are your total content costs in a month or what’s the average for three months? Then, you can look at your costs and revenue to determine your content marketing ROI.

Once you have this baseline, compare it to your organization’s marketing ROI for targeted advertising. This can be a helpful comparison to gain support from executive management so you can go back and focus on measuring content performance.

Be Strategic about Defining Your Metrics

There are dozens of performance indicators you can look at to track your content ROI.

Performance metrics will reveal what you need to know, as long as you tie them to your business goals. Which means you aren’t going to focus on the same metrics all the time. As your business goals and, therefore, your content marketing priorities change, so will the numbers you use to gauge performance. The trick is to make sure your defined metrics are always telling your content’s story.

For example, if you are trying to build your audience, sure, look at web traffic. You also want to know your brand’s share of the conversation and social media sharing, bounce rate and time on site. This will give you a better idea of engagement and how much your content is king in your industry.

If your business needs better-qualified leads and conversions, your content strategy will probably focus on creating case studies, white papers, eBooks, and other content that motivates people to subscribe to your newsletter. This is where you’ll look at both your conversion numbers for your content as well as customer retention numbers. How long are the leads you work so hard to nurture with your content staying as customers?

For customer loyalty, the focus will be on retention as well as monitoring customer feedback. How much of a response are you getting and what is the qualitative response to your content? What percentage of people respond favorably to your social posts, blog posts, white papers, videos, events or other types of content?

Set Your Benchmarks

Once you have your current priorities set and you know what metric data to focus on, you can create your performance benchmarks. What does content marketing success look like for your organization? Being able to measure against your benchmarks makes it easier to see if your content is helping to reach goals or if it needs work.

Then, when you calculate the ROI of your content by looking at your costs vs. revenue (or a given value for an action if you can’t tie a metric directly to revenue), you can see where things are working and where you need to make changes to either the content or a part of your strategy.

This is why tracking your ROI with the intent of informing your content is so important. When you can see where one content channel is experiencing higher than normal conversion numbers, where another seems to lead to an apparent dead end landing page, what types of your content are making up the bulk of your industry presence, and every other pearl of wisdom you dictate your data to tell you – you have a wealth of information to constantly refine your strategy.

And, never-ending refinement is what brilliant, business-boosting content strategies are made from.

6. Where to Build Your Content Hub

One way to make your content marketing more effective and to make your best content more accessible is to build a content hub. Your hub acts as your content’s online repository. It’s a sort of branded resource center or command central for your thought leadership.

With a hub, not only can your audience delve deeper into your online content library because your top blogs, videos, case studies and more are clearly organized on one page or microsite, but you also have more control over how you want to guide your brand’s voice in the industry conversation.

For example, you can create a broader context for each piece of content, which gives all your content more meaning. That thought-provoking blog post on the latest industry research offers a whole other level of value when placed next to a how-to video that shows your customers how to apply these new research insights.

It’s the central location where your whole content marketing strategy comes together in one neat, attractive, thoughtfully put together place, which exists….well that’s the challenge. The where of your content hub is a big deal.

Should it be part of your website? Or should it be a standalone entity?

Getting the ‘where’ part right will dictate how easily your audience can find your content hub. It also dictates the impression your hub makes.

The Pros of Building Your Content On Your Website

There are major advantages to creating a content hub on your website. It’s like doing a home extension project versus building a separate ADU on your property. It’s easier, more streamlined and it’s connected to your products or services.

SEO

This advantage works both ways. The dynamic appeal of your hub’s media mix will boost your website’s SEO. At the same time, you won’t have to start from the ground up to generate traffic and optimize a separate site for your content hub because your website’s users can stay on your site to explore the hub.

Lower resource commitment

With limited resources, it’s a lot easier to build upon the website you already have than to create a standalone hub, promote it, optimize it, and make it into its own worthwhile online hot spot for your audience. This makes building onsite appealing to smaller businesses who don’t have the resources to create and cultivate a separate online entity.

Streamlined analytics

Your content hub will give you a lot of analytics as it tracks the way users interact with your hub’s content. When it’s an extension of your corporate website, this data can be streamlined with your other website data, giving you a clearer picture of your audience instead of having to differentiate between the two different sources of content data – and possibly, different buyer segments (unless that’s exactly what you are going for).

On-site hubs elevate the overall website, making it a greater source of value for your buyers and a more attractive destination. With smaller companies or if your hub is clearly aligned with the ideas, value propositions, and has the same SEO and target market you’re appealing to (and learning about through analytics), building your hub as just one more destination on your website makes a lot of sense.

REI’s content hub is an excellent example of a successful onsite hub.

When visitors click on the tab for REI’s CO-OP Journal, they stumble into a sea of well-organized content. The hub is user-friendly as it’s divided into multiple topics and subtopics – activities, gear, how-to’s, and local content. REI clearly positions themselves with their hub as an ultimate source of outdoor enthusiasts and adventurers. But it also uses the space to connect visitors with branded content that really drives home the REI story, which they may not have originally sought out, like their content surrounding sustainability and social responsibility and REI’s unique series – Take It From Me and Wild Ideas Worth Living.

REI’s content hub has enough complexity to deserve a microsite. But why take your audience to a different site when your products are a click away from inspiring content?

The Pros of Building a Standalone Content Hub

As practical as building your content hub on your site is, there are situations where it makes more sense to create a standalone content hub.

When your big company is also slow to adapt

Depending on your organizational structure, keeping your hub separate may be a smarter strategy. For example, in larger companies where there is a lot of red tape to make anything happen to the website, it may be wiser to let the content marketing team work at its pace to build an unfettered content hub.

When your hub itself is too big

One of the reasons to build a hub for your content in the first place is it improve the customer experience. Hub visitors can quickly access the information they want and can see, at a glance, related content they may be interested in. If your hub is loaded with different types of content, combined with different landing pages to pick up subscribers, event registrants, webinar sign-ups, podcast followers, and more, then your hub may need a home of its own. This allows you to create a better user experience and to better control the way visitors interact with your content.

To differentiate sales and content

When your content hub is all about establishing industry authority, it can be smart to make a standalone hub. This allows you to keep the sales pitch a mile away from the thought leadership articles, content created by your employees, curated content, and other content that is focused more on the message than the actual company.

To reach a new or specific audience

A separate microsite gives your content marketing the ability to take off in a new and exciting direction because it’s somewhat removed from the brand’s online corporate base. This also makes it a smart move if you want your hub to cater to a specific buyer segment.

The Hartford Financial Services has a dedicated content hub for targeting small business owners. SmallBiz is packed with helpful articles on topics small business owners and entrepreneurs would be interested in, as well as a SmallBiz podcast.

This how having a separate content resource center makes more sense. It appeals directly to a certain segment, creating a better experience for these viewers. This also makes it easier to generate leads as the entire hub directs viewers to one primary action – to sign up as a subscriber.

The Content Hub Location Checklist

When deciding where to build your content hub, you can use this checklist summarizing TriComB2B’s Chris Eifert’s advice to help narrow down what online space makes more sense for your brand and your content marketing strategy.

If your goal is…

SEO, then using your corporate website is better

Objectivity and authenticity, then a stand-alone hub is better

To quickly create a site and you don’t have time for website bureaucracy, go for standalone

The best user experience, then standalone is usually better, although a great user experience can work on the corporate website

Lead generation, then standalone is usually more effective

Add to this list, these factors:

Limited resources or small market presence, business website wins

Planning on creating one or more hubs for different segments, opt for standalone.

Make Your Content Hub Strategic

When you have a solid content marketing strategy, your content hub is what can bring it all together for your audience. It also creates a central platform for sharing the strategy – inviting hub visitors to more than a blog post or a video but the whole pie, all in one, convenient location. It gives you more space to get your brand story clearly across than a single piece of content, and more opportunity to show your buyers just how useful your content – and by extension, your brand – can be in their lives.

8. How Much Budget Do You Need for Content Marketing?

You know your content marketing strategy will positively impact your marketing goals and business bottom line. But, how much budget do you need to make sure your content marketing is effective enough?

There are two perspectives when it comes to the content marketing budget:

Invest more and gain more – The more layered, the better supported by technology, and the more skill you have going into your content creation, the greater potential impact.

Content marketing can be extremely cost-effective so harness that advantage – Part of the power of content marketing is its ability to deliver cost-effective results. Remember, Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound yet generates three times as many leads. It also drives conversion rates that are six times higher than other marketing methods.

Both of these budget perspectives are true. With a large budget, you can invest in better technology to make your strategy more effective. You can keep up with (and reap the rewards of) the big-hitting content marketing tactics like influencer marketing and experiential marketing. But, there’s also a lot you can do with a small budget, even as a tiny startup.

When you have the budget to move beyond blogs, social media and explainer videos, you can start moving into creating a multi-dimensional brand ‘world’ that your audience can not just buy from, but also become a part of. This is where you’ll find not just your traffic and lead generation numbers rising but also your loyalty metrics.

Here’s the thing. If you start with a large budget but haven’t yet mastered the efficient use of your content marketing dollars, you could be losing a chunk of your budget. For B2B marketers, on average, 70 percent of content created never gets used. That’s mindblowing!

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So, to figure out how much is enough, look at the content marketing budget as an evolving number. Even if you end up with a small budget this year, that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to increase it by 10 percent, 20 percent, or more in the following year. This gives you the flexibility to have what you need but also to avoid wasting your budget simply because your organization doesn’t yet have enough experience with content marketing, what it can do, and what channels and tactics make the most sense for your brand.

How Much Does Content Marketing Cost?

More companies are using content marketing (86% of B2C organizations and 91% of B2B marketers). And, most of those who are using it are increasing their budgets each year.

What’s the average spend on content marketing? Overall, 26% of the total marketing budget is dedicated to content marketing for the B2B sector. For B2C, it’s 22 percent.

But, here’s where it gets interesting. The most successful organizations spend closer to 40%of their total marketing budget on content strategy. Those with a relatively mature hold on content marketing spend about one-third of their budget on content.

image source Setting your content marketing budget has a lot more to do with how much your organization has already done with content marketing rather than just throwing a quarter or a third of the budget towards content. A lot of this comes down to the nature of a good strategy – you have to get to know what works for your brand and what resonates well with your buyer segments to create a more sophisticated strategy.

You also need to understand the cost of content marketing and create a strategy that delivers more high quality content, as often as possible

The only way to learn this is to start using content marketing, tracking the ROI of your content, and analyzing what works and what doesn’t. Then, you can go back and improve upon your strategy even further, ideally boosting web traffic, lead generation, and revenue growth, and being worthy of a bigger chunk of the marketing budget.

Who’s Increasing Their Content Marketing Budget?

Just under half of B2B marketers plan on using the same budget from 2018 to 2019. About 38% plan on increasing what they spend, with only three percent expecting to use a smaller budget in the future. This is a trend that has been going on for years, with 2015 being the sixth consecutive year for double-digit growth of the content marketing industry.

Part of this is driven by the ROI – organizations experience a greater return as their strategy gets more effective. So, they invest more. It’s also driven by competition. With only a small fraction of companies not using content marketing, how can you expect to keep up with advertising and other outbound methods? Customers’ expectations for high-quality, relevant content are increasing, which means the more developed your strategy is and your use of technology, the easier it will be to ensure your content becomes the cream of the crop, rising to the top of search engines, social feeds, and email inboxes.

How to Build a Content Budget that Makes Sense

What do you need to factor into your content budget?

Who’s on your content team?

If you don’t already have a content marketing manager, you may want to put this position on your list of budget priorities. 43 percent of organizations have a dedicated manager. You also want to look at what content creators and analysts you’ll need and which ones will be outsourced. Strategists, social media managers, copywriters, content editors, video production. The list can get pretty long.

What content marketing tools do you need?

What tools does your organization already have, need to upgrade, or need to start using? From your automation software to content management, collaborative platforms and SEO tools, most content marketing teams use an array of tools. A lot of your technology is priced based on a monthly subscription or user-based fee. Your technology expense will make up a lot of your fixed costs.

What content is in your strategy?

Being able to create a workable budget is one of the reasons for having a solid content marketing strategy is so important. Only when you have a detailed strategy, including what content is going to be published and where, how it’s going to be promoted, and your timeline for how your content strategy will unfold over the next three months, six months, and current year, will you have any idea of how much it is going to cost.

You can estimate the cost of each piece of content, looking at either your outsourcing fees or the cost per hour of your content creators. Detailing the costs of each piece of content, as well as different components (How much does your blog cost a month? Infographics, videos, event marketing?), won’t just make budgeting easier. Calculating your ROI will be a lot easier too.

There’s No Such Thing as a Static Budget

Even with a detailed analysis of your expected costs and factoring in what percentage of your marketing budget make sense based on your organization’s level of content marketing sophistication, you shouldn’t expect to stick to your budget. Here’s why. To really be successful at content marketing, you have to keep refining your strategy. As you gather more customer data and feedback and identify what resonates, you can continually improve upon what you have – which means there will be changes.

To make room for your content strategy to evolve, plan for some flexibility in your budget. This way you’ll have enough in your budget for brilliance.

Conclusion to The Ultimate Guide To Content Marketing Strategy ROI

I realize the title of this post is a bold claim. I’ve poured at least 40 hours into it so I hope the time was worth it for you. But if you are still wondering how to get ROI from your Content Marketing, just click on the contact link up above. I promise to get back to you within a day!

The post The Ultimate Guide To A Content Marketing Strategy That Delivers ROI appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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Content Marketing & Content Creation

Content Marketing & Content Creation is the procedure of developing priceless, associated articles to draw, attain, and participate your listeners. Buyers and customers immediately are inundated by a lot more promoting and advertising information than previously-well over 2,900 each and every day, by ongoing estimations. This generates an surroundings of recognition shortage, problematic advertisers with the work of developing involving article content that won’t go missing within the fixed. A highly-created content internet marketing strategy different places your organisation through the situation of a believed head, making label personal taste as you notify and inform consumers. Rendering valuable and fun information can style a solid bond in between the brand and customers that carries on to strengthen and grow after awhile.

Conventionally, entrepreneurs experienced to “rent attention” off their people’s advertising by exhibit advertising on web-sites, booths at industry events, or email messages brought to thirdly-party displays. As an example ,, in cases where a brand will pay you out huge amount of money for that Very Dish advertising, these are getting the attention that this Tv set companies have developed. Website content promoting, then again, permits on-line marketers to end up being web publishers because they build their unique people and appealing to their own personal special attention. Marketers increase their brand awareness and preference by establishing a relationship of trust with consumers as they move through the sales funnel, by creating and distributing content that buyers find useful. In addition, material online marketing may be known as a cheaper technique than some many people. It can have somewhat of a slower start up whilst your posts collection reaches and grows an increased audience.

At this time, 41Percent of B2B marketing experts look into article content tied to the getting vacation associated with a customer, however many organisations neglect to yield custom made website content focused entirely on all step of this selecting period. Custom text messaging doesn’t just result in focusing on by group or filmographic considerations, it implies proactively supplying website content that is suitable for each and every position within the buyer’s adventure. Eighty-five percent of clients faith options that invest time to walking them because of a variety of ways for preferences rather than just attempting to make that choice for them. This material shows consumers that you agree to and appreciate their ability to evaluate and make conclusions by themselves.

“Successful articles online marketers arrive at all steps for the home buyer path-from start to finish. Most makers are really above-weighted in the bottom belonging to the funnel. Plus they fail to see significant chances to interact with potential customers at the purpose of really need.”

- MichaelBrenner and CEO, Promoting and advertising Specialized Group

Typical problems that articles promotion can fix

Content marketing and advertising is actually a thoroughly extraordinary technique of involving with prospective buyers that circumvents a portion of today’s best agony spots, specifically in digital area.

•Dilemma: I need to increase the level of my pure hunt. Your audience can’t buy from you if they can’t find you, and today up to 93% of buying cycles start from a search engine. According to Kuno Creative, 51% of content consumption derives from organic search, so content marketing is a great way to build organic awareness, additionally. If your helpful content material positions hugely on yahoo and google, or perhaps provided vastly on social media sites, you are building product attention at no cost, and also, since your articles are only mutual when it’s related, your target audience would be fewer likely to tune it all out.

•Concern: I have to establish make personal preference. Getting posts marketing causes taste thru thought management by designing you a trusted method of obtaining education and information. In addition you can generate selection throughout human relationships, that are strengthened whenever your content material entertains or assists your potential buyers. Customers will probably purchase from organizations with whom they already have marriages.

•Issue: It’s not engaging my customers, even though i have a content marketing plan. Content material promoting will guidance your customers, not target them. Once you openly give your crowd anything so worthwhile that they’d be inclined to pay for it, you create depend on, which, ultimately, are you finding your most powerful supplying method.

•Concern: I have to accomplish significantly more prospects, whilst keeping my costs lower. According to Forrester research, today’s customers distrust and resent marketing that interrupts or intercepts them. Engaging content material promoting must be an important part of an all natural talking with current and potential clients, be connected to their hobbies and actions, and make a persistent story after a while. Website content marketing and advertising makes sense benefits for a very long time, this kind of appearance multiplies when you develop from the content and articles library.

•Problem: I am undecided how to present the return on your investment (Return) of my article content marketing strategy. On the whole, posts online marketing will help you to multiply website traffic, guidance guide certification (especially when content is produced by state), and, essentially, head conversions into product sales.

Since you now be aware of what challenges content and articles selling can solve, read about the dilemmas in order to prevent when launching your articles selling organize in the manual 8 Best Goof ups Content On-line marketers Make and the ways to Avoid Them.

Aspects of subject matter online marketing

In order to do it right, you’ll need to determine what type of content your potential buyers prefer to consume, content marketing can take various forms, and.

•Blog articles. Distill your content marketing strategy inside your web page schedule or methodology. The seller web site should and can be utilized to go across-stimulate other article content, which supports continue content with a reliable itinerary. Whenever you do not get a promotion workforce participant who seems to be well-versed in website seo (Website positioning), this is actually an area where by you should consult with an expert.

•E books. Guide subject matter should observe some kind of narrative format, including a lot of superior, visual pattern. It’s important to keep language consistent with your brand voice, even though the goal of an ebook is to educate.

•Videos. The key to efficiently employing video footage with regard to a article content strategy is maintaining it as a incredible as you can so that you aren’t instructed to consistently dedicate time and money making additional. Large-good quality online video material may also be used to show your trademark to YouTube’s active and large crowd.

•Infographics. Use as little word as it possibly can and allow images say to the plot. Find a talented freelancer who can make something beautiful and informative if you don’t have a killer in-house graphics artist.

•Cheat linens. They are shorter-two or three web pages at most. Which means there will not be many place for big pictures, so you will wish to use wording formatting and have them as possible for a audience to fast check out throughout. Connection or examine other practical information on much more in-range figuring out.

templates and •Workbooks. These solutions are best ways to you want to keep trademark ahead of potential buyers when continuing to inform. They should be devised for print out and generated as interactive and practical as they possibly can.

•White papers and reports. White papers and reports are generally less graphically designed and use language that is a little more professional, even though these materials are similar to an ebook in that they are primarily educational. They are able to also make chance to lover with the other groups.

•Slip decks. Slip decks are a smart data format for deteriorating difficult guidelines into simple steps or chew-size articles. Maintain your glides simple and easy: Use low textual content in a single font and big visuals right through.

•Condition experiments. Put together condition analyses with authentic figures and finished experiences. This will aid keep the material devoted to the results and value, not the emblem.

•Demos. This is where a freeevaluation and assessment. Alternatively, trial works nicely to start the dialogue and to begin to fully qualify your most interested leads. If you have an e-commerce-based product, you can leverage a discount code to use at the time of the transaction to establish some urgency around making the purchase.

•Distribution channels.

•Possessed: Showing your site content in the brand’s very own social media marketing stations-like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter or Pinterest-may be a instant, easy to customize, and no cost ability to correspond with your potential audience.

•100 % natural: Weaving some Search engine optimisation most beneficial practices in to the content material can certainly help get a beneficial perception with Google and bing and relocate your web blog in the search positions listing. The strength of a good quality website content marketing plan is inside offering the information and answers that your chosen customers wants, so be certain that he or she can discover it.

•Paid: Most social networks permit some form of paid back advertising and marketing, which includes sponsored content, shell out-each-simply click (Paid advertising), search engine marketing (Search engine marketing), show, and retargeting. Complementing a network’s demographics with all your brand’s personas will allow you to determine where you can make an investment.

•Accumulated: This is the most valuable, but hardest to create. Attained social networking promotional comes about when your crowd selects to discuss your site content making use of their system.

Get more info Visit BuzRush

Join: - Question & Answer Platform https: //community.buzrush.com/

[anthonykrierion]

10 Skills Every SEO Expert Should Have

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in March of 2012 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Whether you’re going to hire someone to run your SEO campaign or you’re going to take a stab at it on your own, there are certain skills that help the optimization process happen smoothly.

The skill set for SEO experts is typically quite broad, but there’s normally a baseline of traits that contribute to their digital prowess. In considering how you or your SEO service provider handles your optimization, keep an eye out for these 10 skills.

1. Critical Thinking

It’s important to remember that no two SEO plans are completely alike. Every website is different, and there are many factors that impact a site’s search engine ranking.

Because of that, it’s imperative that an SEO expert should be able to find potential issues on the websites that they work on. This can be done by engaging in competitor research and figuring out what’s working or not working for some of your chief rivals.

SEO success boils down to having the ability to “out-optimize” your chief competitors. An SEO expert should be a critical thinker; someone who can examine your campaign vs. those of your rivals to determine what went right, what went wrong, why it happened, and how you should go about fixing any problems.

There is no standard SEO formula. That’s why it’s important to bring a critical mind to the table in order to understand unique problems from multiple angles and find creative solutions to correct them.

2. Prioritization

Prioritization is vital to running a successful SEO campaign. That’s why all SEO experts should have a strong understanding of the steps that need to be taken. Each of these steps should be prioritized as it pertains to their importance and difficulty.

For example, back link building is one of the most time consuming and difficult aspects of the SEO process. It is also one of the most important factors in determining ranking. A backlink is a link to your site from a respected website that is relevant to your industry. Think of it as a recommendation. When a site is linking to your page, it is acknowledging that you are an expert in your field.

Because of the difficulty and importance placed on link building efforts, it’s important to give this process lots of time and attention to ensure that it pays off for you in the end. Simple matters like content tweaks, while still important, take far less time and shouldn’t be prioritized.

3. Research Minded

Research is incredibly important to an SEO campaign. An SEO expert should be someone who mastered the art of researching while still in school and perhaps even enjoyed it on some level. Comfort and confidence are needed for strong research, and make no mistake about it, keyword research is going to take a fair amount of time.

Be thorough and look into every angle when planning out your keywords. SEO experts know the importance of terms that are both high value, meaning that there is a large demand for them, and relevant. Relevancy is huge. If your SEO director is telling you that you should apply keywords that have nothing to do with your product of service, that’s black hat SEO and it will actually hurt your ranking in the long run.

An SEO expert should be well versed in tools like Google’s Keyword Planner. It’s also important to do a lot of research the competition, but be careful not to copy them. What works for one business might not work for another, even if they’re in the same industry.

Finally, and most importantly, SEO experts need to constantly research Google, and stay on top of its ever changing search algorithm. SEO is not something that you just learn once and then never touch again. You have to always be reading articles and paying close attention to what Google is doing. If you fall behind, you’ll lose out on a lot of progress.

4. Analysis

Analytics are the backbone of SEO. It’s how SEO experts measure success, so it should be a regular part of their day. Every action that is taken during an SEO campaign can and should be measured.

Experts in SEO should understand how to pull analytics as well as how to read and interpret the data that they’re receiving.

But they have to know a lot more than how to simply read the results. Any SEO expert worth the title will know how to take action and apply those analytics to the site that they’re working on in order to achieve continued success.

SEO is a report based process, so any SEO professional who does not have strong analysis skills will be unable to monitor their successes and failures.

5. Decision Making

Throughout the SEO process, you have to make decisions on the go. It is a constantly evolving atmosphere and you can’t always wait to discuss developments in a committee.

What’s more, SEO is never a consistent process. Google is constantly changing the way it examines websites and changes have to be made fast, lest you lost the progress you’ve gained. That’s why it’s important that SEO experts have the ability to make decisions quickly.

Knowing how to make the best decision in a given situation without having to ask 10 different people their opinions is a strong quality that all SEO experts should demonstrate. Such a skill only comes from having inside out knowledge of Google’s process, and keeping an ear to the ground to determine when things are changing.

6. Flexibility

If a specific strategy that an SEO expert believed would be a sure thing turns out to be a flop, it’s important that they know when it’s time to course correct.

One size does not always fit all with SEO. That means what worked well for other companies won’t necessarily be a slam dunk for another company. Your SEO expert should have the flexibility to switch strategies at a given moment.

What’s more, it’s important that these strategy shifts not kill any momentum or slow the process down in any way.

7. Writing

Strong writing skills are a must for anyone managing an SEO campaign. Remember, search engine optimization is a content driven strategy, and SEO writing is an art form that not everyone is good at.

It is exceedingly difficult to weave keywords into your content without making it seem forced. There is nothing more painful than reading a blog or information page that has been obviously stuffed to the brim with keywords. Readers see right through it and so does Google. At the end of the day, bad writing may actually hinder your SEO progress.

(Image Source)

SEO experts should also understand what kind of content gets clicks in your industry. You have to appeal to both Google and your core audience. What’s the point in drawing people to your site if the content is bad and doesn’t encourage customers to make a purchase?

An SEO specialist also needs to understand how to blog effectively for link building. One of the best ways to get links for your website is to write blogs and shop them around to other relevant sites. These blogs should not be about your service specifically, but rather a general information piece that shows off your expertise and includes a link back to your site.

SEO experts should specialize in writing content for both web pages and blogs, creating titles, writing metadata, and more.

8. Web Coding

While SEO experts don’t have to be web designers, it’s important that they understand the basics of web design and Meta tags. SEO specialists have to be a rare breed of marketing professional with an understanding of how to merge web design and SEO strategy in a way most web designers would not appreciate.

(Image Source)

When you’re designing a site for SEO purposes, you have to always keep the overall strategy in mind. Designing an SEO compliant site means relying less on artistic vision and more on cold hard data, which flies in the face of what most designers are looking to do.

9. People Skills

Having people skills will help an SEO expert in the realm of client communication. Clients ted to get upset because they don’t understand how the SEO process works. This can lead to frustrations and unfair expectations. It’s important that an SEO expert understands how to properly communicate and manage the expectations of their clients so as not to back themselves into an unwinnable situation.

For example, SEO takes time. Most campaigns will go a full six months before any kind of return on investment is seen. If that is not properly communicated to a client, they may become fed up after the first month or two.

You don’t just want to communicate your point effectively; you want to do it in a way that can reassure people that SEO results will happen in time.

10. Humility

As we mentioned before, the world of Search Engine Optimization is constantly changing. Even experts can get left behind if they’re not keeping up with Google’s constant algorithm changes.

Believe it or not, humility is a skill in the SEO world. Some people simply prefer to learn what they can to do their job, then go home and do other things. For an SEO expert, work cannot be something to just “get through.”

Being an SEO expert never means knowing everything there is to know about the world of SEO. To think so would be arrogant, and there is no room for ego in SEO. Specialists have to be able to recognize when they’ve made mistakes, accept that certain ideas that they’ve had won’t work, and move along quickly and efficiently without stubbornly dragging their heels through the sand.

Know What to Look For

If you want to hire an SEO expert to improve your search engine standings, it’s important to know what it is that you’re looking for. You want an individual or company that properly embodies all of these 10 vital tasks.

You need critical minds who understand how to prioritize their actions. You need someone who is heavily research minded that won’t mind the long hours that it takes to compile lists of high-value relevant keywords. It has to be someone who knows how to analyze a website, make decisions on the fly, and is flexible enough to abandon failing strategies at a moment’s notice and adopt an entirely new perspective.

You’re looking for a strong writer with a background in web coding, who understands what needs to happen on the back end for SEO to truly succeed. What’s more, your SEO professional should be able to easily explain the process to you and manage your expectations while remaining humble and keeping their ear to the Google ground.

Sometimes it can be difficult to find one person that embodies these specific traits. That’s why it’s often a great idea to employ the services of a full-service SEO marketing firm over bringing in an in house employee to manage your campaign full time. An SEO firm puts an entire team of professionals at your disposal, working together toward one common goal, to push your website up to the first page of Google and to keep it there.

SEO can and does work. Don’t be discouraged by a previous bad experience or a lack of quick progress. Invest in SEO and watch your visibility rise to the top of the world’s most trafficked search engines.

10 Skills Every SEO Expert Should Have was originally posted by Video And Blog Marketing

[samuelpboswell]

10 Skills Every SEO Expert Should Have

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in March of 2012 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Whether you’re going to hire someone to run your SEO campaign or you’re going to take a stab at it on your own, there are certain skills that help the optimization process happen smoothly.

The skill set for SEO experts is typically quite broad, but there’s normally a baseline of traits that contribute to their digital prowess. In considering how you or your SEO service provider handles your optimization, keep an eye out for these 10 skills.

1. Critical Thinking

It’s important to remember that no two SEO plans are completely alike. Every website is different, and there are many factors that impact a site’s search engine ranking.

Because of that, it’s imperative that an SEO expert should be able to find potential issues on the websites that they work on. This can be done by engaging in competitor research and figuring out what’s working or not working for some of your chief rivals.

SEO success boils down to having the ability to “out-optimize” your chief competitors. An SEO expert should be a critical thinker; someone who can examine your campaign vs. those of your rivals to determine what went right, what went wrong, why it happened, and how you should go about fixing any problems.

There is no standard SEO formula. That’s why it’s important to bring a critical mind to the table in order to understand unique problems from multiple angles and find creative solutions to correct them.

2. Prioritization

Prioritization is vital to running a successful SEO campaign. That’s why all SEO experts should have a strong understanding of the steps that need to be taken. Each of these steps should be prioritized as it pertains to their importance and difficulty.

For example, back link building is one of the most time consuming and difficult aspects of the SEO process. It is also one of the most important factors in determining ranking. A backlink is a link to your site from a respected website that is relevant to your industry. Think of it as a recommendation. When a site is linking to your page, it is acknowledging that you are an expert in your field.

Because of the difficulty and importance placed on link building efforts, it’s important to give this process lots of time and attention to ensure that it pays off for you in the end. Simple matters like content tweaks, while still important, take far less time and shouldn’t be prioritized.

3. Research Minded

Research is incredibly important to an SEO campaign. An SEO expert should be someone who mastered the art of researching while still in school and perhaps even enjoyed it on some level. Comfort and confidence are needed for strong research, and make no mistake about it, keyword research is going to take a fair amount of time.

Be thorough and look into every angle when planning out your keywords. SEO experts know the importance of terms that are both high value, meaning that there is a large demand for them, and relevant. Relevancy is huge. If your SEO director is telling you that you should apply keywords that have nothing to do with your product of service, that’s black hat SEO and it will actually hurt your ranking in the long run.

An SEO expert should be well versed in tools like Google’s Keyword Planner. It’s also important to do a lot of research the competition, but be careful not to copy them. What works for one business might not work for another, even if they’re in the same industry.

Finally, and most importantly, SEO experts need to constantly research Google, and stay on top of its ever changing search algorithm. SEO is not something that you just learn once and then never touch again. You have to always be reading articles and paying close attention to what Google is doing. If you fall behind, you’ll lose out on a lot of progress.

4. Analysis

Analytics are the backbone of SEO. It’s how SEO experts measure success, so it should be a regular part of their day. Every action that is taken during an SEO campaign can and should be measured.

Experts in SEO should understand how to pull analytics as well as how to read and interpret the data that they’re receiving.

But they have to know a lot more than how to simply read the results. Any SEO expert worth the title will know how to take action and apply those analytics to the site that they’re working on in order to achieve continued success.

SEO is a report based process, so any SEO professional who does not have strong analysis skills will be unable to monitor their successes and failures.

5. Decision Making

Throughout the SEO process, you have to make decisions on the go. It is a constantly evolving atmosphere and you can’t always wait to discuss developments in a committee.

What’s more, SEO is never a consistent process. Google is constantly changing the way it examines websites and changes have to be made fast, lest you lost the progress you’ve gained. That’s why it’s important that SEO experts have the ability to make decisions quickly.

Knowing how to make the best decision in a given situation without having to ask 10 different people their opinions is a strong quality that all SEO experts should demonstrate. Such a skill only comes from having inside out knowledge of Google’s process, and keeping an ear to the ground to determine when things are changing.

6. Flexibility

If a specific strategy that an SEO expert believed would be a sure thing turns out to be a flop, it’s important that they know when it’s time to course correct.

One size does not always fit all with SEO. That means what worked well for other companies won’t necessarily be a slam dunk for another company. Your SEO expert should have the flexibility to switch strategies at a given moment.

What’s more, it’s important that these strategy shifts not kill any momentum or slow the process down in any way.

7. Writing

Strong writing skills are a must for anyone managing an SEO campaign. Remember, search engine optimization is a content driven strategy, and SEO writing is an art form that not everyone is good at.

It is exceedingly difficult to weave keywords into your content without making it seem forced. There is nothing more painful than reading a blog or information page that has been obviously stuffed to the brim with keywords. Readers see right through it and so does Google. At the end of the day, bad writing may actually hinder your SEO progress.

(Image Source)

SEO experts should also understand what kind of content gets clicks in your industry. You have to appeal to both Google and your core audience. What’s the point in drawing people to your site if the content is bad and doesn’t encourage customers to make a purchase?

An SEO specialist also needs to understand how to blog effectively for link building. One of the best ways to get links for your website is to write blogs and shop them around to other relevant sites. These blogs should not be about your service specifically, but rather a general information piece that shows off your expertise and includes a link back to your site.

SEO experts should specialize in writing content for both web pages and blogs, creating titles, writing metadata, and more.

8. Web Coding

While SEO experts don’t have to be web designers, it’s important that they understand the basics of web design and Meta tags. SEO specialists have to be a rare breed of marketing professional with an understanding of how to merge web design and SEO strategy in a way most web designers would not appreciate.

(Image Source)

When you’re designing a site for SEO purposes, you have to always keep the overall strategy in mind. Designing an SEO compliant site means relying less on artistic vision and more on cold hard data, which flies in the face of what most designers are looking to do.

9. People Skills

Having people skills will help an SEO expert in the realm of client communication. Clients ted to get upset because they don’t understand how the SEO process works. This can lead to frustrations and unfair expectations. It’s important that an SEO expert understands how to properly communicate and manage the expectations of their clients so as not to back themselves into an unwinnable situation.

For example, SEO takes time. Most campaigns will go a full six months before any kind of return on investment is seen. If that is not properly communicated to a client, they may become fed up after the first month or two.

You don’t just want to communicate your point effectively; you want to do it in a way that can reassure people that SEO results will happen in time.

10. Humility

As we mentioned before, the world of Search Engine Optimization is constantly changing. Even experts can get left behind if they’re not keeping up with Google’s constant algorithm changes.

Believe it or not, humility is a skill in the SEO world. Some people simply prefer to learn what they can to do their job, then go home and do other things. For an SEO expert, work cannot be something to just “get through.”

Being an SEO expert never means knowing everything there is to know about the world of SEO. To think so would be arrogant, and there is no room for ego in SEO. Specialists have to be able to recognize when they’ve made mistakes, accept that certain ideas that they’ve had won’t work, and move along quickly and efficiently without stubbornly dragging their heels through the sand.

Know What to Look For

If you want to hire an SEO expert to improve your search engine standings, it’s important to know what it is that you’re looking for. You want an individual or company that properly embodies all of these 10 vital tasks.

You need critical minds who understand how to prioritize their actions. You need someone who is heavily research minded that won’t mind the long hours that it takes to compile lists of high-value relevant keywords. It has to be someone who knows how to analyze a website, make decisions on the fly, and is flexible enough to abandon failing strategies at a moment’s notice and adopt an entirely new perspective.

You’re looking for a strong writer with a background in web coding, who understands what needs to happen on the back end for SEO to truly succeed. What’s more, your SEO professional should be able to easily explain the process to you and manage your expectations while remaining humble and keeping their ear to the Google ground.

Sometimes it can be difficult to find one person that embodies these specific traits. That’s why it’s often a great idea to employ the services of a full-service SEO marketing firm over bringing in an in house employee to manage your campaign full time. An SEO firm puts an entire team of professionals at your disposal, working together toward one common goal, to push your website up to the first page of Google and to keep it there.

SEO can and does work. Don’t be discouraged by a previous bad experience or a lack of quick progress. Invest in SEO and watch your visibility rise to the top of the world’s most trafficked search engines.

The post 10 Skills Every SEO Expert Should Have appeared first on HigherVisibility.

from The SEO Advantages https://www.highervisibility.com/blog/10-skills-every-seo-expert-should-have/

[lucyariablog]

17 Questions to Break Free From Competitive Content Issues

In 1998, I became the investment club guide for About.com. My responsibilities included the creation of at least one original article per week on the topic of investing or investment clubs, as well as development of the e-newsletter for the subscribers of that channel.

I absolutely loved it. Every piece of content I created scored more traffic. The formula seemed so easy … just create article after article answering questions about investment clubs and the audience grew and grew.

About.com had hundreds of guides like me covering almost every topic imaginable. By the early 2000s, About.com was one of the largest websites (by audience traffic) in the world. At that time, it was all about scale … creating content for everybody. Yahoo did it. Microsoft did it. Excite.com did it (I owned stock in that little disaster).

It was about scale until it wasn’t about scale.

As more and more publishers and brands entered the market, About.com’s market share started to disintegrate. About.com realized, like many others, that if your content is for everybody, it’s for nobody.

For years About.com continued to languish, changing ownership multiple times, until a new strategy was hatched a few years ago.

If your #content is for everybody, it’s for nobody, says @JoePulizzi. Click To Tweet

About.com, renamed Dotdash, focused on verticals where it could become a go-to resource for particular audiences. Instead of creating content for practically everyone, Dotdash believed it had a competitive advantage in six verticals in which it would go narrow and deep on each topic. Today these include Verywell (health), The Spruce (home), Lifewire (tech), The Balance (personal finance), Tripsavvy (travel), and ThoughtCo (life hacking).

According to CEO Neil Vogel, the change in strategy is working, and at a faster rate than expected.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Connect with a Hard-to-Reach Audience: A Niche Marketing Strategy

Are you niche enough?

I presented a workshop to a group of students in Des Moines a few weeks back. One student asked if I would launch CMI the same way today as we did almost 10 years ago. My answer: absolutely not. If CMI launched today, there is no way it could compete as a broad education and training site for content marketing. There is simply too much competition now. We would have to focus on a niche like nonprofit content marketing or content marketing for financial services companies. Or, perhaps, we’d have to change the audience.

The question you need to start with is, “Are you niche enough?” How do you know?

My litmus test is this. Answer these first two questions.

If you employ the resources you have for the strategy, can you be the leading informational provider in that niche to that audience? If the answer is yes, move to Question 2.

Can you be the leading information provider in your niche to your audience, asks @JoePulizzi. Click To Tweet

In this niche to this audience, are there fewer than 10 legitimate competitors? That includes your real competitors (who sell your products and services), media companies, bloggers, influencers, and anyone else who covers the niche.

If there are more than 10 competitors, your niche isn’t niche enough. It will be incredibly difficult to break through with so much competition in that area, unless you are truly able to differentiate yourself.

For example, when John Lee Dumas started his podcast EntrepreneurOnFire (EOF), hundreds of competitors were going after the startup crowd with real-world advice. Most of those competitors had bigger budgets. But, no competitor created its platform as a daily podcast. That was John’s “content tilt.” John has never missed a day in over four years. Today, he’s a multimillionaire.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Differentiate Content in a Crowded Field [Example from Adidas]

Audience questions

To start, everything should be focused on your specific audience … and there should be only one audience. If you target more than one audience group (or persona), you will fail (sorry to be so blunt). Here are the questions to answer before selecting your niche(s):

If you target more than one audience group (or persona), you will fail, says @JoePulizzi. #contentmarketing Click To Tweet

Who’s the target audience? (only one)

What’s the audience (content or informational) need(s) as it pertains to your strategy?

How will your content marketing strategy help your audience members with their job or life in some way?

Why does he or she care about this? (Does the audience care?)

What unique value proposition (UVP) do you offer this audience? What differentiating value do you bring to the table?

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 4 Ways to Shift Your Thinking to Truly Focus on Your Audience

Content questions

Highly scrutinize your content. If the information isn’t truly differentiated, with limited competition, there is little chance you will break through and garner attention.

What is the content niche you are planning to cover?

What other companies are providing this kind of information? Do you even have an opportunity to become a leading resource in this area? How do you find out?

Is there a possibility to purchase an existing external asset instead of developing a new one?

Where will these stories be found? Who in the company has the expertise to help? What internal assets and other content do you have?

What resources (staffing and otherwise) will you need that you do not have?

How will the stories mainly be told (audio, video, textual)? Remember, focus on one key content type and one key distribution platform (a blog, a magazine, an event series, a podcast, a video series, etc.).

What key design issues will make or break the program?

What platform makes the most sense to distribute the content?

Are you creating a new content brand, or weaving into your existing product or company brand?

Content marketing mission statement

I talk about this concept so much that even I’m tiring of it. But the truth is (and even CMI/MarketingProfs research bears this out), most organizations don’t develop a content marketing mission statement (like an editorial mission) as their guiding light. Why is this so important? It not only gives you focus, but it gives you the power to say no. When your CEO or CMO walks into your office or emails some great idea, the first thing you do is run it by your mission statement. Does it fit? If not, sorry … that content is just not going to fly.

A #contentmarketing mission statement gives you focus AND the power to say no, says @JoePulizzi. Click To Tweet

There are three parts to the mission statement:

Core target audience

Material to be delivered to the audience

Outcome for the audience

Let’s look at Digital Photography School’s content mission: “Welcome to Digital Photography School – a website with simple tips to help digital camera owners get the most out of their cameras.”

Let’s dissect the mission statement:

Core target audience – digital camera owners

Material to be delivered to the audience – simple tips

Outcome for audience members – get the most out of their camera

As you can see, a content mission statement is not rocket science. The content tilt is more than just telling a different story. It’s about finding an educational or informational area of little to no competition where you have a chance to break through all the clutter.

In thinking about Digital Photography School, with thousands of websites available that talk about photography, how did DPS break through with little to no promotional budget?

It believed that the majority of photography content on the web was 1) focused on the photography professional or 2) in a long textual form that was hard to engage in. DPS’s content tilt – the reason it separated itself – was its insight and ability to turn the focus on a beginner audience with helpful, consistent tips that its readers could use easily and immediately.

No one was doing that in that way … and that is the main reason DPS has been successful.

Most likely, you already started your company’s content marketing journey. No problem … just go back and adjust the strategy based on the answers to these questions. You may find that you are indeed targeting multiple audiences or you really aren’t niche enough with your content. No time like the present to make a change.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Do a Competitive Content Marketing Analysis

As you develop and grow your niche, let CMI be a helping hand. Subscribe to the daily newsletter (or weekly digest) today. 

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 17 Questions to Break Free From Competitive Content Issues appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/11/questions-competitive-content/

[shorthaircutsmodels]

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On the off chance that you've constantly imagined about volume yet your straight and slim hair isn't doing the stunt you ought to decide on certain waves. WOB wavy bounce is the correct decision for you. A wavy weave. In the event that your hair is long enough do a few twists and leave medium-term. You will adore the outcome when you unbraid them toward the beginning of the day. She combined her WOB haircut with a red lip. Be an attractive miss lackey. Charming Short Asian Hairstyles For 2020 Trendy Korean Short Haircuts, Some have been one of the dull steeds of this current year as far as short hair inclines yet I can genuinely say we sort of observed this coming. Following quite a while of super-long augmentations on top blasts and waves and twists it was surely prime time for a palette invigorate the extent that the eye can see. We originally played with the idea with some blast that we had the option to play with length without truly giving up such a lot. Korean Short Hair 2020 At that point came the now dissipated La throw all over the place. At that point came a least layered static edge of 90s revival and afterward here we are at gruff bounce focal. Also you can clearly accept that South Koreans are exceptionally quick pattern connectors one of the first right now bounce train. In case you're in the very same circumstance or need to change your hair yet don't have a clue how to begin our communicate today will take care of your concern. Cute Short Haircuts For Asian Girls 2020 In case you're especially inspired by Korean dramatizations and K pop shows you can see that Korean entertainers and icons consistently look in broad daylight with a stylish and appealing hairdo regardless of how we weave to make a straightforward bun even Korean young lady haircuts consistently look extraordinary. So today Bequeenhair will show you a rundown of Korean hairdos that will rouse you. In case you're searching for a short hair style the accompanying Korean short hairdos will be actually what you're searching for. Korean Short Hairstyle Female 2020 Asian haircuts all in all particularly Korean hairdos specifically have just experienced huge change each year and are step by step asserting their situation on the rundown of the world's best rundown of in vogue haircuts. Best Kpop Short Hair images The straightforward yet appealing short hair style that follows the Korean style is getting progressively famous. The short dull wavy bounce is a standout amongst other Korean short hairdos for round appearances. Best Korean Short Hairstyle İmages This hair style can without much of a stretch work out in a good way for various hair shading and outfit style. The hairdo that is famous for somebody 2020 is a popular perfect and simple style. Would you like to blur or undermine short to medium or long hair there are astounding trims and styles to look over. Korean Short Hair Men The Korean entertainer hairdo is a positive choice to attempt in 2020. Korean on-screen character hairdo 2020 is the best haircut to attempt now. See the most recent hair patterns to discover the haircut of exemplary and present day style trim hair relying upon the kind of hair. Korean Short Hairstyles 2020 Female The data we can send is identified with hairdo 2020 article with the title 25 + propelled Korean on-screen character haircut 2020. The rise of k fly over the most recent couple of years has brought an exceptionally fascinating and drawing in look in the realm of style and design. We are discussing the styles of Korean men obviously. They have gradually become well known and have become a part of the Backstreet Boys and the East regarding pattern. I was increasingly inquisitive. Short Hairstyles For Korean Women That'Ll Blow Your Mind Look down to see the full rundown and press the game at the base for a snappy recap. first. Basic Korean men's hair styles we should begin with an extremely basic however current hair style that Korean men have been embracing. Short Korean Hairstyles Male A brush with a side piece with a tricky surface with basically no layers. Hair sparkle specialist is discretionary. The eternity stylish hairdo keeps on being mainstream and whether you have more slender or thicker hair there's an excellent weave haircut that suits you. Trendy Korean Short Hairstyles That You Must Try Today Try not to trust us. She is the agent executive of Japan's Tricca salon's hair expert Toshihide Mori and the Ambassador of the Shiseido Professional Beauty inventive group who share her recommendation on short hairdos for Asian ladies. Many have the discernment that it is hard to keep up short hair. So it's ideal to attempt a sway trim with a confided in beautician who suggests Toshihide who has over 20 years involvement with the hair business. I accept wavy bounce will keep on being well known in 2020 as it gives independence and presentations one's regular twists relying upon the surface of the hair. The Most Fantastic Korean Hairstyles 2020 For Girls I concede I've likely known about the pattern of hair styles including none other than Korean short hair in design for ladies. I comprehend it's wherever via web-based networking media and on the web. In case you're searching for another hairdo or need to get a smooth hair style to change your. Trendy Korean Short Hairstyles To Try in 2020 Style then you'll adore this assortment of the best haircut 2020. It's not to say that sways is the main Korean short hair making the hot circuit at the present time: a few cycles of the edited trim have gone fiercely popular thanks to some extent to Asian big names models brandishing a look and ulzzang's top facial influencers. Korean Short Hairstyles For Round Faces Look through to check whether this drifting look is one you'll before long be bookmarking. These days you need a quick and low-support haircut to stay aware of the high-beat network. Indeed even conventional Asian style patterns have experienced colossal change in the previous scarcely any years. Aside from trendy shapes and styles similarity is additionally a factor to consider. Today how about we investigate 12 beguiling short Asian hairdos with our magnificent photographs beneath. Images For Trendy Korean Short Haircuts Short haircuts can give ladies an easily cool look. Individuals of all age gatherings can have an appropriate short hair to make an appealing style in the city. Layers can assist with encircling the two sides of your face. A delightful since quite a while ago layered hairdo can make. Asian young ladies look excessively adorable with glad jawline length. Snappy side impacts will likewise accomplish this impact for you. In the event that you need to do a short hairdo remaining in. The group simply spot yourself with a flawless gruff blast. Korean Short Hairstyle 2020 Rae is tired of your present haircut and is searching for some hair that is in vogue and stunning. On the off chance that you need to trim your long hair all the time there is no better time presently to ride the short hair wave. The K Drama industry is dropping liberal clues about the rising prominence of short hairdos. It's not hard to comprehend why shorter hair is agreeable is low support and in particular adaptable enough for the vast majority. It doesn't make a difference whether you're a self observer or outgoing individual out of control or coy there's a style to each character and hair type. Korean Short Hairstyles Female 2020 We've even added some style thoughts to make things simpler for you. The grass is constantly greener on the opposite side. Everybody realizes that young ladies with straight hair incline toward. Twists and young ladies with wavy locks attempt to fix them. In the event that you have normally straight hair and. Would prefer not to style your hair with warm devices in every case straight. Hair can be very alluring contrasted with different hairdos. Beautiful Korean Short Haircuts You can discover stunning short straight hair styles and styles whether you are thick or flimsy hair type. The most significant thing is you can put off an additional half hour since straight hair is the simplest hairdo. Bounce's hair style was constantly cherished and increased in value by many. The ones hone the highlights and make them look smooth and alluring. Weave is an immortal haircut that can be worn by anybody.