Using the Instagram Suite of Apps for Business

8 Social Media Apps to Make Your Job Easier

Social media management isn’t as easy as sporadically sending out Tweets and posting pictures to Instagram. That might be fine for your personal accounts, but when it comes to marketing a business, there is a lot more involved. Connecting with influencers, finding the right content to publish for your audience, running ads and creating custom content are just some of the daily tasks that come along with social media marketing. In order to be more productive and keep some of your sanity, it’s a good idea to load up your social media apps toolkit.

Your kit should include apps that make some of the more tedious aspects of social media management easier. That way you can effectively streamline your workflow and maximize your results. Here’s our compiled list of eight apps that will help you accomplish all of that, and more:

1. Canva

If you want to be successful on social media and stand out, you need to get visual. Tweets with images get:

• 18% more clickthroughs
• 89% more favorites
• 150% more Retweets

Canva is one of the most popular graphic design apps for creating visuals in the social media industry. Whether you want a perfectly-sized Facebook Cover or a custom graphic to advertise your latest sale on Twitter, Canva makes it as simple as dragging and dropping the different elements into your image.

You have access to a huge library of free and paid photos, graphics and fonts that allow you to make professional looking social media graphics even if you have zero design skills. There’s also a Design School that’ll allow you to sharpen your skills a bit. Stop resorting to boring stock images and see what you can create in Canva.

Try Canva

2. BuzzSumo

In order to earn new social media followers and keep your current ones, you need to share great content. The best type of content is relevant and helpful for your target audience. One survey found that 21% of people would unfollow brands on social media because of boring content.

BuzzSumo is a content discovery and influencer outreach tool that shows you:

• What content gets shared the most in your industry
• Who’s sharing the content (influencers)

It’s an ideal social media app because you can use the information you gather from BuzzSumo to figure out what type of content you should create and share in order to get more traffic and social media engagement.

You might find that listicle or “how-to” articles get the most shares. Then you can start to share more of that type of content to generate additional interest for your social media posts. On top of that, you’ll also have a better idea of which influencers to reach out to on social media. As you build relationships, you’ll be able to get your content organically shared by top influencers in your industry.

Try BuzzSumo

3. Scoop.it

BuzzSumo will give you a good idea of what type of content to share. But you’ll also need a source to get a steady stream of blog posts, videos and articles to distribute. That’s where Scoop.it comes in. Scoop.it is a content curation tool that will crawl the Web for content related to keywords you enter. The app will also give you a list of relevant articles to share around that keyword.

One great benefit of Scoop.it is you’ll get to share content from a variety of sites. A lot of businesses make the mistake of only sharing content from the same two or three blogs, including their own. When you’re constantly sharing content from different sites, you have an opportunity to connect with more people by including an @mention to the original source of the content. The content creator will more than likely Retweet you, which gives your business exposure to a new audience. The more influencers you mention, the more reach you have.

Try Scoop.it

4. Google Analytics

Some of you might be wondering what Google Analytics is doing on a list about social media apps. Before you start thinking we’ve lost our minds, let me explain. Measuring your social media marketing efforts is one of the most important steps of the process. Unfortunately, 41% of companies have no idea whether or not their social media efforts are paying off because they don’t track their activity. Google Analytics makes tracking your social media campaigns much easier. In fact, we’ve written a couple of guides on how to do it:

• Ultimate Guide to Measuring Social Media ROI
• Social Media Campaign Tracking With UTM Parameters in Google Analytics

Within Google Analytics, you can track which social media platforms are bringing in the most traffic, which pages on your site are getting the most social traffic and even what your social media ROI is. Nearly any type of data correlation between your website and social media that will help you make decisions can be found through Google Analytics. Plus, this tool connects with some of the other social media apps on our list, so it makes for easy integration!

Try Google Analytics

5. IFTTT

Automation can be extremely helpful for social media marketing. However, you have to be cautious of what you choose to automate. In case you’re unfamiliar with IFTTT (If This Then That), it’s a very handy tool that lets you connect different apps into what’s called a “recipe” to streamline your workflow. For instance, maybe you want to automatically post the photos you share on Instagram to your Tumblr page or a specific Pinterest Board. IFTTT makes it possible by connecting your social accounts and automatically performing these tasks without the need for additional work.

The beauty of IFTTT is that its capabilities are only limited to your imagination, and you can make it work to fit your needs. Think of some of the most tedious and time-sucking social media tasks that you’re doing manually. Now, head over to IFTTT and see if there’s a way to create a recipe to automate it. Here are some time saving Instagram recipes to get started.

Try IFTTT 

6. Sprout Social

A social media dashboard is one of the first social media apps you should add to your toolkit. The native interfaces you get with social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn weren’t made for marketers. They’re meant for casual users, so each platform doesn’t have the functionality businesses need to be efficient. Your dashboard will serve as the home base for all of your company’s different social media profiles. Instead of having to log into five or six different accounts, you access everything from Sprout Social.

Within Sprout Social, you can:

• Schedule your social media posts
• Track brand mentions
• Get in depth reports
• Track social conversations
• And much more

It’s also ideal for agencies and companies that have multiple people who handle the social media marketing efforts. You can track who’s publishing content, assign tasks to specific team members, insert message approval systems and communicate with your team in the dashboard instead of emails. A social media dashboard is a necessity for any business that does social media marketing.

Try Sprout Social

7. AdEspresso

Facebook has one of the most robust advertising platforms online. The data the social network collects from users allows marketers to ensure their ads are being seen by their target market. When you’re only running a couple of ads with a relatively small budget, using the native Facebook Ads platform is perfectly fine. But once you start to get more advanced, run multiple campaigns and do more split testing, staying organized can become a hassle. AdEspresso is a Facebook Advertising tool that makes running multiple ads much easier.

Not only does AdEspresso allow you to better manage your ads, but the app helps you optimize ads to improve your ROI by analyzing them and providing actions you can take to get better results. Even though Facebook Ads are relatively cheap compared to other advertising platforms, you can waste a lot of money if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you haven’t been seeing very good results with your Facebook ads or have been struggling to stay organized, give AdEspresso a shot.

Try AdEspresso

8. Repost for Instagram

Have you ever came across an awesome photo on Instagram that you wanted to share with your audience? Unlike Twitter, Pinterest and Google+, Instagram doesn’t have a way to let you share content from other users within the app. You can only like pictures and leave a reply. This forced people to use workarounds like using screenshots and cropping out the image they wanted to share. That’s inconvenient, inefficient and sometimes unprofessional looking. Instead, the Repost for Instagram app allows you to easily repost content you find on Instagram and give credit to the source.

This is a good way to start networking with other Instagram users, or even share content across multiple company profiles. For instance, if the entire company attended an event and you post a group selfie on the company page, everyone else can repost it to their individual accounts too for more exposure.

Try Repost for Instagram

What Does Your Social Media App Toolkit Look Like?

It’s amazing how much more you can get done when you have the right tools at your disposal. Add these eight social media apps to your arsenal to find and share better content, streamline your processes and become a more effective social media marketer.

This post 8 Social Media Apps to Make Your Job Easier originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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The 10 Must-Read Email Marketing Posts of 2015

From confirmation emails to connecting with customers, we’ve covered a lot of hot topics on the blog in 2015. So in light of the new year, we’re counting down the best of the best (as determined by your clicks, tweets and shares):

10. Quick Ideas for Emails You Can Send Today

Bookmark this handy email cheat sheet, filled with quick ideas for emails you can send today.

9. How to Write an Autoresponder Email Series

Autoresponder emails have a ton of time-saving and business-growing benefits… and yet 75 percent of businesses aren’t using them. Add a follow up series to your email marketing strategy today and get ahead of the curve.

8. 10 Easy Ways to Grow Your Email List and Revenue

Whether you’ve grown your list to 10, 100 or 1,000 subscribers, it can be hard to reach that next big goal. Here are 10 easy ways to kickstart your email list growth.

7. 5 Time Tracking Tools to Take Back Your Day

Take back your day with these five time-tracking apps that will help boost your productivity, maximize your time and let you do more of the things you love.

6. Twenty Tools to Help You Design Better and Write Smarter

From Canva to Buffer, here’s our comprehensive list of tools to help you design better, write smarter and create engaging content faster.

5. How to Engage Social Followers Using Facebook’s New CTA Button

With Facebook’s new call-to-action feature, it’s easier than ever for your followers to do things like sign up to your email list or start shopping with the click of a button.

4. 6 Ways to Connect with Customers through Email

You’re sending emails in order to make personal connections with people. And if you truly want that kind of relationship with your email audience, it’s essential that you keep these tips in mind before hitting “send” on your next message.

3. How to Reactivate Your Email List in 5 Steps

Considering that the average email marketing list depreciates by 25 percent every year, how can you be sure that the people on your list really want to be there? With a reactivation campaign, of course!

2. Writing Confirmation and Welcome Emails People Love

Whether you have a lot to say and don’t know where to start (or you’re just dealing with the worst writer’s block ever), content is one of the biggest hurdles for first-time email marketers. This blog post will help you get started with the two emails you should create before you begin collecting new subscribers: the confirmation email and welcome email.

1. Holiday GIF Guide

We’ve created more than a dozen GIFs you can use in your holiday promotions (and beyond!), plus tips for using them in your emails!

What’s Next

What do you predict the top 10 trends of 2016 will be? What would you like to see more of on the blog? Let us know in the comments!

The post The 10 Must-Read Email Marketing Posts of 2015 appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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[Podcast] Episode 003: How do I get more email subscribers when starting from scratch?

We are quickly approaching the new year, and with each new year comes new beginnings. If you’re planning to start a new business venture in 2016, then you’ll definitely want to listen to this packed-to-the-brim episode of Ask Me About Email Marketing.

This week’s question comes from life coach, Dr. Wasi Saleem, who recently launched his brand and is looking to attract more email subscribers. To answer his question, we’ve recruited Brandon Olson, Content Marketing Manager at AWeber.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to optimize your website by determining your primary goal
• What elements to split test to boost conversion rates
• Common mistakes that can sabotage conversions
• How to use email automation to deliver valuable content
• The importance of opt-in form consistency
• Ways to integrate email marketing with social media

Listen below to hear Brandon’s response.

Want to be on the show? Here’s how you can participate:

• Use the widget below to record and send us a question about email marketing.
• We’ll select a question from the submission pool and track down one of our in-house email marketing experts to provide an answer.
• We’ll record their response, package it up with your question and release it as a new podcast episode each week. Plus, each episode will include bonus resources to help you level up your email marketing.

There are so many topics to explore in email marketing. So if you’re struggling with design, content, analytics or just getting started, leave us a message with a specific question and we’ll start answering!

A few notes on submitting:

• Introduce yourself, and your business/email marketing venture. Please don’t share any spammy URLs.
• Keep your question brief. Anywhere between 60-90 seconds would be ideal. Two-part questions are okay, too!
• Keep it clean. We won’t accept any submissions with disrespectful or vulgar language.

If we select your questions, we’ll air it. By submitting a question, you are agreeing to allow us to use your full, submitted audio clip on our podcast and in marketing the podcast and AWeber.

Ready to ask a question? Click the green button below!

The post [Podcast] Episode 003: How do I get more email subscribers when starting from scratch? appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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Do You Know How Your Email Open Rate Is Calculated?

Okay, I admit that this isn’t the most exciting topic when it comes to email marketing. You want your data, and you don’t care too much about how it’s obtained.

But it is important to consider if you’ve switched (or are thinking of switching) email marketing service providers (ESP). And here’s why: not all ESPs calculate email open rates the same way, and that can change your view on how your emails are performing.

Where ESPs and pizza places intersect

Switching to a new email marketing provider is kinda like finding a new pizza spot. Even though you have a whole new menu, you still expect certain elements to be the same. But then you realize your new pizza hangout creates their sauce differently, and nothing makes sense anymore. Even though it’s still pizza, something just seems off in comparison.

Well, moving to a new email marketing platform can be a similar experience, such as when you start reviewing your open rates on recently sent emails. Just like how no two pizza places follow the same recipes for the same pies, not every ESP uses the same formula for calculating open rates.

While this won’t impact how many people are opening your emails, it can portray different pictures of how successful your emails are.

But first, what’s an open rate?

Open rates represent the percentage of subscribers who opened your email compared to the number of emails that were delivered.

To track opens, ESPs that provide analytics add an invisible tracker image within HTML emails. As long as the email is opened using a provider that doesn’t block images, the open rate will be tracked.

This data is helpful as it provides insight into how effective your subject lines are at convincing subscribers to open your emails. It can also tell you the best times to send emails to your subscribers; if your open rates are higher between 2 pm and 5 pm on Wednesdays than any other time of the week, you might want to start sending future emails during that time.

How open rates are calculated

While ESPs track opens the same way, the road begins to split when it’s time to calculate the open rate. Here are the three most used formulas:

1. Unique Opens / Total Number of Subscribers

This approach (which we use here at AWeber) means the open rate is calculated by taking the unique opens (i.e., the total number of unique subscribers who open your email) and dividing it by the total number of subscribers on your list. So regardless of how many times a single person opens your email to look back at its contents, it will only count as one open.

For example, if you send an email to 100 subscribers and 20 people open it, your open rate would be 20 percent.

2. Total Opens / Total Number of Subscribers

With this formula, one person might count as multiple opens if they open your message more than once. Let’s go back to your email you sent to 100 people. Now, if 20 people open your message, and one person opens your message five times, the open rate would be 25 percent using this formula.

So even though the same number of individuals read your message as the previous example, the results are quite different since total opens are referenced. And this has a couple of pros and cons:

Con: The disadvantage with this number is that your rates might be skewed higher than normal if someone opens up your email a number of times.

If you were to send out an email with a link to a new ebook, someone who isn’t ready to read the whole thing might go back to that email multiple times to grab the link. Someone, or multiple people, might be re-opening your email 10, 15, or even 20 times! As a result, your open rate might seem as though more people are opening your emails, when it’s really just the same few individuals.

Pro: Total opens can also tell you more about how engaged your subscribers are with the content in a particular email. If someone goes back to your email 10 or more times, there’s something about the content that urges them to do so.

3. Unique Opens / (Emails Sent – Emails Bounced)

Sometimes your emails never get opened because they don’t make it to your subscriber’s inbox in the first place. Emails bounce due to a number of reasons, like an invalid user, invalid domain name, permanent bounce backs, etc. As a result, some ESPs calculate open rates by excluding the number of emails that bounce from an Internet Service Provider (Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL).

Let’s say you send your email to 100 people, 20 people open it, one person opens it 5 times, and 9 emails bounce. Your open rate will be calculated as follows:

20 / (100-9) = 22% open rate

You’ll notice that this open rate is again different from the previous two results. Depending on how many emails bounce, this formula might present a slightly higher open rate as the number of recipients who received your email gets smaller.

So, what’s the best approach?

That’s sort of a trick question, because there is no single right way to calculate open rate. Each formula will paint a slightly different picture of how your emails are performing, and being aware of what the story is telling you is the first step to understanding your analytics.

To get deeper into the data and learn more about how your subscribers are interacting with your emails, check to see if your ESP provides more in-depth reporting. AWeber users, for example, can view breakdowns of both unique and total opens for sent emails. This allows you to gather more insight in addition to the percentage that is presented to you.

How are your open rates calculated?

Check with your email service provider to see how your open rates are being calculated. If you’re planning on switching to a new ESP, be sure to research how they determine the rate as well.

For more tips on how to improve your open rates, here’s another great read from our blog.

Have any questions about open rates? Ask away in the comment section!

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Should I Hire a Social Media Agency?

4 Email Marketing Best Practices to Stay Relevant in 2016

By the end of 2016, it’s predicted that there will be 4.6 billion email accounts.

Wow. That’s a huge audience! As more people embrace email, you need to change the way you engage with your subscribers to keep up with their changing needs. To stay relevant, your email marketing best practices need to adapt to your audience.

To help you into the New Year, we have four email marketing best practices for 2016 to make your emails the coolest and most relevant in the inbox. Keep reading to learn how you can win with email marketing in 2016.

1. Contextual Emails

In 2016, 7 percent more emails will land in the inbox. So your job as an email marketer will become more difficult because audiences will be distracted by a downpour of emails. How can you be heard above the storm? Create contextual emails.

What are contextual emails?

Contextual emails are personalized to your subscribers. You can accomplish contextualization by sending emails based on the unique qualities of those subscribers. With contextual emails, subscribers receive the right email at the right time.

To create that awesome, contextual email that drives sales, write emails that subscribers feel were made exclusively for them. One easy way to do this is to segment your emails. When you segment your email lists, you are sending different emails to subscribers based on their varying pain points or interests.

Because specific content will resonate best with different subscribers, segmenting allows you to send the best content to the best recipient, creating more personalized and more effective emails.

You could segment your audience by their favorite color, their geographical location or even by their New Year’s resolutions for 2016. Learn more about sending personal, contextual emails.

2. Mobile Matters

Sixty-six percent of brand marketing emails are opened on mobile devices. Makes sense, right?

Just think about how many times your friends or family missed what you were saying because they were staring at their phone. When they finally look up from their phone screens, their glazed eyes say it all: mobile controls attention.

To grab your audience’s attention, you need to reach them where they are most reachable, and according to research and observation, that’s on their mobile devices.

So what’s the best way to drive email engagement on mobile devices? We have a few tips:

Responsive Emails

Use responsive email templates instead of mobile friendly emails. A responsive template will respond to the device that it is read on, while a mobile friendly email will not.

For example, if you read an email on your cell phone, a responsive email template will resize the font and images and even change the layout of the email to fit the small screen. A responsive email often looks different on a cell phone than on a laptop, because the template may convert two-columns into one-column to increase readability.

While responsive emails respond to different devices by converting text size and layout, mobile friendly emails appear the same on every device. Since their design doesn’t change for small devices, mobile friendly emails often contain text that is too small to read unless you zoom in.

Below on the left is a responsive email. The text is more readable and the images fit the screen better.

Brevity

Keep your emails short. Subscribers checking email on mobile typically have a few minutes to skim an email or two. Brevity is key. Otherwise, they won’t reach the end of the email.

Subject Lines

Optimize email subject lines. A good subject line is like spotting an adorable puppy in a room full of llamas. You pick up the puppy because who wants to get spit on by a llama.

How can you write a good subject line? Keep the subject line short (30 characters or less). Shorter subject lines have higher open rates.

Additionally, personalize subject lines by including the subscriber’s first name in the subject line or using a location-specific subject line. Personalizing your subject lines is another way to create appealing, contextual emails.

Finally, construct time-sensitive subject lines by stating when an offer ends. With a time-sensitive offer, you will create a sense of urgency for your reader. When they know they have limited time to act, they will act more quickly. For more information on subject lines, check out our tips on writing engaging subject lines.

Preview Text

Make your email preview text captivating. Behind your subject line, your preview text is one of the first things your subscriber sees. It’s like the kitten that’s next to the puppy in the room full of llamas.

3. Motion

In 2016, emails with videos and GIFs will capture more engagement than static emails.

Video

By 2017, video will control 69 percent of consumer internet traffic. If you video it, they will watch it.

But does video encourage engagement? Yes. Businesses that use video in email campaigns report a 55 percent increase in click-through rates.

Although videos may not play in the inbox due to video compatibility problems, there are still many creative ways to incorporate video in your email marketing campaigns. If you’d like a few ideas, check out our guide to creating awesome videos.

GIFs

Besides using video, add motion to emails with GIFs. GIF stands for graphics interchange format. To create the illusion of motion, GIFs rapidly display multiple images.

Because they are widely supported across email clients, GIFs are frequently sent in marketing emails. The motion in the inbox creates a standout email with increased engagement.

4. Wearables and Email Marketing

Wearables like the Apple Watch transform the marketing landscape. To best reach your customers, you now need to send emails that are optimized for a tiny screen on someone’s wrist.

By 2016, 9 percent of adults will have smartwatches like the Apple Watch, which means you can’t ignore wearables. Thankfully, there are plenty of tips out there on how to create great emails for smartwatches. We recommend experimenting with plain text emails, optimized subject lines and brief content.

Email Marketing in 2016

Our email marketing best practices for 2016 include personalizing your emails, optimizing for mobile devices, using motion like GIFs and video and writing emails geared toward smartwatches.

But we’d love to hear from you! What email marketing best practices do you think will be important in 2016? Share your opinions in the comments section below.

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Your Go-To Facebook Marketing Guide

How To Care For Your Email Template

Water daily, direct sunlight, and lots of love. Okay, just kidding, but I really do LOVE to code and design email templates, and there’s lots you can do to care for your email template to make sure you’re getting the most out of it!

Emails thrive better in some environments than others. As an email designer, I do my best to code templates that will work well across all email clients, browsers, and apps. If you’ve ever tested your emails to different combinations of browsers, email clients, and apps, you may have noticed your emails display differently depending on where it’s being rendered. You may have also noticed that some email clients are more difficult to work with than others.

So what can you do to take proper care of your email template?

Copy and paste with caution

Copying and pasting content is a common practice, but it can introduce some pests into your email code. It’s best to type directly into the editor, or to only copy and paste from plain text sources which will strip out any extra code picked up in the copy process.

For example, when I copy some text from one of our blog posts into the editor, extra tags are being added into the code. Note <h1></h1><p></p> below. While these are common HTML tags, different email clients may handle these tags differently than the browser where you’re creating the message.

5 Essential Design Tips for the Non-Designer

As a writer, I can’t believe I’m saying this: Visuals are the foundation of your business. Consistend, empowering branding helps to draw in prospects and keep customers coming back for more. It’s your first opportunity to make an impression.

It’s your brand identity.

 

Here’s another example of the code when I copy it from our blog, then paste it into a plain text editor. I’m using TextEdit with Plain Text formatting selected, as opposed to Rich Text formatting:

5 Essential Design Tips for the Non-Designer
As a writer, I can’t believe I’m saying this: Visuals are the foundation of your business. Consistend, empowering branding helps to draw in prospects and keep customers coming back for more. It’s your first opportunity to make an impression.
It’s your brand identity.

 

The extra code is not being embedded into the editor and will yield better results across a wider variety of email clients and browsers.

Keep it simple

Overdoing your message can cause your engagement to wilt. Keeping things simple will allow for you to have a clear, concise message.

Avoid overemphasis – don’t confuse or distract your reader by adding too many font sizes and styles, like underlines and bold text, throughout your message.

Use a simple color palette – try to keep the font colors to a minimum to avoid distraction. Pick a headline color, font color, and link color and stick with those colors throughout your message.

Limit the number of images you use.In some cases image-heavy emails work, but too many images may not only be distracting, they may also impact load times. If your message doesn’t load within a couple seconds you risk losing the attention of your readers. Another thing to remember is that some email clients will block images by default, so relying on images to convey your message isn’t recommended.

Make sure your images aren’t too wide – most of our templates are 600 pixels wide. If you upload an image that’s wider than 600 pixels, consider using the Optimized or Thumbnail option for the best results. If you have columns in your email, make sure the width of the image isn’t “breaking” the width of the column.

Avoid using too many links.In many cases you will want a clear call to action within your message. Offering too many links can actually prevent your subscribers from taking action.

Test your messages

Test your email in a variety of different environments. Create test accounts with free email services, and check to see how your email renders in those clients and different browsers. There’s also services, like Litmus, which will run dozens of tests at once to save you some time.

These are some of the most popular email clients, and I suggest trying to test to these if possible:

Desktop Email Clients

Remember, not everyone will be using the same version and rendering may vary from version to version

• Outlook
• Apple Mail

Webmail

The browser being used may also affect rendering – always test a variety of browsers like Chrome and Firefox

• Gmail
• Outlook.com
• Yahoo!

Mobile Apps

While all of our email templates are designed to be responsive, some email apps will display a mobile friendly version

• Mail App for iPhone
• Gmail App for iPhone
• Gmail App for Android

Need help cultivating your email template?

Did you know we have a team of email design experts who can help you troubleshoot rendering issues, and even design custom templates to match your brand? Let us help you grow your brand!

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Why Your Brand Should Invest in Blab

Marketers have seriously started directing their attention to live streaming—and for good reason. According to Nielsen, in 2014, time spent consuming digital video increased by more than 50% in all age groups. Simultaneously, Nielsen saw either no change or a decrease in time spent in front of the television.

Earlier this year, Meerkat and Periscope were welcomed into the live-streaming social space with an array of media attention, while Blab was quietly and quickly shaking things up. Founded in spring 2015 by the team responsible for the relaunch of Bebo—a visual social messaging platform scheduled for re-release in early 2016—Blab has been proving itself as a valuable tool for brands interested in entering the live-streaming space.

What Is Blab?

Blab is a live-streaming app focused on facilitating group discussions. A combination of up to four hosts can be featured in Blab’s live-video chat forum, organized in “Brady Brunch” fashion, with an unlimited amount of viewers tuning in. During the broadcast, viewers are able to connect with hosts through chat and can be invited into the video broadcast as a guest if space permits.

Blab for Brand Building & Increased Social Engagement

Blab allows companies the opportunity to have direct, face-to-face conversations with their audiences. The platform’s unique format can bring together multiple company stakeholders, organizational leaders and brand ambassadors for live, in-depth discussions. For enterprise and legacy brands in particular, this level of transparency and real-time interaction can help strengthen brand loyalty.

Engagement is also high. In fact, according to Blab’s CEO, the average time spent on the platform is 64 minutes, putting it in direct competition with TV, Netflix and other mainstream broadcast services. Heavy use presents an opportunity for enterprise brands to invest early, build trust and attract new leads within a growing, active and engaged audience.

Blab Best Practices

A brand’s business objectives and social voice should always influence how to approach Blab. Still, there are a few best practices to keep in mind.

1. Focus Your Topic

First and foremost, you want to drive value by establishing a clear topic for your series. Give your Blab series a concise name that clearly communicates your focus. Reinforce your topic with a related, custom hashtag. Promote your Blab hashtag on the channels that make sense, especially Twitter, which directly integrates with Blab.

Your angle should connect to your brand’s offerings, align with the interests of your audiences and strike the right balance between being seen as an expert and not being too exclusive. For instance, a hotel chain with a sustainability focus might launch a show entitled “Green Travel” (#GreenTravel) to discuss all things related to eco-friendly vacations.

2. Choose the Right Hosts

Leave at least one of Blab’s four host spots open so that you can cycle in guests or viewers of your show. This open space lets you to take advantage of what makes Blab unique while helping round out your brand’s expertise. One of the hosts should be an employee of your organization, to support your advocacy efforts, while the other host might be an industry partner, social influencer or media personality.

Consider who makes the most sense for your brand. But also invite interested individuals to do a test run. It might surprise you who comes to life the most when the camera is rolling—and who suddenly becomes shy. Also, avoid solo broadcasts, which can easily turn into a monologue.

3. Train Your Talent

Before a live broadcast, you want to make sure your hosts are camera ready. If you choose the right personalities, this will be much easier, but anyone can benefit from media training, and everyone should at least be apprised of your key brand messages.

That said, live streaming is at its best when it seems natural, so don’t let these brand guidelines overwhelm your talent. Simply empower your people to have a productive conversation.

4. Select a Unique Format

You want to seriously consider the structure of each show. Interviews are the default for most Blabs, which is why your team should consider some others ways of packaging your content to help stand out from the crowd.

Consider focusing the format of your Blab series around:

• A customer service hour to provide real-time feedback to your audience (Note: This idea requires extensive training and planning to avoid potential issues in communicating directly with a dissatisfied customer.)
• A community Q+A session where viewers ask questions on air or in the comments to a particular guest or about the subject at hand
• Company events that can add dimension by bringing in attendees and featured speakers
• A game show setup where the discussion is turned into an audience activity with the potential to win prizes
• An experts panel to provide varying perspectives on a particular topic, similar to a roundtable at a conference
• Training sessions around your products or services
• Your other content, repurposed from your blog, podcast and elsewhere, so that you’re not reinventing the wheel and instead maximizing all your marketing efforts

5. Follow a Schedule

Finally, set a schedule, and stick to it. Consistency is key when it comes to branding. In a Blab series, it establishes an ongoing cadence with your audience so that people know when to tune in and what to expect in terms of topics that might be covered.

When deciding how often to live stream your Blab series, determine what capabilities your team has to execute and maintain a daily, weekly or biweekly show. We recommend the frequency being no less than every other week to ensure you are consistently reaching your audience; otherwise, it will be easy for viewers to forget about your program.

Blab On

Now that you’re familiar with Blab and the platform’s best practices, it’s time for your brand to start engaging with its audience through live-stream video. In November, Sprout Social took the plunge and hosted its first Blab in coordination with a #SproutChat dedicated to navigating the platform.

You can follow Sprout on Blab here. Meanwhile, as your brand begins to incorporate Blab into its social strategy, share what best practices you discover in the comments below.

This post Why Your Brand Should Invest in Blab originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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11 biggest SEO trends and events of 2015

To help unpick the tangled web of news-stories and trends are a selection of expert contributors, who will expand further on the biggest events on the year and perhaps shine a light on what may come in 2016

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[Podcast] Episode 002: How do I convert my social traffic into loyal email subscribers?

We’re back with another episode of our podcast, Ask Me About Email Marketing.

This week’s question comes from Deonne Kahler, a photographer who sees a large amount of shares on social media, but is looking to convert that traffic into loyal email subscribers.

To answer her question, we’ve recruited guest expert Scott Richardson, Motion Graphic Designer at AWeber.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Ways to best ask for more subscribers without being too pushy.
• Some experiments to run with your optin forms.
• Tips for getting more subscribers via Instagram.

Listen below to hear Scott’s response.

Want to be on the show? Here’s how you can participate:

• Use the widget at the bottom of this page to record and send us a question about email marketing.
• We’ll select a question from the submission pool and track down one of our in-house email marketing experts to provide an answer.
• We’ll record their response, package it up with your question and release it as a new podcast episode each week. Plus, each episode will also include bonus resources to help you level up your email marketing.

There are so many topics to explore in email marketing. So if you’re struggling with design, content, analytics or just getting started, leave us a message with a specific question and we’ll start answering!

A few notes on submitting:

• Introduce yourself, and your business/email marketing venture. Please don’t share any spammy URLs.
• Keep your question brief. Anywhere between 60-90 seconds would be ideal. Two-part questions are okay, too!
• Keep it clean. We won’t accept any submissions with disrespectful or vulgar language.

If we select your questions, we’ll air it. By submitting a question, you are agreeing to allow us to use your full submitted audio clip on our podcast and in marketing the podcast and AWeber.

Ready to ask a question? Click the green button below!

The post [Podcast] Episode 002: How do I convert my social traffic into loyal email subscribers? appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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How to Start a Twitter Account for Your Business

One of the most powerful tools for businesses is still underutilized in today’s market. And that tool is Twitter. The significant push toward both social media and branding has made it nearly impossible to avoid this social space.

Whether you’re educating customers about your product or service, reaching a new audience or promoting your brand, Twitter is one of the most useful places to be to achieve your marketing goals.

When brands steer clear of Twitter, they usually use the excuse that they don’t know how to use it. Businesses also feel the network can be overwhelming for a single person. While some marketers might not have room on their plate to manage multiple social media accounts, there’s no excuse for being inactive on Twitter as a business.

To ensure you get off on the right foot, here are six simple and easy-to-follow steps on how to start a Twitter account for your business:

1. Make a Twitter Account

While this is the most obvious step, simply making a Twitter account is a crucial part to being active on social media. At Twitter’s site, you just enter your name, work email and create a multi-user friendly password for the account. Once you’ve signed up, you begin filling out some information for the rest of your account.

Don’t be afraid to enter your name and work email on certain questions. These features are changeable and easy to format for your business. Once you’re ready to pick a username, remember the shorter the better. You want to be searchable for your customers and others in the industry.

You want to get into the practice of making everything short and concise on Twitter because you only have 140 characters to use. Additionally, you want to think about when customers or other users reach out to. When they @mention you or reply to one of your posts, your username will take up some of the characters for the response. It’s always best to keep usernames limited for this reason.

Here are a few things to remember when signing up:

1. You can change your username later.
2. Your Twitter password should contain letters, numbers and symbols.
3. Confirm your account before trying to personalize.
4. Log out of your personal Twitter account before creating a new one.

2. Connect With Others

Like any social media network, it’s all about connecting with other users to share content. Luckily, Twitter is great spot for new users to build connections and the network even gives you a head start to find influencers.

Twitter allows you to connect with others as soon as you fill out your profile. You’ll receive recommendations on who to follow, whether it’s celebrities, athletes, comedians, business leaders or musicians. However, you can browse for people that would match your business’s interests.

Once you begin to add people, Twitter provides helpful suggested users to follow based on your previous selections. Additionally, you can see related users when you’re on someone’s feed you follow. The process is extremely easy and unlike Facebook, Twitter is a great spot to add people you don’t quite know. The social network is more about building connections than intimate or personal networks.

3. Add Profile Details

So you’ve set up a Twitter account and followed new people–now what? This is the best time to add some flair to your account. You don’t want the users you just followed to come to your profile only to see something that looks abandoned. Simply click “Edit profile” on the right side of your screen below the header on your profile.

First, you’ll want to upload two different photos to your profile:

1. Twitter profile picture
2. Twitter header image

Your profile picture should be something that’s clear and distinguishable even as a small icon. It doesn’t hurt to upload a larger image, but Twitter will shrink it down to size.

As for the header photo, you will have much more room, so pick something visually striking. All the top businesses that operate on Twitter use appealing photos to engage readers on their profile.

From this same screen, you can update basic profile information. You can catch up on our previous Twitter bio ideas post to get some help. In your profile, you can add a linkable website, your location and a 140-character bio that is linkable and respondent to hashtags and @mentions.

Try to convey what your business or brand is about as succinctly as possible. Don’t go overboard with buzzwords or hashtags. You should make your Twitter bio clean and accessible. If you want to update the color scheme of your entire profile, there’s also a button for “Theme color.” Use a color that matches with your brand so everything seems uniform with your logo and company colors.

4. Start Sending Tweets

Now that everything is ready, you’re set to start sending Tweets. Remember, each tweet only allows 140 characters (including Twitter usernames and links). This will help you keep your messages short and sweet, which is much of the allure to Twitter. Aim to be concise without getting too casual. Your business won’t look very professional if you use Internet lingo shorthand.

ICYMI: Here's a recap of @larrykim's #SEJThinkTank webinar on social media ads: https://t.co/11rP0YJwoc http://pic.twitter.com/poSom3BL3B

— SearchEngineJournal® (@sejournal) December 21, 2015

Abbreviations like TBT (throw back Thursday) and ICYMI (in case you missed it) are perfectly fine for businesses to shorten their message. On the other hand, using words like “ur” for you are and “cuz” for because can seem unprofessional.

Twitter provides two sample posts that you can start with, complete with the #myfirstTweet hashtag. If you want to start with something more unique, you can compose your own first tweet in the text field below the samples. Hit the “Tweet” button and you’ll be off and running.

5. Engage

One of the best things about Twitter is how well you can engage with others. You can do this by asking other users for Retweets, followbacks or answers to your questions. You also should continually Tweet from your profile. There’s nothing worse than a stagnant Twitter account, and simply put, you won’t get much interaction if you give little effort.

Instead, try to schedule Tweets out each day and at specific times that work for your followers. Peak post times always seem to be up in the air, but with Sprout Social’s Viral Post feature, you can schedule Tweets to be sent at the time when your followers are most active on Twitter.

It’s also good idea to be visual on Twitter whenever possible. This doesn’t mean you need an image in every single Tweet, but trends show more social media users engage with visuals than plain text.

Get a $30 Amazon Gift Card when you book an Amazon Home Service: https://t.co/SlBCCwy3qH http://pic.twitter.com/3BrSEihlmz

— Amazon (@amazon) December 16, 2015

Engagement is all about communication. This is why it’s important to collaborate with other influencers. With the right connections, you can promote other brands on your profile to get shout-outs on their site. Generally you want to use Twitter to showcase your brand’s personality to connect with others. The more active you are on Twitter, the likelier you’ll engage with new users and gain a better following.

6. Integrate With Sprout Social

To completely harmonize your Twitter business experience, connect your profile to Sprout Social to get the most out of your social media campaign. By linking your profile to our platform, you’ll be able to:

• Monitor social networks for mentions of your brand
• Create and schedule all of your social posts in advance
• Pull unlimited presentation-ready reports on your success
• Shorten links automatically in the compose box
• Track hashtags associated with your brand
• Automatically post content via RSS from your trusted sites

Through these features, and many more, make sure you have a Twitter management tool you can trust and use to monitor your activity and engagement.

Build Your Social Media Knowledge

Twitter is just like any other social network, it takes time to master. However, it doesn’t have to be a strenuous process to get out and start Tweeting. Remember, the most important key to being successful on Twitter is staying active. If you’re still worried about how to use Twitter effectively, take a look back at numerous posts about Twitter today!

This post How to Start a Twitter Account for Your Business originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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Quick Tips Video: What to Write in a Re-Engagement Email

With the new year quickly approaching, it’s the perfect time to review your overall email marketing strategy and make plans for a fresh start come January 1.

And what better place to start than with your subscriber list?

Cleaning up inactive subscribers from your email list is an easy way to set yourself up for success for the new year. It ensures that you’re emailing the people who want to hear from you, and it’ll help improve your overall engagement.

To find out if your subscribers want to remain on your list, you’ll need to send them a re-engagement email. Watch the latest episode of Quick Tips to find out what you should include in your message:

Here’s the transcript in case you missed anything in the video:

M: Hi, welcome back to another episode of Quick Tips. I’m Monica.

O: And I’m Olivia. As yet another awesome year comes to an end, I can’t help but look back and feel a bit nostalgic.

M: Me too. But you know, I’m excited for the new year; starting fresh with a clean slate.

O: As you’re wrapping things up for 2015 and getting your plans together for next year, there’s one thing that comes to mind that could probably use a little refresh: your email list.

M: Now don’t get us wrong; a growing email list is great. But as your subscribers increase, you might notice that your open rates aren’t looking so hot.

O: This might occur for a few reasons. Usually, it’s a sign that you have a high number of inactive people on your list.

M: We refer to inactive subscribers as those who haven’t opened a single email in the last 6 months. Since the key to a healthy email list is regular maintenance, removing inactives is one way to boost email performance.

O: But you shouldn’t just delete them and say sayonara. First, you’ll want to send them a re-engagement email to give them a chance to stay on your list.

M: So what do you write in your email?

O: Let’s break it down piece by piece, starting with the subject line.

M: Your subject line should get right to the point. In a recent re-engagement email we sent to our inactive subscribers on our blog list, the subject line read: “Do you still want to receive our emails?”

O: It seems like an obvious choice, and that’s the point. A simple, direct headline is all you need.

M: The same can also be said for the main content of your email too.

O: In your email message, avoid fluff and be direct about why you’re emailing them. Tell subscribers that you’re reaching out because you want to make sure they still want your emails.

M: This is also a good time to repeat the value of your emails. Whether you send blog post updates, company news, event announcements, or promotional emails, remind subscribers what they’ll miss out on if they unsubscribe.

O: Once you’ve taken care of those content must-haves, it’s time to write a clear call to action. To make it easy for subscribers, we recommend including only one call to action.

M: Check out our re-engagement email to our blog list – notice the CTA specifically tells them that by clicking the button, it will ensure they remain on our email list. Think of it as a way to re-confirm their commitment to our email list.  

O: You’ll also notice copy below the CTA that states they will be automatically removed from the list if they don’t click the link in 7 days. This eases the subscriber’s fear of what will happen if they don’t click the button. It also gives you a timeline for when to remove subscribers who no longer want to be on your list.

M: And that’s all you need for your re-engagement email! Simple, right?

O: Now for your Quick Task: As you gear up for 2016, take a look at your subscriber list to see how many are considered inactive. Write a re-engagement email and start cleaning your list so you have a fresh start for the new year.

M: That’s it for today! If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below. To make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe to our YouTube channel!

O: Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you back in a couple of weeks.

The post Quick Tips Video: What to Write in a Re-Engagement Email appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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The furore over #BlackHermione should surprise no one who uses the Web everyday

Yesterday, Twitter exploded with the news that Hermione Granger, the female character at the heart of the Harry Potter franchise will be played by Noma Dumezweni, a 45-year-old Swaziland-born actress in a new play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Noma is black.  Yeah, this isn’t going to work…. It’s #HarryPotter & a new-look Hermione https://t.co/xHfLvtjmGX via @DailyMailCeleb — LadyConserv (@LadyConserv) December 20, 2015 i’m offended by the casting of #CURSEDCHILD hermione is a white character. we may not make poc characters white so white should not be poc — Michelle (@1006michelle) December 20, 2015 @Hypable why would they make Hermione…

This story continues at The Next Web

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SEW's 10 most popular articles of 2015

Yesterday we brought you the 10 most popular articles by Search Engine Watch's guest writers, now it's time to list those produced by our editorial team.

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Connecting 40Nuggets + AWeber for Email Lists of Gold

The following is a guest blog post written by Yael Brygel, Customer Outreach Manager at 40Nuggets, a SaaS company that helps businesses get quality leads from their websites through opt-in messaging and sophisticated targeting. Yael loves reaching out to new clients to help them meet their conversion goals.

The key to any successful email marketing campaign is a killer opt-in subscriber list, filled with people who will are excited to open your next email. And when that list is filled with the right prospects, you can engage in a long-term journey with these individuals, moving them along your sales funnel so that they ultimately become loyal customers of your product or service.

As we all know, building a great list can take many hours and some occasional frustration. You can’t expect to receive a high quality email list on a silver platter – but with the right strategy, it also doesn’t have to be hard to obtain.

With the help of 40Nuggets, you can use sophisticated targeting to significantly bulk up your AWeber email list with quality subscribers and prospective customers that fit your business. It may not be a silver platter, but it’s certainly easy to set up.

Through our beautifully designed screen overlays, banners, slide-ins, or lead capture widgets, you can collect subscribers straight from your website. Our seamless integration with AWeber passes their data directly along to the subscriber list of your choice. The best part is, you don’t need any coding or special technological skills to do it.

Once this is done, the fun begins. You can create a tailored, multi-step engagement journey for each site visitor over a period of time, making relevant offers to every visitor on your website.

Smarter Targeting, Better Leads

If you know the characteristics of your site visitors – how each one got to your site and where they came from – you can relate to each of them as an individual, in the language he or she speaks (literally).

With 40Nuggets, you can make offers that are unique and relevant to each customer’s needs and interests. Think about the way you would be treated at your local coffee shop – where the baristas greet you warmly, and maybe even remember your order if you are a regular. This customized approach can maximize conversions and get more leads into your AWeber lists.

40Nuggets offers the following targeting tools. Keep in mind, we do all the work for you. With the click of a few boxes in the Segments section of our Dashboard, you can decide how to greet and interact with every one of your site visitors:

Traffic Source: SEO and paid advertising will bring relevant visitors to your website. Nuggets close the loop, helping you track ROI and present relevant offers. With this feature, you can uniquely target direct traffic and visitors coming from social media, paid campaigns, or a particular search engine. Make your marketing dollars pay off by greeting paid traffic differently than organic visitors.

Visitor Type: Tailor your engagement strategy based on the number of times the visitor has been to your site in the past. 40Nuggets can help track this so that you can target new visitors, returning visitors and loyal visitors differently. For instance, you may choose to create an email campaign with special promotions for customers that come to your site regularly. Create a Nugget for those loyal visitors, while showing new visitors a low-key offer to sign up to your newsletter.

Location (Geo-targeting): With our Dashboard, you can target site visitors based on which state or country they live in. This way, you can send relevant messages to different populations. Let’s say your store in Maryland is having a special in-store-only promotion. You can show a Nugget announcing the sale to visitors from the immediate area, and show out-of-state visitors a Nugget with a small discount for online orders. Show people what is relevant to them, and they’ll be more likely to convert.

Language: 40Nuggets can detect the browser language of the website visitor and allow you to use that information to target specific visitors. Speak to your visitors in their native language to make them feel welcome. If you know your target audience includes a lot of Spanish speakers, you can make a special Nugget that will be shown only to visitors whose browser language is set to Spanish. Offer them a special discount offer, which you can follow up with an automated email describing when and how they can use it.

Demographics: This sophisticated 40Nuggets feature enables you to target people according to household income, home value and whether or not they have children. This will help you segment your offers, such as offering a luxury item to high-income visitors versus low-income visitors. Understanding different demographics in these way can help boost your conversions.

Device: Targeting according to device – desktop computer, mobile phone, or tablet – enables you to engage visitors differently and optimize your offers based on the device.

Special Parameters: You probably already have valuable information about your website visitors, subscribers or customers. In order to leverage this information and engage with your website visitors intelligently, you can pass along data to 40Nuggets so we can better target your site visitors.

If a website visitor is already a subscriber to your newsletter, you wouldn’t want to show them a newsletter Nugget when they come to your site. Offer them something else to upsell them and keep them engaged. We’re here to make sure each engagement is meaningful and goal-oriented.

Connecting 40Nuggets with AWeber

When you use 40Nuggets to provide the best offers on your website for your visitors, you can attract quality email subscribers and grow your list with AWeber. For more ideas on how to use 40Nuggets with AWeber, watch this quick video below:

The post Connecting 40Nuggets + AWeber for Email Lists of Gold appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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What the most popular posts on Instagram in 2015 say about us

With the end of every year tech companies produce a slew of round-ups attempting to distil the past 12 months into a neat and tidy data-driven package. Spotify has done it, so has Google. Instagram too joined the bandwagon with its most liked photos. But instead of just re-publishing the 10 photos that users of the social network went crackers over, I wanted to try to find out what it says about Instagram and the Web more generally. Why did the following ten photos of female celebrities mean more to us than anything else that happened in 2015 on Instagram? Model…

This story continues at The Next Web

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7 Highly Effective SEO Tips for Bloggers

Search engine optimization (SEO) gets a bad rap among bloggers. On one hand, search engines are one of the top traffic generators for most blogs. But on the other end, there’s a false belief that writing “SEO optimized content” means stuffing keywords into paragraphs and headers, resulting in barely readable blog posts. However, that’s not what SEO is about.

At its most basic level, SEO is about showing search engines like Google and Bing that your blog is a relevant resource for people searching for information about your topic/industry. Figuring out how to relay to search engines that your website is relevant to different queries is where a lot of bloggers and marketers get lost. This can eventually lead bloggers to tactics that could potentially harm their websites.

There are always new SEO tips for bloggers popping up around the Web. It’s even more difficult for new bloggers to get a grasp of what they’re supposed to do when it comes to getting content to show up higher in search engines. It seems like the go-to tactics are popular one day, and become absolutely toxic a few months later.

Despite several changes to the algorithm Google uses to determine where your content will rank for different queries, the best practices for SEO have remained fairly consistent over the years. If you can stick to these concepts and tactics, you’ll be much more confident. No one wants to be the anxious marketer having sleepless nights because of rumors of Google updating Panda or Penguin on Webmaster.

Here are seven highly effective SEO tips for bloggers that you need to start implementing right now:

1. Write for Your Audience

When “SEO content” became a buzzword, we started to see some pretty big drops in the quality of writing from bloggers. They were starting to write specifically for search engines (robots) instead of people. Unfortunately, some bloggers still write this way today. But luckily it has gotten a lot better, especially after the Hummingbird update and the trend toward voice searches.

The Hummingbird update was created to help Google better understand the [em]intent[/em] of searches. For instance, if you were to Google “places to get burgers,” Google would interpret that as meaning you’re looking for local restaurants.

This impacted SEO because search engines are catering toward answering questions and semantic search, rather than just being focused on keywords. Think about it. When you use Google, Bing, YouTube or even Siri, you’re usually looking for the answer to a question. Take that concept and apply it to your blog. Your content should be written in a way that answers your target audience’s specific questions,. Your blog should not just be a place to rank for a specific keyword.

Here’s a real-life example. In our recent post on how to run a Twitter audit, we walked you through the step-by-step process of performing an audit. The audience the article caters to are people who want to learn how to audit their Twitter accounts, not people who are just interested in what a Twitter audit is. The content answers questions like “what’s included in a Twitter audit?” and “how can I improve my Twitter account?”

Shift your focus away from thinking about keywords, and more toward providing content that solves the problems of your target audience. You can use Quora, forums, social media and other resources to find out what your audience’s struggles are. Then provide the solution with your blog.

2: Relationship Building Is the Best Form of Link Building

Getting other websites to link to your content is still one of the strongest search engine ranking factors according to data from Moz. Over the years, bloggers have tried everything from spammy directory sites to buying links from low quality blogs in order to get as many links pointing to their website as possible.

As search engines began to penalize sites engaging in “black hat” link building tactics, bloggers were forced to become more creative with how they got backlinks from other sites. We hate to break it to you, but there is no magic secret to link building. The one strategy that has stood the test of time is building relationships. People link to sites they trust.

Start by making a list of websites, influencers and authorities in your industry. Then think of ways you can get on their radar, usually by offering some type of value to them. For instance, you could include authorities in a blogger roundup post, or engage with popular websites on social media.

After you start to form a relationship, they’ll be much more likely to link to your content on their own site. You could even work together on future projects that would put you in front of a wider audience while earning a backlink or two in the process. Even if you don’t get a backlink, just getting influencers to start sharing your content will have a huge impact. Having just one influential person share your content can result in 31.8% more social shares.

3: Nail On-Page SEO Basics

In the same Moz study mentioned earlier, the second-most important ranking factor was on-page optimization. The great part about on-page SEO is you have a lot more control than off-page factors like backlinks. There is a lot that goes into on-page SEO, but you don’t have to be extremely technical to get started. Just doing the basics will put you ahead of the game.

SEO friendly URL’s: The URL for your website should clearly show what the page is about. Let’s say you had a blog post about the best ugly Christmas sweaters. Instead of “http://ift.tt/1QFdldk;, it should be “http://ift.tt/1Ny7ra1; Keep your URL limited to roughly 2-5 words and include your target keyword.

Meta title: A meta title helps search engines determine the main topic of a page. It’s what shows up at the top of your browser, and also in search results. Include your target keyword in your meta title, but keep it natural. No keyword stuffing!

H1 tag: Every page on your site should have an H1 tag. It’s the headline of the page. If you use WordPress, then the post title will automatically be given the H1 tag. However, sometimes certain themes will override this feature so it’s always nice to do a double check.

Subheadings: In addition to the H1 tag, you should also use subheading tags like h2 and h3 to clearly structure your posts. The subheadings make it easier for readers and search engines to navigate your content.

Images: Adding multimedia in your posts makes them more visually appealing. When it comes to optimizing your images, one of the most important tasks is setting an alt tag. Since search engine bots don’t see visuals and only text, alt tags allow them to know the content of an image. Your alt tags should describe the images you’re adding.

Outbound links: Adding links to relevant content within your posts helps search engines better understand what the topic of your content is. Not only that, but you can reach out to sites you link to and build a relationship. In turn, they might share your post with their audience.

Internal links: If you’ve been blogging for a while, you should have a solid library of content that you can interlink. Adding internal links (links from one of your posts to another post on your site) helps search engines better understand the topic of your blog content, and keeps people on your site longer.

Usability: It sounds simple, but so many bloggers overlook the importance of having a site that functions correctly. Do all of the images in your content work? Are there broken links? Does your content load quickly? All of these factors affect user experience, which is very important for on-page SEO. We’ll go over some different tools to help you check and fix any potential usability issues on your site in tip No. 6.

Those are some basic steps you can take to improve your on-page SEO. The goal is to make it easier for search engines to understand the topic of your content. The more relevant your content appears to be, the better chances you have of ranking highly in search engines.

4: Get Familiar With Google Webmaster Tools

Remember back in grade school when the teacher would give you a warning when you did something wrong? That warning was your chance to straighten up your act and get back on track to avoid being punished. Well that’s kind of what Google Webmaster Tools is for your blog.

When something fishy is going on with your blog, Google Webmaster Tools will give you a heads up by providing you with diagnostics, tools and data to keep your site in good health. From the Webmaster Tools Search Console, you can see:

• How many of your pages are indexed in Google
• If Google’s bots are having problems crawling your website
• If your website has been hacked
• How your website shows up for Google’s bots
• Links to your site
• If your site has been manually penalized by Google

The beauty of Webmaster Tools is it doesn’t just tell you what’s wrong with your site, but also how to fix it. There is an extensive knowledge base of articles and a forum to help you take care of any issues Google finds with your blog. Getting setup is simple. Just go to http://ift.tt/oZ8H2S. If you already have Google Analytics installed on your site, it’s as simple as connecting the accounts.

Check your Webmaster Tools on a regular basis to make sure everything is working correctly.

5. Build Your Authority

While Google relies on algorithms to determine where websites rank in the search results, it also uses humans to manually review the quality of the websites that show up. Whether it’s good or bad criteria about a site, Google tells these manual reviewers to judge a site on its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Up until recently, that book has been unavailable to the public.

The book is over 150 pages long, and jam packed with great information. One of the key takeaways from the guide was the importance Google puts on authority. There are several mentions of E-A-T, which stands for Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness.

How @Google quality checks its #search results. Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness are key. https://t.co/XyBTmMfbGA #SEO

— Vishal Srivastava (@Trainedge) December 2, 2015

Your content should show that your website or the people contributing to the content on your blog, are credible and have some level of expertise on the topics being covered.

Authoritative content doesn’t necessarily just mean being written by a well known person. Crafting a piece of content that is the best resource on the topic could qualify. For instance, if you wrote an in-depth blog post about how to install a graphics card in a computer, and it has more detail and information than a post on a more well known site, your content could still be more authoritative.

As you start creating more great content and networking, your blog will start to get mentioned around the Web, which will help build your authority even more.

6. Invest in SEO Tools

Just like with social media marketing, SEO is something that can be handled manually, but it’s more efficient to use tools. There are hundreds of SEO tools available to help with different aspects of optimization. Here are some basics to get you started:

Keyword research: Keyword research is one of the most important parts of SEO. You want to make sure you’re creating content about topics that your target audience is searching for. In addition to brainstorming, you can use these tools to streamline the keyword research process:

• Google Keyword Planner
• Long Tail Pro

Rank Tracking: Although keyword rankings are losing some of their relevance as personalized search results become more popular, rank tracking tools will give you an approximation of what position your content shows up in the search results for your target keywords. Here are some options to consider:

• Serpfox
• Agency Analytics

On-Page SEO: Manually trying to ensure that you hit everything on the on-page optimization list we mentioned earlier can be tedious. Luckily, these tools can handle the dirty work for you.

• Yoast (for WordPress users)
• MySiteAuditor
• Screaming Frog

Link Building: As we mentioned, getting other sites to link back to you is one of the top search engine ranking factors. You shouldn’t use automated link building software, but these tools make it easier to find new opportunities to earn genuine backlinks.

• Ahrefs
• BuzzStream
• Majestic

Content Creation: Not only do you need to target the right keywords, but you also need to write about topics of interest for your audience. Coming up with new ideas for content is a lot easier with these tools.

• BuzzSumo
• Topsy
• Scoop.it

All-in-one Tools: In addition to these tools, you can also consider using these all-in-one tools that perform several different SEO related tasks.

• Moz Pro
• SEO Powersuite
• SEMrush

7. Create Linkable Assets

A linkable asset is a unique, extremely useful piece of content that’s so valuable people can’t resist linking to it. It’s like when you go to an amazing restaurant vs. going to one that’s just ok. You’re going to go out of your way to tell everyone about the amazing restaurant, but you’ll probably only talk about the one that was just ok if someone asks if you’ve been there.

A great example of a linkable asset it the ProBlogger job board. It’s a great resource for freelance bloggers looking for paid writing gigs. The page is constantly linked to in blog posts about how to make money blogging or paid freelance writing sites. Why? Because it’s unique and extremely valuable.

Here are some ideas for linkable assets you can create for your blog:

• A free tool or app
• Ultimate guide posts
• Mega lists
• Infographics
• Online guide
• Influencer round-ups
• Quizzes
• Case studies
• Industry research or surveys

Before creating your linkable asset, look at the top-ranking content for similar topics. Your goal is going to be to make something even better. After you form your linkable asset, the next step is to spread the word. Try these five content distribution techniques to start promoting your new asset.

SEO Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated

Hopefully these SEO tips have given you a new outlook on how to use search engines to get traffic for your blog. You don’t have to be a Web developer or have 15 years of experience with SEO to optimize your site. Focus on creating awesome content (with proper on-page SEO) and building relationships.

The next time you start writing a blog post, keep these SEO tips in mind. You might be surprised by how much of an impact these changes have.

This post 7 Highly Effective SEO Tips for Bloggers originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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