Black History

Have you read sales pages that scream, “You don’t need to know SEO! Our software does it all!”

Solving your SEO writing woes with software sounds so easy. You wouldn’t have to worry about keyphrase usage, penning the perfect title length, or structuring links. Just feed in your copy and poof! instant optimization help! In fact, the sales copy for one SEO plug-in even says, “We walk you through every step: no need to hire or be an SEO expert.”

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Here’s the question: do you even need to know SEO if a plug-in can do it all? In other words—can you trust SEO writing tools, or do writers still need to know SEO? Here’s how to think about it.



Machines can’t replace humans (yet!)

SEO tools are extremely helpful and save marketers time. We rely on them every day. But their recommendations are just that: recommendations. The writer (or SEO) makes the final optimization call. Sometimes, it makes sense to follow the recommendations, and sometimes, it doesn’t.

For instance, I’ve received emails from my writing students asking, “The Yoast SEO for WordPress plug-in is telling me to [fill in the blank]. Should I do it even if it doesn’t quite work with the page?” The plug-in was telling them one thing, while their writing experience was telling them another.

Please know that I love and highly recommend Yoast’s SEO for WordPress plug-in and many other SEO experts do too. It’s a nice plug-in that handles a lot of the geeky SEO stuff behind-the-scenes. Plus, it allows you to preview the title and description, check your readability, and more. Heck, I use it on my own site!

But other than a quick check, I don’t follow Yoast’s checklist recommendations as gospel. Why? Sometimes, following the recommendations would mess with the copywriting flow. There may be a reason that I’m not using the focus keyword in the title or that I don’t include the focus keyword in the first paragraph. Or I choose to link a certain way.

I may not follow every recommendation, but I know the page’s SEO strategy is still sound.

At the end of the day, good SEO writing connects with the reader and converts. It’s not because it ticks off various “here’s how to optimize everything perfectly” boxes. Even Yoast admits it’s “nearly impossible” to get a “green bullet” for every checklist item.

Plus, some tools still use keyword density as a scoring item. This means writers are still matching the keyphrase exactly multiple times in order to satisfy a mythical keyword density. They don’t know any better. They’re just doing what the tool tells them to do.

Did you know that 15 percent of state surveys miss actual harm and jeopardy nursing home residents are facing?

When these cases come to light, these people need legal representation. If they don’t know about your law firm, they won’t be able to contact you. The ability for people to be able to find your business is why you need an effective digital marketing campaign.

In this article, we are going to talk about marketing a law practice and how you can use the internet to get in front of your target market.



Launching a Successful Digital Marketing Campaign

As you are learning more about launching your firm’s campaign, your goal should be getting your firm in front of your ideal customer. While wide-reaching approach type marketing plans may be the norm, you don’t want normal. When you have a well-planned campaign, you will be able to pass your competition with smart law firm marketing ideas.

When you become a lawyer, you probably didn’t expect to need to learn digital marketing skills for your business. While you may not have gone to school for marketing, you’ll need to get good at it if you want to bring in a steady stream of clients.

Focus on UX (User Experience)

User experience should be the center of your marketing efforts. Your website should allow potential clients to find what they need easily.



Setting up your site’s navigation in a common sense way will make it easier for people to use the site. Keep visible options to a minimum so extra buttons don’t distract users from taking desired actions. Important call to actions should be positioned strategically.

Use YouTube to Get in Front of Potential Clients

Video marketing is a powerful way to get your message in front of your target market. When people watch your videos, it is easier for them to connect with your image than words on a page.

When you use video marketing, do keyword research to find terms you want to rank. You might want to rank for terms in your local area, such as lawyer in your city or attorney in your city. Optimizing your videos for certain terms helps your videos show up in the right places.

Make Sure Your Website Is up to Speed

Optimization is the process of serving unique experiences to each individual in your digital space by tailoring content and design to their specific needs and preferences. According to Forrester, continuous optimization is “an analytics-driven approach that seeks to leverage every customer interaction to evolve the understanding of the customer, which is in turn used to evolve and optimize current and future customer experiences.” In today's age, optimizing your digital presence to meet the needs of consumers is vital in promoting new sales, customer loyalty, and business growth.

Why Is It So Difficult to Achieve?

Often times, while some members of an organization may wish to start moving toward optimization, there are factors that actually prohibit their ability to achieve it. Common challenges that businesses are faced with include lack of data available and the misconception that all visitors are the same. It’s important to understand that every user is unique, and not everyone will engage with content or experiences in the same way across digital channels (think email, website, and mobile apps). Without an ample amount of data, decisions tend to be based upon opinions and hypotheses rather than factual evidence.



So, Why Should Your Business Care About Optimization?
By utilizing a testing strategy to reach optimization, businesses are able to use data as evidence in deciding what content, designs, and experiences will resonate with people most in order to create better-performing user experiences across the board. There are a plethora of reasons as to why businesses should adopt an optimization strategy, but here are a few of the most common reasons:

1) An optimized UX on your website or app shortens the path to conversion for your visitors.

Consumers are constantly looking for the quickest and easiest ways to accomplish tasks, and optimizing the user experience is vital in helping users accomplish this. By testing and collecting data to determine exactly how users interact across digital platforms, organizations are armed with the facts around how to convert visitors quickly, easily, and seamlessly without a conscious thought from the user.

2) Gathering actionable insights allows your business to keep up in an ever-changing marketplace.

Gathering actionable insights is where data collection becomes a true game changer. Monitoring users on a website allows a great deal of information to be gathered, and based on user behavior, areas of opportunity and areas of strength can be identified extremely quickly. This allows business to turn data into knowledge and power, to eliminate the guesswork when planning for future designs and experiences.

3) Cross-channel enablement enhances your ability to foster brand equity.

By testing, collecting data, and gathering actionable insights, business are able to start moving toward a cross-channel approach. Serving users consistent experiences across digital channels not only helps increase brand awareness, but it fosters the idea of brand loyalty and the ability for visitors to remain connect and engaged with specific products or brands that are of interest.

My clients often ask me to write posts for their industrial blogs. This requires me to work very closely with engineers and technical SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) on a daily basis for creating content. I have learned some important lessons about blogging that are specific to this technical and industrial audience.

Editorial calendar: This may sound like content marketing 101 but let me tell you why it is so important for industrial blogs. At a recent discovery meeting, I received little to no response when I asked a group of engineers about their customers’ challenges that we could blog about. I was expected to do the industry research and come back with a list of topics. Ideas for blog posts just flowed after I presented my findings. I kid you not; I now have weekly blogging topics lined up until the second week of November for this manufacturing client.



SME Interviews: I have found it a lot easier to write technical blog posts if I start by interviewing SMEs. I have to do my homework and come prepared with a list of intelligent questions to ask. Engineers can spot a novice quickly and they are not particularly patient with people trying to interview them about a topic that the interviewer knows very little about.

Be a ruthless editor: Writing copy based on interviews is one thing but the skill that I find most useful is editing. It takes time and understanding of the subject matter to publish blog posts that are compelling stories that educate and engage readers. One caveat I have discovered is that there is a fine balance between being a marketer and a technical content editor. What may sound geeky to a marketer may be just the right content for a technical audience.
Become an SEO expert: You’ve got to learn most everything there is to know about keyword research, on-page SEO and internal linking with keyword-rich anchor text. There is no point in publishing a bunch of unoptimized blog posts that your target audience will never find in search engines. SEO and social marketing skills are what separate a content marketing expert from a copywriter.

Add a touch of humor: This one is a myth buster. Contrary to popular belief, engineers do have a sense of humor and appreciate wit. Just don’t go overboard and try to be too clever and cutesy. Clever wordsmithing will only take you so far if your content lacks technical accuracy and substance.
For more on this topic, you may want to read my earlier post, “How to Coax Content Out of Engineers.”

As a Mechanical Engineer myself, I find it easier to interact with technical SMEs but I still have to go in there prepared to get my job done. I know I couldn’t just wing it after all these years and having written hundreds of industrial blog posts.

These days, finding good-quality links for SEO purposes is as challenging as it’s ever been. Not only should your links appear within the editorial content of a page, they should be naturally acquired and placed on pages that are relevant to your own website’s content.

But ever since Google’s Penguin update, fewer and fewer opportunities exist to obtain backlinks that meet these criteria. If you’ve exhausted your email link building and guest posting efforts, another option to consider is broken link building.

What Is a Broken Link?

A broken link is when you click on a link and it takes you to a 404 page. Broken links are also often referred to as “dead links,” as the page you were directed to is now dead.

Even if you have tried broken link building in the past and say it doesn’t work, you probably weren’t doing it correctly. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you why in this article.

The process of broken link building involves seeking out website pages in your industry with broken links in their content and then contacting their webmasters to offer your own content or link as a replacement for these dead URLs. If you’ve struggled to find new link building opportunities in the past, read on to find out exactly how this useful process can be implemented on your own website.

1) How to Find Broken Links: Identifying Web Pages

The first step in the broken link building process is figuring out how to find broken links. It’s not as hard as you might think.

If you’re going to contact webmasters with broken links and recommend that your own URL replace the dead references you’ve identified, the obvious first step in this process is to find web pages that contain these outdated links. There are a few different ways you can do this depending on your time constraints and budget.

CitationLab’s Broken Link Finder (Big Budget)

If you’re short on time and long on extra cash, CitationLab’s Broken Link Finder tool will automate the entire process of identifying dead links on pages throughout your industry. Depending on your marketing budget, investing in a program like this can be a great way to build the largest possible number of links in the smallest amount of time.

“Growth hacking” is one of those buzzwords that’s started popping up in digital marketing circles over the last few years. But what exactly is growth hacking and how can you use it to benefit your content marketing efforts?

The clue is in the name – growth hacking is all about growing your business rapidly with a limited budget. The term came about from start-ups who needed to grow their fledgling businesses as quickly as possible with limited resources. These start-ups typically achieve this growth by taking advantage of low-cost alternatives to traditional marketing that can be extremely effective when done well.

A growth hacker is essentially a marketer who might use a combination of techniques including social media, viral marketing, and SEO to increase brand awareness and conversion rates as quickly as possible.

Your business may not be in the start-up stage, but you can still use growth hacking techniques to grow your business.

When you apply these techniques or “hacks” to your content marketing, you end up doing something that’s come to be known as “content hacking”. A content hacker is someone who achieves massive growth through content.



Quick Takeaways

Content hacking can help boost your marketing efforts in a short time, with a limited budget.
Good content hackers are data-driven, innovative, and constantly optimizing their content.
Analyzing your own successful content and that of your competitors is a great start for driving content growth.

Content Hacking Basics

So how do you become a content hacker? The key is to think outside of the box and look for little content marketing tricks that you can take advantage of to attract more social shares, drive more traffic to your site, and boost your conversion rate.

These days, nearly everyone is using content marketing, and for a very good reason – it’s more effective than many other marketing channels, and yet, you can get started on a shoestring budget.

Some of the things you must consider to growth hack your content marketing include:

SEO – Google’s algorithm is always changing. Successful content hackers stay up to date with these changes and know how to craft their content in order to use them for their own benefit.

Data analysis and optimization – successful content hacking strategies are almost always data-driven. By carefully analyzing the data you have available, you can look for optimization opportunities and tweak your content strategy for growth.

Recognizing opportunities – a good content hacker will always be on the lookout for the next opportunity. Something like being the first to publish a breaking news story in your industry could be your key to achieving explosive success.

Understanding virality – viral content is one of the cornerstones of content hacking. There’s no sure-fire way of ensuring a piece of content goes viral, but content hackers will do their best to maximize the chances of this happening.

Originality – content hacking is all about finding your own unique path and not copying what everyone else is doing. Only those who experiment and think outside of the box can become true content hackers.

Google has released a flurry of algorithm updates in the first half of 2018, which has made it difficult for SEO professionals to work out exactly which tactics are working to help sites rank at the top of organic search results. Whether a website has been practicing white hat, grey hat, or even black hat SEO, the entire industry has been affected by the recent updates.

How to rank better in 2018To make things more challenging, Google hasn’t provided any indication of what factors may be contributing to SEO improvement or deterioration. SEO pros know there have been algorithm changes. They just can’t identify exactly how they have been affected.


Despite the uncertainty, there are still certain practices that stand the test of time with SEO. So, if you want to virtually guarantee an improvement in your website’s organic search position, here are a few ideas you should implement in addition to on-page optimization.



Ensure that all of your site’s 301 redirects are going to the right URLs.

It’s likely your website has permanent (301) redirects pointing to the wrong URLs or even broken links that are sending 404 error messages to search engine crawlers. Your URLs have a certain amount of PageRank associated with them. If you want a percentage of the PageRank from these web pages passed onto your new URLs so the authority passes throughout the website, you need to correctly implement 301 redirects.

You can view your redirects either by running a crawler on your website, analysing the server logs, or viewing the list in your redirection plugin (if you have one installed).

Analyse your server logs.

The server logs will unearth the most valuable technical data for your site’s SEO campaign. They will show the exact timings and navigation path that search engine crawlers take on your website. It’s essential that you analyse the URL paths, redirections, loading success, or errors flagged in the server logs.

Additionally, you will need to identify how many URLs the search engine crawler is visiting each time it’s on your website. This way, you can optimise your “crawl budget” to ensure the search engine crawler finds and indexes the URLs and the content that you want it to access on your website.

Add a responsive mobile design to your website.

Google continues to put more emphasis on mobile-friendly websites. The easiest solution is to add a mobile-responsive design for smartphones, tablets and other portable devices. If your site is also configured to a mobile application, Google provides developer guidelines to allow users searching from mobile devices to open the app directly from the organic search result.

Add AMP to your site’s content pages.
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If your website hosts informative articles, blog posts or news articles, you’ll want to incorporate accelerated mobile pages (AMP) on your site. This will allow you to serve content more quickly on mobile devices. Google tends to look favourably on sites that incorporate AMP.

Automate SEO activities with Sheer SEO

Minimize your web page size to improve the loading speed.
Web page loading time is important because the search engine crawler will attempt to download as many pages as it can to crawl and index the web content. If a web page size is too large, it will slow down the crawling process and may force the crawler to leave the website prematurely.

Aim to limit the size of your web pages to 1MB or less. This should allow the crawler to download and crawl more pages, thus improving the organic search visibility of the website.

SEO has been a hot topic over recent years. Many people talk about things like technical SEO or local SEO, but how do you actually find out how well your website is optimised for search engines? That’s where an SEO audit comes in. What is an SEO audit? What do people look for when they perform a website audit? Why does it matter? We’ll cover all of these questions below.



DEFINING AN SEO AUDIT

An SEO audit is a process of identifying ranking factors for your website and analysing how well your web page enhances the user experience and relates to Google’s best practices. This is your first step to creating and putting a plan in place that will give you measurable results. At the core, an SEO audit looks for as many issues that negatively impact your organic traffic and search performance. The audit will show you:

Issues with your technical SEO

Issues with local SEO

Loading time lags

Broken links

Website structure problems

User experience problems

Content opportunities and gaps

Off-site problems

On-site problems

Link building issues

Meta description and title tag problems

Competitive marketplace insights

The SEO audit takes all of these small pieces into consideration and gives you one comprehensive audit report. You can use these results to fix your issues and align your website with the most recent best practices.

It can also show you targeted keywords that your potential customers are putting into the search engine so you can add them into your keyword strategy. This can boost your rankings. The more things you fix, the better your organic search results will be, and the more traffic will end up on your website. In turn, your conversion rate will go up, and you’ll make more money.

There’s been a competition going on between PPC and SEO for quite some time. And while there are pros and cons to both traffic-generation strategies, one of the best pro-PPC arguments has always been that PPC drives more targeted traffic.

But organic search engine optimization can deliver highly-targeted traffic, too – if you direct and qualify that traffic properly. Landing pages are the perfect tool to do it.

If you’re skeptical, take a look at the chart below from a survey of B2B marketers. “Search engine advertising” does beat out “organic search” by a little, but SEO comes in very close, and is among the best sources of traffic for high-quality leads overall.

Here’s an adjusted version of the chart, with only organic search and paid search for a clearer comparison:





So the two channels are actually neck and neck for high-quality lead generation. Add in the ability landing pages have to focus and convert the free traffic coming from the search engines, and SEO looks even better.

Because landing pages can convert organic traffic. Here are a few charts to prove it.

This alone can be valuable data. If you can estimate what a reasonable conversion rate would be, and you know roughly how many organic searches are happening for the keyword you want to target, all you need to know next is what a potential click-through rate from the search results might be.

Search click-through rate varies from position to position, but this recently-updated research about CTR per search position tells us that if you could get your landing page into say, third position, you’d get a click-through rate of about 9.75%.

If you’re a photographer looking to drum up some extra business, you need a website.

Websites are today’s business cards, but they do so much more.

Creating a photography website is a great way to showcase your work. A photography website can act as a landing page for all your social media followers. If someone on Instagram wants to work with you, they’ll want to contact you through a website.

So if you’re serious about your photography, it’s time to set up a website. Check out our tips on how to make a photography website to get started.



Pick a Good Domain Name

There are lots of different methods to pick out a domain name. You should make sure it’s short, simple, and easy to remember. If you can, choose a “.com” domain because they are the most popular.

When you’re creating your photography website, pick something like YourNamePhotography.com.

Let’s say you meet someone while you’re out doing your photography thing. They might not remember anything about you but your name. Use that simplicity to your advantage, and use your name in the domain.

Know What You’re Trying to Do

If you’re trying to figure out how to make a photography website, you might be starting a business. If that’s true, then you need to ask yourself the age-old question: “Why am I doing this?”

Are you trying to display your latest photography project? Are you hoping to bring in new work? Is it a little of both?

Your answers will determine the photos for your portfolio and the layout of your website.

Choose the Best Stuff

Once you’ve picked out your domain and you’ve figured out your “Why” it’s time to create your portfolio.

This isn’t social media, where an ever-steady stream of content is a good thing. Your website needs to display your best work. That means you need to be very selective.

A common headache for any account manager is a decrease in budget. It seldom feels that we’re faced with extra ad dollars, but every once in a while, miracles do exist. While it may seem like an answer to account limitations, there are some things to look out for concerning budget increases. Any large change to an account can require a secondary ramping up period. Much like when a new campaign launches, larger account changes need to build a history with Google to find a sweet spot in performance. Account managers often look at budget increases as a major change requiring special attention. This issue is magnified if the account was already struggling to spend the budget it had been allocated in the first place. In this article, we list four tips for increasing SEM spend without taking a hit, ensuring your performance stays profitable


1. Keyword Expansion

The first step to increasing campaign spend is to expand your keyword focus. Auditing the search queries report is the best place to look for new keywords to add to your campaign as it shows you exactly how people are searching for your business. If you’re not regularly auditing the search query report, you could be missing out on potential keywords, and phrasing of keywords, that would add great value to your program. Long-tail keywords are also a great way to broaden your keyword list, as well as increase traffic, for they typically have a slightly lower cost per click and the quality of traffic is higher. This report can further be utilized as a way to find new negatives that can help you avoid acquiring ad impressions for searches that won’t lead to sales. Implement these tactics and you’re a step closer to fully maximizing the effectiveness of your PPC spend.


2. Geography

When setting up any new search campaign, you must enter a target geography to serve your ads. If your account is limited by budget then your geography might reflect that by choosing only the most important radii, cities, or states. If your focus is niche, even when limited by budget, it’s best practice to start with a larger target area, then reduce as needed. Just be sure that you don’t let this run for too long without checking spend.

In cases where budget is not an issue and you have the freedom to leverage national targeting from the beginning, be aware that more isn’t always better. When given the opportunity to expand your geography to other desired areas, keep in mind your goals and needs, avoid adding cities and states you cannot serve just to ensure the budget is spent. You can also take into consideration geo modifiers. These give you the control to increase coverage on areas that have shown positive results and you can also add negative geo modifiers and area exclusions when expanding. Before adopting this method, though, have in mind the regions you do not want, or are unable, to market to.

Business success doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a solid strategy to grow your small business. Nowadays, digital marketing is something you really should explore to achieve your bottom line, and a channel that you may consider utilizing is Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or search advertising. This entails using paid ads or pay-per-click (PPC) ads to promote your brand or content to increase search engine visibility.

Paid search means “bidding” for placement before the organic search results when users look up a keyword relevant to your business. Obviously, when your brand is at the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), you get better exposure and can pull in more prospects.



Benefits of SEM for Small Businesses


Competitive advantage

SMBs are at a disadvantage when it comes to competing with big brands. Usually, more established brands are the ones taking the top organic results for popular keywords, but with an excellent SEM strategy, SMBs can one-up their larger competitors.

Understandably, big brands can also afford paid ads, but if you have a smarter plan with more compelling copy, you can differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd.


Instant awareness

One of the challenges of SMBs is that they have close to zero visibility. Not many consumers will be familiar with your brand, especially if you’re just starting out. However, if you continually show up on top of SERPs for your relevant keywords, you can foster instant brand awareness with otherwise unacquainted users.

Reinforces name recognition

It’s been said that it takes 7–13 touch points before a prospect converts. It’s safe to say that a customer would not readily purchase from you at the first moment they find you online. You need to reinforce recognition so that customers keep your brand top-of-mind once they’ve decided to push through with the purchase.

Have you read sales pages that scream, “You don’t need to know SEO! Our software does it all!”

Solving your SEO writing woes with software sounds so easy. You wouldn’t have to worry about keyphrase usage, penning the perfect title length, or structuring links. Just feed in your copy and poof! instant optimization help! In fact, the sales copy for one SEO plug-in even says, “We walk you through every step: no need to hire or be an SEO expert.”

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Here’s the question: do you even need to know SEO if a plug-in can do it all? In other words—can you trust SEO writing tools, or do writers still need to know SEO? Here’s how to think about it.



Machines can’t replace humans (yet!)

SEO tools are extremely helpful and save marketers time. We rely on them every day. But their recommendations are just that: recommendations. The writer (or SEO) makes the final optimization call. Sometimes, it makes sense to follow the recommendations, and sometimes, it doesn’t.

For instance, I’ve received emails from my writing students asking, “The Yoast SEO for WordPress plug-in is telling me to [fill in the blank]. Should I do it even if it doesn’t quite work with the page?” The plug-in was telling them one thing, while their writing experience was telling them another.

Please know that I love and highly recommend Yoast’s SEO for WordPress plug-in and many other SEO experts do too. It’s a nice plug-in that handles a lot of the geeky SEO stuff behind-the-scenes. Plus, it allows you to preview the title and description, check your readability, and more. Heck, I use it on my own site!

But other than a quick check, I don’t follow Yoast’s checklist recommendations as gospel. Why? Sometimes, following the recommendations would mess with the copywriting flow. There may be a reason that I’m not using the focus keyword in the title or that I don’t include the focus keyword in the first paragraph. Or I choose to link a certain way.

I may not follow every recommendation, but I know the page’s SEO strategy is still sound.

At the end of the day, good SEO writing connects with the reader and converts. It’s not because it ticks off various “here’s how to optimize everything perfectly” boxes. Even Yoast admits it’s “nearly impossible” to get a “green bullet” for every checklist item.

Although there are numerous blogs and websites dedicated to SEO, sometimes the best way to learn in-depth is by finding an expertly-written book that can explain the intricacies of SEO strategy and tactics.

These are interesting times for books. Books now come in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, Kindle Unlimited (free with subscription), PDF, and audio formats. After experiencing consistent growth for the previous 5 years, ebook sales were actually down about 20% 3 years ago, while analog books were up 7%. Analog books are back, especially with young children. Sales of e-readers declined steeply by more than 40% between 2011 and 2016 as more people use smartphones to read ebooks, according to consumer research group Euromonitor International.


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However, you want to read them, here are the best SEO books that we have found for marketers from beginners to experts looking to improve their SEO techniques and results.

Learn how to organize and operate an SEO team in SEO Management. Discover a succinct 4-step SEO methodology in How to Maximize SEO ROI. Check out our blog on 10 Steps to Becoming an SEO Expert.

Best SEO Books 2018
SEO for Dummies, 6th EditionSEO for Dummies
By Peter Kent
5.0 stars on Amazon
$15.99, 2016

If you are serious about learning a subject, then you should probably have a textbook in your lineup. Textbooks cover a subject with breadth and provide an index and a reference. The downside of textbooks is that they are a little bit difficult to read cover to cover. Textbooks tend to take a tactical approach to the topic instead of an abstract or strategic one.

New research suggests that marketers are continuing to utilize social media as a tactic, but they remain unsure of how to measure its overall effectiveness.

Buffer recently published its “State of Social” report, which found that the overwhelming majority of marketers (58.8 percent) claim that social media is “very important” to their overall marketing strategy. However, 19.1 percent of marketers are “uncertain” of how effective social media marketing as been for their business.

The majority of respondents (50.9 percent) claimed that they do not have a documented social media strategy. When it comes to gauging effectiveness, most marketers (66.4 percent) said they rely on likes/shares/comments. About 59.5 percent look at interaction with their brand, while 50.8 percent weigh discussion.


In terms of measuring the ROI of social media advertising, 60.3 percent of marketers say they look at engagement. Fifty-one percent assess traffic, while 48 percent gauge leads.

Social Media Marketing and Its Overall Effectiveness

Despite the challenges still associated with social media marketing, marketers do not appear to be slowing down in their investment in this tactic, according to previous research.

Social Media Today published its “Social Spending Survey” to gauge how marketers are investing in social media channels ranging from Instagram to Facebook. Overall, 68 percent of marketers intend to spend more on social media ads in 2019, suggesting that the tactic is yielding some benefit.

Currently, most of marketers’ social media budget (nearly 60 percent) goes toward content creation, followed by advertising (approximately 20 percent), staff (about 20 percent) and management and reporting tools (less than 10 percent).

There are times that customers aren’t easy to engage. It takes various marketing strategies and persistence to reach your audience and boost sales. Doing the opposite – flooding customers with assertive marketing — overwhelm and even annoys them. It’s estimated there will be 1.92 billion global digital buyers in 2019 and in order to effectively market, you need to strive to reach your audience repeatedly time and again. Aim to make numerous points of contact to build familiarity and encourage purchases. If you’re ready to market your e-commerce business, take a look at these three marketing techniques that are simple to make happen no matter your budget.



Get your name out on social

Social media marketing requires consistency and posting at the times that work with your customers’ schedules so they actually see what you’re trying to show them.

Do not spread yourself too thin by attempting to have a presence on every social media platform. Concentrate on the ones that your potential buyers are actually utilizing. Turn to data-driven tools to see where your buyers are the most active. Share news related to your industry and other relevant information on your customers’ favorite social media accounts to expand your brand presence.

It’s also smart to share direct links to your site and products, but do not inundate your followers with direct ads. Overdoing it with self-promotion makes your account less appreciated by buyers. Aim to share 80% industry news and 20% posts related to your website and products. When you’re selling personalized t-shirts online, jewelry or home décor, it’s vital to find that happy medium of sharing your products and sharing information unrelated to your business (that benefits your customers).

Build strategic partnerships

You can generate some major buzz around your eCommerce store by networking with your industry’s big dogs. Start by contacting blogs to see if they will review your products in a post. When your website is featured in a blog post on a well-known site, you could drive countless targeted visitors to your eCommerce store.

Go ahead and contact social media influencers who can share information about your offerings. Once you have identified industry-affiliated social accounts that have a large number of followers, it’s time to regularly engage with them. Like their Facebook pages and like and reply to influencers’ tweets. Don’t forget to thank the influencers who retweet your posts!

Intermingling and connecting with other professionals with your industry results in a greater awareness of your product and brand and spreads the world about your store.

It’d be great if we promised you Olympic swimming pools, private chefs, and exclusive living arrangements, but that’s not what we’re about here at the Good Life. However, we do have a good life recovery program — a program that works.
We’re not going to promise you the sun and the moon. We’re not going to promise you a vacation from life. That’s not what treatment’s about and that’s not how we operate.



Rather, we promise you or your loved one a challenging and life-changing experience driven by comprehensive and evidence-based clinical care.

The Good Life Recovery Program

What does that care look like? Well, our day and night addiction treatment program offers the following:

An intake process including a biopsychosocial and psychiatric assessment.
An individualized, uniquely tailored treatment plan.
Therapeutic groups meeting for a minimum of 25 hours each week and focusing on a variety of topics.
Individual therapy with a dedicated primary therapist.

Family therapy.

Psychiatric care.

A strong focus on family care and involvement.

Workshops on a variety of topics, including spirituality, health, tools for sober living, and many others.
Wellness and adventure therapy activities that complement and deepen your treatment experience.
Extensive case management, including housing, work, education, legal, and medical help

The Internet has made it easier than ever to start a business. A simple idea can spur disruptive empires seemingly overnight. Even the oddest ideas have merit as you’re bound to find an audience somewhere out there on the Web.

But:

The ease of starting a business is equally shared with your competition. It often turns out that your ideas aren’t as unique as you thought. Even now, you may be finding new competitors racing to your market that wasn’t there yesterday.



You also have global brands pumping millions into their ads & marketing campaigns. It seems like building a successful business is a long-shot, doesn’t it? In some ways, it can be, unless you know how to grow your local business.

The faster you grow and reach the market, the better chances you’ll have competing against these startups and global brands.

Don’t know how to start learning and apply growth strategies? Follow along as we get into a collection of our best ideas and strategies.

Creating a Lean, Mean, Growth Machine

You’re in a fantastic position as a small, local business:

Smaller operational costs

Fewer management headaches

Hyped workforce and outlook

You’re lean. You’re agile. You’re a go-getter.

You don’t have bureaucracy sabotaging your efforts. You control the direction and keep each marketing attempt succinct and affordable.

Here is the point saying all of this:

Don’t feel obligated continuing a technique if it isn’t working out
Fail fast and learn from the mistakes, then move onto the next
Now, consider each of the following items below for your growth efforts. Keep these items in mind moving forward with your campaigns and business goals.

How to Grow Your Local Business the Smart, Affordable Way
Every growth strategy involves some investment. Since many small businesses don’t have big budgets, they’ll make it affordable by DIY learning and doing.