by getgrowth | Jun 4, 2020 | Marketing, Social Media
Social media is vital for the proper development of your business. This is why it’s so important to ensure you don’t make any social media marketing mistakes when it comes to growing your business.
A study published back in 2011 showed the world how any businesses can make use of social media marketing. If the study seems a little outdated and you’re questioning its validity, make sure you also check out an
analysis.
But how do you go about starting to work on your marketing strategy for social media platforms? As it is with most things in life, it’s best to first see what social media marketing mistakes you need to avoid:
1. Making your audience wait is one of the biggest social media marketing mistakes you can make!
If you own a business you probably already know how important customer satisfaction is, especially when they contact you in regards to something they need. Placing them on hold, even for only a minute or two, just won’t cut it. Addressing their needs in a speedy manner is the way to go. Same thing goes for social media.
If your audience needs their questions answered in the comments section, then you need to respond as soon as possible.
2. Not keeping an eye on your competition
You might assume your rivals haven’t taken an interest in social media, but this assumption is a mistake. Statistics show that not only do most businesses make use of social media, but consumers actually expect and want them to.
Seeing what your competition is doing on the web can teach you a lot. It can even show you how to avoid certain social media marketing mistakes. See how they interact with their audience and what promotions and special deals they offer their followers. Don’t plagiarize their strategies.
3. Focusing too much on the negative aspect
Let’s face it: social media websites can be a tough place, especially for newcomers. Be prepared to receive your fair share of negative feedback, whether it’s justly deserved or just mean-spirited. Don’t take things too seriously and don’t stoop to the agitators’ level because it will only show your audience you aren’t professional and don’t know how to take criticism.
The more professionally its handled, the more impressed your audience will be. Being professional in response to a negative comment reassures your audience that you have the ability to address and resolve any issue in the professional realm. It builds trust and can actually end up being advantageous for your reputation…if you handle it admirably.
4. Lack of creativity
This can be a serious problem for a lot of online business owners. Using bland, stale content will eventually lead to making other social media marketing mistakes. Creating quality content might take time and effort, but it’ll be worth it in the long run.
Try using humor or adding shock value to increase traffic and engage your audience.
Increasing your readership doesn’t have to cost you money
If you aren’t too keen on spending a lot of money on content creation services, then you can always do it on your own.
Put some time aside each day to learn something useful and you’ll be writing quality content in no time.
by getgrowth | May 14, 2020 | Marketing
Did you know that 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content every day?
If you’re one of them, you know how much time-consuming this job can be. So, the right branding tools for busy marketers can make a real difference.
Most people are highly productive between 9AM and 12PM. Do people stop working after 12 PM? Well no, but productivity tends to drop massively.
You should also add another interesting fact to this equation. In the last 20 years, working hours have increased by 15%. The opposite goes for leisure time – decreased by 33%.
Time management has reached vital importance.
You can find tips and tricks on how to achieve more in less time everywhere. They’re usually simple: Create to-do lists, take short breaks to clear your mind and so forth.
Now “branding tools for busy marketers” sounds a bit different. They focus on the productivity side. Think along the lines of improving the way you do things. Getting everything done faster and better means you’ll have more free time on your hands.
Long work hours may impair personal health and cause high-stress levels. In the US, most full-time workers devote 60% of their day to personal care. How can you reach the same work-life balance? Easy! You need the right tools.
Branding Tools That Expert Marketers Use
Before we go more in-depth, I think you’ll agree it’s a good idea to let you know what tools I’ll mention in this article.
In no particular order, the tools for busy marketers presented in this article are:
- Sumo – Your one-stop shop for website apps
- InstaPage – A landing page builder that requires no coding skills knowledge whatsoever
- SEO by Squirrly – A powerful SEO – and so much more – plugin for WordPress
- ContentLook – A content marketing website analyzer
- Pixlr – A powerful online photo editor
So, if you’re interested in what these tools do and what expert marketers love about them, stick around.
Let’s take them one by one:
01. Sumo – 12 Tools in One
There’s no solid evidence, but it seems every marketer has heard about Sumo. It’s a suite of 12 tools to help you grow your website traffic. It has tons of useful features for marketers.
You get:
- A list builder
- A buy button
- Google Analytics
- A heat map
- Image sharer
- Highlighter
- Contact form
- Smart bar
- Content analytics
- Welcome Mat
- Discover
- Social sharing
Sounds great, right? AirBnb, theChive, and Social Media Examiner are just some of the big names using this tool. But it’s important to look further than the brand names.
Marketers are relying on this tool to improve their work, so it has to be great – not just in terms of features. It has to help them save time too.
Sumo does that by automating many of the processes involved in content marketing.
The List Builder turns readers into email subscribers.
It is fully customizable and has a cool smart feature. That enables it to detect when a user is about to leave your website. A nice looking pop-up asks them to subscribe to your email list.
It works on mobile devices as well. That’s important, as there are almost 2 billion users worldwide.
When you’ve reached the desired subscribers mark, you’re one click away from integrating your list with your email marketing service.
The Buy Button is a feature that lets you sell anything on your website.
It is completely customizable and it’s interesting to see that Sumo doesn’t ask for a cut. It also has a nice A/B testing feature – you can find out how to increase the conversion rate.
Google Analytics does exactly what the name suggests.
It enables you to see your analytics data without going to Google Analytics. Furthermore, the plugin highlights the important data you should be tracking.
Heat Maps gives you useful insights about where your audience is clicking.
This feature is great when you’re building custom landing pages. Being able to place the right widget in the right spot can make a world of difference. It helps you find out where you should place the CTAs. All this leads to increasing your conversion rates.
It helps you find out where you should place the CTAs. All this leads to increasing your conversion rates.
Image Sharer is a cool feature that can get you more traffic.
Users can’t really share those beautiful pictures you use in your posts. But this plugin gives them this ability. They can share the image they like the most with a simple click and link back to your website. A must-have feature for the food and fashion industry!
The Highlighter is a cool way to get pieces of your content shared on social media.
Let’s say a user loves one of the phrases you used in your latest post. They simply need to select it with their mouse and then share it on Twitter, Facebook and so forth. Of course, the share will link back to your post.
The Contact Form makes it easier for your readers – or customers – to get in touch with you.
It is highly customizable so you can get that premium look you’re striving for. You also get an auto-response feature. Whenever you get an email through this feature, the sender gets a response from you.
The Smart Bar sits at the top of your website. It’s a cool tool that enables you to constantly remind visitors to take action.
You can use it to grow your email list or to incite readers to check out your new blog post. You’ll be amazed what a powerful call to action and a reminder can do.
Content Analytics
Content Analytics is one of the most insightful tools Sumo has to offer.
It provides great information regarding how much of your content actually gets read – the attention span in 2015 was 8.25 seconds.
The same data outlines that if your web page had about 600 words, only 28% of it was actually read. So knowing exactly where your readers stop is extremely valuable today.
The Welcome Mat displays a fullscreen call to action.
Many experts use this to boost their conversion rate.
It shows up when the page is visited and it is fully customizable. You can place a call to action to increase your subscriber list. The tool is 100% responsive since it covers mobile readers too.
The Discover tool enables you to get more traffic.
What Sumo does is place your content on other websites using it. Once you join, your posts will recommend others’ related content to your readers.
Your content will be recommended by others and so forth.
The more traffic you send, the more credits you get. These can be used to get even more traffic. It’s a win-win situation.
Share is a social sharing tool.
You can link up to 16 social media networks on which readers can share your great content.
The more shares you get, the more viral the posts become.
It also analyzes which share buttons are the most used every day and prioritizes them.
Phew! We finally made it!
12 tools to rule them all.
It’s a great thing they’re grouped under the same hat. This gives you a better overview. But the most important part is the automation. This is the real time-saver. This is what we’re all looking for.
Sumo gives you useful insights about how users navigate your website. It enables you to grow your email list faster than ever and integrate it with just one click. It helps you get your killer content viral. If that doesn’t boost your traffic to high-enough rates the Discover tool has you covered.
02. Instapage – Probably the Best Landing Page Platform
If you know your inbound marketing, you know that landing pages are a crucial piece of the puzzle.
Did you know that only 48% of marketers build a new landing page for each campaign? That number needs to increase.
This is where Instapage comes into play.
This tool allows you to create beautiful landing pages in no time. You get tons of templates which you can customize according to your needs. Their interface is easy to use and intuitive.
Here are the main features:
- Easy building – You only need a mouse and a keyboard
- Beautiful templates with great design options
- 100% responsive – The pages will look good on mobile devices as well (you can customize the mobile landing page too)
- No coding skills required
- Easy integration with CRM, and email marketing platforms
- Directly publish to WordPress and more
- A/B testing tool – Track, analyze, and pick the best version of the landing page.
All the above tasks can be completed with ease. You’ll save tons of time and design everything faster. You’ll get high-converting landing pages that are perfect for your campaigns.
03. Squirrly SEO
SEO by Squirrly is one of the most powerful tools of its kind. You don’t really need to listen to us but you can see for yourself how we back up this claim.
SEO by Squirrly has recently reached the 100k users’ milestone. It received many great reviews, including from thought leaders like Neil Patel.
The most exciting part about Squirrly is its keyword research capabilities.
Most of us use Google’s Keyword Planner tool. But did you know that its solutions are for advertising?
If you want to write content that will rank well, Squirrly will help you. You will receive information about recent discussions, the competition, and trends about the keywords you’ve chosen.
Squirrly SEO is unique thanks to its approach to SEO and content at the same time. Moreover, you get to check the SEO requirements while you write the article – thanks to the Live Assistant.
You also get weekly audit reports. They outline what website aspects you need to improve and also highlights what you’ve done so far. It’s great that you get tips on how to fix each aspect if necessary.
SEO by Squirrly also allows you to enrich your sitemap.xml file. You can add video content, for example. These settings need to be done just once. In case you’ve set everything up with another plugin – Yoast, for example, and still want to try Squirrly, you won’t lose anything. Squirrly will automatically import your previous settings.
It’s a great tool for professionals and beginners alike. You don’t need a background in SEO – you’ll earn it while using the plugin.
04. ContentLook – For Quality Content Analysis
If we’re talking about tools for busy marketers, we can’t leave ContentLook aside.
It’s a powerful evaluation tool for your entire website in regards to SEO. You’ll get extremely useful insights on what is working and what needs more work.
Here are its main features:
- Social Media Evaluation – ContentLook analyzes how well your posts do on social media networks. It calculates how many shares, likes, comments your posts have received across platforms. This helps you find out where you should be focusing your efforts.
- Traffic analytics – The tool evaluates your overall traffic. Nothing out of the ordinary, you may think. But it analyzes traffic in general and based on individual posts. Combine it with the above and you’ll find out what kind of content performs the best.
- SEO score – ContentLook lets you know how well optimized your content actually is. It then gives you tips and tricks on how to improve it. The higher the SEO score, the easier readers can find your content on search engines.
But the tool doesn’t stop there.
- You also get integration with Trello and Google Analytics.
- You can create and assign tasks for your blog posts and landing pages.
- You can create and analyze digital marketing campaigns. This is a great way to track all your objectives in a single place.
05. Pixlr – Powerful Online Photo Editor
Every marketer that loves his/her job is determined to create the best content possible. This often involves visual content as well. But time flies and you often find yourself unable to finish the touch-ups on that photo.
Pixlr brings the power of photo editors like Photoshop to your browser.
Creating stunning content for social media is much easier with this tool. You have all the needed functions one click away.
It’s amazing how much more beautiful pictures can get after you’ve processed them through Pixlr.
The tool is absolutely free and easy to use. The team behind it also blogs often, offering tips and tricks on how to use Pixlr to its full potential.
Conclusions
After reading all the details presented above about these five tools for busy marketers, there’s a natural question. How many tools do you use to achieve those tasks? If the answer is more than five, then you should improve that. The more tools you use, the more time you may end up wasting.
Sadly, yes, nowadays it’s all about time. The more you improve time-efficiency, the more spare time you’ll get to enjoy. And this is an important aspect if you want to keep a proper work-life balance. The less stress, the better you’ll feel.
Back to you: Let us know how you feel about these branding tools in the comments section below. Have you used them and switched to something else? Are you using them as we speak? Have any tips you could share with the others?
It would be great to learn from each other!
by getgrowth | May 7, 2020 | Content, Marketing
Every website owner has to be able to precisely analyze their content’s performance, regardless of its type. In that case, there’s mostly just one solution: Google Analytics (GA).
You’d be amazed how many aspects it can track! And does it for free. You don’t need to pay anything – except attention to the following lines.
Learning the ins and outs of GA is a must for all website owners. Not just because marketers say so, but because it’s a good way to grow your business.
Here are the top tips on using Google Analytics and getting as much as possible from the data (and how to precisely read the data).
Set Up Your Goals
Are you running an eCommerce business?
Are you selling certain services?
Have you developed a SaaS and people are downloading it?
Regardless of what the answer might be, you should always clearly define your goals in Google Analytics so you can track and analyze it better.
Downloads, form completions, add to cart, successful sales – everything can be defined and tracked through GA. You should do this right at the start because your decisions should be based on the goals and conversions you focus on.
To define these goals, head to your Google Analytics and click on the Admin wheel. Then, click on Goals from the right column and on the red button NEW GOAL. The tool provides you a user-friendly wizard which guides you through the entire process.
Track Your Events
Part of setting up your goals is Event Tracking.
By using just a bit of extra code, you can start collecting data on countless extra activities that can’t be tracked with the regular GA code. These are actions you can’t track because they don’t lead to a Thank You page or follow up page.
Events include aspects and actions like:
button clicks,
clicking on links,
email addresses,
social media icons,
file downloads.
Setting up events is just like setting up goals, except you’ll have to add a specific code.
If your site is using Universal Analytics, you’ll need to use this code:
ga(‘send’,’event’,’category’,’action’,’opt_label’, opt_value)
There are a few variables that will change with each different event you track:
Category – grouping events into desired tracking groups
Action – the action the user takes
Label – to differentiate this event from the others (optional)
Value – perceived dollar value of event (optional)
If you want your visitors to download something without taking them next to a Thank You page, you’ll want to input the following:
- Category: Downloads
- Action: Click
- Label: Whitepaper/Plugin
- Value: 0
Thus, the code you should implement on your page looks like this:
ga(‘send’, ’event’, ’download’, ’click’, ’plugin’, 0);
Sync Your Google Analytics with Google Webmaster Tools
For the uninitiated, Webmaster Tools (now officially rebranded as Google Search Console) is another free application which lets you check the indexing status and optimize the visibility of your website.
By connecting your Search Console property (website) with your GA account, you gain full access to Google’s new Search Engine Optimization reports.
These come in three forms:
- Queries,
- Landing Pages,
- and Geographical Summary.
In addition to helping you discover your top performing search queries and landing pages, the data can also be used to identify:
- Keywords that have a low click through rate, but high average position. Once you know what these are, you can change the meta title and description of your page to improve their CTR.
- Landing pages that have a good click through rate, but low average position. These pages can then be put through an on-page optimization process to improve their rankings.
- The countries your organic visitors are browsing from.
Filter Out Your Traffic
Do you and your colleagues have your website set as their home page, or do you visit to test and update content? Of course, you do.
Accessing your website over and over again can actually alter your analytics data.
To prevent this, and to exclude yourself and your co-workers from your Analytics data, you will need to set up a filter under the Admin panel.
If you have a static IP address, go to All Filters, click on Add New Filter and set a Predefined Filter to exclude traffic from your given IP address.
If you don’t know your IP address, just google ‘what’s my IP.’ Be aware, though, this will ONLY work if you have a static IP (most business broadband packages come with a static IP these days).
Conclusion
Every website owner needs to use Google Analytics, regardless of the stage of their business.
This fantastic free tool can answer so many questions, be them simple or complex. Without it, you can’t possibly know the answer to essential questions, such as:
- How many people visit my website on a daily basis?
- Where do these visitors access my website from?
- Are they using mobile devices to browse my site?
- Which pages on my site are the most popular?
- How many visitors are converted into customers?
And the list can go on and on.
If you have additional questions about Google Analytics, please post a comment below.
If you found this article helpful, you can share it with your audience on social media.
by getgrowth | May 2, 2020 | Marketing
Product Hunt is like the new cool kid on the block – everybody wants to hang out with him and tell the world about their new best friend.
Have you heard about this new cool kid?
If you haven’t, then don’t worry. You still have time to become friends with them. This article will tell every one of his secrets and how you can make it your best ally when it comes to implementing a marketing strategy.
What Is Product Hunt?
PH is a community type platform where people can submit a new product they’ve been working on. Here are some of the main categories that they have on the website:
- Developer Tools
- Bots
- iPhone
- Productivity
- Books
- Email Marketing
- User Experience
- Lifehacks
- Marketing
- Social Media Tools
You can discover all of them here.
If you’re an author, a podcaster, a marketer or a product creator and you’re helping build a product that fits into one of these categories, then you should consider launching it on PH as well.
If you just need to know about the best things that are available for free, Product Hunt is a good place to find that out as well.
It can help you find amazing books to learn from, great SEO tools for your business, awesome podcasts (from people like Neil Patel). You can get discounts to many products and you can try out the latest digital marketing tools.
Product Hunt is a community of people who love hearing about the hottest and coolest apps, tools, websites, or projects. This might sound pretty basic, but there’s actually a lot more to it.
It’s all related to the Product Adoption Curve.
Ovi Negrean, Chief nugget at nugget, did a great job at explaining this concept in his ultimate guide to launching on Product Hunt, so I’ll do my best to do the same.
Here it goes.
When launching a new product, you’re going to use many different strategies and communication channels. You want to make sure that as many people as possible hear about your product and try it out.
As far as your audience goes, you’re most likely not targeting everyone, but an audience with a particular profile.
Then, there’s the fact that each product that has ever been launched and will ever launch will go through some phases. It all starts with tech enthusiasts and ends with skeptics. Skeptics are resistant to change, so you can’t be bothered with them.
Tech enthusiasts, on the other hand, are exactly the audience you want to reach when launching a new product.
Why? It’s simple.
They will test your product even if it’s not pitch perfect and is still a little buggy. They will even help you improve it.
Uber is one of the companies that went to innovators first and then reached early adopters. Its success is partly due to this strategy. Of course, the hundreds of millions of dollars in investments had an impact as well.
Product Hunt is a community of tech enthusiasts, who are exactly the people you need to reach in the first phase of launching a new product.
The chances are that, if your product is really good, you’ll manage to attract a lot of advocates and influencers who will help you get that much needed initial traction.
Now that you know what PH is, it’s time to see how it actually works.
How Product Hunt Works
This is what the PH homepage looks like.
As you can see, you can browse the community and explore an abundance of topics. The homepage feed is sorted chronologically, and here you will only see products that were posted by a particular type of users and that managed to get the highest amount of upvotes.
While you can see all the products that have been posted and read all about them, you can’t upvote them.
To do that, you need to create an account, which is easy to do.
You have the Login button on the upper right side of the screen. You can choose to login with Twitter or Facebook.
And just like that, you now have access to the PH community.
Upvoting is super useful for you, as a marketer. Why? – Because it will help you easily form lists of all the latest and greatest tools that you can use to take your WordPress or business to the next level.
In your profile you will have a list of everything you’ve upvoted and you’ll always be able to come back to it. I, for example, still find some pretty awesome marketing tools that I bookmarked a couple of years ago, and even the Pitch Deck used by SEOmoz (now called MOZ) to get over 10 millions of dollars in investments.
Let’s see how you can upvote a product.
You can either start browsing through all the topics, or you can type in the search bar a name of a product you’re already using.
Let’s take Slack for example.
Right next to the “GET IT” button, there’s another one with a number on it. Those numbers represent how many people upvoted this product. By clicking it, you’ll be upvoting for it as well.
In the screenshot above, I clicked on those circles with faces on them. This shows you all the people that have upvoted the product. You can click on their name to see their Product Hunt profile and then follow them if you want to receive notifications about the products they post.
Also, if you’re an Author and you want to launch a book (just an example) you can use those lists of people to build a potential buyers list for your own book when you will launch it.
PH is a pretty closed off community because new users that have just created an account cannot post a product right away. They first have to upvote products on a regular basis, engage with the community and show their value.
You don’t even have the ability to comment, even if you have upvoted a product. You can request to do so, but that doesn’t guarantee anything. The PH team will accept your request based on a few different factors.
Product Hunt manages to bring so much value because:
- Not everyone can create an account and post right away
- The comment section is also protected by filtering the people who have commenting rights
Now, you’ll notice that some users have an M or an H next to their profile photo.
The M stands for Maker, which means that it’s the profile of a person that created a particular product (there can be several, as you can see above).
The H stands for Hunter, which means a user who has the rights to post products to the platform (aka hunt it.)
A user that decides to hunt a product doesn’t necessarily have to be the maker. In fact, in most cases, some people love a product so much that they decide to post it on behalf of a company. There are probably some products which have been posted, and their makers don’t even know about this.
OK, by now, you should have a pretty good understanding of what PH is and how it works. It’s time to get into more real stuff and discover the reasons why you should consider launching your product on PH.
Why You Should Launch On Product Hunt
There’s an interesting shift happening nowadays. Traditional PR will most likely be dead soon because it will be replaced by influencer marketing.
Marketers, I’d recommend focusing more on finding influencers for your products and not sending mass press releases to media outlets. People are slowly starting to lose interest in those as they’d rather follow online influencers.
Let’s imagine that the launch of your product is coming up. You’ve already planned out a strategy, established KPIs, put together a team, and everything looks pretty much flawless. The odds say that the launch is going to be a success.
But the big question is: are you going to reach the desired audience that will help you get traction?
Here are my top reasons why Product Hunt is THE place to launch your product:
- You will get plenty of traffic. Not only that but the traffic that will come from PH will translate into conversions, whether it’s sign ups or sales. Because, as we’ve already established, it’s a community of tech enthusiasts, these people will want to be the first ones to test your product.
- Your visibility will increase in the upcoming days as well. Product Hunt sends a daily and a weekly newsletter to all of its subscribers. If you made it to the homepage and you were in top 5, you’re going to be featured in their emails as well. This basically means that tens of hundreds of people will read about your new product.
- Increase your visibility on social media. PH has hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter alone. One single tweet about your launch can go a long way. Other people will definitely be retweeting their post so just think about the impact.
- You’ll get real feedback. I’m not saying that you won’t get real feedback from other places. What I’m saying is that the people on PH will embrace your product with flaws and all and are willing to help you make it better – if it’s not already, of course.
- Free press. If your product is really that great, then you won’t even have to bother pitching it to dozens of media outlets. They will naturally come to you and feature your product in their publications.
You’ll get all of these benefits. Just by launching in one single place. Isn’t that amazing?
Successful Product Hunt Launches
There are tons of great articles out there that talk about how people decided to launch on PH and how they turned it into a massive success.
Here is just one of these stories.
What Have We Learned Today?
Product Hunt, even though it’s kind of an exclusive community, managed to grow massively in two years.
What’s even more interesting is that the traditional way of launching a product is not capable of generating the same interest. Not anymore.
We have to think outside manuals and old-fashioned ways of doing things, especially when it comes to marketing.
My advice is to head over to Product Hunt now, browse their topics, see what people are discussing and start upvoting some of your favorite products. I’m sure you’ll find other cool things as well and you’ll be hooked in no time.
If you have any questions about PH, feel free to post them in the comment section. I’ll be happy to answer them for you.
Happy hunting!
by getgrowth | Apr 19, 2020 | Marketing
You have been finding out from us what are some important elements to get people on your site, how to build great content, and now we are going to talk about how to organize it in a sitemap.
You might have been wondering for some time which is the best way to make people search for more information on your site.
Well, that is an easy one, you need a clear navigation path for your readers. Making sure that your site has a clean walkthrough is established through your sitemap.
In this article, we will talk more about why a site map is important, how it can be done and a few principles to help you along the way.
Understanding that besides building great content you need to take the time to get everything sorted out in your sitemap will pay off from a Bot and Human standpoint.
Getting all this done in a logical fashion will make it easier for your future work as well. Having a clear structure will also give a holistic view of your content.
Why focus on a Sitemap?
A sitemap is a list of pages of a website accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for Web design or a Web page that lists the pages on a site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion.
Search engines care about having a sitemap because it gives them an order inside the information you offer in your site. This can very well direct them to pages that otherwise they would never discover.
If you make sure that you create one and submit it to Google, you will make the indexing better and quicker for new pages, as the crawling will go beyond the normal process.
This is quite important if you own a blog on which you write on a regular basis or if you are in the first steps of building the site and the structure is changing. If you have a big disorganized archive taking the time to create a structured sitemap will come in handy.
Dynamic content and structure might make it hard for Google’s spiders to find everything but give them the site map before hand will make it easier for them and better for you. So even if you build awesome articles but not even crawlers can’t find them, it’s quite in vein because people won’t find them either.
For readers establishing a sitemap that they can access is also important. You need to make sure that the are able to understand your structure and know where to find the right information or documents. If they can not find it easily and don’t even understand where they should be searching for
If they can not find it easily and don’t even understand where they should be searching for it, they will give up faster than you think. The user experience requires for the people to find the information in fewer tasks as possible.
Building one
There a number of protocols but I do recommend you the XML schema. If you want to build it manually, use the helping information form sitemaps.org.
This will make sure that the structure of your website will be understood by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Of course, the other formats are expected by the search engines but there is also the possibility that problems will appear.
If you’re taking care of your own site and writing all that code doesn’t quite come in handy you can use a site to generate the XML Site map and then just submit it to Google through your Webmaster account.
Squirrly, our WordPress SEO plugin can also help you take care of this task faster than you think.
Keep in mind
As I promised at the start of this articles I will present a few principles that you should keep in mind when building your site map in order to make it work for a long time for your site.
- Put your buy persona first
As I have presented in an older article, you need to get to know your audience and establish what each group needs from you. This is called establishing the buyer persona, that uses your site or blog.
When building a site you should start from them and understand which is the flow you want to take them through in order to get to the end result they were searching for.
So the main structure of the Sitemap should be determined to buy the number of buyer persona you have identified and they different navigations paths.
- Navigation should be intuitive not simple
Now don’t get me wrong. I am not promoting very complicated site maps that have weird connection between pages and information. You have to focus on creating an environment that is that necessary simple, but rather one that is easy to access for them.
Meaning that the logic that you find the site, might not concise with the one that your visitors have. Walk a mile in their shoes to make sure that it makes sense for them or ask a few of them and use their feedback.
- Make it adaptable for the future
You need to understand the evolution of your site before you pin down a sitemap. It would be best that the structure of your site doesn’t change to often as your user appreciate a sense of consistency.
They might also bookmark different pages for future reference and if you change the structure too often this will mean that will not find the same info again.
Make sure you know where future articles, updates to pages and other elements will be integrated in the site map before they are even created.
Organized information has a higher rate of retention
In the end, you need to remember that Sitemaps help you in your SEO work in many different ways. They help Bot better understand your site and there for index it better.
It is also an important element for your user in order to get more information on the different subject from multiple pages on your site.
If you need any other information about Sitemap or want to tell us how you have build your own, please leave a comment bellow.
by getgrowth | Apr 16, 2020 | Marketing
When thinking about website analysis many people consider the graphics and metrics but don’t actually have an understanding of how this information influences their creation process. Knowing how to interpret the information means you’ll identify what the problems are and also some solutions.
Why website analysis information can influence your work
Information is very important, but it’s only useful when you know which information, and how to interpret it and use it in the future. Some key website analysis data that can help in your creation process is connected to your traffic. There are a few levels at which you can interpret this.
Knowing that your site’s overall traffic is high or low is not that important. You can first of all see which are the most visited and revisited pages on site. If there are articles you have comments on, ask for feedback from those people; take into account what they have offered you and how you can reverse engineer its success.
Performing a website traffic analysis can also tell you the best days to post and how often. This way you can maximize your efforts. Maybe writing an article each day is not necessary, but rather concentrating your focus on one long article that you publish once a week will work better.
Having a clear sitemap and a feed can also help your creation process. It can give you a clear idea of the topics that are missing from your portfolio, how you can better structure your article and what the internal links you need to create are. Make sure that your site makes sense at not only an article level, but also at an intermediate and whole level as well.
Acquiring information, easier than before
Everybody knows this, that it’s much easier today to obtain information about your site. But not all products make it as easy to understand that information. You can try out ContentLook, a free product, to see how your site is performing and learn how to improve it.
However, let’s get into how that data can improve the writing process. One big chapter that many bloggers and brands don’t take into consideration when creating the most valuable content is social media. Find out how well your site or articles are doing on social media.
If they have lots of shares, find out why and how they managed this. Is it because of the persuasive social media messages? Is it the trending topic or the quality of the article? If not, find out what they are missing. You might have great articles, but if don’t promote them at the right time for your audience or don’t engage further with them when they need explanations or answers they won’t succeed.
Most audiences nowadays expect an interactive source of information. And you can integrate this into your creation process. Give them CTA in which their input matters for the outcome of the action. One simple example for this would be quizzes. Many sites implement them in order to have a better connection with their audience.
Website analysis can also help you determine which type of content is most appreciated by your existing audience. That way you can deliver more of what they desire as information in a way that they like to digest it.
Links and how they influence your research
Another aspect of website analysis that can give a helping hand in creating the best content for your site are the links you receive for your site. If you are interested in being mentioned by a popular site or blog there are a few tactics you can use. Start interacting with the author that can mention you, and start writing content that has the same style or information they usually use as a reference.
You also need to make them aware of your content if you want it to have any influence on your website analysis data. Other strategies are to try to guest post on their site. This will also help you redirect traffic to your site, but more than that it will get you in front of a new audience that is interested in the same topics.
It will help you have establish a clear name, personal brand and authority in your field.
Start your work with a quick pick at the past
Once in a while don’t forget to take a look at the website analysis of your site before deciding your month’s topics or writing new articles. It will direct you on the right path to digital success.
Appealing to your audience and engaging with them is also an important aspect of being a content marketer. Let us know in the comment section about your own strategy of implementing website analysis tools in your future work.
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