5 keys to success with content marketing: the power of a good story.

Posted On January 20, 2017 By l7copro In Content Marketing, Online Marketing Tips, SEO, Social Media, Strategy /

Surely you’d prefer to follow a story, rather than the same classic advertising email marketing or “call now” ad. At least, we do. That’s the main reason why content continuum is the key to acquiring some marketplace advantages. And what if that content is generated just by a regular user like you? The power of a good story is so much stronger than any other traditional content. Great content with which the reader can connect is even better than the generic one generated by brands. If you can achieve that, you’re all set up.

Compelling stories told by great brands serve both readers and marketing departments. If you read about content marketing you’ll find out that the 5 keys to success are the following ones.

The 5 keys to content marketing success

Relevant and useful content, easy to share and deploy across social channels, email marketing, blogs, etc. Your strategy should be 360°, a holistic way is required.
Customer-centric personalized content. Personalization will make your audience feel they’re being valued by your brand, and to get an experience that will not equal any other content at all, ever. At least if you do it well!
User-generated content. We talked about this previously. If you see a friend of yours, or a friend of a friend, or even someone to whom you will likely feel identified, you’ll be more impacted than with any other content.
Effective trending publishing techniques. That means you have to consider what’s positioning better for each channel in which you’re sharing your content. For instance, videos and streaming perform better on Facebook and Instagram. Same happens with a gif format. New innovative formats are also welcome, like triptychs on Instagram (content that is divided between three pictures and posted individually, getting as a result just one complex image).
Content should be continuous. We talked about a continuum because you have to build a relationship with your clients. If you stop talking to them, they’ll forget about you, or worse, they’ll feel betrayed.

A good content strategy will also help you in many other aspects, like performing better on SEO, in order to gain more traffic and better position on Google or to reach more new prospects. We’ve seen statistics that talk about content generation as the most successful strategy to improve SEO (57% of the brands that took the survey).
The goal is engaging your consumers so badly that they’ll be looking forward to hearing from your brand, not as much as from their friends, but at least more than from your competitors. It’s all about taking care of the digital experience they’ll get, that finally will be far more important than the product itself, or even its price.

Stranger things are happening on your site. Don’t let the monster take your clients away!

Posted On September 13, 2016 By l7copro In Content Marketing, SEO /

If your site is not SEO-optimized, it won’t matter if your mother, the police or the devil itself is looking for you – no one will ever find you. The SEO world may appear to you as terrifying as the Upside Down, but if you take care of it from the beginning, you’ll be safe. You’ll have to elaborate a plan, though, and stick to it no matter what, because any mistake will take your site away, and your clients with it.

When Joyce and Hopper are taken in for questioning they’re under a lot of pressure, a situation awfully similar to what Google will do with your site. They’ll take everything into account. From day one, your site starts to collect points, or to lose them.

Google can be a really good fellow, or can become into a horrible companion, and when this last thing happens, how can you fight the monster? How can you prevent your site from being taken away? Do you remember when Nancy and Jonathan get ready to save Will? All the ammo and arms they gather together to fight the monster? The boys couldn’t have beaten the monster by themselves. They counted on lots of people and tools to help them. Well, this is similar.

Linkbuilding
At first, Lucas is annoying, we know. And so does link building. Nobody understands what it really means, and it’s really hard to get someone with the necessary expertise on this subject that’s both affordable and available. But it’s worth it.

Quick definition: link building consists on getting other sites to link to yours, so that Google starts to see your site as relevant, and ranks it better. If you decided to take arms by yourself, here’s an article that may be of good use to you: http://backlinko.com/high-quality-backlinks

Reddit for keywords
Reddit is like Eleven to us. No matter how brilliant of a keyword planner it is, Eleven is the best (sorry, Reddit is the best). You’ll be able to perform a search about your brand’s topics, or the product you’re trying to sell on your site, and in 5 minutes, you’ll definitely get access to some brilliant new keywords to work on.

Old content is the worst!
If you are trying to reach your clients with a site that is not completely updated, it will be similar to trying to connect with your son through the wall, as Joyce tried with Will. It’ll drive you crazy! So you should update and repost your old content frequently. Old content that’s left untouched is penalized by Google on their ranking.

Your content should have at least 1800 words
Winona Ryder’s character is angry, nervous, and nobody believes her, but she struggles to find her son anyway. When you get to write this much as 1800 words, and nobody believes it’s going to work, and everyone tells you it’s a waste of time, don’t listen to them, you’ll get awesome results!

The thing is that Google is like the real world to Eleven. It’s a mess, she can’t communicate effectively with all that noise and chaos. But if you jump into the SEO bathtub, you’ll find that clear communication and better positioning on Google’s results is not that impossible. You can make it!

Pic copyright: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stranger_Things_logo.png

Do you PPC? 3 reasons to start doing it right away

Posted On March 7, 2016 By l7copro In Online Marketing Tips, SEO /

You might not like and you may even refuse to engage in it but we’ve warned you already – paying for exposure will be insanely huge in 2016. That will mostly apply to content marketing but the old paid marketing tricks will remain under the spotlight, especially the star of today’s article – PPC. Pay-per-click has been a stable and popular marketing stunt for years – even for successful businesses.

Why so many brands use PPC? Well, exposure. And given the fierce competition for visibility in search results, many are using it because it works. That alone should have you already reaching for your wallet to pour some money on a PPC strategy. But if you still aren’t convinced, then perhaps these 3 reasons will show you why you should think of PPC for your small business.

5 New Year resolutions that can make your small business succeed

Posted On January 15, 2016 By l7copro In Online Marketing Tips, SEO /

Yes, we know that the New Year started 15 days ago. And yes, we’re also aware that you most probably have already made your resolutions for this year. Yet, we feel confident that following 5 are a worthy addition to any small business owner’s list, even when they come a little late. After all, we’re in January, 2016 has just begun and there’s plenty of time to make this your year. How? We told you already – by making these resolutions and really, really work to stick to them.

Why you should delete some of your old content

Posted On October 2, 2015 By l7copro In SEO /

In the age when content is king, thinking about deleting content might seem like crazy. Why get rid of articles and blog posts that may be driving traffic to your site? Because they might be causing more harm than good. We won’t argue that perhaps you have some old content that is actually valuable, that drives traffic and ranks well in search results. But chances are that most of your old content is obsolete by now – and it may be something that’s holding you back.

Not so long ago, we all grew accustomed to post up to 5 or 6 300-word articles per day. It was the way content worked then – keyword stuffing, link building, more quantity before more quality. But times have changed a lot since then. The updates applied to Google’s algorithm over the past years have tried to shift the focus from quantity to quality, penalizing sites that won’t adhere to the new rules.

The results? We are all writing longer and longer posts capable of providing actual value to the reader. A 300-word article isn’t enough anymore and most of us have played along. But many of us have forgotten about something – our old crappy content is still online. And Google doesn’t forget that easily. So, perhaps it’s time for you to analyze your old content to check if it isn’t hurting your site’s SEO without giving anything in return. Here’s how to do it.

4 DIY SEO changes you should make on your site

Posted On September 1, 2015 By l7copro In SEO /

You can put all your eggs in the content marketing basket, come up with an astonishing web design and have a tight social networking strategy to promote yourself but you’ll still need some basic SEO changes. Making some tiny adjustments on your site can make a huge difference on the amount of traffic you get from organic searches.

So, even when there’s people arguing that SEO today is more about user experience and less about keywords and tags, applying those “technical SEO” changes can help you reach an audience you might be missing. Don’t let that “technical” scare you. Those SEO changes are so easy to apply that anyone can do it. Ready to get the job done?

SEO – what is it and why should do it

Posted On July 15, 2015 By l7copro In Online Marketing Tips, SEO /

If you are getting a brand new website for your small business for the first time, you’ve surely heard one word that repeats on and on in digital marketing – SEO. Perhaps you already know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, perhaps you don’t. But do you actually know what that even means? You don’t have to pretend around here, we won’t judge if you don’t know. But we are going to say this – without a sound SEO strategy, your new website is doomed.

The latest Google mobile update is here- how does it affect your small business?

Posted On April 29, 2015 By l7copro In Mobile, SEO /

For something called Mobilegeddon, the latest Google update for its search engine isn’t as scary as everyone else is trying to make you believe. I understand if you’re in disbelief – the whole Internet has been panicking for quite a while now over an update that could crush virtually anyone, big or small. But going deeper beyond the surface, the new Google update could mean good news for anyone that knows how to take advantage of it. Yeah, that’s right – even you and your small business can profit from these changes.

But, how? And why your business of all the businesses in the world? The explanation is simple: Google rewards sites that follows the guidelines deemed by the company as mobile friendly. In other words, the Mountain View-based company wants everyone to get on board of its idea of user experience as big player – in fact, a player as big as content, the supposed king up until this month. So, get on board with them and you’ll be ok.

Ideally, you already made the change to a responsive site months ago, even before Google started announcing the update back in February. Though that was what should have happened, there’s a chance you forgot to make the change or shrugged it off. Look, I’m not here to judge but if that was your case, let’s say you shouldn’t include it in your list of brightest moments. Google still controls what people searches on the Web, so listening to it (and acting accordingly) are a must if you’re to survive.

So, you didn’t make the change on time and now the update is in full force. Is everything lost? Not really. However, each particular site and its competition will determine whether the update’s effect is huge or something controllable. If all of your competitors have jumped to mobile-friendly sites before the update hit, then you’re already running them from behind. That’s because all of their indexed pages won’t just keep the rankings they already got before the Mobilegeddon –they’ll get a boost as a reward for playing along.

If, on the other hand, your competitors are in your same situation, you are in a less grimmer scenario. You’re in time to make the jump and make all of your future efforts count towards a better ranking. But for that to happen you need to make the change now. Here’s where small businesses have their shot at glory.

Though you might think that big companies had all of this figured out for years and are now laughing while they roll over their piles of money, new reports show that they are in bigger trouble than small businesses. Sites as big as reddit and Interviemagazine.com are among the biggest losers after the update went live. The same goes for big businesses all over the country and the world. This means that search rankings suffered a major rearrangement that is still making waves.

The timing for you is perfect because for all of those big businesses that didn’t make the change on time, getting back on their feet will be harder than for you. I’m assuming that as a small business, you’re in control of practically every major decision concerning to its whole marketing plan. So, you’re definitely able to prioritize the change to a responsive site accordingly – meaning right f**k now – without having to plan that much. Just contact the IT Guy and ask him to do it. It will be half as hard as you think it may be.

All of the above is especially true if your business relies heavily in localized search. Imagine someone that types “donuts in Sunnyvale” on their phone looking for a place like yours: if you haven’t made the change to a responsive site, that someone will get another recommendation by Google. In other words, if most of your visitors/customers came from organic searches made from Google, then your numbers are already suffering and making the change should be your top priority (you should even stop reading this!).

I repeat to make it perfectly clear: if you haven’t made the change, the damage is done by now. But that doesn’t mean the game is over. You just have to act quick and get yourself a responsive site (you know, the one with big font, easily clickable links that resizes to fit any screen) and start paying attention to the mobile aspect of your digital presence. Given how much it has increased in the last years, mobile is already defining the Web, so you start thinking a business designed for it or go looking for another job.

Don’t know if your site is mobile friendly? Use this tool to check it now”