The Dos and Don’ts for Announcing You’re Looking for Guest Bloggers

There are plenty of articles out there that cover the dos and don’ts of guest blogging, how to craft the perfect pitch for your dream outlet, and the traffic benefits that guest bloggers can have on your website. But what about seeking out guest writers? What’s the best way to announce that your blog is open for guest bloggers and to entice them into submitting their original content? While the rules will vary depending on the type of blog you have and the content you’re looking for, if you’re planning on creating some specs to get started here are the dos and don’ts to keep in mind.

Do… Create clear guidelines for structure and tone.

What are you really looking for in a guest post? This is about so much more than writing an article for the sake of getting it published and backlinked on another website. Be clear upfront about the kind of content your audience enjoys reading about and how successful posts are structured, whether that means writing in a bullet format or taking a long-form approach. Additionally, share how the tone of the post should be conveyed. Should it be conversational or do you prefer a more serious approach? All of this matters when writing the final draft of the article so it’s important to establish these guidelines from the start.

Do… Be specific about submission format.

There are a few ways you can go about doing this. You can create a landing page that allows the potential guest writer to submit their article directly to the team from the page. Or, you can encourage guest posters to email you directly (through a generic submission email) with their post. Be sure to specify how you want the guest article to be included. Consider format first, including whether the post should be submitted as a Google Doc or Word Document, and then the method for sending it in. Some options can include submitting the guest post as a PDF attachment, via a Dropbox link, or copied and pasted directly into the email. Attachments in the last few years have turned into a dicey area where spam content can easily be submitted, so it’s important to follow the rules exactly.

Don’t… Ask for images to be included with submissions.

This is a controversial statement to make, but through personal experience I have found it is a better idea to source your own images. Create accounts with stock image sites like Getty Images or iStockPhoto or seek out free high quality photos from communities like Pixabay or Unsplash. It’s always better to err on the side of caution in this department, even if the writer claims that they have permission to use the image attached, and all of these sites have fantastic, credited images that can accompany any blog post regardless of its topic.

Do… Request more information about the author.

What makes this writer credible? You don’t need them to share with you their life’s story, but interested guest bloggers should submit a bit of background information in their bio or byline that states who they are, what they do, and what makes them a fit to blog with you. Bonus points for any guest writers that can also include links to their existing published content so you can get a feel for their writing style and areas of expertise.

Don’t… Guarantee an immediate response.

It’s entirely possible that you might not be able to get to the guest post the second it has been submitted, so make a note on your landing page or within your guidelines about what the follow-up process for post submissions might look like.

Don’t… Sell yourself.

If you would like to endlessly talk about how awesome your business is, you can create your own blog for those kinds of posts. When you’re posting on another blog, this is your opportunity to share your expertise and ideas. Be respectful and understanding about that.

Do… Cast a (fairly) wide net for your search.

Now that you know you’re looking for guest writers, you’ll want to share the news so as to bring in as many potential contributors as possible. Make the announcement via your social media handles, Facebook groups you’re a member of, your company newsletter, and even by sharing the news with trusted partners of your business or influential bloggers you already work alongside. Make sure that the writers you do get in touch with are the same ones you build a rapport with — and you might even be able to reciprocate by blogging with them as well later on!

First read here — > http://www.socialmediatoday.com/smt-influencer/dos-and-donts-announcing-youre-looking-guest-bloggers

7 Easy and Free Ways to Get More Traffic That You Should Be Using (But Aren’t)

We all want our content to reach more people, and to also live on, and keep bringing visitors to our site long after we’ve published it. Most brands do the basics, they publish a blog and cross-promote articles on social media. Some brands take it further, by publishing directly on social platforms like LinkedIn’s publishing platform or connecting their blog to Facebook Instant Articles. Companies who are serious about driving leads and winning customers online have adopted an inbound marketing strategy that drives traffic, captures leads, and moves those leads down their funnel using lead magnets and calls-to-action on their website, and blog.

We’ve found, however, that most companies aren’t using some of the best content promotion techniques available to them, even though they’re free. We think they’re so valuable, that we add these sites, tools, and strategies to the content strategy we create for all of our clients.

In this post, we’ll share seven easy and free ways to get more traffic.

1. Add Links to Social Bookmarking Sites

You should look to promote all your content on social bookmarking sites.

Bookmarking sites like Reddit and Digg, and StumbleUpon are used by many as one of their primary sources of news, information, and opinion. Adding links to these sites give you access to those audiences.

At the start of 2105, StumbleUpon was the fourth best traffic generating social networking site, behind Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. As you know, mileage will vary (we get 4-7% of our traffic from StumbleUpon alone).

t’s not 20%, but it’s not bad either, especially considering that social bookmarking sites are totally free.

2. Add Calls-to-Action to Links You Share

Tools like Snip.ly enable you to add calls-to-action to every link you share.

The ways these tools work is simple – you paste in a link and the tool shortens the link and displays a call-to-action anytime someone clicks it.

Link sharing CTAs are great for promoting lead magnets with every piece of content you share – be it your content, or curated material. They’re also great for promoting events and getting sign-ups.

Different tools have free and paid options which provide additional features, like custom branding, analytics, and promotion options.

We use Snip.ly, but there are many similar tools to choose from including:

Snip.ly
Replug
CliClap
Smol
Insighter
Backly
When reviewing the tools, be sure to check out how many clicks and conversions you get at each price point (or for free), and if the tools integrate with CRM and email automation software if you plan to use them to collect sign-ups.

3. Add Banner Calls-to-Action to Your Website

Simple website banner ads can be compelling and are usually easy to add to your website.
If you’re doing inbound marketing right, you should have calls-to-action on each page of your site related to the content on each page. Website banners stand out because they’re at the top of the page – they’re the first thing visitors see. They also stand out because they are consistent across your entire site, making them an omnipresent advertisement on all of your pages.

You can use website banners the same way as link based calls-to-action, but they can be particularly nice for driving sign-ups or your event.

GoAnimate has a good article where they compare the 6 Best, Free Banner Making Tools.

4. Use Pinned Posts on Social Media Networks

Pinned posts are a great way to promote content on your social channels. The great thing about pinning a post is that it stays at the top of your page’s feed until you unpin it. That means, whenever anyone visits your page or profile, it’s the first post they’ll see.
Dhariana Lozano wrote a great article on how to pin posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. We recommend keeping your latest blog post, content offer, or event as a pinned post.

5. Make Your Social Media Page Banners Calls-to-Actions

Another way you can leverage your social media channels for some free promotion is to change the page banner of your social media profiles into a CTA graphic. This lets everyone know about your latest offer or event.

Facebook is especially well-suited to this because you can use their call-to-action buttons to link to the landing page related to what you’re advertising. All you need to do is design a banner that describes your offer and points to the button on your page.

Not all page banners are as well suited to this as Facebook, but you can usually find a way to utilize the banner to promote your latest offer or event.

If you’re using pinned posts, you can combine the two and have your banner point to the pinned post that has a better description, and a link to the relevant landing page.

6. Answer Questions on Social Q&A Sites

Another set of promotional sites which are worth looking into are social question and answer sites like Quora, Yahoo Answers.

How do you use a Q&A site to drive traffic? Simple, use the blog posts you’re already creating to answer questions posted on the site. Every time you publish a new post, search for related questions. Answer those questions and link back to the relevant blog post for additional information.
This can often be done in as little as 30 minutes after publishing a post, and from that point, the traffic will start streaming in.

Wishpond wrote an article about how they use Quora to generate traffic, and the numbers are startling.

7. Have Employees Share Content on Their Social Channels

One thing every marketer and business is trying to do on social media is get more reach. Employees can provide built in reach.

Encourage employees to share your latest articles, content offers, and news about upcoming events on their personal social channels. Employees are often eager to talk about the exciting things their company is doing, and this gives them the opportunity to do just that. Every employee that shares your content will be extending your reach to a new group people.

Brevard Seo Read this first here –>http://www.socialmediatoday.com/smt-influencer/7-easy-and-free-ways-get-more-traffic-you-should-be-using-arent

The Impact of LinkedIn Group Sharing API Changes [New Data]

The Impact of LinkedIn Group Sharing API Changes [New Data]

If you use social media mangagement tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Hubspot or many others, you likely started seeing notifications in mid-June that you would no longer be able to use those tools to post content to LinkedIn’s Groups after June 30th. On that day, LinkedIn sunsetted it’s Groups API, and along with it, the ability to post or retrieve content from its groups through external tools.

The end result of the change is simple – if you want to share to or read content from a LinkedIn Group, you have to log into LinkedIn and share the content through the LinkedIn interface.

There was a lot of debate about the reasons behind the move – and lots of reactions from marketers. With LinkedIn considered to be the largest B2B social network, this change was especially concerning to B2B marketers. My company specializes in doing inbound marketing for hi-tech companies, so our team was squarely in that group of concerned marketers.

The impact of this change is many-faceted, and we’ve been tracking and collecting data about as many of those facets as we can. In this post, we’ll look at three of those facets; the change in our process and the time it takes to share content on LinkedIn, the impact we’ve seen in groups, and the impact on the traffic we get from the social network.

Multi-Faceted Impact

Why are LinkedIn groups so important? They’re where professionals share information about their industry and other topics of interest.

Publishing content on LinkedIn is like broadcasting to your connections – you’re speaking to everyone you’re connected with, hoping that a few will like what you’re saying. Messaging is another way to stay in touch with your connections – but the key deficiency of both publishing and messaging on LinkedIn is that you’re reaching out to people you’re already connected to.

With publishing, it is possible that your content will reach beyond your current network, if your connections share your article or if it becomes popular enough to be featured on Pulse. Other than that, those options don’t give you direct reach beyond your connections. InMail’s are a way you can reach anyone, inside or outside your network, but those aren’t generally used for sharing content.

Groups, on the other, give you reach outside your network. Groups are for like-interested people to communicate and share ideas, regardless of whether or not you’re connected. Many businesses will have members of their marketing department join groups related to the industries they serve.

Groups provide many ways to connect and engage, but this article is focused on content sharing. With regards to that, content posted to a group is likely to be seen by its members. That gives B2B marketers access to many people who they’re not directly connected with, but who are likely interested in the products and services they provide.

We write a lot about conversion optimization tips, and one of the first steps to getting more conversions is sharing content on the networks where your target audience is active. As a B2B agency, we’ve gotten some of our best results from content shared to LinkedIn groups.

There were a lot of articles, and opinions, published in response to LinkedIn’s announcement that the group sharing API was going away. Some, like Hubspot’s, were simple notifications, others like BBR Marketing’s, went through more of the potential impact. We all knew two changes were coming:

Since social media management tools couldn’t post to groups, B2B marketers would need to manually log into LinkedIn to share content and updates
Content aggregators and other tools used to find and browse content would no longer be able to show content published to LinkedIn groups
There were also many theories about how marketing on LinkedIn would be impacted including:

The lack of convenience offered by external tools would mean that people would publish less frequently
That same lack of convenience would make it more difficult to find and consume content from groups, leading many time-strapped professionals (which is all of us) to decrease consumption of content in groups or give up altogether
Marketers would move to other platforms
Group participation would decline because less content will be posted to groups making them less valuable
Since we do a lot of publishing on – and get a lot of leads from – LinkedIn, we took a step back in mid-August to analyze our data in the wake of the change. And we found some surprising – and some not-so-surprising – results

The Impact to our Content Process

As part of a strong inbound marketing strategy, we have a process for consistently sharing valuable content on a number social networks, and through a number of other online channels that generate good web traffic.

One undeniable realization from this change is that we, and I suspect you as well, have become dependent on ease and convince of social media publishing tools. They make content scheduling to easy, and easy means consistency, and time savings.

Here’s what we found since the change:

Inconsistent publishing – Despite putting a plan in place, and allocating more time, our posting to groups became inconsistent. Content curation and content publication takes time, and adding time to that process for a busy marketing team can break things. We aim to post to LinkedIn groups once per day, Monday through Thursday. After we switched to manual posting, we found that we were missing one or two days each week. Team members needed more time to work manual posting into the daily process.
Manually posting to groups takes longer than expected – Everyone knew it would take longer, but tracking time has proven it takes significantly longer than we expected. We use a word processor – Notepad works fine – to store a title, description, and shortened link. It takes about 30 seconds per group to copy and paste to create a post, longer if you want to add images. That includes pasting the different post elements, and, after the native link is populated, deleting the pasted link and quickly checking for errors. Unfortunately, humans get less efficient with repetitive tasks. The more groups you post to, the less efficient they become. We’ve seen 30 seconds creep up to a minute or more. It usually takes us about 15 minutes to post to 20 groups.
Group Depreciation

After switching to this manual process we quickly decided to take a second look at the groups we were posting to in order to make sure we’re getting optimal return for the time we were spending.

While groups that were large and active before June 30th continue to have many conversations starting every day, activity in some of the smaller groups has dried up. In several groups, we were the only people posting, or doing the majority of posting. We’ll likely stop posting to these groups to save time.

Groups that had low participation and engagement prior to the June 30th are the majority of the groups on our chopping block. As a benefit, or side effect, of this change, weaker and less engaged groups may die off while stronger ones thrive.

Impact on Traffic

If you’re doing inbound marketing right, you’re posting content on social networks to drive traffic back to your website so capture leads.

So that’s the money question – what’s been the impact on traffic after 2.5 months? The answer is not good.

Before June 30th LinkedIn consistently delivered the most, or second most referrals to our website from social networks each month.

 

We advertise on LinkedIn, so it’s difficult to show six months or a year of data because advertising skews the numbers. But, taking the advertising out, on any given month LinkedIn generated between 15% and 40% of our traffic from social sites.

After June 30th, we saw a precipitous drop.
LinkedIn went from generating between 15% and 40% of our social traffic to 3.6%.

There are other factors to consider in this drop – we service the tech industry, and July and August are notoriously slow months for tech companies, due to vacations and July fiscal year turnovers. But it’s never been this bad. Those previous low traffic months were the ones where LinkedIn generated 15% of our traffic from social – those were the slow months like January and July.

Consistency also has to be factored in. We changed our process and gave our team more time to get group posting done. We’ve been consistent since late August. Factoring out July and August we’ve seen a slight uptick in September, but still only to 5.8%.

This drop is too big to blame on the summer lulls or inconsistent posting. The more likely reason is that since aggregators and other tools can’t access content from LinkedIn, people who rely on those tools to consume content, have stopped seeing the content posted to LinkedIn groups.

It’s simple – we’re all busy. Those tools make it easy for to find and consume content. If that content isn’t there, it appears that LinkedIn group members won’t go looking for it. So I may have been wrong earlier – easy means more than consistency, it means reach.

Without the easy, B2B marketers may have effectively lost reach to many professionals they share LinkedIn groups with.

Conclusion

While we’re still assessing the impact of LinkedIn group sharing API changes, some might say they diminish the importance of content sharing on the platform. Others might argue it’s just the end of the free lunch – after all, we’ve never had access to Facebook groups for publishing from external tools.

LinkedIn, like Facebook, is moving to a pay-to-play model. They’d prefer to you spend money to get reach. This API change appears, at least in part, to foster that goal.

This was first posted here —> http://www.socialmediatoday.com/smt-influencer/impact-linkedin-group-sharing-api-changes-new-data

A Guide to Social Media Ad Retargeting

A Guide to Social Media Ad Retargeting

How often do you see current or potential customers coming to your site but then not taking any action? They poke around your pages a bit, look at a few things, then move on, without giving you a new conversion. How can you get that customer back to your page to actually go through with the action you’d ideally like them to take?

Welcome to the world of retargeting.

I’m sure you’ve all seen retargeting ads in action before – ads in your Facebook feed showcasing those shoes you almost bought online the other day, or a sponsored post of one of the apartment buildings you looked at two weeks ago, which has now magically appeared on your Instagram feed.

You can use retargeting to draw customers back to your page or product, and social media has a big role to play in the process, seeing as nearly 70% of all U.S. adults are active on at least one social network.

In this post, we’re going to take a look at how retargeting works, and which platforms offer retargeting options through their audience settings.

But first off, let’s start with the basics.

What is retargeting?

Retargeting, in a digital marketing context, is the process of targeting your online advertising to reach people who’ve already visited your website or are already in your database as a lead or customer, based on their previous internet actions.

You can retarget people based on a range of criteria and activity, dependent on each platform and the back-end data collection methods you’ve set up.

How does retargeting work?

There are two main options when it comes to retargeting: pixel-based and list-based. Let’s take a look at both.

Pixel-based

Pixel-based retargeting places an unobtrusive piece of JavaScript (also referred to as a cookie) into a user’s web browser to track the pages and products that this person views. The cookie then notifies the ad networks chosen by the advertiser to serve specific ads to that user based on what they browsed.

Ads can run for up to 30 days from the last time a customer visited a website.

Pros

Timely
Behavior based
Specific to a particular page on your site
Cons

Lower number of people in the campaign at any given time due to retargeting ads expiring once the user has been absent from the site for more than 30 days
Can be complicated or time-intensive to implement JavaScript on so many pages
List-based

List-based retargeting uses a list of emails you upload of potential or existing customers. The platform you’ve chosen then identifies people using that same email address on their network and shows ads specifically to those users

You can create multiple lists based on different actions, and it never expires.

Pros

Allows for more customization since you choose who goes on what list based on actions customers have taken in the past
Cons

The possibility of users having different emails used across platforms.
Less timely due to managing lists manually.
Why should you care about retargeting?

Retargeting enables you to remind users of products or pages they viewed, which can subsequently encourage them to proceed further through the purchase funnel.

It can also be used to generate awareness by drawing people’s attention to products, features or announcements which are relevant to your business.

The advantage of a social media retargeting campaign is that people can see that the ad is from a real account. This can help encourage users to share, reply to and discuss your content on well-known platforms.

Social media platforms and retargeting

Social media platforms offer a variety of retargeting options. We’ve listed them below to help you design your paid social retargeting campaign.

Facebook and Instagram retargeting

Custom audiences. There are several options to consider.

Contact list – Uses data from your CRM system or customer contact list to connect with these customers on Facebook or Instagram
Website visitors – Inserts the Facebook Pixel (similar to the JavaScript code mentioned earlier) to create a custom audience based on people who have visited your site. The website traffic data can be used to show people ads for things they’ve demonstrated interest in on your website
App users – Uses the Facebook pixel to target people who use your app to inspire them to return to a game or view items they may be interested in purchasing
Dynamic Ads – These can be used to promote products to people who’ve already expressed interest in your website or app. You need to upload your product catalog to Facebook or Instagram and set up the campaign once – it’ll then work continuously to find the right people for each product and remind them of items they viewed but didn’t buy
Twitter retargeting

Twitter offers ‘Tailored Audiences’ for retargeting. Choose between three audience types available.

Lists – They can be used to target relevant influencers based on emails of current customers or Twitter names
Web – Target people that have visited your site, using the Twitter website tag or Twitter’s Official Partner Program
Mobile apps – Reach groups of people who’ve taken an action inside your mobile app, such as an install or sign up, using conversion tracking
LinkedIn retargeting

LinkedIn now offers website retargeting, which enables advertisers to segment website visitors based on pages they’ve visited on your site.

LinkedIn’s process then tailors the ad content to the visitor you wish to reactivate. It also assists in helping to convert more prospects by guiding them along the buyer journey.

Snapchat retargeting

Snapchat has ‘Engagement Audiences’ which can be used to target users that have previously interacted with any of your ads on the app.

YouTube retargeting

YouTube’s ‘Video Remarketing ‘ reaches viewers based on their past interactions with your videos, TrueView ads or YouTube channel.

Pinterest retargeting

Pinterest’s retargeting options aim to reach pinners who’ve interacted with your Pinterest campaigns in the past with personalized content. You can create an audience based on pin clicks, comments, saves, close ups or based on their interest in a specific pin.

Pinterest also offers ‘Visitor Targeting’, for which, you need to add the Pinterest tag onto your webpage. The option enables you to retarget people based on the actions they’ve taken, such as browsing a specific category, adding an item to a shopping cart or signing up for your services.

There are two options for visitor targeting:

Events – Uses event tags on your site and the data associated with the event.
URL – Tracks one or more pages a visitor views on your site.
Retargeting best practices

General insights

Put a frequency cap on your ads to limit the number of times a targeted user sees your ad. This approach helps you avoid the risk of having a potential customer feel overwhelmed.
Align your messaging and creative with the lists you’ve developed, and where your customers are in the sales funnel.
Use a burn code (burn pixel) to untag users who actually followed through in making a purchase, ensuring you aren’t serving ads that can annoy people.
Rotate your creative and perform A/B tests.
Facebook and Instagram

Include as much data as possible to segment your target in order to reach the right people.
Separate data into columns according to the data types accepted by Facebook.
Add correct product IDs to Facebook pixel and App events.
Twitter

Be sure your list matches at least 500 users – otherwise your audience will be too small to be used for campaign targeting.
Use the “expand reach by targeting similar users” option when you have a small audience or to drive higher campaign volume.
While additional targeting is available, layering highly granular targeting into a tailored audience campaign will likely result in very low campaign volume.
LinkedIn

Name your audiences clearly and uniquely.
Choose a URL rule that aligns with your retargeting campaign goals.
Check the “Verified” tag status of your designated audience segments after 24 hours.
Diversify your campaign to ensure scale, reach and relevance.
Snapchat

Distribute meaningful visual content to increase engagement.
Include lookalike audiences to expand your reach to Snapchatters similar to your target audience.
YouTube

Refine your targeting with specific categories such as topics, interests, keywords, demographics, etc.
Use various ad formats when building your remarketing campaign.
Look to performance metrics to optimize your campaign.
Combine your remarketing lists to customize your targeting.
Pinterest

Use keywords to define your target audience to reach them while they browse and search on Pinterest.
Make sure your Pinterest tag is verified in the tag dashboard.
Choose keywords that are relevant and compliant with Pinterest policies.
Getting back into the spotlight

These potential customers were drawn to your website initially for a reason. By following these tips, you can use retargeting as a tool to develop deeper relationships with these customers and get their eyes back on your products.

This article originally appeared on https://strikesocial.com/