MyDigiBrand™

When it comes to websites, you’ll agree with me that WordPress is one of the most popular choices for content marketers and bloggers like us. I use it and many of the most successful marketers, bloggers, and business owners I know use it, too.

In fact, the usage statistics for WordPress might surprise you. They certainly surprised me.

Here’s an example of what I mean: Did you know that over half of all sites using a known content management system (CMS) are powered by WordPress?

According to statistics, WordPress powers 24.8% of all websites – or roughly 75 million sites total by some guestimates. And it’s not just individual bloggers who rely on it – 48% of Technorati’s top 100 blogs are built with WordPress.

That’s a huge market share. It makes sense to me.

When you consider the many advantages of WordPress, it’s easy to see why it’s so popular:

It’s easily customized  and changeable by installing new themes to change your site’s appearance.

It keeps your content well-organized and managed.

For most users, it’s pretty easy to use and has a fairly short learning curve.

It has a large, generous and truly helpful user community.

Lots of WordPress developers are available to help with more complex tasks.

I think one of the biggest reasons behind WordPress’s popularity is its extendibility. In other words, it’s easy to add tons of functionality to a WordPress site by simply installing plugins.

Plugins are basically small bits of code that are easily added to the installation of core WordPress files and which add specific functions to your site, either for your users or for you (i.e., in your Dashboard).

In many cases there are outside tools, apps and other solutions that can accomplish the same goal or function.

For instance, you can create landing pages with Leadpages.net – so why would you choose a plugin instead?

Of course, the answers depend on who you ask. But like many bloggers and marketers, I often find plugins easier to use, since they’re specific to WordPress, which I’m already familiar with.

Also, you can generally tell how well-tested, well-developed, and well-supported a plugin is by looking at the user feedback it’s received. Some bloggers and site owners simply find it more convenient to stay inside the WordPress Dashboard.

The choice is yours. But if you’re one of the many who find WordPress useful and user-friendly, this article was written with you in mind.

Below, you’ll find a list of 15 types of plugins that make your job as a content marketer easier and your content more effective.  I’ll tell you which plugins can take care of each job and why they’re important for content marketers.

Some of these plugins work by increasing your conversion rate, while others may reduce your bounce rate, improve search rankings or create more engagement with your readers.

Download this printable cheat sheet of 15 essential WordPress plugins.

Most of these plugins are free, though some have premium versions available for paid subscription or purchase. They’re part of an essential toolbox that, in my opinion, no content marketer should be without.

1.  Security Tools

Why It’s Important: Your website or blog is a valuable business asset that deserves to be protected.

Hackers can cause a lot of damage. While WordPress itself is secure, WordPress sites can be vulnerable to hackers for a number of reasons.

According to one set of statistics, more than 70% of all WordPress installations are vulnerable. That’s pretty frightening.

These statistics have been questioned by many WP experts. But, it’s a fact that WordPress sites are frequently targeted by hackers.

Of course, “targeted” doesn’t mean “insecure.” But no site is 100% secure, regardless of how well it’s built.

I know that one of the easiest ways WordPress hackers gain entry to your site is through outdated core files. That’s why you should always update core WordPress files after a new release is issued.

Believe it or not, though, plugins are actually the major source of all vulnerabilitiesin WordPress.

I think we can all agree that hacked sites are bad for business and do all kinds of damage to your site, your brand and your bottom line.

For instance, one popular aim of WordPress hackers is to insert spam links for counterfeit luxury goods, medications, or “performance-enhancing” substances.

Other hacks take control of the domain and redirect all incoming traffic to porn sites.

Even if a successful hacker doesn’t cause damage your visitors can actually see, your site, brand and reputation can still suffer.

One of the worst forms of “invisible” damage that hackers do results in your pages becoming blacklisted entries in Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

In other words, a search user looks for pages just like yours in Google. But instead of seeing a compelling description and enticing headline, the user sees a big, frightening warning to stay away from your site.

Over 40% of all U.S. small businesses have been hacked, according to a 2013 survey conducted by the National Small Business Association, with average remediation costs per company of $8,700.

“Soft costs,” such as lost profits and the damage to your brand are much harder to put a pricetag on.

The bottom line is this: You and I can’t afford to leave our sites open to hackers. While WordPress itself is fairly secure, there are lots of things we can do to “harden” that security.

A solid security plugin is a must. Add to that a plugin that limits login attempts, and you’ll have a security combination that makes it much harder for hackers to take over your valuable website and ruin all of your hard work.

Specific Plugins:  Limit Login Attempts is a plugin that protects against brute force attacks by limiting the number of attempted logins and making it harder for hackers to guess your password on the login page.

However, Limit Login Attempts hasn’t been updated since 2012, so it may not play nicely with recent WordPress updates.

Instead, look at WP Limit Login Attempts, which does the same thing but is current and updated through the most recent core file update. As of the time of this writing, it enjoys a positive rating of 4.3 out of 5 possible stars.

Wordfence is a comprehensive plugin that manages all of the critical site security issues. It can ban IPs and IP ranges as well as scan your files for problems, on a schedule or on demand. A premium version is available and offers more control and security, though the free version may be all you need.

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) is another comprehensive security plugin. It has both free and premium “Pro” versions. It also provides two-factor authorization, which experts agree is a security “best practice” and a strong password generator. You can even create temporary sign-in credentials for developers you hire to do specific contract work on your site.

2. Caching

Why It’s Important: A cache plugin can significantly decrease your page load time, which boosts your conversion rate and delivers a better user experience.

Paying attention to your site speed will help you rank better in SERPs and grow your business.

It’s no surprise to most marketers and bloggers that today’s web users make snap decisions about the websites they visit. In fact, statistics tell us that the average person today has an 8 -second attention span  – shorter than that of the average goldfish!

Your users’ attention spans aren’t nearly as long as you might think.

Your users also have certain expectations of you and your site. In fact, a recentresearch study says that 47% of users expect a site to load in two seconds or less.

That’s not just for sites they’ve never seen before, by the way. Radwaresays that over half of all U.S. web shoppers agree that they’ll abandon a purchase – even if they’re in the middle of the checkout process – if the site is too slow.

Over time, that can really put a chokehold on your sales and revenue.

As I’ve said before, page load time is also one of the ranking factors used by search engines such as Google in ranking your pages in SERPs. Amit Singhal, Principal Engineer with Google’s Search Quality Team, says that a page’s relevance is more important, but your site’s speed is definitely one of the ranking factors.

The good news is that even small improvements to your site speed can result in huge benefits. In fact, speeding up your site by only two seconds can actually double your conversion rate.

One of the best things that you can do for your content marketing strategy and business is to speed up your site. That’s where a good cache plugin comes in.

Here’s how it works: Like many CMSs, WordPress is powered by a database, which can get pretty large if your site’s been around for any length of time and if you’re consistently publishing fresh content on it.

Every time a user comes to one of your pages, the content is generated dynamically. When the same user comes to the same page later on, the page gets generated fresh again – even if there’s been no change to the page.

That’s an unnecessary drain on resources.

You can cut that page load time significantly by creating a static version of the page – i.e., a version that doesn’t make a new request to the database every single time a visitor lands on that page.

Caching plugins create those static versions of your pages, which can help speed up your site overall. In fact, a good cache plugin can actually speed up your WordPress site by a factor of ten.

Specific Plugins: The two most popular caching plugins are W3 Total Cache and  WP Super Cache. Both of these plugins deliver a crucial boost of speed to your site’s pages and either of them will help decrease page load time.

3. Analytics

Why It’s Important: If you want to make the right decisions for your brand and your business and master online marketing, then you need data.

In my experience, hard, reliable data about your users and how they behave on and interact with your site is critical to making smart marketing decisions. Everything you can think of that concerns your online marketing strategy and tactics depends on accurate user data for your site.

Without that data, you can’t tell what’s working on your website – and maybe even more importantly, what’s not working. Good, reliable data is one of the most important tools in the content marketing toolbox.

Analytics tell you so many useful things about your site, your content, and your users:

Where your users are located and other demographic data

What devices they’re using to access your site

What pages they land on most

What pages make them leave your site quickly

As WordPress users, you and I have lots of sources to choose from when it comes to analytical data about our sites and users. Google Analytics is one of the most popular choices for content marketers and bloggers and I think it’s surprisingly robust for a free service.

It’s fairly simple to install on your WordPress site, but it’s even easier with a plugin. You’ll also find the basic data that Google Analytics provides is easy to access, use, and understand.

Beyond the basics, you’ll get a wide variety of data – link tracking, conversion rates and goal setting, A/B testing and even real-time insights from your users.

You don’t need to sign up for multiple accounts if you want to track data for more than one website. A single dashboard lets you add and track multiple sites.

There are some perceived drawbacks. It’s from Google, so you’ll be sharing your data with Google. Some folks don’t want to do that, for a variety of reasons.

Moreover, because of the depth and breadth of what it can do, there’s a bit of a learning curve you’ll have to master if you want to get the full benefit from the moreadvanced functions of Google Analytics.

However, for basic data such as bounce rates and traffic source data, most new Google Analytics users have few problems getting started.

Specific Plugins: Google Analytics by Yoast,  Google Analyticator, and  Google Analytics Dashboard are all popular choices for bloggers and site owners who want to tap into the powerful data that Google Analytics provides.

4. A/B Testing

Why It’s Important: Let’s take a short quiz. Answer the following questions, if you can:

What’s the best background color for your call to action buttons?

Do your users prefer how-to articles or more in-depth, thought leadership pieces of content?

Where’s the best place to put your email subscription form on your home page?

If you’ve read any of my in-depth articles about content marketing before, you probably already know that these are all trick questions. The answer to each is pretty much the same: “The only way to know for sure is to test.”

Split testing in a thoughtful, strategic manner helps you to know for sure which of two or more options produces the best result.  If you’re testing two options, it’s called an A/B test. If you’re testing three or more options against each other, it’s called multivariate testing.

Split testing isn’t as simple as many bloggers and marketers seem to think that it is. In fact, it’s easy to make mistakes with A/B tests or multivariate tests that, if you’re not careful, can result in design alterations that don’t really change your conversion rate or grow your business at all.

Plugins make the process of A/B testing easier on WordPress blogs, so you can concentrate on the strategy and the specifics of your test.

Specific Plugins: Nelio AB Testing is a premium plugin that routinely gets mentioned in “best of” lists by WordPress bloggers. A full list of its features is available on the company’s website.

Simple Page Tester has both free and premium versions available. The premium version offers full conversion tracking and statistical analysis.

Title Experiments Free only tests article titles. The company does have a premium version, WP Experiments Pro, that gives more advanced testing for your content.

Marketing Optimizer for WordPress is especially useful for those who subscribe to the Marketing Optimizer software service but you don’t have to be a subscriber to enjoy its benefits. It integrates with Gravity Forms and is compatible with all the major caching plugins.

5. Email Subscription Form Management

Why It’s Important: How many times have you heard “The money’s in the list” or some version of that statement? Well, there’s a reason that it’s a cliché – and that’s because it’s true.

According to HubSpot’s marketing statistics, businesses that nurture their leads through email generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a reduced cost of 33%.

Your job, as a smart content marketer, is to ignore vanity metrics and focus on getting your prospects into your sales funnel. The beginning of that funnel is your email list.

So it stands to reason that one of the most important things that you can do is to convert visitors into email list subscribers.

Email marketing ROI is pretty spectacular. In fact, the Direct Marketing Association found that, on average, email marketing nets $40 for every $1 spent.

Email outperforms display advertising and social media advertising. It even does better than both combined.

You can only grow your email list after you make it as easy as possible for readers to subscribe to your list.

Specific Plugins:WP Subscribe Pro is a highly recommended plugin that integrates with and supports MailChimp, Aweber, and Feedburner. It offers popup animations and color controls, doesn’t add to page load time and is responsive on all platforms, including mobile, with no additional coding required.

Mailbag appears to work solely for MailChimp and Campaign Monitor users, but it’s fully customizable with CSS. You can also choose to have your form inherit styles from your current theme, or use the rather minimal style options that come with the download. You can place it anywhere on your pages with a short code adjustment.

Bloggers and marketers who use the default WordPress comment form will especially like Newsletter Sign-up, which prompts users to opt into your mailing list while leaving a comment. Newsletter Sign-up works with most third-party email marketing services, like Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp, Aweber, iContact and more.

6. SEO & Sitemaps

Why It’s Important:  Put simply, search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for content marketers who want any traffic from organic search results.

As a smart marketer, you have to pay attention to current SEO best practices and separate the search optimization myths from the reality.

Much of your SEO efforts will take place on the page itself – i.e., “on-page SEO.”

Even though some on-page techniques that used to have a huge effect on SEO are no longer quite so important, they may still have an impact on your search traffic.

For instance, meta tags have a number of uses, some of which will affect your users. The page description is pulled into SERPs. That’s a great opportunity to attract search users and persuade them to click over to your page!

According to Survey Monkey, 43.2% of people click on a given result based on the meta description alone. Title tags are likewise important.

WordPress by itself doesn’t give you an easy way to control these and other aspects of on-page SEO. Some premium themes add SEO controls to the add-post page, but if yours doesn’t, you’ll need an SEO plugin.

Site and search optimization led to a 15% increase in average order value for Café Britt, a specialty coffee and chocolate B2C company.

You’ll also want to take advantage of sitemaps. Sitemaps won’t actually help your pages rank more highly in SERPs. But, they’ll help make your pages visible more quickly to search users.

Think of sitemaps as a guide that give more information about your site to Google and in the process helps to ensure that all of your URLs are properly indexed for easy crawling.

Casey Henry experimented a little to find out exactly what effect a Google sitemap had on search indexing. He installed Google XML Sitemaps plugin on a client’s website, then compared the time it took Google to index new pages before and after the plugin installation.

Surprisingly, it was a significant difference.

Before installation, it took Google 1,375 minutes to index a new page:

But after, it took only 14 minutes for Google to index new pages:

The faster Google indexes your pages, the sooner it can start sending search traffic your way.

Specific Plugins: Without a doubt, the two biggest players in the WordPress SEO plugin game are Yoast SEO and All In One SEO Pack. You don’t need both, but either one is almost sure to satisfy your needs as a content marketer and blogger. Both Yoast and All in One are free.

Squirrly offers both a free version and premium version. The free version is sufficient for blogs publishing about five articles a month. If you publish content more frequently, you’ll need the premium “Pro” version, which offers more for amonthly subscription fee.

Google XML Sitemaps is the choice of many bloggers and WordPress site owners for sitemaps. It automates the process of sitemap generation with just a few clicks.

LinkPatrol monitors all outgoing links to let you know if a site you’re linking to is spammy, which can in turn damage your own SEO efforts. There’s a one-time fee for its use, which includes one year of support and updates.

7. Mobile Responsiveness

Why It’s Important: If mobile is the future, then the future is here, right now.

An impressive 65% of Americans own and use smartphones. Those numbers aren’t much different all over the world. A We Are Social study shows that 50% the world’s population has a mobile phone and that there are 9 new mobile phone users added every second.

People with mobile devices aren’t just browsing. They’re also shopping. Mobile e-commerce is also on the rise.

With numbers like that, it’s no surprise that Google led the charge towards encouraging the entire web to get “mobile friendly.” Earlier this year, it announcedthat beginning in April 2015, it would start giving a boost to sites that were mobile-ready – or “responsive” – in search results.

What does having a responsive site design really mean? Let’s allow Google to provide a definition for us:

So, a responsive site is one that displays well on a variety of mobile devices with a minimum of adjustments (e.g., resizing, scrolling, panning, and zooming).

Why did Google make this change to its algorithm? Well, Google knows that user experience on mobile devices suffers without responsive design and we already know that Google is all about its users.

What that means for the owner of a non-responsive site is ultimately a higher bounce rate and a lower conversion rate, which will eventually lower SERP rankings and decrease search traffic.

Increasingly many themes, both free and premium, are designed to be responsive. It’s pretty simple to check and see if your current theme is one of them or that you’ll need some help from a good plugin.

First, go to MobileTest.me, and choose one of the images to select a mobile device.

Next, plug your site URL into the search box and click on the “go” button.

If you pass the mobile-friendly test, you’ll see a page like this:

If your site fails the Mobiletest.me challenge, don’t worry! There’s a very simple fix and it’s called WPTouch.

WPTouch is a plugin that gives you a fast, simple way to make your site responsive on a wide variety of mobile devices and improve your mobile user experience.

There are free and premium versions available, with the main difference between them being a greater degree of control over the aesthetic elements of your site with the premium version.

Specific Plugins: WPTouch is the way to go if your theme isn’t responsive already.

8. Editorial Calendar

Why It’s Important: One of the most important things you can do to turbo-charge your marketing and increase engagement is to create a written content strategy.

According to Content Marketing Institute, only 27% of B2C content marketers have a documented content strategy. You can start that documentation process by creating and following an editorial calendar.

An editorial calendar is just a document of some kind (e.g., spreadsheet, actual calendar, plain text file, etc.) that lets you know ahead of time what content you’re going to publish on specific dates for a certain length of time – i.e., a week, a month, or more.

It tells you what topic to research and which facts, data and case studies you need to gather for that piece of content.

An editorial calendar is a good way to ensure you’re publishing the right kind of content in a deliberate, thoughtful and strategic way

Remember that the more content you can publish on a consistent basis, the more opportunities you have to reach your target audience and persuade them to buy from you. Editorial calendars actually increase your productivity and your impactby imposing deadlines and structure.

A good editorial calendar that’s consistently maintained and updated gives you a bird’s-eye-view of all your content marketing efforts and helps you visualize all your content at a glance.

Garrett Moon from CoSchedule put it best:

A content marketing editorial calendar gives you a framework for being deliberate and intentional about how you are reaching and building trust with your audience. In part, it is a strategic marketing tool. In another way, it is a place to keep your team organized and on top of things. Both of these things are going to be very important as you move ahead.

In my opinion, better content comes from being thoughtful and intentional about meeting your audience’s needs and desires. Smart tools, including editorial calendars, can help you achieve those goals.

Specific Plugins: Editorial Calendar is the plugin I’d recommend for those bloggers and content marketers looking for a full-featured solution that works in the WordPress environment. It’s well-reviewed with a rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars on the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Editorial Calendar lets you drag and drop items to move them around in your calendar and even lets you edit your posts right from the calendar interface. You can see the plugin in demo form at Zach’s WordPress Sandbox.

Another option, Content Scheduler, helps you determine when content “expires,” what events take place when that happens and what happens with the content after expiration. You can also use Content Scheduler to notify team members and content contributors when content expires.

9. Social Sharing

Why It’s Important: Did you know that 76% of US web users say that social media impacts their purchasing decisions?

Even if you’re a complete beginner to social media marketing, you probably already know you’ll need a social media strategy that works.

That means you can’t ignore social media and hope to achieve the kind of online presence that will grow your brand and improve your bottom line.

Any workable social media marketing strategy should include ways to make it as easy as possible for your users to share the content you create.

Forcing users to open up a new tab or window in their browser, hunt for your Twitter handle or Facebook page, copy and paste the URL, etc., will only decrease your social shares.

Those social shares – or social signals – are crucial to developing your brand and reaching your target audience. They may not pass direct link juice to your pages, but they do serve a critical purpose in your overall content marketing strategy.

Of all the social media tools that experts recommend you use in social media marketing, the most crucial is a set of attractive, functional social sharing buttons on each of your content pages.

Specific Plugins: WordPress bloggers and content marketers have a host of plugins to choose from when it comes to social sharing. Each of them have their share of fans and critics. You may have to experiment a bit to find the plugin that works best for you.

Share Buttons by AddToAny allows you to display share buttons in the sidebar as well as above and below every content piece. You can also customize the number of social networks you want to show your visitors.

Floating Social Bar lets you display buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It has a minimal impact on your page load time, since it doesn’t actually load the social media scripts from the start, showing instead only a “replica image” initially.

Digg Digg has long been a very popular choice. However, it doesn’t appear to have been updated in over 2 years.

AA Digg Digg Alternative claims to be faster than Digg Digg, based on tests the developer ran on several sites. It supports shares to Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Reddit.

10. Social Account Buttons

Why It’s Important: Smart content marketers who are savvy about social media marketing know that it’s not enough to just enable social sharing.

You also want to give new readers easy access to your social profiles, so they can find more of your content.

Ideally, you want to give them that access at the moment where they’re most likely to want to take advantage of it – that is, after reading your longer content pieces and presumably finding them useful.

Adding to your fan base on Facebook or your follower count on Twitter, for instance, extends your reach dynamically, by exposing you to their audiences.

That in turn gives you more opportunities to engage with your community and create those social signals that drive more traffic back to your “home base” – your website.

Specific Plugins: The Social Links covers the main networks – Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram. You can also purchase access to about 20 more social networks for $5 via The Social Links Pack.

Simple Follow Me Social Buttons Widget boasts dozens of supported networks. It also has a color picker to customize the background color of the icons. You can even change the color on hover for an eye-catching special effect.

Social Profile Linking integrates with about 20 sites, including the “Big 7” (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn). You can add the buttons via  shortcode, PHP, or a widget anywhere a widget is supported by your theme.

11. Comment Management

Why It’s Important: I guess that commenting system plugins aren’t required for content marketers, strictly speaking, since WordPress already comes with a perfectly adequate commenting system right out of the box.

But I think it’s important to mention them because they can provide two highly valuable assets to a content marketer: more user insights and a better user experience.

Commenting systems operate on the basis of accounts – not just yours, as the blogger or site owner, but also on those of your users/commenters.

So with Disqus, for example, you can find out comments that they’ve left on other sites. If any of those sites are related to your niche, you might want to reach out to them for a guest blog post opportunity.

Another plugin that provides extra value is in a special subcategory of “commenting plugins.” CommentLuv is the well-known adage of “the Golden Rule” in action.

We all know the Golden Rule, right? It simply tells us to treat others as we’d like them to treat us. That’s great advice anywhere, but it’s especially good advice for content marketers.

As content marketers, we want people to share our content. CommentLuv gives a nice little bit of exposure to those users of yours who go to the trouble of leaving a comment, by sharing their latest blog post in your comment section. In turn, it alsoencourages other users to leave useful comments on your content pages.

This takes up very little real estate on the page, while at the same time adding value to your commenters and to your users overall, exposing them to other bloggers and content creators they might not have heard of otherwise.

It’s a nice way to give a little recognition back to the people who go the extra mile and leave a useful comment on your site, increasing your engagement and social proof, and helping you attract a more loyal audience in the process.

Specific Plugins:

The two best-known commenting system plugins are Disqus and Livefyre. Both plugins sync all comments back up to your database, so they won’t disappear if you decide to deactivate the plugin or try another option.

CommentLuv is developed by Andy Bailey and has both a free and a premium version available.

12. Related Posts

Why It’s Important: One of the biggest problems many bloggers and content marketers struggle with is the challenge of the lost reader.

This happens every time a new user comes to your site, reads your content, likes it and finds it useful – and then leaves your site without commenting, subscribing to your list, browsing the rest of your content or buying anything.

This is a bounce rate problem and it happens when you don’t give that user anywhere else to go.

To put it simply, a related-posts plugin gives those users somewhere else to go on your site.

The longer you can keep those users on your site, the better your chances of converting them into email list subscribers and customers or clients. That makes sense, right?

It’s sort of the same principle behind making sure you place internal links in your content that lead to your own pages. It provides additional exposure to the rest of your content, but it also does so much more.

Most importantly, related posts help reduce a high bounce rate.

Bounce rate can be defined as “the percentage of single-page visits” out of all visits.

In other words, it’s the number of visits in which a user comes to one of your pages, then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site.

Or as Avinash Kaushik colorfully put it: “I came, I puked, I left.”

Google sees a high bounce rate as an indication that your users aren’t finding relevant information on that page, which could then reduce your search rankings.

There are a number of ways to reduce your bounce rate but one of the simplest is to give them somewhere else to go at the end of the article they’re reading.

These plugins add a handful of suggested posts at the end of your article, based on the content of that article, on the theory that if the user was interested in that topic, they might also be interested in other articles on that same topic.

It’s similar to Amazon’s “customers who bought this item also bought….” carousel and operates on the same principle.

Did you ever wonder why Amazon does that? Sure, it’s because they want to be helpful to their users – but it’s also because giving their customers other related options increases their sales and revenue.

The match of “related posts” to displayed post isn’t always perfect, but if you take the time to write the best, most clickable headlines you can, each and every time, you’ll encourage the user to stick around and read more.

Specific Plugins: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin was updated last in May 2015, not as recently as others on this list, and has a rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars. However, it also has a number of 1-star reviews, so you’ll want to test it out thoroughly to make sure it works for you.

Contextual Related Posts enjoys higher ratings, more positive reviews and has also been more recently updated.

Editorial Assistant by Zemanta is definitely worth a look. It pulls related posts from your own blog and also from its network, so be aware that some of the results on certain pages could go to sites other than your own. However, it does feature some added benefits that could prove useful, including sharing your links on other people’s blogs as well as providing a library of free-to-use images that you can include in your content.

13. Rich Snippets

Why It’s Important: It’s no secret that Google is always looking for new ways to provide the best, most helpful, and most authoritative content for its users. Rich snippets definitely fit that category.

Introduced in 2009, rich snippets are little pieces of markup code for your web pages that get displayed on search listings as extra information.

They can enhance your listing and increase search traffic by drawing the search user’s eye to your listing and instantly establishing that your page is a better “fit” for their needs.

Rich snippets are currently supported for the following kinds of content:

The plugins I’ve listed below will take care of the coding part of the rich snippets equation. However, the final decision as to whether the rich snippet displays for your pages is entirely up to Google, so the plugin isn’t a guarantee.

Specific Plugins: Three rich snippets plugins you can try out are WPReview, Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin, and Google SEO Pressor for Rich Snippets.

All three can take care of the markup code, although you should be aware that Rich Snippets isn’t free (it currently costs $12), and Google SEO Pressor has very mixed reviews.

14. Calls to Action

Why It’s Important: It’s estimated that somewhere around 70% of all B2B small business websites don’t have a single call to action on the homepage. They’re really missing the boat, I think.

Calls to action (CTAs) aren’t optional for business anymore. You have to tell your audience what you want them to do whether that’s subscribe to your email list, sign up for a free trial or make a purchase.

The most effective way to include a CTA on your site’s pages is by creating clickable buttons with clear, succinct copy telling your reader what to do next.

Even a simple change in the background color for your CTA button can make a big difference, as Performable discovered – changing their CTA button color from green to red led to a 21% increase in conversion rate.

You don’t need to be a great designer to include a dynamic and attractive button on your site. Instead, simply install one of these plugins to craft your buttons for each page.

There’s no one single rule for crafting effective calls to action – just guidelines and examples you can try out. As I’ve said before, the only way to know for sure is to test out variations on your own site.

Plugins also have the advantage of enabling you to change colors and copy so that you can easily split test variations to find out for sure what works best for you and your brand.

Specific Plugins:MaxButtons is one of the more popular CTA plugin choices around. With it, you can craft attractive CSS3 buttons to be used anywhere on your WordPress site. It features a user-friendly button editor that makes it super easy to create beautiful CTA buttons in a snap.

Contact Form and Calls to Action by vCita isn’t as widely reviewed as Max Buttons, but it’s a solid choice. It helps you actively encourage your site users to engage with you, is fully mobile responsive, and can even double your number of generated leads.

WP Calls to Action not only helps you create calls to action on your site but also lets you monitor and track conversion rates, run an AB split test on your CTAs, and generate more leads.

15. Landing Pages

Why It’s Important: If you want to generate more leads that you can nurture through your email marketing and other parts of your sales funnel, then you need to create high-converting landing pages.

A landing page is simply any page that you publish that’s created specifically to “close the deal” – that is, persuade a reader to sign up for your list, agree to a free trial, or make a purchase.

In other words, landing pages are designed solely for conversion.

According to The Landing Page Course, “Landing pages live separately from your website and are designed to only receive campaign traffic. …  this separation allows them to be focused on a single objective and makes analytics, reporting & testing a simpler task.”

They help focus the user’s attention very quickly on a specific call to action by promoting a quick, positive first impression.

According to an eye-tracking study reported by ConversionXL, it takes 2.6 seconds for a user’s eyes to land on the critical part of your page design.

Ion Interactive says it happens even more quickly than that – 1/20th of a second.

You don’t have a whole lot of time to convince them to take the next step. That’s why landing pages are so useful.

Landing pages are essential tools in your content marketing toolbox. If you don’t get those prospective customers into your sales funnel and convert them into actual customers, you’re wasting your time, no matter how useful your content is.

For instance, Conversion Rate Experts generated $1,000,000 million for Moz with a single landing page and a few emails.

There are lots of tools available that can help you create, build, and improve upon high-converting landing pages.

Plugins can help you simplify this process and take care of the landing page creation process right from your WordPress dashboard.

Specific Plugins: Zedity lets you create pages of any kind without any coding whatsoever, perfect for those who are new to WordPress or don’t know CSS and HTML. You can also use Zedity to add boxes or call outs anywhere on any page, even if your theme doesn’t natively support these features.

Conclusion

Keep in mind that there’s some risk to adding plugins to your WordPress site, especially when it’s done carelessly.

For instance, there’s always the potential for conflicts between a new plugin and one you’ve been using. Additionally, plugins that aren’t consistently updated can break your site, creating ugly error messages that confuse and repel visitors.

Moreover, there’s always a risk of malicious code in a plugin. Spammers and hackers often use plugins to gain unauthorized entry to your site and do some damage to it via malware, spam links, or malicious redirects.

Plugins can also slow down your site, sometimes dramatically. What I do is simply check my page load time after I install a new plugin. That way I know for sure whether the new plugin is slowing my pages down.

All of these risks can be managed by simply doing your research and due diligence, reading unbiased reviews and only selecting tested and positively reviewed plugins for your site.

Plugins that are actively developed and maintained by responsible developers, and that play well with other plugins and core files, are indispensable for content marketers.

The plugins mentioned here can help you increase your conversion rate, lower your bounce rate, and get more search traffic and social signals.

Written by Neil Patel. To read the full article, please click here. MyDigiBrand is a boutique website development and digital marketing firm in San Diego, California. We help our clients create powerful and engaging online brands. For more information, please visit our website at www.mydigibrand.com.

Here are the key issues you’re facing:

The market’s looking for user growth where there just isn’t any – Twitter’s barely seen any growth in its US audience for the past six quarters (even a slight decline in the latest numbers), while its international user base has only grown by 40m in the last seven quarters going back to Q2 2014. For comparison, Instagram’s added around 200 million new users in that same time span, while Facebook added 46 million users in the last quarter alone. For whatever reason, Twitter’s growth rate is slowing, it’s not catching on with new users in the same way other platforms are. If You Were Twitter, What Would You Do? | Social Media Today

Revenue growth is strong, but not as strong as you’d like it – Twitter posted a 48% increase, year-on-year, in 4th quarter revenue, matching analyst estimates by reaching $710 million. But those estimates were revised down after Q3, where analysts had, at the time, been projecting around $737 million for the quarter. Now that’s not overly bad – $2.2 billion in full-year revenue is still a great result for the company, but again, there’s that inevitable comparison. Facebook just last week reported that they’d reached $17.9 billion in revenue for the full year, more than eight times the result from Twitter. Such a comparison may seem unfair – no one could’ve predicted ongoing the rise and rise of Zuckerberg’s social giant. But that comparison will always exist, and when you see upstarts like Snapchat boasting about their rapid growth, particularly among younger users (traditionally Twitter’s key demographic) you have to wonder whether Twitter can remain as ‘essential’ as it once was. Ideas seem to be running thin – In the last six months we’ve seen Twitter introduce Moments, Twitter polls, ‘hearts’ instead of ‘stars’, autoplay Periscope broadcasts in-stream, a re-vamped home page for non logged-in users and, just this week, an algorithmically-defined timeline to help people find more relevant tweets (currently opt-in). While all of these updates are interesting within themselves, none are ground-breaking – Moments, in particular, hasn’t delivered anywhere near the attention Twitter would have hoped (at least, not yet). There’s also been speculation about an emoji reactions tool (similar to Facebook), 10,000 character tweets and an in-stream GIF option. Again, all of these could be great additions, but none of them look set to boost new users or user engagement in any significant way.

When you see all these things together, you start to get an idea of the uphill battle Twitter’s facing, and some insight into why Jack Dorsey and Co would be keen to consider anything, whether that annoys the ‘power users’ or not.

I should stress here that Twitter is not dying – as noted by Will Oremus for Slate, that’s a false narrative, the revenue numbers alone highlight its strength – but Twitter is struggling to meet market expectations, and market expectations fuel overall perceptions. And those perceptions can keep new users from even bothering to give the platform a chance.

If it’s dead anyway, as the title of a post from The New Yorker suggested recently, why bother with it, everyone knew this day would come, right? Everyone knew this social media thing was just a fad.

Twitter’s not dying – check out the activity on the platform during any major event, anywhere in the world, and you’ll see the utility that the service provides, the important role in now plays in our wider communicative landscape. But Twitter does need to make changes – it’s simply not an option to continue to lose value at the rate the company’s stock is currently dropping.

So what do you do?

What’s concerning at the moment is that Twitter increasingly seems to be running out of answers. This week they’ve introduced two new ad products, both of which seem like back pocket ideas they’ve held onto in case of emergency. The first was the introduction of their new ‘First View’ ad units, video ads that’ll appear at the top of every Twitter’s users’ timeline for a 24-hour period. This is no doubt an expensive option, putting it out of the reach of the majority of Twitter advertisers, but given that cost, even if only a few major players take it up, it could provide a solid revenue boost for the company.

The second was the addition of new ads attached to individual tweets – last week, Twitter quietly changed the way tweets are presented so that tweet conversations now pop-out in a single click. And that’s fine – it has its positives and negatives, but no big deal either way. But what it has enabled Twitter to do is to create more ad real estate – click onto one of your Twitter conversations right now and scroll down and you’ll likely see something like this:

If You Were Twitter, What Would You Do? | Social Media TodayAnd again, that’s no big deal – it’s out of the way and not highly intrusive. But you’d also suspect it’s probably not very effective as a result – it’s beyond the actual conversation, so your eyes don’t even have to track over it, and Twitter’s ad targeting isn’t personalized enough to make these bottom of screen promos so focused and relevant that you’re likely to be compelled to scroll down. In fact, the only real beneficiary of these ads, from what I can see, is Twitter. And it seems like a reaching effort, like that was an extra bit of real estate Twitter could use, but haven’t yet, but could if things got real bad.

That element is an issue – that Twitter seems to be tapped out. If these are the ideas they’re throwing up, then I don’t see a lot to inspire confidence – and clearly, I’m in line with the market with this thinking. In Twitter, I don’t see a company that’s dying out, I see a company that’s failing to see its value, that’s trying too hard to be something that it’s not. Now, that’s obviously easy for an outsider to say, and I’ve got no doubt that the many brilliant minds working at Twitter have thought through every possible scenario and option, but it seems to me that Twitter, rather than trying to keep up with user trends, should focus on the power it already has, the capacity for what it can do that other networks cannot. That power, for Twitter, is in its data, its real time pulse of the world, in the thousands of tweets flowing through its circuits every second of every day.

Twitter, better than any other resource in the world, can uncover real-time trends and patterns as they happen.

No one, nothing in the world can compare with Twitter on this front. Facebook can’t because so much of its data’s walled in – it’s hard to highlight how trends are evolving when they’re not able to show you the full trail of where conversations are originating from, and anonymized data trails are great, but largely only valuable in retrospect. No other platform is close to Twitter on this – so why doesn’t the platform focus on that strength and show its users, both existing and prospective, why they need to use Twitter to stay on top of the latest news and happenings?

Twitter could do this via their trends sidebar – at the moment, Twitter’s trends selection which it shows to each user isn’t highly focussed, it’s generic to a specific region but the breadth of topics vary so much across the platform that most of the conversations aren’t going to have significant appeal among a wide range of user groups.

So make them more specific.

Twitter has the capacity to track trending topics based on hashtags, content being shared, correlations among influential users and a range of other data points. These options are not only possible, they already exist in apps like BuzzSumo and Nuzzel, with filtering options based on Twitter data that can hone down your content focus to very specific interests.

If Twitter’s looking to implement an algorithm to boost engagement, let that algorithm be one that highlights relevant content to each user based on what they commonly tweet about – but not by uncovering tweets they may have missed in-stream. Use that sidebar real estate to best effect and show each person trending content that’s most likely to be of relevance to them. If that listing was so compelling, so up-to-the-minute, so personalized and in-tune with each users’ interests, people wouldn’t be able to resist clicking through to learn more. People would be telling their friends about Twitter’s improved focus and customization, people would be using the platform more and more because it would be serving a distinct purpose in their lives.

You may think that wouldn’t be as relevant to younger users, but what if Twitter was detecting all the latest trends faster than anywhere else and the people who were on it were in the know before those on other platforms? And remember, the key element is personalization based on on-platform actions, so people would only be seeing the trends relevant to them, based on their tweet activity.

This is what Twitter does, what Twitter’s good at, what distinguishes the platform from other social networks. And what’s more, a more defined algorithm, attuned to each users’ behaviors and interests, would also better inform Twitter’s ad targeting. After a few months of refinement and feedback data on how each user was responding to the more personalized trends, Twitter would start to get a real sense of what topics are resonating with each audience, with each individual user – if you had a track of each specific trend each user was clicking on, that would become a powerful indicator of interest. This would enable Twitter to better target sponsored tweets and generate better ad results, based upon actual, on-platform activity.

But of course, I have no doubt that Twitter’s already considered this, there’s no question in my mind that Twitter’s looking at their options in regards to smarter algorithms based on individual inputs – similar to how Facebook’s News Feed works – and also how developments in artificial intelligence may be able to play a part in that wider movement (note: Twitter purchased AI startup Whetlab in June last year).

But it’s possible, too, that Twitter might be looking at it the wrong way – there’s no need, in my mind, to actually reduce the complexity in the way Twitter works or look at altering the way the tweet timeline functions, so much as there’s a need to compel people to actually want to use the platform in the first place. If complexity was an issue, no one would use Snapchat – that interface is significantly less intuitive that Twitter’s. But people work it out because everyone’s on it, everyone’s talking about it.

It’s not about making Twitter easier, necessarily, it’s about making it so compelling that people want to take the time to get involved.

This is how Twitter grew initially, right? Twitter’s user-experience was arguably worse when hundreds of millions of users signed up to use it initially. Yet, those people did sign up and they did learn it. Because they wanted to. Because everyone was talking about it. In this sense, it’s not about being more like Facebook or Snapchat or anything else, it’s about being more like Twitter, in using the platform’s strengths to advantage and building on Twitter’s capacity to learn based on what people tweet.

Facebook’s taught users, via their News Feed, to expect more control over their experience, to expect personalization and customization based on their, individual interests. If Twitter fails to do the same, they’ll continue to lose ground, particularly as Facebook’s system gets smarter and more attuned to each users’ preferences, every day.

And while you’d expect that the current opt-in algorithm-fuelled timeline will, eventually, become the default, there may be other options that allow engagement to grow more organically.

Twitter doesn’t have to be something else, and it doesn’t necessarily have to settle for smaller numbers or worse market performance as a result of being what it is. But it does need to embrace its defining traits and strengths, and use them to deliver a more personalized user-experience, which, increasingly, is what people are growing to expect.

But it’s easy to say from the outside looking in. Whether Twitter’s actually able to achieve this, weighed down with the burden of market expectation and the pressure of flailing numbers, is another question entirely. I don’t envy Jack and Co in this respect, but I do hope the platform is able to find a way.

Written by Andrew Hutchinson. To read the full article, please click here. MyDigiBrand is a boutique website development and digital marketing firm in San Diego, California. We help our clients create powerful and engaging online brands. For more information, please visit our website at www.mydigibrand.com.

By using social media, we make ourselves active and constant participants in a parallel economy that has permeated into virtually every aspect of our lives. The social economy is driven by its own markers of social currency, like recognition, status and attention from others, but its main commodity is content.

Exchanging content, therefore, is the way to attain social currency, andthat means that we should constantly be interacting with one another’s content.

For small and large businesses alike, playing in the social economy is not always easy, however. Large companies often try to shortcut their way through the social economy, in essence trying to convert their actual currency into social currency. However, the content they share is not always genuine, and as a result it often doesn’t work as well as they had hoped.

Therefore, actual currency is less important than we may have believed: Young companies actually have the opportunity to enter the social economy and amass social currency without the need for millions of dollars of budget. For businesses of all sizes, what we’re talking about here — organic content — is still the best way to get ahead in the content-drive social economy.

This means that small business owners have an advantage over big brands: They can make closer connections with online audiences and build influence through content and thought leadership.

Thought leadership is the most organic form of social-media marketing, because it requires sharing only what you know. It all starts with content — blogs, videos, images, editorial content, for example — through which you provide valuable information. Indeed, quality content can become a crucial part of your online presence, enabling you to establish yourself as an expert on a particular topic.

Maybe you’re a tax lawyer, for instance; you answer common questions regarding tax preparation. Maybe you’re a makeup artist; you create tutorials on YouTube. Perhaps you’re a naturopathic physician; you write articles about natural healing remedies. Whatever your niche, sharing content on social media gives you a direct connection to online audiences and potential prospects.

This is the same place where digital creatives start to build their influence on social media. And while some of these digital creatives will always be willing to use their influence to build awareness for brands, small business owners are different: They can use whatever influence they develop to support their own businesses.

Content becomes a way for owners to reach their target audiences directly, to build credibility and to develop an authentic relationship.

Through this relationship-building, you as an owner may find that followers learn to trust your expertise and may even become prospects if you offer a product or service they need. What’s more, your followers may recommend you to a friend, expanding your influence even more.

Gretchen Rubin, a former lawyer-turned-best-selling author, was curious about the nature of happiness. She started exploring her own theories on the subject and kept a digital journal. Her first book, The Happiness Project, was published in 2009 and became an instant best seller; she was named one of 2015’s most influential people in health and fitness by Greatlist.

Rubin had started out merely sharing something she was passionate and curious about. You could do the same. Here are some things to keep in mind when you start developing your social media influence for your own brand and small business:

1. Start with what you know.

Whether it’s highly specialized knowledge or a passionate curiosity, building influence for small business owners is all about establishing yourself as the expert on a topic.

2. Be consistent and focus on quality over quantity.

Don’t worry about cranking out tons of content, especially in the beginning. Pick one channel or content type; then be consistent. Your output will increase over time, but you can’t build an audience without quality content.

3. Pay attention to the demand.

Pay attention to what people do and don’t engage with. This is usually an indication of what your audience is most interested in. Feed this interest and grow your following even more.

By being true to your personal brand, and focusing on the content you produce, you are in effect becoming your own influencer and generating your own social currency. By meeting users’ demand for content, you will be able to grow your brand within your own vertical and make a splash within that “parallel economy.”

Written by Eric Dahan. To read the full article, please click here. MyDigiBrand is a boutique website development and digital marketing firm in San Diego, California. We help our clients create powerful and engaging online brands. For more information, please visit our website at www.mydigibrand.com.

When my digital media students are sitting, waiting for class to start and staring at their phones, they are not checking Facebook. They’re not checking Instagram, or Pinterest or Twitter. No, they’re catching up on the news of the day by checking out their friends’ Stories on Snapchat, chatting in Facebook Messenger or checking in with their friends in a group text. If the time drags, they might switch to Instagram to see what the brands they love are posting, or check in with Twitter for a laugh at some celebrity tweets. But, they tell me, most of the time they eschew the public square of social media for more intimate options.

The times, they are a-changing

For a few years now, alarms have been sounded in various quarters about Facebook’s teen problem. In 2013, one author explored why teens are tiring of Facebook, and according to Time, more than 11 million young people have fled Facebook since 2011. But many of these articles theorized that teens were moving instead to Instagram (a Facebook-owned property) and other social media platforms. In other words, teen flight was a Facebook problem, not a social media problem.

Today, however, the newest data increasingly support the idea that young people are actually transitioning out of using what we might term broadcast social media – like Facebook and Twitter – and switching instead to using narrowcast tools – like Messenger or Snapchat. Instead of posting generic and sanitized updates for all to see, they are sharing their transient goofy selfies and blow-by-blow descriptions of class with only their closest friends.

For example, in a study published in August last year, the Pew Research Center reported that 49 percent of smartphone owners between 18 and 29 use messaging apps like Kik, Whatsapp or iMessage, and 41 percent use apps that automatically delete sent messages, like Snapchat. For context, note that according to another Pew study, only 37 percent of people in that age range use Pinterest, only 22 percent use LinkedIn and only 32 percent use Twitter. Messaging clearly trumps these more publicly accessible forms of social media.

Admittedly, 82 percent of people aged 18 to 29 said that they do use Facebook. However, that 82 percent affirmatively answered the question, “Do you ever use the Internet or a mobile app to use Facebook?” (emphasis added). Having a Facebook account and actuallyusing Facebook are two different things. While Pew does have data on how frequently people report using Facebook (70 percent said at least once a day), those data are not broken down by age. And anecdotal evidence such as what I’ve gathered from class discussions and assignments suggests that many younger people are logging in to Facebook simply to see what others are posting, rather than creating content of their own. Their photos, updates, likes and dislikes are increasingly shared only in closed gardens like group chat and Snapchat.

Why would they leave?

Although there is not a great deal of published research on the phenomenon, there seem to be several reasons why younger people are opting for messaging over social media. Based on my discussions with around 80 American college students, there appear to be three reasons for choosing something like Snapchat over Facebook.

Granny did not need to see what you got up to last weekend. Woman image via www.shutterstock.com.

My gran likes my profile picture As Facebook has wormed its way into our lives, its demographics have shifted dramatically. According to Pew, 48 percent of Internet users over the age of 65 use Facebook. As social media usage has spread beyond the young, social media have become less attractive to young people. Few college students want their parents to see their Friday night photos.

Permanence and ephemerality Many of the students I’ve spoken with avoid posting on sites like Facebook because, to quote one student, “Those pics are there forever!” Having grown up with these platforms, college students are well aware that nothing posted on Facebook is ever truly forgotten, and they are increasingly wary of the implications. Teens engage in complex management of their self-presentation in online spaces; for many college students, platforms like Snapchat, that promise ephemerality, are a welcome break from the need to police their online image.

The professional and the personal Increasingly, young people are being warned that future employers, college admissions departments and even banks will use their social media profiles to form assessments. In response, many of them seem to be using social media more strategically. For example, a number of my students create multiple profiles on sites like Twitter, under various names. They carefully curate the content they post on their public profiles on Facebook or LinkedIn, and save their real, private selves for other platforms.

Is this a problem?

We may be seeing the next evolution in digital media. Just as young people were the first to migrate on to platforms like Facebook and Twitter, they may now be the first to leave and move on to something new.

Young adults still are the most likely to use social media. Pew Research Center

This exodus of young people from publicly accessible social media to messaging that is restricted to smaller groups has a number of implications, both for the big businesses behind social media and for the public sphere more generally.

From a corporate perspective, the shift is potentially troubling. If young people are becoming less likely to provide personal details about themselves to online sites, the digital advertising machine that runs on such data (described in detail by Joe Turow in his book “The Daily You”) may face some major headwinds.

For example, if young people are no longer “liking” things on Facebook, the platform’s long-term value to advertisers may erode. Currently, Facebook uses data it gathers about users’ “likes” and “shares” to target advertising at particular individuals. So, hypothetically, if you “like” an animal rescue, you may see advertisements for PetSmart on Facebook. This type of precision targeting has made Facebook into a formidable advertising platform; in 2015, the company earned almost US$18 billion, virtually all of it from advertising. If young people stop feeding the Facebook algorithm by clicking “like,” this revenue could be in jeopardy.

From the perspective of parents and older social media users, this shift can also seem troubling. Parents who may be accustomed to monitoring at least some proportion of their children’s online lives may find themselves increasingly shut out. On the other hand, for the growing number of adults who use these platforms to stay in touch with their own peer networks, exchange news and information, and network, this change may go virtually unnoticed. And, indeed, for the many older people who have never understood the attraction of airing one’s laundry on social media, the shift may even seem like a positive maturation among younger users.

From a social or academic perspective, the shift is both encouraging, in that it is supportive of calls for more reticence online, and also troubling.

As more and more political activity migrates online, and social media play a role in a number of important social movement activities, the exodus of the young could mean that they become less exposed to important social justice issues and political ideas. If college students spend most of their media time on group text and Snapchat, there is less opportunity for new ideas to enter their social networks. Emerging research is documenting the ways in which our use of social media for news monitoring can lead us to consume only narrow, partisan news. If young people opt to use open messaging services even less, they may further reduce their exposure to news and ideas that challenge their current beliefs.

The great promise of social media was that they would create a powerful and open public sphere, in which ideas could spread and networks of political action could form. If it is true that the young are turning aside from these platforms, and spending most of their time with messaging apps that connect only those who are already connected, the political promise of social media may never be realized.

Written by Felicity Duncan. To read the full article, please click here. MyDigiBrand is a boutique website development and digital marketing firm in San Diego, California. We help our clients create powerful and engaging online brands. For more information, please visit our website at www.mydigibrand.com.

Platforms come and go, sure. But one thing that’s stayed in use since the early Internet days is email. Email is here to stay and its continued relevance has allowed many businesses to use it for marketing purposes. The question is, however, does email marketing actually work?

How many sites have you visited recently that have asked for your email address? A lot, I’m sure. Virtually every business website you go to online gives you the opportunity to share your email address. They’re building what they call their “list.” Whether it’s a site about technology, news, entertainment, shopping, hobbies, or social networks, they all want your email address. Why? Because they know that having your email address is a great way to contact you with offers. And potentially turn you into one of their customers.

Everyone has an email address and most people check it several times per day. And with so many people having smartphones, you have access to it 24/7. With push notifications, you can know immediately when you’ve received a new email. It’s a service that’s solid. Tried and true, and here to stay. This makes it an excellent platform for marketing.

General Statistics About Email Marketing

There has been a lot of research done on the value of email marketing. So before we dive into the “how” of the subject, let’s spend some time going over the more interesting statistics about marketing with email.

According to McKinsey & Company, email is almost 40 times better at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter, and conversion rates are three times higher.

According to Direct Marketing Association, email marketing yields an average ROI of 4,300% for U.S. businesses.

ExactTarget shows that for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average ROI is $44.25.

Hubspot explains that companies that use email to capture leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost, and produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities.

According to MailChimp, emails they send for businesses have an average 22.28% open rate.

Phrases like 40 times better, 4,300% ROI, 50% more leads, 33% lower cost etc. is nothing to sneeze at. This is enough to demonstrate that email marketing works and that it should be a part of every company’s marketing efforts.

“Marketers consistently ranked email as the single most effective tool for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention.” – Gigaom Research

This goes to show that email should be very high on your list of platforms for your marketing plan. By opting in to your email list, your readers are opening the door for you to contact them with information, offers, and more.

This shows that email is a great choice for marketing because it’s inexpensive to create and send, targeted to your audience, effective because you can include virtually any offer, and used by over half of the world’s population.

Stats for email marketing on mobile devices are pretty convincing, too.

Statistics for Mobile Devices

As if that weren’t enough numbers for you, the stats also show that the majority of users receive and interact with emails from mobile devices.

And with Google’s latest algorithm change, you had better believe that’s relevant.

Yesmail Interactive shows that mobile devices account for 22% of email-generated revenue and 45% of all email clicks in the first quarter of 2015.

ExactTarget shows that 91% of consumers check their email at least once per day on their smartphones. This makes mobile devices the most used for checking email.

According to MovableInk, 38% more email was opened on iPhones than all desktops combined In Q1 2014.

EmailExpert says that 64% of decision makers read emails from a mobile device.

All of this means your readers will almost always have access to their email.

Advantages of Email Marketing

Here are a few reasons that email marketing works.

Email is targeted. You know your audience is interested in what you’re sending them because they signed up for it themselves. They’ve asked you to contact them with offers, advice, and news. They’re already on board and ready to see what you have to offer them or what you have to say or share. They’re pre-sold on your topic. This makes them more likely to open and read your emails, click on your links, and share them with others. This also makes them easier to talk to because it’s not a cold-call. They’re expecting to hear from you.

You build a following. Since readers have to go through steps to sign up for your email marketing efforts, you know they have an interest what you have to say. You can use this to your advantage by keeping in contact with them and encouraging them to share your information with others. This builds your brand and your reach. It also reminds them to come back to your site.

Email is private. You can read an email in private without having all of your connections knowing you’re online. You can read through something without an interruption.

Email is personal. Your email is handed directly to your reader. They don’t have to come to you. They don’t have to think about it. You’re not relying on them to remember to come back to your site to check for your latest content or offer. They only have to open it. They don’t have to go to another site or click on a link before it gets lost in the fast stream of information on their screens. They can find it again the next day, next week, or next year, even.

What About Social Media?

Social media is just one part of a good marketing campaign.

Social media is a good choice for marketing too, but it doesn’t take the place of email marketing. There are many social networks and you can’t possibly be on them all. Knowing which networks to focus on can take a lot of effort and the information might change. How do you know where your audience is?

Social networks come and go. They’re not constant nor consistent. Do you still use MySpace? What do you use today? What will you use tomorrow? Facebook and Twitter are popular today, but will they be popular a year from now? Plus, social networks limit what you can do. Facebook uses EdgeRank which limits how far your updates will reach. Twitter’s updates can be so busy that your message gets lost in the stream. Ultimately, the social networks themselves have control over your marketing efforts.

It is true that many, if not most, people online spend time on at least one of many social networks, but they all come back to their email inboxes. Email is the only true constant. Yes, inboxes can contain their own static and emails can get buried within the haystack, but you can also stand out from the crowd and readers usually look at each email to see if it’s important. Social streams can pass without being noticed and finding something can be a headache. Have you ever searched a social network for a message you remember seeing, then only after a while of searching you’re not even sure which network you saw it on?

Social media is important for marketing, but it doesn’t take the place of email. The two are very different types of platforms and when a reader is done with a social network, he’ll come back to his inbox. Email is the constant. I mean, how often do you even change your email address?

…The Key is How You Use it

There’s no doubt that email marketing can make a huge impact on your business. The trick is knowing how and when to use it.

Here’s a look at the process of email marketing and some tips to make email marketing work for you.

The Process of Email Marketing

There are several things that have to happen in order for email marketing to work:

Readers have to sign up

Readers have to open the email

Readers have to perform the desired response within the email

Without any one of these our email efforts are moot. Ideally there would be a fourth:

Readers would spread the news

We want to turn our readers into our spokesmen. We want them to share our brands with their followers and friends. We want their readers to become our readers.

Getting Readers to Subscribe

Before you can send your newsletter you first have to get your readers to subscribe. The best way to do this is by giving them something for free.

Free ebook with tips – PDF works best

Free access to a How To video

Free templates or tools

List of resources

Then insert your sign-up form. It should be well-placed and easy to use. At the top of your site’s sidebar, in the header, and/or beneath your posts (even in the middle of them) are good positioning options.

There is a formula to crafting the perfect email headline.

Creating Titles That Get Read

Sending an email is a lot like fishing. You can cast and cast, but unless the bait and techniques you’re using are enough to capture the fishy’s attention then you’re just one of many choices. Maybe even many dozens of choices.

What can you do about it? It comes down to the subject line of your email.

Which of these have you opened lately?

3 Day Sale

Buy today

Please read

Last chance

7 things you should never do in the shower – and I’ve done number 6!

She lifted the rock but didn’t expect THIS to happen!

Online Gam’r Weekly Newsletter

The first four are so generic that we don’t even notice them. But the fifth one … that’s got me curious. And the sixth one… I want to know what happened! Was it dangerous? Was she hurt? I want to know! I want to open the email and read it. And I’m opening the last one because I’ve been waiting for it. I always open those.

We humans are a curious lot. We want to know about things we find interesting and when something piques our interest it’s hard to walk away without knowing what it’s about. Titles like these shout “open me!” you can create titles like this with just a few techniques.

The topic of headlines can take up this entire article but here are a few principles you can use to create titles that will ensure readers open your emails.

Including the right keywords can increase email opens substantially.

Tips for Creating Great Headlines

Here are a few principles that you can use to build catchy headlines. I’ve given a few generic examples.

You can fill in the blanks any way you want and make these work. There are many more ways you can put these together.

Scare your readers using threats and warnings – (7 Warning Signs __, 5 Lies You’ve Been Told About __)

Mention mistakes – (7 mistakes you’re making __, Don’t do these 9 things when __)

Pique their curiosity – (9 Pickup Lines to use Tonight and You Won’t Believe #3!)

Promise peace of mind – (5 habits that will get you out of debt fast, Relieve stress today with this easy trick)

How to – (How to __ when you’re __, How to __ even if __, How to __ without __)

Piggybacking famous brands and people – (How Brad Pitt Saved 40% on __, Tom Cruise’ 7 Tips for __, Anna Kournikova’s Top 10 Secrets for __)

Lists – (10 Resources to Save __ Without __, 7 Surprising Ways to __, 5 Steps to Get __)

Tell what’s inside – (‘Company Name’ Newsletter – note, this is the most effective for business according to MailChimp)

You’ve seen all of these headlines before. There’s absolutely nothing new here. Why? Because they work. They continue to work year after year. They work on our emotions, they give us promises that we desire, they pique our interest, they promise juicy news, and they help us solve a problem.

Just don’t be salesy, pushy, sleazy, or slimy. Don’t overdo it. Don’t annoy your readers. Some work better for certain audiences and purposes, so you might have to experiment to see what works best for you. A headline only works if it gets read. If it looks like spam it will be trashed. Grab their attention and then give them a hint of what’s inside.

“The most effective headlines are those that describe the subject of your email.” – MailChimp

Plugins and Services

There are many email plugins and services that work with well WordPress. Email marketing campaigns don’t have to be time consuming. You can use tools within your WordPress site to help save you time.

Here is a short list of what is available. I’ve combined them here because some providers combine the two.

e-Newsletter

DETAILS

This one from our plugin lineup does not require a third party email service. You can use the built in templates or build your own. You can also embed subscription forms using a shortcode or use the widget, and then send the newsletter and track the results all from within WordPress.

You have full control over subscribers and you can even have multiple groups of subscribers and it will personalize the emails for you. Other features include the ability to clone older emails (which helps save you time in creating new emails), auto-responders, and you can view statistics such as receipts, opens, and bounces for every subscriber.

You can get e-Newsletter for $19 per month by itself or $24.50 with a membership.

MailPoet Newsletters

DETAILS

MailPoet Newsletters lets you create newsletters, send automated emails, and post notifications. It includes autoresponders. It has a signup widget to capture emails. You can easily drop your posts, images, and social icons directly into your newsletter and change fonts and colors as you go. All the work is done in WordPress. It does not require a third party email service.

There’s a Premium version if you need more than 2000 subscribers.

MailChimp

DETAILS

MailChimp is an email service that lets you create newsletters, manage subscribers, and provides analytics. It has a large list of templates and tools to design the email, and you can build your own templates if you want. The email list and campaigns are managed, built, and sent from MailChimp’s website. You can connect it to your WordPress website using a plugin to capture emails in a form.

Up to 2000 subscribers is free. After that you can add subscribers starting at $10 per month.

MailChimp for WordPress

DETAILS

This free plugin lets you create a customizable sign-up forms that you can place anywhere you want on your site with a template, widget, or shortcode. You can even add sign-up checkboxes to other forms such as your comments or contact forms.

The free edition has one form. There’s a Pro edition for $49 that has unlimited forms.

SumoMe

DETAILS

This free plugin provides a suite of tools to help you build your email list, provides social sharing buttons so your readers can share your content, and provides analytics to help you optimize your content.

It comes with a List Builder, which is a lightbox form that’s compatible with MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse, and other services; Share, which re social sharing buttons; Image Sharer, which adds image sharing buttons for the popular social networks; Heat Maps, which lets you see what areas of your site are “hot” or getting the most clicks; and Highlighter, which lets readers tweet about your content by selecting specific sentences from your articles.

Some Last Minute General Tips for Email Marketing

Include sharing buttons in the email. Give them a reason and a way to share your content.

Make sure the email opens correctly. You only get one chance at this. If it doesn’t open on the first try they’ll likely trash it.

Use an interesting headline. It doesn’t have to be overly catchy. It just needs to give them a reason to open it.

Focus on mobile. Your emails should be targeted to their mobile devices. The design should be responsive. Take the smaller screens into account when you send out images, use fonts that are easy to read, and test your templates on your own mobile device before sending out your first newsletter.

Use personalized promotional mailings.

Automate your email marketing. Use tools to help you as much as possible.

Build nice forms and strategically place them on your site for the best performance. Every site is different so it might require some experimenting.

Entice readers to join by giving them something free.

Send emails that are value added and have a purpose.

Keep a consistent schedule. This will train your readers to look for your newsletters and they’ll be even more likely to open them because they’re expecting them.

Wrapping Up

Email marketing is still very much alive and working better than ever in today’s often overcrowded online world.

It has an amazing ROI and there are many strategies to help you make the best email campaign possible. Most marketers’ only regret is not starting to build an email list sooner!

Have you tried email marketing? What strategies work for you? Has your experience been different from what I’ve described here?

Written by Brenda Barron. To read the full article, please click here. MyDigiBrand is a boutique website development and digital marketing firm in San Diego, California. We help our clients create powerful and engaging online brands. For more information, please visit our website at www.mydigibrand.com.

No matter the path you decide to follow in business, you’re always at risk of running into some road blocks, legal troubles, PR crises, and a thousand other negative consequences. Most businesses are well aware of this and understand that the risk-reward scenario insists they must move through the minefield in order to achieve success. However, with social media still a relatively new thing for most brands, these risks aren’t yet understood quite as well.

What are the inherent risks of using social media to promote the growth of your bottom line and of your brand in general? Some may consider negative feedback or a technical malfunction to be the brunt of the potentially bad news here, but it can actually get a lot worse.

Whether or not you hire a social media marketing consultant to assist you in operating your campaign, the fact is that you can find out about most of the hazards with some simple research. Start by focusing on these factors below if you want to understand some of the risks associated with social media advertising.

Inherent Risks of Running a Social Media Marketing Campaign 

A Public Relations Crisis

What exactly is a public relations crisis? Well, a PR crisis can wear many different masks. There is no one particular thing that stands out above another. The real issue here is the speed at which a simple PR faux pas can transform into a brand-crippling viral crisis. For example, if you’re caught using false information about a product, you might expect some negative feedback. But when dealing with social media, this can go viral and spiral out of control. Your dishonesty can be a trending topic on a variety of social sites. Just replace that situation with any one of an endless number, and you’ll realize just how risky it can be.

A Security Breach

Do you think that hackers have decided to leave social media alone? They’re browsing social media sites in large numbers, and it’s not always about your company information or your finances. Some basement-dwelling hackers just want to get into your accounts in order to wreak havoc. They think it’s fun to spam your fans and to screw with your profile page. People can get your information if you’re publicly displaying your email, clicking on links, keeping the same password, etc. Be mindful of your security to help minimize a potential breach.

Offending Your Audience

Some of the risks associated with social media marketing are just risks you have to take. You can handle the social media management after the fact with some of the situations, such as offending your audience. Unfortunately, we live in a hyper-sensitive world, where many people truly believe it is their inherent right to not be offended. These individuals actually seek to be offended just for the claim. And, of course, even if that isn’t the case, you may end up inadvertently releasing material that offends some. It’s just another form of a PR crisis that you’ll have to stay out in front of if you want to keep it under control.

Sticky-Fingered Competition

When operating online, you’re always at risk of your competition stealing from you. There are different “levels” here, for lack of a better word. For instance, another similar brand may simply find some inspiration in what you’re doing, emulating the tactics. That’s fine; that should even be encouraged for you to do. But others will run the exact same promotions, post the same material with their name inserted, and mirror your activities. It’s rare, but it’s still a risk you have to be aware of.

Legal Implications

Focusing on staying within the boundaries of the law is now more important than ever. What you do on social media will be around permanently in some form or fashion, and an ad you released a year ago may be pulled up to be used as evidence in some type of litigation. This risk is handled by understanding the law and by operating a clean campaign. But you have to realize that the risk is there.

The more risks you’re aware of in social media, the better equipped you will be at handling them. The risks mentioned above only cover a small number of the many potential issues you could face. However, understanding the main categories will give you the proper frame of reference for dealing with most of the inherent risks.

Written by Craig Robinson. To read the full article, please click here. MyDigiBrand is a boutique website development and digital marketing firm in San Diego, California. We help our clients create powerful and engaging online brands. For more information, please visit our website at www.mydigibrand.com.

Looking to launch your career in social media, or want to keep up on the best marketing practices for your own company? We know the best way to get inspiration is to head straight to the source, so we’ve pulled together a list of 12 smart, savvy social media women you should be following on Twitter.

Take a look, then tell us! Who are the social media gurus you follow?

1. Kim Garst @kimgarst

The founder and CEO of Social Media Branding, a branding and social media business consulting firm, Kim is passionate not only about helping others build a social media presence, but also sharing how you can do it yourself.

Follow @kimgarst

2. Amy Porterfield @AmyPorterfield

This social media strategist specializes in Facebook: Check out her book, Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies, and tune in for non-stop tweets with great articles and resources in the social media world.

Follow @AmyPorterfield

3. Christine Perkett @missusP

PR and social media go hand in hand, and if you’re looking for a career in either, Christine Perkett is a must-follow. Recognized as one of the industry leaders, it’s rare to see a social media conversation happening on Twitter that she’s not part of.

Follow @missusP

4. Ann Handley @MarketingProfs

Named #2 on Forbes’ Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers, Ann is widely considered one of the world’s leaders in social media. (She’s also the Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs, a site anyone in the marketing world should bookmark, stat.)

Follow @MarketingProfs

5. Liz Strauss @lizstrauss

Named to HuffPost’s Top 10 Influencers Alive list and Forbes’ list of Top 10 Women Social Media Influencers, Liz Strauss has been called “one of the most thoughtful, prolific bloggers on the planet.” Follow for seriously brilliant insights.

Follow @lizstrauss

6. Renee Blodgett @MagicSauceMedia

Renee Blodgett runs Magic Sauce Media, a brand strategy company “where innovation meets social media, PR, and branding.” If you’re looking to launch your career in the marketing world, make her your role model.

Follow @MagicSauceMedia

7. Eve Mayer Orsburn @LinkedInQueen

Love LinkedIn, or want to learn more about making it work for you? Klout ranks Eve Mayer Orsburn as the 2nd Most Influential Person on LinkedIn (behind only LinkedIn itself!). Check in for tweets on everything you’ve ever wanted to know about LinkedIn and beyond.

Follow @LinkedInQueen

8. Mari Smith @MariSmith

Speaker, author, and social media strategist Mari Smith focuses on helping small businesses understand the art and science of social media. If you’re looking to ramp up your company’s social media efforts, check her out.

Follow @MariSmith

9. Sharon Feder @Sharonfeder

Sharon Feder is the inspiring COO of Mashable (and yes, you should be following@Mashable, too). Starting at Mashable in 2008 as an editorial assistant, she’s been a huge part of the company’s explosive growth, and knows more about what’s going on in social media than just about anyone.

Follow @Sharonfeder

10. Kristie Wells @kristiewells

The brand strategist and founder of Social Media Club, a non-profit that promotes media literacy, industry standards, and ethical behavior. A fun follow for social media news, plus you’ll feel like you’ve made a new friend.

Follow @kristiewells

11. Claire Diaz-Ortiz @claire

Who better to follow than one of Twitter’s own? Claire Diaz-Ortiz heads up Twitter’s philanthropic, social good, and cause marketing initiatives. Follow for a peek inside Twitter or if you’re interested in social innovation.

Follow @Claire

12. Susan Cooper @BuzzEdition

A social media strategist specializing in the entertainment industry, Susan is an amazing resource for social media news and tips, plus a great way to sneak in your entertainment news.

Written by The Daily Muse Editor. To read the full article, please click here. MyDigiBrand is a boutique website development and digital marketing firm in San Diego, California. We help our clients create powerful and engaging online brands. For more information, please visit our website at www.mydigibrand.com.

First, let’s get one thing straight.

Yоu dоn’t nееd tо bе а grарhіс dеsіgnеr tо сrеаtе grеаt іmаgеs fоr sосіаl mеdіа. Еvеn іf уоu dоn’t hаvе а сrеаtіvе bоnе іn уоur bоdу уоu саn mаkе grеаt іmаgеs, аnd уоu саn dо іt аll іn а frасtіоn оf thе tіmе thаt аn ехреrt mіght tаkе. Тhе sесrеt lіеs іn thе tооls уоu usе. Grарhіс dеsіgnеrs stаrt frоm sсrаtсh usіng ехреnsіvе tооls thаt tаkе уеаrs tо mаstеr.

Ѕmаrt smаll busіnеss mаrkеtіng mаvеns usе frее аnd іnехреnsіvе tооls tо сrеаtе rеsults thаt оnlу lооk lіkе thеу tооk ехреrtіsе tо сrеаtе. І’vе рісkеd four оf thе bеst tооls fоr уоur sосіаl mеdіа tооlkіt sо thаt уоu саn sреnd lеss tіmе mаkіng bеttеr іmаgеs.

Before we get to the tools, here are a couple cool stats you should know, first published by my brilliant friends over at Buffer:

Blog posts with images receive 94% more views than those without images

Having at least one image in a post leads to more than double the shares on Facebook and Twitter

Using an image on Twitter increases retweets by 28% and favorites by 36%

With that, here are 4 Тооls fоr Маkіng Awesome Ѕосіаl Меdіа Іmаgеs: 1. Саnvа.com Тор оf mу lіst іs Саnvа.соm, а slісk оnlіnе dеsіgn sіtе with the best templates on the web. Fоundеd bу а bunсh оf Аussіеs, Саnvа’s dеsіgns еnсоmраss thе еntіrе rаngе оf sосіаl mеdіа nееds іnсludіng blоgs, Fасеbооk соvеrs аnd еvеrуthіng іn bеtwееn. Саnvа рrоvіdеs thе dеsіgn sрасе, аll thе іmаgеs аnd grеаt-lооkіng tехt еlеmеnts fоr уоu tо соmbіnе. Yоu саn аlsо uрlоаd уоur оwn іmаgеs.

Саnvа іs rіdісulоuslу еаsу tо usе аnd thе rеsults lооk ехсіtіnglу frеsh аnd сlеаn. Тhе sіtе оffеrs mоst оf іts gеnеrіс соntеnt fоr frее, аnd аddіtіоnаl рrеmіum іtеms соst оnе dоllаr еасh. Моst реорlе wіll gеt gооd vаluе bу соmbіnіng frее соntеnt wіth аn оссаsіоnаl рrеmіum еlеmеnt whеn nееdеd. Саnvа оutрuts dеsіgns аs РΝG іmаgеs оr РDFs, аnd уоu саn аlsо соllаbоrаtе wіth оthеrs bу shаrіng thе рrојесt lіnk.

Here is a quick video intro to Canva.com:

And here is my post and links to my Podcast episode with Canva.com Sr. Designer Poppie Pack (love that name) – CLICK HERE

2. BeFunky.com

Befunky’s mission is to provide tools that are easy enough anyone can create beautiful photographs and professional-quality graphic design without any special skills or technical expertise.

They are a cool company with a slick interface that has a great mobile presence so you can take your creating on the road.

They recently did an overhaul to the interface to make it even simpler.  Instead of me telling you, they show you here:

3. РісМоnkеу Ѕоmеtіmеs іnstеаd оf оnе іmаgе, уоu’ll wаnt а соllаgе оf іmаgеs. РісМоnkеу оffеrs аn еаsу wау tо сrеаtе а соllаgе fоr уоur sосіаl mеdіа nееds. Аt РісМоnkеу, сlісk Соllаgе аnd thеn uрlоаd thе іmаgеs уоu wаnt tо usе, оr іmроrt thеm frоm Flісkr оr Drорbох. Сlісk thе Lауоuts орtіоn аnd sеlесt а соllаgе lауоut suсh аs а Fасеbооk соvеr. Yоu саn nоw drаg-аnd-drор уоur іmаgеs іntо thе lауоut оn thе sсrееn.

Yоu саn аdјust ехроsurе, rеsіzе іmаgеs аnd аdd а bасkgrоund соlоr tо thе lауоut. Whеn уоu аrе dоnе, dоwnlоаd thе іmаgе tо уоur соmрutеr оr sаvе іt tо Drорbох. Тhе bаsіс tооls іn РісМоnkеу аrе frее, аnd уоu саn uрgrаdе tо а wіdеr rаngе оf fеаturеs frоm $2.75 реr mоnth.

Here is a video tutorial about PicMonkey:

4. Pablo by Buffer

Pablo is probably the simplest and easiest of the bunch.  No sign-in required, Pablo just cuts right to the chase and get your designing.  Choose from 3 easy templates, connect an image from Unsplash, my site of choice for amazing royalty-free images, and you are off.

Simply put, love it and love Buffer.

Here is a quick video introduction to Pablo:

I hope you enjoy these amazing tools as much as I do.

Make it a great week!

Written by Drew Bedard. To read the full article, please click here. MyDigiBrand is a boutique website development and digital marketing firm in San Diego, California. We help our clients create powerful and engaging online brands. For more information, please visit our website at www.mydigibrand.com.

Do you want double your social engagement and get your content shared like crazy?

For small businesses and brands everywhere, posting multiple images on social media has been proven to have massive traction

It seems simple right? But if it was so easy wouldn’t everybody do it?

Like most good things, in life – there’s a catch. And it isn’t not needing a huge budget or incredible graphic design skills.

When it comes to content creation, many people make this simple mistake: they add more visuals just for the sake of it. This is a basic approach. Smart content marketers create visual content that reach people’s emotions – content with real psychological impact.

If you’re not a graphic designer or artist, don’t freak out. I’m going to walk you through you ten types of powerful visuals that are easy to create and can double your social media engagement. Let’s get started.

1. High quality stock photography

Beware: your fans will smell a cheesy stock photo from a million miles away. Not only will it lead them to discredit your professionalism as a brand, but will deter them from wanting to share your post.

On the other hand, high quality stock photography can do the complete opposite. As well as making your brand seem more credible, high quality and relevant images help establish your brand’s reputation and boost engagement. If you’re looking for original content, check out this handy article that lists and rates over 70 free stock photography websites.

image: http://www.jeffbullas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/types-of-visual-social-media-posts-1.jpg

Image: Elite Daily

Take a look at this post on Elite Daily’s Facebook page. By using relevant and high quality stock photography, the band achieves a “wow factor” which immediately tempts the viewer to click through to the blog.

After all, everything your audience shares on social media will reflect back on themselves. You can’t blame them for wanting to look good, but you can choose the right images to make it possible.

2. Screenshots

You’ve probably heard the old adage “seeing is believing”. In terms of visual content, the psychological lesson here is that when people can see something for themselves, they’re more likely to trust the source – which develops its credibility.

image: http://www.jeffbullas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/types-of-visual-social-media-posts-2.jpg

Image: Buffer

In this Twitter post Buffer gauge interest around one of its growth experiments by showing two screenshots of an A/B tested email. By doing so, Buffer are able to immediately impress the viewer which intrigues them to read on.

The text used to accompany the post is short yet effective: providing a hook for the article but letting the image become the compelling factor.

3. Infographics

The most basic way to understand why visual content is so effective on social media is to consider that the brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text. When we’re scrolling through hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of posts, tweets and updates – images are simply easier to digest.

Infographics take this concept to the next level, allowing brands to capture complex pieces of information and turn them into engaging social media posts.

Notice how Charity World Vision have created a Pinterest board dedicated solely to its infographics. By doing so, they’re able to share large chunks of information in a single visual post.

image: http://www.jeffbullas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/types-of-visual-social-media-posts-3.jpg

Image: World Vision

By following design guidelines to ensure your infographics are easily readable and visually engaging, this is a great opportunity to increase impact beyond what a single image could achieve.

4. Personal photographs

The best way to connect with your audience on a deeply authentic level is to show them that you’re human, no matter how successful you are. If your business or brand doesn’t have a human face, people will find it hard to relate to.

To execute this personal element in your visual social posts, add snaps of your CEO or management staff. In this example taken from fashion retailer Nastygal’s Instagram, the brand’s CEO Sophia Amoruso is seen at a book signing of her recent book #GIRLBOSS.

Not only does this boost interest around the book, it builds the authenticity of the brand. Look at her: she’s a boss!

image: http://www.jeffbullas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/types-of-visual-social-media-posts-4.jpg

Image: Nastygal

5. Behind the scenes shots of your workplace

Another way to connect  people to the human aspect of your brand is to show behind the scenes shots of your workplace. This exclusive insight fosters a personal connection with your fans and strengthens their brand loyalty.

This particular type of imagery is more suitable for Instagram and Facebook, which are often considered the more “social” mediums. Designer Jen Gotch does this well on her instagram account by regularly featuring quirky shots of team activities.

image: http://www.jeffbullas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/types-of-visual-social-media-posts-5.jpg

Image: Jen Gotch

These images give the impression that the team are “real people” and even encourage fans to consider Jen as a friend.

6. Quote graphics

A throwback to those motivational posters in your school counselor’s office – a quote graphic is still very beloved, and highly sharable. In fact, quote graphics work on every social media platform, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

The three things to consider with a quote graphic are the quote, the font, and the imagery. Go for a short quote with words that are easily digestible. Consider a font that’s readable on smaller screens because a lot more people are viewing through mobile devices these days.

Be sure to find an image that captures the spirit of the quote without competing with it for attention. The image should serve as a meditation space for the mind to go while its considering the quote.

image: http://www.jeffbullas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/types-of-visual-social-media-posts-6.jpg

Written by Anna Guerrero. To read the full article, please click here. MyDigiBrand is a boutique website development and digital marketing firm in San Diego, California. We help our clients create powerful and engaging online brands. For more information, please visit our website at www.mydigibrand.com.

As one of the leading creative agencies in Manchester we are well aware that there has been a huge buzz around social media over the last few years, especially as a digital marketing tool for small businesses. Conventional wisdom would have us believe that every business should be using social media, with a presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as the bare minimum. But, should we be listening to conventional wisdom, or should we be assessing the specific benefits of social media for an individual business?

It is common for people to use sweeping statements when talking about the usage of social media for business; some say ‘it has to be done’ and others say ‘it is a complete waste of time.’ When you take a closer look, the results of using social media vary between businesses. As a social media company in Manchester, we know better than anyone that each business has its own individual market. We know that sometimes social media will not work for a specific market and that other times it will completely transform a market.

So, let us look at what the main benefits and pitfalls of social media marketing are and assess how you feel about them.

The Benefits of Social Media Marketing:

Direct Customer Communication: Social media allows you to get in touch with your customers (or qualified leads) directly – although you may have to pay out for sponsored ads to achieve this.

Real Time Interaction: Social media allows you to interact with your customers in real-time, using the chat feature or by replying to comments as they are made. It also allows you to make promotions live as soon as you upload them.

Potential to Go Viral: Sharing interesting and unique content on a social media platform will help to attract attention to your business and create some buzz around it. This means each piece of content you share has the potential to go viral.

The Pitfalls of Social Media Marketing:

Time Investment: Although social media marketing is hailed as a convenient way to get your message out to customers, as a company who offer digital marketing in Manchester we know that you need to invest a significant amount of time and energy to get results. This could be challenging for smaller businesses, as with a smaller amount of people, you run the risk of letting social media fall behind other more important tasks.

Digital Knowledge Required: Not every small business owner has the knowledge or skills required to get the most out of social media marketing. This may mean that they use other methods to reach their customers.

Lack of Interaction: If the person controlling your business’s social media handles does not completely understand how to gain and interact with followers to help to build a community of interested and loyal followers, you may not be promoting yourself to a large enough audience.

When we speak to companies who tell us that they have tried social media, but it hasn’t worked, it is usually due to one of these reasons:

The Company Doesn’t Lend Itself to Social Media – There are lots of examples of companies using social media in a creative and amazing way, which is leading them to success. This is great. However, frankly, some companies have a larger appeal on social media than others. For example, Cadburys have tonnes of content centred on the delicious chocolate they sell and who doesn’t like chocolate?! By contrast, a business that repairs water pumps for a certain type of factory doesn’t have quite the same universal appeal.

You Are Not Being Social on Social Media – If you are just using social media to sell to your customers then it is not going to work; people are likely to glaze over when they read your messaging. You need to put some time and effort into making your social media output fun, informative and interactive. Not everyone has the time for this – which is where using a social media specialist can be very helpful.

Although, it’s not all doom and gloom, we are massive fans of social media and believe that it can work for most businesses if they work closely with their digital marketing agency and take into account the following rules:

Define your audience first – there are millions of people using social media, which makes it easy to reach people, but how do you know you are reaching the right people? Think about who your ideal customer is, what social media platforms they use, and use this information to guide your strategy of how you are going to target them.

Set Realistic Goals – If you go into social media marketing believing you are going to be the next internet sensation, then you may be disappointed with the results. Set yourself more realistic goals, such as raising awareness of your brand, and this will enable you to set a particular strategy to achieve each goal.

Be Prepared to Experiment – Some things will work and some things won’t – it happens. Don’t let your lack of success on social media define your company. Learn from it, move on and try something else.

Written by Paul Heaton. To read the full article, click here.  MyDigiBrand is a boutique website development and digital marketing firm in San Diego, California. We help our clients create powerful and engaging online brands. For more information, please visit our website at www.mydigibrand.com.

Life has become complicated. In the past we only had one brand to create and maintain.

The “physical brand” that is constrained by time and space.

Its maintenance is constant and it is something we all do and some are better at it than others.  You rise from your sleep and perform activities that could include showering, preening and wrapping yourself with the latest fashion.

Check in the mirror and you’re done, you are ready for the world.

In today’s digital age we also have the online brand to maintain, nourish and polish to present to the world. This is not restricted to a geographical location but roams and communicates beyond the space, time continuum.

It is your virtual “digital brand”.

Digital Visibility

The challenge today is to become visible in a world of online noise, torrents of information and global web competition, whether you are a personal or business brand.

A Multi-channel cyber persona is now becoming mandatory. The brand digital persona needs to be spread across websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and that is just the start. The brand message needs to be consistent and constant on a variety of media. Visual channels are adding to the mix with Pintrest, Instagram and Fancy

It requires persistent and vigilant management as we check our emails, logon to our Facebook page and review Twitter updates. The blogger needs to check what blog posts are resonating, then review and approve the comments. Others will be checking how many hits have happened overnight to the YouTube channel. LinkedIn fans and users will want to know what connection invites are sitting in the inbox. If you are on Slideshare, you will be checking how many have downloaded or viewed your presentations.

Social media has pushed our lives further into the digital sphere as we check our friend requests on iPads and iPhones and often before leaving our beds.

The public and digital persona needs constant optimization to ensure that it has not been hijacked by spammers, scammers or trolls. It is an exercise in constant surveillance and management.

As they say “its complicated”.

The Rise of the Digital Assets

Business is now playing out online and thinking that your bricks and mortar presence is all that is needed is ignorance in a digital economy. If you are not found by search engines then you might as well be invisible. In some industries up to 90% of all buying decisions start with an online search. The holy grail is being ranked one on Google.

So what are the digital assets you need to create, market and manage?

Websites (including blogs and e-Commerce stores)

Social media channels and assets

Multi-media content assets

Mobile assets including apps and mobile sites

Digital databases including email subscribers

The value of building and continuing to invest and build these assets cannot be underestimated. Most online stores have more traffic than physical stores.

Digital Marketing

Once created the next challenge is moving your online brand from “invisible to visible” so that prospects and customers can find you, read and view your content and then buy your goods and services. Digital asset creation should not be “set and forget” as it was in the past.

Successful campaigns require multi-channel digital marketing strategies and tactics. These include:

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Paid digital advertising (this includes banner ads and Google Adwords)

Social media marketing

Email Marketing

To be truly successful requires three types of “multi“, multiple digital assets, multi-media and multiple marketing channels.

Marketing can no longer rely on just one channel or even two channels as your target audience has splintered and dispersed across a digital matrix.

Managing and Monitoring the Digital Brand

Multi-channel marketing requires the right tools and platforms to measure success and failure of campaigns.

The marketing manager and brand police will want  to know what is being said about the “Brand” to protect PR disasters from destroying a reputation in hours or even minutes as real time communication offers both opportunity and potential catastrophe at the speed of a tweet.

Community managers maintain and monitor “Tweet Stations” on Hootsuite or other Twitter platforms to see what is unfolding online. This maintenance can be in-house or outsourced.

Advertising agencies will want to know what are the click through rates on banner ads.

Many tools are needed to manage the process of brand protection and maintenance.

Written by Jeff Bullas. To read the full article, click here.  MyDigiBrand is a boutique website development and digital marketing firm in San Diego, California. We help our clients create powerful and engaging online brands. For more information, please visit our website at www.mydigibrand.com.

Do you ever wonder how your competitors are generating so many leads?  Over 96% of small businesses agree that social media is an absolute necessity when it comes to advertising and lead generation. Many small businesses utilize social media as a large component of their advertising, as it uses a limited budgets. In a world of digital marketing, social media can reach a larger scope of individuals that traditional marketing could only dream of, especially taking into account budgetary concerns. However, spending time monitoring your social media channels, reaching out to customers, fielding questions can be taxing on a small business owners time. This is something we, at Creative Revolution, understand greatly. This is why we offer social media managementservices for your small business or startup. We save you the time and the money, with the benefits of having your social channels firing on all cylinders, packaged with analytics and reporting.

Small business social media can be a daunting task. It all starts with a strong strategy, which can be broken down by using the proper channels, keywords, and content. This strategy is defined by your target audience and where they tend to gather, as well as, what they are searching for on the internet. Then you need to clearly define the problem you are trying to solve for these individuals. With their problems, lies your solution, and the solution is directly portrayed in your messages posted on social media.

Once you have defined your audience, their needs, and your message; we immerse ourselves in the constantly evolving worlds of social media channels. Each with their own unique characteristics, audience types, and message styles. In an effort to generate leads, your website will be the main benefactor in the social media strategy. Driving users to your website, where you capture leads through powerful landing pages, connecting them to you. This is known as the call to action (CTA), and is widely overlooked when developing websites to capture leads.

We can start to see the path of your small business social media. But if time is your big concern, try limiting yourself to 1 or 2 channels at the start. You will need to incorporate your social media into your daily agenda. It can as simple as squaring away an hour in the morning. Programs likeHootsuite and Buffer offer automated message postings, allowing you to schedule a weeks worth of messages in one sit down. Start delivering your messages, hitting those keywords and hashtags that are being searched. In addition to your messages, try connecting with other business owners. Use social media as a networking tool, exchanging tips and information. Offer your viewers tips, in conjunction with curated messages that you have accumulated. Encourage your audience to reach out via social media.

Consistency is the name of the game, build a voice that directly correlates to your brand. Tell your message the same way you would tell your customers in person. Keep everything relevant. And keep posting! Your channels need constant action, which is why it is important to keep a consistent flow of messages. Once a week is not going to build an audience or generate clicks on your website.

Written by Derek Brusin. To read the full article, please click here. MyDigiBrand is a boutique website development and digital marketing firm in San Diego, California. We help our clients create powerful and engaging online brands. For more information, please visit our website at www.mydigibrand.com.