Best Practices for First Page Rankings

Having maximum online visibility for your business is no longer an ancillary marketing concern. To remain competitive your business MUST be easy to find on the Internet. If it is not, then you can bet that your business is gradually becoming unknown, and thus, obsolete.

One of the most essential ways to help your business get found easily online is through top placement within the search engines’ results pages; more specifically, within the first 5 organic rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Over 85% of all transactions start online and the organic results receive 65% more clicks then the sponsored results, thus making search engine optimization a crucial part of your marketing plan. A strong SEO campaign will help your website get ranked organically over time, making it a necessity for any business website.

How To Use Growth Hacking To Attract and Retain Customers

Today, let’s talk about growth hacking.

Every business owner will do whatever to grow their business. Today, we have at our disposal more information, tools, resources, and skillsets than ever before. How do you take advantage of all of these assets to grow your business?

Finding innovative ways to get things done in order to achieve a definite result is the job of a hacker. Growth hacking was first used by startups to achieve significant growth rates for their businesses.

In 1996, co-workers Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith built a web-based email system (Hotmail). And within 6 months, they had their first 1 million users. By the time they sold it to Microsoft 17 months later, they had clocked 12 million users.

How did they achieve this significant growth within a short time? That’s growth hacking at work. And you’ll learn all about it in this article.

How To Create Better Content For Your Customers

Content is the new advertising.

According to Sprout Worth, over half of the most effective marketers put out new content for their readers at least several times a week, if not every single day. And70% of KISSmetric’s traffic is primarily from in-depth content that sits on Google’s top results pages. The best content will always win.

Your target audience is sick and tired of interruptive ads. They want something more valuable, rich and actionable. The content has to be digestible information, whether it’s presented in the form of an article, a blog post, an infographic, video, memes, podcasts, or short reports.

If you run a blog, your customers are most likely your readers. And if you’re an information marketer, your customer is someone who interacts with you in a certain way, in order to buy your product or service.

5 Data Insights into the Headlines Readers Click

A Conductor study finds that the more explicit a headline is as to the reader takeaway, the more the headline resonates.

The new digital economy has created a wealth of new opportunity for modern marketers across search, social networks, and digital channels. Digital marketing has brought with it the opportunity to create leads, drive engagement, and drive sales at costs far less than traditional offline channels.

In some ways, though, online marketing has been victimized by its own success. Viral media site Upworthy’s co-founder Peter Koechley describes it this way:

“When we look at the media landscape, we see there being more of a demand problem than a supply problem — how do you get people to care about important stuff amidst the avalanche of content we all face each day?”

22 Headlines That Went Viral. Have These Marketers Cracked the Code?

image: http://www.jeffbullas.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/22-Headlines-That-Went-Viral.-Have-These-Marketers-Cracked-the-Code-.jpg

Headlines were the key tactic to make people buy newspapers, buy books and magazines. Now they make people click and share on the web and your mobile phone.

Bloggers, publishers and marketers are always on the lookout for attracting attention to drive traffic, engage with their readers and customers and make money. No clicks and you have no traffic. It’s that simple.

So where do you start?

Nothing has changed. The headline is still the step and tactic that attracts attention and drives action. The skill of writing headlines is taught in journalism school from day one.

How We Increased Our Organic Search Traffic By Using HitTail ?

Everyone who has a successful blog or online presence can agree that search engine marketing is important. After the Google Panda and Penguin updates, everyone is trying to find ways to increase their organic search traffic the right way. A while ago, we came across a tool called HitTail through a friend’s recommendation. Although we were impressed with his HitTail review, like most folks we are skeptics when it comes to anything SEO related. After using HitTail to facilitate our long-tail SEO startegy on WPBeginner, we found that we increased our organic search traffic by 20% in less than 2 months.

Some of you would be like 20% that’s it? There are other bloggers who are bragging about 500% increases. The issue is that those other bloggers don’t have a lot of traffic to begin with. Increasing 500% is easy when you only have 500 visitors a month from Google. It is nearly impossible to do that on an established site getting 250,000+ visitors a month from Google. In this article, we will show you how we increased our organic search traffic using HitTail in WordPress by taking advantage of the long tail keywords.

How to Write Email Subject Lines That Will Increase Your Open Rate By 203%

What’s the benefit of having thousands of people on your email list, if very few of them actually open your emails?

Have you ever sent an important email to your list and wondered why the open rate was poor? If so, you’re not alone. It’s an issue that a lot of Internet marketers struggle with.

In 2012, Epsilon’s fourth quarter email analysis revealed that out of 7.3 billion emails sent across several industries, the average open rate was 27.4% and the average click through was 4.5%.

That means almost 75% of people don’t open emails and about 95% of those who do open them don’t bother to follow any of the links.

That’s a problem if you’re trying to get your customers’ attention, but there is a solution. In this post, I’ll highlight the factors that affect email open rates and show you the best ways to write email subject lines that will increase your emails open rates by 203% and even more. Here’s what I’m going to teach you:

1. What determines email open rates
2. Why you need to nurture your subscribers
3. Case studies: winning email subject lines
4. How to write clickable email subject lines
5. How timing increases email open rates

Download this worksheet to improve your email marketing success rate.

What determines email open rates

If you had to explain email open rates to a two year old, how would you do it? Don’t worry; you don’t have to. Echogravity has an excellent graphic that explains it:

In a nutshell, your email open rate is the number you get when you subtract bounced emails from emails sent and divide the opened emails by that number.

If you’re marketing with email, you need to know this number. All email marketing providers track email open rates and give you statistics on them, as well as click, bounce and complaint rates.

But before you get into increasing your open rate, there are 3 factors you need to know to make email marketing much smoother.

1. Have a clear business objective: To be successful at anything you need to know why you are doing it. Most people build an email list for one main reason – to make money, but there are other possible reasons too.

Michael Massie outlined five reasons why you should build a list for your business. Two of my favorites from his list are automation (making it easier to follow up with your contacts) and relationship marketing (something I’ll discuss more in a while).

You may also start an email marketing campaign to solve a problem for your customers. If they understand that you care about their problems, they are more likely to open your emails.

Having clear goals will affect your decision-making, your motivation, your actions – and your open rate. See this detailed e-book on goal setting for help with this.

2. Develop a unique selling proposition: To be an exceptional Internet marketer and to make your customers want to open your emails, you have to have an edge. That’s what your unique selling proposition (USP) is all about.

Ask yourself these three questions:

• What can you do that other marketers can’t do?
• What makes your product unique and better than your competitors’ products?
• How can you present your service to inspire people to want to click, open or buy?

Here’s an example from the travel industry.

Let’s compare two top hotel comparison sites: Trivago and Agoda. Which one inspires you to click?

Trivago lets you compare hotel prices on 206 booking sites at once, but there’s no information on check in/check out dates, available rooms and length of stay.

What about agoda.com? This site goes beyond price comparisons:

Most people would prefer Agoda because:

• You can easily search for a city, hotel, landmark or destination.
• You can set check-in/check-out dates.
• You can choose how long you want to stay

In other words, the second site (agoda.com) offers a user-friendly platform and solves a problem for its customers. That’s its USP.

Do that with your emails and you will be successful too.

If you need help with developing your own USP, check out this article fromConvince & Convert.

3. Figure out your lead capture system: Your own site isn’t the only place you will capture leads. Choosing the right places to capture leads will affect whether people see your emails as relevant and how they respond to them, and that has an impact on email open rates.

For example, guest blogging on authority sites and relevant blogs will help generate more emails and build relationships which could result in sales.

When you know your business goal, your USP and how you will capture leads, that is when you need to make the most out of your subscribers. That’s why you need to nurture your email list.

Why you need to nurture your subscribers

Did you know that 85% of global web users use the web for email? That means there’s a huge opportunity to connect with people via your email newsletter. The hard part is, you have to figure out what makes people want to open them…

Here’s the truth. People you build relationships with are more likely to open and read your emails. I’ve got the stats to prove it:

• Companies that make lead nurturing a priority generate 50% more sales from their leads at a 33% reduction in cost.
• And HelpScout found that taking time to nurture leads resulted in a 21% increase open rate for their email marketing campaigns.

That’s why relationship marketing is fundamental to a winning email campaign. To increase your email open rate, you must be committed to strengthening the rapport between you and your email subscribers. You need to nurture them: connect, share, communicate and relate to them like a true friend.

This can also make you stand out (and be part of your USP). A study fromeconsultancy shows that around a quarter of businesses don’t invest in relationship marketing at all and half of businesses don’t make it a huge priority. If you do, then you will definitely have an edge.

One of the best ways to nurture your leads is by providing helpful, interesting and actionable content.

A few days ago, I got an email that sparked my interest. Have a look and see why.

It was the urgency of the event of the message that made it interesting. If people feel they have to act immediately, they are more inclined to open your emails.

Case studies: winning email subject lines

Do you know the most important part of your email? It’s the subject line.

The email subject line determines the open rate, especially the ones with 4 – 15 characters.

That’s the reason that people have written thousands of posts and articles on the topic of improving email subject lines. HelpScout implemented just a few of the tips I’m sharing with you in this post and achieved an open rate of almost 60% for their email campaigns.

Not everyone can achieve those open rates, but some have done even better, likeGlen Allsopp. Here’s what happened when he sent a niche idea to his subscribers.

Subject line: Profitable Niche #2 (cloud niche)

Of the 1056 recipients, 879 opened the email (83.2%). That’s a phenomenal email open rate by any standards.

Here’s what you can learn from Glen’s example:

• Short and descriptive subject lines work better
• An element of curiosity can increase your open rate
• You can always tweak your subject line and resend the email to subscribers if the first send doesn’t deliver great results

Use the K.I.S.S. principle: In other words, don’t overcomplicate your email subject lines. Get straight to the point and your subscribers will immediately decide what action to take.

The chart below from Content Marketing Up shows that short subject lines get more opens.

Here’s another example of how short subject lines and curiosity worked to get emails opened.

Did you know that most of the $690 million President Obama raised online was because of emails sent to subscribers and supporters? Like the examples above, these subject lines are short and nudge you to take action:

You can use President Obama’s subject lines as inspiration for your own email marketing, and there’s more good advice in this slide presentation from Hubspot.

Now when you are crafting your subject line there are 5 key elements that you need to know about:

• C = curiosity
• U = urgency
• R = relevancy
• V = value
• E = emotion

Curiosity: wanting to know something. Do you think you have a wonderful message for your subscribers? Then make them think they’re missing out on something essential if they don’t click. This email subject line from Buffer generated a huge response.

Urgency: As I mentioned earlier, email marketing will produce better results for your business if you call for immediate action from your subscribers.

Relevancy: this is the #1 reason people subscribe to your list. Each time you send emails, make sure it’s relevant to them and your open rate will continue to improve. This example from JetBlue really delivers.

Value: Relevant information must always be valuable and deliver what you promised your recipients. The subject line is the best place to show this, like this example from Quicksprout.

Emotion: This is a major aspect of creating winning email subject lines.  Here are examples from wordstream.com:

• Everyone Is Gay: Social Media As Social Action
• Why Your 5-Year-Old Is More Digital Than Most CMOs
• Your Marketing Sucks: Why You Need to Think Local

Research from Fuel Design shows that customers’ buying decisions are based on emotion 80% of the time. When you buy a car, logic tells you it’s to make it easier to get around; emotion makes you feel good about a fancy new possession you can show off to your friends.

Speak to people’s emotions to get them to open your emails.

This chart from Ignition Marketing Group  also shows that crafting email subject lines to speak to the emotions of your audience will produce better results:

And research from CoSchedule also supports this: emotional headlines get more social shares.

Here’s how you could change some email subject lines so they have more emotional appeal.

Existing headline: Tips To Help Keep Your Taxes Organized All Year Round

Fresh headline: 5 Smart Tips To Keep Your Taxes Organized Easily

Why is it better? The new subject line is more concise and appeals to the reader’s vanity with the word “smart”.

 

Existing headline: How Your Organization Can Improve Conversion Rate

Fresh headline: How You Will Improve Sales Conversion By 110%

Why is it better? A specific outcome is more believable and the use of “will” instead of “can” makes the reader believe s/he can take action.

 

So the next time you write an email subject line, make sure it’s on the CURVE.

For more help with crafting subject lines with emotional appeal, read these 30 magical words you can use from  Vertical Response.

Writing clickable email subject lines

So far, you have learnt the importance of using clickable subject lines for your emails. The problem is, most people don’t know how to write one.

When Mailchimp analyzed 200 million emails, they discovered that personal emails had the highest open rate, followed by affiliation and timely news.

To write an email that people want to open, follow this simple two-step strategy (and make sure you don’t use these 50 SPAM words and phrases):

1. Personalize your emails: Using people’s name gets their attention and immediately makes your email seem more useful and relevant.

Mailchimp advises that you avoid the use of “Dear” in the subject line – instead, use their first name, full name or last name for effective personalization.

Personalization settings differ depending on the email marketing provider you’re using, but here’s how to use Getresponse to send subscribers an email with their first name in the subject line.

Step #1: Go to getresponse.com and log in. If you’re not a member yet, sign up for a 30-day free trial.

Step #2: Hover on the “messages” tab. From the drop-down options, click “create newsletter.” This is what you will see:

Note: Click the New Email Creator on the left, which is user-friendly and great for personalization.

Once you hover on “Personalize”, the next action is to click “[[firstname]] from the drop-down options.

As you click it, it will automatically appear in the subject field:

Note: After clicking [[firstname]], don’t forget to use a hyphen (-) or colon (:) to put some space between the recipient’s first name and your subject line.

Step #3: Activate automatic social sharing so you’re not just relying on the inbox for traffic.

Step #4: Scroll down and click “next step” to continue writing your email message.

When you’re done, your email will have the subscriber’s first name in the subject line.

2. Ask the right questions: We live by asking and answering questions. Dr. John V. Richardson, UCLA Professor of Information Studies says there are two forms of questions:

The first is a close-ended question which limits the answers/options the recipient can give to a specific question. The answer is usually a single word or definite phrase. Such as:

• Do you enjoy connecting with friends on social media networks
• Possible answers: Yes/No

• Is your favorite color red?
• Possible answer: Yes or No, my favorite color is……

• Have you read Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki?
• Possible answer: Yes I’ve read it/No I haven’t.

When writing email subject lines, avoid close-ended questions. If people can answer the question, they have no incentive to open your email.

And the second type of question is open-ended questions. One of the the best ways to connect with loyal subscribers on a personal level and get them to speak their minds is by asking open-ended questions.

Open-ended questions make the recipient think before giving an answer. The answer is usually long and more detailed, compared to answers to close-ended answers.

Here are some examples of open-ended questions:

• In what area of Internet marketing do you need urgent help?
• What do you want to know about real estate investing?
• Can you tell me what you’re struggling with in your startup business?

Even though some of these questions are specific to a particular industry, they still encourage recipients to think and respond.

When someone joins your email list and you send them a welcome message, ask questions in this manner:

• Tell me what you’ve been struggling with.
• What kind of traffic do you want to drive to your blog?
• Tell me everything you’ve tried so far to get traffic that worked/failed.

As a rule of thumb, giving rooms for open-ended email subject lines can really be helpful.

PeoplePulse, a survey software shared some examples of open-ended subject lines and their click-through rates:

• Subject Line #1: “FIRSTNAME, November Client Attraction Newsletter out now” – click through rate of 20.3%
• Subject Line 2:“FIRSTNAME, here’s a new 7 Marketing Trends report for you” – click through rate of 28.0%
• Subject Line 3: “FIRSTNAME, 7 Marketing Trends I think you should know about” – click through rate of 45.6%

How timing increases email open rates

There’s one more thing you can do to get more people to open your emails and achieve a 203% increase in open rates: get the timing of your emails right.

Nathan Williams recorded a 60% open rate when he sent an email with a welcome kit to new signups within 24 hours.

Can you be 100% sure of the right time to send emails? Absolutely not.

Industries differ and individual prospects/subscribers respond to emails at their own pace.

But there are plenty of insights from industry experts and email marketing companies who manage and track billions of sent emails per day to get you started:

• This KISSmetrics infographic on timing email marketing is a must read.
• Rick Stamberger says the best time of day depends on when your target market is most likely to read emails. He got an open rate of more than 70% when sending emails to restaurateurs after the lunch hour rush.
• Kevin Gao, founder of comm100 stated that Mondays are the worst days to send emails. Open rates also slip at weekends when people focus more on family time. He says midweek days are the best bet for a healthy email open and click rate.

When it comes to email timing, you are going to have to test it. For example, with my Quick Sprout list, I get the most opens when I send them out on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday at 8am PST. You can use the articles above as a starting point, but you still need to test it out.

Conclusion

Implement the tips in this post and you will not only increase your email open rates, but you will have a more loyal subscriber base who will anticipate every email.

You have to keep testing your email subject lines as they may not go up right away, but eventually they will as long as you follow the tips above. When I tested email subject lines, the first 3 tests failed, but I was able to get an increase of 203% with the 4th test.

So what other ways can you increase your email open rates?

7 Best Free SEO Tools for Beginners

To get the best out of your SEO marketing endeavours, you need to have the best SEO tools out there. Some of these tools are expensive while others are either too expensive or free. And although many marketers would argue that the best tools are the paid ones or even the most expensive one, there are some free tools that are free and have been proven time and time again to generate top results for both new and old marketers.

We have taken our time to search for 7 of the top free SEO tools for beginners and will attempt to briefly describe why we think they are useful and can deliver the required results.

How to Easily Double Your Traffic from Social Media

Many businesses are publishing content as a way to build their audiences and increase traffic to their websites. However, they may not be getting everything they could from each piece of content they create.

If you are serious about your content, then you also need to be serious about driving as much traffic to it (over social media) as possible. One great way to do this is to share your content on social media more than once. Sounds pretty simple, right? Let’s take a look at a hypothetical example:

Immediately after publishing a new blog post, we promote that post on social media. When we share it with each of our networks, we garner a certain number of clicks for each share. In the chart above, I hypothesize about a post that is sent to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ immediately after the post goes live. The return on the effort looks great.

What happens when we share a link to that post a second time the next day? Does the traffic double? Based on the law of diminishing returns, no. That’s not quite what happens during the second round.

But, if we share the content again a third time, the traffic (for the second and third sets of shares combined) more than doubles. How can you argue with results like that?

Of course, this is a simple (and hypothetical) example, but the point is the more often you share, the more likely you are to get clicks. The big question most of us have is whether this type of thing really is ok?

Is It OK to Share Content More than Once?

Sharing your content multiple times on social media can trigger strong reactions. Some people don’t care for the practice of sharing the same content more than once on a social account, but, as is often the case, it is hard to argue with results. Awhile back, I shared the strategy my own startup uses to promote blog content on social media. Guess how many complaints we’ve received from the practice?

Zero.

The reality is that no one really cares, or even notices. And if they do, what is the worst thing that can happen? I mean, really? One aspect of marketing we often forget is that no one notices everything we do.

Your social media followers aren’t like RSS subscribers who see and read every post. In fact, sharing more than once probably is an essential part of providing your audience with the value you promised them. If you don’t share your links a few times, they may never see any of your updates.

How to Not Be a Spammer

I once was a guest on a podcast where the host was having a heyday complaining about a few Twitter users who were sharing content too much. His complaints were valid. The users had installed a certain plugin that shared their old blog posts (randomly) once every single hour. It was too much, and it seemed like spam.

While that strategy might lead to additional clicks (in the short term, at least), it is not the type of practice I am suggesting in this post. If you share too much, people eventually will learn to ignore your tweets, and probably will unfollow you altogether. If you are going to start sharing your content more than once, you need to abide by a few ground rules, such as:

1. Take your followers into consideration. Your social feed is for them, not for you.
2. Don’t turn into a spammer. Create a smart schedule rather than a crowded one (more on this later).
3. Consider your own habits. How do you use social media? Where is the “spam line” for you? Don’t cross it.
4. Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t like. How would you react if you saw another user with your identical strategy? This is a great gauge, because you probably wouldn’t be the only one who would feel that way.
5. Always provide value. Like I said, promoting content more than once actually is a good thing, as long as you are doing it to provide value for your audience.

Once you agree to follow these simple ground rules, you should be able to develop a great social promotion schedule for your content that literally doubles your traffic.

How to Share Your Content More than Once

Step 1 – Develop a Sharing Schedule

To begin sharing your content over social media more than once, you need to develop a simple schedule that will provide some guidelines for how often you want to share your content on each network. With this schedule, you will be tackling questions like:

• How often can I share this on each network? What is acceptable?
• Is there a preferred time of day that I want to keep in mind?
• How long will my content be fresh, or shareable?
• How much time should I put between each new social message?
• What are some ways I can create variety in my social sharing schedule?

Be careful in your planning. You don’t want to send your messages one right after another, or in big clumps, because that’s where the spam thing comes in to play.

Now, let’s discuss your message schedule, which simply is the series of messages that will be sent once your blog post goes live. The goal of the schedule is to create a “peppered” social media approach that will help you get more clicks. A well-executed schedule may look something like this:

1. On publish – Social message sent when blog post goes live
2. Same day – Initial social messages trickle out to your accounts over the next 2-3 hours
3. Next day – Messages are shared again on the appropriate social channels
4. Next week – Another series of messages are pre-scheduled and sent the following week
5. Next month – Even more social messages are pre-scheduled for the following month
6. Next _____ – Optionally, additional messages can be scheduled for the three-month mark or beyond

Once you’ve defined a good schedule for each network, you can map it out in a simple timeline that will give you a bird’s eye view of your content promotion. This is an important step in the process.

In this example, you can see that we’ve decided to share our content very frequently on Twitter, and a bit less frequently on Facebook and Google+. For Tumblr, we are sharing our content only once. These decisions were made based on the individual intricacies of each network. You may feel differently about them, so you may develop a different schedule.

Step 2 – Never Share the Same Message Twice

This is a very important step in the process that truly will separate you from the unruly spammers. For most of us, when we share a blog post on social media, we include the title of the post, a link, and a few hashtags. This is fine. Once! But, it can get pretty monotonous for your followers if you aren’t careful.

The better strategy is to add some simple variety by asking questions or including pull-quotes from the post itself. Here is an example based on a recent post about getting started with social media lead conversion:

In this example, you can see each tweet was unique in its own way and alternated between asking questions and sharing the headline of the post itself. This simple trick takes time to execute but adds a lot of variety to the final stream. It is a great way to engage your audience with your content without looking like someone who just wants to promote their own stuff. There are a number of message types you can use as needed. Here are a few of our favorites:

• Straight and Easy: Post Title + Link
• The Question: Ask an engaging question to stir conversation
• Cite a Fact: Share a fact or figure that is included in your post
• Share a Quote: Grab a pull-quote from your article and turn it into a social message
• Add Intrigue: Write a teaser message that grabs the attention of your readers

This tactic provides an excellent way to try out new ideas on your followers. For example, does asking questions increase reader engagement?

Also, it is worth noting that this process gives you a great opportunity to test alternate headlines.

Step 3 – Optimize Your Content for Each Network

We all know that each social network handles images and text differently, but how much do you take that into account when you are creating social messages? One way to add some variety and value to your posts is to take advantage of the strengths of each network.

A good example of this is the way Google+ allows for longer copy and basicmarkdown text in each post. As you can see from the example above, we regularly add bulleted lists and bold text to our posts to make certain items stand out and provide additional value to our readers.

Another great example is how Twitter displays images, as shown below. Posts that include images are much more noticeable than posts that do not. This is a simple way to get noticed more, and squeeze out a few extra clicks.

Step 4 – Monitor Your Results

As always, it is important to monitor your results to make sure the changes you make to your social publishing schedule actually work. Here are a few of the things you want to watch out for:

• A decrease or an increase in post activity. As you adjust your schedule, notice if there is an increase or decrease in post activity? More clicks? More retweets? More shares? Sometimes, this is a gut-level check, and other times you might want to dip into your Bit.ly stats or utilize custom Google Analytics tags to make sure you are right.
• Negative feedback from your audience. Although it is rare, some users may notice your increased activity and comment on it. Take this to heart, but don’t let one complaint spoil a good thing. Use metrics to verify whether your schedule is too aggressive or misguided.
• A slowly fading interest in your content. I think the biggest threat to a social feed that has become “too busy” is a natural tendency of followers to simply ignore the content. Watch your click throughs to make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

I know this seems like an infomercial for a new prescription drug that must disclose all possible side effects, even though very few people ever experience any of them. You can take this technique too far, and I don’t want to accidentally turn you into a spammer. If you do this right, it will be worth the effort. If you do it wrong, then you may suffer some of the adverse consequences listed above.

Content Shared More than Once Might Go Viral

Not long ago, one of our own writers had a post go viral a full month after it was originally published, thanks to her implementation of this exact social promotion strategy. Julie’s message schedule was pretty simple. She tweeted once when the post went live, and then repeated it once 30 days later. The first tweet went relatively unnoticed, but the second one (a full month later) took off.

Regarding the message, Julie says: “The original publishing of the post didn’t cause much interest, beyond regular readers, nor did any of my posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or LinkedIn. It was a little tweet I sent out, just one tweet, a month later. I was very glad I had put into place a structured system that didn’t just blast out one social message at the moment of publishing and call it good enough.”

In Julie’s case, that second tweet brought her some pretty big traffic, and made the extra effort totally worth it. By sharing your content on social media more than once, you not only stand a chance of doubling your traffic, you also may double your chances of striking a chord and going viral. Of course, you should never become a spammer. Always remember there is a right way and a wrong way to share your content. Choose wisely.

How KISSmetrics Can Help

50 Things Every Content Marketer Should Know

Fancy yourself a content marketer, or want to become one? Here’s a big fat content marketing skills list and tactics you should know before you apply for that content marketer job or update the title on your business cards. Help yourself by highlighting the right marketing skills needed for your resume.

1. Good grammar and proper use of punctuation – Hopefully you learned this in school. If you weren’t paying any attention, it’s not too late. You can pick up a lot just from reading voraciously – like how the mermaid in Splash learned English from watching TV. I also recommend picking up a basic writing manual, because it would be very difficult to intuit all the finer points of grammar and punctuation through intuition. You’ll feel nice and superior once you know the difference between a hyphen, an en-dash, and an em-dash.
2. The difference between grammar and style – A lot of choices you make when writing aren’t technically about grammar but what editors call “style” – and I don’t mean whether your shoes match your belt. A “style guide” is a set of conventions that publishers agree to use for consistency’s sake. Most newspapers adhere to AP stylewhile most book publishers adhere to Chicago style. Unfortunately, a lot of web publishers skip this step, part of the reason why many websites and blogs appear less than completely professional. If you’re serious about content marketing, make sure there’s someone on your team who understands the grammar/style distinction. Ideally, you’ll create your own style guide for internal use. An example of a style choice is whether you hyphenate “email” – for years, “e-mail” was the usual standard, but it’s now most commonly written without the hyphen.
3. How to create an outline – Good fences make good neighbors, and good outlines make good papers. It’s one of the secrets of good writers. Start with structure and build out from there.
4. How to write concisely – A new book called How to Not Write Bad (see what he did there?) by Ben Yagoda shows an example of a needless circumlocution: “The criteria that made this site able to be nominated are because of the uniqueness of the content it possesses.” Yagoda rewrites this statement as: “The site has excellent content.” Fluffing up your point with extra and longer words is a classic student paper move. It only has the effect of making you appear underconfident in your opinions. State what you mean as clearly and simply as possible (which is not to say there’s no room for personality in your content – see #5).
5. How to write in your own voice – Everyone talks in their own voice without thinking, but many people find it difficult to write in that voice. Though some types of content require a sort of generic, professional uber-voice, your blogging and social media efforts will benefit from showing some of your real personality. Don’t write sentences you would be embarrassed to say out loud. Avoid marketing cliches. Consider developing a set of internal guidelines for brand voice.
6. The difference between concision and saying too little – There’s a persistent myth that web readers are lazy and won’t read long content. We’ve found the opposite to be true – the longer our content, the better our engagement metrics across the board (page views, shares, time on page, comments, etc.). So don’t use “concision” as an excuse for dull writing that lacks detail and analysis.
7. How to write scannable content – That said, not everyone will want to read every word on the page, so use lists, bullet points, subheads, boldface, highlighting, pop-out quotes and other formatting tricks that make your content easy to scan for high-level takeaways. Another good trick for long-form content: Create a table of contents with jump links so readers can skip right to the part they’re interested in and ignore the rest.
8. HTML – Most content management platforms have a WYSIWYG editor – i.e., “what you see is what you get.” That means they work like a Word document, with buttons to help you format your text, insert images, etc. But no WYSIWYG editor works perfectly every time, and you’ll find it incredibly useful to be able to look at the source code and fiddle around to get your formatting right. Bonus points if you can hand-code a table.
9. How to do keyword research – SEO keywords are still the cornerstone of content marketing. Familiarize yourself with some basic keyword tools and start using them regularly. I use Google’s tool and our own Free Keyword Tool as basic starting points, then delve into others for special circumstances.
10. How to find and use long-tail keywords – Keyword tools won’t always provide you with a lot of long-tail keyword options. Here are nine ways to find those longer, more specific niche terms.
11. The three types of search queries – Different types of search queries reveal different intent and demand different types of content. Know the three main types: informational, navigational, and transactional.
12. How to align content types with marketing goals – Some types of content drive lots of traffic. Others may get fewer views, but be better at converting new leads or customers. Know what types of content are more likely to help you meet your business goals.
13. On-page optimization basics – I.e., where to put those keywords. Title and URL are no brainers. Then there’s subheads, images, your meta description, etc. – and obviously your keyword should be peppered throughout the body of the text if it’s actually relevant to the content. SEOmoz has a good analysis of on-page optimization factors to help you aim for the perfectly optimized page.
14. The anatomy of a SERP – You should know what a basic Google SERP looks like depending on search query type and be able to recognize anomalies, changes, and possible tests. What queries trigger universal results or the 7-result SERP? How much real estate is given to ads – above the organic results, on the right-hand side or even below the results? Are there product listing ads or just text ads? What queries trigger the Knowledge Graph?
15. The difference between page title and H1 – Each page on your site can effectively have two titles. You can choose to make these the same or vary them.
16. How to write a super clickable, shareable title – The viral marketing experts at Upworthy recommend writing 25 titles (you read that right, 25) for each piece of content to help you hit upon true title genius. Because the first 24 might suck. Here are moreheadline writing tips.
17. How to write formulaic titles – Not every page on your site needs to be hyper-shareable. Product pages, for example, should stick to the basics, conveying maximum information while still being SEO-friendly. By hitting upon a title tag formula, you can optimize this high-volume pages in a scalable way.
18. The character/pixel limits for titles and meta descriptions – Up until recently, the thinking was that titles could be no longer than 70 characters, or Google will truncate them or, on occasion, substitute a completely different title (yay). Recent experiments suggest that characters per se are not the limiting factor, but pixels. (If you don’t feel like counting pixels, 70 chars is still a good rough guideline.) Your meta description should be between 150 and 160 characters.
19. How to write a meta description – Aside from knowing the character limit, know the purpose of this text. Google says it can’t and won’t affect your rankings, but since it might show up in the search results, it should accurately describe your content as well as “sell” it to convince them to click. It should be as relevant and compelling as a PPC ad. Also: Don’t use quotation marks in your meta description – a quote will make Google think your description is over before it is.
20. How to optimize images – Image search traffic, the other white meat! Know how to use keywords in your image file names and alt text in order to rank in Google image search. (Know your social media image properties too.)
21. When to link – and when not to – Links are a beautifully subtle, gently suggestive way to point readers to more information on related topics within your content. Use internal linking to keep readers on your site and foster flow among your various pages. Use external linking when it makes more sense to reference an outside source. Don’t overuse either or you’ll sacrifice readability, and piss Google off in the process.
22. The importance of inbound links – Links still matter, yes they do, we like links and you should too. Even if your team separates the content marketing and SEO roles, every web marketer should understand why links matter, the kind of content that earns them, and the types of links that send real referrals.
23. How to write an outreach email – If your content marketing mojo is strong, you’ll get links without even asking for them. But it takes a while to get into that upper echelon. Initially, you’ll need to go out and seek the links. One way to do this is by writing anoutreach email to potentially interested linking parties. After all, people can’t link to your content if they don’t know it exists. And the goal here is actually twofold – you’ll bebuilding relationships at the same time.
24. How to use Google Alerts – Set up a Google Alert so you’ll know when people talk about you, your company, or your products, etc. on the web. You can also use Google Alerts to follow a “beat” – for example if you plan to cover some industry news announcement, you can keep up with the evolving story and the coverage elsewhere. (Note that in my experience, Google Alerts don’t work very well for low-volume queries.)
25. How to turn citations into links – If a site mentions your brand or cites your content without linking, reach out and ask them to provide a link. It’s one of the easiest forms of link building.
26. How to make your content easily shareable – You’ll get more social shares (on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, what-have-you) if you make it very easy for readers to share your stuff. Install social buttons and widgets that minimize the work for your visitors.
27. How to monitor brand mentions on social media – Don’t sign in to Twitter to tweet out your new content, then promptly sign out and never look at it again. Ugh! If you’re going to use social platforms to promote your content, make sure you’re also keeping up with conversations there, responding to questions and feedback, and occasionally promoting other people, content, and brands as well. In other words, be human.
28. How to respond to a complaint – If someone leaves a nasty review or flames you on social media, don’t get mad and don’t get defensive (at least not publicly).
29. How to moderate and respond to blog comments – This seems more basic than basic but a lot of content marketers get this wrong. If you never respond to comments, it gives the impression that you don’t care whether people leave them or not. Andplease don’t leave obvious spam comments under your posts. Major turnoff.
30. When to update old content – If you’re still getting search traffic to an old piece of content that is no longer accurate or up-to-date, take the time to update the content, or you’re wasting that traffic.
31. The importance of anchor text – Anchor text – the text that you make clickable when hyperlinking – is powerful stuff. You can even see it in action with less competitive queries. But tread carefully – many experts believe that anchor text is getting less valuable as a signal, and over-optimized anchor text could even get you flagged as a web spammer.
32. The importance of information architecture – It may not be part of your job to define the structure of your website, but at the very least you should understand why a well-organized information architecture is key for good SEO and usability.
33. How to use Google Analytics – When Larry interviews SEO candidates, he asks them to sign into their Google Analytics account and poke around. This shows two things: a) how their site or blog is doing (which demonstrates if they can apply SEO) and b) if they know their way around the application (which demonstrates how much time they spend in Analytics). Don’t just create content; track and measure so you know what works and what you should do more/less of in the future.
34. How and when to leverage rich snippets – Rich snippets are the organic SEO equivalent of ad extensions in AdWords. They benefit some types of businesses more than others. For example, e-commerce companies should make use of the reviews and ratings snippets. Here is a list of the types of rich snippets that Google offers.
35. How to set up author markup – Specifically, as a content marketer, you should know how to take advantage of the author markup snippet so that your author photo shows up in the SERPs, which builds authority and can have a big effect on your click-through rate. Unfortunately (IMO) you’ll need a Google+ account to do this.
36. How to use the structured data testing tool – Use this tool to test how your snippets/microdata appear in search results.
37. How to set up an A/B test – A/B testing isn’t just for ads and subject lines. You can test titles, layouts, images, all kinds of marvelous things that could affect the way people interact with your content. There are some pretty robust software options out there for A/B and multivariate testing, but the easiest (and free-est) way to get started is with Google Analytics Content Experiments (formerly Website Optimizer).
38. How to write a press release – These are usually pretty boring and formulaic, to tell you the truth, but nonetheless you should know how to write professionally about a corporate news announcement. Know what information to include in a press release and how to set the right tone.
39. How to “spin” an article from different angles – There’s always more than one way to skin a cat and spin a story. I’m not talkin’ about old-school, spammy-crappy, no-value article spinning. I’m talking about re-writing an article or other piece of content with a different focus, so it has broader appeal to more audiences. Just make sure the different articles are truly unique with minimal overlap.
40. How to repurpose content in other formats – Similarly, know how to change the format of a piece of content to get more leverage out of it, without changing the “angle” per se. Turn a long blog post or series of blog posts into an e-book or guide that users can download as a PDF. Or turn the data in an infographic (visual content) into a written, readable article.
41. How to pitch a story – You’ll occasionally want to publish content somewhere other than your own site, to build your audience, expand reach as well as grow your link profile. Learn how to write a tactful pitch letter that demonstrates the value you can provide with a contributed piece of content.
42. How to build a slide deck – As far as I’m concerned, PowerPoint and Excel are necessary evils. As a writer, I’d always rather work in a good ol’ Word doc, but there are situations where you’ll need to present information in a different way. Webinars and online courses, for example, require slide decks. This presentation has some ideas for making better-looking slides:
    
    You Suck At PowerPoint! by @jessedee from Jesse Desjardins – @jessedee
43. How to find questions to answer with your content – Common questions make great starting points for content. Here are three ways to find questions to answer.
44. How to do an interview – It’s hard to get good answers if you don’t know how to ask good questions. Once you learn that skill, interviewing experts with a higher profile and larger network than you can be a great way to drive traffic and links and attract some attention. Another smart tactic is the group interview (AKA crowdsourcing).
45. What makes a good infographic – Like them or not, infographics are a type of content and as a content marketer, you should know your way around one. Not every kind of information lends itself to a visual presentation, but some data does, and when executed well, infographics make awesome linkbait.
46. What makes a good video – It’s often easier to rank for a competitive keyword with a video than with traditional written content, because fewer people are doing video. “How to” keywords often lend themselves to videos, for example.
47. When to outsource content creation – Your time is worth something, and it won’t always be cost-effective for you to handle every aspect of a content marketing project. Consider outsourcing when you want to create a type of content that’s not in your area of expertise. For example, I don’t know how to edit a video or execute complex design work – but I can write the script or do the research.
48. How to do a competitive content analysis – Before tackling a competitive keyword space, see who and what is already ranking. What do their backlink profiles look like? Do you have a hope and prayer of competing? How can your content be more awesome?
49. How to create and maintain an editorial calendar – The bigger your site, goals, and team, the more likely it is that you’ll need an editorial calendar to keep things running smoothly and on schedule. Here are some of the pros and cons plus mistakes to avoidwhen creating an editorial calendar.
50. How to troubleshoot a traffic loss – If a previously reliable piece of content suddenly falls off a Google cliff due to algorithmic changes, know how to troubleshoot and recover.

What content marketing job skills did I miss? Content marketers, let me know in the comments! (Also check out our list of 32 content marketing tools; you’ll need to master some of those!)