With the issue of keyword ratios as variable as it has been in the world of SEO, it’s often difficult to keep track of the current state of keyword density and how much strength the concept still has in terms of ranking high in organic search results.

What’s the Optimal Keyword Ratio for SEO?

This is somewhat of a trick question, because content marketing experts agree that there truly is no target number that writers should aim for in their content.

Experts Chime In

According to Forbes, marketers are quickly moving away from keyword density as a focal point when creating content, and Google’s Matt Cutts has said that there is no magic number that will help a web page rank.

SEOBook’s Aaron Wall believes that keyword ratios are part of an overrated and outdated concept for modern SEO, while Brett Tabke offers up what he thinks could be much more useful, one that he refers to as keyword proximity density. As he explains it, modern SEO is concerned much more with where keywords are than how many are crammed into a page. The basic guidelines of the theory of keyword proximity state that keywords should be:

• On the page
• In the H1 title
• Preferably, in the URL
• In the header of the article
• Spaced out throughout the piece

When you start to examine where keywords are in your post rather than how many there are, you’ll start to see results in terms of SEO. The most important factor when writing blog posts or website copy is that the information is valuable to the reader, following along with the latest tenets of content marketing.

[ctt template=”4″ link=”f2D34″ via=”yes” nofollow=”yes”]Content marketers agree that there truly is no target number you should aim for in your content.[/ctt]

So Are Keyword Ratios Still Relevant?

Don’t take the fact that keyword density is an outdated concept to mean that you shouldn’t worry about keywords at all. You still should, but be aware of your priorities in regards to them. What matters more to the search engines is not the number of keywords on the page, but rather where the keywords are and how they’re used.

If you don’t use a keyword or target phrase at all, your page has no chance of ranking for that word or phrase. Try not to force keywords into the text. Instead, use them where they naturally fit in the body of the content, and always keep value to the reader top of mind.

Related: Why Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords Allow for Better SEO

What’s The Lesson?

Keyword density isn’t a concept you should really be worried about. Instead, spend time focusing on using keywords strategically in accordance with where they are on the page.

In the presentation mentioned above, Matt Cutts wraps it by saying: “In other words, your keywords are important to show Google what you’re talking about.”

Save

The post What’s the Latest on Keyword Ratios, and How Do You Calculate Them? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Companies have been able to promote branded content through the Facebook pages of bands, media outlets and celebrities for some time, but not through private profiles. This changed with the October update; Facebook announced that verified private profiles could promote branded content to harness the power of influencer marketing. Facebook also added a series of new marketing analytics to a feature called a Facebook sponsor tag.

Here’s a breakdown of how it works and just how both parties involved benefit from this major step forward in Facebook’s marketing policy.

New Facebook Sponsor Tags

When you create content promoting a specific product or brand as the owner of a verified profile, you’re given an option to click on a handshake icon and tag the brand directly in the post. This new feature, which is called a Facebook sponsor tag, works for Facebook’s whole range of posting options from simple text posts to interactive live streams.

When brands are tagged, Facebook provides marketers with the ability to quantify the reach and ROI for sponsoring influencer posts. A brand’s marketers can view their marketing metrics such as reach and unique engageements on individual posts and are given the option to boost or share branded content to extend customer interaction possibilities.

For example, a brand might approach an individual social media influencer asking for a product promotion. Instead of paying the person via an independent interaction and then letting him promote the brand, companies pay through Facebook’s new platform, and the influencer would tag the page for the company using the new handshake icon.

As you can see, the quick summary of a branded post’s reach includes key insights that are crucial to deciding whether or not to keep spending a brand’s marketing budget in a specific direction.

Who Benefits?

In short, everyone. Marketers are given wider options to promote their brands to new audiences, while influencers are given a clearer way to monetize their popularity, a method Instagram has already used effectively.

• Influencers are given new options to market themselves. It’s a sort of symbiotic relationship, really. Notable figures with verified profiles who previously had preferred other social platforms where making money off of their public image was simpler will now use Facebook more often.
• Marketers are able to better understand their reach with the Sponsor Tags feature. Facebook intends to make its platform more friendly to brands by expanding the parameters of their marketing ability and adding a toolkit that makes them able to harness the power of word-of-mouth in a major way.

In essence, Facebook has generated a ton of buzz with its new branded content policy. It fosters a more friendly environment for brands and marketers alike and facilitates marketing transactions that are clearly separated from other posts on the platform so that Facebook benefits, their B2C users benefit and the community benefits.

The post How Facebook is Changing the Marketing Game with Influencers appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Many people don’t realize that few magazines and online sources are staffed with writers in today’s “gig economy”. In fact, many publications get some, most, or all of their content provided by ambitious freelancers who pitch an idea, and then write an engaging piece on that idea.

Should you add to the work you do with content creation platforms by writing independently for print or online publication?

What should you consider when pitching an article to a major publication? It can be intimidating to present an idea for the first time, but remember: publications need the creativity of freelance writers as much as freelancers need the money and exposure.

Here’s a beginner’s guide to pitching your unique ideas:

Have an Intriguing Idea

No matter how experienced or talented you are at writing what are referred to as “query letters”, your endeavor will never get off the ground if it isn’t backed by a clever idea. With the rise in prominence of media sources like Buzzfeed, we’ve reached a point of content saturation, wherein if you’re going to suggest new content, now more than ever the idea must be as strong as possible.

This seems fairly obvious, but many freelancers overlook it due to anxiety about the pitch itself.

Consider the Editor Receiving Your Pitch

Ask yourself questions about the person to whom you’re pitching your article.

What is the best way to reach them? Most editors only respond to queries made by email, so this is your best bet. Feel free to reach out with a note requesting the best way to make your pitch.

How can you grab an editor’s attention? If your query is unnecessarily long, it has a chance to be ignored simply due to the time it would take to consider it. One successful freelancer recommends putting information about the idea in the subject line, so if the reader is interested in the pitch, it jumps out immediately.

Introduce Yourself

Writer’s Digest suggests breaking down your query letter into sections to make sure you include all the relevant information.

Let’s review. You’ve gotten the editor’s attention with an excellent lead, you’ve presented your idea in a comprehensive way that justifies the writing and makes the editor want to buy it; all of this means very little if you don’t also sell yourself professionally.

This is basically a cover letter for your contributions to the publication. Discuss your background, your qualifications and why you think your writing could be a strong addition to the publication’s existing content. Think of every query letter partially as a job application.

There are plenty of success stories about strong pitches from talented, confident freelance writers. Freelancing can sometimes make you feel defeated, but having a strong basis of how to pitch an article can yield major results and boost your career to new levels. As a supplement to an existing career as a trusted content creator for a reliable on-demand content site, writing articles for larger publications can take your freelance career to new heights.

Have you successfully (or unsuccessfully) pitched your ideas to a print or online publication? Tell me in the comments!

The post How To Pitch an Article to a Major Publication appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

As the market becomes more and more competitive, you need to start adopting new strategies that can bring more impact to your site’s ability to drive traffic. Here are 3 tips useful to those trying to take their traffic to the next level:

Embrace the Impact of the Influencer

When you utilize an influencer to promote your product, you’re basically piggy-backing on a brand that’s already been established to promote your own.

Shopify has an excellent blog post on this concept, that discusses that consumer actually value word-of-mouth product recommendations more than conventional advertising. The value of an influencer endorsement, however, relies on how relevant they are to your audience.

Optimize the Impact of Your Advertising

Speaking of which, the value of your advertisement rests on how well you know your audience. One way to glean an in-depth understanding of your audience is by creating and studying customer personas that lend a little information about your audience.

By knowing where to find your audience in the digital market, you can target your advertising budget to be the most effective it can be. For example, which demographics watch the most TV, and how? Will your paid social media advertisements be more effective on Facebook, with the largest audience, or Instagram, with the youngest?

Use Analytics to Fine-Turn Your Website

If you’re not using some form of analytics to learn about your site, you’re missing out on your ability to grow. Google Analytics is the largest aggregator of website data, and within hours of signing up you can find out where your site is bringing in traffic and where it’s failing.

To ignore the many free tools that Google curates for website managers is to put blind faith in charge of your website’s success. The ability to monitor which keywords are bringing in traffic and which customers are being converted at the highest rates is invaluable in terms of your website’s growth.

Once you learn the basics of SEO and content marketing, your work is not done; you’ve simply grasped the foundations on which you can build a site that drives traffic and creates conversions.

How do you take your site’s traffic to new heights? Tell me in the comments:

The post Advanced Methods for Increasing Website Traffic appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

But people that rush into entrepreneurship don’t often take the time to consider the details of their business plan. In fact, there are thousands that have the same idea and without a major cost-prohibitive barrier to enter the market, competition is fierce. Here are 3 tips to make your emerging store stand out among the competition:

1. Embrace Partnerships

Many first-time online sellers fail because they try to go it on their own. The approach that brings success to a vast majority of e-sellers involves forming meaningful partnerships with more successful stores, both ecommerce and brick & mortar.

Why? Because Amazon and the like have it all figured out, as far as drawing and retaining customers. Associating with a major brand can kickstart your business, after which you can re-assess your relationships.

2. Market and Re-Market Through Multiple Channels

To get the largest return out of your likely small, starting advertising budget, you have to capitalize on opportunities to build loyal customers. This means send emails to shoppers that abandon their carts and take part in less expensive advertising strategies like content marketing in the form of blog posts and valuable email newsletters.

Your starting budget for advertising and outreach will most likely be miniscule; that’s the part of starting a new business that most people consider to be the most expendable (as opposed to, say, rent on your inventory storage) and you’ll want to squeeze every dollar of ROI out of this budget.

3. Consider the Limits of Your Products and Pricing

It may seem like an attractive option to offer deep discounts, but according to Inc., nothing makes a seller appear more desperate than frequently discounting products, not to mention the effect it has on your profit margins.

The same goes for your product range. While you may think it’s a better option to try and meet the needs of more customers, this can increase the inventory burden on your business. Ask yourself, “is it more complicated and expensive to store 1000 units of 1 product or 1 unit of 1000?”.

The market for ecommerce businesses has never been more attractive, and in turn, more contentious. To stand out among the intense competition, you’ll need to solidify your business plan in a way that gets the most out of your limited resources.

The post 3 Tips to Help Your Emerging Ecommerce Business Surge appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

It’s often thought the way to engage with a more digital audience is a simple ramp up in social media, but as some brands have shown, it’s not as easy as it seems. It takes a well-planned digital marketing strategy to reach an audience when it’s comprised mostly of millennials. Here are some ways to slow down your strategy and engage this unique demographic group:

Don’t Simply Sell, Target

According to Forbes, an estimated 84 percent of millennials don’t trust traditional advertising. That number isn’t just a blip on the radar; it’s indicative of an entire generation’s weariness of standard, broadly sweeping ad campaigns.

Personalized Content is Key

Instead of simply treating younger audiences like dollar signs, marketers need to take the time to understand exactly what their audience wants to see. Rather than simply communicating an audience to buy, brands should produce practical content that benefits millennials outside of existing solely as marketing material.

Another way to create advertising that millennials feel is authentic is to collaborate with the audience. Nothing is more customized than content that speaks directly to the reader, and this demographic wants to provide input into how the products they use are designed. Social media provides a perfect voice to speak to younger consumers, and collaboration and feedback never hurts the creative process.

Don’t Disregard Causes

Insights points to a study that suggests millennial consumers are more likely to positively interact with brands that are committed to social causes. They directly point to brands with charitable interactions tied in with their marketing, like Toms’ “One for One” campaign.

These companies use sustainable advertising methods that tie all aspects of the sales process to a good cause. This shows consumers that not only is the company providing a net benefit to the community with their purchase, their gestures of good faith go far to foster brand loyalty in the future.

As the younger, “connected” generation has increased their power to consume over the recent decade, marketers have struggled to understand their unique approach to advertising, as evidenced by numerous hasty social media faux pas.

Brands that play fast and loose in their social marketing strategy do so because millennials are considered to be more casual than any other group in advertising history, but perhaps taking a step back and using more well-researched advertising strategies is the best way into the hearts and minds of this group.

The post Marketing to Millennials Won’t Work Unless You Try This appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Here is a simple guide to content audits and the benefits they can provide for your site.

What Is a Content Audit?

Simply put, a content audit is a systematic review of your site’s blog and content activity. You might think that such a practice, to be successful, would be exhaustive and time consuming and you’d be right.

Content audits combine methods of cataloging every page of your site and examining the analytics for each: factors such as keyword density, conversions and load rate. The Content Marketing Institute has a list of top analytics to use when auditing your site.

Interested in performing your own content audit or simply learning more about the process? Quicksprout has a useful, step-by-step guide to conducting an audit, as well as helpful tools you can use to ease the process.

What Are the Benefits of a Content Audit?

For marketers, there are several key benefits to conducting a comprehensive audit for your site:

1. Find Out Precisely What’s Working (and What Isn’t)

For a content marketing campaign, you may have a hunch or a feeling about the effectiveness of certain strategies, but until you look at the full picture, you can’t know for sure.

As you examine your content, you’ll be able to see which pages are driving traffic and which ones aren’t, and key into the reasons behind these factors.

2. Develop a Concrete Content Marketing Strategy

The cohesiveness of your content marketing campaign is never more visible than when looked at from a birds’ eye.

Ask yourself if there are inconsistencies in your strategy and figure out how to fix them. This is also useful in developing a best practices guide for future content.

3. Analyze Your Content For Problems

Gaps, SEO flaws and outdated content are a few examples of problems that you might find with your content when you audit, but you may simply want to re-read old content for quality.

A good writer can identify poorly written and ineffective content almost instantly.

4. Refresh Your Memory

If your site has an abundance of pages, you can’t be expected to have clear recollection of your past content.

Reviewing your content can allow you to find articles to re-purpose, multiple articles on the same subjects to consolidate, and allow you to take inventory of everything written on your site.

What Benefits Do the End Users Get?

When marketers review their content frequently, they learn more about their audience and the questions they want answered. In return, the audience gets fresher, greener, more practically valuable content that suits their needs more effectively.

Have you ever done a content audit or helped a client with a content audit?

Share in the comments section.

The post What Is a Content Audit and How Can it Help Me? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

What many small businesses don’t know, however, is that mobile marketing involves more than simply optimizing their site and email formats for mobile browsers.

If that’s all you’re doing to reach your local customers, you’re leaving a major well for reaching potential customers untapped.

Here are a few ways small businesses can take advantage of mobile marketing strategies in local markets:

Take Advantage of Geotargeting

For physical businesses that market to consumers, huge steps forward have been made in the area of mobile marketing. In 2015, Google announced a response to an increase in mobile searches containing some variation of the phrase “near me” in the form of a local advertising option for businesses.

This marked a significant expansion in the way businesses can interact with the mobile community in their area, including the ability to target deals directly to local consumers.

Geotargeting is a significant tool for local, product-based businesses to market on the basis of knowing their potential customers’ locations.

Advertise on Apps and Primarily Mobile Sites

Many sites, like Facebook and Twitter, are seeing increased use from mobile browsers. Some apps, like Foursquare and Snapchat, have a user base that is mostly or all active only on mobile devices.

To reach these users, you have to pinpoint the best mobile sites and apps on which to advertise, which entails keeping your ear to the ground on mobile trends and popular apps.

Here’s a blog that contains a guide of best practices for small businesses looking to capitalize on Facebook’s mobile site, using location extensions in their ad campaigns.

Distinguish SEO and Mobile SEO

There are different considerations to account for when striving for high rankings in mobile SEO than you’re probably used to paying attention to in your desktop SEO.

Mobile site redirection, pop-ups, page loading speeds and button size are all aspects that you’ll have to view in different ways to capture a high mobile SEO ranking for your keywords.

Here is a guide of best practices to follow for succeeding in a mobile SEO campaign, and driving local traffic.

Use these tips to make sure you’re not ignoring a huge marketing channel.

Do you have a current mobile marketing campaign, and if so, what’s working for you? Tell me about it in the comments!

The post How Small Businesses Can Harness Local, Mobile Marketing appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

There is a movement, however, in establishing that SEO and content marketing are inexorably related, and as such must be fine tuned and integrated for marketing success.

I tend to agree. Here are a few ways to grow your digital presence in a way that creates a harmony between SEO and content marketing:

Understand the Ways Keywords and Backlinks Interact

Keywords and backlinks are two major common threads between SEO and content marketing, and unsurprisingly, they hold an important key to integration of the two.

Increase Your Rankings for Keywords Using Content

Grasp of technical SEO can lead to capitalization on keywords and the ability to dominate your niche.

Using analytics, you can see the keywords that drive your traffic, effectively communicating to you what sort of content will be valuable to your audience. You can use this information as a jumping off point; when you know what your audience wants to read, your blog can target content directly to them.

Harness Backlinks From Authoritative Sites

Most marketers already know that backlinks from other reputable blogs raise your SEO ranking. This is a key example of a way in which SEO and content marketing are related: we value backlinks for their contribution to our SEO rankings, but backlinks aren’t possible without great content that provides value to the site using at a resource.

A method of achieving this at a higher rate is looking at the SEO rankings for sites for various keywords, and seeking opportunities for guest blogging, where you can link back to relevant pages on your own blog.

Build On Your SEO With Content Marketing

Integrating SEO and content is a matter of knowing how to develop them. As this Kissmetrics article suggests, once you master technical SEO, there is no room to change or grow. With content marketing, on the other hand, there are never a shortage of ways to innovate and gain leverage on your competition.

If you think of your digital marketing budget as a house, you have to build the foundation first. This is your SEO; you can’t have an effective digital presence without an effective SEO campaign.

The rest of the house, however, is your content marketing. You can develop and add on the more creative features of your house with content that targets your relevant keywords and retains your audience through providing consistent, valuable content.

The post How Can You Integrate Your SEO and Content Marketing? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Somewhere along the way, however, marketers are taking this to mean that simply posting a blog or two a week is all they need to do to explode their brand’s social presence, when in reality, bad habits in content marketing could be hurting ROI.

Here are some common ways bad content can cause your brand to lose the value that content marketing offers.

1. Inconsistent or Stale Content

If your content doesn’t have an audience, it won’t yield new leads. That’s the major difference between a content marketing campaign and an SEO campaign; if your website copy is focused only on SEO, you can get away with bland writing, as long as the keywords are there.

Content marketing, on the other hand, necessitates that thought go into the writing, so that the result is content that is relevant and valuable to your current audience and hopefully, prospective new leads.

2. Writing For the Search Engines Only

Content marketing and SEO are related, but when marketers produce content for the primary purpose of courting search engine rankings, content itself drops in quality.

It’s easy to get caught up worrying about keyword density, but if the content itself isn’t robust and valuable, you’re throwing away benefits of adopting content marketing in the first place.

3. Not Engaging Multiple Channels

Maybe you see some ROI from your blog, but should you rest on your laurels at the faintest sniff of success? There’s a reason why the marketing community can’t seem to agree which content marketing channels are more effective than others.

Different brands have different marketing considerations, so it’s understandable that their lead-maximizing strategies will be different as well. Try different combinations of social media, email newsletters and valuable, sharable blog posts to better reach your audience.

4. Poor or Nonexistent CTAs

Even if your content is otherwise perfect, a Call To Action (CTA), or lack thereof, can hamper your marketing ROI.

No matter how much you spend on content marketing, you won’t see a significant increase in sales without an effective CTA.

The CTA is the bridge that turns your blog audience into a new lead and potential conversion, with a concise statement that shows your product or service’s value to the customer and link to the conversion process.

Without a careful, start-to-finish content marketing strategy, You’re leaving benefits on the table.

How do you maximize the effectiveness of content marketing for your brand, or the brands you write for?

Let me know in the comments section below.

The post 4 Ways Bad Content Can Hurt Your Marketing ROI appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The freelancer’s world today, however, comes with more stability than it ever has.

There are platforms for content organization that make it easy for freelancers to communicate, collaborate, share resources and find work.

Here are four keys to keep in mind as you embark on those nervous first steps as a new freelance writer.

1. Your Market Share Is at An All-Time High

Content marketing is increasing on the back of an increasing reliance on market analytics used to tell marketers what’s working and what isn’t.

The results have shown that content marketing, the consistent release of valuable content to a targeted audience, has increased significantly.

According to Curata in recent years, marketers are increasing their content budget by 76 percent, showing a firm commitment to a form of marketing that is becoming more and more useful as we learn more about our audiences.

New freelancers are not entering a risky or under-appropriated market, by any means.

2. Qualifications Don’t Matter; Expertise Does

As enters the market as a freelance writer, it’s understandable to have some anxiety about how your credentials compare to your peers.

As some experienced freelancers will tell you, however, this comparison is more a product of your perception than a real concept.

More important than where or how you learned to write is what you develop a specialization for.

If you carve out a niche in the freelance market as an authority on a specific few subjects, you have a direct path by which to grow your personal business.

3. Build Loyalty and a Personal Brand

Many people equate being a freelance writer to being willing to take whatever work comes along, and it might be like that in the beginning, but over time you’ll be able to focus your career and refine the work you accept to specific customers and sectors.

This is where building your personal brand comes into play as a major factor for developing your identity as a freelancer.

You’ll find clients with whom you can maximize your benefit and become able to help each other’s businesses move forward.

4. Embrace Your Freedom and Take the Plunge

Freelance writing isn’t easy, nor should you expect it to be, like any other job. Unlike other structured work, however, freelancing garners you a freedom and versatility to keep your identity with you throughout the process.

Your earning potential is, within reason, whatever you want it to be and offers a flexibility unmatched by work in almost any other sector.

It takes a special type of person to want to take the first steps towards a freelance career, but typically it’s the same type of person who can be a self-motivated, successful part of the freelance market.

Do you have any tips that have worked for you? Let me know in the comments section below.

The post 4 Tips For New Freelance Writers To Hit the Ground Running appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Contradicting these theories, however, are recent trends. For example, Amazon and several other major ecommerce players have opened their first brick and mortar (B&M) stores to extend their reach beyond the online market.

How can smaller players in ecommerce use these events to strategize their foothold in the market?

It’s increasingly difficult to launch a business that relies solely on a digital presence; the market has become crowded and contentious, but on the flipside, how do we know how much B&M presence is enough and how much is too much?

Here are some things to consider when deciding how to balance your online presence with your physical one.

1. The Effects of B&M Stores on Customer Service

Apple, for example, could easily carry out all of their business through online stores and licensed retailers, but they opt to maintain a huge B&M presence, bigger than traditional retailers like Penney and Gap.

Having the ability to control the majority of their customer service and tech support interactions has allowed Apple to build a reputation for facilitating the learning of their products and having a positive record with customer interactions.

2. Online Stores Can Support Physical Ones

Many businesses are entering into the online retail arena without a physical store, but it’s become easier than ever to create the latter out of the former.

When you’re already an established online retailer, it’s easy to find out what B&M business will offer your store by the process of trial-and-error.

Pop-up shops are a recent trend in retail in which stores, typically digitally founded, try out a physical presence to see how they can interact with various markets and demographics in different locations. It’s a way to strengthen brand engagement and increase exposure, at least on a trial basis.

3. The Considerations of Customers

Depending on your products and target demographics, your store may have to take different avenues to reach them. For example, if your product is something that lends itself more to physical shopping, like fine jewelry, it may not benefit you to disregard the benefits of a physical store.

Additionally, different demographics view shopping in different ways. While the older generations may be intimidated by comprehensive ecommerce experience, young shoppers are more likely to embrace it. One article points out that mothers are more likely to view physical shopping as a way to engage socially.

When it comes to exposure and all the complex considerations that come with running a business, online or by traditional B&M, it can be difficult to manage all the aspects that come with it. Trends in how the biggest ecommerce names do business, however, show that if you can find a balance that is right for your store based on all the considerations, you can grow your retailer.

The post Brick and Mortar vs Ecommerce: What Should You Emphasize? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

In 2015, research was published that found goldfish to have a higher attention span than the average human. The rise in use of smartphones, and sudden boom in prevalence of short form media like Twitter and Buzzfeed have contributed to a population that desires their content in bite-sized pieces; easy to process and easy to forget.

So how can we create content that leaves a lasting impression?

Marketers pore over the issue of capturing their audience in a way that builds authority and keeps them coming back, trying new and inventive content marketing strategies like breaking long form content into smaller portions by way of serial marketing.

In a marketing world where long form content continues to be recommended amidst a rapidly shrinking attention span, it’s prudent to understand your audience and take a mixed marketing approach.

The Case For Long Form Content

While it seems counter-intuitive, there is a significant body of data that suggests that long form marketing is still effective. There is a positive association between post length and time spent on the page, meaning that long form content has the ability to hold attention, at least in moderation. Long form builds authority for a business and grips an audience when the content is strong.

The recent boom in long form is primarily due to our increased ability to analyze our marketing materials and its effect on SEO.

Where optimizing content for the highest search engine rankings is concerned, long form has been shown to be effective in building SEO and backlinks.

The Merits of Short Form Content

As hot as long form content is for content marketing, shrinking audience attention spans should give marketers pause for several reasons.

First, long form content has to have quality to be effective. Forcing long form marketing where it doesn’t belong will hurt SEO and cause an audience to lose interest.

If there isn’t enough information to present over the course of a long form piece, there is no reason to create it; to build inbound links to your site, there has to be interesting content to link to.

Short form lends itself strongly to social media, which is the form of marketing and communication that dominates the digital arena in many ways.

When you can present something in just a few hundred words, it’s easier to distill into 140 characters and tweet out to a captive audience.

Tailor Your Content to Its Purpose

The idea here isn’t to recommend one form over the other. Content that has enough substance to be spread over 1200 words or more would be doing itself a disservice to shorten into fewer, just like quick marketing pitches will be entirely ineffective if arbitrarily spread out into more words.

Ultimately as a marketer, you have to assume that all other content in the market is optimized to maximize marketing ROI, not simply that there is a length to shoot for in content marketing.

A mixed strategy that utilizes a variety of content lengths as needed is ideal for best results. Simply make sure that you know your audience through analytics and demographic research and cater your content to what you think will keep them engaged.

What do you prefer? Short form or long form content?

The post Is it Viable to Pursue Long Form Content? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

How can we understand the entire consumer market from a handful of buyer personas?

Marketers who adopt a one-size-fits-all strategy and expect their brands to be everything to everybody are doomed to fail. By first identifying which demographic groups your core consumers sit in and then learning as much as you can about them by developing buyer personas lets you create and execute focused campaigns that work.

Buyer Personas Identify Key Demographics

The process of creating a customer persona involves taking the time to explore your business’s analytics to find the interests represented in your customer base. From this, you can build a few profiles representing the type of people to whom you’re selling, including their income range to their motivations, fears and buying attitudes.

The Shopify blog has an excellent step by step guide to finding this information and using it to create effective buyer personas.

When a marketer understands their buyer in great depth and detail, they can target advertising and content towards them.

When you know the motivations and fears of your consumer, you can create advertising that targets those attitudes, effectively producing personalized marketing pitches.

Powerful Content Can Be Aimed Directly at Consumers

We already know that the effectiveness of content marketing is based on producing content that is relevant and valuable to our audience.

When we understand how our core customers think, we are able to zero in on the content that they want to read and engage with.

The positive effects of a content marketing strategy are amplified when the audience is a known quantity.

Information About Buyer Attitudes Can Predict Behavior

Long and frustrating roadblock for most marketers, customer behavior is a difficult value to capture.

Buyer personas make behavioral factors more transparent and easier to key in on.

According to the Harvard Business Review, consumer attitude and behavior are inexorably linked. Customer personas provide a method of understanding buyer attitudes, which can be used to predict the buyer’s behavior.

When we know generally how our customers are going to behave in the face of our marketing campaigns, we get a clear path to the sale.

When you have access to deep understand about your core customers, it makes it much easier to market to them, and you’ll see an increase in your marketing ROI.

The benefits to marketing that customer personas present prove their worth, even given the time it takes to create them.

Do you or your clients use personas? Let me know in the comments section below.

The post 3 Reasons Why Buyer Personas Are Key for Marketers appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The ability to break content down into bite-sized morsels and parse them out over a longer period of time, when used correctly, is an excellent way to keep the reader engaged and hanging on.

What is Serial Content?

The first step to unpacking the concept of serial content is to differentiate it from a content series.

Think of a series as a topic about which multiple posts are made, while serial content describes a narrative that ties each installment together.

Serial content aims to capture the attention of the reader and keep them coming back with each update.

Looking at content like a story makes it inherently more engaging.

The narrative quality of the content, when used correctly, will hold an audience much more effectively than basic, bland content offering an optimistic call to action at the conclusion.

What Are the Key Benefits of Serial Content?

• It Increases Productivity: By turning one idea into the framework for a series of engaging content, you can focus on your ideas with the highest potential and transform them into a story that keeps the reader hanging on to every word.

• It Caters to Diversified Forms of Content: When you direct your content marketing in the form of serial content, each bit becomes bite-sized and more manageable. This not only presents a way to better capture the short attention spans of the market, it lends itself to podcasts, short videos and social media in a way that other content does not.

• It Increases Traffic: Serial content allows its user to grab the reader and keep them coming back for more, which in the short term, translates to more traffic. If used correctly, this strategy means a higher conversion rate and a higher ROI over time, if the content continually meets a need for the reader that was previously unmet.
• It Allows For Better Planning: By mapping out the whole series ahead of time, you can decide how you want to disclose information and format the series for the best results. Use market analytics to find an engaging topic for your audience and plan your method of presenting details to prevent information overload and keep your readers hanging on.

When effectively done, serializing your content distills information down into engaging pieces that are easier for your audience to process and allows you to present new information with each installment.

Whether your goal is lead generation, publicizing products or an increase in conversion rates, the use of serial content can be the versatile means to that end. If you need a hand creating serial content, be sure to check out our high-quality content writing services to connect with a freelance writer perfectly suited for you company.

Have you ever written serial content for a client? Do you have any examples of brands who are utilizing the concept of serial content? Let me know in the comments section below.

The post What Is Serial Content and How Can It Benefit Me? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

As the most successful businesses have found, however, the online environment is not well-suited for a company that resists change. As the trends and shapes taken on by an online market are actively changing, they necessitate an online presence that changes with it.

Use these tips to make sure your business’s online presence is one that is evolving for the growth of your business.

1. Build a Dynamic Website

Your website must reflect the goals of the business in its structure and tool set, but this doesn’t mean the work is done after launching a site.

As Forbes notes, a website isn’t like a paper advertisement or a billboard; it can and should be changed frequently to fit new commerce, payment and advertising technology as well as design trends and be responsive to feedback.

2. Stay On the Pulse of eCommerce Trends

Ecommerce is one of the fastest growing sectors of business due to the expanding capabilities of online markets and the fact that it’s a space that is extremely receptive to innovation. As a result, trends in eCommerce are very useful to keep track of for your business.

An article from Entrepreneur suggests that a key obstacle for a growing online presence isn’t money, but rather the lack of creativity in response to trends in eCommerce.

3. Don’t Stop Tracking and Monitoring

To have a strategy of engaging online presence and effective SEO, you have to know if what you’re doing is working or not. A business that sets an SEO strategy or online customer service channel for brand engagement has to monitor the effects of these strategies.

Has your conversion rate improved as a result of changes in your online presence? Has your SEO led to more visitors to your site or social media channels?

Tracking and analyzing strategies for your online presence is key to acclaiming the returns on your investment, and knowing what to keep and what to change about your online brand management.

If you think your work is done after website creation and basic SEO, think again. These simple tips will help with an evolving business that adapts to an inherently evolving market.

The post 3 Ways to Make Sure Your Website Evolves appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

The author warned against using these sites for anything beyond product discovery and recommended trying to direct traffic to a business’s independent ecommerce retailer as an alternative.

While there are no flaws with the logic exhibited in the article, there are benefits in the sustained use of a retailer like Amazon for your business.

The Conversation Rates of Big Retailers

It’s not a secret that Etsy, Amazon and other ecommerce giants have figured out the formula to turn page views into sales; in fact, Amazon is credited with the highest conversation rate in the industry.

This is likely the reason why the HuffPost blog article praises these sites ability to generate the benefit of product discovery for small businesses marketing through multiple channels.

The blog points out that these sites are also experts in getting customers to click to other pages, diminishing the potential for brand loyalty to an individual seller.

The idea is that once a product or business is established in the market, more energy should be spent directing traffic to an unique site in hopes that they consider only that seller in the future.

According to Forbes, however, expansion in the ecommerce sector may be reducing the existence of true brand loyalty.

When you can’t ensure that page visits will lead to a continued consideration of your products, it follows that sustaining use of Amazon as an additional retail channel is wise choice to capitalize on conversion rates.

Big Retailers Add Value Intrinsically

Most retailers, when considering when and how to use bigger sellers to push their products, are not large enough to have name recognition.

Companies like Amazon have lengthy and established agreements in place between buyer and seller, making the consumers less wary of fraud and online security threats from a site on which they enter payment and identity information.

Amazon, Etsy and the like, bring a familiar brand to an online store, so that new customers can feel more assured about making purchases, adding a value that is most likely unseen in the analysis of marketing strategy.

These concerns must be considered when deciding how to shape the retail channels that are best for your business.

What do you think?

Let me know in the comments section below.

The post How Can Amazon and Etsy Help New Ecommerce Brands? appeared first on Crowd Content - Blog.

Whether the community in question exists in a public space, such as through social media, or in a more private setting operated by the organization, here are three tips to getting the most out of online communities.

1. Participate in the Community

Some companies might create an online presence through an avenue like a Facebook page or other public space without taking the time to participate.

Few behaviors make an organization seem more tone-deaf than creating a means for feedback and then completely ignoring it.

Instead, find ways to interact with the community. Community members are more likely to interact with each other if they see their feedback being responded to.

Like in offline communities, online communities necessitate the building of trust between a company and its customers.

Within a community, if participants can see an earnest effort on the part of the organization to interface with them, a relationship of trust is established, proliferating brand loyalty.

2. Don’t Be Afraid to Take Feedback

More than simply interacting with the community, make sure to let them know that their opinions are being heard and are reflected in the thought process of the organization.

Some feedback may be negative, and that’s okay.

Organizations are often judged not by the feedback they receive, but how they respond to that feedback.

A company that lashes out or attempts to silence negative commentary in a public space is setting themself up for a wholly negative public image.

Additionally, studies show that feedback can be useful for business.

Many companies take product ideas or recommendations directly from the suggestions found within online communities. Think of it as a very large focus group.

3. Find Ways to Grow the Community

Like focus groups, online communities are more effective as they increase their numbers and diversity.

The higher the number of people participating in a community, the more viewpoints a company can capture as feedback. In terms of driving traffic, a growing online community equals a growing number of people who are aware of an organization’s content.

To grow an online community, it takes a widespread marketing approach.

Advertising the company and the community on various forms of social media and highly trafficked blogs and websites assures that a specific community will gain traction in the public sphere.

Of course, there are more methods of getting the most benefit out of an online community as a business or organization; these tips are simply the building blocks of a successful and collective virtual presence.

To capitalize on the cultivation of an online community for you and your business or organization, be sure to build a relationship with the community’s user base, encourage and respond to feedback and continue to find creative ways to generate continuous growth in your community.

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