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The 21st century human is an information junkie. We consume information almost every minute of our waking hours. On the Internet, through newspapers, magazines, billboards, on television; the list is endless.
At least 90 percent of all information that we consume is in the form of words. And how do we access these words? Through typography. Typography is the art of making words do their job of conveying information in the most efficient way possible.
Typography consists of 5 basic elements:
1. Fonts or type used
2. Size, weight, color, variety of fonts
3. Layout of text – hierarchies and flow
4. Spacing of text
5. Interaction between text and the images
For the sake of simplicity, I shall not delve into leading, kerning, counters and other such technicalities here.
We spend hours of research and design time trying to perfect the layout of a Web page, the color of each button, the number of fields in a form or the navigation from one page to another in order to maximize conversions on our website.
Typography is an integral part of design. Why then, do we not spend any time on understanding how typography affects a user? Do we realize the impact typography can have on website conversions? Do we even think there is a causal relationship between typography and conversions? Why Should You Care About Typography?
Typography is the nice suit that you wear to your job interview. You do not get hired based on how nice a suit you wore, but wearing a shabby un-ironed suit definitely makes a bad first impression and reduces your chances of landing that dream job.
Going back to the earlier definition of ‘typography’, you’ll notice that the operative words here are, ‘convey information’ and ‘efficiently’.
Like that nice suit of yours, good typography makes your site look attractive and the information on it easy to read and understand. It casts a good first impression and makes a user want to stay and read on.
A user typically lands on your website to fulfill some need of theirs – to get information, to shop, to compare prices and so on. Users on a website typically view your page as a whole. We all do.
We scan for things that jump out at us first and then follow the visual hierarchy of text, images and white space to understand the information being conveyed.
As a designer / marketer, your job is to make life easier for the user.
Use good typography to help your user understand and agree with what your site is trying to convey. That is the first step to turning a visitor to your site into a paying customer.
John Siebert is the President and CEO of Tranquil Blue – A Web Design Tampa Company that focuses on all kind of website design, mobile app development and search engine marketing.
Want to get more out of the amazing content you publish online? Of course you do!
Writing guest blogs takes a lot of time to research the topic, write engaging content, provide images, and pitch to quality websites. My SEO team and I utilize a few different methods to repurpose our content creation efforts by reposting our external publications on our own blog.
Normally, posting duplicate content on your website is a bad idea. However, the following three strategies address the duplicate content issues and enhance your website’s user experience, RSS feeds, and email marketing.
Show off your content to your loyal website visitors
By posting your external publications on your own website, you’re allowing WordPress, or any other CMS, to display the thumbnail, an excerpt, and an article link on your website providing easy access to your amazing content. You spent a lot of time on your guest blog. This is a nice way to show your website visitors content you publish on other websites.
Notice on my blog that the SEW article is showing in my blog list.
It also shows the article in my Recent Blog Posts list in the footer of my site.
The excerpt might just show in the SERPs too. The screenshot below shows my main blog page with a snippet from a previous SEW article that I posted on my site using this method.
Displayed in RSS feeds
Accessible by RSS Readers
Take a look at an RSS reader app I have on my iPhone. Notice the SEW article with Matt Cutts and his cats is showing when viewing my website’s RSS feed. Unless your followers were subscribed to every blog you publish on, they might never know about your content.
Included in your email marketing
We don’t do as much email marketing as we should, but I do manage to get out a monthly email to my blog subscribers using MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email feature. I created an email template, don’t laugh, and scheduled the campaign to check my blog for new content on the 1st of each month using my RSS feed. MailChimp conveniently compiles the email and fires it off.
My blog subscribers get an opportunity to read the content I publish on other websites.
3 Strategies for Reposting on Your Website
Method 1: Reference with a summary
Summarizing a publication is a great way to generate new content for your website while referencing the original publication. In the example below, I crafted a descriptive title, added an image of my news article, and summarized the interview from our local newspaper.
The nice part about this method is you can provide an update. In this case, our company had almost tripled in size in just a few short months.
Method 2: rel=canonical
If you have multiple sites that you own or control and publish content that is useful to the users of each individual site, then this method is preferred. By including an rel=canonical tag in the head section of your page that links to the original source, you can control which property Google displays in the search results and obtains PageRank.
Search Engine Watch uses this method when republishing from sister publications like ClickZ, the Inquirer, etc.
Dr. Peter Meyers, a marketing scientist at Moz, wrote up a really great article that answers a lot of rel=canonical questions. If you find yourself confused, I advise checking that out.
Method 3: 301 redirect
If you’re struggling to find time to summarize your publications and are worried about confusing the search engines with the rel=canonical tag method, you can simply repost your article and apply a 301 redirect.
Some might argue that you are driving your website visitors away from your site, which you are. This might not be for everybody. I use this strategy for credibility.
Our web and SEO company is pretty small, so I find it advantageous to show my potential clients that I’ve been published as an expert on popular SEO blogs or mentioned in the news. I’ve landed a few accounts and speaking opportunities from external publications.
Create a new blog post in your WordPress admin using the same exact content from your guest blog. Add your featured image, etc., just like a normal blog post.
Pro tip: Create a unique excerpt to increase your click-through-rate (CTR).
Now here’s where the Quick Page/Post Redirect plugin comes in.
Check “Make Redirect Active”
Check “Open redirect link in a new window.”
Decide if you want to Add rel=”nofollow” to redirect link (to pass link juice or not)
Check “Show the Redirect URL below in the link instead of this page URL”
Enter the URL of your guest blog post.
Change the Type of Redirect to a 301 Permanent
And finally, publish your blog post.
Bonus: Fetch as Google and Submit to Index (using 301 redirect method)
I’m not sure if this works as I’d hoped, but I was attempting to notify Google of new content that isn’t on my site using Google Webmaster Tools. Normally, you wouldn’t be able to fetch a page under a domain that you don’t have control over, but since I’m 301 redirecting my post, the fetch was successful and I was able to Submit to Index. Take a look at the screenshot below.
I need to do some additional testing to verify that this works, but hey, it’s looking good!
Summary
By reposting off-site publications on your website using either of those three methods, you are able to repurpose awesome articles and put your content in front of more readers without worrying about a duplicate content penalty from Google.
I tend to write more articles for other blogs than I do on my own website, so it’s a great way to show my clients and blog subscribers what I share.
Seeing that this is an RSS driven tactic, I’d be curious to see if you have any other uses for this application. Share your comments below.
Matt Morgan is the founder and CEO of Optimize Worldwide, a web design & SEO company based out of Northern California. Matt writes for numerous SEO blogs offering tips to help companies gain more online visibility in the major search engines through post panda/penguin website optimization, content marketing, and creative link building strategies. Offline Matt enjoys enduro motocross riding, networking with like minds, and hanging out with his wife Holly.
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How to manage the multiple online conversations for your business
With the torrent of social media conversations coming at us today, how do you manage the flow?
The answer used to be: Painstakingly and one conversation at a time. But a new crop of social media tools aims to tamp down the social media gusher by letting you update, manage and maintain several communication outlets at once. (While it’s sometimes hard to know what counts as a social media dashboard, we’re not including a wide range of customer relationship management (CRM) or social media monitoring tools here.)
When selecting a dashboard for personal or professional use, you should consider such items as cost, analytics and which social networks they support, among other things. Our list is meant to feature some of the breakout social media dashboards in the space and highlight their distinguishing features to make the selection process a bit easier.
Threadsy: Unify your email, social networks
1Threadsy is an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard that allows organizations to connect through multiple email accounts as well as Facebook and Twitter. Free to use, Threadsy is great for managing your brand from one clean dashboard across the big names in social media platforms. With no fees and no downloads, this service should make a splash in the space for both personal use and use by your business or organization.
Myweboo: Organize your information streams
2Haven’t heard of Myweboo? That’s OK. This upstart startup invites users to discover, browse and read popular streams and share them with friends and followers. You or your organization can choose from a wide variety of “applications” to connect to and stream to a dashboard from categories like news, social, fashion, photo and video. These streams can be viewed together of filtered from “My Dashboard” and then easily shared via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Delicious and other networks. You’re in complete control of which sites will make up your dashboard. Free to use, Myweboo is run by an appealing brother-and-sister pair of young tech stars.
Hootsuite: Integrate all your platforms
3Our personal favorite is Hootsuite because of the depth of its products and services. You can update multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and more) from a computer or iPhone, Android or Blackberry. A team of users can track results of their interactions and create a dashboard that will work efficiently with their preferred social streams. Hootsuite offers two versions. One is free and aggregates up to five social network and two RSS feeds; it stores stat history for 30 days and is ad supported. For $5.99 a month, your organization can enjoy unlimited capabilities for a single user, with each additional user costing $10 per month.
Spredfast: For teams of social marketers
4Spredfast allows an organization not only to manage its social media presence but also to monitor and measure its voice across multiple social media channels from one easy-to-use dashboard. A great choice for organizations with multiple hands in social media marketing efforts, Spredfast offers superb organizational tools that help identify and assign tasks to multiple users across multiple social media sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn and blogging platforms. It also lets you publish video to many video sites at once, similar to TubeMogul. Free for 30 days, Spredfast has pricing tiers that start around $250 per month for businesses. See our recent writeup on Spredfast.
MediaFunnel: Collaborative, permission-based system
5Coordinate and manage your business’s social media presence with MediaFunnel, a collaboration platform that lets you navigate and moderate online conversations about your brand. One interesting feature: You can use MediaFunnel to manage your team member’s social media updates — say, by holding your intern’s tweets in a queue until approved by a supervisor (roles include admins, publishers and contributors). Chiefly geared to businesses, MediaFunnel makes it easy to combine several social media accounts and to offer solutions for presenting a brand’s presence through multiple voices. Scheduled tweets, brand alerts and tweets via email or SMS are supported.
CoTweet: Advanced features for Enterprise users
6CoTweet is used by thousands of individuals and employees at enterprises around the world. The free Standard edition is limited to a few Twitter accounts and geared to a couple of team members. The paid Enterprise edition supports Facebook, too, and is geared to brands more deeply engaged in social marketing, brand building and customer support. It supports an unlimited number of users, advanced workflow, more analytics, third-party integrations — including Salesforce.com — productivity tools, unlimited conversation history for deeper customer relationships, a mobile app, rich profiles of fans and followers and more. Continue reading →
Before the days of the internet, we learned about businesses, products and services from newspapers, magazines, television and radio. We associated a business name with what it offered. We didn’t type in a keyword and come up with a name. If you pay attention to what’s happening in the search world now, Google is moving away from favoring websites that vehemently pursue rankings through anchor text and towards the websites that establish their brands. This is evidenced in the decrease in backlinking strategies that are effective and the increase in rankings of big brand names. You can see this in the move towards more natural backlink building and in local results presented by proximity to the searcher. New websites should take their business building cues from what works offline; that is, establishing their brand’s reputation.
Social Media
One of the most obvious places to engage current and future customers is in social media platforms. Given the latest search feature “Graph Search” now offered by Facebook, your business pages’ activity and business location proximity to the searcher increase the chances of being shown to searchers typing in keywords related to your business page.
But, the most important use of your business page is to communicate with people interested in your products or services. There, people will see your response to inquiries, how you handle concerns and be more receptive to information about your business than they are by email.
Back Links
The focus of your backlinking strategy, especially when your website is just out of the gate, should be to let people know what you offer and associate those services with your website. Those links should contain more natural links, i.e. http://www.yoursite.com, yoursite.com and yoursite than any other type of link. If you focus on link building as a way of sending traffic from related sites rather than building anchor text links, you will build higher quality links and build a reputation on websites where there are really people interested in your business. It’s like running an ad in a trade magazine; you would want to pay for the magazine related to your business, not any random magazine where the readers wouldn’t be interested in your services.
Press Releases
If done properly, press releases offer a great opportunity to create brand awareness. Focus not on the links, but creating something newsworthy that can be picked up by quality news sources and blogs containing readers who will be interested in your business.
Don’t Be Boring
If your website contains just a few pages and offers nothing different or engaging to the visitor, you’re not going to stand out from other websites offering the same thing. Find a unique way to engage people by being informative and adding new content on a regular basis.
Be sure to include your contact information, rather than a form, so people know they are working with a reputable company that doesn’t hide when a purchase goes awry. You might draw people to your website the first time, but to build your brand, you can’t give them reasons to go on review websites and complain about you. Your interaction and accessibility are essential.
Theresa Happe works with Namefind.com where businesses can find the best brand names for their websites and corresponding available social handles.
Client work for B2B and B2C organizations has me reviewing thousands of conversations in social venues every month, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that much of Sales and Marketing as we know them is significantly out of alignment with B2B clients. They are much smarter now and want a new style of relationship with their business partners (erstwhile “vendors,” “providers”). Social business is permeating client networks throughout the economy and changing client behavior and expectations.
This has created a rare opportunity for B2B sales and marketing people who understand and respond ahead of the market. Here I’ll do a deeper dive into how legacy Sales and Marketing functions will evolve, using social business as a lever.
Reexamining B2B Sales and Marketing
Marketing assumes it’s not economically feasible to have large-scale one-on-one client conversations. Sales assumes it must rely on one-on-one prospecting to drive value. Both assumptions are increasingly false.
Two examples of misalignment: One of Marketing’s underlying assumptions is that it is not economically feasible to have large-scale one-on-one client conversations, so marketing must achieve scale through secondary research (and remain isolated from the client). One of Sales’ key assumptions is that it must rely on primary one-on-one prospect/client/customer communications to drive value. Both of these are increasingly false, so I’ll drill down on them before offering practical recommendations for how Sales And Marketing can explore social business at a new level.
As head of marketing for several B2B firms with direct sales forces since the 1980s, I have worked with my fellow execs in Sales, Operations, Finance & IT to drive the top line. As a management consultant, I have advised clients in adopting numerous disruptive technologies that have confronted enterprise functions with change. These experiences lead me to believe that social business will transform B2B Sales And Marketing during the next 5-10 years. Moreover, organizations that begin the transformation process earlier will profit at the expense of laggards because social business will improve enterprises’ communications and collaborations with clients by an order of magnitude.
B2B Marketing usually refers to several practices that vary with the type of business, but the end game is to define/control message and produce leads that are worked by Sales: •Defining the firm’s brand, strategy, value proposition and “message”; this includes managing how various brand elements are used (elevator pitches, logos, colors) •Designing and running outbound “campaigns” via email marketing, snailmail •Attracting/capturing inbound leads via rich media, SEO, SEM, thought leadership •Conducting database management (CRM..) •Producing “collateral” (websites, brochures, templates for use by Sales) •Managing the firm’s participation in conferences and trade shows •(often) Managing the firm’s channel and strategic alliances •All of these practices are grounded in scaled group communications; i.e. Marketing communicates with researched demographics, not individuals because they usually have no relationships with individual prospects.
B2B Sales/Business Development is a contact sport that usually refers to a direct sales force, which is sometimes supported by indirect or inside sales: •Identifying leads via face to face, telephone or email interactions with their individual professional networks; often salespeople are hired for their career-accumulated networks •Working leads sourced from Marketing and their individual work according to a gated pipeline or funnel along which leads approach conversion •Conducting (telephone) calling and email campaigns •Getting and conducting meetings with prospects •Working conferences and trade shows under Marketing’s direction •Entertaining clients and prospects (golf, opera, sports, other events) •Collaborating with channel partners’ representatives to exchange and work leads •Closing deals and handing off to “delivery” teams (or, in the case of professional services, managing delivery) •All of these practices are based on communications with individual prospects.
In summary, Marketing has served as the firm’s research and scalable communications arm while Sales has been responsible for doing the deals. Marketing’s value proposition has been researched intelligence, strategy and scaled communications. Salespeople would develop intelligence based on direct feedback with their own networks.
How B2B Sales and Marketing can evolve with social business
Marketing’s biggest mental roadblock is the habit of being isolated from the client/customer. “But I don’t touch the client, that’s Sales.” No, Marketing has to evolve its approach. Marketers that realign themselves will unleash value that they could only dream about before. Here are a few specific ideas to get your evolution thinking started: •Marketing makes most decisions in isolation from real clients (research and focus groups are too artificial because they rarely focus on client-to-client interactions, which are an order of magnitude more enlightening). Marketing can start infusing marketing research with direct communication with prospects and clients. •Conferences and trade shows can be fantastic opportunities to connect with differentiated prospects, but few firms even come close to realizing the ROI. The opportunity here is to reimagine events as connection opportunities that happen to have a geographical/time dimension to them. Marketing currently spends most of its attention on physical event logistics. What if they used the event as an excuse to involve prospects in discussions leading up to the event? Onsite, they capture the most relevant client/prospect conversations on video, which can enable other prospects to get engaged. They design programming that engages attendees and non-attendees in what happened “after” the event. But “the event” is no longer bounded by the physical event. •Transform the channel by organizing online collaboration spaces that connect various channel partners in ways that are meaningful to them. Most parts of the channel have information that is useful to others, but it’s almost impossible to get someone on the phone. Email is very inefficient. And people need guidance for how to interact in transparent social venues. •Here’s how many-to-many communications in social venues have different economics: Research has consistently showed that, in most online social venues, about 10% of participants are interacting while 90% are observing. And they can go back to it. Moreover, anyone interested in that topic can find it. Now. Email is a closed system that has no leverage in comparison. High-quality, relevant digital conversations are almost always superior to any “content” that any company can create because the prospect is involved. It’s more relevant, it’s more individualized.
Sales needs to come out of its shell. Many salespeople are actually shy in front of large audiences they don’t know personally (how many times does the sales team gab among themselves at the trade show booth?). So, it’s a stretch for many salespeople to converse with “strangers” in social venues. Many of them are afraid of writing (they’re talkers). Here are specific examples for Sales: •Although many people have learned this, I’ll repeat just in case: In general, writing questions and responses in public is held to a fairly low standard grammar-wise. Most people aren’t going to attack you if your sentence structure is horrid. You can spell-check words. Get over this fear if you harbor it. (Rare exceptions apply.) •Like Marketing, Sales need no longer accept assumptions about “market conditions,” or prospects’ needs. Find and interact with people in social venues who are talking about things your clients care about. Observe what they think, and ask them questions. •Think about yourself compared to people in your firm and outside. What knowledge or interest do you have that you have related to the product/service that lets you add unique value? Experiment with search: create keyword combinations that find these conversations, and observe them for a while. Then jump in and add your perspective. Remember, these conversations are your thoughts immortalized. Even better, you can bookmark the best ones and share with prospects later. In the LinkedIn forum, the prospect will see you offering value-added information and guidance; when people thank you, your credibility goes way up. In forums, other prospects are setting the table for you to help them and gain huge, immortal visibility.
Net net
Disruption always serves to elevate threats and opportunities. I hope you can see that “traditional” sales and marketing practices developed in an era in which B2B clients had relatively little opportunity to find information independently or to connect with other people with similar challenges. Social business has changed the game, and early movers have the opportunity to profit to the detriment of their competitors.
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SUNRISEDATA1 ~ Increase Your Visibility To Your WebSite 