You don’t have to pay for ads to boost your social profile, but you will have to work that much harder to attain it. Are you willing to put in the effort?
The post How to Increase Your Social Profile Without Paying for Ads by @IAmAaronAgius appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Neil Patel shares three SEO strategies that are so simple, you might be surprised you’ve overlooked them.
The post 3 Super Simple SEO Strategies You Probably Forgot About by @neilpatel appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Posted by Dr-Pete
Earlier this year, Google rolled out the Related Questions feature (AKA "People Also Ask"). If you haven't seen them yet, related questions appear in an expandable box, mixed in with organic results. Here's an example from a search for "Samsung Galaxy S6":
If you click on any question, it expands into something that looks like a Featured Snippet:
Currently, Related Questions can occur in packs of between 1–4 questions and answers. Here's an example of a box with only one question, on a search for "lederhosen":
Once expanded, a typical answer contains a machine-generated snippet, a link to the source website, and a link to the Google search for the question.
We started tracking Related Questions in late July on the MozCast 10K, where they originally appeared on roughly 1.3% of queries. Keep in mind that the MozCast set tends toward commercial queries, and the absolute percentage may not represent the entire web. What's interesting, though, is what happened after that. Here's a graph of Related Questions prevalence since the end of July:
You can clearly see two spikes in the graph — one measured on October 27th, and one on December 1st. As of this writing (December 10th), Related Questions appeared on about 8.1% of the queries we track. In less than 5 months, Related Questions have increased 501%. This is a much faster adoption rate than other Knowledge Graph features.
When you expand a question, the answer looks a lot like another recent Knowledge Graph addition — Featured Snippets. Digging deeper, though, it appears that the connection is indirect at best. For example, here's an expanded question on a search for "monopoly":
If you click on that search, though, you get a SERP with the following Featured Snippet:
It's interesting to note that both answers come from Investopedia, but Google is taking completely different text from two different URLs on the same site. With Featured Snippets, we know that the answer currently has to come from a site already ranking on page one, but with Related Questions, there's no clear connection to organic results. These answers don't seem tied to their respective SERPs.
It's clear that both the answers in Related Questions and the snippets in Featured Snippets are machine-generated. Google is expanding the capabilities of the Knowledge Graph by extracting answers directly from the index. What may not be as clear, at first glance, is that machines are also generating the questions themselves. Look at the following example, from a search for "grammar check":
Out of context, the question doesn't even make sense. Expanded, you can see that it relates to a very specific grammar question posted on Quora. While the topic is relevant, no human would attach this question, as worded, to this search. Consider another example, for "cover letter examples":
The first and last question are obviously, to a human, redundant. To a machine, though, they would look unique. To be fair, Google has come a long way in a short time — even a couple of months ago, some of these questions were riddled with grammar and spelling errors. As of this writing, I can't find a single example of either.
Finally, there are the questions that no human would ever ask:
No rational human would ever want to know what kind of meat is in a gyro. It's better that way.
It's clear that Google is rapidly expanding their capability to generate questions and answers from the index. Both Featured Snippets and Related Questions have evolved considerably since their respective launches, and Google's ability to understand natural language queries and semantic data is growing daily. It may be months before we fully understand if and how these results cannibalize organic clicks, but it seems very clear that Google no longer considers these features to be experimental and will be aggressively pushing forward question-and-answer style SERPs in the near future.
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Posted by ryanwashere
Over the last 2 months, I've driven well over 6,000 organic Facebook visits to my site.
It's not coming from a Facebook Page; it's coming from a Facebook Group.
Several months ago I started my own Group, Digital Marketing Questions — this week we hit 3,000 active, engaged, spam-free members.
In this post, I'm going to retrace my steps and tell you exactly how to build your own Facebook Group.
Before I tell you how to build one, I quickly need to talk about why you should build one.
All the kids left Facebook years ago for Instagram (now Snapchat) and a number of businesses gave up on Facebook marketing efforts when "organic reach" plummeted.
Despite this, there are still hundreds of millions of users still on Facebook.
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg posted a status a couple of months ago stating that for the first time in the network's history, Facebook had over 1 billion active users in a single day.
Let that marinate for a second.
Facebook is a powerhouse that isn't going anywhere anytime soon — it's time to re-invest back into the network.
Facebook pages and personal posts rely completely on the Newsfeed algorithm for organic exposure. Facebook Groups send users a notification whenever someone posts to the Group, thus driving traffic to each post.
On mobile as well:
Facebook gives users the option to silence these notifications. However, if your Group consistently adds value, they won't.
A while back I ran a test:
Let's piggyback off the previous point for a second.
With the ability to drive quality traffic with a single post, you've got a powerful value proposition. I do a ton of link outreach for clients — including the Group in my pitch has skyrocketed success rate.
I mean, which outreach email would you respond to?
Outreach email 1:
Hey [Editor's name],
I came across your post [insert URL] and really enjoyed it. I noticed you're linking out to some posts about [insert topic] and wanted to pitch you on my latest guide that fits in perfectly.
If interested, let me know and I can send you the URL to check out for yourself.
Outreach email 2:
Hey [Editor's name],
I came across your post [insert URL] and really enjoyed it. I noticed you're linking out to some posts about [insert topic] and wanted to pitch you on my latest guide that fits in perfectly.
If included, I'd be happy to share it with my active Facebook Group [insert link] that regularly drives over 600 visits every time I post.
Link building (and marketing, really) is about the exchange of value. When you've got a solid value proposition in exchange for the link, your acceptance rate goes through the roof.
Despite the lack of organic reach, Facebook Pages are still a tremendous marketing resource. However, you need invest time into creating content to be successful. This is a full-time job in itself which requires you (or someone else) to spend time managing it.
When properly managed, Facebook Groups run themselves because the content is crowd sourced from members.
All you need to do is stay active on threads and make sure you're keeping a close eye on spam.
Hopefully I've convinced you about the benefits of building a quality Group. Now, let's talk about the how...
I'm not going to go into detail on how to create your Group because it's easier than setting up a Facebook Page.
I do want to talk about creating the context of your Group. In other words, what should your Group be about?
Unless you're a brand, don't make it about you.
Shopify has a number of helpful Groups geared towards customer support, marketing, general tips, etc. They're able to build communities based on their brand.
For those of us who aren't brands, we don't have that luxury.
In the grand scheme of things, I'm a nobody. If I would've made my Group "Ryan Stewart's Digital Mastermind", I wouldn't be writing this article right now because nobody would've joined.
Focus the context of your Group on the value it provides to members. I like to approach it like I would content strategy:
Facebook Groups shouldn't be approached with a conversion or direct marketing mindset. They work best when approached as a branding tool.
If you can create a valuable resource, your brand will grow with the Group by association.
Remember, Groups are communities—they need to be focused on what engages members. That means hold off on promoting yourself, your business, and links until you've earned the Group's trust.
How do you build trust? By delivering value.
Some Facebook groups are just a feed of links to the admin's blog articles.
Don't do that.
Instead, create native content specifically for the group. Keep ALL the content and engagement within the Group, instead of trying to drive them to your latest post.
In fact, I went a full month without posting a link directly to my site.
Things to try:
Make it obvious you're there to help them.
Do this well and when you do post a link to blog/promotion, people will trust you enough to click it.
A Facebook Group can grow much faster than a Facebook Page (my Group grows 20x times faster than my Page). However, they don't grow on autopilot. They need a significant investment of time, energy, and resources to drive members.
The key to growing a Group (or anything, really) is making it a priority. If you foresee value in owning a Group, take it seriously by investing the necessary resources into growth.
First, let me say this...
DO NOT add people to the Group without their permission.
2 reasons:
Instead, target influencers in their space and share their content.
Tag them in the post so they know you shared it.
They'll most likely join the Group on their own. This is a huge bonus for Group members and incentive for more to join.
You've got your Facebook Page on your website, right? Why not add (or replace) this with a link to your Facebook Group?
If your website does significant traffic, this is a great way to grow your Group.
Data shows the standard logos in the header attract little to no attention. Instead, I added a link to my Group in the bottom right-hand corner of my footer and tagged the link with a tracking CID.
Over 3 months, it drove 346 clicks. Not a massive amount, but every little bit helps.
It's not uncommon to create a great piece of content to entice email opt ins (aka "gated content"). Instead of asking for emails, you can drive people to your Facebook group.
For example, I wrote a post about how to create an SEO proposal. I also took the time to create a free proposal template for visitors to download for their own use.
I hosted the proposal template within the "Files" section of the Group.
To download it, they had to join the Group. Of course, just creating content isn't enough, we've got to promote it as well.
I chose to use organic channels like Inbound.org, GrowthHackers, Warrior Forum, and a few others.
This was by far the most effective method I used, not only to gain members, but quality ones as well. Try and focus your promotion efforts in places where your target users are spending their time.
We want to focus more on building a quality, engaged member base as opposed to a massive, inactive one.
It took me some tinkering to figure out how to promote the Group with Facebook Ads.
You can't promote a Facebook Group the way you can with a Page.
Here's how to get around it:
I started by targeting by remarketing list and then expanding to lookalike audiences after that was exhausted.
In honor of full transparency, exact results from the ads are difficult to track.
"Results" are calculated by post engagements, i.e. Page likes, comments, shares, etc. Not included in "results" are people who clicked through and joined the Group.
From my own calculations, the Group grew 300 members during the 1 week we were boosting the post — that's three times the organic growth rate.
Even though you can't directly track new members with analytics, Facebook ads are no doubt a valuable promotion tool.
I write a lot of guest posts. Within my posts I often link to my personal website.
That site has a big ol' call to action to join the Facebook Group:
This helps to strategically reach new audiences without directly promoting the group within the post.
You can also use guest posts to drive traffic to your post with "gated" content. Both tactics work well, but this one is slightly more direct.
If you're consistently adding new members, you can pitch other Group admins to exchange cross promotion posts. I've had good success using Facebook's internal search to find similar groups.
It takes a while to find spam-free Groups, but once you do it's just a matter of tracking down admins, adding them as friends, and sending them a quick pitch.
If you've got a different audience base, you can add tremendous value to each other by exposing your Groups to new audiences.
The biggest knock against Facebook Groups is spam. A Group can turn into a discount Ray Ban marketplace overnight if not carefully watched by the admins.
It's your job to set and enforce the rules.
Leave no room for guessing. If someone joins the Group and immediately promotes a link, they're banned, no questions asked. It's entirely too much work to give individual warnings to people.
Encourage Group members to flag spam if they see it — stand firm on your no spam rule.
Some people are in a lot of Facebook groups. They don't always remember what they can or can't do in each group.
If you get an uptick in spam in your group, post a reminder about the rules. This has the added benefit of pulling the group together, since the members genuinely want a spam-free place for questions and discussion.
I got tired of repeatedly posted warnings so I created a video and pinned it to the top of the Group. Since doing that, we've seen a significant drop in spam posts.
Even established members of the group will occasionally break the rules. Usually it's because they forgot or weren't sure if something was okay to promote.
In those cases, delete the post, but also PM the offending member and let them know what happened.
Often the person will apologize and that's all you'll need to do. If they argue with you, just remember it's your group, not theirs. You get to decide who stays and who goes.
When you ban someone from the Group, it's an opportunity to reinforce the pride people feel at being part of the "inner circle."
They get to stay, because they followed the rules. The other people broke the rules, so they got banned.
This also reminds people to report spam or rules infractions when they see them.
Sometimes a passionate discussion devolves into an ugly argument. When that happens, PM to the parties involved and let them know it's not okay to have a big public fight in the Group.
Usually that will calm things down. If things got really nasty, you also have the option to just delete the entire thread.
Finally, when your group gets big and active, you might not have time to properly moderate it.
That's the time to hire a moderator. Often you can find someone who's already active in the group, knows the rules and is willing to do it for free.
Bottom line — a Facebook Group can turn to spam quickly. Make sure you're prepared to invest some resources to make sure it stays clean over time.
The numbers don't lie — my Facebook Group is the strongest brand asset I have.
If you're looking to build an active, engaged community around the problems your business solves, I strongly suggest you look into creating one of your own.
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Google’s John Mueller has confirmed via a comment on Google+ there’s no loss in link signals when moving from HTTP to HTTPS.
The post Google Confirms No Loss in Link Authority on HTTPS Implementation by @mattsouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
It may be my age or the craziness going on around the world (or both), but I’ve seen so much hatred on social media lately that it’s almost scary.
People jump into argument with so much passion that it’s almost impossible to keep sanity.
Yet, we have to: It’s essential to maintain dignity. In many cases, it mostly comes down to stopping the discussion before it’s too late.
Here are a few tips for those who agree with me on this:
Some of your friends tend to share something you don’t agree with? It doesn’t make him/her a bad person… nor justifies a spoiled relationship.
If you unfriend that person, he’ll notice sooner or later.
If you stop following what he/she posts, that will always remain your secret prerogative. There’s no way to tell if your Facebook friend is also following your updates.
You can also unfollow a separate thread to stop notifications on new replies and ignore the follow-ups. This is better done earlier than sorry:
The simplest way to explain the difference:
Muting a user on Twitter means their Tweets and Retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline, and you will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from that user (though they can still send you DMs).
Blocking a user on Twitter means everything what muting does + The blocked user cannot see your tweets when going to your Twitter profile.
That basically means that the user can easily tell when you are blocking them but there’s no way for them to tell if you are muting them.
Muting is like silent blocking which you can use to stop seeing annoying tweets without ruining that relationship completely.
Social media discussing is a weird beast: You basically talk to total strangers you know little about. You have no idea about their background; you can’t even tell what they feel.
This is why keeping sanity and trying your best not to offend anyone is so essential. It’s ok if you cannot accept an opposite point of view… or the way your opponents express it in words: You don’t have to change yourself.
What you can do is to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings or saying something you won’t be proud of by shutting down that conversation before it’s too late and without offending your opponent.
Read further: Social Media Etiquette: If There’s an Option, It Doesn’t Mean It’s a Good Idea
The post Social Media Discussions: How to Keep Sanity When Someone Disagrees with You appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
More often than not what tools you use can make a significant difference to the bottom line. Here is a list of tools to grow your business in 2016.
The post 101 Tools to Grow Your Business in 2016 by @ChristinaBaldas appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Posted by kelseyreaves
The link building world is in a constant state of evolution. New tools are continually introduced to the market, with SEOs ready to discover what works best. Our outreach team at Modernize recently found ourselves in this position. In need of a new email automation service, we were eager to explore and test out new tools to see what improved our overall outreach system.
Modernize is in the home improvement space, and we focus heavily on energy efficiency and green living — thus, we target lots of green blogs, solar websites, etc. Our aim at Modernize is to be a resource for homeowners and provide quality content so homeowners can make informed decisions when it comes any home improvement project.
When faced with this task of changing our email automation service, we were pleasantly surprised to come across a more effective tool. This recent switch drastically increased response rates and ultimately our number of attainable back links. In an effort to help other link builders increase reply rates, I wanted to detail our process of switching from Get Response to Pitchbox, and how we eventually increased our response rate by 187% in only one month's time.
Our link building strategy has two main parts that work in conjunction to generate links: our initial outreach email sent via Get Response and our marketing automation built in Infusionsoft. Both parts are essential to our outreach strategy; however, with time we had realized Infusionsoft was working great, while Get Response was causing us some trouble.
To begin, we take the list of prospects we've assembled and upload them into Get Response. Next, we craft our initial outreach message using a Get Response template. Each email used similar messaging, although we swapped writing examples based on the vertical we sent to. For example, green websites would be sent samples of our content on “How to Save Energy at Home This Winter” and “Why Solar is Always a Good Investment.” Home decor bloggers were sent our sample content on “Trendspotting: Home Accents in Neon” and “Great Sources for Temporary Wallpaper.”
For each response, we’d create a record in Infusionsoft that contained their basic information, including their first name, the source, email, website name, Domain Authority, and Page Authority. We also place each contact within the appropriate status in the 10-point sales sequence we created.
Here's each step in that sequence:
Example contact in Infusionsoft
Example contact placed into marketing automation within Infusionsoft
We place each record created in Infusionsoft within our marketing automation. If a prospect doesn't respond within a week, they get an automated follow-up. The messaging varies dependent upon where they are in the sales sequence. Each stage has a series of 5 follow-up messages. If after 5 tries there's still no response, we move the contact to “Lost.”
Snapshot of 2 stages of our sales sequence built in Infusionsoft
As we standardized the process, it was clear that Get Response had drawbacks. With Get Response, you’re required to use one of the pre-made templates when sending out a bulk email. We tried to make the template look as "real" as possible. However, the best template we found offered a cupcake-yellow background and unusual centering. As one would expect, our initial email looked very spammy. Furthermore, the “From: 332015@getresponse.com” at the top was a dead giveaway that the email was automated.
With this process, you cannot set up automatic follow-ups to those who do not respond or open the initial email. It’s essentially a one-and-done deal. Therefore, if a prospect didn’t respond to our initial email, we would have to manually export the list, craft a follow up template, and send an entirely new message. Needless to say, this was not a viable option for the volume we were striving to reach on a weekly basis.
When making the switch from Get Response, we had certain features we were in need of that the new tool we tried, Pitchbox, was able to fulfill. These included:
Pitchbox templates, including the initial message and two follow-up messages
Our first step when setting up Pitchbox was to connect our outreach email to the account. After we synced our account, we crafted the first outreach message. Minus a few changes in wording, we essentially used the same message in Pitchbox as we had used with Get Response. The pitch read:
Over time, we tested different subject lines and discovered our highest-performing subject line was “quick question about: domain.com” that had an average open rate of 60.19% across all verticals.
Next, we went ahead and created the follow-up messages. We wanted the follow-up messages to look as realistic as possible, and therefore used the following message as our first follow-up. The idea was to make it seem like we were replying to the last message we sent them.
Here's what the follow-up message looked like:
The last follow-up message followed in the exact same form:
We decided the optimal wait time between follow-up messages was 4 days. This gave us time both to respond to all emails and to follow up close enough to convey a sense of urgency.
Our next step was composing the outreach schedule. Pitchbox sends one email out every 3–4 minutes; with multiple campaigns running at once, it was essential to create an outreach schedule that could handle a large volume of emails. Therefore, our outreach schedule sends out emails every day of the week, 7am until 8pm specific to the recipient's time zone. We also added another outreach email that helps to split up the volume of the emails.
Now we could send out two emails every 3-4 minutes, not just one. With Get Response, we did have the ability to send out emails all at once, therefore we could test different times of the day to see what works best. Since Pitchbox sends via Gmail, we don’t have the luxury of testing different send times.
Pitchbox provides you with awesome analytics, specifically related to response rates. It can differentiate between the different replies, such as an out-of-office response versus an actual response back. It also looks at the opportunity age and accounts for the amount of responses over time. Get Response didn't have analytics on responses, but it did have analytics on opens and clicks, which Pitchbox does not currently have (though it's a feature they're adding in the future). Our weekly reporting focused heavily on response rates as well as open rates, so we needed to find a solution that would track the open rate and click rate of our outreach emails.
After researching our options, we discovered the email tracking service Bananatag. With this tool, every email sent through Pitchbox is given a tag that tracks the interaction.
Individually-tracked emails found in Bananatag
For reporting, I’d simply export all tags and do a VLookup in Excel to compare email lists sent with the tags Bananatag has tracked. From there, I’m able to find the open rate and click rate for each campaign.
It's clear in this case; the numbers tell the story. When we were using Get Response as our email automation service, our average reply rate was 16.55%. The accept rate of an individual expressing their desire for an article was 5.32%. When we made the switch from Get Response to Pitchbox, our average reply rate increased by over 187% to 47.44%. The accept rate increased as well: it's at 7.35% and continues to steadily increase over time.
We also saw a positive increase in open rates of the initial outreach email. With Get Response, the average open rate was 49.59%. With Pitchbox, the average open rate is now 54.76%.
It’s safe to say the switch in email automation service was the reason for the overall increase in response rates and accept rates. We hypothesized that the main reason for the overall increase was the legitimacy of the initial email. Because it's sent through gmail, therefore looks like (and is) a genuine email. There aren't any weird alignment issues or off-colored backgrounds — just a good, ol'-fashioned email that looks as if I crafted each one individually. The follow-up messages are also another big reason for our increased reply rates. With Pitchbox, we increase our chances of getting a response with the three message we send, unlike the one chance we got with Get Response.
Moving forward, we really want to test different types of messaging, specifically related to the follow-up messaging and the outreach schedule. Currently, the two follow-up messages we use in our campaign are sent out every 4 days. We'd like to test this and see if we should narrow that time from 4 days to 2, or possibly extend the time in between follow-ups from 4 days to 7. Testing our messaging is also vital to improving the process. Are prospects losing interest too quickly because our message is too long? We plan on A/B testing this in the future, using our original message and a shortened version.
When faced with the task of changing our email automation service, we were pleasantly surprised to have not only improved upon the tools we use in our link building process, but ultimately increase our reply rates drastically — by 187%. Have you had your own success with any particular outreach tools? Share your tips in the comments!
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