What You Need to Know About Podcasting

Welcome to the podcast revolution! Now, more than ever, podcasting has reached the peak of its popularity, probably because it is an ideal way to share your thoughts and ideas to the entire world. If you are looking for a jumping point to start your podcasting career, here's a list of things that you should prepare.

Factors to Consider During Pre Production

1. Theme - Before you do anything else, pick a niche that you are passionate and knowledgeable about. It must be something that you think is fun so that you will not run out of ideas in talking about it. If you want, you can cover a broad topic like motherhood, books, or student life. No worries, if you feel like expanding your theme or narrowing it down in the future, there are no rules that will stop you! But, as you are still starting, make sure that you will stick to a specific one first until your brand is established.

2. Format and Episode Length - Most podcasts last around 30 to 60 minutes long, and anything longer can be too much for the typical listener. How long do you want your podcast to be? Take into account an outline of the critical things you want to be included in every episode, and outline it from there. You should also think about how you will be segmenting the show.

3. Script - No matter how much you know about the show you want to produce, you should write a script and outline everything. With structure, you will make transitions more elegant, natural, and allows you to stay within the time limit.

Essential Podcasting Equipment You Should Buy

1. USB Microphones - Pod-casters must invest in the proper microphones. You can use the USB ones like Fifine USB Plug & Play and CAD 37 that you can directly plug to your computer for excellent sound quality and flexibility. You can also use the Audio-Technica ATR2100 for an inexpensive microphone option.

2. Recording Software - For your audio recordings, you have a lot of options to choose from. One that's great to use is called Audacity because it is the one which is most compatible with the usual operating systems. With Audacity, you can record directly, or you can upload different audio files like WAV or MP3 files. Other alternative options are Acoustica, AudioJungle, or Pro Tools.

3. Headphones - Headphones are essential so that you can hear yourself and your guests talking. There's no need to buy fancy ones. Just make sure that it is compatible with your mixer if you have one.

4. Pop Filters - Sometimes audio recordings can hurt the ears, especially with popping sounds. Make sure that you get filters to clamp on to your mics so that too much air pressure or hard pronounced consonants will not hurt your podcast.

5. Mixers - If you're an amateur, there's no need to get this yet. But, if you are serious with this, it can be a significant investment as they offer better recording options, more ways to control, and comes with some effects.

Things to Do During Production

1. Recording - So, this part is where you apply everything you have prepared for. When you're starting, there's no need to perfect everything and overthink your actions. Prepare yourself from some troubleshooting, especially during your first time. Just enjoy the recording until it is complete.

2. Editing - This is where the magic happens. Editing takes some time to learn and lots of time to execute as well. Here you can trim your file, add some effects, add some background audios, or tinker with the volumes. Some things that you should watch out for are ensuring that your vocal levels are precise and roughly the same throughout the podcast. You should also trim out dead spaces and awkward pauses to make things sound more smoothly.

3. Uploading - A podcast only becomes a podcast once you have shared it on the internet. To share your show, you should find a host site online before you link the file somewhere else. Some people tend to use Blogger or WordPress for a more straightforward means to host their audio files. But, there are limitations when these almost-free blogging sites are used.

4. Indexing - Podcasts, in general, are XML files that index MP3 files and metadata about a specific show. To generate the best results, a reliable guide would be the specifications as set by Apple Podcasts. Once you accomplish sending the XML file online, use feedvalidator.org or other similar RSS validation tools to make sure that you did things right. After that has been checked, you can submit your podcast to sites like Sound-cloud, Stitcher, iTunes, Google Music, or Spotify.

How to Spread Your Podcast Around

1. Host Website - Make sure that your podcast has somewhere that it considers as its home. Design a site that would stand out and accurately represent your brand. Also, don't forget to provide all the information about your podcast on your website, including episode titles, episode descriptions, all participants, and episode show notes.

2. Social Media - To gather listeners for your podcast, utilise the power of social media. Post notifications and promotions to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and other similar sites whenever new podcasts become available. Also, use social media for branding, additional features, and showcasing extra content. You can also include updates and other links to keep promoting your podcast even after it has already aired. You can also use social media to encourage your guests, post teasers, share sneak peeks, and shout outs.

Final Thoughts If you have accomplished all of these, congratulations! You are now officially a pod-caster! Pro tip: podcasts are like TV shows that recur, so you should get your thinking hat on and plan the next episode. But before you record the upcoming production, consider acquiring feedback from people close to you, people who have listened to your show, and do a self-reflection of things that you can improve on. Another great tip is to have an ideas notebook or journal where you can jot things down every time you feel the creative juices flowing.

Lydia Lee is a Fashion Blogger and works for a Tech company as her day job while writing as a freelancer for several fashion magazines both local and international. Her pet terrier named Fugui keeps her company and loves going on long walks at the park.

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Infographic: SEO Mistakes That Ruin Your Website

One of the building blocks of a successful website is Search Engine Optimization. There is no way a blogger or website owner can forget this internet marketing technique if they want to increase traffic and rank higher on search engines. More importantly, SEO is important for businesses who want to improve their brand’s visibility & online sales. As such, researching and implementing the best SEO strategies for your website is a must. This will help you to attain website authority that’ll help propel your business to a level of success in the online world.

However, SEO is not an easy task that can be mastered quickly. There is a lot involved in it, and despite being divided into on-page and off-page techniques it can be a lot challenging. This leads to many newbies making silly SEO mistakes that could ruin their website. Thus, it is important to be aware of these mistakes and rectify them immediately.

What SEO mistakes do you need to be aware of?

There are quite a few, however, the most common mistakes are over-optimization of keywords, lack of social media presence, slow website speed, broken links, and non-mobile-friendly website. These can affect not only your site’s conversion but also hurt your brand’s reputation.

Not having a responsive (mobile-friendly) website, for example, will lead to you losing out potential customers to your competitors. It could also affect your site’s ranking. Likewise, the lack of a social media profile for business on relevant social platforms also limits your reach and brand visibility. Thus, it is essential to identify these mistakes and fix them post-haste.

To this end, here is an in-depth infographic that provides you with a list of common SEO mistakes which marketers make. So, go ahead and take a look, and for further detail take a look at this article Common SEO Mistakes.

We hope the Infographic will you to identify the mistakes you have and don't forget to share it. Peace & Blessing :)

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Top 10 Best Free WordPress Websites Plugins in 2019

There are heaps of free WordPress plugins that can provide helpful functionality to your WordPress site. Plugins can help you create better content, help in marketing your site more effectively and keep it loading quickly. There are various free WordPress plugins that provide a better personal experience. Before selecting the WordPress plugins, you can divide available plugins into four categories and then select the plugin as per the need. These categories can be divided into marketing and SEO, creating various types of content, performance, security, and maintenance, and advanced users who like tinkering. Plugins can help the website to be SEO friendly, robust, secure, and complete with all the things that are required in modern websites.


Here are some of the best free WordPress Plugins available for the website in 2019. These plugins include speed optimization plugins, security plugins, and social media plugins.

1) MonsterInsights Lite

With the MonsterInsights Lite, the user can connect the WordPress website with the Google Analytics account. This helps the user to see how site visitors find the website and what they do while being there on the website. With this, the user can capitalize on what site visitors like on the website that encourages them to come back.

2) Everest Forms

The contact page on the website is considered to be one of the fundamental pages. Everest Forms helps to create contact forms and comes with the drag and drop interface and also helps in building contact forms quickly and easily. It includes general fields along with the advanced fields that can be easily dragged and dropped to create forms.

3) Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML sitemap provides an easy way to create an XML sitemap for search engines like Bing, Google, Ask.com, and Yahoo to index and crawl. By making it easy for crawlers to see how content is organized and update the search rankings when the content is updated on the site. Google XML Sitemaps plugin help to boost the website’s SEO significantly.

4) Jetpack

Jetpack is the plugin by the team behind the WordPress software. Jetpack helps with website security, traffic growth, website performance, website appearance, image optimization and more. It enhances distribution by automatically sharing published content with third-party services like search engines, thereby, increasing the traffic. The most important thing is that it helps in protecting the website by force attacks and monitors the website every five minutes for the downtime and quickly notifies if any issue is found.

5) Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO helps in creating better content and improves the ranking on the search results. This plugin helps in creating the content which is useful and also SEO-friendly. It helps in gaining the trust and sustain ranking also known as sustainable SEO.

6) Lazy Load

The speed of the website plays an important role in enhancing user experience and Google search rankings. Lazy Loads help to load website images only when images become visible to the site visitor. This plugin reduces the HTTP requests that are made while improving the loading time of the page. Lazy Loads works on post content, thumbnails, iFrame, and avatars images.

7) WooCommerce

WooCommerce plugin can help the user to sell anything on the website. The plugin can be used in case of creating an online store. It includes various features to help the growth of the online store. Multiple options can also be provided to the user through the online store. Meanwhile, WooCommerce also provides extendable shipping options, including local pickups, free shipping, flat rates, and others.

8) W3 Total Cache

Website speed is the most important SEO ranking factor to boost site conversations, rankings, and site traffic. W3 Total Cache plugin can help in serving cached and compressed files to the visitors on the website while improving overall site speed and minimizing load time.

9) Nivo Slider

Nivo Slider plugin is available in the free as well as premium version. This plugin makes it easy to add image carousel, post sliders, and slideshows. It comes with an intuitive design structure and is user-friendly. The sliders created using this plugin can also be used as the homepage slider.

10) UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus plugin is the free backup solution that helps in scheduling automatic backup for the database and files of the website. It also stores the backups in the cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc., and can restore the website easily and quickly using the restore button.

Although the type of website determines what type of plugin is needed for the website, there are some plugins that every website needs to ensure website security, speed, reach, SEO, etc. There are plenty of plugins available on the official plugin repository almost for every feature and function on the website. In addition, multiple plugins are also available for the same function and feature, and most of the plugins are available as freemium.

Author's Bio: 
Ritesh Patil is the co-founder of Mobisoft Infotech that helps startups and enterprises in mobile technology. He loves technology, especially mobile technology. He’s an avid blogger and writes on mobile application. He works in a leading Android & iOS app development company that has developed innovative mobile applications across various fields such as Finance, Insurance, Health, Entertainment, Productivity, Social Causes, Education and many more and has bagged numerous awards for the same. Join me on Linkedin and on Twitter as well.

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SEO Automation: The Ultimate Guide For 2019

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is an ever-changing activity that gives quite some headaches to bloggers and website owners around the world. If organic traffic is the main way your website relies on getting new users, you know very well that SEO is not a piece of cake. Every year, Google comes up with some algorithm adjustments that usually messes up with the previous year strategy.

For website owners, who cannot rely on an SEO agency, obtaining effective SEO results requires constant hard work. Putting an emphasis on this, however, doesn’t always result in immediate outcomes. For this reason, many decide to shift their attention to more controllable factors and let SEO be, hoping that somehow it will work.

Should You Still Focus On SEO in 2019

Considering the hard work and the little chances to succeed against bigger players, it might be reasonable to ask yourself, why. If you have little resources, should you still put an effort in trying to rank higher in Google or any other search engine?

Obviously, the answer is yes!

Organic traffic will outperform any paid campaigns on search engines by 5.66 times. On top of that, if you still think it might be wiser to invest money in paid ads rather than SEO, you need to consider that nearly 80% of online users ignore those sponsored ads in search results.

Remember that ranking on search engines requires a long time and hard work. It won’t happen overnight. The key to being successful in the SEO game is to dedicate each week some time to it. If you don’t see results at the beginning, and you won’t, don’t despair, just keep working on it.

How To Focus On SEO Without Losing Sight Of The Bigger Picture?

As a website owner or blogger, you might think that there is not enough time to do everything. You are alone or part of a small team and the tasks are too many. SEO won’t bring results tomorrow, so how can you successfully keep working on it while everything else happens?

SEO is not made of just one activity. There are several things you need to take into consideration when optimizing your website for SEO. Content creation, keywords optimization, off-page, and on-page optimization, long-tail keywords, influencer outreach, and link-building are just some of the things you need to consider when working on your SEO strategy.

Online resources can help you identify what makes the most sense for you to focus on, however, implementing those activities is the toughest part of the plan. SEO success is directly proportional to the amount of effort you put into it.

The good news is that some of these activities can be automated to free up your time from some boring tasks.

What SEO Activities Can You Automate?

Automation won’t help you achieve better results faster, however, it will help you dedicate some of your time to other growth areas. Using automation tools is one of the best hacks that you can implement in your strategy to do more with fewer resources.

    1. SEO Analysis

“Analysis paralysis” is a well-known issue not only in the SEO world. When we need to analyze too many things, we tend to overthink on what to do next, which leads to not taking any action at all. With SEO, you might find yourself analyzing tons of data and get stacked into “what’s next” decision, especially when SEO is not your area of expertise.

For this reason, automating SEO analysis can free up quite a lot of time from your daily activities. Easily understanding how to optimize your on-page SEO as well as off-page activities can be a life-saver.

Best Automation Tools For SEO Analysis

Yoast SEO Plugin

If your website is running on Wordpress, then this is a free plugin you don’t want to miss out on. It helps users easily identify SEO issues for on-page activities and ways to solve them. The free version has some limitations, obviously, but the value you get from it is quite high. The plugin also has a “Readability Analysis”, that checks on how easy it is to read the content.

SEOptimer

This tool helps website owners get also a good understanding of off-page factors that influence SEO rankings. All you need to do is simply type an URL and wait for the results. The data provided is not only limited to SEO but takes into consideration also usability, social signals, and performance. 

Google Search Console

Perhaps the best way to know how a website is doing on Google is to ask Google itself. Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that helps website owners take a look at how the website is doing. There are several interesting things that you can check with it. For example, “Fetch as Google” gives an idea of how Google sees specific URLs helping users in troubleshooting some issues; or “Page Speed Insights” allows to measure the performance of desktop and mobile versions of the website. 

Woorank

This is another tool to help website owners and marketers get insights on webpages optimization and improvements. The analysis is divided into different sections and it takes into consideration important areas together with SEO, such as usability, mobile performance, technologies, and social signals. 

HubSpot Website Grader

HubSpot is a well-known company for their marketing and CRM solution, however, back in 2007, it launched a website grader tool that helped understanding performance and optimization opportunities. Like many other tools for SEO analysis, it is very simple to use, simply add a website URL and wait a few seconds for tips.

Moz Seo Toolbar

Moz offers several paid SEO tools that help website owners understand how to improve their SEO strategy. There are, however, also free tools, such as the Moz SEO Toolbar. This is a simple add-on that quickly helps to analyze any website. Although it doesn’t give you any suggestion per se on what to do or how to fix it, the tool helps to easily identify where problems might be.

    2. Influencer Research

As part of improving your SEO results, you will need to make sure to reach out to relevant influencers in your industry to share the content created. Making good use of influencers can increase your website social presence and shares across different platforms. However, reaching out to influencers can be a daunting task. Sending hundreds of emails hoping for an answer is not a scalable activity.

For this reason, it’s important to use tools to identify the right influencers and content to increase the chances to get an answer and successfully increase brand awareness.

Best Automation Tools For Influencer Research

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo allows users to search the Internet for the most shared content and influencers. By using it, website owners can not only identify interesting people to reach out to but also get ideas on what content gets the most attention online.

Ahrefs Content Explorer

Ahrefs has a lot of similarities with BuzzSumo. The content explorer tool allows bloggers to find thousands of interesting topics shared online. In similar ways, users can get immediate insights on what is trending for specific topics the website focuses on.

Social Animal

Social Animal is another widely used tool very similar to BuzzSumo. It helps website owners and marketers understand how certain topics are shared across different social media. The tool also helps to find out influencers per keyword.

NinjaOutReach

This tool focuses exclusively on identifying influencers per keyword searched. Like others, it also helps you find the most shared content online, however, its power is on the influencer research. When performing a query, users will also be able to find email addresses and other contact information, which make the outreach activity extremely simple.

SentiOne

SentiOne is a social listening tool for bloggers and website owners that help to identify interesting content that is shared online as well as brand mentions. When working on influencers outreach, users might want to focus on those who are already familiar with their brand. This tool helps to find out exactly this.

3. Keywords and Backlinks Monitor

When it comes to SEO, one of the most important things to do, constantly, is to check how well you rank for certain keywords as well as who is linking to your website. Keeping an eye on the best keywords will help you understand what to focus on for new content creation. On the other side, understanding which website is linking to your content can help you identify potential partners as well as understanding what content gets the most attention.

Doing this without manually, however, requires several hours (to be optimistic) and it can be difficult to get a good picture of what to do with the results. Automating this task can help you save time and make better decisions.

Best Automation Tools For Keywords and Backlinks Monitor

SE Ranking

This is a great tool that helps to automate activities such as backlink monitoring, keyword research, rankings, and website analysis. Users can get insights also on competitors’ strategies. SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO tool, this means that once purchased the license, you will get access to all the tools available. 

Moz

Moz offers more than what we saw previously. The tools available for the paid and free version allow users to analyze backlinks and keywords. Like any other tools, it is very simple to use and creates awareness on where the brand stand against its competitors. The free version offers limited analysis capabilities but still enough to get started with an SEO strategy. 

Semrush

Semrush allows users to identify your competitor’s best keywords, observe position changes in domains, uncover long tail keywords for websites and for PPC campaigns. By combining the tools available for keywords research, website owners can uncover long-tail keywords without dealing with multiple spreadsheets.

Ahrefs

Like other keywords and backlinks monitor tools, Ahrefs’ solution helps users understand what are the best keywords available for volume, ranking and it also offers alternative suggestions. The tool includes several options for website owners and marketers to easily analyze competitors’ activities, new or lost backlinks as well as brand mentions to work on a proper SEO strategy.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog has been designed for SEO/SEM-minded marketers. There’s a free desktop version available for download where users can easily analyze URLs for common SEO issues. It is a blessing from the sky, considering that if you have a fairly large website, such analysis could take hours, if not days.

4. Social Sharing

According to Google, social media shares are not an SEO ranking factor. So, why bother? Although not directly correlated to ranking, social signals, such as comments, likes and also shares have a direct impact on how “popular” your content is. If your content gets shared several times on different social media, this might not impact the ranking per se, however, it amplifies your content visibility. At the same time, the more time your content gets shared online, the more Google, and other search engines, will “hear” that people like what you are working on. Getting a higher social engagement can directly affect the organic traffic your website or blog gets. However, sharing manually content can be a very lengthy and difficult process, therefore, automating this task could help you get better results.

Best Automation Tools For Social Sharing

Buffer

The buffer is one of the most popular social sharing tools available in the market. In the free version, users can connect up to 3 social accounts. With Buffer, website owners won’t have to login in every single platform each time to share content. The tool does everything automatically and with time it starts also to learn the best time to share content based on the engagement received.

HootSuite

Similar to Buffer, Hootsuite helps website owners in managing social media activities, from social sharing to keywords tracking. The main benefit is that users have one single place to access all their social media profiles, which saves quite a lot of time.

SproutSocial

Sprout Social has a cleaner dashboard compared to its competitors. In addition to the usual features, if there are more than one users accessing the tool, there are simple customizations available to assign tasks to each team members. It comes also with in-depth analytics connected with Google Analytics, setting the tool apart from many of its kind.

TweetDeck

This is a completely free tool aimed at managing an unlimited number of Twitter accounts. Although specific for Twitter alone, the level of customization is so high that is worth a mention. It can also be downloaded as desktop software and it has integration with Buffer.

Social Pilot

This tool helps users automate social media postings across different social media platforms. If users have an eCommerce website, SocialPilot actually automates the product additions to different websites. It comes with a Google Chrome extension and it has over 300 integrations

Conclusion
SEO is a tough nut to crack. It requires time and effort to master and eventually see some results. SEO automation tools become crucial as the activities to track increase daily. Although all these solutions are here to save time (and money eventually), you still need to take care of them and invest resources. Your SEO strategy gets better and easier to develop with all these excellent tools, however, it’s crucial to understand that just using some of these won’t make your life easier. As a matter of fact, it’s best to check first what makes sense for you to implement in your day-to-day activities and slowly start automating some tasks. If you blindly add more tools to the mix, you might actually end up wasting more time.

Author Bio:  Luca is an experienced sales executive and business coach with a background of over 10 years in sales and management. When not working, Luca runs one of the leading online magazines for startup knowledge, MyStartupLand, with the aim of providing meaningful and helpful content to startup founders and business people. You can also find him on Twitter & Facebook

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11 Mistakes Small Business Making in Social Media Marketing

Having a consistent presence on social media is a must for businesses of all sizes. So you’ve heard, but the fruit hasn’t been very sweet. It’s possible that your efforts are half-baked or you are making a common social media marketing mistake without realizing it. It’s also possible that you are approaching social media marketing from a wrong angle because it is not about advertising. Instead, it is a lot about relationship marketing. The reality is that stats and industry research don’t lie.

71% of the folks who experience good social media service from a business tend to recommend it to others. So, that’s digital word-of-mouth at its best. If you do not see any of the results, it is time you learn about common small business social media mistakes that you may be making.

Let’s dive into these:

1. Not separating business account from a personal account

Only 37% of the small businesses are using a business social media account according to the WASP Barcode Technologies’ State of Small Business Report. This means that 63% of the businesses are using their personal account as their venture’s social media page.
This invites several issues. Firstly, it makes you look unprofessional. Secondly, it doesn’t make sense to share several personal pictures on your business account. A few pictures sometimes on your business page to give a behind-the-scenes look are fine though. Lastly, you give your opinions of all sorts including the political ones on your personal/business profile. This can turn off lots of potential customers.

2. Over-marketing

What happens when you sit in the company of a friend who talks about herself only? You get bored, and you eventually stop talking – sour relationship, right? It’s pretty much the same with social media. If you keep marketing your services throughout the day, you are bound to repel prospects. Unless you have a new announcement or new product, limit your posts. You should only be providing content that relates to your field and is valuable for your followers.

3. Under- or over-posting

Social media is about consistency and engagement. These are the key ingredients for developing a targeted audience for your small business. So, you need to post daily or throughout the weekdays. If you find it difficult to cope up with your workload, consider automating your social media posts.
On the flip side, don’t over-post as it gives off spammy vibes. Try to make between 2-5 posts per day depending on the social media platform. Your goal should be to engage rather than just have a stream of updates coming out.

4. Posting the same message across all social channels

Each social media network has a different audience and unique post requirements. So, if you are posting the same message on all your social profiles, then you are doing it wrong. In fact, it tells your audience that you are merely posting updates for the sake of posting them. Social Media Marketing, therefore, requires a lot more work than you may think. Put simply, the same message you posted on Twitter shouldn’t be posted on your Facebook profile and so on.

5. All taking and no giving

Social media is a two-way communication channel, so you need to make the most of it. If you’re only advertising your products, you are missing on building relationships with your prospects and customers.
So, don’t only share what you’ve written or what is on your business blog. Instead, follow others and share their posts. Also, interact with your customers. Make a point about responding to their comments and mentions.

6. Spreading yourself too thin

While it is important to leverage the potential of each social media network, you don’t have to spread yourself too thin. Don’t attempt to maintain a presence on each network. You may succeed in showing up, but you won’t be able to do much in terms of actually being there. This decreases your engagement.

7. Excessive automation

Social media automation can be helpful but not in excess. A surplus of automation is poisonous for your social media. Your audience can quickly pick up the post frequency and tell that you’re automating your post instead of being present yourself. Eventually, your audience will stop engaging with you, which spoils the very purpose of social media for your small business.

8. Not responding to customers on social media

When your customers send a query to you on social media, they expect a response. In fact, a quick one. 85% of consumers expect an answer on Facebook within six hours. Moreover, 64% of consumers on Twitter anticipate a response within an hour. Not responding to your customer’s queries leaves a poor impression on them. This isn’t something you’d want for your small business. This is because people who have a good experience recommend your business to others.

9. Not offering any special deals

A survey by Marketing Sherpa learned that 56% of the customers connected with a business to be able to avail regular promotions and coupons. Hence, if you’re not offering special deals, coupon codes and, promotions for your social audience, then this is another social media marketing mistake.

10. Not diversifying the content shared

Your social media profile needs to show personality and diversity. Posting the same thing all the time will lower your engagement. So mix up the content that you share to add some diversity to it. Share your blog posts, videos, photos, and articles. Link to other external content, which is relevant to your audience’s interests. Sharing your followers’ content can also help you engage with them better.

11. Missing on creativity

Over 50 million small businesses have Facebook pages. That’s a lot. So how do you cut through the noise and stand out from the crowd? There is one solution – creativity. A bland social media profile for your venture wouldn’t draw anyone. But a unique voice and creativity will.
Plan a social media strategy for your business that revolves around a specific business voice. Get creative. Seek help from tools such as Canva to design visually stunning posts for your social channels.

Concluding Thoughts
All in all, the key to social media success for a small business is to maintain a unique voice and be consistent. Plan out a creative stream of content that varies as per the social network, and engage to get ahead of your competitors.

Author Bio

Audrey Throne is the mother of a 3-year old baby and a professional blogger by choice. Throne is passionate about lifestyle, business, automotive, technology and management and blogs frequently on these topics. Find her on Twitter: @audrey_throne.

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4 Tips to Create an Effective Screen-cast Video

Nowadays, before people go to the store to buy a product, they will first go online to do research on what brand or model is the best. The same thing applies if you are selling a digital product. They will do research to compare your digital product with others to see whether it is worth the value of their money. In this post we're going to share 4 tips to create effective screencast videos to promote your product in digital marketing, you can use a screen-cast recorder like Movavi Screen Recorder for Mac to make videos about your digital product. But you can't just simply create a video and expect that people will watch it and be influenced to buy your product. The following are 4 tips on how to create screen-cast videos for your product that can convert well.

1. Know the Purpose and Audience of the Video

Firstly, you must ask yourself a couple of questions so that you know how to optimize the video, for example, what product you are promoting, what purpose you want to achieve through the video, what audience you are targeting, how long the video should be and if the video will include any technical content. For example, if your targeted audience is customers with a hectic lifestyle, you should make a short video clip. If you are making an educational video clip, you can make a longer video clip that is 5 - 7 minutes long. If you are creating a live demo of a product, you can increase the video clip length to 20 - 40 minutes long.

2. Optimize the Video for a Particular Platform

The video should be optimized for the particular video sharing platform. For example, if it is a YouTube video, create a screen-cast on things that people are interested to watch on YouTube. On Instagram, the videos should be kept to up to 60 seconds long. You can first record a rough draft of the video using the screen recorder and then use a video editor to cut the clip to reduce to the desired length showing only the most important content. To record, first draw the recording frame over the area of the screen you want to record with your crosshair cursor. Get more details at www.movavi.com/screen-recorder-mac/.

Next, you must check the microphone and audio button to enable the recording of your microphone and audio speaker. On the control panel, you will find every important command you need for managing the screen recording. When ready to record, press the REC button. You have 5 seconds to prepare yourself before the actual recording will take place. When finish recording, you have the option to trim the video using the trim markers or click the Open in Editor button and work on trimming the video using the scissor tool in the timeline.

3. Add Interactivity to Video with Audio Narration

If you want people to watch your video, you must include some audio in it. This can be a background soundtrack or a voiceover narration. Voiceover narration can add interactivity in the video. So, when you are adding voiceover, make sure to talk in an upbeat manner to add some energy to your video. When talking, make sure you pronounce the word clearly so that your customer will not miss the message that you want to convey in your video. It is not easy to explain a product with enthusiasm when you are reading from a script. It is easier to forget that you have to click on a feature you are demonstrating when you are talking.

4. Practice before Recording 

For this reason, it is always important to practice recording a few sentences first before the actual recording. Doing so allows you to get an idea on the pace of your narration and make the necessary adjustment in the actual recording. If you've practised before, recording the actual video should take only a short while. If you add audio in the background, make sure it is not too loud otherwise people won't be able to hear what you are saying. The background audio music can be a light music track that is uplifting so that people will not feel boring when watching the product demo video.

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Do SEO Professionals Help Increasing Business Efficiency?

If you run a business, you know how important an SEO professional is to boost your digital resources. You are also having to aware of the pros of having someone to implement the SEO work on your behalf. When you hire an SEO specialist, you lessen the worries related to your business’s visibility. SEO works regardless of the size of your business. The optimum result that it provides is solely related to taking your business to higher grounds.

However, first,

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the art of enhancing the website content for the different type of search engines, be it keywords, text or images. This enables search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo to improve the ranking of the of that particular website. It works to gain traffic and increase the credibility of content, to understand the need for SEO in gaining integrity for your website, you need to know how a search engine conveys search results. First comes the process of Crawling, during which the search robot draws the web pages linked to a site. Then all the web pages are indexed in a list to be selected according to the need and reliability. After a search request is received the Search engine robot processes the most reliable information related to search keywords opt-out the result. Lastly, results are displayed that fit the need and go well according to their rating and user experiences.

Here are some ways in which the SEO professionals help in increasing your business efficiency to gain better ranking at the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages):

User experience

In the race of achieving a good ranking and better credibility, good user experience works like magic. However, few businesses put interest into this and hire SEO Professionals. To create a solid website, you need to invest in professional logo design and SEO service. Google works by interpreting user experience, through this, it denotes how successful your business has become by the pivot of positive feedback or great web design.
A customer is well-aware of the needs that led them to the page. Lack of adequate performance will automatically lower your ranking. Quality SEO works to incorporate positive feedback to win a place in the SERPs that Google very keenly selects.

The help of organic search

Organic search plays a key role in how the business website is performing throughout the time. It might as well be considered as an important component of the market funnel ultimately affecting customer engagement too.
Marketers are aware of the need for balancing out their visibility on every search engine. Despite that, their prime goal is to be visible on Google as it holds 75% of the overall search market. It, therefore, gets necessary for them to use SEO professionals to manage their website clutter. This is done according to the targets set to appear on various SERPs.
To make your site a high-quality website, it’s necessary to be in the high picks of Google by using excellent SEO techniques.

Credibility matters

To appear in the result pages, a good sense of credibility and trust is necessary. It comes with the performance of the brand and of course, its digital assets. While it seems like a hard task to keep a balance between these two during a loss period, it is handled easily via SEO.
An SEO specialist will pay due regard to the optimization barrier set by the quality search engines. They’ll work to generate good backlink profiles. Other than that, they will keep on moderating the user experience and the necessary changes based on them.
A good thought will be provided to the machine-learning signals. Lastly, the content and element on the page will be regularly monitored to tailor the specific needs.

The traps

The website admin sets the rules that affect site ranking and credibility since it is made. SEO specialists work in regard to providing the customers what they want to see. In this run, both the customers and SEO specialists are well-aware of the SEO traps.
This can render their decision making and degrade the user experience and eventually harm the business. The SEO specialists, therefore, recognize the honest ways of credibility to produce noteworthy results.

Conversion rate

This rate lies between how many customers visited your page to how many became your customers. When the SEO professional directs SEO to the correct audiences, this gains viewers of interest. It will not only work in the betterment of the ranking but will eventually increase your sales.
It is, therefore, a smart way to convert visitors into customers pretty easily. As the technique is slowly gaining modernization, it might be a good step if taken as soon as possible.

Brand popularity

The more your brand becomes visible, the more its awareness is guaranteed. To achieve this place, SEO provides the SE what they require. The specific keywords and the content of interest are derived and formulated. This makes the webpage reach a good number of viewers. It, in turn, increases the brand popularity. This online leather jacket store is ticking off all boxes by incorporating both photos and text with relevant keywords:

Engagement tactics

When you hire professionals to optimize your brand according to the search engines, you do 69% of the job to attract an audience. They work to engage with the audience and get insights to improve the
service. As soon as the audience is satisfied with the responses to their opinions, your revenue starts to boost. The website has to be promoted on correct times and places to reach an organic optimization. It is an SEO specialist’s duty to connect the audience to their needs. Not only this, but they also work to empower your brand by providing a good digital and tangible result.

Verdict

If the SEO professionals are hired to highlight the website’s digital and overall needs, it’s always going to be helpful. It’ll grow the brand’s marketing revenue and keep the audience smooth. It might be critical at some points or be harmful. However, this ‘modern day’ marketing technique is doing wonders. It helps your business grow no matter how competitive the environment is.

Author Bio

Audrey Throne is a mother of a 3-year old and a professional blogger by choice. Throne is passionate about lifestyle, business, automotive, technology and management and blogs frequently on these topics. She is associated with Logo Design Valley. Find her on Twitter: @audrey_throne.

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Dos And Don’ts When Comes To Digital Marketing

We are now living in the digital age wherein most businesses thrive with the help of online marketing. With internet users conducting billions of searches daily, it has become inevitable for business owners to try and build their reputation online, with the hopes of making convertibles and gain revenue. Yes - more and more entrepreneurs now know the power of the internet, and many are focusing their marketing efforts online. However, being online is not enough.

Unknown to many, there are lots of dos and don'ts when it comes to digital marketing. Knowing what you need, will enable you to maximize positive results in the long run. On the other hand, knowing the things you shouldn't do will help you ensure you don't make the common mistakes which can make all your efforts go down the drain.

Know Your Customers & Competitors

Two of the most commons mistakes when it comes to digital marketing would be not knowing your customers and competitors. Unlike offline marketing, you can easily learn about your target audiences and rivals with the help of analytics tools available for free online. You can get the data by using these tools to determine what your prospects need, what they want, how they interact with other brands and what they say about yours. You will also need to check who your competitors are, how well they are doing in terms of their internet marketing effort and what they do, among other things.

Focus on What Makes Your Brand One in Million

One of the best ways to stand out in the saturated market and the sea of competitors would be being loyal to your brand. Focusing on making it more unique, remember your mission and inform your audiences about the things that make your brand special.

Say Yes to Diversification

Digital Marketing is a form of investment, and one of the gold rules in winning over your investment is by not putting your eggs in a single basket. This only means you shouldn't focus on a single marketing technique. You may find joy and success in your social media marketing, but that alone won't be enough for you to enjoy the full potential of digital marketing.

Post-Unique and Engaging Contents

Posting just for the sake of having something new for your blog or website or page is a big no-no. Plagiarized and low-quality contents won't bring you new visitors and doing so can even make you lose your credibility. If you have no enough time to do your content marketing right, it would be best to hire professionals to handle the tasks for you to acquire the best results.

How to Customize and Personalize Your Marketing Efforts

It is time to evaluate your digital marketing efforts and lean towards a more personalized approach. More consumers are getting tired of generic emails, blogs posts, etc. For you to retain old clients and attract new ones, learn how you can personalize your engagements.

Never Neglect Bad Reviews and Feedbacks

You can consider consumers nowadays as picky eaters. You may be offering them your best goods, most in-demand services, and competitive prices, but without great reviews to back-up your claims, you can’t expect them to appreciate your efforts. Make sure to listen to their views, ask for feedbacks and respect their opinions. Also, address bad feedbacks accordingly but gracefully, and always ensure customers to do better each time.

Don’t Underestimate the Importance and Power of Analytics

Reviewing your analytics will enable you to determine whether your marketing efforts are fruitful or are all in vain. With the data collected, you can use them for the betterment of your brand, make better decisions in the future and even get ahead of your competitors. So, make sure to review your analytics regularly and to use the data you’re able to collect wisely.

Work With Influencers Related to Your Niche

Blogger Outreach SEO is one of the best ways to reach your target audience the easy, cost-effective and efficient way. By building good relationships with influencers who are also bloggers and site owners, you get to build quality backlinks, increase site traffic and make convertibles.

Think About User Experience

If you wish to retain customers, make site visitors want to stay on your site, and actually make convertibles, don't forget about their user experience. If your site loads fast, is easy to navigate, looks great when views on computers and mobile phones and your site are full of useful and engaging contents, you can guarantee success.

Don’t Say Goodbye to Newsletters

Many think that just because AI, videos and Virtual Reality are fast gaining momentum, you no longer need to exert much effort in your email marketing. However, newsletters, when done the right way, will help you build better relationships with your subscribers, make old customers into repeat buyers and gives you the opportunity to provide a more personalized service that no other digital marketing technique can produce.

Focus On Engagement

Having a large number of followers is good, but having many engagements is better. One can evaluate their marketing efforts by checking the number of engagements you get on your posts. What’s the use of a significant amount of subscribers if they are not even active on your page? Make sure to write quality and engaging contents to help boost engagement, and don’t be afraid to post old contents if they get more than enough views and comments. This only means this is the type your audience wants to see on your page and is the type you need to do more often to get more engagements.

Don’t be Afraid to Seek Professional Assistant

Before we end this article, we want you to realize that there is nothing wrong with asking for help. There are things you are not an expert, and there are times you’re not able to put in your best effort and the time to make it work. Take the example of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), If you don't have knowledge, skills & expertise in SEO or you’re too busy with your marketing plan, it would be better to hire an expert to do the task which you doesn’t have expertise.

Author - Joana Marie is an SEO content producer and web content writer of Creative Working Playground. She loves reading, enjoys writing and spending valuable moments with family. She is proud to be mom of bubbly rugrat, Registered Nurse, strawberry shortcake lover and have dreams of travelling the world.

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