Ideas

Create Web Content That Gets Noticed With These 5 Tools

By Bill Freedman

We all know that content management systems makes it fast and easy to publish to the web. Fast and easy, however, isn’t the same as optimal. Optimal is harder to achieve—and squishier to define. On the web it means you have to think about multiple variables: your audience, text, images, search engines, standards, guidelines, technology and a lot more, since there are different options for this purpose, from using websites to market your products to other strategies like send text message online to promote your products or services.

Your reader comes first. Period.

This should be obvious. You are publishing content for your audience. You are trying to inform, educate, persuade and amuse your audience. But when traffic or ranking on search engines is lower than you’d like, it’s tempting to make changes that negatively impact your audience in the hope of a short term traffic boost. My advice: don’t do it. Earning a loyal audience and avoiding penalties are two good reasons to take the high road. Concentrate on creating good content that keeps your audience engaged, opt to use AI content writer like Copymatic.ai to personalize your content even more.

Earning a loyal audience

If you’re like most web site owners, you want the audience to visit more than one page. Perhaps you want them to buy something or register for update or browse other content on your site or return again in the future. That first visit is your chance to earn trust and loyalty. If you think it’s hard to get somebody to your site, just wait until you learn how hard it is to keep them on your site or to convert from an anonymous visitor into a potential customer. Yes you need to get people to your site, but success requires planning for a journey, not just a single step.

Avoiding search engine penalties

Search engines have the power to reward and to punish publishers. Remember, they’re competing for users and trust just like you are. The are continuously tweaking and improving algorithms to present the best and most relevant information to users with each and every search. So when a page or an entire site is employing tactics that inflate the relevance of your content, you may get a short term improvement in your rankings and visits.

Users and search engines are smart. Users will abandon pages with weak content (called pogo-sticking). Search engines will take notice of sketchy practices and issue algorithmic or manual penalties. If your site relies on search engine traffic for revenue, getting penalized will be very painful. Future traffic could drop by 20% or more. And even after you clean up the user un-friendly tactics, it will take weeks or months to regain the trust of a scorned search engine vendor.  Those are significant costs and effective deterrents for mainstream site owners.

The flip side of penalties are rewards.  Following Quality Guidelines will not only let your avoid penalties, it will reward you with engaged readers and higher rankings in search engine results pages. Surprisingly few people have read Google’s quality guidelines. Fewer have put them into action. And even fewer still embrace these guidelines consistently across their site and content. That is your opportunity. Below are five tools that help authors succeed at publishing content that gets noticed by readers and search engines alike.

The more visitors to your site, the more of them you can eventually hope to convert to paying customers. SEO tends to be one of the best-converting traffic channels, because it relies on pulling in actively interested people instead of trying to capture their attention with paid ads. Partnering with an seo agency manchester also ensures you’ll know how to handle unexpected changes, like algorithm updates or even penalties. SEO agencies  have experienced these many times before, and can guide you through each potential issue smoothly and quickly. You may also attend an Internet Marketing Conference to learn more about effective digital marketing strategies.

As your financial services company starts showing up for more searches, more people will become aware of it, use different software or apps for finances, the seamless payroll operations system will be an improvement for your business. Soon, they’ll be associating your brand with being a major player in the field of finance. In time, if your on-site content truly delivers what they’re looking for, you’ll also strengthen your brand credibility by positioning yourself as a reliable expert.

5 Tools for creating irresistible content that gets noticed

Below are several of my favorite tools that help you create elated and sticky users and sites that are easy for search engines to crawl, parse, index and rank highly in search results. These tools focus on “on-page optimizations” which means that each page you create is ready for consumption by readers and search engines. “Off page optimization tools” which focus on building site-wide credibility and links are beyond the scope of this article. All of the recommended on-page optimization tools have free versions. Some have extremely useful professional editions that are worth evaluating.

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is an excellent plug-in for WordPress and Drupal that helps authors follow on-page search engine optimization best practices.

Get Noticed: Yoast SEO

Incorporating this tool into the writing/editing/publishing workflow is super easy for everyone from authors to content strategists, blog editors and WordPress administrators. Use this tool before publishing posts to validate that the content is set up for success across multiple dimensions. Yoast SEO uses the idea of a “focus keyword” as an organizing principal. It then provides guidance to authors for improving the content for robotic search engines crawlers such as increasing article length, incorporating useful hyperlinks and subheadings and crafting optimized meta descriptions. Now it’s even better because of 2016 improvements for post readability. Yoast SEO provides helpful and light-handed readability suggestions by scanning your content for long sentences, passive voice and use of transition words.

Yoast SEO also does a ton behind the scenes optimizations too. Webmaster best practices such as maintaining sitemap.xml and robots.txt files happen without direct intervention from authors, editors, administrators or theme designers.

2. ImageOptim

ImageOptim is a free and open source MacOS app that strips images of extra pixels and unneeded meta data. This is extremely important because photographs, stock images and even images created in tools like Photoshop include a lot of information that isn’t needed by image consumers. Extra information results in bloated files that download slowly. The result is small image files that render beautifully and transfer across the internet quickly.

Get Noticed: ImageOptim

Adding ImageOptim to your workflow is super simple. Once you’ve downloaded and install the app, add the icon to your Mac’s dock. Before adding new images to your post, drag it onto the docked icon. The reduced-size file replaces the original. Lossy compression is a available as a user preference if you want to reduce file size even further.

3. Web Developer Extension for Chrome

Web Developer is a Swiss Army Knife of web development tools used by just about every experienced web developer and publisher—and you should start using it too. Your initial focus should be on using the extension to run validation tests using the W3C validation engines for your HTML and CSS code plus any links that are on your page.

Get Noticed: Web Developer for Chrome

Many HTML and CSS errors are benign. Others cause pages to render poorly. Poorly formatted pages discourage users and diminish trust. The same is true of hyperlinks. Nothing frustrates a visitor more than clicking on a link and not getting the desired payload.

4. SEOQuake Browser Extension for Chrome

SEOQuake presents a consolidated audit of SEO metrics and ranking factors for published pages.

Get Noticed: SEOQuake

It gives you information about how easy your pages are to be indexed along with useful information on effective keywords. Not only does SEOQuake help you evaluate your own site and pages, but it’s highly useful for evaluating how effective your competitors are at creating irresistible pages.

5. Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is a web application focused on the all-important page load time. You provide it with a URL and it identifies fixable elements on your pages for improving performance on desktop and mobile devices. Research studies suggest that in 2016 users prefer pages to load on any device in 3 seconds or fewer and that pages that take more than 5 seconds to load risk abandonment. What’s more, Google uses page load time as a ranking factor.

Get Noticed: PageSpeed Insights

The tool presents a numeric score for your pages, but the real value is in the detail. Drill in to learn where PageSpeed bottlenecks are and how to fix them. The report is a gold mine of issues that are generally easy for authors to fix, like compressing images with ImageOptim.

There’s a lot more you can do but I strongly recommend start with a “high road” philosophy and this initial set of tools. Take the time to learn their features. Figure out how to incorporate the tools into your publishing workflow. And, when you have a few moments, you should also run these tools on previously published pages.

Getty Images New Embedding Policy: I’m Excited!

By Bill Freedman

I’m pretty good at stringing together some words to tell a story. Images? I’m not as good at creating those. I like images a lot which is why I’m excited about Getty Images announcement that it’s allowing bloggers and social media users to embed selected Getty Images at no charge.

Images improve stories. They add texture and dimension. They set a mood. And images get into the reader’s brain more quickly than words.

Getty Images Library is huge and spans a range of topics, events, people, places, emotions and situations. So when I’m looking to emphasize an idea, I now have ready access to a large set of visual messages that can be embedded without having to either consult a lawyer or open a wallet.

I sense this is good business for Getty Images, too. It’s safe to say this policy change will drive more people to their site.  Like most good marketers Getty Images is confident that they can convert visitors into customers. And if they are good modern marketers, they have a predictive model in place that helps them reliably forecast a rosier future.

Remember, the agreement allows you to embed images only. No derivative works. No customization. No mash-ups. No white label. No offline use. For those you need to license images.

Getty Images: New Tool, Not a Replacement for Custom Design

As excited as I am about Getty Images new embedding policy, I’m still improving my visual design skills, taking more photographs and keeping my licenses for Sketch and Pixelmator. There just are too many times when only a custom image will do. A few examples:

  • Fact-based charts
  • Gradient backgrounds
  • Icons
  • Specialized items like email headers
  • Presentation slides
  • Search Engine Optimization (image “alt” tags)

… and much much more.

Today, however, is a day to be joyful about the new possibilities. My keyword searches have found many spectacular images. I feel like a kid excited about the future.

What Are the Collective CIO Priorities for 2014?

By Bill Freedman

CIO Priorites in 2014? Who knows.For the past several years I’ve blogged about the Gartner Executive Program’s January announcement of Global CIO priorities for the coming year. Gartner would survey 2000+ CIOs and publish the findings. The announcement took the form of two lists. The first was a top 10 business priorities. The second was the top 10 technology priorities. My clients and I found these lists useful in understanding where  IT leaders focused their brain cycles and budgets.

This year, Gartner went a different direction with their January survey announcement,  “Taming the Digital Dragon.”

“Digitalization, the third era of enterprise IT, is beginning, but most CIOs do not feel prepared for this next era.”

Yes, there was a large survey of 2,339 CIOs. Yes, they published a few statistics, such as “51 percent of CIOs are concerned that the digital torrent is coming faster than they can cope and 42 percent don’t feel that they have the talent needed to face this future.” However there are no lists, no trends and no basis for discussion.

What’s my take on this, you ask? Gartner is reaching for newer opportunities in strategy consulting for IT. In the process they are shedding a valuable operationally-focused report around vendor, budget and technology priorities within IT. Hey, it’s their decision what to do. I’m just saying that I miss the previous lists of CIO Priorities.

Bill’s Take on Potential CIO Priorities

My best hunch is that some of the following might be on CIOs’ minds:

Bill’s Picks
Prioritizing the “new four:” social, mobile, cloud and unstructured data, along side the “traditional three:” people processes and technology
Becoming as good at rapidly applying data to decision-making as Google and Amazon
Establishing policies to address mobile device proliferation, diversity, management and security
Becoming more hybrid and federated across Mobile, Desktop, Cloud and Data Center computing
Balancing disruptive innovation with operational predictability

What do you think about my list? Where do you think valid data will come from?  How are we going to have a public discussion of business and technology priorities without first having a rigorous data set? I wish I knew.

The Full List: 23 Varieties of Successful Web Conversion Offers

By Bill Freedman

Your website should deliver your highest value and lowest cost business leads. People who find your site are interested in your business. People who stay on your site are engaged and developing trust. People who fill out a form on your site, sharing their contact information in exchange for something of value, are gold.

Web Conversion Offers

To mine gold, your web site needs to offer two things:

  • One or more registration forms
  • Relevant content that visitors want

Below is the full list of 23 successful web conversion offers, sorted by category:

Information Downloads

  1. White papers
  2. Tip sheets
  3. Software
  4. Apps

Registrations

  1. Webinar sign-up
  2. Cloud account on your site
  3. Trial request

Activities

  1. ROI calculator
  2. Webinar attendance
  3. Meet-up attendance
  4. Hack-a-thons
  5. Software usage

Subscriptions

  1. Newsletter signup
  2. Mailing list signup
  3. Blog or podcast RSS subscription
  4. Social media “like,” “follow” or “channel subscription”

Access

  1. Contact us
  2. Request a demo
  3. Meeting request
  4. Free consultation
  5. Contest entry
  6. Claim a discount
  7. Inbound call to sales

Picking offers for your business is a very important decision and should flow naturally from your marketing strategy. One size doesn’t fit all. A free trial may make sense for a software developer but not for a business decision-maker. Make sure you have content for all potential buyers.

Keep one more thing in mind: conversions happen in the buyer’s mind and only gets measured on your web site. To earn a conversion, you first need to prove that your business is trustworthy, honest and helpful.

What’s Not on the Web Conversion Offers List

The following types of helpful web content are not listed as conversion offers because it should just be freely available. Somethings, even some valuable things, you just need to share freely. Make the following content freely available to inform, engage and build customer trust:

  1. Product specs and data sheets
  2. Announcements and press releases
  3. Customer success stories
  4. Endorsements
  5. Infographics
  6. Sizzle videos

Are you using other types web conversion offers to generate leads? Share below!

5 Behaviors to Win at Content Marketing Arms Races

By Bill Freedman

Learn how to outsmart, rather than outspend, your competitors

Avoid a marketing arms raceI didn’t expect a simple blog comment to change my thinking about how to win at content marketing, but it did.

As I was catching up on my Internet reading, I found Chris Brogan’s “Stop Making Content Just to Make It.” Since I was swimming with content deliverables for multiple clients at that moment, I clicked. And read. And thought. And then I commented.

My comment lamented that industry practices run counter to Chris’ excellent advice. Increasingly, large marketing organizations are using simplistic content marketing measures like volume over meaningful measures like conversions. And customer helpfulness—that isn’t even in the discussion. What’s worse, the flawed strategies are inspiring similarly flawed responses from competitors, hence the arms race analogy.

I wasn’t alone in my feeling. Tema Frank (‏@temafrank) and others joined in. So I studied content marketing strategies further in search for a winning solution that avoids an arms race. Here’s what I learned.

Content Marketing as Arms Race

Win at Content Marketing

Source: Google Trends: “Content Marketing”

Arms races begin when rivals seek advantage from investing in a new “weapon,” or to drop the military-speak, “tactic.” The idea of divesting the tactic while your rival continues to invest would lead to inferiority and possible annihilation. The result: both rivals invest at levels that ensure neither side gains an advantage. This is what game theorists call the “Prisoner’s Dilemma.”

Content marketing fits this pattern for two reasons. Content Marketing drives down cost of sales. According to DemandMetric, Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads. Second, competitive spend levels for online content creation, digital marketing and social media is increasing. Forbes reported on  why 5 organizations  increased spending on content marketing, but many other sources confirm the trend.

Whether content marketing escalation is good or bad is the wrong question. Game theorists confirm the behavior is rational as a way to avoid annihilation.

5 Behaviors That Will Help you Win at Content Marketing

So what is a savvy-marketer to do? Compete smarter. Here are five content marketing behaviors that are currently winning across the Internet:

  1. Set Meaningful Success Metrics – Keep your eye on corporate goals like revenue or new customer acquisition rather than dozens of content-marketing-focused key performance indicators.
  2. Understand your Audience – Knowing your audience makes it easier to focus creation efforts on meaningful, helpful and trust-building content. It also helps you invest wisely in qualified media buys.
  3. Help, Empathize and Listen – Success may start with content, but it grows from follow-up communications. Whenever possible, follow up with people who consume your content.
  4. Generate Content You Can Produce Well – Avoid the risk of undermining helpful content with poor production quality. Get good at writing, graphics and video production, if that’s what’s needed.
  5. Invest for Success – Content isn’t free. Invest wisely at levels to achieve objectives. Strive to meet business goals, execution quality and effective follow-up to avoid losing on budget size.

In future posts, I’ll provide additional detail about each of the recommended behaviors.

My thinking, and perhaps others’ thinking, is still evolving on this subject. Please add to discussion by adding your comments below.

This Novice Built a Responsive WordPress Theme in a Day—And So Can You

By Bill Freedman
Screenshot of article in responsive wordpress theme

A post from Bill Freedman’s Soon to be a Major Trend viewed from an iPhone using the new WordPress Responsive Theme

How cool is it that a marketing leader and data nerd with modest web development skills can, all by his lonesome, bring a WordPress blog/website into the modern era in under a day? That’s just what I did.

I’m pretty darn happy with the new look of Bill Freedman’s Soon to be a Major Trend. I started this site in 2006 when table layouts were the bomb. My last major change was in 2008 when I started using the MistyLook theme by Satish. Browse through the pages and posts. Read the articles and view the images. Leave comments. Did you have a good experience with my spiffy new theme and the pre-existing content? Did you find something I should fix? Please leave comments below.

I’m amazed at how little effort was needed for browser and platform accommodations in this era of fragmented computing platforms. This site with its Responsive WordPress Theme looks good to me on an Android phone, a Windows PC, an iPad as well as a MacBook Pro running Chrome  that was used for “development.”

Responsive WordPress Theme Development Shout-outs

While the make-over only consumed about a day of my labor, my success clearly benefited from the innovation, creativity and contributions from many others. As Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I’d like to give heart-felt shout-outs to a number of sturdy-shouldered giants who saved me time, effort and frustration:

  • WordPress—It was a great piece of software when I got started blogging in 2006, and I’ve been a user and trusting fanboy ever since. WordPress has become an incredible content management system (CMS) backed by an industry and ecosystem devoted to helping the world create flexible web sites. The platform has evolved to support HTML5, CSS3, responsive design, security, scalability and a whole lot more. All this without making me edit my previously created content.
  • Automattic—The commercial sponsor of WordPress contributed to my site in countless ways, from sponsoring development of core WordPress features to essential plug-ins like Akismet to driving standards in theme development.
  • Ian Stewart—The original Theme Shaper and now an Automattic employee. I found Ian’s Thematic framework in 2008 and have been learning from him ever since. While I’m not a PHP coder or theme developer, his well-commented themes and blog posts taught me that themes matter. While I didn’t dabble with the latest in themes on this site, my clients’ sites benefited from his contributions, teachings about functions and child themes, and now from Underscores (_s), which is the starter theme for this site.
  • Anonymous Media Query Author—Somewhere at sometime I found a set of WordPress- and _s-ready media queries. I don’t remember who wrote this code. I hope I’m not violating your license. I just added the media queries to my style.css file and—poof—my site was responsive.
  • Yoast—Joost de Valk and the Yoast team have created numerous reliable plug-ins and training that help my content get found. It’s not enough to have a pretty and responsive WordPress theme. Your site and content needs to be found, read and responded to. WordPress SEO by Yoast helps the SEO and writing process for authors and does the behind the scenes work to make your content irresistible to Google and Bing.
  • Font Awesome—I’m a fan of this set of well designed icons and happy to include them as a core part of my new look and feel. The style sheet and plug-in (by Rachel Baker) made integration of the icons-as-font easy. I also like that the associated .pdf enables me to use the icons as scalable images in derivative works.

I could go on. But rather than blindly take my recommendations, just get started with updating your own theme. One piece of advice: don’t do theme design on your production blog. Do it on a local WordPress instance, which isn’t that hard to set up and manage. All you really need are some free tools, intermediate knowledge of CSS3 and comfort configuring advanced things on your desktop. I have a Mac, so I’ll help you out with tools for Mac:

  • A MAMP stack-Mac OS, Apache, MySQL and PHP-to run WordPress. One preconfigured download is MAMP.
  • A MySQL admin tool to export/import your content between production and development. I use SequelPro
  • A text editor. I like Sublime Text which isn’t free. TextWranger is a good choice that’s free.
  • An FTP browser. My choice is Cyberduck.
  • WordPress
  • A starter theme. I used Underscores.

Perhaps you’ll go the Underscores route as I did or perhaps you’ll purchase a ready-to-use responsive WordPress theme. It doesn’t matter. Get your site onto the WordPress platform and take advantage of the wealth of resources that can take your site from good to great.