ProBlogger: Modern Enterprise Link Building Strategies for 2015

Modern Enterprise Link Building Strategies for 2015

Posted: 04 Dec 2014 04:41 PM PST

This is a guest contribution from digital marketer Ryan Chester. Everything needs to adapt with the advancement of customer needs, whether it is fashion, food or even enterprise digital marketing strategies. People should have to make changes in their principles as the time changes. Likewise, when you talk about link building and its key principles, you should have to create some distinction from their previous techniques because things are not like what they used to be in the past. Companies, who haven't modified their strategies, or hired followers of old link building techniques, always suffer. They encounter difficulties in increasing their online presence. However, it does not mean that one cannot mend it or to become successful again. All they have to do is to change their thoughts and make themselves aware of the latest Google's linking strategies.

Importance of links

I personally own a business, in addition to my current job. I too experienced this situation where my business was about to close – but thanks to Google's Webmaster Tools, I gained insights about establishing credibility. I'm back to successfully running my business that is getting amazing response from all over the world. Initially, what I came to know is that creating links is an extremely important steps if you want to get quality search engine results.

Matt Cutts, head of the web-spam team in Google, cleared that Google uses sophisticated text-matching strategies to display search results and makes sure that they are both relevant and important for the users. Throughout my learning process, I found that links are not only important for maximizing your online presence, but they are even important for different SEO purposes. This is a possibility of getting traffic from many of your linked websites. Maybe, people visiting other websites are directed towards your site via external links. So, you can say that backlinks are always important for any website who wants to survive in this virtual world, no matter they have zero value. Let’s have a look at some of the most successful link building strategies.

On-Site Content Creation

The Webmaster Guidelines of Google recommend website owners create high quality and unique content that is relevant to their business, so they can naturally gain popularity and help them to develop trusted links. Your website's traffic depends on the backlinks and links' ability to cater attention of readers is entirely based on the quality one will be producing. If you have created impressive, flawless and high quality content, chances are higher that it will get better response compared to those that have low quality content. So, your first step in link building should be based on online content marketing with all the quality standards involved.

Tips for Creating Backlinks

Research

When I started, I didn't know the real importance of research and didn’t have any idea where to begin. But, as soon as I explored the field, I began to realize its importance. My online content strategy was not successful until I came to terms with this. After getting all the information, I reset my techniques and focused on the research. However, I didn't have to make much effort because I got something useful! Let me explain… since you are not alone in this industry, your competitors (who may have been in this industry for a long time) have done enough legwork that can help you in evaluating what sort of content you should create. You just have to look at their work and find out what type of content attracted most of the readers. This industry establishes credibility by revealing their secrets to gain more clients.

Content Development

After determining the best topics related to your industry, start combining them with content types that best compliment the idea. Below are some of the most famous content kinds that can definitely generate high traffic:

Lists

They are considered as the easiest techniques to create content because they can easily provide the desired information. Just like Heartbleed Hit List, you can cater attention of readers by showing more and more list numbers.

Videos

The web is making a major shift toward video content, and it's a good time to get ahead of the curve. There is a lot of opportunity here, and you can make a big splash with YouTube in sending a lot of traffic to your website. There are some tips optimize your YouTube video or channel for better rankings too!

In-Depth Guide

If you have knowledge about a certain topic, you should discuss it in depth. Apart from showing how efficient and expert you are, I would recommend you to accept criticism from people because this will help you to get appreciation in the sense that you are ready to learn more- no matter how much experience you have. It's always a good idea to build a 101 guide or introduction guide, like we did for email marketing intro for entrepreneurs.

Pillar Pages

They actually refer to list of resources present on your website's page for a certain topic. You can combine many articles on one topic on one pillar page and welcome readers to have a look at them. This will not only help you in showing the extent of your knowledge on that topic but also earn links and shares for you.

Industry Reports

You can gather data on your industry in the form of industry reports and allow readers to go through them whenever they want. Be sure not just to ask questions on different aspects but also throw light over demographic details to authenticate your words.

Content Promotion

Don't think your task is over because content creation is half the battle. Its publication and promotion also need your attention because it is the actual time to attract readers so they can read it. When your goal is to create links, don't just start sharing on social media platforms or via email marketing. You need to adopt a different approach and try to approach people through other sources. You can use Influencer Outreach, Content Amplification as well as blogging platforms to show your online presence.

ProBlogger: Get Social Media Right: Five Things you Just Can’t Miss

Get Social Media Right: Five Things you Just Can’t Miss

Posted: 10 Dec 2014 06:57 AM PST

This is a guest contribution from Pratik Dholakiya.

There’s no doubt social media is important for businesses to engage with potential and existing customers. It’s marketing 101. Since it's the de facto "I'll let the world know what I think about this product or brand" medium, it's also a unique channel where companies and businesses now face intense scrutiny.

Social media is best used for engagement. It's a powerful tool that finally lets companies (of any size) get one-to-many with its customer base. Social media allows you to sell (without actually pushing).

At least 72% of people surveyed by HootSuite state that they are likely to buy from a company they first interacted on Twitter, for instance. There's also a 30% in unsolicited recommendations.

With more than 500 million tweets a day and over 230 million active users, your customers are on Twitter, which is proving to be a great way to improve customer relationships. Facebook – with a user base over a billion and counting – continues to be the mainstay for B2C companies.

LinkedIn meanwhile is a great platform to establish your social presence, attract clients, employees, vendors, and even investors.

On social media conversation, share, and engagement is a direct result of your updates performing. If social media provides amplification for your content assets, the right metrics help you measure that amplification.

However, there are production costs associated with those updates. People, time, tools, resources are all under the anvil. So, how do you finalize your key performance indicators, measure the metrics that are important and determine if they're the one that can deliver maximum ROI? Here are some of the top indicators every social media marketer should pin to the wall.

Business Assets

Today, content can be classified as a business asset. Assets are built to perform. Analytics help you understand how your assets perform over time in line with your business strategy. But just because something exists doesn't mean it's important. With so many metrics out there for a marketer to measure, life just got harder for content marketers.

For contemporary content marketers, metrics are best classified into classes, and then each asset must be measured against the overall performance of the asset class it comes under.

Cyfe is a single tool that helps you aggregate all of your asset classes in one place. You can pull in the numbers from the various sources, channels, campaigns (organic and paid), and maintain a single view for analytics. Chris Abraham of Socialmedia.biz termed it as One Dashboard to Rule Them All.

Cyfe integrates with social media networks, email marketing tools, and all other major sources for your traffic, revenue, or sales. Cyfe also plugs into campaign data from Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Yahoo Advertising, retargeting networks, and with Facebook paid campaigns.

It helps you mitigate these challenges that metrics carry:

Metrics are numbers. But the actual transaction flow – from the time a prospect first knows about your business to the point of sale – isn't straightforward.
One single metric, by itself, doesn't mean much.
Metrics are best understood in clusters.

Time Vs Production

Time has a cost to it – a direct one at that. Although this metric is an internal assessment for your team to ponder on and get better at, it has a direct correlation to the rest of the metrics.

If there's an editorial calendar, planned per day, for the period of time, how are the deadlines being met?
For every specific content asset, how long does it take to create and publish/
How many different types of content are produced and published for a specific period of time?

Use Excel or any other tool/software you are comfortable with but measure these to get your internal processes in shape.

Retention

Social media retention is hard to get at, especially given that social updates have a miserable shelf life of about three hours on average, according to Pamela Vaughan of HubSpot.

According to her post,

The mean half-life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours.
The mean half-life of a link on Facebook is 3.2 hours.
The mean half-life of a link via 'direct' sources such as email or instant messaging clients is 3.4 hours.
The mean half-life of a link on YouTube is 7.4 hours.

Given these numbers, you'd have a vested interest in looking at the effectiveness of your social media assets beyond the initial contact. For your social updates, you'd need to look at:

Tracking follower or fan growth over a period of time.
The ability of each social update to garner interest in the form of likes, Tweets, and interactions with each update.

For Twitter, as an example, here's a sample snapshot of Twitter growth for the last 28 days:

You also get to see demographic information, interests of your followers, and gender distribution as follows:

Engagement and Sharing

Social media is "social". Unlike any other media, there's the question of reach, engagement, and sharing that's critical to this media. Traditional publishing depending on reach alone. Social brings in engagement and sharing too.

The more engagement, reach, and share your social updates can manage to stir up, the better it is for your business for multiple reasons. Tools like HootSuite and Buffer App already provide built in analytics for you to dig into. Each social network, meanwhile, also provides analytics on how your social web properties perform.

Facebook provides insights. LinkedIn has analytics. Twitter just rolled out activity dashboard to let you see how your Tweets perform including link clicks, engagement, retweets, replies, and instances of your Tweets being marked as favorites.

For each social network, the important engagement and sharing metrics will include (but not limited to):

Number of impressions or reach per update.
Activity level around engagement per update.
Retweets, shares, likes, comments, and responses per update.

Lead Metrics

Vanity metrics don't mean a thing. They really don't. Except for massaging your ego, there's nothing else vanity metrics do for you. Jay Baer of Convince and Convert writes:

"The end goal is action, not eyeballs."

All the branding, engagement, and sharing later, it's finally about leads. Kevan Lee of Buffer Blog wrote the ultimate guide on social metrics and gets right to the point with an emphasis on leads.

A conversion is that metric you should hang on to. Defined as the number of leads generated from the sum total of social updates, amplification, engagement, and reach.

If you use a tool like Snip.ly, you can also measure direct metrics like clicks originating through each update. This nifty tool also helps you measure conversions (originating from links within social updates) to specific destinations such as landing pages and website pages.

This is the point where all the talk about social media ROI begins to make sense. Taking it a bit further, these are the metrics social hawks at Moz are looking at. The folks at Moz talk about relative engagement rates. Their point is simple: the conversion rate on Facebook isn't the same as engagement that comes from your Instagram or Pinterest account.

They recommend a tool like TrueSocialMetrics, which helps calculate the true economic value of your social marketing across specific platforms.

Over to You

With social media, the numbers aren't hard to get. The only thing that matters is your analytical interpretation of those numbers and how they relate to your business goals.

In short,

Ignore vanity metrics.
Define your goals, classify your metrics, and measure what matters.
Conversions are still the real metrics that matter.

How do you measure your social metrics? What are you on the lookout for? What kind of numbers are you busy crunching?

Pratik Dholakiya is the Co-Founder & VP of Marketing of E2M and MoveoApps. He's passionate about fitness, entrepreneurship, start-ups and all things digital marketing. Hit him up on Twitter @DholakiyaPratik for a quick chat.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Get Social Media Right: Five Things you Just Can’t Miss

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