We are through with Thanksgiving followed by the Black Friday and Cyber Monday madness and are now almost at the point of the start of the holidays and of a bigger shopping season.
Shopping was at its wittiest best in the Black Friday/ Cyber Monday season, with even the unsold, uninterested items that were gathering dust on the shelf selling a few copies, thanks to the “Scarcity Syndrome”.
That reminded me of a quote some wise marketer said –
Everything sells. Whatever gets made gets sold irrespective of how useful or, useless it is. It is just about the marketing.
On that note, let us get into weekly link roundup.
Weekly Link Roundup – Engaging with Videos, Tips and Tools to Create, Market and Promote Content
Videos have been my first choice in content marketing. I learnt its impact during my early days when I would create simple review videos and upload them on Youtube. Most of these videos made me money without a lot of promotion.
How, you may ask?
That’s the power of Youtube and Videos!
So, it was imperative to get glued to a post that talks about generating views of Youtube. That where I start with, in this weekly link roundup.
9 Steps to Get Millions of Views on YouTube
Youtube is a powerhouse of traffic. If you know how to create engaging videos, irrespective of the length of the video, you could get a ton of traffic to them and then redirect them to wherever you want.
People made a lot of money using the Launch Jacking technique with Youtube and still continue to do so.
But things have changed and getting videos ranked has become tougher than it was some time back.
So how do you get thousands of views for your videos. Jeff Bullas explains that in this informative post.
YouTube is the second most powerful search engine on the planet, and holds the top spot as the largest video network in existence.
The video site continues to grow more pervasive with the maturation of smartphone technology. Today, half of YouTube video views stem from mobile devices.
For this reason, and many others, YouTube is the master of reaching across generational boundaries to impact and engage members of GenX, GenY and GenZ. For example, YouTube currently reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any U.S cable network currently broadcasting.
Image Courtesy: jeffbullas.com
Why You Need Video on Your Landing Page
Video landing pages are proven to convert and that is evident in the rampant use of videos on landing pages. While I personally never enjoyed long form sales letters and sales videos with little or, no control at the viewers’ end, they seem to be doing well.
Or, at least that is what research says.
While videos help you stand out of the crowd, it is extremely important that your videos are engaging enough to keep your visitors glued to it so that you can sell to them.
A lot of the sales videos are unlike this. They are so monotonous that you will fall asleep as you watch them and worst, you cannot even control them, except for playing and pausing them.
This post on Social Media Today has some decent and convincing points which will make you want to look at videos again, if you were like me and you were against putting that video on your sales page.
If you’re looking to generate conversions from your new or existing website it’s imperative that you have an attention grabbing landing page.
Think about the number of times you’ve visited websites and have left just as quickly because the landing page isn’t engaging or has too much text to read through before actually finding what you’re looking for.
You want your landing page to stand out from the crowd and make a great first impression, and the most professional way to show your brand’s image and personality is through engaging video content. We’ve mentioned it before, but we can’t emphasize the importance of video content enough
Read more at socialmediatoday.com
How to get started with content marketing – and succeed
Scoop.it was a platform that I used a lot at the start of my content curation journey. I simply loved the platform and the simplicity with which you could find and curate content.
A little later I learnt that I could even drive traffic to my primary websites using Scoop.it.
Content curation is powerful and very helpful in building your authority on the internet. A good content curation strategy can beat any other content generation strategy, hands down.
Who better than Scoop.it to explain how to formulate a content curation strategy?
If you’ve been on the fence about trying content marketing for your business, but are finally ready to give it a try, this is the post to read. It’s written for you bootstrappers. We assume your marketing “team” is one person. We figure your budget is more garage band than Fortune 500. And we understand you probably aren’t doing this as your full-time job.
Don’t let those limitations stop you. Here’s what you’ll need, how to get started, and how to grow from there.
Image Courtesy – blog.scoop.it
5 Creative Content Marketing Tools To Skyrocket Your Strategy
Technology is all about creating tools to simplify tasks. And when it comes to content marketing, tools are by the hundreds.
You come across a lot of tools, some simple and useful and yet others extremely complicated and worthless. With a new tool coming out each day, it is important to not get lost.
Test, try and then decide if a tool is good for you.
This post at Lifehack is about some handy tools that you can use in your content marketing strategy. And since a few of them are tools that I use everyday, I couldn’t but include the post in this Weekly link roundup.
Instead of presenting content with the typical approach like making use of written text, images or videos plainly, marketers these days should understand more about digital design. When visuals, text, and videos are ready for a campaign or landing page, there are storyboarding tools that provide layouts and guidance so your idea can be visualized before going live.
Fortunately, there’re sites that help to plan and organise strategies and content ideas. Options are many, but here’re the recommended ones to give your strategy an edge:
Image Courtesy – lifehack.org
Creating Link Worthy Content Using Competitor Research
Is link building important in today’s scenario?
At least I don’t really think so. I find link building is slowly losing its importance as search engine algorithms are changing. You will find a lot of websites with relatively lower scores on pretty much every aspect of conventional SEO ranking much better than a ton of other websites who were much better.
That’s me and I could be wrong.
But, Neil cannot be wrong. At least when he says that “Keyword Research” is no more important.
Having professed that “link building is not important”, I should also mention that natural quality links from quality sites can help you establish yourself as an authority and how strong a brand are you could become one of the search engine ranking factors.
So don’t completely ignore link building right now. (I might be sounding contradicting, but that’s how these things are, in content marketing.)
For savvy marketers, acquiring links should not be the sole objective of content marketing activity. Content marketing is actually defined as the creation and distribution of content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience, with the objective of driving profitable customer action. However, it is hard to overlook the associated value that relevant backlinks acquired to the content created in any content marketing campaign can bring. This is precisely the reason many traditional SEO agencies undertake content marketing activity for clients looking for increased organic visibility.
Image Courtesy – stateofdigital.com
Read more at stateofdigital.com
Get Control of Your Content Marketing Ideas So You Can Take Action
I was stuck with a strange syndrome for long. It was the “Ideation” syndrome.
I will spent hours ideating. My notes would be full of ideas but 99% of them never saw the dawn. They were stuck there in the notes and eventually got buried in even more ideas.
Content marketing is about execution. It is about writing that blog post, creating that information product, marketing it on social media and promoting it.
If all of these things stayed as ideas in your notebook, you would still be reading blog posts and getting frustrated at the end of the day.
This post at the Content Marketing Institute particularly grabbed my attention because of the topic it touched upon. I included it in this weekly link roundup and hope you too will like it as much as I did.
Ideas are easy, but execution is tough.
Can you relate? Do you have lots of ideas but aren’t sure which ones to pursue? Or maybe you start working on something, but then a new idea comes along that piques your interest. You jump to that one and then struggle to bring either project to completion.
Ninety-two percent of successful B2B marketers value the craft of creativity (compared to 74% of the overall sample of B2B marketers), but how do you move from ideas to execution when you’re feeling overwhelmed and your to-do list is overflowing?
Image Courtesy – contentmarketinginstitute.com
Read more at contentmarketinginstitute.com
4 Ways To Promote Your Portfolio of Published Content
Content promotion has always been a pain point for me and I am sure it is for a lot of your folks as well. Over a period of time, I realized that the main problem with content promotion was the lack of a good strategy and the focus on one too many channels of promotion.
If you really want some traction on your promotions, then you need to focus on the key few and formulate a fool proof strategy and then adhere to it.
This post at entrepreneur.com discusses about 4 simple ways to promote your content.
So you’re on the phone with a prospective client, and she asks a fantastic question that you know would make a great post for your company’s blog. You jot down the idea (maybe even enter it into your knowledge bank), and spend eight hours over the next week outlining, writing, editing and polishing this great article.
You next publish it to your blog, and it gets a few shares on Twitter the first day — but then nothing. The post gets archived in the blog, never to be seen again, and your thoughtful creation collects digital dust.
Sound familiar? The issue here is not in your content creation, but in the distribution and continued promotion of this content — or lack thereof.
Over to You with the Key Takeaways
What’s your favorite tool for content marketing? Let us know by commenting below and we will like to include them in our post on content marketing tools.
I hope you enjoyed this weekly link roundup. Here are some of the key takeaways –
- Video still rules, both on landing pages and as a content marketing tool. Youtube still is the king and you can drive a ton of traffic from Youtube
- Picking the right content marketing tools are as important as having the right strategy. But which is the right one can only be decided once you have tried it. So before you pick up a tool and start running with it, ensure you have tried it.
- A content promotion strategy need not be an encyclopedia with a thousand pages. Even 4-5 effective steps can help get the attention that you content requires.
- Keyword research is no more important as per Neil Patel and I agree with him. I also believe that link building is losing its sheen and might soon become a fossil. But till then you need to spend some time on building links.
Do let us know your thoughts by commenting below. Don’t forget to share the post with your friends and social media circles by clicking on the share buttons below.