15 Things You Need in Place for Creating Your Personal Brand

When you think about it, a personal brand is one of the most useful things you can build.

It’s powerful. It’s valuable. It’s killer.

But it also takes a considerable amount of work. As I’ve built my personal brand over the past few years, I’ve discovered that one’s personal brand doesn’t merely grow when you achieve some level of business success.

Instead, you have to work hard at it.

Building a personal brand is almost like building a business. You have to identify your target clients, discover the best marketing methods, and relentlessly work to deliver what they want.

But the results? Worth it!

As you build your brand, it becomes much easier to connect with prospective clients, close deals, and grow the opportunities that weren’t possible when you started.

To get to that point, you’ve got to start with the right foundation.

Seventy-seven percent of B2B buyers said they speak with a salesperson only after they’ve performed independent research online.

More than 50% of decision-makers have eliminated a vendor from consideration based on information they found online.

With this many eyes watching, it pays to build your personal brand in the most effective way.

I’ve had success with growing my personal brand because of careful planning. I had things ready to go before I started promoting myself.

Here are the things you’ll need to have in place as you work to develop your personal brand.

1. Head shots

I am immensely thankful that we’ve moved beyond the Glamour Shots era. Still, the people who used those portraits throughout their professional lives had the right idea.

(kind of…)

When you start to promote your personal brand, you want to be easily recognizable, and you want people to take you seriously. I have a number of professional head shots and photos that I use across my online properties for consistency.

As my appearance changes (and, yes, I do age…or mature), my head shots get updated.

Take pictures that represent the personality you’re trying to portray, and use those images across all your social channels, websites, gravatar accounts, and author bios.

2. Your focus

Entrepreneurs working to build a personal brand typically want to be known as experts in something. When you’re creating your personal brand, you need to identify that one thing that’s your passion and area of expertise.

• What are you focusing on?
• What’s your unique angle?
• What do you want to build your business around?
• What’s your ultimate vision?

Understanding your focus and your vision helps lay the groundwork for the rest of the steps you need to take to create and launch your personal brand.

3. Your elevator pitch

Let’s say you and I meet in an elevator. I strike up a conversation that quickly leads to your work. You’ve got about 30 seconds to explain what you do.

Can you condense your job or brand down into a short pitch that’s clear and gets the point across?

This pitch isn’t just for personal connection opportunities. The same brief statement can be utilized throughout social channels and online bios to help followers and prospects best understand who you are and what you bring to the table.

Write up what you do and what makes you valuable, and don’t be afraid to make it detailed. Once you have the information down, start trimming.

Keep trimming until you get it down to a strong, impacting statement.

4. Know your USP

Your unique selling proposition (USP) goes hand in hand with your elevator pitch. This is what sets you apart from others in your industry or specialization. If there are 2,000 other entrepreneurs offering the same service, why should your prospective customers choose you?

Why should your audience pay attention to you?

What is your unique value they won’t find with anyone else?

Your USP should be a succinct, single-sentence statement of who you are, your greatest strength, and the major benefit your audience will derive from it.

USPs typically fall into 3 categories:

Quality – It’s about superior materials or ingredients, craftsmanship, or proprietary manufacturing. Think “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza.” from Papa Johns.

Price – Price isn’t the best USP, but it can work if you offer the best prices, low rate guarantees, price matching, bulk discounts, or unique special offers.

Service – This can be unquestioned returns, satisfaction guarantees, or extended services to delight customers. Think Tom’s Shoes’s practice of giving shoes to the needy.

This is a critical component for branding. You’ll use this to craft your pitch, and it will be prevalent in virtually all of your marketing messages and outreach.

5. A defined audience

Defining your area of expertise is only part of the journey. You have to know to whom you’re catering. Building a brand is useless unless you’re targeting the right people.

You have to define your audience so that any content you create is relevant, your marketing turns heads, and you can eventually monetize your brand.

Think of it like a game of darts. You score if you hit the board, but you score higher if you hit dead center. Without a target, you’re just throwing darts blindly.

When you know your audience, you can:

• create highly valuable content specific to their needs
• generate offers that will provide solutions to their greatest problems
• create brand advocates who will embrace your message and help spread it for you
• identify the best ways to engage your audience
• identify places to find them

Defining your audience takes time and research, but without a clearly defined audience, you’ll never grow your brand.

6. A student mindset

You have to maintain the mindset of a perpetual learner, no matter how much experience you gain in your field. Change happens fast, so adopt the “I am a student and always need to learn” attitude.

Tune in, listen, and stay up-to-date with industry trends.

If you fail to stay relevant, people will stop paying attention to you.

It never hurts to learn new things, develop new skills, and expand your knowledge. Everything you learn is an opportunity to pass something new to your audience and provide more value.

7. Create a marketing strategy

Before you launch your personal brand, you need a strategy that details how you’ll promote yourself. While it doesn’t need to be as robust as a marketing strategy for a major brand, it’s still a good idea to create a documented marketing plan you can follow.

This should include (but isn’t limited to):

• social media deployment and posting schedule;
• plan for influencer outreach and engagement;
• content marketing strategy for the creation, distribution, and promotion of content;
• SEO and link building strategy with tactics like guest blogging to improve visibility;
• community engagement strategy for groups and sites such as Quora.

8. A personal brand audit

While you’re in the process of creating your personal brand, you likely already have public information available about you.

Before you push the growth of your brand, take the time to audit your online presence. Do extensive searches for your name and identity online.

This can help you manage anything that doesn’t mesh with your brand image as well as show opportunities for your branding campaign once you get started.

This isn’t a one-time audit, either. Schedule routine reviews of your personal brand to monitor how you appear on the web.

9. Create a personal website

A website isn’t just a place to toot your own horn.

You certainly want to show off your expertise and the work you’ve done. You also want to make sure you control as much real estate around your brand as possible.

A branded website is another source of content that will show up at the top of the search results when people search for information about you.

Having a website ensures that you stay in control of the top search results rather than allowing third-party sites to shape your online image.

10. Define your story

The strongest personal brands are carried by a potent narrative. The people most interested in following you or working with you will want to know your story.

If you specialize in more than one area or have a series of things you’re passionate about, a narrative becomes even more important.

It’s a unified theme that ties everything together.

Think about some of the most well-known personal brands like Mark Cuban, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, or Richard Branson.

In every case, the stories are well known and the narratives lend tremendous weight to these people’s brands, ultimately defining how we see them.

What’s your story?

11. Build on Feedback

Even when we look into a mirror, it’s not easy to define ourselves and understand who we are. It’s just not that easy to form an objective opinion of ourselves.

Use the feedback from others you know to build the framework for your personal brand. Ask people you trust, e.g., colleagues, friends, family and co-workers, to describe you with just a few adjectives. You can also ask additional questions like:

• What do you think I’m good at?
• What do you think my weaknesses are?
• What are my greatest strengths?

12. Define your goals

Why are you developing this personal brand? Is it to create a solid image to help you land a better position in your career? Do you want to create a more trustworthy and authoritative persona to land clients?

Creating goals can help you shape your personal brand and the direction of your promotion and marketing. Aside from your major goals, you should also define smaller, more readily attainable goals.

Where do you want to be in 6 months? In a year? What are your traffic goals for your brand website?

When you create goals, break them down into smaller milestones, and create a roadmap you can follow from launch to achieve those goals.

13. Create a personal style guide

Brands often use style guides to define the appearance of their logos, fonts, and colors to represent themselves and their products/sevices. This may even include employee dress code.

Everything you do contributes to your personal brand. Create a personal style guide similar to what the brands use. This way you have a consistent representation of your personal brand.

This should include the way you dress, carry yourself, behave with others, and even write and respond to emails.

14. Create a content strategy

Even though I mentioned creating a marketing strategy already, I feel it’s important to list this on its own. Not everyone will create an overall marketing strategy or social media plan. At the very least, you should create a content marketing strategy.

Much of your branding will revolve around content.

You’ll use content to build authority and show your expertise. You’ll create guest posts to generate referral traffic and links. You might create short videos to share your ideas.

A content strategy can help you maintain a consistent schedule and generate the right topics for your audience as well as give you the greatest chance of growing your personal brand.

Moz has created a terrific content strategy framework you can use to plan your own.

15. Perform a competitive evaluation

Personal brand building isn’t a popularity contest, but it does pay to know where you stand in the crowd.

Occasionally, you can collect some data, e.g., from Google trends, that will display the general query interest around your personal brand.

You want to know some of the key metrics around your brand so you can pivot and act accordingly.

This data is from Buzzsumo.

In the early stages of building your personal brand, you may or may not be selling anything. Regardless of your approach to monetization, you have competitors. They’ll fall into two categories:

• Direct competitors, competing for your audience’s money
• Indirect competitors, competing for your audience’s attention

Once you’ve identified your audience, you need to take stock of the industry and find out who is turning the heads of your audience and what they’re using to keep them engaged.

You don’t want to mimic your competitors. That’s bad. Remember, you want to be unique.

A competitive evaluation will give you the insight to take whatever your competitors are doing and do it 10 times better so you can capture and hold the attention of your audience.

Conclusion

Your personal brand is how the world will see you. For that reason, you need to polish your brand and give it a strong start, out of the gate. Starting with an unpolished and uninteresting brand is only going to hurt your efforts.

Including these elements in the launch of your brand will connect you with the right people. Those people will begin to identify you with a specific industry or area of expertise. As you share information and build rapport, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a trusted authority in your niche.

It won’t take long before the right opportunities will present themselves, and your branding efforts will begin to pay dividends.

Have you started building and promoting your personal brand? Which elements do you think are most important for making you stand out in your industry?

from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/sly8Xfzx134/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/151177523894

Six most important search marketing news stories of the week

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week we’ll mostly be talking about Penguin 4.

What do you mean you haven’t seen the first three? Well don’t worry, I’ll bring you up to speed. In the first instalment, a terrible tragedy befalls a young penguin at Camp Crystal Lake while the teenage camp counsellors weren’t paying attention.

Then 21 years later, the Penguin returns… hang on I may have the wrong Wikipedia tab open here… I’ll get back to you.

Penguin 4.0 news round-up

As Google confirmed last Friday, Penguin 4.0 is now being rolled out. The spammy link punishing update now works in real-time and will only penalise offending webpages rather than the entire domain.

Penguin recovery time:

It seems Penguin recoveries are happening right now, as Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed on Twitter…

@atmoore81 it’s happening as we speak. or tweet. it will take a few more days to finish that part

— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 28, 2016

It’s also worth noting that Penguin 4.0 has been coming together gradually over time, with the main component rolling out on the 23rd.

2/? @rustybrick we choose that announcement date because it’s just hours away from the most noticeable part’s launch time. In fact we said..

— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 28, 2016

Expert view on Penguin 4.0

This week we talked to a few SEO practitioners to get their expert views on Penguin 4.0. and for some advice for those who wish to avoid being affected by Penguin.

Kevin Gibbons: Focus on building a brand, not links. Aim to tell your story via content, data-driven analysis and knowledge – and amplify to a targeted audience via multiple channels; social media, paid search, digital PR etc…

Gerald Murphy: Data analysis is even more important to SEO. This most effecient way to analyse this update is to breakdown links by category, sub category, and page level, and then compare this with data, such as, visits, average blended rank, and revenue, for example.

Nikolay Stoyanov: Forget about shortcuts in SEO! There aren’t any. The only way to stay on the safe side and secure your brand, visitors and sales is if you do white hat SEO. Write well researched and useful content and build quality links to it.

Just 36% of people entering the tech industry are women

As Luke Richards reported this week, the technology industry is lagging behind many other sectors when it comes to the proportion of women taking up entry level positions.

McKinsey’s report, Women in the Workplace, surveyed 132 companies which collectively employ more than 4.6m people. It shows that while 75% of CEOs in corporate America are saying gender equality is a top ten priority, tech is still woefully behind.

More online product searches start on Amazon than Google

As reported by Graham Charlton this week, Amazon is beating Google for product searches.

The second annual State of Amazon study by BloomReach found that 55% of consumers start their online product searches on Amazon, compared to 28% who opt for a search engine.

The survey of 2,000 US consumers found that Amazon’s share of the action was up 11% year on year, and the figures down for search engines and other retailers.

Google AdWords introduces cross-device remarketing for TV ads and offline sales

Google AdWords has released a new product designed to “close the loop between TV and digital” with Brand Lift.

According to the AdWords blog post, Brand Lift will be able to show marketers how TV ads increase Google and YouTube searches for brands compared to YouTube campaigns.

There’s little to set up, you just need to be running Brand Lift on both your TV campaign and YouTube campaign, and Google will report the searches for your brand.

Google is also introducing location extensions and store visits measurement for the Google Display Network to help marketers “close the loop between online ads and offline sales.”

As people browse specific websites or interact with their apps, brands will be able serve ads that show a business address, Google Maps directions or photos.

AdWords announces improved remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA)

In a busy week for AdWords, the paid search platform has announced improvements to RLSA to give you more flexibility on how you adjust search ads, bids, and keywords.

• Reach your customers across devices. If someone visits your website on their laptop or tablet, you can now reach them with more relevant ads when they search on their phone.
• Keep site visitors in your list for 540 days. This longer membership duration makes it easier for businesses with seasonality or high consideration products to reach their customers
• Add your remarketing lists at the campaign level later this year, making it faster and easier to use RLSA. This will work for Customer Match too.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/09/30/six-most-important-search-marketing-news-stories-of-the-week-2/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/151144502619

Just 36% of people entering the tech industry are women

The technology industry is lagging behind many other sectors when it comes to the proportion of women taking up entry level positions.

This is according to US research by McKinsey in their new report: Women in the Workplace

The study surveyed 132 companies which collectively employ more than 4.6m people. It shows that while 75% of CEOs in corporate America are saying gender equality is a top ten priority – and in the wake of the high-profile Gamergate controversy – tech is still woefully behind.

Women entering the tech industry are far outnumbered by men and they lose ground on every step of the ladder

The McKinsey report separates out key industries in the US and shows the proportion of women working at each stage of the corporate ladder.

For the tech industry (including electronics, hardware, software and IT) just 36% of entry level positions are accounted for by women. This proportion goes down to 31% at manager level and an even lower 19% at the C-Suite level.

Tech is certainly lagging behind other sectors…

For instance, the asset management and institutional investors industry sees 50:50 parity for men and women at entry level (but just 14% women in the C-Suite). Professional and information services sees a majority of women at entry level (59%) but just 22% at C-Suite.

The report also allows for comparison of the issue with corporate America as a whole. On average, 46% of all people going into corporate jobs in the US are women but this shrinks down to just 19% at the C-Suite level. For women of colour, the percentage is 17% at entry level and 3% at the C-Suite.

Gender inequality research in tech and digital is growing

McKinsey’s research builds on wider research into gender disparities across tech and digital.

In February, Econsultancy released UK-centric career and salary data for those working across the marketing, digital, design and advertising industries. The research highlighted the inequality in average pay between men and women across the digital sector – from specialists to general marketers.

In 2016, the average female digital specialist earns £38,176 – around £8,000 less than her male peers. For women in general digital marketing roles, the average salary is £37,477 – again around £8,000 less than the £45,750 earned by the average man doing the same work.

Gender inequality as contributor to the digital skills gap

The latest McKinsey report and that by Econsultancy earlier in the year will be cause for concern for those in government.

As I wrote in an article last month, a recent report by the Science and Technology Committee highlights that 90% of jobs in the country today require digital skills to some extent and suggests that we need 745,000 workers with these skills to fulfil industry demand by 2017.

The report also looks at methods for overcoming gender inequalities in its chapter headed Role models and diversity in STEM, stating:

“There is continuing concern over the lack of diversity among computer science/IT graduates and in wider Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) careers. Role models are an effective way of inspiring confidence to pursue a career path, but FDM Group highlighted that children and young people are more likely to identify with Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) as technology role models than Baroness Lane-Fox, Sheryl Sandberg (CEO of Facebook) or Marissa Mayer (president and CEO of Yahoo).”

And:

“Despite long standing campaigns from Government and industry, however, there remains a marked gender imbalance in those studying computing—only 16% of computer science students at school are female (compared with 42% who studied ICT) and this low level of representation persists through higher education and in the workplace. A survey of more than 4,000 girls, young women, parents and teachers in 2015 showed that 60% of 12-year-old girls in the UK and Ireland thought that STEM subjects were too difficult to learn and nearly half thought that they were a better match for boys.”

Gender inequality as contributor to lost GDP

McKinsey back in April also conducted research into the actual monetary gains all US states can make should women attain full gender equality in the labour force.

Their report The power of parity: Advancing women’s equality in the United States posits that collectively more than $4 trillion could be added to the US economy by 2025 if gender parity is fully realised.

Referring back to the Women in the Workplace data which sees the worst gender inequality in job roles further up the corporate ladder, it’s notable that The power of parity report singled out inequality in leadership and managerial positions as one of six priority ‘impact zones’ for action to improve business opportunities for women and the economic benefits this will lead to.

So are things improving?

Women in the Workplace does show that CEOs seem increasingly keen to make their workplaces more equal and that things are moving in the right direction. But progress is slow at just one or two percentage points closer towards gender parity from 2015 to 2016.

That said, it is positive to see another report highlighting the issues of inequality in tech, as well as for providing evidence for the social and economic gains from better gender parity in business. But this latest McKinsey data shows there is still a lot of ground to be covered in the industry before the gap is closed and the benefits are realised.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/09/29/just-36-of-people-entering-the-tech-industry-are-women/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/151144502294

How paid search and personalisation can work together

We don’t generally think of paid search as a great channel for personalisation, but increasingly, it’s becoming one.

Caroline Reynolds, VP of Paid Search at iProspect, gave a presentation at the Content Marketing Association’s most recent Digital Breakfast explaining exactly how personalisation and paid search can work together.

It’s never been easier to reach people through the myriad marketing channels at our disposal, and yet it’s also never been harder to make a real connection with them. Marketers are discovering that personalisation is key to this: it allows them to build an emotional connection with consumers in a way that was never possible before.

“It’s all about that personal, adaptive and valuable connection,” said Reynolds.

So how can this be done using paid search?

The audience revolution

With paid search, Reynolds explained in her presentation, small and large brands alike are on a level playing field. A paid search spot is a paid search spot – and even though larger brands might be able to ante up more funding for a higher position on the results page, many brands have discovered that the fourth or fifth position can still yield a good rate of click-through while not costing as much.

On top of this, paid search is particularly good on mobile, where a majority of search traffic now originates. Due to mobile’s narrow layout, paid search spots appear front and centre, requiring a lot of scrolling to move past, and they have been shown to deliver strong ROI.

How does personalisation play into things? It’s about understanding the consumer at the moment of searching, adapting and making them care, said Reynolds.

We’ve reached a period that she has dubbed the “audience revolution”, in that we have more capacity than ever before to assemble data about the person behind any given search and work out exactly who they are.

For iProspect, the watershed moment came when Google gave them access to remarketing data which allowed them to see exactly who had interacted, who had bought before, and who had shown ‘affinity’ – the term given to someone who searches for things similar to what you’re selling. Now, the company only has a very small proportion of people who are unknown to them.

For example, Sky is one of iProspect’s clients. Every time someone carries out a search for Sky, iProspect will map it to an audience view and then tailor ad copy and personalise the site accordingly. Now, 90% of Sky’s traffic is known to them and personalised.

“You can understand your consumer, and we can do that better than we’ve ever done it before,” said Reynolds.

Connecting online with offline

The way that people search is influenced by external factors. The more of those you can plug in, the more relevant you can make your advertising, advised Reynolds.

One of the things that iProspect does most often is to connect offline channels like television to online. This is easier than you might think – a study by Millward Brown found that on average, people in the UK spend 50 minutes per day using both a TV and a smartphone, with 22% of people using this time to search for more information about what they’re watching on TV.

A breakdown of how people use their smartphones for TV-related activities

A technology known as digital fingerprinting can let brands know exactly when their advert is running on TV, allowing them to up their paid search accordingly.

For example, when British Gas ran their advert “No Place Like Home”, they were able to use paid search placements to send people directly to the relevant page online for a period of 5-10 minutes while the advert was airing.

Another example of how paid search can work with personalisation comes from Eurostar. A user can research ‘holidays to Paris’ and be directed to a PPC ad, through which they reach the Eurostar website and browse fares to Paris. Later on whilst surfing the web, they will be presented with a tailored display ad for Eurostar travel from London to Paris.

Takeaway tip: You can take what you learn on one channel, and adapt your messaging on other channels accordingly.

Some handy tools that Reynolds recommended which can help you gather data to personalise your paid search placements are:

• Google Correlate: This tool allows you to find search patterns which correspond with real-world trends, such as looking at which search terms are more popular in winter, or which terms correlate with certain geographic locations.
• Google Keyword Planner: A classic keyword research tool for Google Adwords, which gives access to keywords and ad groups ideas, historical statistics, and search traffic forecasts. (Though be aware that it is prone to inaccuracy in some areas).
• Answer the Public: This handy tool lets you see the different questions and search terms that people have searched for any given keyword. As well as being a great campaign tool, this is also invaluable when you want to create SEO-friendly content marketing which answers people’s questions about a topic.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/09/29/how-paid-search-and-personalisation-can-work-together/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/151144501849

Understanding the impact of speech recognition software on search

In the movie Her, Joaquin Pheonix plays a lonely and heartbroken man who develops strong romantic feelings for his mobile operating system. “Samantha,” as he calls it, speaks to him, listens to him, and ultimately becomes a major part of his life.

As technology stands right now, we may not be at the point of making real “human” connections with our mobile devices, but we do talk to them. We talk to them a lot.

Mobile technology is progressing quickly, and soon, speech recognition software will become even more advanced and far more prevalent than it is now.

Ultimately, improved speech recognition software will have a significant impact on how the public uses search engines. As search engine queries evolve, the results will naturally follow suit.

Consequently, SEO practices will be affected and businesses will have to develop new techniques (or alter current methods) for optimizing their websites.

Speech recognition software: the road to success

Smartphone speech recognition software has been frustratingly slow, glitchy, and spotty at best. At its worst, the burgeoning technology has produced some embarrassing and problematic communication blunders.

Basically, talking to Siri has been somewhat like trying to converse with your older grandmother after she’s taken out her hearing aids for the night.

It’s a far cry from the convenient hands-free technology creators originally set out to build. A new experiment, though, has suggested that there is a solution on the horizon.

Putting new technology to the test

James Landay, a professor of computer science at Stanford and co-author of this recent study said:

“Speech recognition is something that’s been promised to us for decades, but it has never worked very well. But we were noticing that in the past two to three years, speech recognition was actually improving a lot, benefiting from big data and deep learning to train its neural networks to produce faster, more accurate results. So we decided to formally test it against humans.”

Landay and his research team, which included scientists from Stanford, the University of Washington, and Baidu Inc., took Baidu’s Deep Speech 2 software and challenged 32 texters to a competition of speed and accuracy.

To test Baidu’s reportedly advanced speech recognition software, the researchers recruited a group of 19- to 32-year-olds to type messages on the Apple iPhone’s built-in keyboard in a race against the machine.

“They grew up texting, so we’re putting speech recognition up against people who are really good at this task,” explained Landay.

The participants either typed or verbalized about 100 everyday phrases. Some subjects performed the task in English while the others did so in their native Mandarin. Regardless of the language, the results were clear – Baidu’s Deep Speech 2 software was significantly faster and more accurate.

In English, speech recognition was an astonishing three times faster than typing, and the error rate was 20.4% lower. In Mandarin, the speech recognition software performed with a staggering 63.4% lower error rate.

Stanford computer science PhD student and co-author Sherry Ruan said:

“We knew speech recognition is pretty good, so we expected it to be faster, but we were really actually quite surprised to find that it was almost three times faster than typing on a keyboard.”

The future of speech recognition software

Now that researchers have been able to quantify the success of speech recognition software, they hope it will inspire engineers to design better user interfaces that take advantage of this technology.

“We should put speech in more applications than just typing an email or text message,” expressed Landay. “You could imagine an interface where you use speech to start and then it switches to a graphical interface that you can touch and control with your finger.”

Though software company Baidu does not currently plan to make Deep Speech 2 available to the public, they are integrating it into their own apps in China.

Regardless, it seems that improved speech recognition software is on its way to smartphones and other mobile devices here in the United States. Before we can discuss how this technology will impact user behavior and affect the way we do business, we must first answer the question, ”Who is using speech recognition software and why?”

It may not come as a surprise, but the majority of people using mobile personal assistants like Siri fall into the generational category of ‘millennials‘. The breakdown looks like this:

• Ages 18-29: 71%
• Ages 30-43: 59%
• Ages 44-53: 39%
• Ages 54+: 38%

Now that we’ve established the “who,” it’s time to talk about the “why.” Why are we using speech recognition software? What’s the purpose?

According to a Northstar Mobile Voice study, teens and adults use their phones’ speech feature for different reasons.

The majority of teenagers (43%) use speech recognition to make a phone call, while 38% ask for directions and 31% use the search feature to get help with homework. On the other hand, 40% of adults use it to ask for directions, while 39% dictate texts and 31% use it to call someone.

Many people are starting to use speech recognition for search engine queries. It is this application in particular that will impact businesses, digital advertisers, and SEO specialists.

How will voice search affect SEO?

There are bound to be differences between how we type our search queries and how we verbalize them. As user behavior changes, so, too, will search engine results. The question is will you be ready to adapt to these changes in order to keep your website optimized?

Here are the two major ways voice search will affect SEO.

Query length and phrasing

When we type our search queries, we rarely input more than two words. We typically don’t write full sentences, knowing that Google will get the gist.

While right now, voice searches are still relatively short, with most capping at around three words, it is important to note that voice search is still in its infancy.

As mentioned previously, voice recognition software hasn’t historically been all that useful; only now are we starting to see more advanced programs that can actually comprehend and accurately communicate with us.

As the software improves and we become more comfortable using it, it is highly likely that voice search queries will start to resemble natural language.

Stronger intent

Natural language demonstrates intent more strongly. When we speak in full sentences, our meaning becomes clearer to our audience. It’s pretty simple, right?

Here’s an example:

The user types “air conditioner” into the search bar. Google doesn’t know if they want to buy one, repair one, learn their history, or see images of them. Now, if they were to use voice search and say “Where can I buy an air conditioner?” then Google can provide them with more appropriate results.

For online marketers and SEO specialists, knowing users’ intent can be extremely helpful. They can strive to rank on question phrases with a higher likelihood of action.

Modifying your SEO strategy

As Internet user behavior changes, your business will need to respond and adapt.

Here are a few ways you can take action to maintain your website’s search engine optimization.

• Add relevant question phrases to your keyword list (i.e. How much does it cost to travel to Los Angeles?)
• Identify your most valuable question phrases and avoid questions that don’t suggest action (i.e. What time is it in Los Angeles?)
• Include filler words in your keyword questions, like “the”, “to”, “I”, and “for.”

Mobile technology has been progressing not in fluid strides but rather in giant leaps. It’s exciting, it’s impressive, but it’s also exhausting. Businesses need to be on their toes, ready to react and adapt at a moment’s notice.

Speech recognition software may have been around for awhile now, but it has yet to play a significant role in the shaping of our modern society. The time has come. Is your business ready?

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/09/29/understanding-the-impact-of-speech-recognition-software/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/151144501364

13 time-saving Excel shortcuts & tips for marketers

Back in 2013 John Gagnon wrote a very popular post detailing some of his favourite Excel tips and tricks.

We thought we’d update the list of classic shortcuts with a few that reflect some new functionality in Excel 2016.

New Excel tips for 2016:

1. Navigate ‘The Ribbon’ with ALT

In Excel 2016 the ribbon refers to the menu of tabs (File, Home, etc.) at the top of your workbook. Simply hitting ALT will quickly highlight the related keys then used to jump to certain ribbon tabs.

For instance, ALT followed by M will take you to the ‘Formulas’ tab.

You can easily move between tabs by pressing ALT and using the left and right arrow keys, while CTRL + F1 toggles between hiding and showing the ribbon altogether.

2. Tell me what you want to do

Excel 2016 comes with a new helpful feature located in the ribbon, the ‘Tell me what you want to do’ search box.

Click the box, or if you are using Excel without a mouse hit ALT + Q to jump right to it. Whether it’s adding rows or using VLOOKUP, the box is very useful for new and old Excel users alike.

3. New Excel Tip: smart lookup

If you want information from beyond the realms of Excel, another new function for 2016 is the ‘Smart Lookup’ tool which allows you to make a Bing-powered internet search without leaving the Excel pane.

Smart Lookup is located in the ‘Review’ tab and can also be accessed by ALT + R + S.

Classic Excel tips:

Courtesy of John Gagnon. The following tips are accurate and still work as of September 2016.

4. Automatically SUM() with ALT + =

Quickly add an entire column or row by clicking in the first empty cell in the column. Then enter ALT + ‘=’ (equals key) to add up the numbers in every cell above.

5. Logic for number formatting keyboard shortcuts

At times keyboard shortcuts in Excel seem random, but there is logic behind them. Let’s break an example down. To format a number as a currency the shortcut is CRTL + SHIFT + 4.

Both the SHIFT and 4 keys seem random, but they’re intentionally used because SHIFT + 4 is the dollar sign ($). Therefore if we want to format as a currency, it’s simply: CTRL + ‘$’ (where the dollar sign is SHIFT + 4). The same is true for formatting a number as a percent.

6. Display formulas with CTRL + `

When you’re troubleshooting misbehaving numbers first look at the formulas. Display the formula used in a cell by hitting just two keys: Ctrl + ` (known as the acute accent key) – this key is furthest to the left on the row with the number keys. When shifted it is the tilde (~).

7. Jump to the start or end of a column keyboard shortcut

You are thousands of rows deep into your data set and need to get to the first or last cell. Scrolling is OK but the quickest way is to use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + ↑ to jump to the top cell, or CTRL + ↓ to drop to the last cell before an empty cell.

When you combine this shortcut with the SHIFT key, you’ll select a continuous block of cells from your original starting point.

8. Repeat a formula to multiple cells

Never type out the same formula over and over in new cells again. This trick populates all of the cells in a column with the same formula, but adjusts to use the data specific to each row.

Create the formula you need in the first cell. Then move your cursor to the lower right corner of that cell and, when it turns into a plus sign, double click to copy that formula into the rest of the cells in that column. Each cell in the column will show the results of the formula using the data in that row.

9. Add or delete columns keyboard shortcut

Managing columns and rows in your spreadsheet is an all-day task. Whether adding or deleting, you can save a little time when you use this keyboard shortcut. CTRL + ‘-‘ (minus key) will delete the column your cursor is in and CTRL + SHIFT + ‘=’ (equal key) will add a new column. From an earlier tip, think about CTRL + ‘+’ (plus sign).

10. Adjust width of one or multiple columns

It’s easy to adjust a column to the width of its content and get rid of those useless ##### entries. Click on the column’s header, move your cursor to the right side of the header and double click when it turns into a plus sign.

11. Copy a pattern of numbers or even dates

Another amazing feature built into Excel is its ability to recognize a pattern in your data, and allow you to automatically copy it to other cells.

Simply enter information in two rows which establish the pattern, highlight those rows and drag down for as many cells as you want to populate. This works with numbers, days of the week or months!

12. Tab between worksheets

Jumping from worksheet to worksheet doesn’t mean you have to move your hand off the keyboard with this cool shortcut. To change to the next worksheet to the right enter CTRL + PGDN. And conversely change to the worksheet to the left by entering CTRL + PGUP.

13. Double click format painter shortcut

Format Painter is a great tool which lets you duplicate a format in other cells with no more effort than a mouse click. Many Excel users (Outlook, Word and PowerPoint too) use this handy feature, but did you know you can double-click Format Painter to copy the format into multiple cells? It’s quite a time-saver.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/09/28/13-time-saving-excel-shortcuts-tips-for-marketers/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/151091198514

Five surprising benefits of high CTR across all marketing channels

Obviously, CTR is important in PPC marketing. A higher CTR means a higher Quality Score, which reduces your CPC and improves your ad rank.

But it goes much further than that.

A remarkable CTR is not only the most important thing in AdWords, but it is also extremely important for other marketing channels. These include organic search, CRO, social media, and email marketing.

Here are five surprising benefits of having a remarkable, unicorn-worthy CTR across all your marketing channels.

1. Much higher ad impression share

You get big discounts from having a high CTR. Namely, a lower cost per click, which really adds up as clicks accumulate.

This is true not just of vanilla search ads, but all Google properties, whether we’re talking about theGoogle Display Network or Gmail Ads.

But a remarkable CTR doesn’t just impact CPC. It also impacts your impression share – how often your ads show up in the first place.

On the Google Search Network, every increase (or decrease) of 1 point in Quality Score can make a huge positive impact on your impression share:

 

 

 

 

 

If you can increase your Quality Score by one point, your impression share on average will increase by about 6% on desktop.

This is even bigger deal on mobile, where impression share is twice as competitive.

 

 

Increasing your Quality Score by one point would increase your impression share by an average of 12%!

Data sources: Impression share data is based on an analysis of approximately 10,000 small and medium-size accounts (spending between $10,000 and $15,000 per month), based worldwide, advertising on the Search network in Q1 and Q2 of 2015.

2. Your organic search positions will get a boost

We recently conducted research to test whether achieving above-expected user engagement metrics results in better organic rankings. We observed an unmistakable pattern:

• The more your pages beat the expected organic CTR for a given position, the more likely you are to appear in prominent organic positions. So if you want to move up by one spot (e.g., Position 5 to Position 4) in Google’s SERP, you need to increase your CTR by 3%. If you want to move up again (e.g., Position 4 to Position 3), you’ll need to increase your CTR by another 3%.
• If your pages fall below the expected organic search CTR, then your pages will appear in lower organic SERP positions. Basically, if your page fails to beat the expected click-through rate for a given position, it’s unlikely your page will appear in positions 1–5.

You want your pages get as many organic search clicks as possible, right? Attracting more clicks means more traffic to your site, which also tells Google that your page is the best answer for users – it is relevant and awesome.

Another thing we discovered was that the weighting of click-through rate is in Google’s organic search ranking algorithms is becoming more important every month this year.

 

Here I was tracking a group of 1,000 keywords and URLs for the past 5 months. What I found was that the Google algorithm is shifting to increasingly higher CTRs for top-4 organic ranking status.

This is what you would expect to see if Google Search were employing a machine learning-based algorithm that reordered listings based on CTR – people would see more of what they were hoping to see at the top, reducing the need to scroll lower down into the SERPs.

3. Your conversion rates increase

Increasing your click-through rate will also increase your conversion rates. If you can increase your CTR by 2x then your conversion rate should increase by 50%.

That’s why click-through rate is the most important conversion metric (in my opinion).

For example, look at this data from one large client’s account:

This is just one example. We see this same conversion curve in many accounts. (It’s just difficult to combine multiple accounts into one graph because conversion rates vary depending on factors like the industry and offer.)

What’s happening here is that if you can get someone excited to click on your website (via email, ads, organic search listings, or whatever), the excitement carries through to sign-up and purchase.

4. Free clicks from social Ads

Facebook and Twitter don’t have a Quality Score. Well, they do, Facebook just calls it Relevance Score and Twitter calls it Quality Adjusted Bid.

Whatever they call their version of Quality Score, having a higher score results in a higher ad impression share for the same budget at a lower cost per engagement. A high engagement rate means your ads will be more visible and more cost effective, as shown here:

Notice how the cost per engagement on Twitter Ads falls dramatically as the engagement rate of the post you’re promoting rises.

One of the surprising benefits of having high engagement on Facebook and Twitter is that you’ll benefit from free clicks. How?

On Facebook, if someone shares one of your boosted posts, that will show up in another person’s news feed and you won’t get charged for any of the additional engagements that happen there.

On Twitter, if you do a Promoted Tweet, when one of your followers retweets or shares it, you’ll get more totally free organic impressions.

5. People will actually see your emails

Now let’s talk about email marketing. How many emails do you get each day? Dozens? Hundreds?

If you engage with the emails that brands and businesses regularly send to you, you’ll continue to see them. If not, it might get filed away in Outlook’s Clutter folder or it may be relegated to Gmail’s Promotions tab – or even worse, the Spam folder.

Microsoft Outlook’s clutter filter regularly filter emails I’ve opted into receiving – including internal emails from my own company! These emails are being filtered out based on machine learning.

What does this mean for your company?

If your emails have a higher CTR (though for emails the better equivalent is actually higher open rate), then it’s more likely that your emails will actually get seen, opened, and clicked on. If your click-through rates are terrible, your emails will be rounded up and thrown in the dark “clutter dungeon.”

One thing we did was to delete people from our email lists who were unresponsive. If you’re just accumulating emails over many years, why? Do you think someone who has been dormant and never engaged with your emails is going to magically turn into a sale 5 years later?

Deleting half your database is one way to instantly more than double your CTR. Email providers will notice that more people are engaging, making it less likely your emails will end up in the dungeon.

This is an abridged version of an article published on Larry’s WordStream blog: High CTR benefits. 

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/09/28/five-surprising-benefits-of-high-ctr-across-all-marketing-channels/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/151091198214

Penguin 4.0: what does it mean for SEO practitioners?

As you’re no doubt aware, Google finally rolled out its Google 4.0 algorithm update at the end of last week.

Penguin is now part of Google’s core algorithm, penalising websites that use various black-hat link schemes to manipulate search rankings.

Other important changes include:

• Penguin data is refreshed in real time, so any changes will be made as soon as the affected page has been recrawled and reindexed.
• Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking of the offending page, rather than affecting the whole site.

So how do these changes affect actual SEO practitioners? I asked a panel of experts and SEW contributors their views on Penguin 4.0, including:

• Gerald Murphy, Client Service Manager at EMEA at BrightEdge
• Kevin Gibbons, Managing Director at Blue Glass
• Nikolay Stoyanov, freelance SEO consultant at niksto.com

Do you think the new version of Penguin is fairer? Do you think it’s an adequate deterrent when it comes to spammy link-building?

Kevin Gibbons: Yes, being realtime helps to set expectations as you won’t have to wait weeks or months for the next algorithm refresh to assess your link removals.

Of course Google’s algorithm is always a moving target – but it is becoming harder to be manipulated at scale. In some verticals it can even be a game of whoever doesn’t have the worst backlinks might win. Perhaps having a new domain with no link reputation isn’t a bad starting point any more!

Gerald Murphy: I think the algorithm is fairer. Think about it, you will be awarded for great content, instantly. I also think that, with the rise of AI, Google will soon be able to understand links more. A flower shop on Valentines Day, for example, will get away with more spam-like links but this won’t be the case in September. As links will be linked with behaviours.

Nikolay Stoyanov: Yes, I think that the real-time version of the Penguin algorithm will be fairer and will play a very positive role for the whole SEO community.

Google Penguin is now a part of the core algorithm and every change (either a negative or positive one) will happen very quickly (maybe not instantly but on a daily or weekly basis). After more than 700 days of waiting we can finally rest assured that whatever SEO mistakes we make we will be able to quickly fix afterwards.

This works both ways though. If we use some gray or black hat techniques Google will be able to catch us very quickly and punish us for not following its rules. So this is a double-edged sword.

Another great change with Penguin 4.0 is the fact that it became more “granular”. This means that whatever penalties hit our sites from now on they will impact separate pages on the site and not the whole domain in general.

I believe that this will be a positive thing as it will give us a better chance to fix those penalized pages and to learn from our mistakes without losing a huge amount of our organic traffic (like before).

Ideally, the latest Penguin update will benefit white hat SEO experts like myself and will help us take our SEO to the next level. Same goes with end users who will get better results to answer their search intent properly.

Conversely, black hat techniques (especially PBNs) will slowly become obsolete and will eventually stop working which is the ultimate goal.

Have you experienced any affect from the Penguin update?

Kevin Gibbons: None of our clients have seen any negative shifts in organic traffic.

However, in the past we have noticed trends of referral traffic dropping as a knock-on effect from blogs/forums/publishers that have been penalised and as a result of them having less traffic, there are fewer outbound link clicks.

The data we have so far is too early to highlight a trend, but it’s certainly one to keep a close eye on…

Nikolay Stoyanov: No, I haven’t seen any change on my site or my clients’ sites since Penguin 4.0 was launched. I guess it’s because I’m playing by the rules but also because it’s not been entirely rolled out yet. It’s way too soon to jump to conclusions.

How can webmasters best avoid the risk of being affected by Penguin?

Kevin Gibbons: Focus on building a brand, not links.

If your activity is just for link building, it will leave an SEO footprint. No-one wants that.

Aim to tell your story via content, data-driven analysis and knowledge – and amplify to a targeted audience via multiple channels; social media, paid search, digital PR etc…

Also monitor the links you have and audit these on a frequent basis. If you’re in a competitive industry, you may have to actively disavow negative links that have been built to your site that someone else has built!

Gerald Murphy: Data analysis is even more important to SEO. This most effecient way to analyse this update is to breakdown links by category, sub category, and page level, and then compare this with data, such as, visits, average blended rank, and revenue, for example.

Nikolay Stoyanov: Forget about shortcuts in SEO! There aren’t any. The only way to stay on the safe side and secure your brand, visitors and sales is if you do white hat SEO.

Write well researched and useful content and build quality links to it. That’s it! Nothing’s changed. Hopefully with the real-time Penguin that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Maybe not at once but eventually.

With Hummingbird and RankBrain we’re already seeing lots of positive changes in the SERPs from content perspective. Now’s the time to see the same when it comes to link building.

How, if at all, will this update change the way you work?

Kevin Gibbons: The update doesn’t change our process, the only thing it might do is re-affirm the message we have been on the right track by focusing on quality. We’re just hoping it catches some of our clients competitors out!

Nikolay Stoyanov: I wouldn’t say that Penguin 4.0 will change my work routine in any way. But I am pretty sure that there will be a much higher demand for quality link building services in the upcoming years due to this huge change in the SEO world.

Hopefully, more and more webmasters will start playing by the rules as they should be same for everyone. That’s fair!

Gerald Murphy: It won’t.

What future algorithm changes do you wish to see? Is there anything Google is ignoring?

Kevin Gibbons: There’s always been a gap between what Google says it’s algorithm does and what it actually does. Over recent years they’ve done a much better job at closing these, and most of the tactics that do work are often very short-term, which is enough to keep most brands away from them.

I would expect them to be looking at things such as:

• Spammy link building at high velocity, which can still rewarded by Google.
• Ecommerce site cloning can be a pain point, where Google starts to rank the phishing/fake site organically with the clients own content.
• Redirected domains into sites/pages/new domains – some can be for legitimate reasons (re-brands/acquisitions) – but others are purely for short-term SEO boosts.
• Mass content production, with many companies pumping out X amount of articles a day/week trying to show ‘freshness’ of content but not putting enough effort/resource into the quality of content. Long-term you’d expect panda to go against them, but short term it can work better than expected.

Gerald Murphy: AI integration with links to get a deeper analysis of behaviour, such as, seasonality and maybe even social media signals. Remember mobile is going to kill links because of our behaviour. Name me a user, sitting in the front room on their tablet or smartphone, reading another great blog who creates a HTML link. This is not in our behaviour.

Nikolay Stoyanov: I want to see all the black hat and grey hat methods dead. Starting with PBNs. I still see multiple sites ranking in top 5 or higher with low quality or PBN links that I can smell from a mile away. It’s high time that Google Penguin starts penalizing these websites like they deserve.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/09/28/penguin-4-0-what-does-it-mean-for-seo-practitioners/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/151091197739

20 Fascinating Topics That Every New Blog Should Tackle

When you know your stuff, writing a blog is easy, right?

Uh. Not necessarily.

I’d say that I’m pretty familiar with digital marketing. But when it comes to blogging, I still face challenges.

The challenge isn’t my lack of knowledge; it’s translating that knowledge into readable content—content helpful to you and other marketers.

Maybe you’ve faced the same challenge.

For some reason, conveying stuff you know inside and out is a lot trickier than it appears. Writing is difficult enough, but continually coming up with topics that would boost your online marketing efforts seems downright impossible.

In the old days, maintaining a business blog was more about appeasing search engine algorithms than appealing to actual humans. Back then, cramming posts full of keywords was the top priority.

Today, for a business blog to produce results, it has to appeal to humans first and search engines second. In fact, SEO and UX are basically one and the same.

Gone are the days of blathering on ad nauseam about anything your heart desires.

Content marketing via blogging is one of the best ways to increase the online visibility of a brand. These days, though, the posts you create must be engaging, informative, interesting, and generally high in quality to get you anywhere.

Contrary to what you may have heard, quantity does not exceed quality here. Even so, coming up with fascinating topics for a blog is often difficult for business owners. Here are 20 topics and ideas to get you off to a great start.

1. Write a long-form post

In the business world, getting straight to the point is generally the way to go. Quick, snappy blog posts have a time and a place, but your blog will suffer if that’s all you ever do.

Regardless of your niche, there are surely topics you could cover that require more than 400-500 words. Brainstorm topics that demand extensive, in-depth coverage, and then create long-form blog posts about them. The exhaustive nature of such posts will make them fascinating to anyone who is thirsty about the topic.

You may be aware that long-form blog posts—over 2,000-3,000 words—will rank higher, get more shares, and earn more links.

This is the kind of traction you need to gain with your blog.

2. Be a reporter

Even if journalism was never your forte, pretend otherwise by reporting back to your audience about important events in your industry. Ideally, these should be events you have attended yourself.

There are, of course, differences between journalistic writing and blog writing. However, in today’s content-driven world, there is also a lot of overlap.

For example, write a blog about your experience at a recent trade show. At the event, take notes about the things you see and the people with whom you interact. Take photos, and include them in your post. Include your own insights to make the piece more personal.

3. Comment about a popular post

Part of maintaining an interesting blog is staying in the loop about happenings in your niche and industry. You should already be keeping up with blogs in that sphere. When a particularly interesting one pops up, write a post about it.

Doing this accomplishes a few things. First, it lets you engage with the community while delivering your take on the original post. Second, it gives you the opportunity to link back to the original post, which might result in a link in return. You’ll gain exposure and, potentially, some backlinks!

4. Share your secrets

No, I’m not telling you to give away all your secrets. Rather, connect more deeply with your audience by giving them information about your business practices and processes “from the horse’s mouth.”

It’s all about transparency and authenticity, and it resonates strongly with readers. People enjoy feeling like they are privy to special knowledge.

I do this as often as possible, e.g., by updating my audience on the $100,000 challenge, showing all the relevant data, metrics, and revenue numbers, and sharing the lessons I’m learning from my experiment.

Maybe it’s time to pull back the curtain, and share your secrets in a blog post.

5. Round up industry experts

Establish relationships with key players within your industry through persistent social media activity. Once they’ve gotten to know you, invite thought leaders in your niche to share their views regarding a specific topic.

Compile all their contributions—with their permission, of course—and create a roundup blog post with them. Include links to each person’s blog because they might return the favor.

6. Make an infographic

You probably have plenty of facts and statistics about your niche and industry at your disposal. Put relevant ones together, and use them to create an eye-catching infographic to share on your blog.

If necessary, hire someone to create it for you. Include it in a new blog post, and then provide commentary about the facts and statistics within the body of the post. Encourage sharing by providing an easy link for people to use.

7. Look at both sides of an issue

Posts covering the pros and cons of a particular issue, product, or service tend to be received very well, and they are usually a breeze to put together. Brainstorm and write down issues that tend to have significant advantages and disadvantages.

During the course of researching this kind of piece, you will become even more knowledgeable about your niche. In the post itself, speak directly to your audience. Ask them for their take on the issue. Through their contributions, you can develop even more fascinating fodder for your blog.

8. Go behind the scenes

Blog posts about your actual business should be kept to a minimum as they tend to be pretty yawn-worthy. From time to time, though, go ahead and give readers a glimpse of what makes your company tick.

Reserve these posts for behind-the-scenes topics your audience will actually care about. For example, share what your company does to prepare for a big trade show, or introduce a new employee who you suspect will be a real game-changer for the company.

9. Explain how to do something

How-to articles and blogs tend to do well because people overwhelmingly turn to the Internet for advice and instructions on accomplishing various things. If you can incorporate one of your products into a how-to post, all the better.

For example, perhaps there’s a special way to use one of your products few people know about, or maybe there’s a process people should follow to make the most of it.

Be as thorough as possible in your post. Explain it as meticulously as you can. Include videos and photos to drive home your point and to ensure people bookmark and share your article.

10. Interview people

Yep, I’m asking you to be a journalist again. Remember those thought leaders and industry experts from a previous tip? Interview one of them to create a full-fledged blog post about your niche or industry.

Thankfully, you don’t have to be in the same room as your interviewee to talk to them. Come up with a list of questions your audience would be curious about, and email it instead. You could also post the questions via Twitter or another social media channel.

11. Make an FAQ post

Since you’re already actively engaged with your niche and industry on social media—you are, right?—you can easily keep your finger on the pulse of what people are saying. More importantly, you can quickly figure out what they are asking.

Scour social media for questions from everyday people regarding your niche. Compile a frequently asked questions post to address them. You might even include links to questions on sites like Twitter and Facebook to gain a little link juice too.

12. Give readers the hard truth

I don’t care what niche or industry you cover. There are sure to be at least a few elephants in the room or subjects that people are generally afraid to broach. As long as you have something useful to say, go ahead and have at it.

Controversial posts shouldn’t be the bread and butter of your blog, but they can certainly stir up interest under the right circumstances. Tell it like it is in your blog from time to time to really wow your audience.

13. Share a case study

Blogs that explain how everyday people make use of a company’s products or service can be pretty engaging. However, resist the temptation to make something up. Wait until you have something truly special to share, and then share it.

Ideally, you should get permission from the client or customer to feature them, and include their input in the case study too. While the piece will obviously be promotional to some extent, write it in a factual, journalistic way to avoid alienating your audience.

14. Start a series or a regular feature

Some topics are so extensive that they can’t be covered adequately in a single post—not even a long-form one. When you run across one of these, consider breaking it up into a series for your readers. Create cliffhangers at the end of each one to keep them coming back for more.

You could also come up with a weekly or monthly feature for your blog. For example, you could highlight happenings regarding your niche in social media every Monday, or you could feature a new product or service every month.

15. Make a really long listicle

By now, we’re all familiar with the standard listicle, which typically contains 5-10 related points. This has been done so much that people don’t get very excited about it anymore.

Improve on the concept by coming up with a really long listicle that pertains to your niche. But do so only if the topic at hand is deep enough to warrant it, or you will end up with a bunch of similar-sounding points.

16. Stir controversy

Think of some common views or beliefs regarding your niche. You are sure to disagree with at least a few of them, so write posts expressing your viewpoints, challenging the accepted opinions.

Doing this will likely invite controversy, so be sure to write these posts in a tactful way. Don’t attack others. Instead, explain why you think the status quo has it all wrong, and challenge readers to convince you otherwise.

17. Debunk some myths

What are some common misconceptions or myths regarding your industry or niche? Compile a list, and then use it to create a really fascinating post for your audience.

Make sure you back up your claims, though. Otherwise, readers will lose their interest when they realize they’re reading the rants of someone who really doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Approach writing such an article with the intention of providing as much useful and usable information as possible.

18. Share customer success stories

With any luck, satisfied customers will occasionally contact you to express their appreciation. When this happens, ask them if you can feature their comments in a blog post for your business.

In this type of post, begin by describing the problem the customer was facing. Describe the product or service they used, and then explain how they were able to solve their issue by using it. If possible, include additional comments from the actual client to make the post especially engaging.

19. Perform research to delve deeper

At a certain point, you will exhaust the resources regarding facts and statistics concerning your niche. Avoid becoming repetitive, and conduct your own research.

This could mean something as simple as posting an online survey for your existing readers and sharing the results. However, you might even want to hire a market research firm for assistance. If you can present brand-new facts and information to the world, your blog will be better, and you will have a lot more to go on.

In your post, include visual representations of data to help people make sense of it. A simple pie chart or bar graph can make a huge difference.

20. Share a link roundup

As you run across interesting posts, memes, and other content regarding your niche, save them. After accumulating 10 or 20, write a link-roundup post featuring each one.

This is great for a few reasons. First, it forces you to stay up-to-date on your industry news and helps you bring relevant information to your audience. Second, it lets you branch out and opine about all kinds of content. Finally, it may even enhance your link-building strategy, which never hurts.

Conclusion

In a perfect world, none of us would ever have to cope with writer’s block.

The ideas would flow freely and continuously. Since that’s not the case, use this list of topics and ideas to kick-start your new blog.

When readers visit your new blog and are presented with an array of fascinating posts, they’re likelier to engage with it, bookmark it, and keep coming back for more.

And that’s exactly what you want to happen.

Have you already covered one of the ideas listed above? Which new ones are you excited to try?

from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/HdTf3w4NjzQ/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/151065049244