Category: Curated Content

 

Everything you should know about website planning

Save yourself a lot of time and headache: before you dive into building your new website, think through a high-level website plan.

This planning process doesn’t need to be complicated or time intensive. It’s more or less about taking the time to answer some important questions that will help ensure you build your website with the right foundation to accomplish your goals.

For example, creating a website to sell products is very different than creating a website for your personal brand. Thinking through what you’ll need to accomplish one or the other is essential to building a successful website. (If you don’t make the right choices now, you may have to tear down everything you’ve built and start over from square one.)

In fact, this planning process is as much about deciding what you do not need for your website, as it is to figure out what you do need. Less is definitely more here. Don’t fall into the trap of adding a bunch of stuff to your website just because it seems like something you should or because it’s what other websites do. I recommend using MindMeister or some other mind-mapping tool to drive this process.

The purpose of this guide is to prepare you to create your website.

In order to best illustrate the process, I’ll walk you through how I did it for one of my undeveloped websites, SelfTeach.com. This is a content-d… Read More

YouTuber Lilly Singh -also known as IISuperwomanII – is famous for her comedic videos that have garnered 2.7 billion views and 14 million subscribers, which even got her a deal with Coca-Cola. As of 2018, one of her sponsored videos of Coke has over two million views. This is one of the few things that a global influencer can do.

Influencers are individuals or groups of content creators and curators who have a steady following. Their commentary can influence their subscribers’, followers’, or fans’ purchasing decisions. Their audience doesn’t need to be huge. If they have a fanbase that deems their opinions and thoughts to be credible, then they can be considered to be influencers.

Over the last few years, influencers have grown as a dominant force online. Many have utilized influencer marketing to sway consumer behavior and decisions. The method helps build up engagement through social media marketing and increase subscribers on different platforms.

So if you want to take your digital marketing to the next level, consider collaborating with an influencer! But first, it’s best to know what influencer marketing is before getting onboard with it.

What is Influencer M… Read More

Are your Facebook ads underperforming? Are you unsure how to get your ads to work better? In this article, you’ll discover five issues that impact Facebook ad performance and how to fix them. #1: You’re Bidding Against Yourself The way Facebook ads work is that you’re in an online auction bidding for the chance for […]

The post 5 Facebook Ad Mistakes That Could Be Hurting You appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

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The emphasis here is on first. This guide is meant to help you get your first dirty brand identity out the door.

It’s meant to be functional and good enough for now.

There are two options I recommend for developing your first brand identity:

Do it yourself
Use 99designs

Both options will get you to the finish line. The trade off is your time vs. your money. If you are short on money, then do it yourself. If you are short on time, then use 99designs.

If you were to get a high quality, professional brand identity, it’d cost you tens of thousands of dollars (or $211 million).

A more professional approach with an agency would look something like this. If you hire 99designs, you won’t get this level of quality, but you’ll still have a very functional starting point. 99designs has a brand identity package that starts at $599.

If you aren’t familiar with 99designs, it’s a platform that runs design contests. I particularly like the contest approach for your first brand identity because chances are you don’t know exactly what you want yet. Having a bunch of options to choose from will help.

Brand Identity Contents

A brand identity can be extensive, but we’ll just focus on a few things that you need to get off the ground. Everything else is a bonus.

Logo — There are 7 common types of logos: lettermarks, wordmarks, pictorial marks, abstract logo marks, mascots, combination marks, and emblems.
Colors — It’… Read More

At this point, the digital marketing landscape has been disrupted so much that what was effective just a few years ago is now old hat.

Posting content to social media was once all you needed to grow a following. Today, customer interactions come at a premium. If you aren’t wowing your customers with personalized content or starting a real conversation with them, you’re falling behind the curve.

While some businesses are on the cusp of the latest marketing trends, many others are still playing catch-up to what was hot a few years ago.

If you still feel like your head is spinning from 2018, 2019 promises to be even more disruptive. And it isn’t just new technologies that are changing the game.

Here are 7 of the most important digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2019.

1. Omnichannel Marketing

“Omnichannel” is a term that gets thrown around a lot. But it’s not just a buzzword. The best way to understand omnichannel is to compare it to the term “multichannel.”

In a multichannel marketing strategy, you set up various marketing touchpoints which reinforce each other to ease a customer through their buying journey. For example, you may use socia… Read More