Category: Curated Content

In 2012, $1 billion seemed like an awful lot to pay for Instagram, given that the photo-sharing network had just 30 million users.

But, Facebook was weak on mobile in those pre-IPO days, and a purchase of Instagram allowed an immediate shoring up in that area.

Mark Zuckerberg was lauded for his commitment to keeping Instagram independent, and not just Frankensteining the technology into the parent Facebook app. Now, six years later, his quotes are even more interesting:

“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.”

Not only have they kept Instagram… Read More

Email newsletters are a great way to stay in contact with your subscribers. I use this strategy for my businesses as well.

But when I consult different companies and analyze their email newsletters, I come across some common problems. They’re not using these emails as a marketing tool.

Just sending a newsletter for the sake of meeting your weekly or monthly requirement is not effective.

Your newsletter is a valuable marketing resource, and it’s time for you to start writing them as such. If you need to improve your existing newsletters, read this post.

This guide is also great for anyone just starting out with newsletters.

If you follow my tips, tricks, and advice based on my personal experience and research, your next newsletter will be a conversion machine.

Here’s what you need to know to make this happen.

Give people a reason to opt in

Let’s take a step back for a minute. For you to get conversions in the first place, you need to have an active list of email subscribers.

The best way to do this is to give them a great reason to opt in. Just saying “sign up for our newsletter” isn’t appealing.

How can you approach this? Value. Pitch people with value. Give them an incentive to sign up. Check out this example from the Lands’ End website:

Customers who sign u… Read More

When was the last time you updated your LinkedIn profile? Are you taking advantage of all of the LinkedIn features available to you? In this article, you’ll discover the latest changes to LinkedIn and ways you can use each one to enhance your marketing and networking. #1: Profile Photo Placement Reveals More Usable Background Image […]

This post LinkedIn Layout Changes and Feature Updates: What Marketers Need to Know first appeared on Social Media Examiner.

… Read More

Posted by rjonesx.

Identifying bad backlinks has become easier over the past few years with better tool sets, bigger link indexes, and increased knowledge, but for many in our industry it’s still crudely implemented. While the ideal scenario would be to have a professional poring over your link profile and combing each link one-by-one for concerns, for many webmasters that’s just too expensive (and, frankly, overkill).

I’m going to walk through a simple methodology using Link Explorer and Excel (although you could do this with Google Sheets just as easily) to combine together the power of Moz Link Explorer, Keyword Explorer Lists, and finally Link Lists to do a comprehensive link audit.

The basics

There are several components involved in determining whether a link is “bad” and should potentially be removed. Ultimately, we want to be able to measure the riskiness of the link (how likely is Google to flag the link as manipulative and how much do we depend on the link for value). Let me address three common factors used by SEOs to determine this score:

Trust metrics:

There are a handful of metrics in our industry that are readily available to help point out concerning backlinks. The two that come to mind most often are Moz Spam Score and Majestic Trust Flow (or, better yet, the difference between Citation Flow and Trust Flow). These two scores actually work quite differently. Moz’s Spam Score predicts the likelihood a domain is banned or penalized ba… Read More

Staying active on social media is one of the best ways for you to create brand awareness and engage with your audience.

But with so many different social platforms to manage on a daily basis, it can be overwhelming. Sometimes keeping up with all these networks at once can feel like a full-time job.

You have enough on your plate when it comes to running your business. Sometimes, your social media campaigns get pushed toward the bottom of your to-do list.

If you’re not in a position to hire a full-time social media marketing manager, you can use a variety of marketing tools to help you streamline this process.

Those of you who have a social media marketing manager can still take advantage of these tools to help make their job more efficient.

I’ve used my fair share of social media marketing tools over the years. Some were great while others not so much. I want to help you avoid the ones that weren’t efficient.

I took the time to narrow down my favorite social media marketing tools that helped save me a ton of time. My hope is you’ll have the same results using them. 

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is great because it has versatile plan options that can match the size of your business and its needs. If you’re the only one using it and you’ve got no more than 10 social media profiles, it’s only $20 per month to use this tool.

But for larger teams and businesses, it has plans for up to 20 and up to 50 social media… Read More