TWP Publisher, Author at TotalWeb Partners • Page 8 of 31

November 22, 2021

Email marketing is bigger than ever, so here’s how your small business should do it

Email is a critical marketing tool. Research firm Statistica reports that, in 2020, about 306 billion emails were sent and received every day worldwide, and this figure is projected to increase to more than 376 billion daily emails within the next few years.

That should not surprise anyone running a small business. According to recent research from Campaign Monitor, an email marketing platform, 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers.

Unfortunately, there is still a great deal of confusion among small-businesses owners about how to best deploy email marketing.

For starters, you don’t want to send hundreds or thousands of emails from your company’s mail server unless you enjoy getting into a fight with your internet service provider. That’s why it’s always best to subscribe to a bulk email service such as Constant Contact, Mailchimp, AWeber, or Emma. Besides providing templates and assistance for sending out email campaigns, the primary job of these services is to make sure that your email gets delivered.

The good ones will have best practices and actively enforce opt-in and data rules to ensure that you are not sending spam or messages to people who don’t want to hear from you. Because of these controls, the major mail providers such as Gmail, which recognizes that delivery is coming from a vetted source, are less inclined to block your messages or send them to spam.

What about content? The rule of thumb is that it should be short and mostly non-promotional. That’s because no one wants to receive advertisements. Your community will want information that will help. This information can be about your products but also include thought leadership, insights, and advice.

“If your email marketing is all about ‘buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff,’ then you’re not providing any kind of value,” says Bonny Clayton, a Media-based web design and marketing specialist. “Keep doing that and your email list is going to die.”

Clayton also recommends that if you’re sharing a blog or information about a new product, “don’t give them the whole kit and caboodle in the email. Whet their appetite, pique their interest in the email, and then say, learn more by having a big juicy button for clicking.”

November 21, 2021

by TWP Publisher

Why Good Content Isn’t Always Enough To Compete In SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO

Not long ago, if you wrote good content on a regular basis, you had a decent chance of trouncing your competition in search engine results pages (SERPs), attaining a higher search ranking and therefore getting a higher share of organic traffic. These days, good content is still a major boon for your website — but it’s not enough to compete on the national level.

What do I mean by this? And how can you adjust your strategy accordingly?

SEO Basics: The Importance Of Content

I’ll start with some basic search engine optimization (SEO) background information. SEO is all about increasing your website’s rankings in relevant search results, most commonly targeting Google. For Google to rank your site highly, you need to establish both relevance (i.e., addressing the subject of a user’s query) and authority (i.e., proving that your site is trustworthy).

Written content is valuable because it accomplishes both — sort of. Good content lets you establish relevance for different keywords and phrases, while also building the trustworthiness of your site. If your content is good enough to attract inbound backlinks, which serve as major indicators of authority, it can assist your site even more.

So why isn’t good content enough to compete in SEO in 2021?

The Changing Landscape Of Consumer Content

First, the very nature of “content” is starting to change. Back in 2011, in the wake of the Panda update, written content was not only the norm — it was the only practical way to optimize a site for search engines. For today’s consumers, written content is often an afterthought — they want images, videos, podcasts, audio content and other mediums to consume.

If you want to stand out to both search engine algorithms and human content consumers, you need to diversify the types of content you’re creating and appeal to a broader audience.

User Experience And Technical Factors

Lately, Google has been making more of an effort to prioritize user experience and technical factors in its ranking algorithm. The company’s philosophy has always been to make the web a better place for search users, so websites that provide fast, reliable and technically polished platforms have always had an edge over their counterparts.

In 2021, Google is rolling out page experience, a new set of ranking signals for websites, based on “Core Web Vitals” that measure website performance. Good content can still anchor your site and provide you with opportunities with keyword optimization, but if that content is unreliable, slow to load or otherwise bothersome to users, it’s not going to have the same impact.

November 19, 2021

by TWP Publisher

Four WordPress web design trends to follow

Website Content, Website Design Practices Web Design Trends

As an online business, your website is a powerful asset and you need it to make a good first impression. By getting up to speed on the latest web design trends, you’ll be on your way to converting one-time browsers into loyal repeat visitors and paying customers. To set your website up for success, here are four WordPress web design trends to follow.

Why it’s important to follow web design trends

When designing a website, there’s always a temptation to stand out by creating something unexpected. While defying expectations may sound like a good idea, unique sites often struggle to provide a strong user experience (UX).

Web design trends exist for a reason. Usually, they represent the most popular and widely used approaches at the current time. Follow these trends, and visitors will immediately know how to interact with your site.

This isn’t to say you can’t bend the rules and inject some of your personality and brand identity into your website. However, before you can get creative, it’s helpful to have a solid understanding of what’s popular in the world of web design.

Four WordPress web design trends to keep an eye on

When it comes to web design, we’ve tracked the latest trends. To keep your website relevant, here are four of the most important developments.

1. Flexible multi-purpose themes

Multi-purpose themes enable you to build practically any kind of website. They often include extensive feature lists and multiple built-in tools. Some popular examples of multi-purpose WordPress themes include Divi and the Avada theme.

Multi-purpose themes are ideal for anyone who owns several websites. Instead of purchasing a different theme for each site, you can use a single multi-purpose theme across all of your domains.

In this way, using multifunctional designs can enable you to solidify your branding and give your entire portfolio a professional makeover.

2. Minimalism and white space

Sometimes less is more. If you take a look at some of the top brands, you’ll see that many websites include white space in their designs. This design trend involves using large white sections between text and images.

White space can create a distinction between different sections. In turn, this can help visitors better understand your content.

If you really want to draw the visitor’s attention towards a particular feature, try creating a slight 3D effect by adding subtle shadows. This technique is also useful for ‘softening’ a page that uses lots of contrasting white space and colourful elements.

November 18, 2021

by TWP Publisher

How, why every artist should use email marketing in 2021

E-Marketing, Marketing Email Marketing

The current musical landscape consists of a melting pot of artists, all bidding for the attention of audiences with 12-second attention spans. While social media is great when it comes to building an engaging brand story and identity, artists like you need to take their marketing efforts one step further.

That’s where email marketing comes in. Email is the tried-and-tested medium that can turn someone who stumbled upon your music into a long-term fan.

Why is email marketing beneficial to musicians?

Email is the internet’s currency. Anyone who’s online has an email address.

90% of emails get delivered straight to your intended recipient’s inbox. Conversely, only 2% of your Facebook audience see your posts. If you’ve got 1000 followers on Facebook, only 20 of them will see your post. If you have 1000 people on your mailing list, 900 individuals will receive your email in their inbox. That’s quite a difference!

Email is also one of the most powerful conversion channels out there. The average click-through rate of any given email is approximately 3%, compared to Instagram’s 0.22%. This makes a big difference when talking about overall revenue, merch sold and gig tickets purchased.

It’s also important to consider the fact that many people use social media to communicate with loved ones and to pass the time. On the other hand, email is a more professional communication medium. In fact, 49% of consumers prefer receiving marketing messages via email.

Then there’s also the indisputable fact that email is one of the most stable communication channels on the net. The first email campaign was sent in 1978 to 400 people. Marketers haven’t looked back ever since. By 2013, 53% of marketers agreed that email is the most effective communication channel. In 2020, around 306 billion e-mails were sent and received every day globally. This figure is set to increase to over 376 billion daily e-mails in 2025. Social media platforms come and go – but email has stayed and conquered.

November 16, 2021

by TWP Publisher

13 SEO Tricks That Don’t Result In Google Treats

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) search engine optimization (SEO), SEO

If you’re tempted to use search engine optimization (SEO) tricks in an effort to get organic search performance faster, cheaper, and easier, don’t do it. You’ll only end up scaring your rankings away.

But what if you don’t know if a strategy you’re planning is a trick at all? The simple litmus test is this: Are you doing something for your customers’ benefit or to get better rankings? If the answer is better rankings, you might be about to engage in the kind of SEO trickery that Google and other search engines take a dim view of.

Google in particular publishes clear webmaster guidelines on the types of strategies that constitute bad behavior, including the following 13 SEO tricks.

Automated Content: Using shortcuts like spinning content — a process that runs existing content through a software program to create “new” content — or using other automated methods to generate content typically produces garbage. Poor-quality content is one of Google’s pet peeves. Searchers hate it, and as a result, Google doesn’t rank automated content highly.
Link Schemes: Increasing the number of backlinks from high-quality sites is key to SEO. Buying or bartering for links, reciprocal linking, link rings, and overly optimized guest posting, press releases or articles with embedded links are all examples of link schemes that violate Google’s guidelines.
Thin Content: To earn the right to rank, your site needs to have valuable content that contains relevant keywords. Creating pages with little content or content cobbled together from different sources just isn’t good enough.
Cloaking: Don’t show keyword-rich content to search engines, and then show humans a clean page of images, videos, or other streamlined content. Humans and search engines must always be shown the same content when the page loads.
Sneaky Redirects: Similar to cloaking, sneaky redirects are used to show search engines one highly optimized page of content while sending humans to a different page. The same tactic can also be used unethically to send desktop and mobile visitors to different, spammy pages of content.
Hidden Content: Text and links need to be clearly visible to both humans and search engines, not hidden from human view. Common tactics include using white text on a white background, hiding text behind images, and other ways of deceptively serving richer content to search engines than to humans.
Doorway Pages: Highly optimized pages of content created to rank for similar keyword variants that then funnel searchers to one page rather than providing value on their own are known as doorway pages.

November 14, 2021

by TWP Publisher

Your website could be doing the environment dirty. Here’s how to clean it up.

Website Content, Website Design Practices Web Design, Website design

No trees are seemingly cut down every time you Google something or read a social media post on your phone or laptop. But websites alone do create emissions—internet usage is responsible for almost four percent of global emissions. That might not seem like a lot, but its equivalent to about the same emissions caused by global air travel. That percentage is predicted to almost double by about 2025 according to a post by Brussels-based energy magazine Energuide. And internet usage is on the rise– as COVID shut down the world last spring pushing many jobs and education online, internet usage went up as high as 40 percent, Yale News reported.

“The pandemic-related switch to digital has important environmental benefits, such as the reduction of travel-related carbon emissions, but the transition to a more digitally-centered world is not as clean as one might think,” Kaveh Madani, the Henry Hart Rice Senior Fellow at the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale’s MacMillan Center who led a study that outlined the internet’s environmental impacts, told Yale News.

The emissions caused by websites comes from the hosting company that ensures that websites are up and running when users search for them, on their server. By working with an environmentally-sound server like GreenGeeks, A2 Hosting, and HostPapa that focuses on renewable energy or lowering their energy usage, websites become more sustainable, Wired UK reported. Something as simple as using fewer images on a webpage also helps lower emissions. Another way to lower emissions is to have simply designed websites with little to no moving images like gifs.

“Images are the single largest contributors to page weight. The more images you use and the larger those image files, the more data needs to be transferred and the more energy is required,” Vineeta Greenwood, account director at design agency Wholegrain Digital told Wired UK.

Another aspect of creating more sustainable websites means raising awareness, or letting servers or customers in need of new web design know that it’s even an option for them. Some major search engines like Google have pledged to lower their tech centers’ water usage and to rely on more sustainable energy to run their search engines and other online products like Gmail and Google Docs.

Baruch Labunski, CEO of Toronto-based SEO company Rank Secure, explains that when many clients work with the company to have their websites designed, they don’t often think about sustainability. Companies like Rank Secure make a point to have sustainability as part of their process when working with businesses who want help with web design by relying on more sustainable data centers.

November 13, 2021

by TWP Publisher

Email Marketing Automation Guide

E-Marketing Email Marketing

Email marketing automation can help you save time, increase your ROI, and deliver a better experience to your subscribers.

Email marketing automation sends targeted emails to subscribers automatically.

Email marketing automation allows you to continue building a relationship with your subscribers over time.

In addition to saving time, email marketing automation provides a better customer experience and boosts revenue.

This article is for business owners aiming to streamline their email marketing campaigns.

If you’re looking for a way to bring in and convert new leads, email marketing is still one of the best strategies out there. Email marketing allows you to connect with your customers and send them automated, personalized content.

Not only is this marketing strategy an efficient way to connect with your customers, it’s the most cost effective. One study found that every $1 spent on email marketing generated an average ROI of $38. And 78% of marketers have seen an increase in their email engagement over the past year.

Fortunately, email marketing automation is a lot easier to set up than you may think, even if you’re new to email marketing. Once you understand the basics, you’ll be well on your way to providing this benefit to your customers.

What is email marketing automation?

Email marketing involves sending targeted emails to groups of your subscribers. This could be a weekly newsletter, information about your products or services, or just general information about your company.

Editor’s note: Looking for the right email marketing solution for your business? Fill out the below questionnaire to have our vendor partners contact you about your needs.

With email marketing automation, these emails are sent without your constant involvement. You set up automatic workflows, and when a customer signs up for a free lead magnet or makes a purchase, they will receive an email or a series of emails.

Email marketing automation allows you to continue building a relationship with your subscribers over time. When you plan your campaign, you’ll decide who it targets and your campaign’s purpose.

From there, you’ll decide how many emails to include and how frequently your customers will receive these emails. Once you schedule your campaign, the emails will be delivered automatically.

November 12, 2021

by TWP Publisher

Five Ways To Supercharge Brand Awareness With SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) search engine optimization (SEO)

Whether you’re a CEO of a large enterprise, marketing director, small business owner or author, you can and should use search engine optimization (SEO) to build your brand. Personal and business names alike can improve their online presence by standing out and gaining recognition.

SEO focuses on improving the user experience for consumers. Your website’s speed, design, content, responsiveness and intent all play a role in your visibility and desirability online. The easier your online presence is to find and access, the faster you can build awareness to draw the right people to your brand.

To supercharge your brand awareness efforts, target the right audience with the right content at the right time and place. How? Through SEO.

Using SEO To Build Brand Awareness

By optimizing critical elements of your website for search, you can boost your rankings and achieve greater brand recognition online. Attract more traffic to your website and convert visitors into leads and engaged consumers.

1. Use content marketing.

Publishing quality, valuable content on your website regularly is one of the most effective ways to increase your rankings on search engines, build brand awareness and attract quality leads to your website. Content marketing can help you build trust with people, educate consumers and inform people of your products and services.

To create a foundation of outstanding content, focus on giving your audience what they need. This may include answering common questions, offering unique perspectives on industry-related topics or crafting engaging pieces that people can’t wait to consume.

Content marketing isn’t limited to blog posts and case studies. You can create everything from e-books and infographics to videos, podcasts, webinars and other creative pieces to engage your audience.

2. Identify relevant keywords.

Optimizing your content with appropriate keywords is an essential part of every great SEO strategy. Identifying relevant phrases and longtail keywords can help you rank for the terms needed to enter the conversation with consumers and meet them where they are in the buyer’s journey.

Ranking near the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific key phrases is also a form of social proof. In other words, it can boost your credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of consumers, as organic rankings are typically more trusted than paid ads.

Remember to optimize every piece of content for search intent (or user intent). Give users what they intend to find when they type specific terms into search engines. This will help boost your conversion rates and keep people onsite longer. Focus on keywords that are navigational, transactional, informational and commercial to satisfy intent. And don’t forget to target branded search terms in addition to industry keywords.

November 10, 2021

by TWP Publisher

Web Design: 5 Ways Valen Digital Can Help You Improve Your SEO Game and Maximise Results

Website Content, Website Design Practices Web Design

Do you have a business with a website but hardly any traffic, offering awesome services or products that still struggle to attract customers? If so, you’re not alone!

It’s one thing to have a promising business, but if nobody can find your company online then most of that promise will sadly go to waste. This is where search engine optimisation (SEO) comes in to save the day. When done right, SEO can make your business visible online to your ideal clients and help to convert them. However, due to the industry’s complexity, it’s often worth getting professional help with SEO to achieve best results.

Valen Digital is a marketing agency that specialises in providing innovative SEO marketing strategies and web design solutions to help clients get noticed online and maximise profits. Here are 5 ways in which Valen Digital can help you to up your SEO game:

Research

During this initial stage, Valen Digital will work hard to understand your specific marketing objectives. This way, the team there will know exactly how to tailor various services to you to help get the best results possible for your business.

Once the experts at Valen Digital have identified your business’s unique objectives, they will thoroughly research which keywords are most relevant to your website. This in turn gives them a clear idea of how to refine your website’s content so it conveys the right message to your target audience.

Technical strategy

In this second stage, the SEO specialists at Valen Digital will strive to identify and then rectify any SEO issues with your current site.

The team are more than capable of identifying current technical issues you may be having, after which they will find a way to address these issues. They can also come up with new marketing strategies for you to use to ensure you have the best possible standpoint from an on-page technical perspective.

Content strategy

Next, the Valen Digital team will help you to be found by the right audience – you know, the people who are most likely to be interested in your business and convert to paying customers.

Valen’s specialised content strategy is there to reinforce the relevancy put forward in the previous steps. This combined with new, fully optimised content will attract organic traffic and links from engaging SEO campaigns, making sure your business is visible online to those who matter.

Marketing strategy

Valen Digital’s next mission is to connect you with new audiences by creating key content pieces that reinforce SEO objectives while still following your overall marketing plan.

November 9, 2021

by TWP Publisher

Marketers search for new email marketing technology to meet pandemic challenges

E-Marketing Email Marketing

During the pandemic, email marketing budgets remained steady while marketers considered new technology to get the most out of the channel, according to a new report from email optimization company Litmus that surveyed 400 marketers.

Marketers this year are most interested in automation. Of those surveyed, 59% said expanding automation was a priority for 2021. Also, 55% are looking to boost personalization, while 35% are considering enriching customer profiles.

Privacy. This year’s iOS changes, including Apple Mail Privacy Protection, have 43% of marketers saying they will look for new ways to measure their email campaigns. Conversely, 24% say that don’t plan to make any changes.

Also, nearly 20% of marketers will run more A/B testing as a result of the new measurement challenges, while 16% will change automation flows and 10% will message their audience about the Apple updates or privacy issues in general.

Budgets. Just because email marketing budgets didn’t increase notably thus far in the pandemic doesn’t mean there aren’t plans for them to grow in the next year. More than 40% of companies intend to up their spend in the channel in 2022.

There is also a shift within email marketing to move the efforts in-house, the study indicates. For instance, 41% of companies plan to hire more email marketers, and 52% expect to decrease the use of agencies, consultants and freelancers.

Relevance. Close to two-thirds of marketers say that they change the tone of their email messages in response to world events.

Specifically with regards to diversity, 27% of companies have sent an email detailing their stance on DE&I. Most of those who haven’t don’t plan to. Only 7% say they haven’t yet, but expect to send out this kind of email.

Why we care. The MarTech Replacement Survey showed a similar interest in boosting email capabilities over the same period. The Litmus survey suggests that even though there was a great need to innovate, budgets were still lacking to make a serious investment in transformation. More optimism about 2022 will likely carry this momentum, as a good many marketers will have more options and funding to make serious changes to their email stack.

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