What makes a successful blog? If you think the answer is number of views, you may or may not be right

Some blogs are there to convert, others to promote awareness and some are there to encourage conversation. Regardless of what your metrics are for judging a blog’s success, one thing is for sure, you always strive to improve your performance. Majority of bloggers and marketers are judging a blog post on an individual level. While it does provide information on best and worst performing blogs it does very little in informing your strategy going forward. [si_guide_block id="85104" title="Download FREE Resource – Top 10 common content marketing mistakes" description="Grow your audience and build interest and leads by avoiding these common mistakes. With so much content being produced, it's important your content marketing strategy cuts through. Our content marketing mistakes guide reveals the most common mistakes, but more importantly what to…

Here are some SEO Tactics that will be sure to help improve your ranking

Broadly, SEO is any activity that helps you improve your ranking on search engines such as Google, Bing, and others. With 3.9 billion internet users and over 3.3 billion searches being performed each day, securing a good rank isn’t easy. And that’s exactly why SEO techniques are so important for businesses. [si_guide_block id="80207" title="Download FREE Resource – 10 business-limiting SEO mistakes " description="The search engine optimisation (SEO) mistakes to avoid and what to do instead. Google's engineers have said there are at least 200 'ranking signals' which affect whether you can rank above your competitors or not for searches which will bring you new business. To make SEO even more challenging, many of them change frequently in Google's algorithm updates. So, it can be really tough…

Many marketers and businesses don’t really put together a detailed strategy to outline their blogging objectives

Content marketing is well-known as one of the most effective forms of business promotion; and out of all content marketing tactics, blogging is arguably the best-performing and most cost-effective tactic. In my latest Quick Win for Smart Insights, I show you how to develop a blogging strategy from start to finish. You’ll learn: Why blogging is such an effective form of content marketing How to set quality objectives for your blogging strategy How to perform content and keyword research to improve your content How to put together an editorial calendar and come up with great headlines and topics for your blog How to create a promotional strategy for your blog to improve your overall results As well as how to measure your results from blogging so you can improve your blogging strategy and…

Are you using YouTube to market your business?

As one of the biggest search engines in the world and the second biggest website in the world, it’s definitely the place to be. A YouTube channel can help you reach a much wider audience, generate more traffic, more engagement, and more leads and conversions.

So since we’re in the age of video marketing right now, here’s how to become a better YouTube marketer:

Start by developing a schedule

Consistency is always important in content marketing, but it’s really important with YouTube marketing. If you’re posting a video now, another one in a month, the third after another couple of months and so on, you won’t be able to get very far or get subscribers or traffic.

The first step in building a successful YouTube channel is a posting schedule; determine a realistic frequency and plan your content ahead…

9 Tools You Can Use to Spy on Your Competitors

Businesses that focus on their target audiences, ideal buyer personas and customer pain points are ahead of the marketing game. But they’re still missing a crucial step to success. Failing to thoroughly investigate what your competition is doing - and how they’re doing it - can leave you in the dark and in a permanent state of second place. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to spy on your competitors. Simply studying their websites can give insights into what they’re doing right and wrong, and what you can do better. Take it a step further, and go deep into your competitor analysis by searching for their backlinks, studying their email marketing funnels and researching what kind of paid and organic search keywords they’re focusing on. Need some resources to get started? Here are seven tools you can use to spy on your competitors. …

Those in ecommerce industry tend to consider benchmarks, budgets, and trends to streamline their businesses. Unfortunately, they ignore risks

Every year, around this time, Shopygen publish a post on important risks that cannot be ignored by our readers’ businesses and clients. [si_guide_block id="79186" title="Download FREE Resource – 10 ecommerce mistakes" description="Explore the top 10 ecommerce mistakes and how to avoid them. Ecommerce is a fast-moving environment and we actively keep our mistakes up to date so you’re always making the most of your marketing"/]

Ecommerce Online Security

From a perspective of tackling cyber fraud, stringent security standards should be implemented. For a broader overview of different types of cyber threats, consider the following list: Phishing Hacking Credit card fraud Data errors Unprotected online services Adoption of techniques such as…

Chart of the day: Facebook Users' Privacy Concerns

In the wake of global data disasters, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where an individual’s online privacy has fallen at risk of being misrepresented and misused for falsely priming political agenda - people have undoubtedly become wary of their personal details saved online. However, it’s interesting to see that even though privacy concerns amongst users are high, Facebook daily visits seem to have been largely unaffected by this disaster. Recent research by Marketing Charts shows that personal data security is the top concern with Facebook. According to a Gallup survey, 55% of Facebook users are very concerned and 25% are somewhat concerned about their personal data being sold to and used by other companies and organization, among many other…

Millennials (or Generation Y) are people born between the early 1980s to the early 2000s. Statistics show that in the near-future, millennials will make up most of the workplace. In fact, these young people are the largest generation in the U.S. labor force.

Most marketing agencies will simply not survive if they don't hire millennials now.

Flexible hours and remote working are becoming more and more common options that are offered in order to win the new generation over.

In addition to remote working, young people love technology. For many, it's an absolute must that the agency they work for has the right types of software tools or gadgets. As older generations begin to retire and the younger workforce steps in to fill their…

Chart of the Day: Which are the most popular merchandising techniques used by online retailers?

Best practices for creating effective user experiences for Ecommerce sites are often discussed along with how to improve experiences through conversion rate optimization. However, it's less common for retail merchandising techniques to be discussed. To help retailers learn best practices, we've created a new online merchandising guide by retail Expert Mark Hall which is available to Business members. To highlight some of the merchandising techniques available this research reviews techniques used based on a review of the Ecommerce sites of some of the 50 top global Ecommerce brands. The results suggest a variation in merchandising adoption with some techniques such as top sellers, trending now and top-rated products having a surprisingly low adoption. This in turn, suggests, the challenges of including merchandising features when retail brands are looking to simplify experiences on mobile devices…

Over half of the leading marketing teams report they are using AI in some way, and 57% of teams believe that AI is necessary to support their strategies and sales goals

It’s no surprise that AI technology is all the rage in nearly every marketing department these days. According to Forrester’s report on AI adoption, a shocking 94% of respondents believed that AI-driven marketing would be very valuable to their company. And yet, over 67% of participants also reported they had concerns and obstacles that stood in the way of AI adoption.

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The benefits of AI technology in marketing…