How Dynamic Rendering Can Help SEO Efforts and ROI

Dynamic rendering is a technical SEO practice that allows you to create a bot-friendly version of your website — to increase the amount of content crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engines — and a human-friendly version optimized for a quality user experience.

This article will answer these questions:

• What does SEO look like in 2021?
• What is technical SEO?
• What is dynamic rendering?
• What are the SEO benefits of dynamic rendering?
• What are the business benefits of dynamic rendering?
• How can I implement it for my own site?

Search Engine Optimization in 2021

When people think of search engine optimization (SEO), many people think of on-page and off-page SEO tactics like meta-description optimization, backlink acquisition, and keyword research. Both on-page and off-page SEO work to authoritatively position websites and content so that their website can rank higher for specific keywords.

But the internet has grown more expansive and complex, and it is becoming more difficult for search engines to process all of the content on the web. In order for a search engine to rank your content, it’s important that they are able to find and process your web pages in the first place.

Because of this, SEO has also had to evolve and has become increasingly technical.

What is Technical SEO

Technical SEO  is the practice of optimizing your website for search engine bots by making it easier for them to crawl, render, and index your web pages.

Technical SEO can include many different types of strategies including:

• structured data markup (schema markup)
• page speed optimizations
• rendering optimizations

The need for webmasters to implement technical SEO practices has increased as search engines struggle to understand and index all content for every website.

The Problem

In the last ten years, websites have become more expansive, interactive, and customized.

Because of this, many websites are not getting fully indexed by Google.  In fact, a study posted on Search Engine Land reported, on average, 15-20% of a website’s URLS are not indexed by Google.

When a search bot gets to a web page, they need to crawl and render it in order to understand and index the page’s content. Once the bots understand the content, they can rank in search results according to the long list of ranking factors.

When a page has a lot of javascript search engines need to take extra time to run the page through a javascript renderer.

A large portion of the websites today use javascript to enhance the user experience. Google is able to render javascript — they are the only search engine that can — but it takes more time and can cause indexation issues.

When it comes to Google, efficiency is everything.

Google allocates a certain amount of time and resources to crawling, rendering, and indexing any given website — this is called their crawl budget. So, when a website is slow-to-load, or difficult to render, then fewer pages are included in Google’s index for any given time they crawl your website.

That means it’s going to take Google much longer to find some pages — if they ever do find them.

The Solution: Dynamic Rendering

Google is aware of this problem. That’s why in 2018 they announced dynamic rendering as a workaround solution to indexation problems caused by the increase in javascript content across the web and now provides Google dynamic rendering documentation and best practice guidelines.

What is Dynamic Rendering?

Dynamic rendering is when two versions of your site are created and then served dynamically depending on the user-agent that calls it.

Users are served a user-friendly version of the page with CSS and javascript code to enhance the user experience.

Google crawlers are served a bot-friendly, pre-rendered, static-HTML version of the page so that they can quickly crawl and index each page.

BENEFITS OF DYNAMIC RENDERING

So how does dynamic rendering actually benefit SEO rankings and overall business?

Help Google crawl your website more quickly, and get the most out of your crawl budget.

Google budgets a certain amount of time and resources for each website. As mentioned above, if your website is difficult to render and crawl, then it’s likely the crawl rate will be lower, not all of your pages will be indexed by search engine crawlers, and your content won’t appear in Google search results.

More content crawled and indexed by search engine bots, without compromising a quality user experience.

With dynamic rendering, search engine bots are able to crawl and index your website much more quickly and effectively. Because search engine bots are able to use your crawl budget more efficiently, they can index more URLs and content on each page, effectively solving indexation issues.

Higher returns on content investments

More content indexed in Google means a higher return on investment for your content marketing efforts and investments made into your organic search channel.

Dynamic rendering is associated with a higher number of organic ranking keywords, and an increase in organic impressions, clicks, and ultimately conversions.

Remember, you can employ the best writers, and produce the best content, but if Google can’t crawl your content, then no one will see it in Google search.

Sites That Should Use Dynamic Rendering

Here is a list of types of websites that benefit the most from dynamic rendering to help you determine if it is the right solution for your website.

Dynamic Rendering is recommended for:

• Large sites with rapidly changing content that requires quick indexing

• Websites that rely on modern javascript functionality

• Websites that rely on social media sharing and chat applications that require access to page content

How To Start Using Dynamic Rendering

In order to reap the benefits of dynamic rendering, you’ll need to follow the Google guidelines for implementation. Google provides step-by-step instructions on how to configure dynamic rendering for your website, from setting it up, to verifying your configuration and troubleshooting through issues.

Another option is to use a dynamic rendering software solution. If you use a dynamic renderer with support staff, they’ll be able to help you set it up on your website and make sure that it’s running effectively so you get the best results.

Guest Author: Lindsey Nelson is a content marketing coordinator at Huckabuy—an SEO software platform that automates Google’s key technical SEO initiatives including structured data, dynamic rendering, & page speed.

The post How Dynamic Rendering Can Help SEO Efforts and ROI appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/dynamic-rendering/

How to Keep Your Content Fresh By Predicting The Future

Google loves fresh, relevant content and has been favoring websites that offer a steady stream of timely content since 2011 (read their post on the subject).

Your social media audience loves it as well, getting a significant percentage of their daily news from content shared by accounts they follow.

When I say timely content, I mean that it’s fresh (recent) and focused on current events or trends. “Timely” refers to relevance, in the moment, and if your content speaks to the current moment effectively. In contrast, evergreen content is the opposite, designed to attract more links over time (thereby increasing search rank) by providing value that doesn’t diminish over time (hence “evergreen”).

Where evergreen pieces tend to be long, dense, and time-consuming to create, timely content is easy to create by comparison and can gain attention quickly -though is unlikely to retain attention or position in search results (SERPs) long-term.

The key to producing effective timely content is to have your proverbial ear to the ground about your industry and the key trends where your offerings are most relevant. When the opportunity to generate awareness reveals itself, you need to be in-the-know, and agile enough to take advantage before the moment passes.

Identifying topics that are already trending is easy to do, but not terribly useful. Being able to act on emerging trends, before the competition has a chance, is a different matter entirely. Timing is everything. You need to be able to identify topics gathering momentum before they catch fire.

This approach only works with topics that evolve. There has to be new news to comment on; waxing philosophical about known knowns just doesn’t cut it. Compelling headlines are shocking, or concerning, or exciting. They’re definitely not rote or redundant.

The formula for success with this approach requires three ingredients, in equal measure:

1. Advance knowledge (or the ability to predict) a future state of affairs.
2. Credentials that demonstrate unquestionable authority in the subject matter at hand.
3. A differentiated point of view that garners respect and raises the audience’s awareness of you (and the brand you represent).

That’s “it”. Simple, if you’re lucky enough to A) know something everyone else doesn’t, B) be an expert in the subject, and C) be able to produce a smart response that neither offends nor makes anyone feel stupid.

Leverage your brand’s mission to differentiate your message

Your unique point of view should be a function of your brand’s unique value proposition. This is a “kills two birds with one stone” situation because when you focus on topics you know intimately through personal experience, you have both inside information and the expertise to make use of it.

What does your brand do that the competition doesn’t (or doesn’t do as well)? These are your differentiators. Your organization has made a deliberate choice to be something, something specific, so look for opportunities to share this point of view when it can shed light on a timely topical issue.

Examining a real world example

I work for a company called MarketChorus which builds tools that help content marketers understand what their audiences are reading and sharing online. We want people to associate our brand with smart and cost-effective content marketing.

Our unique value proposition is a patented approach to finding people based on what they’re reading and sharing on social media.

We monitor industry news sites and blogs for new articles mentioning topics like “AI in content marketing”, “Facebook custom audiences”, or “contextual retargeting”; waiting for an opportunity to inject our brand’s unique perspective into a trending discussion.

We’re hoping to see a headline trending like “Why are Facebook Ads so damn expensive?!” so we can seize the opportunity to publish an article explaining our unique value proposition; finding people engaging very specific content on social media.

The right insights, from the right expert, at just the right time -this is the winning combination that gets people’s attention.

We took advantage of this opportunity to write an article explaining how the presidential election is driving up Facebook ad costs -and how to counter those rising costs.

In your industry, you’re the right expert, the trick is just knowing how to “time the market”, so to speak; riding waves of attention as trends in your industry ebb and flow.

How to monitor the news like a pro

Now you know how to position yourself as a thought leader in a way that will benefit your brand. All that remains is to find a way to predict which topics will become trends in the future. To assist you there, I’ll share my secret weapon…

(whispering) psst…it’s AI.

Who has time to actually read the news anymore? No one, which may be why so many of us get our news from social media timelines.

Of course, there’s still value in what’s being published, even if you can’t always spare the time to read it. Media monitoring solutions like Mention, BrandWatch, and others can help you spot trends, but a content intelligence solution like MarketChrous Resonance (get a free account) or SparkToro may provide more tactical insights.

Each monitoring solution works a little differently, some monitor for keywords (Mention, BrandWatch) and others for “topics”, using natural language processing technology to search contextually (MarketChorus) for related topics.

Monitor any relevant industry publications for opportunities to express the value of the way you do business. Then blog about it, contribute thought leadership content to industry publications, and supply quotes and interviews for reporters covering the topic.

4 Ways to distribute timely thought leadership

#1. HARO

HARO emails come three times a day, loaded with questions on all kinds of subjects -and hopefully a few that you can answer…

An acronym for “Help A Reporter Out”, HARO is a mailing list of sorts, where subject matter experts can offer their opinions in the form of quotes to answer questions submitted by reporters in need of a source. When your quote is used, you’ll be sourced.

Even in situations where you don’t receive an explicit link (links most directly affect your rank in search), there is still value in contributing because Google recognizes high-quality brand mentions as an indirect ranking factor.

#2. Combination blog and email newsletter

Writing an extremely relevant blog post explaining your company’s position on a hot button issue and then having it sit there unread for weeks isn’t going to feel great -or accomplish anything. Timely content needs to be seen in the moment, so have a distribution plan, but don’t overthink it.

Which audience is most likely to appreciate (and share) your point of view?

Customers, subscribers -people who’ve given you their email address at some point in the past- are more likely to pay attention to you than folks with no prior exposure to your brand.

If you have an email list, use it! Send your unique perspective to your customers, partners, blog subscribers, etc as a way to remind them who you are and where you stand on the issue at hand.

#3. LinkedIn/Medium articles

Normally I’d suggest you syndicate rather than produce original content on platforms like LinkedIn and Medium but they were specifically designed for mass distribution of timely, trendy content, so it makes sense.

Save original evergreen content for your blog but don’t be afraid to spread your message out to these third-party platforms when the shelf-life of your content is temporary anyway. Even so, don’t pass up the opportunity to link to your blog from your LinkedIn or Medium article to take advantage of any inbound links your article attracts (no-follow links still have value).

Focus on attention-grabbing headlines and consider investing in paid social to drive eyes to your content before your awesome hot take goes cold. Urgency is the name of the game here…

#4. Contribute thought leadership to relevant industry publications

You’ll need existing relationships with publications that accept submissions and be able to produce content quickly to pull this off but this approach has the potential to get your content in front of the right audience very quickly.

Anticipate a delay between your submission and it being published and prioritize faster moving publications to make sure your timely commentary is still relevant by the time it reaches an audience.

The Forbes Councils program is a particularly strong channel to use for this strategy, if you qualify and can afford the membership fees. Forbes articles are published quickly and tend to receive a lot of visibility in search and social media.

There are many, many other suitable publications though, so don’t feel like you have to be a Forbes contributor to take advantage of this extremely effective tactic. There are almost certainly a number of publications specific to your industry which would be more than happy to publish your expert opinion.

Do your homework in advance. Research publications in your space that accept submissions with advanced Google searches like this:

“content marketing” OR or OR “martech” “become a contributor”

This search should provide many avenues for you to pursue for thought leadership with relatively little effort. Each site will have a set of contributor guidelines. Read them, follow them, and write for as many as you can make time for, because each article can contain a useful inbound link to your site. And when an opportunity presents itself, you’ll already have a host of relationships with the types of publications whose audiences will appreciate your expertise.

Publish the right mix of timely and evergreen content

As great as timely content can be, there’s no replacement for evergreen content, because it lives longer and can gather more links over time. The two strategies are both valid, and even necessary, but neither are a replacement for the other.

Blend timely content into your content calendar opportunistically. Focus your content strategy on evergreen topics but keep a watchful eye on the news looking for topics gathering steam and where you can provide a unique perspective.

Equip yourself with automation, so that you can monitor the news effectively, and without wasted time and effort. Tools like the ones I mentioned above can not only help you spot growing trends but can speed up research dramatically and help you keep an eye on the competition as well.

Finally, don’t forget to track your results and optimize future efforts. Use UTM links in your bylines and backlinks embedded in your articles. Leverage social analytics tools to reveal how many times your content is shared, liked, and so on.

Learn as you go and this strategy will continue to pay dividends again and again.

Guest author: Nathan Binford is the VP of Marketing for MarketChorus, a content intelligence platform that provides insights into content and the audiences that engage with it online. Nathan is an avid technologist and marketing geek and frequently writes about the intersection of content and AI. Find more from Nathan on the MarketChorus blog and at NathanBinford.com

The post How to Keep Your Content Fresh By Predicting The Future appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/keep-your-content-fresh/

7 Proven Ways to Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates In 2021

Getting new customers is always exciting.

But real business growth comes from repeat customers. Research shows that return customers spend 33% more per order than new clients.

And that’s not all.

They’re also 77% more likely to recommend your brand to their friends and drive additional revenue.

Why is this important?

Because 92% of people now trust personal recommendations over paid advertising when making a purchase decision.

All these stats mean one thing.

If you want to grow fast you need to turn your customers into loyal fans and brand advocates.

In this article, I’ll tell you exactly how to do it.

What is a brand advocate?

A brand advocate is a highly-satisfied customer who voluntarily spreads positivity about your brand, speaks highly of your business on social media and other public platforms, and influences the purchase decisions of your prospects with positive word of mouth.

Their impact is huge.

According to research, brand advocates drive more than $6 trillion of annual consumer spending and influence 2x-3x more new sales as compared to your regular customers.

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Strong brand advocates increase awareness about your brand beyond your immediate target audience and eliminate costs that are associated with traditional marketing and customer acquisition strategies.

This is why both B2B and B2C brands are focusing more than ever before on developing brand advocacy programs and encouraging customers to publicly share their positive brand experiences.

How do you turn regular customers into raving fans and loyalists?

I’ll explain that in the rest of this article.

7 Tips to turn happy customers into brand advocates

You can’t rely on random positive reviews or occasional referrals from satisfied customers. You need a coordinated strategy to convert the positive sentiments of your customers into tangible business results.

Here are a few ways you can do it.

1. Understand what drives advocacy

Brand advocates will always be a small portion of your overall customer base. Most other customers will purchase from you (once or repeatedly) but won’t engage with your brand or talk about it much on public platforms.

So keep an eye on the customers who do take the time to spread a positive word about your brand and understand what drives their advocacy.

How can you do it?

• Run On-Site Surveys: A simple question like “how likely are you to recommend us to a friend”, plus a small explanation of the answer, can give you a deep understanding of what’s making your customers happy.
• Social Listening: Keep an eye on people who’re talking favorably about your brand on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc., engage with them, and listen to what they’re saying.
• Repeat Customers: Once a customer renews their subscription, ask them what made them do it and how you can ensure that they renew the next time as well.

Knowing what drives advocacy is crucial because it gives you the necessary insights to develop an effective and long-term strategy for your business.

2. Develop a memorable onboarding process

First impressions often leave the strongest mark on people’s minds.

This is why your product’s onboarding process has a direct impact on your customer retention rates.

According to research, 86% of people say they’re likely to stick longer with a product and even pay more than before if it has a better onboarding process that educates them on making the best use of the product.

When people truly understand the value they can get from your product, and use it to its full potential, they’re much more likely to spread the word about it as well.

How do you create an effective onboarding process?

• Instead of throwing all your product features at your customers at once, ask them why they’re using your product and what they hope to achieve with it. Then guide them to the most helpful features that are relevant to their needs.
• Give them templates that they can start using at once.
• Minimize friction points so that your customers can start using the core features of your product as soon as possible.
• Develop an onboarding email sequence that guides and educates your customers on making the best use of your product.

Converting a stranger into a lead and a lead into a customer takes a lot of work. Don’t waste it by ignoring your product’s onboarding process.

It’s a low hanging fruit that many SaaS companies underestimate.

3. Develop a customer-centric culture

Customer experience is the biggest factor that determines whether a customer becomes an avid fan and word of mouth marketer for your brand or your biggest critic.

This is where you win or lose future business.

According to research, 55% of customers are willing to pay more to brands with a customer-centric culture.

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What is a customer-centric culture?

A culture where customer satisfaction and happiness are at the center of all your business decisions. Customer-centric companies don’t outsource customer service to just one department.

Instead, it’s a part of their core value system and every department feels equally responsible for ensuring customer success.

Zendesk, a leading customer support platform, conducted a detailed study of more than 45000 businesses across 140 countries. One of their key findings was that 68% of customers were annoyed when their problems were transferred for resolution from one department to the other. They also found that 70% of customers expect companies to collaborate between different departments on their behalf.

In simpler words, don’t toss the customer around because of your company’s internal structure. Develop a culture where customer issues have the highest priority in all departments and every section of the company works to offer a memorable customer experience.

To develop such a culture, you need people with the right skillset.

Here are the most important customer service skills for modern businesses.

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Customers might forgive and forget a lack of features or an occasional technical glitch in your product, but most of them would never forget a bad customer experience.

If you invest in shaping memorable experiences, your customers will stick longer and bring in more referral sales.

4. Reward customers for referrals

I’ve already mentioned that modern-day consumers trust personal recommendations more than paid advertising when it comes to making purchase decisions.

Why not use this tendency to drive more sales and incentivize your satisfied customers to spread the word about your brand?

Starting a referral/affiliate program for your brand can be a real game-changer.

It turns passive customers, who’re mostly satisfied with your services, into active marketers because they’re getting a clear monetary reward for their hard work.

It’s a proven strategy to drive brand advocacy that’s used by the biggest brands in the world.

According to a study by Forrester, of more than 150 companies with minimum annual revenues of $200 million, 84% of them have active affiliate programs.

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Starting an affiliate program has another advantage.

It allows you to leverage the influence of high-authority bloggers who have millions of followers in different niches.

Most of them are always ready to promote a good quality product that pays well for referrals.

This is why affiliate marketing is the most popular for bloggers to make money online.

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To make it an even more attractive program, you can pay a higher commission rate to your customers as compared to any random affiliates who haven’t used your product before.

This would make your customers feel special and at the same time encourage other affiliates to purchase your product before promoting it.

5. Offer an enhanced loyalty program

Loyalty programs play a crucial role in driving brand advocacy and customer loyalty.

What exactly is a loyalty program?

It is a marketing strategy that encourages customers to engage with your brand in different ways (for example purchasing your product, buying add-ons, renewing subscription, sharing your content on social media, referring new customers, adding product pictures, leaving positive reviews, etc.) to earn loyalty/reward points.

When a customer has enough loyalty points, they can use them for benefits like discounts and deals on different products.

This builds brand loyalty, helps you earn more per customer, and increases the percentage of repeat sales.

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But creating a loyalty program isn’t enough.

Research shows that an average American household holds memberships in 29 loyalty programs but are active in only 12 of them.

An engaging loyalty program is easy to use and understand (seamless conversion from points to dollars). Plus, it rewards users for anything that helps spread the word about your brand (not just sales).

6. Offer actionable value with content marketing

Content marketing isn’t just useful for generating leads and converting them into customers. It is equally important in educating your customers on making the best use of your product, retaining them, and turning them into brand advocates by giving them tons of free actionable information.

If you regularly publish high quality content, it gives you more chances to engage customers with your brand and strengthen their bond with it.

This is why modern-day marketers consider it a key part of their overall marketing strategy.

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According to Maryville University, which has been offering degree programs in digital and content marketing for a few years, B2B companies are, on average, spending $45000/year on every member of their content marketing teams.

This constitutes a significant portion of their overall marketing budgets. 

But the long-term ROI of content marketing makes it worth every penny.

Salesforce blog is a great example of how to use content marketing effectively to generate word of mouth marketing.

Despite being a leading CRM solution, Salesforce invests heavily in content marketing and regularly publishes highly engaging and well-researched content.

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It not only keeps their customers hooked to their brand but also shows different ways they can use it to achieve business goals.

Ahrefs and Buffer are other great examples of brands using content marketing to develop brand loyalty and triggering word of mouth marketing.

7. Encourage user-generated content

User-Generated Content (UGC) refers to the pictures, videos, comments, reviews, or any other content that your customers create for your brand.

Encouraging customers to create UGC is a great way to engage them with your brand, increase brand loyalty, and generate word of mouth marketing.

Research shows that 86% of Millennials believe that UGC is a good indicator of the quality of a product, brand, and/or service. The same research also found that UGC influences the buying decisions of more than 80% of Millennials.

How do you encourage customers to create UGC?

You can hold social media competitions or make UGC rewards a part of your loyalty program. Sharing customer success stories is another great way to encourage more customers to come forward with on accounts of how they benefited from your brand.

Are you ready to turn customers into brand advocates?

Brand advocates play a crucial role in driving more sales and referrals. Thankfully, in the age of social media and 24/7 connectivity, it isn’t very hard to engage customers with your brand. The challenge, however, is to stay consistent with your brand advocacy initiatives because people have short memories these days and can quickly forget your brand if you don’t engage them regularly.

Let me know if you have any questions, I’d love to respond in the comments section.

Guest author: Jawad Khan is a freelance writer, professional blogger and marketing consultant. He works with digital marketing agencies, small businesses and entrepreneurs to build their online presence and brand image. He blogs regularly on www.WritingMyDestiny.com

The post 7 Proven Ways to Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates In 2021 appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/turn-customers-into-brand-advocates/

Is It Time To Forget Social Media?

In 2008 I joined a movement.

It started with an upload of some data and snippets of my life to Facebook to get started and then logging in. And this was quickly followed by a Twitter profile. Then the posting of my first tweet.

The digital banter had started and I was hooked.

So I kept diving in.

We all kept tweeting and playing and watching the global and often witty screen driven repartee. Then the iPhone made its mark.

Gave us our portable publishing machines. The text messages became photo sharing and then we recorded our lives in full HD video.

And then the addiction went to a whole new level.

For years it was a fun and frivolous Wild West. Few filters and no algorithms of consequence. It was an innocent game of considered sharing and playful innocence.

But then things changed.

In the beginning it felt like an equal exchange. We were working together.

Our information is now used to make money. Without our permission. 

The bad actors used it to separate our humanity for their own greed and means.

Lies override truth.

Sharing became narcissism.

Open platforms allowed cyber bullying.

Then they brought in the machines. Started charging us to reach our followers. 

They have scaled the disease of more. Corporate and global greed disguised as innovation and caring. At a commercial level, the robots are now making it difficult to even place an innocent Ad as AI rejects or blocks the very reasonable submission.

But if you have millions of dollars in your back pocket and disinformation to spread then the door is wide open. 

We now need to reconsider that relationship. Because it is not working for the good.

Just for the social media mafia brotherhood.

It is time to change the game.

Or we may slowly go insane.

A Social Media Love Affair

Social media

We fell in love with you

There was a promise of new

Embracing a changing world view

An openness and an honesty of shared experiences

Loaded onto the smart platform

A future

Human nurture

Where we were free to reveal our lives to a waiting world

Not filtered by the moguls

Bribed by the gatekeepers

Paying the advertising ghouls

Begging the writers

The PR machines

Until the gate’s locks were changed

Driven by the unbidden need

Greed

To make more money controlled by the technology machine

That has no morals

Except to maximize dollars

How much do you need

When is it enough

We used you

In innocent bliss

Created pithy tweets

Posted family photos

Shared our travels

But there was an agenda

Put into the blender

The seed

Of primal need

It was something we missed

Hidden in the ether

Of power

Of money making

Power baking

We were innocent fools

Tools

Now you are using us

That was not what we signed up for

You made us the product

Stole our information

Mined our data

Dived into our personal lives

Pretending it was free

But there was always a cost

You sold

Our inclinations

Our intimations

Affirmations

To the highest bidder

To harass us

Bombard us

With disinformation

Fake news

We thought you were the muse

At our side

To get our voices and art out

The truth

Absolute power corrupts

You aren’t a small god

Posing as a demigod

But a monster in the mist

Twisted and amiss

It was

Disguised as free speech

Unfiltered

With abdicated responsibility

Don’t look here

Nothing to see

Hiding behind the skirts of exciting and new

We are tempted into the web

The robotic rabbit holes

That don’t make me feel whole

But make me less

As the highlight reels of others

Polished

Makes me feel a mess

Not good enough

Not quite right

Not a success

In the name of what?

Unbridled capitalism

Raw greed

A money making machine

Wrapped in a package of caring ambiguity

Hoping we would continue to play your game

It’s complicity

Why do you push back

Against considered control

Responsibility

Because you call it innovation

Sorry that’s not enough

We are heading towards abomination

A social experiment that threatens

Our village

Our community

Our democracies

Our self worth

So where to now?

It’s gone to a whole new how

You’ve built the robots

The algorithms

To scale your rape and pillage

The global village

Wrapped in caring

Sharing our secrets

It’s becoming tough

And I’ve had enough

So….

I’ve turned off all my alerts

Silenced the annoying interruptions

Of the social media disruptions

That are no longer invited

Your commercial needy love is now unrequited.

For a decade

I was amused

Now I am just feeling abused.

The post Is It Time To Forget Social Media? appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/is-it-time-to-forget-social-media/

How to Scale Content Production Without Going Crazy

You have been creating content for some time now, and the traffic is coming in. You start to feel excited about the potential growth your company could experience thanks to the power of content marketing. So you decide to scale your content production; more content will drive more results.

The desire to scale content production is becoming increasingly common. According to Content Marketing Institute’s 2019 North America report, 56% of businesses have indicated a desire to increase their content creation spending.

The problem is that doubling your investment in content creation won’t necessarily result in a linear increase in output, either in quantity or quality or both. Without the right systems in place, your content team will experience several bottlenecks, which will reduce your team’s morale and effectiveness.

To scale your content production, you need to learn about developing a content development process that can support it.

Understand the content development process

By definition, “scaling” means to “grow or expand in a proportional and usually profitable way.” Therefore, when you scale your content production, you expand the number of content pieces you regularly publish without compromising quality or efficiency.

To expand this production, you first need to understand your content team’s process. This is called a content development process, and it defines how you plan, create, and distribute your content.

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Without a systemic view of your content development process, scaling your content production can end up disrupting your content team’s productivity, resulting in low morale and bad performance.

Imagine that you have one content manager responsible for writing articles, editing, and formatting every blog post and email your company publishes monthly. Beneath this manager, you have one writer who’s the creative mind behind every post and emails produced – ten blog posts and ten emails in total.

If you wanted to triple your content efforts, you could hire two more people, so that the three writers create thirty blog posts and emails in total. In theory, this would work perfectly, except that the poor content manager won’t properly edit and format every content piece. While the content production capacity increased, the editing and formatting didn’t. Therefore, a bottleneck is born.

To scale your content marketing strategy, you need to dissect your entire content development process to understand how each part works, so you can adapt to each one accordingly once you increase their capacity.

There are different ways you can break and categorize each part of your content development process. In the simplest terms, here are some of the most important steps your process will include:

1. Topic brainstorming from your marketing personas, competitor analysis, and company news
2. Keyword research from your existing content, your competitors, and new opportunities available
3. Topic prioritization to define the ones most likely to drive traffic and leads
4. Topic assignment to the different writers, editors, and other team members required to create a piece
5. Content writing or production (if it’s video, audio, or graphic design)
6. Content editing or post-production
7. Content formatting – i.e., taking the content piece and getting it ready to publish
8. Content promotion, which includes sending an email to your list, reaching out to influencers, and setting up paid media campaigns

Each step can be broken down even further as an independent system, which can then be scaled further.

Map your content production capacity

Now that you know what a content development process is, you need to see your team’s current content production capacity.

Sit down with your content team, and have them explain to you how they create their content. You want to develop a visual representation of how they work to achieve their goals.

Each step in this process should have the team members responsible for executing it, plus any resources they use – e.g., the software they use, the budget assigned to their task, etc.

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As you develop this workflow, ask your team:

• How much content is each team member capable of creating?
• How much time does it take them to create each content piece?
• What’s their most significant time-consuming activity?
• Do they report to multiple people?
• Do they communicate efficiently?

The goal is to develop a clear view of your current content production system to get an idea of how much content you could create to increase your production input.

You also want to take note of the existing tools your team uses to create its content. Whether that includes Slack, Atlassian, or Trello, you want to make sure your team uses the best tools for their job. If they don’t use any specific content tools, consider adopting:

• Nightwatch for SEO analysis
• CoSchedule for content planning
• Social Pilot for social media scheduling

Define your ultimate goal

The idea of scaling your content production may seem appealing, but without a clear goal, it won’t drive any results. If you publish a weekly article and decide to scale this effort, what does it mean for you? Is it posting twice a week? Or is it creating other content types, like webinars and ebooks?

Define a goal that’s both achievable, considering the current production your team handles, and desirable, considering your greater business goals.

Let’s say your team produces nothing but blog posts, emails, and social media content, and you want to start creating two monthly webinars to drive more leads. Given your team’s skills and capacity, you will have to hire someone with experience in webinars. Webinars are time-consuming and require skills that don’t necessarily correlate with content writing.

If one team member is willing to create webinars, you need to compute the writer’s production decrease caused by their new responsibilities.

Whatever the case, having a clear goal will help you scale your content efforts intelligently, adapting to the changes without losing steam.

Create a checklist

When you are developing a new scalable content creation process, you need to have clear SOPs (i.e., standardized procedures) for most of the tasks the content team is responsible for. You want to have a well-oiled system that your content team can implement flawlessly, while still keeping their creative input intact.

Checklists are tools that balance the strict nature of SOPs with the creative spirit of content marketers. By definition, a checklist specifies the tasks someone needs to implement to fulfill a step of your content development process.

For example, a tentative checklist for optimizing your posts’ on-site SEO would include the following tasks:

1. Take the keyword defined before the post was approved.
2. Add it to an SEO tool, like Text Optimizer.
3. Add the keyword naturally in the post as many times as the tool from the previous step indicates.
4. Add the keyword to the images’ alt-tags.
5. Add the keyword to the title tag.
6. Write the meta description.
7. Add natural keyword variations in the post.

By following this checklist, a content manager guarantees the correct on-site optimization in every post. The manager’s only job would be to make sure the writer – or whoever is responsible for this checklist – checks this task from their project management tool’s card.

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In each step of your content development process, discuss adding a checklist to standardize the step’s correct implementation step. Be careful not to choke your content marketing team with strict procedures; the goal of using checklists is to take care of the most important tasks for each step. Your content team members should have some room to test new ideas and improve the current checklist.

Besides on-site SEO optimization, other potential cases that could use a checklist include:

• Keyword research
• Defining the blog’s quarterly topics
• Writing an email newsletter
• Sharing social media content
• Editing and proofreading according to your style guide

As you create checklists, make sure your team implements them to see whether they are missing a step or using one that’s unnecessary.

With checklists, you can simplify every part of your entire content development process so your employees – or contractors – can execute your plan seamlessly. And as you will see, your checklists will make it easier for you to delegate and outsource these tasks.

Hire the right partners

There are several tasks that your team won’t be able to execute because they lack the time, skills, or both. In those cases, it makes sense to outsource them to freelancers.

Freelancers will help you extend the scale of your content team without incurring high costs. You can hire freelancers from marketplaces like Upwork or Fiverr, or better yet, you can hire them from your network. Ask your colleagues for people with the skills you require to implement the checklists you developed in the previous step.

What’s more, hire based on expertise, not on cost. For example, if you want to hire a freelance writer, check their portfolio, and analyze their content. If the content they have written isn’t relevant or close to your brand’s style, they won’t be a good fit, regardless of their price; but if they are, then their content will be worth more than their cost.

Alternatively, you can hire an agency. Nowadays, productized services have become popular, with many agencies offering flat-fees for services as diverse as SEO, design, and paid media.

Whether these agencies charge flat or custom-made fees, it’s critical you hire your partners as if you were hiring a full-time employee. These partners should have a good fit with your content team; otherwise, they will cause unnecessary bottlenecks in your content process.

The goal of working with freelancers or agencies is to increase your content production while keeping the efficiency intact—the motto should be “more content with fewer headaches.”

Automate and win

Not only can you hire partners, but you can also automate some of the tasks you have created checklists for. Fortunately, you don’t need to hire a technical person to develop complex automation algorithms. With the help of tools like Automate.io, Zapier, and IFTTT, you can connect your entire marketing stack in a few clicks, freeing your team’s time from mindless low-value tasks.

Let’s say one of your team members spends two hours a week exporting and formatting your new email subscribers to a Google Sheets to create a custom audience in the Facebook advertising network. With an automation tool, you can easily connect your email marketing tool with Facebook, and have the former send the information you require to the latter. Thanks to this automation, your team has saved two hours they can now spend creating and promoting more content.

The tasks you automate may not be too complicated or time-consuming, but aggregated, they can represent dozens of hours wasted in low-value activities. Some other opportunities for automating your content marketing process include:

• Getting transcriptions of new podcasts for republishing in your blog
• Adding new leads generated through Facebook ads to your CRM
• Sharing new blog posts on every social network
• Republishing content from one social network to another

If a tool is missing in Automate.io, Zapier, or IFTTT, or if these tools don’t let you create the automation you desire, then you have two options:

• Use built-in integrations when they are available.
• Create a custom-made API-based integration.

The former is almost identical to using any of the automation tools mentioned before, while the latter will take time and cost money. Regardless of the investment needed to automate your content development process, your goal is to increase your efficiency – getting more tasks done in less time. In the long run, the productivity gains will override almost any initial cost.

Are you ready to scale your content production?

There will be a moment where you will have to decide whether to increase your content production or keep it as it is. If you think other priorities are more important than scaling your content production, there’s little you can learn from this article.

But if you decide to scale your content production, you will need to shift your existing content creation process accordingly.

Today, you learned some of the basics of what it takes to scale your content production. The question to you is, are you willing to make the effort?

Guest author: Ivan Kreimer is a freelance content writer for hire who creates educational content for SaaS businesses like Leadfeeder and Campaign Monitor. In his pastime, he likes to help people become freelance writers. Besides writing for smart people who read Jeff Bullas’ blog, Ivan has also written for sites like Entrepreneur, MarketingProfs, TheNextWeb, and many other influential websites.

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