PPC (pay-per-click) Marketing Strategies

What is PPC? Step by Step to Pay Per Click Marketing

By Omotayo Afolabi Olayinka July 21, 2019

Pay per click marketing is one of the best forms of paid advertising. If done properly, it also has one of the best conversion rates as far as digital marketing is concerned.

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With pay per click advertising, online marketers only pay the owner of an ad space only when the ad is clicked and which in turn helps customers save money. The price a marketer pays per click is determined by bidding and other factors such as landing page quality, CTR, etc; all of which shall be discussed in subsequent sections.

Pay per click marketing is of different types, namely: paid search marketing, display advertising, social media advertising, retargeting PPC marketing, price comparison website advertising, and affiliate marketing.

How is Pay Per Click Marketing Important to Digital Marketing?

Savvy online marketers know how to leverage on all marketing channels be it SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, video marketing, etc.

Although pay-per-click advertising can be expensive, depending on various factors, it is also found to be a lot regarding in terms of ROI.

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A major determinate of online marketing is the ability to properly define a target audience. The different categories of pay per click ads allow marketers to further customize their campaigns for a target audience. For example, you are most likely to have better PPC success for some niches with display ads than you would with search ads.

Marketing plays a crucial part in any company’s success. Great products alone do not guarantee revenue but the ability to show it off to other people and convince them to buy from you and not from someone else – there are other folks out there, trust me.

Since the evolution of search, pay per click advertising has changed the world of the marketing industry.

Pay per click advertising is important to digital marketing because it provides an opportunity where marketers can better target their audience, tools for measuring marketing success in real-time, and most importantly, advertising at very cheap rates as compared to television commercials, billboards. and newspapers.

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Types of Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising can be categorized into six types namely:

Paid Search Marketing
Display Advertising
Social Media Advertising
Retargetting PPC Advertising
Video Advertising with YouTube
Affiliate Marketing

As you can see from the above, there is a range of different pay per click advertising model available with some popular than others.

In recent times, the most popular PPC models are the paid search marketing, social media advertising, display advertising and video advertising with YouTube.

What Is The Difference Between Pay Per Click & From Search Engine Optimization?

Pay per click advertising effort is a type of online marketer where a digital marketer gets traffic to a website through paid efforts. This type of traffic is referred to as paid traffic.

That being said, search engine optimization is a digital marketing technique where an online marketer gets website traffic through organic effort. SEO website traffic is referred to as organic or free traffic.

Another difference between PPC and SEO is that the pay per click advertisement gives immediate success but SEO takes time.

Why Should You Use Pay Per Click Marketing?

Now you understand a bit about paid advertising and it’s benefits, why should you use it over other methods of online advertising?

The reason is what I mentioned before, the results are almost immediate. All you need to do is create an ad, create your landing page, set a bid, and you’re good to go. Your ads will be enabled within minutes and you will notice an increase in your website traffic.

Another great reason to use paid advertising is that it that it’s not as expensive as you think. Although some keywords can cost a lot of money, however, you can use long-tail keywords which are very cheap. This means you don’t need to focus on the expensive ones. Instead, you can target 100 cheap keywords and get just as much traffic as the big ones.

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How to Increase Pay Per Click Ads ROI

Pay per click advertising has a lot of moving parts. Paid advertising might be an excellent advertising solution for many businesses, but you always need to be aware of your ROI. Tracking your conversion rate will show you how your ads are performing.

For example, you should look at ways to decrease your cost per acquisition if you’re spending $500 a month to make $100.

There is, however, another way to improve your ROI without lowering your cost per click. Please check out the comprehensive article at 1 in 4 ad clicks is fraudulent.

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10 Insane High-Converting Landing Page Elements

By Omotayo Afolabi Olayinka July 19, 2019

Increasing the conversion rate of a lead capture page entails optimizing some of the landing page elements.

Generally speaking, a website landing page can be said to be the entry point for a website. Landing pages are usually static by design.

In online marketing, a website landing page (also known as as a lead capture page), is a single static website page that a searcher she when she clicks on an indexed page on search engines, marketing promotion, marketing email, or an online advertisement.

10 Insane High-Converting Landing Page Elements

The main purpose of any landing page is to convert website visitors into paying customers with prominent call-to-action buttons.

Conversions are of different forms and types. For example, newsletter signups, online form submission, free product trials, etc.

There are a number of techniques and strategies used in creating high-converting landing pages. Highlighted below are ten landing page elements that can help your landing page generate more conversions:

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1. Write a Compelling Headline

Designing a high-converting landing page starts with selecting a compelling page title or headline. As a matter of fact, the success, or otherwise failure of your landing page has a lot to do with your page headline or landing page title.

A page headline must be compelling, and captivating. A landing page headline must able to trigger certain emotions that will compel website visitors to take your desired action (s) which may be to request for a product trial, subscribe for newsletter, make a purchasing decision, etc.

Your headline or title must contain at least one power word and at least another that drives emotions.

2. Structure Your Content to Show Value Upfront

Website users remain the most impatient set of people. According to the 15 seconds rule by time magazine, you only have 15 seconds or less to make an impression on your site users. By this, we mean that you a website visitor will make the decision to either leave or remain on your website in fifteen seconds or less.

That being said, what makes a user read through your landing page and take the desired action is value.

Therefore, it is important to always highlight the value(s) your website visitors will get by subscribing to your service in the top area of your landing page.

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Highlighting the values upfront before describing them in details is one of the best strategies for designing a high-converting landing page.

3. Show Testimonials

One of the few things common to all high-converting landing pages is customer testimonials. Testimonials help improve your landing page conversion rate because they add some legitimacy to your landing page and make people more willing to buy from you.

Since online shopping and e-commerce continue to dominate the retail market, customer reviews or testimonials are important to your conversion in that they show the kind of experience others have about your website and makes new buyers comfortable making purchases or signing up for your products.

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I always consider customer testimonials as the PR you are not paying for. You are simply using other people as your own mouthpiece.

This is part of herd mentality and the reason all the worlds biggest online companies, such as Amazon and E bay have based their whole platforms around customer reviews and/or testimonials.

4. Lead Capture

Lead capture the process of saving or capturing lead information such as name, phone number, email address, etc in order to convert them into paying customers.

Lead capture has two important components which are the lead capture form and the lead magnet.

A lead capture form can be anything from newsletter form, contact form, product trial form, signup form, etc. The common information usually captured by lead forms are the full name, email address, and phone number.

A lead magnet is often some form of incentive online marketer offer potential customer in order to get their email address and other contact information. The most common types of lead magnets are ebooks, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc.

Lead captures are the most integral element of any landing page and greatly determines landing page success.

5. Prominent Calls-to-Action (CTA)

Calls-to-Actions (CTAs) are another category of important elements of any high-converting landing page. Calls-to-Action (otherwise known as triggers) are various buttons or links placed at strategic sections of a landing page that will trigger an action when clicked upon.

For example, a “download” CTA can load a popup containing a lead form. A website visitor will then need to submit some information before he or she is able to access the download area of the website.

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Knowing the right CTA to use at every given time is important to the overall conversion of your lead capture page.

NB: CTAs must not be randomly used but rather with clear-cut purpose. This is because random or overuse of CTAs might show you as being desperate and turn off some of your potential customers.

I always recommend two CTA at most for any landing page.

6. Consider Placement of your CTA Buttons

It is not enough to have Calls-to-Actions on a given landing page. This is because the wrong use of CTAs can cause more harm than good.

The right placement of CTA is another important element that determines the conversion rate of a given website page.

My approach always is to have at lead two CTAs with at least one at the end of the content.

Excellent use of CTAs on landing pages is another way of increasing the conversion rate of the page.

7. Highlight Your Clients

Everyone wants to see a list of the jobs or companies you have worked on in the past.

Savvy online markets have learned to think like their own customers. As the owner of a big corporation, would you rather work with someone that has a proven track record with Microsoft, Google, British Airways or another person with zero track record?

Highlighting some old or current clients on your landing page adds more credibility to your site.

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You can simply add a project portfolio to your landing page in case you do not have anyone in your clientele list. Showcasing what you have done or executed in the past ina good way to improve your landing page conversion.

I always recommend that you add your biggest clients or portfolio to your landing page

8. Remove Menus

The purpose of any landing page is to capture leads. Therefore, it is important to reduce the number of links in order to achieve this. For example, a common practice is to remove all links on a landing page.

Online marketers remove all links from a landing page because they often do not want website visitors to have any reason to leave their lead capture page without converting.

Removing all menus and links from a landing page is another strategy that can help improve on its conversion.

9. Create urgency

Have you ever come across a landing page with a countdown or ran into an offer that ends the moment you close your browser window? The answer is most likely yes. We have all come across those squeeze pages at one point in our lives.

Successful online marketers know that people make purchasing decisions based on how they feel at a given point in time.

Asides love and fear, the most intense emotions are the ones with some sense of urgency.

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Another element that often increases the conversion rate of a landing page is urgency. Create a sense of urgency around your product, make the limited offer lasts just for a few hours and you will see your conversion rate go up.

10. Follow a Z Pattern

The Z pattern remains the most common and one with the best conversion rate. As shown in the image above, the Z pattern shows how website users often read website content. Majority of website users read the screen from left to right and a lot would jump to another important spot on the website after the first paragraph.

Top social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc all use the Z design approach to their landing page.

Although, I always personally recommend a single Z design pattern as in the case of Facebook and the majority of other websites, however, the multiple Z design pattern will also achieve the same result.

Sometimes, the difference between a low-performing landing page and a high-converting landing page is the design style and pattern.

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SEO Strategies

10 Trending Location Page Optimization Elements

By Omotayo Afolabi Olayinka July 18, 2019

With the rise in popularity of location page optimization, the technique for optimizing location pages for the “near me” and other relevant keywords.

Contrary to popular belief, ranking for location-specific keywords or what is referred to as the “Near Me” keywords does not involve keyword stuffing in any way.

Optimizing the location page of a website ensures that the page rank on Google #1 page when users are surfing search engines for certain keywords in those locations. For example, a car air conditioning servicing and/or repair business located in Alberta would want to rank its location page for keywords such as “auto air conditioning Alberta”.

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What is an SEO Checklist for a Perfect Location Page Optimization?

As an SEO professional, I always advocate for white-hat optimization.

This local SEO checklist for a perfect location page covers several possible questions a website visitor may have when learning about a local business.

You can take several of these signals and move them up or down a few positions.

1. NAP

NAP is an acronym for name, address, and phone number. The ideal approach to NAP optimization is to have the exact same name, address, and phone number on the location page of your website as well as on all other directory listings and citations.

Many SEO professionals (and Google) claim that exact match isn’t as important as it used to be, while others claim that it still is.

2. Description of Business Location

I’ve seen many businesses fail at this. I’ve seen businesses use the same description on all location pages of their website and just replace a few information such as location name, phone number, etc. Optimizing the location pages of a website in this manner will lead to a colossal failure as might result in duplicated content/pages.

For example, it is wrong for a business located in three cities across Alberta, Canada to have the same description and just different page title for each of the location pages.

Each business location page should have its own unique content.

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3. Directions to Business

Including directions to your website location page can help your business rank for geo-specific targetting and keywords, e.g. computer technician “near me”.

A general rule of thumb is to describe how to your location from at least two directions (East/West or North/South) from major highways. Mentioning major intersections on the page can also help identify your business location.

4. Embed Google Map

Embedding google map in the location page of your website is the gem of local optimization. This is because maps help website users more precisely figure out if your location is the one nearest to them.

5. Local Business Schema

Website Schema is not only important to page rank in SERP but also determines how your pages are displayed in search engine result pages. Although there are tonnes of schemas for various elements, the most common of them is the standard LocalBusiness markup.

Adding the LocalBusiness markup to a website helps improve on the page rank for some location-specific keywords

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6. Page Title & Meta Description

Having a properly-optimized page title and meta description is a no brainer for SEO. As a matter of fact, it’s the basic SEO 101.

My format to this is “Business Location – Website Slug – Website Title”. By naming the location first in the title, you’re making it more relevant.

Also, I believe your meta description should at least have your postal code and phone number if not all the address.

7. Internal Linking

Internal linking is an important on-page ranking factor and the importance of internal links to your location page cannot be overemphasized. That said, an intelligent approach must be followed so as to make it count.

Below are some of the elements and pages to link from your website location page.

Link to informational or service pages of your website.
Link to location-specific social media profiles.
Link to the about us page of the website.

8. Website Load Speed

Website load speed is an important SEO rank factor.

Sometimes, fast loading speed makes all the difference in how well you rank in SERP for some location-specific keywords or searches.

There are a number of tools you can use to check and analyze your website speed but the best two are GT Metrix and Page Speed Insight by Google.

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9. Manage Your Online Reviews

According to Bright Local’s survey, 97% of all consumers read local reviews in 2018. Although this figure is staggering, yet it is not surprising in any way.

That being said, the question is how do you manage online reviews, especially the bad ones? See below for some ideas.

Always reply review promptly. Though there is no specific timeframe to doing this I always make sure I respond to all reviews either good or bad within 6 hours or less.
Always thank customers for giving your positive reviews and be kind to share discounts and offers with them.
With negative reviews, apologize for their bad experience. Then, reach out to them privately and resolve the issue. In many cases, this will inspire the reviewer to revise their review.

10. Build Local Citations

A local citation is a simple approach whereby you get mentions in other local business directories. For example, you can submit your website to niche directories such as yellow pages and yellow book. Also, you might want to register with other local business directories around you.

The goal here is to standardize your listings. You can add listings, but only as they are relevant.

Conclusion

In conclusion, optimizing location pages is an important part of any local SEO effort.

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Highlighted above are the important elements that must be included in any location page SEO checklist for optimizing the location pages of your website.

Optimizing these location page elements ensures that your location pages appear on the first page of Google and other search engines for relevant keywords.

Do you have any questions or a local SEO project you would like to seek my advice over? Please feel free to contact me for your free consultation today.

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SEO Strategies

30 Top Must-Know Digital Marketing Terminologies

By Omotayo Afolabi Olayinka June 30, 2019

“If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.” Michael Regoli

Introduction

Understanding the complex “jargons” that dominates the industry can be complicated. With words such as conversion and acronyms like SEO is thrown casually in conversations. To catch up, here are definitions of key phrases commonly used in the digital marketing industry.

30 Must Know Digital Marketing Terminologies

1. # (Hashtag)

This symbol represents a tag for categorization on Twitter. Pronounced as “hashtag.”

2. 301 Redirect

Code meaning “moved permanently,” used to point browsers, spiders, etc. to the correct location of a missing or renamed URL. Pages marked with such a code will automatically redirect to another URL.

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3. 404 Error

“File not found” code for a Web page that displays when a user attempts to access a URL that has been moved, renamed or no longer exists. Used as a template for missing or deleted pages, designing a custom “404 page” in a user-friendly way can help people stay engaged with your site even when a given page turns up blank.

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4. A/B Testing

A method used to compare different versions of digital ads or website landing pages in order to determine which one performs better. A typical A/B test for ads involves running the two ads simultaneously and then measuring which version gets a better response from the audience.

5. Ad Audience

The total number of people that have been exposed to or could possibly be exposed to an ad during any specific time period.

6. Ad Banner

The most common form of digital advertising. These ad units, which include static graphics, videos and/or interactive rich media, are displayed on a web page or in an application.

7. CTR – Click-Through Rate

Click-through Rate identifies the percentage of people who click on the link. Usually placed in an email, an ad, website page… etc. The higher the CTR percentage, the more people went through. CTR is extremely important for many parts of the Digital world.

8. CPA – Cost per Acquisition

Cost per Acquisition is a pricing model where companies are charged by advertising platforms only when leads, sales or conversions are generated. It’s been around for a while but has been generating much more traffic as a common pricing model in late 2013 and early 2013. The best part about CPA is you are only charged for the results that you want.

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9. CPC – Cost per Click

Cost per Click is a pricing model where companies are charged by publishers for every click people make on a displayed/test ad which leads people to your company’s website (hopefully to a landing page!).

10. CPM – Cost per Thousand

Cost per Thousand is a pricing model where advertising impressions are purchased and companies are charged according to the number of times their ad appears per 1,000 impressions. It’s definitely a favorite form of selling ads by publishers because they get paid regardless by just displaying ads. CPM model really only makes sense if you are trying to increase brand awareness.

11. Conversion

When a visitor takes the desired action while visiting your site, it is called conversion. This can be a purchase, membership signup, download or registration for the newsletter.

12. Impressions

This term is used to define the number of times a company’s ad will appear to its target audience. The impression could also be related to a website and the number of times the web page appear in total.

Example of how impressions work: 1 visitor could view 5 pages which would create 5 impressions. 2 visitors could view 5 pages which would generate 10 impressions.

13. Keyword

A keyword is a word or phrase that your audience uses to search for relevant topics on search engines. If you are a flower shop, a relevant keyword could be “Buy Red Roses” [short keyword] or “Looking to purchase roses from a flower shop” [long tail keyword]

14. Organic Traffic

This is traffic that is generated to your website which is generated by a Search Engine. This could be traffic from Google, Yahoo or Bing. It’s also known as “Free” traffic. Organic traffic is the best type of traffic!

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15. Paid Traffic

Paid search is when a company bids on keywords and makes advertisements around those keywords to be displayed on search engines. These results appear separately, either on the top, bottom or right side of a search results page. Paid traffic also encompasses any form of paid advertisement that directly points to your website.

16. SEO – Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is a way a company optimizes its webpage allowing the website to rank higher on a search engine’s results page (SERP). The higher your ranking, typically more traffic is generated (if the keyword has traffic) and more targeted traffic.

17. SEM – Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing is a way companies can get higher placement on search engines by bidding on search terms. Make sure to check out our article on How to Run a PPC audit.

18. SERP – Search Engine Results Page

Search Engine Results Page is the list of results provided by a search engine after a search query is made. Essentially, if you are looking for where your website ranks for “Best Digital Marketing Agency” a SERP report will let you know that your website is ranked #4. Meaning that your website is in the Fourth position (1st page).

19. Domain Authority

This is a scale from 1-100 that search engines use to determine how authoritative a company’s website is, 1 being the lowest rank and 100 being the highest. The higher your domain authority the more Search Engines trust you.

20. Keyword Stuffing

This is the practice of using too many keywords in content in hopes of making it more visible on search engines. You will be penalized by search engines if you resort to it. Never keyword stuff, just provide great and valuable content.

21. META Description

The META description is the few lines of text that appear on the search engine results page.

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22. RSS – Really Simple Syndication

Really Simple Syndication is a technology that allows users to become subscribers of content and ultimately get automatic alerts if updates are made. They would need an RSS Reader which is where they receive all the updates. Here are a few popular RSS Readers:

FeedReader

Feedly

23. Viral Marketing

This is a way of marketing where the audience is encouraged by companies to pass on their content to others for more exposure. Usually, a successful viral marketing campaign has an easy share functionality. If you had to pay a lot to generate awareness, it wouldn’t be considered “Viral Marketing” (it would be considered paid traffic).

24. Subscriber

A subscriber is a person who allows a company to send him/her messages through email or other personal communication means. These subscribers are of high value to publishers and businesses alike. Subscribers keep coming back!

25. Social Networking

Social networking is the practice of using web-based platforms (or mobile) to build online communities where people share common interests or activities. The most common social networks are Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest… just to name a few.

26. Landing Page

This is the page on a company’s website that is optimized to act as the entry page to a site. When redirected from external links, this is where the visitors will be led back.

27. The Inbound Methodology

The best way to turn strangers into customers and promoters of your business

Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight for their attention. Sharing is caring and inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more.

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Attract

The first part of the inbound marketing methodology is to Attract. The world of the consumer has changed. You can no longer have your brand interrupting individuals while they are in the middle of something completely unrelated to how you can do business together. The inbound marketing methodology puts your brand in front of prospects when they are actually looking for what you have to offer.

Some of the most important tools to attract the right users to your site are:

Search Engine Optimization
Inbound Content
Blogging
Social Media Marketing

Convert

Convert the middle is when the work really kicks in. We love the convert stage of the inbound methodology because even though it’s a lot of effort, here is where you start to see the rewards of all of your content marketing efforts. You’ve already enticed your strangers to become recurring visitors, so now you need to make them leads by submitting their contact information on your website so they can join your marketing and sales funnel.

Some of the most important tools to convert visitors on your site are:

Premium Content Offers (Ebooks, Whitepapers, Checklists, etc.)
Landing Pages
Calls-to-Action
Smart Forms

Close

The Close stage is absolutely critical. This step means revenue! Closing is where we turn all of those qualified website visitors and leads into customers. Closing a lead and converting them into a customer can be a long process in many industries as well. It typically takes from 7 to 13 touches to convert a lead to a sale. So how can we utilize marketing techniques to help close more customers for your business?

Some of the most important tools to close leads into customers are:

Marketing Automation & Workflows
Effective Email Marketing
List Segmentation
Sales Alignment

Delight

As you know, inbound marketing and inbound selling is all about providing remarkable content to your leads and customers. Just because someone has signed a contract with you, or purchased your products, doesn’t mean you can forget about them. That’s actually the worst thing you can do! Inbound companies continue to engage with, delight, upsell and grow their current customer base into happy promoters of the organizations and products they love.

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Some of the most important tools to delight your customers are:

Dynamic/Smart Website Content
Trigger Marketing
Social Media Monitoring
Surveys

Before you start planning an effective digital marketing strategy, you need to understand the different channels in digital marketing. Identifying what channels work best for your business and working on them will help you propel your business forward.

27. Display Advertising

This channel involves designing graphical advertisements and placing them next to content on websites, e-mails and other digital formats, and instant messaging applications. The advertisements can be text, images, audio or video clips, animation, or other interactive content.

You can target your adverts according to consumer behavior, demographics, or geographic location. Say, for example, you own a salon in Raleigh and are offering attractive discounts to locals, there’s no point in letting people across the continent know about the same.

With the help of analytics, it is possible to track the number of people who have seen your adverts or clicked on them, what a person did on your site after entering it, and the conversion ratio.

Display advertising not only helps you promote new products or offers, but it helps you increase your online presence and reach out to your customers. Display advertising can help drive leads and increase brand awareness too.

28. E-mail Marketing

As the name suggests, you market your products or services to your targeted customers via e-mail. E-mail marketing is a great way to gain new customers or improve relationships with existing customers.

E-mail marketing campaigns are good for companies that may not be able to shell out a lot of dough for promoting their business. E-mail marketing also allows companies to promote other marketing channels effectively. However, building a customer database and designing newsletters/e-mails can be very time-consuming.

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Furthermore, not all your customers may have the patience to go through your e-mails as most people have full inboxes. On the other hand, if you keep sending multiple e-mails, it may irk your customers and they may end up marking your e-mails as spam. Find the right balance and avoid sending e-mails that go with the line ’Do not reply’. Have a specific e-mail domain as communicating with your customers is of prime importance.

29. Social Media Marketing

Social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, blogs, microblogging websites like Twitter, forums, wikis or open encyclopedias, content communities like Flickr and YouTube, and podcasts are all forms of social media. All of these forms involve the building of networks or communities by allowing users to interact with each other.

Social media tools encourage users to share opinions, participate in discussions and engage with others in real time. As such, social media marketing can be the best way to market your brand or company, and connect with your customers. However, know that all digital marketing tools have different purposes; you’ll need to identify your company’s goals and your targeted audience before you get started.

Note that encouraging users to engage and participate is often a challenge, so you’ll need to figure out how you’ll go about these things. Furthermore, continuous communication with customers is necessary and you’ll have to make sure that you are aware of all the positive and negative things that customers have to say about your brand.

When posting new content or comments, always think and review more than twice as social media mistakes aren’t easily forgiven. Keep in mind that any user can take a screenshot of your blunder and even if you edit or delete an erroneous post, later on, the damage will already have been done.

Lastly, follow social media etiquette so you don’t come across as a spammer.

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30. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing involving a business owner and one or more websites or affiliates. The affiliate website owners place advertisements on their own websites to market the business owner’s goods or services in exchange for a percentage of profits.

Considering an affiliate marketing campaign for your company is generally a good choice; you get mass coverage at no additional costs. You also get more exposure when more websites are affiliated with your business.

Your affiliates can make money in three ways: Pay Per Click, Pay Per Sale, or Pay Per Lead. This means that your brand is advertised for free and you only incur a cost when an agreed action occurs- when a user clicks on your advert on the affiliate’s website, or when a user is led from the affiliate website to your website and purchases a product/service or if the user registers on your website.

Our recent review that digital marketing is now bigger than Internet marketing based on searches for knowledge and services related to digital marketing. As demand for digital marketing has grown, so has the number of specialist digital jobs needed in companies and agencies. Google Trends shows us that searches for Jobs in Digital Marketing has overtaken Jobs in Internet Marketing and continued to grow since 2013. To help you find the right job in digital we have below major roles you could developer skills at.

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Conclusion

The above are the 30 common digital marketing terminologies for your consideration. Kindly let me know what you think in the comment section.

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Content Marketing

How to Increase Website Traffic By 500% In 34 Days

By Omotayo Afolabi Olayinka June 30, 2019

”THE BEST PLACE TO HIDE A DEAD BODY IS TO PUT IT ON PAGE TWO OF GOOGLE” WPCOOKHOUSE

Ways to Increase Website Traffic

One of the biggest challenges of many businesses and “SEO specialists” is how to increase website traffic and leads for their businesses or clients from the internet which can only be achieved if your pages land on the first page of Google.

Below are simple strategies to get your pages to the first page of Google for relevant keywords in 34 days.

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DAYS 1-2 – Make Your Website URLs SEO-Friendly

I’ve seen unimaginable links on the web like this:

https://digitalmarketsjournal.com/Dmoz/Search-Engine-10989345?ref=234- Category.aspx

Why does your URL matter for SEO?

Search engines, especially Google uses URLs to help them figure out the topic of your page and the easier your URLs, the better your pages will rank on Google and on other Search engines.

DAYS 3-6 – Use Long Tail Keywords in Your Content

Use long-tail keywords in your content to compete for Google’s first page.

For example, you’re more likely to quickly rank on Google first page for the keyword “SEO experts in Winnipeg Canada” than “SEO experts”

To Increase your website traffic by over 500% in 34 days, you should perform a comprehensive keyword analysis of your content and update your keywords accordingly.

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DAYS 7-10 – Use Latent Semantic Indexing to Your Advantage

LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing) are simply keywords related to the topic your page is about. They include not only just synonyms but other words that often occur when a certain topic is written about.

Use different related keywords at random points in your article

DAYS 10-12 – Front-Load Your Title Tag

This is a trick I learned from Brian Dean of Backlinko.

Google puts more weight on the words found at the beginning of your title tag. You can see this by inaction by searching for competitive keywords on Google.

As you can see, most pages that rank for competitive keywords strategically place their keywords at the beginning of their title tag.

For example, let’s say you wanted to rank for the keyword “weight loss tips” and you had two headlines to choose from:

Headline #1: Weight Loss Tips: 10 Strategies for Shedding Pounds Or

Headline #2: How to Drop 10 Pounds With These Weight Loss Tips

Google would see the first headline as MORE about the topic of “weight loss tips” than the second one.

Why?

Because the keyword is at the beginning of the title tag. So you’d want to go with headline #1.

Source – Backlinko

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DAYS 12-16 – Create 10 Skyscraper Content

Is there anything common to the search results on the first page of Google for the keyword?

Yes, they all start with a certain number e.g. “27 ways to increase…” & “25 ways to increase…”

To use the skyscraper approach, then you should do the following:

Carry out a comprehensive keyword analysis of your website
Google your keywords
If you find the number 1 link to say something like “27 ways to increase…” then double it to “54 ways to increase…”.
Watch your page rank and your traffic

DAY 17 – Allow Your Users to Review or Rate Your Articles

Search engines, including Google, are always out to find the best content for their users.

One of the things that show how relevant your content – rating/review.

NB: CMS programs such as Joomla and WordPress has simple plugins that can be installed to add rating/review functionality to your with a few clicks.

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DAYS 18-21 – Use Outbound Links in Your Articles

Keyword optimization isn’t enough for page authority.

Search engines consider pages with links to other relevant/important reference(s) to be more authoritative and relevant.

Find other authoritative web pages in your niche and link to them from your content.

DAY 22 – Check Your Website Loading Speed

Have you heard? That website speed is an important ranking factor.

Check your website loading speed and minify your Javascript, HTML and CSS files to improve web loading speed.

NB: Use these Google speed checker to analyze your web loading speed – https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

DAYS 23 – Add Social Share Buttons to Your Site

Social signal is a key factor to your page authority and your overall SEO efforts.

Adding a social share button for major social networks to your website is a simple way of getting this done.

NB: Make sure your social sharing buttons are prominently displayed on the bottom of your blog posts and articles. They seem to permit a lot better at the bottom of your posts thank in other areas.

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DAYS 24-27 – Publish Long Content

Writing web content is not enough but long content is the way to go.

New research shows that the top results on Google front page for any keyword usually have an average of approximately 1800 words or more.

Do you have a page you like to get to Google’s first page? Then write over 2000 word

DAYS 28-34 – Rank With Backlinking

Getting backlinks from the authoritative website remains one of the biggest ranking factors for web pages.

List 25 authoritative websites in your business niche.

Write four 2000-word content and publish on your website.

Contact the administrators of those websites and ask if they’d like to link to your articles.

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Conclusion

The above are simple strategies that I used for my blog and for my other several clients.

For more information on boosting your organic SERP rank, leave us a message on my service page or contact me here

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SEO Strategies

20 Sublime On-Page SEO Ranking Factors Relevant in 2019

By Omotayo Afolabi Olayinka June 25, 2019

Search engine optimization can be categorized into two broad types; on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page search engine optimization is equally as important as off-page search engine optimization. On-page optimization is not only important to website page rank on search engine result pages but it is also important for your overall website user experience.

In this article, we shall be looking at what on-page SEO is, and relevant on page SEO factors to optimize for your website. We shall also be looking at how to create a website optimization strategy for your business in 2019.

So without further ado, let us delve into the topic proper.

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What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization or SEO is the process or the techniques used to increase the quality and quantity of website traffic (people) by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users searching for information, products or services relevant to the website on a web search engine, e.g. Google, Bing, etc. SEO is strictly an organic effort, i.e. a process of increasing the amount of website traffic by pure organic or non-paid efforts. By this we mean that website traffic by any paid effort, either by Google paid advertising, social media marketing, etc is cannot be considered as SEO.

SEO may target different kinds of search, by this we mean that there are a number of niches which include images, videos, voice search, academic search, news and reporting search, etc.

Optimizing a website or web pages simply means creating or editing associated content of those pages. There are numerous types of content but the major ones are videos, podcasts, articles, infographics, animations, etc.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by a set of audience. Search engine optimization is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine the higher the website ranks in the search engine results page (SERP) for relevant keywords. These visitors can then be converted into paying customers.

SEO differs from local search engine optimization in that the latter is focused on optimizing a business’ online presence so that its web pages will be displayed by search engines when a user enters a local search for its products or services. The former instead is more focused on national or international searches.

SEO used to be categorized into two broad types; namely: On-page SEO and Off-page SEO; but recently have a third type which is widely referred to as Local SEO.

Definition of important SEO terms:

What is on-page search engine optimization?
What is off-page search engine optimization?
What are keywords?
What is keyword optimization?
What is local search engine optimization?
What is SERP?
What are the on-page optimization factors?

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What is On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is the process of optimizing some key elements on every page of a website in order to rank those web pages for relevant keywords in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

On-Page SEO deals with both technical (i.e. HTML tags) and content of web pages.

The ultimate goal with on-page SEO is to make your website page content easy to read and crawl by search engine bots.

What is Off-Page Search Engine Optimization?

Off-page SEO refers to strategies and techniques used to improve the position of a web site in the search engine results page (SERPs) for some relevant keywords.

Although off-page optimization and backlinks building are somewhat synonyms, this type of SEO involves some other factors such as social signals (i.e. social media presence), and content marketing.

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What are keywords?

Keywords can be defined as search terms a user or users type in search engines such as Google and Bing when looking to buys something or trying to pull up some online resources. For example: “top SEO blogs” “slim tea” “music instruments store near me”, etc. Keywords are often categorized based on two things namely:

Length of the keyword – examples are long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are keywords or phrases that have more than two words. These type of keywords are often easy to rank for and less competitive. Short tail keywords, on the other hand, are keywords not longer than two words, e.g. “shoe laze”
User intent – this keyword type can be categorized into three namely: transactional, commercial, informational, and navigational. Read Demystifying Keywords in SEO guide to learn more.

What is keyword optimization?

Keyword optimization or keyword research is the process of researching and selecting the best converting keywords for a given web page. It is also the act of creating relevant content around these keywords to rank a given web page in SERP.

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What is local search engine optimization?

Local SEO is the process of optimizing a business, product, or service for buyers within a very small geographical location, e.g. a street, neighborhood or city. Although websites are important to any business, however, a business doesn’t need one to optimize for local listing. Some key players in local SEO are Bing my business, Google my business, yelp, etc.

What is SERP?

Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) are the pages displayed by search engines whenever a searcher enters a query or keyword. The objective of any SEO specialist is to always rank a website on the top pages of SERPs when searchers are querying for the products or services offered by that business.

What are the on-page optimization factors?

On-page optimization factors are elements and tags that, when optimized, will make web page content easier to understand, crawl, and indexed by search engine bots.

Top 20 On-Page SEO Ranking Factors to Optimize in 2019

Not all on-page optimization factors are actually important to SEO. Below are the top 20 on-page SEO ranking factors you need to optimize today.

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1. Page Title

A page title is one of the most important on-page ranking factors. The five things to keep in mind when optimizing your page titles are:

Length – a page title shouldn’t be longer than 60 characters.
Keyword – your page title should contain your focus keyword(s)
Power word – your title should contain at least one power word. Learn more about power words here
Negative or Positive Word – Your title should contain at least a positive or negative word
Number – your title should contain at least one number.

2. Page Description

Although Google has come out to say that page description (otherwise known as meta description is not a ranking factor, yet it is important for user experience.

The page description is the summary of an entire web page displayed alongside a web link in search engine result pages. It helps searchers have an understanding of what a page is all about. The page description should also contain the focus keyword of a website.

3. Short (but SEO friendly) URL Structures

The URL structure of your website goes a long way in determining how it performs in SERP. A good URL is short and readable. E.g, www.digitalmarketsjournal.com/contact-us. Two things to keep in mind while determining your URLs are:

Length – your URL shouldn’t contain more than 75 characters. Anything longer than 75 characters is not good for SEO even if it’s readable.
Readability – a good URL is always very clear and readable. An example of a bad URL would be www.example.com/yhUiikjoiuy6765?45/09-kimnjQASW

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4. Navigation

Website navigation goes a long way in determining how a website would rank in search engine result page. A poorly build web navigation will lead to increased bounced rate which in turn will negatively impact your page rank in SERPs.

Therefore, it is key to have website users in mind all through the development phase of any website.

Another easy way around this is to make use of breadcrumbs. Website breadcrumbs help website users easily navigate back and forth a website.

Furthermore, having a search bar on your website will help with user navigation and lower bounce rate.

5. Internal Links

Internal link optimization simply means linking to other resources on your website.

6. Text Formatting

This involves the proper use of header tags. Ideally, you want to start every new section of your website with a header tag. This helps search engine crawlers to easily understand the structure and what your content is about.

A simple technique is to get a sheet of paper and follow this procedure:

Content title (H1)
Section 1 (H2, H3…)
Section 2 (H2, H3…)
Section 3 (H2, H3…)
Section… (H2, H3…)
Conclusion (H2, H3…)

7. Image Optimization

Image optimization involves adding appropriate and descriptive texts to web images. While all images tags are important, however, the two factors to be mindful of when optimizing images are:

Image Size – huge web images tend to result in slow loading time.
ALT tag – ALT (or alternative text) is can be described at the nickname of your image. Alternative texts should be descriptive and contain your keywords.

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8. User-Friendly 404 Pages

We all have stumbled on a 404 page at one point or the other. Although 404 pages are generally bad for SEO, it is however very difficult to have a website without one or two 404 pages.

That being said, a user-friendly 404 page is one that isn’t just blank but apologies for the error and bring users to another page, usually the homepage of a website.

9. Loading Speed

Page loading speed is the measure of how fast your website page loads and is one of the most important ranking factors. The most common factors that determine the speed of your website are:

Videos/Images/Animations – heavy images, videos or animations will reduce your website loading speed.
JS and CSS – these are heavy javascript and cascading style sheets. An easy way out of this is compression. Heavy JS and CSS files should be compressed to increase website loading speed.
Web Host – poor web host can also result in a very slow website loading speed.

10. Website Responsiveness

Website responsiveness simply means that your website has the same feel on mobile devices as it would on computers.

Mobile responsiveness is now a ranking factor as Google places more weight on websites with good responsiveness. Use Google mobile checker to check how responsive your website is.

Since more people now access the internet on their mobile devices, it is important that your website is mobile responsive.

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11. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content generally refers to reasonable blocks of content within a website or across multiple domains that either totally matches other content or are very similar. A website owner should be wary of duplicate content. SEMRUSH has one of the best tools for checking duplicate content.

12. Sitemap

The Sitemaps is a XML file that lists all available URs on a website for search engine indexing. Sitemaps are generally uploaded or linked to the webmaster tool of a search engine. It helps your URLs get crawled by search engines more quickly.

13. Long-Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are those three and four keyword phrases which are very, very specific to whatever you are selling on a website. To have the best ROI on your website, you want to optimize for high performing long-tail keywords. An easy way to find the best keywords is to use google keyword planner.

14. HTTPS

Asides the fact that HTTPS is a ranking factor, it also adds credibility to your website. Top ranking websites for any keyword all have secure SSL linked to their domain.

15. Social Signals

Social signals are the likes, shares, votes, pins, or views, people, place on social media sites that filter out to the various search engines.

16. Fresh Content

This perhaps is the most important on-page ranking factor. Fresh content not only keep people coming back to your website but also bring search crawlers back to your website to crawl new content. The more content you have on your website, the better your chances of ranking high for keywords

17. External Links

External links are important to your on-page SEO effort. This is an act of placing links to external resources from your own site. Adding at least one external URL from your web pages will go a long way in helping you rank.

18. Content Structure

Content structure is defined as the manner in which your content is arranged. Very recently, search engine that you have very long and comprehensive contents on your website to have it rank.

Long content increases the average time duration on your website which gives your page a huge boost in SERP.

19. Canonical URL

There is nothing that kills SEO efforts faster than duplicate content and pages. Duplicate content arises when you have very similar pages. Canonical tag helps tell search engines of your preferred page and thus protects you from penalties.

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20. Schema Markup

Schema markup is one of the latest evolution of SEO. Schema markup is a semantic code that you add to a website to help search engines understand your website better.

There are a number of schema markups such as local business, rating schema, website schema, breadcrumb schema, new article schema, etc Learn more about schema markup from schema.org

Conclusion

Above are the top twenty on-page ranking factors you should optimize for in 2019.

How about you let me know what you think.

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Backlinks

5 Easy Steps to Rank for a Competitive Keyword – The Definitive Guide

By Omotayo Afolabi Olayinka June 9, 2019

Website page rank for a competitive keyword is never an easy task and it remains a mirage for many. According to a study conducted by Bright Edge Data, it was discovered that Organic traffic was the driver of the most traffic to websites across almost all sectors you can think of.

Ranking for a competitive keyword in organic search requires lots of work; more difficult for a new website that does not have many backlinks and hasn’t gotten good domain authority, but it is very possible especially if you take content marketing and SEO seriously.

To get found online when your target audience searches for the relevant keywords related to your product or services, your website needs to be well optimized.

Here are the ten steps to rank for a keyword in Google and to ultimately increase your website traffic.

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What is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is the common term used to describe visitors that find your website as the result of an unpaid effort. For example, a visitor that finds gets to the “Digital Markets Journal” Blog after searching for “Website backlinks” or other relevant keyword is organic traffic. Visitors who are considered organic find your website after using a search engine like Google or Bing.

What are Competitive Keywords?

Basically, keywords are ideas or phrases that people or searchers use in finding relevant information from search engines. Keywords are also called “search queries.” Keywords are of two types: long-tail keywords which usually contains 3 to 4- word phrases e.g. “how to rank for a competitive keyword” and short-tail keywords which usually contain 1 to 2-word phrase, e.g “keyword”, “competitive keywords”, etc.

Both Long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords are important to SEO and used separately and are discussed extensively in The Chronicles of Keyword – The Definitive Guide

Getting your website indexed by search engines and ranking for keywords for that matter takes times – 6 to 8 weeks sometimes.

What I attempt to do in this “Steps to Rank for a Competitive Keyword – The Definitive Guide” is to show you the step-by-step process of ranking for top or competitive keywords in any niche.

With no further ado, let’s dive in.

Step 1 – Lay the Foundation

Before trying to rank for a competitive keyword, certain things must first be put in place. Failure to do this might result in frustration and disappointment. The first things that must first be looked into are:

A strong website – The longer your website has been around, the better. This is because domains acquire and backlinks authority over time. A website that has been around for quite some time usually outperform new ones for competitive keywords mainly because of the domain authority and domain trust they have acquired over time. Are you a new domain owner? Read How to Rank a New Domain on Google Page #1 in 90 Days to learn how to rank a new domain for competitive keywords.
Link building network – Google and other search engines associate relevance to backlinks. Search engines believe that the higher the number of quality backlinks you have, the more relevant your content is and indeed the better you will rank for such keywords.

Step 2 – Perform a Comprehensive Keyword Research

The second step to rank your website for a competitive keyword would be to perform keyword research. There is a number of tools you can use for this purpose but I recommend Google Adword Keyword Planner. Google keyword planner is free and comprehensive.

Keyword research can be time-consuming but this step is important to validate the topic you like to discuss in your content. Keyword research helps you see the average monthly queries of the topic you want to write about. For example, searching “keyword research” in Google keyword planner gives the below information.

The above information shows that we have millions of people searching for something related to the phrase “keyword research”.

Top considerations for this step are:

High Monthly Search – Low Competition – The trick to this is to find keywords with low competition but high average monthly search. The reason for this is because it is a lot easier to rank a website for low competitive keywords than for a high one.
Relevance – You’re more likely to succeed in ranking for a keyword if the term is relevant to your site and your business so you want to look for relevant keywords to your products and services.

Making variations of your keyword is also key to how well you rank for relevant keywords.

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Step 3 – Determine the Intent

Keyword Intent represents the user’s purpose for the search. It’s what the user is likely to do when searching for a particular phrase. There are three basic types of keyword intent are Transactional – e.g. “buy eyeglasses frames”, Navigational intent – e.g. “Digital Markets Journal website”, and Informational intent – e.g. “List of top SEO blog”

Your choice of keyword should depend on your customer intent. For example, you should use transactional keywords if you’re looking to “sell”.

Step 4 – Create Your Content

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Execute your plan. Search engines such as Google and Bing are looking for high-quality content that would benefit searchers be it infographics, blog, or video. A thing of note while creating your content is keyword density. Good keyword density – 3-5; helps search engines to easily understand and index your website pages.

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Step 5 – Publish and Promote Your Content for Backlinks

Step number 5 is where you publish and promote your content. To have a good rank for competitive keywords, you must find people or bloggers to share and link back to your article. Backlinks are one of the major fuels of any SEO effort.

Conclusion

It is important to have a mixture of both short phrase keywords (head terms) and long phrases (long-tail keywords) while creating content for your online advertising strategy. Nevertheless, long-tail keywords tend to attract more qualified leads that hopefully turn into customers. This will give your keyword strategy the right balance.

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SEO Strategies

100-Free-Marketing-Tools-to-Help-You-Grow-Your-Business

By Omotayo Afolabi Olayinka June 1, 2019

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SEO Strategies

8 Key Influencer Trends to Look Out For This Year

By Omotayo Afolabi Olayinka June 1, 2019

The past few years have seen a massive boom in influencer marketing.

In fact, most brands and advertisers now consider influencers as an integral part of their content marketing.

These social celebrities offer an effective channel for content delivery and have proven to bring better results than most other marketing platforms.

But social media influencer marketing is not a static concept — it’s constantly evolving over time with changing consumer behavior, new technology, and unpredictable market dynamics.

If your brand wants to keep up, you need to stay updated.

Luckily, we asked the experts to reveal some of the major influencer marketing trends likely to dominate this year.

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Check out our infographic summary of this post below. Or keep scrolling for a detailed explanation of each trend, with examples!