Need inspiration for your blog? Try looking here

Blogging has come a long way since it first surfaced on the web.
Originally, a blog was a platform for individuals to share their thoughts and feelings, almost like a public diary.
But now blogging has transformed into so much more. It has become a powerful marketing tool for businesses to grow their brand.

Increased website traffic, increased search engine optimization (SEO), and the ability to build up your reputation as a thought-leader in the industry are just some examples of the variety of benefits that can be acquired through blogging.

Blogging has also been shown to increase sales. According to research, 6 out of 10 U.S. online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog, and marketers who use blogs accumulate 67 percent more leads than those who don’t.

Simply put, if you haven’t already jumped on the blogging-bandwagon, then you’re losing out.

Coming up with fresh and engaging ideas for your blog isn’t an easy task. Sometimes it may feel like all the good ideas have already been written about 100 times, or that your ideas lack a “wow” factor.

But fear not, there is an abundance of fascinating ideas just waiting to be discovered and packaged into a brilliantly written blog.

Here are three spots where your business can find inspiration to fuel your editorial calendar.

Email inbox

If you’re struggling to think of ideas in order to create compelling content, a great place to start is your email inbox.

Delve deep into the emails received from your customers and make a list of the kind of questions they’re asking you. Even if these questions seem simple and straightforward to you, they are probably not so obvious to your clients.

Take these questions and transform them into blog topics. Answering the common questions of your customers could also save you a whole lot of time, as instead of individually responding you can direct the customer to your blog.

Competitors content

Now, I’m not saying that you should bookmark your competitors’ website and duplicate all of their content. But, your competitor can be a great source of inspiration.

Take note of your top five competitors and have a look at what kind of topics they’re writing about, the questions they’re answering, and the kind of industry-related they’re sharing on social.

You will be sure to find some topics that you can either expand on or offer a different opinion on.

A good tip is to also take a peek at your competitor’s blog comments. Here, you may find a whole range of questions waiting to be answered by an industry expert- you!


Capitalize on these questions that your target audience are asking, in the form of an engaging blog post.

Scan social

In addition to using social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to promote your blog posts, these platforms are also where you can find your best source of inspiration.

Following and joining social media conversations can lead to discovering great topics that can fuel your blog. Here are a few examples of how you can do this:

Expand on social discussions
Sharing a link to a blog on social media, along with asking for the opinion your followers on the topic, is a great technique to create conversations.

This extended conversation will not only increase customer engagement and build valuable relationships, but it could also lead to new ideas to spark a blog series on the topic.

Follow Hashtags
In the world of social media, there are millions of conversations happening constantly. And if you look hard enough, among these conversations is your next big blog idea.

In order to quickly find the right conversations that fit your industry, head over to twitter and look for trending topics which are relevant.

Use the platform to search for and follow Twitter hashtags related to your industry, location, and competitors in order to discover the conversation happening around it.


Source: techhq

5 top-notch tools to help grow your blog

There are so many great tools out there that can help you grow your website and/or blog. From website creation, to content creation, to market/audience intelligence, and SEO there are 10^nth tools and services out there that claim to be able to help. We have compiled a list of five areas for you to focus your efforts as well as five tools to get you started.

5 ways to improve your website
Content Creation – Content marketing is currently one of the best strategies for many marketers and bloggers. The right tools will allow you to access information on how people consume and interact with the content on your website or blog. According to Jeff O’Brien, Head of Content Marketing at SolidEssay, this type of data will help you to gather information and resources needed to create new content and identify trends that can help you make critical decisions for your blog.

Search Engine Optimization – In order for your website or blog to gain new visits, you have to be found. You need to utilize search engine optimization tools to identify issues on your blog or website and suggest areas and ways for improving your search ranking. If you’re not sure where to start, check out Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Website creation – AI makes website creation easier and better by providing tools to offer a way to create fully optimized websites or blogs with minimal effort on your part.

Real-time personalization – You need to be leveraging data and tools that can help you to provide personalized messages, posts, recommendations, etc. for your blog or website, thus making your audience happy and more likely to continuously read your content.


Accessibility – Ensuring your site is more accessible to people who are visually or hearing impaired will also benefit your site. There are now tools and services that can transcribe videos and turn written content into audio.

Your blog cannot survive without readers, so you have to employ several strategies to bring readers to your blog and to keep them coming back. Now that you know what you need to start exploring, let’s look at some great tools that will help you grow your blog so you not only gain new readers but also keep the established ones coming back for more.

5 tools to grow your blog
Grammarly – Well-written blog posts grab their audience’s attention and make them crave more. In order to write a great blog post, you need a great writing tool. Grammarly is just that. It uses AI to identify grammar and spelling errors while also giving suggestions on how to improve the tone and style of your writing. No writer is complete without a tool like Grammarly.

Crayon – Crayon is used to track what the competitor is doing. It analyzes data from online sources, tracks the activity of your competitors’ websites and provides useful insight for your business. These can be used to help make meaningful business decisions about what to write, how to post and so much more. Be sure to try this tool for your own blog and see how much a difference it makes.

Uberflip – This is a great tool for analyzing your written content and cataloging it. It then uses this to recommend specific content to your audience based on posts they have read in the past. Uberflip is a great way to keep your readers engaged and coming back for more.

Pathmatics – Do you know how to find your audience online? Knowing this will better enable you to find and target them. If you don’t, try using Pathmatics. It uses AI to provide you with digital advertising information from brands, companies, etc. Use it to identify your competitors and keep track what they are doing, how they are spending their time, etc. It will also tell you how the audience is responding to the ads, thus enabling you to make informed decisions for your own advertising of your blog.

Amanda Daniels, Chief Marketing Officer at ConfidentWriters, recommends to use the information to identify companies or brands that you can align yourself with to get more readers to your blog or even guest blog on their platform. The possibilities for this are endless!

BrightEgde – This tool makes content production easier because it helps with tasks such as adding header tags, cross-linking and optimization. BrightEdge tells you what types of content perform better and suggests ways to rank your written content so that your readers are continuously engaged. Measuring your ROI for your blogging has been made easy because of BrightEdge, so be sure to give it a try.

Daniel Spencer, Content Manager at SwiftPapers, has successfully emphasized that blogging is a way to expand your knowledge and to grow, whether personally or professionally. Whether you do it as a hobby, side job or main job, your blog can only survive if it has readers and if it grows. The tools listed above are great, easy-to-use, and will help you do just that. Be sure to give them a try.


Source: besttechie

9 STEP GUIDELINE DESCRIBING PAY PER CLICK MARKETING

Belonging to today’s era, we’re sure you’ve heard of PPC or Pay Per Click advertising. But do you know how pay per click really works? If you’re looking to figure out how it works, you’ve landed on the right article!

So, what is the definition of pay per click? In literal terms, it is a way of paying for visitors to visit your website. As the name suggests, in a PPC campaign, a marketer or business owner only pays when a user clicks on his or her ad. When a user clicks on your ad, your business pays the current cost per click (CPC) from the budget you’ve allotted to your campaign. Once the entire budget is drained out, your PPC network will terminate your ads until you pour in more funds again.

PPC is a way to drive online visitors to your business website. Search engine optimization is one of the popular ways to make your business more discoverable to a relevant audience that is looking for your products or services, ultimately helping your business grow.

Organizations that are familiar with the digital domain understand the importance of ranking well on SERPs. They also understand that it is a lengthy and time-consuming task. So, this is where pay per click advertising comes into action. A pay per click campaign lets your business rank on highly relevant keywords to make you discoverable to a relevant audience. However, initiating a PPC campaign isn’t too easy! So it’s not a good idea to dive into it without planning, strategizing and allocating budgets.

Adhere to the following pointers while starting PPC strategy for your business:

Know your Goals
Before you start, identify what you want to achieve through this PPC campaign and why you’re initiating one in the first place. Do you want quick results? Do you have surplus funds and would like to use them effectively? Are you targeting a specific opportunity that is time sensitive? Do you just want to increase the number of visitors to your website? Get a good understanding of why you want to do this.

Once you know what you want to achieve, you will find it easier to plan out your PPC campaign. This includes creating your ads, tweaking them for better performance, tracking your ads, and revising your campaign. Identifying your end goal is essential for an effective PPC advertising journey.

Keyword Research
When it comes to PPC, everything stems from keywords. The keywords you select can make or break your PPC game! Therefore, it is important that you carry out a thorough keyword research before creating ads with them.

The trick here is to think like your ideal customer. What are the keywords that your target audience is possibly searching for? You must take this into account when selecting your keywords. Once you have your final keywords, it’s time to group them into categories.

Needless to say, you will only get to test the efficiency of your keywords once you start running your ads. You will probably have to tweak your ads and the keywords used in them after analyzing the performance of your ads.

Ad Strategy and Creation
Once you have selected your keywords, it’s time to create your ad strategy. Creating effective PPC ads is a skill that not everybody has. You have to make sure you create ads that seem tempting to click on, relevant and not misleading.

Think about terms and phrases your ideal customer would typically search for while looking for products or services offered by your business.

An important point to keep in mind while creating your ads is to make sure your ads take your user to a landing page that is relevant and not misleading. A lot of times, people click on ads and are taken to irrelevant landing pages. This can bruise your brand in the long run.

Design a Landing Page
Think of where your users would arrive once they click on your ad.

To a landing page! Eventually, it all comes down to the landing page where you are hoping your visitor to make a conversion or inquiry. The question is how can you design an effective landing page?

The landing page should be relevant to the ad your user clicked on. The transition from clicking on the ad to arriving at the landing page and consuming the content should be smooth. At no point in time should a user feel like he or she is lost or does not know what is happening.

A good landing page has content which is easy to consume, clear calls-to-action, and preferably a contact form for the visitor to get in touch with you. Other than that, your landing page should be clean, attractive and organized.

Define a Budget
It is important to have a defined budget for running PPC ads. Not only is this beneficial for the business or company, but it also give you a good idea as to the kind of results you can achieve within a set budget.

Consider involving your finance team to know what kind of budget can be set for PPC campaign, such that other business tasks are not hampered by it. Small businesses that face many challenges to have successful online presence can consider pay per click marketing for their business.

Target Audience
It is important for you to identify exactly who you want to target through your PPC campaign. The way to do this is to identify the kind of search phrases or terms they would typically use to search for products or services offered by your business.

Through your ads, aim at solving problems that your audience is possibly facing. Wouldn’t you feel great if you saw an ad that provided you with a solution to a problem you have been facing?

You can also target a specific audience through geographical and time filters. If your audience is only present in a certain area, you can choose to have your ads displayed only in that area. If you think your audience is likely to search for something during the night time, you can select the time period for which you want your ads to be displayed!

Campaign Type
Select your campaign type. Do you want to display only textual ads? Do you want to list a product? Do you wish to display a visual ad along with a picture? Based on your research and budgets, select the type of campaign you would like to run for your business.

You can also choose the social media platforms on which you want to run your ads.

Run your Ads
Now that you have all of the above in place, it’s time to finally run your ads!

Set up all your ads on your chosen network such as Google AdWords or Bing. You can set up single or multiple campaigns. Pick your settings and filters based on your ad strategy such as geographical filters, timings, negative keywords, budget per ad etc. Once all your settings are in place, you can activate your ads. You can pause and tweak your campaigns at any time you like. This brings us to the next point!

Track Ads
Perhaps the most important step in creating and running your ads is to track and analyze their performance. Only once you track the performance of your ads will you know what’s working. Or what’s not!

Once you identify what’s causing your ads to perform low, you can make relevant changes to them. Testing the performance of ads is probably the most enjoyable part of the entire process! This is where you get the hang of it! Once you are able to tweak ads to make them perform better and witness that success, you will begin to run ads that bring you quality leads, more traffic, and ultimately more conversions.

Running PPC campaigns is a consuming process. If you have the time that it needs to run an effective campaign, we encourage it! If you don’t have enough time, we suggest you hire somebody who understands how pay per click advertising works and PPC strategies and tactics that work well.

We’d love to know your thoughts on PPC Advertising! Would you implement it for your own business? If we missed out on something, let us know in the comments below!

Source: bbntimes

Why Is Apple App Store Optimization And Promotion Important?

Get Rank high with this ultimate guide of App Store Optimization
If the term “App Store Optimization” or ASO is new to you, let me simplify it for you. App Store Optimization is the method of boosting the visibility of a mobile app (such as an iPhone, Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone app) in the respective app store. To put it in simple words, the process through which we expand the reach of an app through various means is called App Store Optimization. Now, as you know about it, let’s jump to the landscape of an app.

Just developing an app with a number of features will help you little in the long-term success of your app. You need to fully comprehend ASO for handsome results. It becomes more significant when we all know how mobile are taking over the desktop. Mobile apps have become more formidable due to the fact that mobile internet usage has gradually surpassed the desktop users.

Currently, the space of mobile apps is dominated by Google Play Store for Android apps and Apple App Store for iOS stuff. These app stores have their own dimensions in their own domain. But to succeed on either of them, you need to invest your time, effort and money not only in the development of a splendid app but also in your store optimization. There are over 2 million apps available on the second-largest app store.

In this article, I will particularly be talking about Apple ASO, which closely resembles ASO for Google Play Store. The major difference comes in the ranking algorithms of ASO and that you need to learn. Firstly, you have to carve a space for your app and to fight among apps that are already existing in the Apple App Store. As per a report by Statista, there are over 2 million apps available on the second-largest app store.

If you have any idea about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you would definitely understand the gravity of ASO.

One of the easiest ways to find the best app of any category is to simply search it within the App Store. As per a research report by Forrester, 63 percent of new mobile app installs directly comes from search results, closely followed by other methods. Therefore, a well calculated ASO strategy can easily land your app in the top searches and will garner maximum downloads.

Now, let’s focus on Apple App Store Optimization and following are the factors that highly influence it:

1. Name of the app
The name of your app is the foremost thing that will define the ASO, as it will make an initial impression on the user. Therefore, dig in deep and be very careful while naming your app and try to relate the word with that of the app. After that, make sure to name your app short and crisp. The length of the titles greater than 25 characters don’t show up. People tend to search for a single word and end up clicking on the one with has pleasing title and length. Moreover, short names are easier to remember.

Most importantly, app stores are the primary source for people to discover an app.

2. App symbol
Your app icon should be striking and engaging. Try not to use words in your icon, as it may confuse the users. The colors and the icon size used should also be considered wisely before putting it in the app store and follow the ASO guidelines.

While designing the app icon, you need to take care of the following  significant factors that will directly impact ASO:

Scalability: The primary concern while designing the icon should be the scalability. The app icon has to be displayed on various platforms and on different screen size. Apple App Store is available on a number of distinct devices, including Retina devices. Thus, the icon should be unique and explicit.
Recognisability: In case, the user is not able to remember the name of your app, it’s very important that your app icon should be lucid enough for the user to recognize in the first go. If you will embed your app with complex design and pattern, the user will have to go through some tough time to decode your app among millions of other apps and your ASO will go for a toss.
Consistency: Consistency plays an important part in the ASO. It is quite essential that you strike a consistency between what you represent by your app icon and what exactly is your app. Never try to fool the users’ because even if they download your app and wouldn’t find what they were looking for, they will spray your app review page with negative comments. The icon should be compatible with all the features and functions of your app.
Uniqueness: While designing and crafting the app icon, you are also required to add some unique taste. Getting inspired from other apps is perfectly fine but, just don’t copy it. Bring out some creativity and usher your app with it. It will help your app to have its own identity.
Don’t Use Words: As I mentioned earlier also, don’t add words and letters in the first go. The app icon is meant to for visual display of your app and it should be utilized for the same. Meanwhile, if you firmly believe that there should be a word in the app icon, don’t put more than one word. Picture and word are two separate visual tools and shouldn’t be blended together. Being a user, I would like to see some picture or image in the app icon rather than a pile of words. For words, you have ample space throughout the app description section. Stick to this basic ASO practice.

3. Keywords Density
There is always a primary keyword that goes with every app, followed by others. The keywords should reflect the idea and features of the app framework. At the same time, you need to take care of keyword competition in the App Store. The less, the better. However, driving huge traffic by inserting relevant keywords can also backfire on your ASO strategy, as people may not be looking for your app and after downloading your app, they might come back to paint your review wall with some negative comments, which obviously nobody wants to see.

4. App Visuals
Visuals are something that can impact the user at the very first glance. It includes elements like app icon, videos, screenshots, and more. Though the visuals have nothing to do with the ranking algorithm but still, it holds a key to the users’ attention and holds a great deal to ASO.

Just in case, a user is searching for some other app, it will be the visual of your app icon that can impress him and will impact him to land upon your app. Also, you should go with the same app symbol everywhere, as it will help the users’ to retain the name and visual of your app. Follow the practice of using same visuals everywhere, from your app to your pages. It will help you to expand your brand recognition and ASO possibilities.

The other essential aspect is the screenshot. Once the user comes to your app, the screenshot will be the first thing that he will view. The more unambiguous the image, the better will be the user experience. Therefore, make sure you place some pretty decent screenshots of the app that should be informative too. And, avoid using vague screenshots, as it may hurt the user.

5. Reviews and Ratings
Reviews and ratings are a mirror to people who are new to your app or who have landed on your app unknowingly. So, anyone would want positive comments on their app. Sometimes, it is the rival app party which indulges in the wrong practice of maligning your app by commenting poor about your app and sadly, you can’t overcome such issues.

But if you take it in another way round, you can push many users to download your app and for that, you need to be unerring on what you are propounding to the user and what you are actually offering. Here, you need to keep the ASO’s outlook in mind.

Also, if someone has reported any concern or bug in the comment section, make sure to address that, as it will show your dedication and commitment towards your users, and trust me, it will prominently influence the app downloads. For catering this issue beyond the conventional boundaries, always add your contact details at the end of your app description and try to garner more than the three-star rating on your app. This technique will rightly help you to propel your ASO.

6. User Retention
User retention is another major factor for the ASO. After launching the app on the app store, you as the developer has to make sure that people stay at your app for long. Though the figures of the average app retention rate in the first month stand at 36 percent, which is not very impressive. Media and entertainment industry top the list in the survey of the three-month user retention rate.

Consequently, you need to pop up some of the other new element to keep the users going. Once you delay the infusing, the user will switch to some other app for some unique experience.

The Final Thought
So, you must have understood the dominance of everything from the visibility to the designing; every element plays its part in the perfect ASO. If you wish to maximize your reach on the app store, do follow the above mentioned ASO practices and let me know if I missed on anything related to the ASO perspective.

Source: mobileappdaily