How Blogging Helps Ecommerce Businesses in the Long Run

Is blogging helpful for an ecommerce website? The answer is a resounding ‘Yes’.

Take the case of Marcus Sheridan owner of River Pools and Spas. His blog post on fiberglass pool costing led to sales worth more than $1.7 million for his swimming pool company.

While it is rare for a single blog post to lead to such huge amount in sales, there are numerous small businesses that have seen substantial increase in their conversion over the long term. According to a study by Hubspot, businesses that blog get 55% more visitors and 97% more inbound links.

Here is how blogging can help your ecommerce site in the long run:

  • Blogging improves SEO

Blogging regularly leads to better ranking on search engines such as  Google and Bing. More blog posts mean more indexed pages for Google to crawl. An average company that blogs has 434% more indexed pages compared to one that does not blog. This translates to better ranking on Google.

Search engines also prefer sites that are updated regularly with fresh content. This is why adding new blog posts regularly will boost your rankings.

Blogging will also give you an opportunity to rank for keywords that do not fit into your product pages. For example an ecommerce website selling bicycles cannot target popular keyword ‘best bicycles for mountain trails’ unless they write a blog about it. Blogging will also increase keyword density of important keywords in your site and drive up your rankings.

Lastly blogging allows other bloggers or businesses to link to your informative post and earn you precious back links. Blogs are also sharable and this helps to optimize your site for search engines.

  • Helps in Branding

All successful businesses are great storytellers. Nobody wants to visit a site with just a list of products. Blogging is an effective way to tell your brand story.

Blog lends a personality and voice to your website. Visitors can know more about your business and product philosophy through blogs. Blogs can be used to connect with your visitors and build a relation with them.

An informative blog that addresses reader’s pain points will keep them coming back for more. Educating your readers with what they are passionate about will build a certain brand authority in their mind. They will turn to you for any query in your industry. This helps to establish a loyal online community that values your brand.

  • Increases Conversions

Yes, blogging has a direct impact on your sales conversions too. In fact, businesses that prioritize blogging experience 13 times increase in ROI according to Hubspot. This is because of the continuous stream of traffic that blogs drive to your website. The marketing ‘rule of 7’ says that most of your prospects won’t buy from you unless they have seen your brand at least seven times.

A quality blog will keep your audience coming back and make sure that you are on top of their mind when they think of purchase in your industry.

  • Supports Content Marketing and Inbound Sales

Blogging provides a continuous stream of content to drive your content marketing. Sharing others content can build audience, but how do you make sure your following becomes your traffic to ecommerce site?

Blogs are an integral part of inbound methodology to convert visitors into leads. This can be done by inserting a call to action in your blog itself. This could be a discount coupon, free guidebooks or free shipping in lieu of their email id.

Sharing your own quality content will build your brand authority, drive traffic and also convert it to customers in your ecommerce business.

  • Customer Touch point

Blogs are also a great way to be in touch with your prospects and customers. Encourage your readers to comment on your post to have a dialogue with them. This drives up user engagement and gives your readers a sense on involvement in the business. Blog comments can also be used to choose the next topic for your blog. Many of the successful blogs just answer the most pressing questions that customers in their industry have. Encouraging a two way communication on your blogs will drive user engagement, conversion and feedback.

The importance of a blog for an ecommerce site must be clear after reading this. So have you started on your blogging journey yet?

11 Reasons Why No One is Watching Your Video Content [Infographic]

Video is a powerful medium for promotional activities of businesses. As a marketer, you might have created several videos for the promotional activities of your business. Though such videos are of good quality you may not get enough viewers for it. What will be the reason for this? There may be many reasons for less viewership of your videos. The problem may be with your video content strategy.

We have a created a list of reasons that keep the viewers skip your video. There are also suggestions listed here in the form an infographic to get you more viewers for your marketing videos. We hope this illustration will help you to formulate a better video content strategy next time.

no-one-watching-your-video-content-infographic

Choosing the Best Social Media Marketing Services for Small Businesses

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is an integral part of digital marketing. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are used by marketers to drive traffic, distribute content and provide a customer experience. According to Social Media Examiner, 92% of marketers have increased their exposure through social media and 80% had positive results in terms traffic.

This blog is for you if you have your own business page and want to improve returns from social media marketing. Social media marketing includes all the activities done online to market your product or service. SMM can lead to more following, increased traffic to your website and customer relationship building.

Whether you are considering hiring a digital marketing agency or buying  SMM software to manage on your own, following is the information you must know to choose the best SMM service for your small business:

  • Have a Documented Strategy

Has your marketing agency developed a written documented Social Media Marketing Strategy? Not having a formalized plan will only lead to ineffective posting on social media platforms. Here is what you can do to document a formal strategy:

1. Know your audience Think of the profile of followers you want to generate on social media. Quality of traffic is as important as quantity. Develop buyer personas and document the needs of your target audience.

2. Develop content to address those needs. Content creation must fit into the broad content plan that you have developed.

3. Make a content calendar to plan when you will share your content. This will ensure consistency in your posting.

4. Also share interesting content by other players in your industry. This could be industry reports, studies and news. Post polls to engage users.

  • Use Social Media Marketing Tools

social-media-marketing-screenshot

There are many tools that allow you to manage all your social media accounts at one place. Platforms like HooteSuite, SproutSocial and Buffer are well known. Using these tools will allow you to schedule posts, track user engagement and monitor your growth on social media.

According to eMarketer, 60% of small business owners say they are not able to track ROI from their social media activities. Tools like Kissmetrics allow you to measure the ROI for each platform  and track traffic and conversions coming from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. It also tracks multiple site visits to give the long lifecycle return from a visitor.

  • SMM must be tailored to your business

The goals of each small business will be different on social media. Define your ultimate goal clearly. Do you want to drive social media traffic to your site or just want to increase brand awareness in the audience?

As a small business you may also have some budget constraints. Here’s the good news. You do not need a huge budget to market on social media. High level of targeting allows you to reach your relevant audience and convert them.

  • Visual Content

According to Buffer, visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media. Many of the social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are visual platforms. For this reason, any SMM service that you choose must have experience in producing infographics, images and videos for each channel.

  • Paid Marketing

All social media platforms have paid marketing tools that make your posts and ads visible to target audience. In fact, major social media networks are focusing on paid channels to monetize their platforms.

It has become difficult for business pages on Facebook to be visible without running an ad campaign. Instagram has introduced carousel ads and ‘shop now’ buttons to its ads.

social-media-usage-screenshot

As per above graph 92% of marketing professionals are using Facebook to advertise. You can start on Facebook with a small budget. The platform is sure to give you returns by micro targeting your audience based on age, location, interests and much more.

Although social media is only one part of digital marketing, it is by far emerging as the biggest and most influential part of it. According to Hubspot’s marketing statistics, more than half of marketers who’ve been using social media for at least two years report it helped them improve sales.

SMM failed for the others because succeeding at social media requires keeping up to date with the latest algorithm changes and new features. You can take help of a digital marketing expert who will take care of all the above points mentioned.

 

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy that Works Best for SEO

High quality content is still the king in online marketing.  Most businesses are now focusing on creating more content than ever before. The major thing to note is that the content is used everywhere and influences every other type of marketing strategy; let that be emails, blogs, articles, press releases or even social media comments. A smart content marketing strategy helps to drive more organic traffic to your website.

Pushing out fresh content that keeps your audience engaged is the requirement that helps you score better in SEO. Professional SEO companies use advanced strategies to promote your brand and business.

Let us discuss some points that help you create a content marketing strategy that best describes your business goals.

Know your goals – Before you begin planning, define your goals. Think about how your content marketing should help you meet your objectives such as

Your audience is your asset

Determine your target audience and get to know them. Before you start suggesting topics and creating titles, you need to know exactly what your target audience is looking for.

Knowing your target audience needs will help you to produce more relevant and valuable content. Understand your audience clearly either using Google Analytics traffic report or with surveys. Learning to provide the right content for the right reader makes your job much easier.

There are few more tools that provide insight on your audience’s interests and requirements. Tools include

Answer the Public

The auto-suggest results provided by search engines provide insight for content marketers. When users start typing a word, Answer the Public allows them to link the keyword that relates to their product or service, the people’s queries about the concerned service, and it comes up with a number of search phrases drawn from Google, Bing and other search engines.

Twitter Audience Insights

This latest analytics tool from Twitter will provide marketers with relevant information about what kinds of people are interacting with their brand. The tool offers access to information such as key demographics, interests, lifestyle, purchasing behavior, and mobile footprint, which helps marketers know exactly what kind of people follow their brand and what sort of content attracts them to their website.

Competitor analysis, a great way to reach the right path

Grab a list of competitors, analyze them and understand what makes them different. Realizing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats helps to find what exactly your customers are searching for in your industry. This analysis also can discover the most useful keywords your clients may be using to search you.

Quality, a priority

High quality, engaging posts with useful details are likely to get more shares on social media platforms. With top quality blogs and articles, even you can get attention from your competitors or even from other industry who take your company as an expert. Also make sure to choose trending topics that are relevant for your business and include a back link to the source, which helps them to know about your article.

Get familiar with content types

Once you establish goals and your target audience, try to provide content that includes informative data that is of use for your audience.

Useful content types include

  • Infographics
  • Video tutorials
  • Case Studies
  • Social media ads
  • Email newsletters
  • Ebooks
  • Templates
  • Podcasts

Don’t just create content, track them too

Set a goal to publish one piece of content daily, weekly or in alternate days. Don’t just leave the content after publishing. Promote them and track the progress of your content. For instance, if you have posted a blog in Facebook, check how many people liked it, respond to the comments, provide answers if any questions were asked and write a follow-up blog with more updated information. This helps to keep your audience in track.

Editorial Calendar helps

Once you have an idea as to how great content can be created, then it’s the right time to go for an editorial calendar. This calendar, which includes social media posts, audit rates and more, helps to keep track of your content. They are extremely helpful to organize our workflow without any error.

Editorial calendar –

  • Provides chance to carefully plan content creation beforehand
  • Helps writers to overcome writer’s block
  • Allows to keep track of every single post in social media
  • Maintain the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content on website

Social media is your friend

Engaging with your audiences in real conversations will bring better results and add more value to your social streams. Know your audience’s priorities as you plan. Focus on what they want to know and not what you want to tell them. Also stay up to date with latest social media changes.

Learn ways to distribute your content

Ways you choose to promote your content is also important. A detailed plan will help. Few suggested ways include

  • Using paid ads on social media platforms like Facebook
  • Preparing a list of sites and bloggers whom you need to contact, which helps in getting a steady traffic and fresh leads
  • Sending Emails and following up them using tools such as Yesware and Mixmax.

Creating a content marketing strategy may be time-consuming, but provide fruitful results for SEO.  If you are not that familiar with SEO or content, consider choosing an experienced SEO firm that can work as an extension to your company.

Why Hire a Content Marketing Agency for Startups and Small Businesses

Needless to mention, any business thrives only when it has a solid customer base. With so many startups and businesses targeting the same consumer segment, it is your prerogative as an entrepreneur to do everything that is within your reach to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

In what way is my product or service meeting the needs of my customer?

In how many ways is my product different from others?

These are the two questions of introspection that should drive you to take certain measures in line with your marketing strategy. All for the sake of generating leads which will ultimately become your brand loyalists, thereby increasing your sales, your marketing strategy should be your prime instrument for change.

It is a thing of the past when customers were influenced to buy certain products that flashed on their TVs or in their morning newspapers. Billboards and hoardings too became promising advertising tools promising a greater reach. But this is not the scene anymore. With technology penetrating into every sphere of human life, the World Wide Web is the pivotal marketplace to checkout and order stuff.

Just signup with your chosen e-commerce website, select a product of your choice, order it online and receive the delivery at your doorstep without any fuss. Doing away the strain of physically knocking on the doors of a showroom, shoppers can shop for their needs from the comfort of their living rooms.

Offering a great deal of freedom and convenience to the shopping fraternity, online shopping has revolutionized the way in which people pick up and use stuff. And what makes this type of business proposition click?

Content – The Magic Wand of Words and Pictures

Primarily focused on customer engagement, it is only through good website content that you can attract the attention of potential customers. It can be a social media update or a compelling blog post. Both these are the techniques that will engage your customers while paving way for a stronger brand positioning.

Genuine content tagged with images and videos is what drives your customers to pause for a second to understand what you are conveying. And if they like it, they will go a step further by sharing it within their contacts.

Commenting about your offering is another way in which online shoppers influence each other. Basically adding value to your service or product, it is only through effective content that you can increase traffic to your website; eventually leading to good sale figures.

The Need to Hire a Content Marketing Agency

Notwithstanding the fact that a professional setup can handhold your business on to the right path, the same belief holds good when it concerns hiring the services of a content marketing agency. Signing up the dotted line with such agencies will deliver you the following advantages.

1. The team of content marketing executives will help you organize, implement and test your content marketing strategy. Along with this, the added advantage comes in the form of tracking the progress of your strategy.

2. The agency can step in to give your current content marketing activities a facelift.

3. When you compare the cost v/s the numerous benefits that an agency has in store for you, allocation of a certain budget will lower your expenditure when you do not have to hire a full-time content strategist or a graphic designer. The team will step in to take care of all your content requirements at a much lower cost.

The Job Description of a Content Marketing Company

Having identified the functional and financial advantages of hiring a content marketing agency, now is the time to discuss about the different ways in which such companies help boost your sale figures.

1. A single-window service that will take care of all your content marketing needs including web content writing, SEO initiatives and all the aspects of your content marketing that will impact your supply chain.

2. The agency helps you gain a comprehensive idea of your business goals looking through the lens of your online presence. Recommending changes to the content alongside fixing content deficiencies will hence be the responsibility of the team.

3. As an outside agency, the team of content marketers will be able to offer you objective suggestions to build your brand. Tagged as a reliable source of marketing information, it is through their years of marketing experience that you will be able to create your market niche.

4. A consolidated report from the professional agency will help you assess whether the current situation is in sync with what was agreed upon earlier as part of the agency contract requirements.

5. Teaming up with a content marketing agency is a purse-friendly decision when you will be spared of incurring employee training costs.

6. Helping you realize your short terms goals, a content marketing agency can be of utmost help when you are hard pressed to deliver an urgent project. While your workforce is getting tuned to the upcoming project, you can be at peace to work around a complete marketing plan offered by the agency. The prompt implementation of your marketing plan does wonders to your bottom line, allowing you to make the most of an unexpected opportunity.

Conclusion

Mindful of the advantages of hiring a content marketing agency for your small entrepreneurial venture, it comes as a wise move to hand over the reins of your content requirements to professionals. Bringing to the fore the cost-benefit analysis, it is evident that the benefits outweigh the costing factor of availing professional content marketing services.

Allowing your business to thrive with unique and high quality content, you will able to differentiate yourself from your competitors by signing up with professionals who can bring in informative and engaging text, videos, webinars, podcasts and infographics. All these enhancements to your website will make you stand apart in your business circles, not only through a better online presence but also in terms of long-standing profitability.

15 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools You Can Use in 2017

Social Media and its evolution into an effective digital marketing medium have changed the face of marketing big time.

At present social media marketing is not just confined to posting and sharing content out there. There are a variety of tools which helps users to retrieve data of their choice from the internet and assist them in creating effective marketing strategies and campaigns.

But what was the reason behind the invention of such tools?

Listening to the audience is crucial for any marketing business. It became impossible at a point of time owing to the vastness of the internet.  As a result, there was a desperate need for an innovation. Thus, social media monitoring tools were born.

Also called social media listening tools, they have great potential if used correctly. They can be the driving force and lucky charm behind your decision making in business.

Modern tools are much more advanced and integrated than it used to be. They can incorporate insight as well as analytics to come up with promising marketing strategies.

People often get confused while choosing a social media monitoring tool as there are plenty of them.

Even though monitoring tools like, HootSuite,  Keyhole, Google Alert, Klout etc. are famous nowadays. There are others which are considered as effective by many.

Let’s go through an infographic to know about the most effective tools in the market.

best-social-media-monitoring-tools-infographic

How Social Media Can Help SMEs to Acquire New Customers In 2017

Today, Social media presents entrepreneurs with a pool of opportunities to expand their businesses and boost their profitability. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others are great platforms for small businesses to expand their businesses by creating conversations with prospective buyers and by serving as a medium for customer care services. Engaging with the customers via social media platforms helps understand their needs better and improve their service delivery.

A quick view on social media platforms:

Facebook:  Widely used social media platform all over the world with over 2 billion active users. It helps SMEs both in brand awareness as well as lead generation.

LinkedIn: One of the main factors which SMEs can’t avoid as there is no other platform better than LinkedIn for quality leads.

Twitter: Twitter is slightly different from other social platforms as it’s mostly news based. But still, it has immense power to change the image of your brand if done right.

Instagram: Owned by Facebook and is the fastest growing social media, thanks mainly to its focus on visuals. Best medium to promote your products as there is no better way to showcase your product’s quality than through pictures.

Pinterest: Another social discovery platform that gives importance to visuals. In this, you can portray the complete story behind your product via images.

In recent times, social media has helped both SMEs and multinationals to effectively handle customer relationships.

If you have a reasonable social media presence, let your customers understand that everything is under control.

One of the main areas where small businesses have made good use of social media is in advertising and marketing. Earlier, companies had to use television, newspapers or other conventional platforms to promote their services and products globally. Many people couldn’t afford this as it was an expensive exercise.

Today, with enough effort, anyone can create a good number of Facebook fans, twitter follows or YouTube views. And you can both advertise and market your products and services at minimal costs to a global audience.

SMEs can attract new customers via social media in various ways:

You must know how to engage people on your selected social media platforms. Researchers revealed that people spend their most of the time on social media. Posting image of your products or sharing information about your products and services in a correct way can help you to reach out your targeted audience.

1. Be Flexible: Every strategy may not work for you as situation changes. You may identify that it is time to change your current strategy and try out something new and more interesting than the previous. Don’t stick to a strategy which doesn’t work for you.
Produce Quality Content That Is Genuinely Useful: People usually think many times before purchasing any product. Experts say that people wish to purchase from the one which is quite popular or they have seen many times in their everyday life. So you must be very careful while marketing your products- use images, interesting words and so on…

2. Entertain Your Fans: Always engage your fans or followers with your posts. Keep an eye on what they like and their comments in your posts, you can get to know from their comments if they get bored. You are supposed to be persistent while implementing a plan and in monitoring your results to know whether you’re on a right track which can let you achieve your goals.

3. Social Organic Search: Sharing a post several time is good for organic search as it will make the post reach to a huge audience. Search engines assume that more shares a post has, the more useful and important readers deem it.

4. Follow Branding Guidelines: You must follow the branding guidelines whenever you are promoting your brands. As if you don’t follow those guidelines it may affect your brand negatively.

5. Social Ads: Social ads provide the most flexible content promotion and are proven best to turn visitors into leads and customers. Making use of social media ads can build your brand recognition and double your organic search click-through and conversion rates!

6. By Creating Events: Social media event marketing isn’t too much time consuming and moreover social media can play a huge part in an event promotion. Consider creating a branded area for people to create good images, take photos, etc.

7. By Initiating Group Discussions: As all know, Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites, so creating and participating in Facebook groups is simply beneficial. It will help you to get noticed by others.

8. Leveraging Social Media Influencers: Influencers are really one of the big deal in social media. Leveraging the influencers enables you to access to a huge circle of influence instantly, helping you to build more audience from which you can build a long-term and stable campaign.

To get the best from social media for your small or medium enterprise, you must lay out a plan first. Do you really need to join social networking site? What is the goal? The objective may be for promotional purposes, customer relations, marketing and advertising and sales among others. The goals have to be measurable.

The most important question, however is among the many social networking sites which are fit for your business? To answer this, consider reviewing where most of your customers belong. To stay safe, use more than one, have a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account for a start.

Social media tools that no “SME” should be without:

Social media can be the most powerful method of gaining exposure for SME globally as having a social media presence creates a close connection between the brand and its followers. Following are 4 tools which no SME can avoid.

Evernote: A free platform helping users to share their ideas and with this, you can also compile content.

Google Analytics: Provides free and enterprise tools so as to measure online & offline data to gain customer insights.

MailChimp: An online email marketing solution to send email, manage subscribers and track results.

Statusbrew: Allowing users to schedule posts and manage audiences on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

Social media is an effective and adorable way for SME to attract their target audience all over the world.

If you’re an SME and not on social media, then you’re missing all the fun…

How to Set Up Google AMP on Your WordPress Website

Imagine a situation like this. You need to access some information urgently but your data balance is too low.

The dilemma of the situation is that you do not have any means to recharge your data balance and all you can do now is to use the data that’s left wisely.

After a quick Google search, you clicked on a link which led you to an unknown page. Bad luck strikes again when the page displays a pop-up draining all your data.

That Sucks big time doesn’t it?

But no need to worry as new innovations are gaining their foothold in the world of omnipresent internet.

Lately, Google has officially declared that more than 52% search requests that they get are from mobile devices.  Added to that Kissmetrics (Behavioral analytics and engagement platform development company) analysis says that 40% of those users just bounce to other websites if the response time is more than 3 seconds. And moreover, SEO experts have confirmed that latest search updates of Google are giving prominence to mobile friendly websites.

These facts were enough to cement the desperate need for mobile friendly websites.

The arrival of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) was at this crucial juncture of time and has proven to work wonders since then.

What is an AMP? How does it help?

amp-google-wordpress-image

AMP is an open source framework program by Google which helps publishers improve their website’s user experience.

AMP helps publishers develop a skimmed down version of their actual page so that the user will not have to wait for much longer for the access.

Advantage of an AMP powered page is that it there is a strong probability that the website might be showcased in Google Carousel thus increasing the traffic and a swift rise in the ranking.

Have a look at this official video of AMP to get a detailed idea,

How does AMP work?

AMP uses a subset of HTML pages for optimized page rendering. Another indispensable and astounding feature of AMP is that it has an exclusive Javascript.

There are three types of AMP,

  1. AMP HTML: A subset of HTML which has got custom tags and properties. However AMP HTML has got lot of restrictions to keep it minimalistic in terms of size. Those who are exposed to normal HTML language can easily adapt to AMP HTML.
  2. AMP JS: Third party Javascript is not allowed in AMP JS. AMP has their own Java frame work which manages resources as well as asynchronous handling.
  3. AMP CDN: This will help AMP pages get cached automatically in CDN through optimization.

How does AMP make a website accessible in lightning speed?

Focus on the website content: Mostly website takes time to load because of third party applications attached to the website. What AMP does is that it gives primary importance to the content of the website rather than anything else.

Next would be the JAVA part of the website. Instead of loading website’s JAVA elements, AMP loads its own version of it. By doing so obstruction by third party JS can be avoided and the page continues to load with or without the JS script.

 However, such limitations can be tackled by iframes which allow third party JS.

 Static Layout: AMP instantly loads the lay out first so that all the external images, apps or even iframes gets confined inside the layout of a website. By doing this AMP can pre-determine the exact size and shape of the website even before it’s loaded. In Short AMP does not require any other outside resources to load a website instead of that it requires only one HTML request to lay out the entire document.

 Inline, Size-bound CSS: Even though everything works fine and is in the correct order, CSS tend to block the entire rendering page load and has high chance of getting bloated. AMP pages only allow single style sheet and that too inline. As a result a lot of HTTP requests will be removed from the rendering path.

One of the most astounding features of inline CSS is the size itself. The entire script will be of 50KB. Thus, making it easy to load. However, the process also depends on the written CSS quality of the author of the website.

 Font Optimization: Font of websites tends to be super large hence optimization of fonts is necessary to decrease the load time. And mostly, AMP requires zero HTTP requests until the font starts downloading. This is only possible due to the synchronous nature of the java script and only inline style sheets are allowed.

 Style and Lay out recalculation minimization: The browser has to recalculate and lay out the page upon script change or even an update. Since Amp mediates all render operations it minimizes effort. In short, one or two layout is required before a page is fully loaded.

GPU Accelerated Animations: AMP transfers a lot of image loading work to the GPU of a device rather than CPU. This makes the website run faster on your device.

How to Install AMP in a WordPress Website?

1. Install WordPress AMP plugin: At present there are 2 plugins are commonly used by developers. The most famous one is developed by Automattic and the latter developed by CDN. After installation, you can see the optimized version of your website if you add AMP to the end of the permalink.

 For eg: www.ABCDEFG/blopost/amp/

Process

  1. Open the DashBoard
  2. Go to ‘Plugins’
  3. Click ‘Add New’
  4. Type ‘AMP-WP’ in the search box
  5. Chose the desired AMP plugin and click install
  6. After Installation click the ‘Activate Plugin‘ tab
  7. After installation go to ‘Settings’ and choose ‘Permalinks’
  8. Click the ‘Save Changes’ button

2. To Validate the AMP version

  1. Paste the AMP version of URL to the Omnibox, Add ‘#develeopment=1’ to the end of the url and press enter
  2. Press CNTRL+SHIFT+I
  3. Select ‘Console’

If everything works fine a message will appear which says that ‘AMP validation successful’

When a user does a search on a mobile device, Google at first searches for an end tag to find out which websites have the mobile version. So the priority always goes to that website which has AMP tag in their link.

<link rel=”amphtml” href=”http://ABCDEFG.com/2016/01/28/a-new-business-model-for-twitter/amp/” /></head>

3. Customize and configure Your AMP Page: After installing AMP to your WordPress website it will create a layout for your page. However, if you need any addition you can avail the help of plugins to edit the CSS as well as your AMP template of the website. For example, you can install analytics, SEO, Adsense etc. to AMP in accordance with your preference.

AMP since it’s open source also has the feature to edit so that any improvement from developers can be added to it.

4. Fixing the Errors: It is obvious and normal that error will pop up after the installation of AMP. If it happens do not panic as AMP is not at all a stand alone plugin which is meant to resolve any mobile optimization related issue of your website. What AMP does is it simplifies layout of your website in each and every scenario. So if there is any kind of error you need to fix it manually which can be easily traced in through WordPress.

AMP is made by Google and they give prominence to websites which have AMP support if there is a search. Fixing errors is a crucial process as it will ensure that your AMP page gets indexed on Google search and cached on AMP CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDN helps AMP websites when there is a search from third party website for eg. Twitter.

Errors of an AMP page can be found by navigating through,

Login to Google search console > Search Appearance > Accelerated Mobile Pages

Last but not least always check for errors after each and every update.

How does AMP influence on Digital Marketing?

Higher traffic: The purpose behind the birth of AMP was to make websites accessible for all users without any delay. Since AMP pages loads within seconds the bounce rate will be less and happy users are more likely to back again.

Higher Ranking: Google has denied that AMP is not at all a criterion for ranking. However, in Google Carousel results, only AMP pages are showcased. and those who are using AMP version of a website will beg to differ as they have seen ranking improvement considerably.

Increase in Paid Search Results: Users tend to hit back to their search after reading the content. Since, pages load within seconds users will have the tendency to access more pages thus increasing clicks on paid search results.

The flexibility of Open Source: The beauty of open source is that it can be improved in accordance with the need of a user. Analytics, as well as SEO extension can be added to the AMP pages so that insight about a website will be detailed and simple.

 

22 Top Email Marketing Tools of 2017 [Infographic]

Digital Marketing is indeed one of the best marketing strategies out there. No doubt in that. Among the digital marketing technique that exists email marketing is gaining so much importance and the reason being its flexibility, effectiveness as well as the amount of creativity that can be incorporated into it.

There is a widespread misconception that email marketing is just about creating an attractive email and sending it to many through an automated software. That’s all in the past. Now the tools used for email marketing has become so much sophisticated and guarantees excellent results.

An astounding feature of this new age tools is that they have the ability to predict the outcome of an email or even a social media marketing campaign.

However, those who are planning to get into email marketing might be baffled by an obvious question.  “What are the effective tools that are put to use in email marketing?”

Don’t Worry! Have a sneak peek at the infographic illustrating the top marketing tools that are being used by digital marketing experts at present.

Top-Email-Marketing-tools-of-2017-infographic

Amazon’s messaging app – Anytime, Will it thrive?

It seems that Amazon has decided to step out of their realm in conquest. According to AFTVnews, the e-commerce giant is about to launch their new chat app with the name Anytime. Even though there’s no official confirmation the news has created a huge buzz on the internet. 

Source: AFTVnews

The report also states that Amazon is already conducting an extensive survey to get an idea about the need of their users in order to create a perfect app.

If the news is true the impact of the app would be game changing as it has been specifically said in the news that Anytime might include a section for e-commerce with chat bot assistance to guarantee maximum customer satisfaction.

In short, unlike other chat app’s which focus on Audio, Video, Message, Filter, Sticker, Smiley etc. Amazon Anytime will have vivid applications, different than that of its predecessors.

The strangest part of this news is that a  leaked photo is circulating online which has the list of features of Amazon Anytime. People are suspecting its authenticity because of a typo in the text.

Source: AFTVnews

Amazon’s recently introduced messaging and calling feature to their Alexa devices. Making Alexa app a pretty decent chat app. Rumor has it that the success of this feature might the driving force behind Anytime.

Addition to this rumor, Amazon’s enterprise chat app Chime has intrigued many people. They are saying that Anytime might be built upon the skeleton of CHime.

If Anytime happens the biggest hurdle in front of the app would the persuasion tactics they should use so that people will start using it on a daily basis. The fate of Hangout and Allo has to be remembered as they also created similar buzz when they arrived.

Whatsapp became a successful standalone chat app due to its simplicity and its swift response time. Nowadays Telegram is gaining trust among people due to the same reason.

So if Amazon Anytime has any chance of survival they should focus on this basic factors the most.