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Search Engine Optimization For Your Blog

This post about SEO is focused specifically on aspects of your blog that you can easily adjust to help optimize it’s presence.

Below are 5 tips to increase your blog search engine optimization.

Tip 1: Use Header Tags

Breaking up content and using header tags helps search engines (read Google) understand what content is important and the flow of your blog post.
How to create a header tag: 
WordPress/Squarespace/most other content management systems: highlight text >> in Style drop down (typically the default is Normal or Paragraph) choose H1, H2, H3, or H4 tag. Best practices is to have one H1 tag per page, 1-2 H2 tags, and then for smaller sections have h3-h4 tags.
If you view the html or page source of your blog, these are noted by <h1> </h1>, <h2> </h2>, etc.

Tip 2: Media in your posts

Upload at least 1-2 images in each blog post and be sure to add an Alt Tag to the image.
How to: In WordPress when you upload a media file, there are text boxes for Title, Description, and Alt tag. We recommend copying and pasting the blog title as the alt tag of an image in your blog.
If you want to go above and beyond, insert an audio or video file into your blog post. Diverse media often works well to make your blog post rank higher than others on the same topic.

Tip 3: Internal Linking

We all know that inbound links to your content from 3rd party websites is useful for SEO, but so are internal links. Basically, these are just links between topics you’ve written about previously on your blog or links to services pages, landing pages, or promotions on your site.
Links like these help search engines to better see within your content what pages are more meaningful.
How to: I recommend making a list of the keywords you want to emphasize on your site and the landing page for these keywords (this can be another blog post). The first time this keyword appears in your blog, simply link it to the existing content. Do this for 3-5 keywords within your blog.
There are also plugins to help streamline this process. With these plugins, you’ll need to identify the keyword phrase, what page you can to link to, how many links should be added to each piece of content, and if the plugin should automatically add links to pages or just posts. These plugins can be incredibly useful, especially if you are writing frequently!

Tip 4: Alternate between different lengths of posts

Recent research showed that posts 350-500 words often received the most comments and shares whereas posts 1500 words long ranked the highest in Google. Our frame of thought is to vary the lengths of your blog posts so some are more apt to be “shareable” and others are meant to rank higher on search engines.
How to: If you’ve always only written shorter posts, combine them to form longer ones! We don’t recommend deleting the old post, but write a new message saying you’ve updated the post to include more information and link to the new blog post. When you combine the posts be sure to separate the different original blogs with H2 tags and the subtopics within these with H3/H4 tags.

Tip 5: Share your post!

Though Google doesn’t necessarily count every share to a social media or social news site (Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc) site as a backlink, however, these provide another opportunity for your target market to find your site online!
How to: You can either manually post each blog to these sites or you can use a variety of tools to make the process easier. We often use a combination of sharing directly to the network or website, using automation tools like OnlyWire, Zapier and IFTTT, and plugins through WordPress that link to our accounts.

What other tips do you have to make sure your blog post is SEO friendly?​

5 tips for better seo on blogs

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Copy Writing: Your Services Pages

What is the goal of your website?

Is it to work as a brochure for your business, to tell the story of your brand, and to ultimately help sell your services? Now stop to think for a moment. When you wrote your services page, did you think about your company (and personal) values or did you just start listing off what you offer?

So often when we are reworking websites for clients, we see their services pages simply stating what they can do. These pages get lost in the shuffle of competitors’ websites and don’t leave a lasting impression of the benefits of working with you, only the features.

Definitions.

Features vs Benefits: What is it vs what is it for ME.
  • Features are defined as surface statements about your product, such as what it can do, its dimensions and specs and so on.
  • Benefits, by definition, show the end result of what a product can actually accomplish for the reader.

If you aren’t listing all of the features, what should you do?

Rather than starting the writing process with the service in mind, start with your customer. Paint a picture and be as specific as possible. What are their fears? What problems do they face in everyday life? Actually write down their narrative and start telling their story. Through your writing, show this individual that you understand what they are struggling to accomplish and try to make an emotional connection with them.

Validate how they feel and ask how they would envision their life or business if this stress was taken off the table. Take the time to write out how their life could change if they were no longer held back by their fears. Again, focus on the emotional aspects of the journey.

Now, how do your services help to solve these issues and what is your process? How is working with you different from working with your competition? What is the cost of staying in the now versus signing up for your services?

At the end of the page, add a call to action to entice your reader to take the next step.

Take a look at what you’ve written. Have you listed off the features or are you actually telling a story that your prospects will relate to? The process of forming your services pages as a story can help you attract the people with whom you want to work rather than just anyone who could benefit from the services. It is a way of showing your values and the value you bring to your clients while at the same time coming across as your authentic self.

Give this exercise a try and let me know what a difference it makes in your business!

What is the goal of your website? Is it to work as a brochure for your business, to tell the story of your brand, and to ultimately help sell your services? Now stop to think for a moment. When you wrote your services page, did you think about your company (and personal) values or did you just start listing off what you offer? So often when we are reworking websites for clients, we see their services pages simply stating what they can do. These pages get lost in the shuffle of competitors' websites and don't leave a lasting impression of the benefits of working with you, only the features.

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Reasons Why Your Business Should Be Writing a Blog

A lot of business owners say they’re too busy managing their business that they don’t have time to write blogs. Others put off blogging because they think it’s just a waste of their time and effort. What they fail to realize is that blogging is a great tool that can provide a wide range of benefits for their business. This is especially beneficial for small businesses.

If your business doesn’t already have a blog, we encourage you to create one today. Here are 4 reasons why your business should be writing a blog. Hopefully, these benefits would encourage you to start a blog for your business.

Establish your business as an industry leader

Blogging allows you to share your expertise. Here, you can post how-to articles, tutorials, trends, industry news, your thoughts or opinion about relevant topics and more. If you run out of ideas to write about, we suggest that you listen to questions customers and prospects usually ask, and answer them in your blog. By providing them with helpful information, people will eventually look to you as a reliable source for information in your industry.

Let your brand’s personality shine.

Blogging gives you a chance to reach potential and existing customers. Through this platform, you can share your business’ story, provide more information about your products and services, as well as future events. Every post you publish helps increase brand awareness and provides more insight into your company. Through this platform, you can show people what your business is all about.

Drive traffic to your website

Writing blogs is one of the most effective ways to attract prospective customers and bring traffic to your website. Most people go online when looking for answers or when they want to learn more about certain topics. If you can provide them with content that are interesting, informative and unique, they’ll keep coming back to your website. Once you gain the trust of your target audience, it would be easier for you to turn them into paying customers.

Boost search engine optimization

Blogging is an effective way to improve your site’s SEO –if you do it right, that is. When people research about specific topics, most of them would only visit websites on the first page of search engines. Some would only check out the first 3 sites.

Search engines like Google reward websites that produce great content. By taking time to create good quality content and publishing one on a regular basis, your website is likely to rank on search engines. But if you write poor quality content or just copy someone else’s blog posts, Google will penalize you by placing your site on the last page.

With all the benefits listed above, now is the best time to start a blog for your business. If you need help writing them, please contact BIMS today. We can help you create blog posts that are informative, unique and relevant to your business.

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Blogging: What to do after you publish a post

You wrote a blog… now what?

We often are asked, “I wrote an article, what happens now?” This checklist provides an overview of the steps to publish your blog or article and how to share it as part of your digital marketing content strategy.

Prepare for Publishing

  • Write an effective post title that includes keywords and is persuasive
  • Divide text into smaller sections with headings
  • Deep link to past posts
  • Add a question at the end to encourage discussion
  • Add on-brand, SEO-ready images
  • Add “alt text” to your images, which will be used as your Pinterest pin description
  • Add a featured image (on WordPress)
  • Make sure your blog contains keywords and header tags

Share your Blog

  • Pin your post image onto Pinterest
  • Schedule it to be pinned to any Pinterest group boards that are relevant
  • Share your post on Facebook and Twitter
  • Create a LinkedIn Group Discussion from your Blog Post
  • Post your blog to your LinkedIn Company Page and Personal Profile
  • Schedule your post for Twitter 3-5 more times over next few days and weeks
  • Share an excerpt from your article to Medium.com
  • Respond to comments
  • Check the analytics of your post to see how much engagement it received. The worksheets in our Blogging eBook offer one place to store this information.
  • In 1-2 months, repin your post onto Pinterest and re-share on other social media channels

We often are asked, “I wrote an article, what happens now?” This checklist provides an overview of the steps to publish your blog or article and how to share it as part of your digital marketing content strategy.

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What’s Up With All Those Beaches?

Odds are, you’ve seen and ad or two come across your Facebook feed with some “Business Expert” on a beach or in tropical paradise. Do all successful entrepreneurs strive to live their life jumping from one wave to another?

NO!

I’m lucky enough to call Colorado my home. My dream is right in my backyard. Yes, beaches are nice, but a cold jolt of fresh air as you click into your bindings beats laying still for hours on end and awaking to a massive sunburn. Rather than showing success through pictures from a beach, though my summer months are spent with my husband on boats in New Hampshire and beaches in Maine, I’m committing to showing pictures of success that ring true to those of us who work hard and play harder. Enough of these beach shots to signify success!

What does success look like for you?

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Blogging: Creating an Editorial Calendar

Creating an editorial calendar for your marketing collateral is often an overlooked piece in designing your small business’ web strategy. These calendars create a easy to understand reference for your blog topics, newsletters, social media posts, and promotions. They allow you to keep ahead of upcoming holidays and make it so you don’t feel like you are always playing catch-up.

Because many of us wear different hats within our business, it isn’t unexpected that some things just fall through the cracks. Unfortunately, however, sticking to a content calendar really is an income-generating task that should garner a space in your list of top-priorities. It is also something you can outsource if it makes sense for your business.

What should your Editorial Calendar include and why is it important for your business?

Your editorial calendar should be broken down by quarter, month, week, and even day. Additionally, it should include a column for blogs, newsletters, promotions, social media posts, videos, etc, and a column for results.

When you put together your calendar, think about what you can commit to. Realistically, can you commit to writing a fresh article once a month, or every day? Do you have the systems in place to post daily to your social media networks or only a few times per week? Is there a social media network that you are most passionate about? Perhaps you should just focus on building this up rather than getting burned out trying to tackle too much at once.

The next step is figuring out which topics to discuss. To brainstorm this, I recommend the following process:

  1. Your products and services
  2. Your background
  3. Your clients and their success stories
  4. Common questions you receive
  5. Topics that interest your target market
  6. Following the topics trade journals (or even your competitors) discuss
  7. Holiday or seasonal topics
  8. National organizations and their promotional schedules
  9. Topics you are passionate about
  10. Other news outlets and articles

For each of these topics, brainstorm a short list of specific topics you can discuss. Add any necessary links in your notes or bullet points to provide more context.

Now, think of the context for posting these. Can you post once per month on certain topics while only quarterly for others? Are there natural sales promotions that go along with the topics? What about videos? We have one client who has committed to filming quarterly reports rather than taking the time to write and format his analysis.

Now it is time to add these to your content calendar.

We’ve put together this workbook to help you organize your topics and ideas.

Why follow an editorial calendar?

Editorial calendars make it easier to stay consistent and keep yourself from being reactive. Consistency can truly transform a business as prospects come to know what to expect and trust you before taking the leap to being a paying customer.

Additionally, being proactive about the content you need to put out allows you to be more mindful about your business and messaging.

Stay tuned for more information on how to build your social media posts into your content calendar for your business!

Blogging Your Business

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6 Best WordPress Themes for Photographers

Top WordPress Photography Themes

We’ve worked with numerous photographers to redesign their website’s. These photographers are looking for websites that are: clean, crisp, responsive, and load quickly. Though sometimes plugins and additional features (or just too many photos per gallery) cause the site to slow down, the following themes are our favorite for Photography Websites.

1. AVADA Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme by ThemeFusion

You’ll find the Avada theme listed as a top theme option on many of our lists. This theme offers flexibility and comes with predefined page layouts for your to customize for your photography business. It is the #1 selling WordPress theme on the market.

$60

avada theme for photography

2. X | The Theme by THEMECO

X is intuitive and allows you to get a site out fast! With 4 different unique designs, this theme is great for photographers looking to set themselves apart!

$65

X Theme for Photographers

3. Enfold – Responsive Theme by Kriesi

This is currently our go-to theme for many of our clients, especially photographers who want a combination of crisp-clean layouts with advanced functionality and ease of use.

$60
Enfold theme for photography

4. Impreza= Retna Responsive by UpSolution

Elegant with functionality for animations and sliders, this beautiful theme is great for photographers looking to showcase their images. It includes the ability to integrate with other top plugins for optimal performance.

$59

Impreza Theme for Photographers

5. Core Minimalist Photography Portfolio by ThemeGoods

This minimalist photography theme is perfect for the photographer who wants their site to stand out. With all the latest WordPress features, we highly recommend this theme to display your portfolio!

$49

Core WordPress theme for photographers

6. Photolux – Photography Portfolio WordPress Theme by pexeto

This theme is powerful and offers tons of options for photographers. You can easily edit any aspect of the theme and offers different slider layouts and unique portfolio template.

$49

Photolux for photographers

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Running a Business: 4 Tips to Start Today

My first introduction to Digital Marketing was back in 2006 with an internship I found through the Tuck Business School Bridge Program. This 1 month, highly selective, program gave students from liberal education backgrounds an extensive introduction from Tuck Business School professors into business courses. As a part of the course, we were assigned to teams that helped local businesses overcome their own obstacles. Our focus was on the branding and marketing for a digital mapping company in the area. As I am originally from the area, I continued working with the company a few hours a week trying to figure out how exactly this whole Google thing worked. We used data as a way to justify or disprove hypothesis we had regarding changes to the website and their effects on the organic ranking of the website.

Though during the starts of the recession I was a financial advisor, I quickly came back to marketing and the notion of using data to make educated business decisions. After a year of working for another business, I launched Boundless Marketing in 2011 and merged with Your Marketing Voice to form The BIMS Team in 2013. I wanted to share some of the most important lessons I’ve learned from owning a small marketing agency.

Lessons Learned from Owning a Small Business:

  1. If you can work from home, great! This take discipline, but can be extremely rewarding. We invested in office space one summer, but have decided working from home is our jam. It allows us to keep our overhead low and the flexibility to work hours that fit the best with our schedules.
  2. Join a networking group! I’m a huge supporter of local networking groups, but as an introvert, I’ve decided only to attend groups with consistency and that follow a set meeting structure. I’m currently the President of a local BNI chapter while Amber helps to run 2 networking groups down in FL. Because we aren’t working from offices, this not only creates new business opportunities, but also gives us the space to create relationships with other business owners in the area. Even if you are just starting out, I highly recommend attending a local networking group. If nothing else, it forces you to refine your messaging.
  3. Find contractors! We outsource a lot of our tasks. If you haven’t already, take a look at The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (affiliate link). Even following just a few of his recommendations can safe you time and effort. Some of our contractors are friends and family who just want to make a couple hundred dollars extra each month, while others live abroad. We’ve worked with one writer from the Philippines for the past 3+ years. Part of me thinks our business would shutter to a halt if we lost her!
  4. Work with clients you love. You are always going to have some clients who are absolutely draining. We use conversations and phone calls at the start of our relationships with prospects to try and weed out these individuals. It can just ruin your day/week/month when the client undoubtedly is difficult to work with, forcing you to bend over backwards. As a small business, you just don’t have the time or resources to deal with people like this.

Above all, love your life as a business owner! If set up properly, it can give you the freedom and flexibility you need to live the life of your dreams!

Free Ebook for Business Blogging

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Introduction of 60 x 60

What’s up with 60 Blogs in 60 Days?

This is a challenge I’m making for business owners (or marketing managers) to blog every day for 60 days straight. In our mind, blogging is one of the most important content creation activities you can do online. It not only is a way to show your expertise, it also provides collateral for you to share through other marketing avenues, and aides in boosting your on-site SEO.

Most small business owners can realistically commit to writing one blog every month, or those who really understand the value make an effort to blog once a week or hire a contractor to provide a few additional blogs here and there. Now imagine Google is trying to figure out which website is more relevant – one that has had 12 blogs in the past year, or one that has been actively updated, every day, for the past month?

Additionally, the blogs are a place for you to explore and dive deeper into topics that you haven’t focused on for a while or topics your clients and prospects care about. This additional writing can help you to position yourself as the expert you truly are.

What’s my goal with 60 x 60?

We have a team of individuals who write blogs for our business and for our clients. These blogs are incredible, but our writers aren’t in the daily grind of operating a digital marketing agency.

My goals for committing to 60 x 60 are two fold:

  1. To cultivate a community of business owners who are looking for support and guidance as they too work to change their business through blogging.
  2. To explore topics and create resources that we’ve rewritten over and over again for clients and prospects. These blogs are hopefully going to allow me to share my knowledge from the last 10 years of digital marketing and empower others to better position themselves online.

How can you get involved?

The more the merrier as we jump into the quest to write 60 blogs in 60 days! Please join our Facebook Group to gain insights into what practices and tips have worked for others on this journey or write in the comments about how you’ve taken your blog to the next level. We want to hear your successes (and failures), your goals, and the actual results of this practice!

Looking forward to working by your side as we transform our businesses!

Blogging Your Business

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Tips to Improve Your Facebook Ad Campaign

Facebook Ads is a very powerful tool. It is an excellent way to promote your business, increase brand awareness and can lead to increased conversion rate. Unless you have a big budget, achieving these goals can be difficult if you’re not an expert.

In this blog post, we’ll give you 4 tips on how to create an effective Facebook ad campaign. Use these tips and you’ll be on your way to a great Facebook campaign.

Identify your target audience

To make the most out of your Facebook ad campaign, you first need to identify your target audience and then create an ad that is targeted to them. Take a moment to decide who you want to see you are ads. Are you looking to reach new audience? Do you want to connect with your existing fans? Or do you want to focus on the people in your area?

Facebook allows you to target your audience by gender, age, location, education, relationship status, workplace etc. The more relevant the ad is to the people you’re targeting; the more likely are they to notice and act on your ad. If done correctly, this will lead to a higher success rate and will reduce your spending in the future.

Establish goals

Before launching your ad, you need to consider what you want to get out of it. Ask yourself, why are you creating an ad in the first place? Do you want to increase your followers? Do you want to increase your web traffic? Or do you want people to download your app? This is important as it will help you plan your strategies for the said campaign and help you assess whether or not it is a success later on.

Choose your bidding option

If this is your first time to create a Facebook ad, you may think that your only option is to optimize your ad on a CPM basis. But the truth is that you have the option to choose from a number of bid setups. You can opt for CPC pricing or opt for bidding based on your objective. Don’t let Facebook do your bidding.

Use eye-catching images

Posts with eye-catching photos get more likes, comments and shares than those without. The same principle also applies with Facebook ads. If you want your ads to perform better, then you need to invest in good quality photos. If you are a restaurant owner, make sure your photos look appetizing. If you own a salon, then feature women with gorgeous, shiny locks. Remember, your goal is to create an ad that gets noticed and create more clicks. Good quality photos will help you achieve that goal.

 

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