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Tips for Getting Great Photos for Your Blog Posts

bimsImages are important. Adding images to your blog posts can help make it stand out and effectively convey your message. It also helps craft a visually-memorable experience. That’s why all top bloggers make sure they incorporate visuals and try to make them as vibrant as possible.

Here are some tips for getting great photos for your blog.

Use images legally

Before using any image on your blog post, make sure that it’s copyright-free. Legally, you’re not allowed to use any images that you got from the internet. If you do, the owner of the image may file a complaint against you and your post can be removed.

Don’t just go and take any image you like. Check the copyright restrictions of photos and obtain permission before using it on your blog.

Create your own images

There are a lot of sources of ready to use images on the web, but it would be a lot better if you can add original images on your blog. You don’t have to be a professional photographer to capture great photos. Just bring your camera with you wherever you go and capture images you can use for your future content.

Not only does it add a touch of personality and uniqueness to your site, it also increases the likelihood of someone sharing your post. According to studies, people are more likely to share images they haven’t seen before.

Flickr

Flickr is an amazing resource for photo lovers and photographers alike. Here, you can find billions of different photos that you can use for your site. But you have to understand that not all photos from this site can be used.

Only photos with Creative Commons license can be used. Copyrighted images cannot be used. If you really wish to use a copyrighted image, you may try your luck and ask permission from the photographer directly.

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How to Measure Social Media ROI

BIMS_11.10We all know what ROI stands for. Unfortunately, not everyone understands its meaning and importance.

If your company is spending money on social media marketing, you want to measure your ROI. This is important so you have an idea what exactly it is you’re getting out of the time, effort and resources you commit to your campaign. It helps you measure the efficiency of your social media marketing efforts.

To show you how you can track your social media ROI, here are the steps you should take to help you gauge the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign.

Identify your goal

Different organizations will have different goals. Before you can track and measure your ROI, you first need to identify your goals. Is it to generate more product trials, get signups for your newsletter or increase traffic to your site?

Track your goal

Each of your goals can be measured using specific metrics such as traffic, engagement, reach, lead generation etc. It all depends on your goal.

There are certain tools that can be used to measure the effectiveness of your actions. You can track follows, likes and share in Buffer. Website actions such as signups, downloads and sales can be tracked in Google Analytics.

Quantify social media return

Add up all the expenses, including the cost of boosting a Facebook post, running a promoted ad and everything that go into generating content and maintaining social media presence.

Determining how much you have spent will help you determine whether you’re getting a positive or negative return on your social media marketing efforts. Now, calculate your ROI using this formula: (Earnings – Costs) x 100 / Costs

Adjust tactics

Monitor the impact of your social media efforts using the formula given above and then adjust your tactics as needed to improve your social media ROI.

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Tips to Improve Your Email Open Rates

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAYou’ve put a lot of work into those emails. You came up with some exciting content and even added a compelling call-to-action. You also ran some email tests in the hopes of getting better results. In spite of all those efforts, your open rates are still not improving.

What can you do to bring that up and get people to actually read your emails? Here are some tips to make sure your emails get delivered, opened and read.

Start with a good subject line

If there is one opportunity to convince recipients to read the email, it is the subject line. After all, it is the first thing they see on any email. Your subject line must be clear and concise. It should tell readers what to expect from the email.

Provide quality content

Offer something of value in every email you send. Subscribers will be eager to read your emails if they know that there is something valuable on the other side of the subject line.

Send your emails at the right time

Timing is everything in marketing. If you send emails too early in the morning or too late at night, they can get lost in the shuffle of other emails. If you send it too late in the afternoon, they may decide to put off reading until the morning since they might be too busy accomplishing some tasks before going home. The best time to send emails is during lunch or after work, when you know they’re reading.

Be consistent

Send too frequently and you may end up losing subscribers. Send too infrequently and you may cause your readers to stop interacting with your email. Send your emails at a consistent frequency to build your email reputation. A good rule of thumb is to send no less than 1 email a month and no more than 1 email a week.

Make it personal

Studies show that subject lines that contain the first name of the subscriber boosts open rate every time. This is a subtle trust builder and an instant attention grabber. Make sure you personalize subject lines with first names.

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Tools to Help with Scheduling Your Social Media Posts

social-media-toolsSocial media is a necessary part of marketing these days. Having a strong brand presence on social media is of great importance.

As a business owner or a marketer, you probably have a lot of on your plate and maintaining a constant social media presence can be difficult.  To make the process easier, the best thing you can do is to use a social media scheduling service. Even if you’re stuck in a meeting, you can still keep your status updates and tweets flowing.

Here are 4 tools for auto-scheduling your social media posts.

Sprout social

Price: $59 per month

Sprout Social is an engagement and management tool for social media.  It gives you a clear overview of response rates and follower demographics.

You can also use this tool to schedule and post updates to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Sprout Social provides a 30-day free trial. But if you wish to continue using it, you’ll have to pay a whopping $59 a month.

Hootsuite

Price: Free; Pro version – $8.99 a month

Hootsuite is a big player in social media management. It schedules your posts based on your previous social history so you’ll reach the largest number of followers. You can also edit the times and days before they go live.

Hootsuite lets you to schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Google +. However, free users are only allowed to add up to 3 social networks. The Pro version, which starts at $8.99 a month, allows users to schedule up to 350 updates at once and add up to 100 social accounts.

Buffer

Price: Individual account – free; Business plan – $50 per month

Buffer lets you schedule 10 social updates all at once. This tool will spread your content throughout the day or week, making sure you have a solid social media presence even if you don’t spend much time in front of the computer.

As a bonus, Buffer also provides analytics from your social media posts. It works with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Timely

Price: Free

Timely allows you to choose the number of posts you’d like to auto schedule per day. Add to that, it also reviews responses from your previous tweets to determine your most optimal posting times. Timely only posts to Facebook or Twitter.

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How to Bring Old Blog Posts Back to Life

bims_10.20If you’ve been maintaining a blog on your website, you have probably built up a pretty hefty archive of old blog posts. Even with the abundance of blog posts, studies reveal that fresh contents outrank older contents, both in terms of clicks and search engines.

Does it mean that you have to create more blog content? Not necessarily. You can reuse, repurpose and reinvent your blog posts. Here’s how to breathe new life into an older blog post.

Create a killer headline

Creating a title is easy, but if you really want to capture the attention of your target audience, then you need to make it compelling.

Take a look at the title of your most popular posts. Do you think it is good enough to compel people to read the rest of the article? Is there any way you can make it more appealing or relevant to the article? Now, go and create an attention-grabbing title.

Keep the content updated

The world is constantly changing. Some of the information you have offered in 2012 are now irrelevant or outdated.

Revisit old posts and delete any parts that are no longer relevant. Also, you might want to incorporate new information and brush up on what has changed in the industry. This is especially beneficial if you’ve seen continuous interest in a certain post.

Look for the evergreen content

If a certain blog post has garnered the attention of the public, then it’s definitely worth coming back to for a spruce up.

Marketers focus on creating evergreen content because it still has an appeal even after months or years after it was created. Consider modifying the original article instead of publishing a new article with the same content. Duplicate content on your website is a bad idea. Once you’ve made some adjustments, publish it as new.

Repurpose into a new format

There’s no reason to waste the time you spent creating those blog posts. You can repurpose the content and turn it into a slide presentation, ebook, podcast, infographic or a short video. Remember, not everyone chooses to consume information the same way.

 

 

 

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Reasons Why You Should Edit Old Posts on Your Blog

BIMS_10.13.15Editing your blog posts is probably one of the best advice that could be given to you, but very few of you will actually do it.

This week, we’ll give you a few reasons why you should edit old blog posts on your blog. Let’s go through them.

Ranking

Just like a news article that’s posted on a local news website, blog posts have dates on them. They become old news and fall from top results after a period of time. If you are looking to improve traffic to your site, this reason alone justifies your editing.

Polish writing

Bloggers don’t have the luxury of an editor to go over our writing, so we try to proof-read an article before publishing it. But as we try to revisit our old posts, we find that they are full of silly mistakes.

Typos are a big turn-off to anyone reading your article, but it’s hard to notice the typos and errors when you write a blog post yourself. Try to read your old posts with fresh eyes to make sure that it’s error-free.

Update content

Blog posts that are a year old or more may contain outdated information. It is important to keep all posts up-to-date and relevant. Otherwise, visitors may hit the close button and move on to other websites.

Updating old posts will not only turn a visitor into a subscriber, it also helps improve your site’s ranking. Be sure to update your content to match the latest facts and figures.

Add images

It is important to include images in your blog posts as it makes the post more attractive to most people. But sometimes, it is difficult to find the right image that aligns with the topic. You can change those images later on in case you find something more relevant.

More images are stored in your database as your blog gets older. This may slow down your site. We suggest that you resize the image to reduce the overall size of the post.

 

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Easy Ways to Expand Your Facebook Reach

BIMSFor many businesses, generating lead is one of the biggest advantages of creating and maintaining social presence. You create content that would pique the interest of your target audience and hope that it goes out to as many people as possible. Unfortunately, the days of posting and reaching all of your fans are gone.

The last year has brought many changes to social media. We’ve heard complaints from several businesses about the drop in organic reach for Facebook pages.

Using the right tactics will give you better results. Follow these tips to ensure that your posts can reach the audience you define.

Create awesome content

Like Google, Facebook puts a lot of emphasis on content quality and relevance. Being one of the biggest social network platforms, there’s a lot of competition out there. If you want to capture the attention of your target audience, then you need to provide them with killer content.

Higher engagement can increase your reach. The more people engage with your page, the more likely are they to see your posts. But if your content is not that interesting, you suffer the consequences of losing organic visibility.

Ask questions

One of the best ways to engage your followers is by asking them a question. Your goal is to start a conversation so be sure to start with an interesting question. Now that you got people to air their opinions, it is important to keep the conversation rolling.

Asking questions does not only help increase reach, it also provides answers to questions that may be crucial for your business’ marketing and sales.

Add call-to-action

Call-to-actions are a great way to get people to engage with your posts. Believe it or not, your audience tends to respond better when they are told what to do. However, most marketers and business owners fail to include a call-to action with their status updates.

Use better visuals

We’ve all heard the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. But it’s actually worth more than that in social media.

Videos and images often get more likes, shares and comments as compared to text-based status updates. ForCall  a more powerful post, consider placing your message along with the photo.

 

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Characteristics of a Great Content

office-594132_640There is a surplus of information on the internet today. In fact, about 2 million blog posts are published every day. Along with that, 70,000 hours of Youtube videos are uploaded and about 290 billion emails are sent on a daily basis. The problem is that most of these contents result in a waste of time, energy and resources.

How do you go about creating content that stands out and captures the attention of your target audience?

While there is no specific way in creating great content, there are a few characteristics that most successful content shares. Keep these things in mind when creating contents for your prospects and clients.

Relevant

When starting out with content marketing, most companies create contents that are centered on their products and services. While there is nothing wrong in wanting to showcase your products and services, you first have to focus on content that your customers care about.

Your content has to resonate with your prospects and existing clients. Otherwise, those contents will just get lost among all other noise.

Provides value

Writing great content is a choice. You can produce high quality content or you can take the easy path and produce junk.

People are searching for information that will educate them, inform them and he6lp them solve a problem. If your content is entertaining, informative and interesting enough, people will be happy to share your content. Add to that, it will get the attention of industry stakeholders and position your company as an educator or expert.

Original

Creating original content will get you great results. Google rewards sites with original, high quality content. On the other hand, it penalizes sites with duplicate content. Original content will help your site get more exposure and improve your site’s ranking.

Easily consumed            

When people use a search engine, they’re not just looking for answers – they want fast answers. In fact, one study revealed that 79% of web users scan contents rather than read them in detail.

Make your posts easier to read by keeping each paragraph short, preferably 3-4 sentences each. Bulleted lists are also very helpful. They are easily scannable and make it easier for users to find the information they need.

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Tips to Help You Generate More Leads from Your Website

public-domain-images-free-stock-photos-high-quality-resolution-downloads-public-domain-archive-14-1000x667A website is an essential business tool. Most businesses use it to generate leads. After all, nothing happens without a lead. No sales, no profit, no revenue, nothing! Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as throwing a “click here” button and watch as the leads start pouring in. In order to generate leads, you need to take a more strategic approach.

Here are some tips that will vault your online lead generation efforts into overdrive.

Get optimized

Undoubtedly, the best way to channel a flood of visitors to your website is to make sure that your site ranks in every search engine. People won’t visit your site if it’s on the 2nd or 3rd page of the search engine. With the competition getting tougher than ever, you need to work your best to achieve and maintain top search engine positions.

Make sure it’s mobile-friendly

Today, more and more people are using their mobile devices for online activities. In fact, studies indicate that mobile traffic accounts for at least one-third of the total web traffic. If you want more leads from your website, you need to make sure that people can access your site through their smart phones or tablet PCs.

Make your contact details visible

Don’t make visitors search for your contact information. Make sure that your phone number is clearly visible on every page. Some business owners make the mistake of thinking that potential customers prefer email as a means of communication. Survey reveals that 75% of client’s sales leads come in by phone.

Install a live chat feature

A lot of business owners think that live chat is only beneficial for retail businesses. But we believe that every business website can benefit from this tool.

Let’s take a restaurant as an example. Having a live chat feature is actually beneficial for this type of business since it helps facilitate reservation. Plus, it is very helpful for visitors, who have some questions or clarifications. We recommend businesses to assign an employee to answer customer queries during regular business hours. This simple step can produce significant results.

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Tips for Social Media Success

socialmedia_9.8Now that so many businesses are using social media to reach out to potential customers and drive more traffic to their site, it’s only a matter of time before they realize how difficult it is to succeed in social media marketing.

This blog post shows you how to achieve success with social media. Check out the tips below and start incorporating them into you social media strategy.

Choose the right platform

There are dozens of social media platforms across the web so feel free to explore which platforms are best for your business. Choose the platforms where your prospective customers most likely spend their time every day.

Deliver content consistently

One of the best ways to increase engagement and grow your following on social media is for you to be active. Keep in mind, though, that social media success requires more than the random postings about your great sale or latest products. Be sure to provide content that are valuable, interesting and relevant to your audience.

Post timely

Research shows that 92.4% of all retweets happen within an hour of posting. That means that the day and time your post has an effect on virality.

Do your research and determine the best days and times to post for your demographics and industry. Also, remember that there are different time zones for different places in the world. To ensure that people will be able to see your content, no matter the time zone, we suggest that you post more contents throughout the day.

Include pictures

“A picture is worth a thousand words”, they say. But it may be worth more in social media. Posts with pictures get more engagement as compared to those without pictures. In fact, research reveals that 44% of Facebook users are more likely to interact with brands if they include pictures in their posts.

Measure results

The only way to determine whether or not your efforts are successful is by measuring and analyzing the results. If you publish a blog, you want to see how many readers are subscribing, what posts they are reading, how many comments you’re receiving and how well your blog compares to others in the industry.

 

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