Marketing is tough and social media marketing is particularly challenging. However, the challenges should only encourage you to work harder and be more creative. Here's a fast fact for you. If you come with the right strategies, you will create a huge followership and market your goods and services to millions of people online. Below are some tips to help you achieve great results.

Engage with Individual Social Media Users

Maybe you are used to engaging with your would-be and existing customers by sending messages, videos, infographics and updates. Now, there is nothing wrong with this approach but you can a whole lot better. Human beings love to be appreciated so you should take advantage of this killer secret. Interact with individuals on the social media on a one-on-one basis. This will make them feel cherished by your business and they will become lifelong customers.

Post Frequently

Now, this one is a no-brainer. You are not the only person trying to attract and keep customers online. It follows that you must work hard because your rivals out there are working pretty hard. Post frequently and while you are at it, you should post high quality and easy to share content. This makes you relevant and the result is more sales and more cash in your bank account.

Use Different Formats

The beauty of social media marketing is that you have many viable options. You can use both content and videos to market your products. You can also use audio, infographics and webinars. Put on your creative hat and you will come up with innovative ways to carry out a killer marketing campaign.

Reward Loyal Customers

The repeat customer is the lifeblood of every business. It follows that you should keep track of your loyal customers and reward them for buying your products. You can give your customers a bonanza sometimes or offer them a discount. You can even carry out a promo and make sure it gets lots of publicity. Customers who benefit from these strategies will praise your products. This will spread the word and get you even more customers.

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is getting reliable backlinks to your website. You want the links to be associated with reputable IP addresses. You also want to have IPs that are different from one blog to another. Today, C-class IPS can give you exactly what you need for your link building campaigns. The following IPS hosting information will help you get started building a blog network for your link building efforts:

Getting Unique IP Addresses For Similar Content

The IP addresses of your SEO websites are important. You want the links back to clients' sites to be reliable and reputable. Therefore, there are some things to consider for websites and the IP addresses used to host them. Consider the following factors when building websites for your SEO services:

-Check dedicated IP addresses for blacklistings
-Separate similar content with unique IP addresses
-Use a quality SEO hosting service for websites

The unique IP addresses can be used to separate websites with similar content. This means that you do not want a bunch of HVAC services or home improvement websites at the same IP addresses. Instead, use unique addresses to separate these types of sites. You can have technology and AC businesses on the same IP address, though. This is because they are not similar content, and this will not affect SEO:

In the world of internet marketing Neil Patel is a legend so when he comes out with a free keyword research tool for Chrome, it's worth paying attention. Here's an overview of Neil Patel's UberSuggest Chrome extension.

Installing the UberSuggest Chrome Extension

To use UberSuggest you'll need to install it in Google's Chrome browser application. Once you've done so and activated it, whenever you perform a search it will go to work.

It shows the volume of searches in a box to the right of the search results and includes options to show Related, Suggestions, Questions, Prepositions and Comparisons options that will show additional information about the keyword you are searching for. Clicking on any of these takes you to the UberSuggest page on neilpatel.com where there are the full array of the tool's options can be found.

Doing Keyword Research

When doing keyword research a key part of the process is assessing the competition for that keyword. UberSuggest provides a number of metrics that help you to do this including an SEO Difficulty rating that was developed by Neil Patel specifically to show how hard a keyword is to rank for. The tool also provides traditional SERP rankings such as the Domain rating and number of backlinks for a particular site. One of the nicer features of the tool is that it shows the domain score and traffic just above the listing for each site returned in the search results.

Traffic Analyzer

The tool offers a traffic analyzer feature that displays accurate numbers on the traffic a site that you enter is receiving. This also provides SEO insights by showing which pages on the site have the best performance as well as the social sites the site is getting visitors from and the countries they are targeting. While UberSuggest doesn't explicitly analyze the overall link profile of a site, you can get data on a site's backlinks by clicking on a Backlinks button in the Main Overview section of the tool. This will give you a general idea of where the site's backlinks are coming from.

Long tail keywords get much less traffic than more general keywords but they are often high-converting and can draw quality traffic to your website. In fact, in some cases long tail keywords draw more traffic than general keywords. Below are some simple (and free) methods for finding long tail keywords.

Check Google's Autocomplete Suggestions

When you type a broad search term in Google it will display a drop-down list of suggestions for completing the search phrase. Because these suggestions are based on search volume this is still one of the best ways to see which long-tail keywords are ranking for a particular niche keyword.

Check the “People Also Ask” Boxes on Google Search Results

When Google shows you the results of a search it includes a 'People Also Ask' box that shows related queries. This is easy way to find long-tail keywords related to the one you are looking for and can give you some good ideas about other ways people phrase search queries related to your seed keyword. Another bonus is you can click on the sites listed to get more ideas.

Use Google Trends

Google Trends is a great keyword search tool and one of my favorites. It shows you how search interest has changed over a period of time (that you can specify) and also shows you a Related Queries box that can be useful for finding other long-tail keywords related to the keyword you've entered. Note that most of the keywords listed in this box are less well known keywords that most other keyword research tools won't find. It can also help you work out whether interest is waning or booming for your niche and keyword.

Use Question and Answer Sites Like Quora

Quora is a question and answers sites where people answer other people's questions on a wide range of subjects. By looking at the answers you can see what problems people are trying to solve related to your keyword. It also shows the most popular questions which can help you focus your search to long-tail keywords that are related to those questions. There are other similar sites out there, such as Yahoo! Answers, that you can check as well.

At first glance, there is not a lot of differences between WordPress tags and categories, but once you become familiar with them you will learn that EACH HAVE THEIR TIME AND PLACE. In this article, I am going to clear up any questions or confusion you may have about Categories vs Tags in WordPress.

Which is the Best Option for Sorting Content on Your Site?

While this may seem like a tough decision, let me make it easy for you. YOU SHOULD ALWAYS RELY ON CATEGORIES AS YOUR MAIN SORTING AND ORGANIZATIONAL METHOD because tags were never designed to be the central organizational pillar of a WordPress site.

I do like tag clouds on some websites, but I strongly prefer a well thought out category hierarchy to the haphazard nature of navigating through a wall of tags. I'm not alone in this line of thinking, so lets explore the purpose and intended use cases for tags and categories.

What Was the Original Purpose of Each Type of Taxonomy.

Categories were included in WordPress so that you can make descriptive categories that define the topic of your page or post. For example, a website dedicated to sports might have categories for football, baseball, basketball and hockey. CATEGORIES ARE MEANT FOR LARGE GROUPS OF POSTS.

TAGS WERE CREATED SO THAT YOU COULD ADD AS MANY KEYWORDS AS NEEDED TO PROPERLY DESCRIBE YOUR POST. In addition, they are also a way to insure that your post includes all the relevant search terms for the post, even if the article doesn't explicitly mention those terms in the text. Finally, they serve as one of the best ways to link related content together so that related pages and posts have a direct association through any shared tags.

How Do You Add These Items To Your Post & Site in WordPress?

YOU CAN ADD CATEGORIES AND TAGS TO YOUR WORDPRESS PAGES AND POSTS DIRECTLY FROM THE EDITOR. If you're using Gutenberg or the classic editor, you will find the Categories & Tags on the right sidebar of the editor.

Regarding displaying tags and categories on your website, that is dependent on your theme. Depending on your theme, it is generally easy to add category and tag widgets to your sidebar. Just go to wp-admin > Appearance > Widgets and then drag the Categories widget and the Tag Cloud widget into your sidebar.

How many tags should you have on each post?

Tags are for any subject covered in the post that doesn't already have representation. YOU SHOULD INCLUDE ANY TAG YOU CAN THINK OF THAT IS RELEVANT TO THE ARTICLE. Going back to our sports blog example, let say you wrote an article on the 1956 Boston Red Sox roster. You may want to add tags such as their star players Ted Williams, Jackie Jenson, and Mickey Vernon, as well as terms such as Roster, the year 1956 and any other phrase you believe may be recurring on your site.

How to make use of Google Alerts to promote internet businesses? Well, you can hear this question from many students learning internet businesses. The introduction of Google Alerts can provide you a wide range of advantages in internet businesses. Let's see here the importance of Google Alerts in promoting online businesses across the world. Google Alerts for keywords is one of the best-used software tools by internet business experts across the world.

Google Alerts to update blog topics

Updated information on needy topics plays a great role in obtaining a top position in this competitive world. How often you update your blog post in the website? Google Alert is generally a type of software tool which allows the user to get the details of the right keyword from the blog. Updated information on new articles related to keywords can be obtained automatically using Google Alerts. News updates in businesses is very important to get a leading position in the market. The inclusion of Google Alerts in businesses helps users to take sufficient actions as per the news update provided on the site.

Google Alerts to increase productivity in businesses

Almost all the newcomers in the internet business will be in search of the best way to increase the productivity from the site. How to increase the productivity in businesses? This query is common from newbies in online businesses. Changes made as per the introduction of Google Alerts can assist the business owners to enhance their productivity. Knowing the performance of the competitive site is very important to make reliable changes in businesses. Google Alerts can help the users to make changes in the site as per the requirement. This condition in turn assists business owners to reduce the bounce rate from the web page.

Google Alerts for specific news

Are you interested to get on-time alerts of specific topics? At present, many of the celebrities are making use of Google Alerts to find their news and the articles online. Instant update of information allows the concerned person to provide the reply within the required time. Hence Google Alerts for keywords is found to be very effective to overcome the difficulties due to information delay. On-time alert helps people to do changes at the right time. Searching based on a particular keyword is generally done on web articles, blog posts, and news sites online.

Pinterest as a Marketing Channel

Whether making pinboards of your dream wedding or virtual closet, Pinterest allows users to catalogue items and ideas in to unique folders and share them with the world. They have capitalized on visual marketing. As Pinterest’s community has risen to over 350 million active users since its inception in 2009, the image sharing site has lead users to some amazing products and services that they wouldn’t have otherwise known about. This means Pinterest users essentially market merchants’ products for them, which helps small businesses and artisan boutiques thrive. 80% of the website’s active users have bought items they had pinned on the website.

Product Pins

Shopify is an e-commerce website that hosts over 500,000 active stores on its platform. Now, Shopify has teamed with Pinterest to create a unique channel that allows Shopify merchants to promote themselves on Pinterest by integrating their products on to the website as a “product pin.” Not only that, but the merchant’s Pinterest page will include a shop tab. This promotion is completely free to Shopify merchants. However, if a merchant does have a budget for promotion, there are also paid ads merchants can opt in to, which Pinterest will promote, and the ad will take users straight to to the merchant’s online store.

Pinterest and Shopify Partnership

Of Shopify’s 500,000 active stores, over 100,000 of those are based in the U.S. and Canada, so a lot more products will be heading to Pinterest if those merchants decide to take advantage of this new channel. The partnership is great for both Pinterest users and Shopify merchants, as this will now make it much easier to shop through Pinterest, and merchants will have access to a much bigger pool of consumers. Merchants will also be given $100 credit to promote their ads once their first ad is posted through Shopify. The Shopify tag on Pinterest even has over 110,000 followers, which tags boutique fashion, beauty, and other products that are only available through Shopify stores, so there is already a level of demand on Pinterest.

Pinterest-Shopify Partnership Marketing Explained

For a couple of days, you can observe that Google is testing AMP results in desktop SERPs. AMP pages were reserved only for mobile users until now, but it seems that Google is testing this option also on the desktop. They now link to the AMP version on desktop too. Let's find out what this change means to marketers and users.

How to Identify AMP Results

First, we should find out how you identify an AMP result. Every AMP page has a lighting bolt icon next to the result. When you make a query and see a result with a lighting bolt icon, it means that it is an AMP result. On the desktop version, we can notice that the images for AMP pages are very big and get all the attention. As they are shown now on the desktop version creates a huge discrepancy between AMP results and the other ones. For now, we discovered that you can see the AMP results when you are searching for celebrities, for example.

These results have great benefits for users. The pages load faster as it indicates the name, Accelerated Mobile Pages. It will first load faster the important features of your website, than the other ones. This improves user experience.

Until now, this feature was available only for mobile users. The marketers were taken by surprise when they discover that Google is testing it on the desktop too.

Marketers and AMP Pages

For marketers are a few downsides about this change in SERPs. The content of the website can be stripped down because it will not be shown as the original version of your website. The accent is put on the fast speed and this can lead to stripping your content for AMP pages.

Another disadvantage for marketers is that they can lose several branding elements. As we have mentioned before, an AMP page will not contain all the elements your website has. The content will be cut and in this context, you will end up losing several branding elements. This will affect your branding efforts. And when it happened only for mobile users was one thing, but when this stripped content is delivered to most of your users, both desktop, and mobile, the impact is bigger. You should reconsider the overall website design for appropriate branding on AMP pages.

How To Add AMP To WordPress - Accelerated Mobile Pages [2019]

E-commerce giants like eBay and Amazon paved the way for a whole new way of shopping over the last 20 years or so. And with it came a whole new style of marketing and customer data collection. But eBay and Amazon are not the only 2 notable e-commerce platforms, in recent years other similar sites have gained a lot of traction among online shoppers due to additional features and USPs.. One of these that has become particularly successful is the Canadian multinational e-commerce site Shopify. Unlike Amazon or eBay it isn't just a marketplace where you can place and sell goods. You can actually create an online shop and website, with your own brand and style, then ship and manage your products through the Shopify shopping cart service.

Marketing with Mailchimp

Mailchimp was a useful tool for Shopify users as it gave them a way of marketing to their audiences and staying in contact with customers as well as developing potential leads. But early last year both Shopify and Mailchimp announced their separation in business, both with a slightly different take on who's to blame and why.

Shopify Mailchimp Breakup

Shopify's side of the story is that Mailchimp had a poor merchant experience and that Mailchimp refused to abide by the terms of Shopify's partner program agreement. Further detailing that this specifically referred to Mailchimp not synchronizing customer data which they had gathered on merchants' stores with Shopify and it's merchants. Therefore disrupting the business ecosystem and not reliably serving their customers. And as such, Shopify announced that it would be removing the Mailchimp app from it's platform.

Mailchimp's response to this was that they requested Shopify to remove them from their platform due to updated terms of agreement that would impact user privacy, and Mailchimp's business at risk. They further explained that Shopify actually wanted access to users' data from before the app was installed, permission for which would not be able to be obtained. Being a company which relies heavily on trust of users' data, Mailchimp said that anything that would put that trust at risk would not be acceptable and as such could not agree to Shopify's new terms.

There is also some speculation that Mailchimp's recent business developments with competitor e-commerce site Square. However due to Mailchimp's involvement with hundreds of businesses some of which will likely be involved in e-commerce and thus competitors, it is somewhat debated as to how relevant this actually was as a factor in the separation.

Shopify Mailchimp Alternatives

But Shopify customers need not worry. There are many alternatives out there which do similar if not the same tasks as Mailchimp. Merchant's may choose from a vast pool of Mail marketing and customer engagement tools: Zapier, Automate.io and ShopSync are in fact recommended by Mailchimp as alternatives for merchants moving forward.

All of these services integrate well with Shopify. However ShopSync allows you to do this for free whereas the others charge. And although they offer free trials, these do not include integrations with Shopify. Zapier has been particularly know to cause some integration issues, and though the others have had some problems too, ShopSync seems to be the best for users who like Mailchimp as it has an almost identical interface and functions in essentially the same way.

No More Mailchimp App for Shopify! What Now?

The Ungagged Los Angeles conference begins this week, providing talks and master classes in search engine optimization and digital marketing. There will be a variety of excellent speakers providing insights into online marketing, link building strategies, analytics and more.

Ungagged LA Conference Speakers

Once of the most exciting speakers to be presenting at this year's Online Los Angeles is Andrew Shotland. He edits the excellent blog Local SEO Ranking Factors. He was a pioneer of NBC's Internet group and started a local search engine that was acquired by City Search. He will be talking about reverse engineering Google's local search analytics and explaining what it takes to master local business rankings. He will also explain how to set up in house local marketing systems. He also is an expert on explaining how gig economy unicorns are exploiting loopholes to optimize search rankings without a physical location.

Another very exciting speaker to be presenting at Ungagged Los Angeles is Andrew Stone, a Key Account manager at Buffalo Partners at Online Casino Affiliate Programs. He will be talking about risk and fraud management, retention marketing and more.

Ungagged LA Location

The conference will be located at Convene South Grand Avenue in the center of downtown Los Angeles. You can book hotel space at Omni Hotel just across the street.