Increasing your online branding in 2020
This is Malcholm Reese the Creative Director for MjrVisuals, and in this podcast, I’m going to talk about Ideas that will help online branding.
You probably know this, but I am going to say it just in case you do not. A strong identity helps your customers remember you and makes you stand out in the marketplace.
You hear the experts, other business owners, marketing people, and your extended family talking about branding and how you need, and if you had it, your business would be doing that much better. By now, you and I know that branding is more than just shiny logos and a fancy name. Branding mainly involves helping customers to have a sense of belonging and attachment to your products, your service, your culture, and your values.
If you want to create an unforgettable brand online, it needs to be consistent, recognizable, and should appear across all aspects of your online and sometimes real-world presence.
Here let me give you ideas that will help your branding endeavors.
Are you prepared to spend some money?
When it comes to online branding, you cannot avoid spending some money. If you want to make more money, you have to spend more money. It means you will have to spend in things like social media, Ad Words, and content creation. A mentor told me once that “the one thing the separates hobbyists from business owners is the willingness to spend money on advertising.” He continued, “everyone out there can do marketing for free; it’s not the new frontier, so if you think your the first one to try it and it’s free, your probably wrong.”
Identify and convey your purpose.
In order to create a powerful online brand, you need to create a defining purpose that will act as your compass. Sometimes it is good to go back to the basics. Why are you in this business in the first place? Does your mission and purpose translate into your online presence?
Keep it real.
Small businesses suffer into oblivion because of their insistence on looking ‘big’ and corporate-like. The truth of the matter is that you don’t have to.
If you want your brand to stand out online, put your personality behind it. People are more receptive to people. For instance, try to include your picture in your company profile. You could also infuse some humor into the content. Authenticity should be your goal regardless of whether you are new in the market.
Be passionate, and you will attract passionate clients.
Revisit your target audience.
Do you know who your target audience is? Yeah, I know 18 – 55, male and female, making X amount a year, but do you really know who your brand is talking to? You need to know who your target audience is and where they are and where you can find them.
Conduct yourself professionally.
Whatever you do, remember that this is business. So you should pay attention to how you conduct yourself. Avoid being remembered for the wrong reasons by ensuring you post or publish credible and factual content. Go for quality over quantity.
You have probably heard the saying, “it is not what you say, but how you say it, “that is essential when it comes to marketing.
Final thought; your personality reflects on your business at the beginning, as your business grows that character will become an integration of voices that will represent your brand.
Mjrvisuals can help you increase your reach. We run the gambit of visual imagination. Be part of our portfolio of clients, and let us tell your story to the world. Visit our website: mjrvisuals.com/
Why Online Marketing is Essential for Your Business
Online Marketing is Essential for Your Business
Are you thinking that the business world has become so competitive that it has almost reached the limit of competition? The bad news is that it is not about to. You are still going to witness more rival business set-ups opening operations and more websites designed to sell the product you are selling being created. Just imagine that whatever line of business you are; whatever industry you are in, there are thousands, sometimes millions of others offering the same product as you are. What do you think will make a customer to choose you over others offering the same services or products? In this century, it is suicidal for any business owner not to have an online presence. It is part of the strategies of remaining relevant and being competitive, as well as attracting new customers, globally.
Why Being Online Matters
It doesn't matter whether you have been in business for the last five decades or you are just starting out. The internet has actually leveled the playing ground for both the big boys and the small fish; in other words, when a customer is looking for a product online, it doesn't matter who is selling the product. What matters is whether the customer is able to find your site and can trust you. Essentially, those businesses which are not yet online are in for a big trouble because sooner than later, they will be out of business if at all they aren't already.
You need to get noticed through Search Engine Optimization
If you are online, the biggest headache is getting noticed. You cannot afford to be ignored if you want to make a fortune online. As they say, creating a website is the easiest part-the hardest part is pushing your site as far up the search engines as possible. Remember, for very niche, there are millions of other individuals, and businesses who are scrambling to get noticed in the search engines.
That is why you need a professional marketing company to help you reach your potential customers. Search Engine Optimization companies are doing a wonderful job to assist businesses undercut competition by pushing their sites up the search engines. Otherwise, if you just create a site and sit back and relax, you are not going to see substantial number of unique page views from your site. Does this explain why many people who created blogs and website with anticipation of carrying home a fat AdSense check are left disappointed?
Optimizing your site isn't a simple-one-day-event as some optimists think. It requires skills, dedication, professionalism and patience for you to succeed at it. Therefore, it is important that you get a professional SEO company to pull your site out of the murk and make it recognizable in the local or global search engines. It is time to let a SEO expert company perform search engine optimization for you as you concentrate on your core business.
Of course there are many other marketing strategies you can apply to grab the attention of the potential customers such as social media, email marketing, pay per click marketing, among others. For optimum results, you ought to apply all the available marketing strategies, depending on where your target customer base is located.
The Marketer’s Creed: 3 Qualities of Great Marketers
Marketing is the engine of any business. Whether you are a small business owner or the Chief Marketing officer of a big corporation, you need to have the right mix of traits to stay successful. The foundation of responsibility is no doubt the most important component of any success in business. In this article, I am going to talk about some touch points around this necessary quality in your life in order to help you achieve your business goals.
- Get motivated
The renowned author and speaker Zig Ziglar said that motivation, just like taking a bath, doesn’t last. One should constantly recharge their batteries of motivation to stay motivated. That is why it is recommended that you stay motivated on a daily basis.
The only way to keep your momentum is to stay motivated. This is like a muscle that needs to be exercised daily if you want to stay on top of your game. Of course there are days you wake up and feel like you would rather stay in bed and abscond your obligations. So many people give in to the temptation and end up wasting a lot of time.
One way to build motivation is to form daily rituals where you perform certain set of actions, every day, which get you ‘in the zone’. If you establish a routine that puts you in the path to maximum productivity early in the day, your body and mind will learn that it is time to get going.
For instance, if you are a runner, you may choose to wake up, put on your shoes and start running every time you wake up from bed. In the office, the ritual could be visualization, meditation before going for a meeting or making a sales presentation.
Our bodies and minds are like engines, they must be kept in optimum working conditions to function correctly. The engine must first be fired before it can start working. Get yourself motivated first thing before you start doing what you planned.
- Assume responsibility
If anything is to be, it is up to you. There are no accidents. Responsibility is the hallmark of successful entrepreneurs and is a way of being, not just what you do. When you are truly responsible, you accept the fact that success or failure is in your hands no matter what. Blaming outside forces or people for your failures shows that you are irresponsible.
Great leaders claim responsibility even when things go wrong not just when they are buzzing. Being responsible means not blaming anyone or anything for the things that go wrong. Being responsible means taking an introspection approach and looking at what you could have done differently to produce better results.
You should be aware at all times the impact you are creating around you and the examples you are setting for others. You have the power to create the circumstances you want. No one prevents you from creating the business you desire.
- Accept no excuses
If you are personally accountable to your business or quality of life, you should be honest with yourself; you should face realty and accept no excuses. Acknowledge where you have done mistakes in the past and commit to improving things in the future.
You really need to be honest with yourself about where you are slaking and resolve to honor your commitments. Do not break promises. Every time you break a commitment or a promise to yourself, your self-worth is eroded and eventually, your inner self’s worth is destroyed.
As a serious entrepreneur, you should choose accountability as your minimum standard in everything you do. If you do so, you will find that your business will have more meaning and you will experience more success.
Online Marketing: How to Write Great SEO Articles that Attract Traffic to Your Website
If you are relatively new to the world of Search Engine Optimization, you may have heard the term SEO being thrown around. Writing great SEO articles is not difficult if you understand the basics of SEO. SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is designed to help people find content easily in the search engines like Google. In other words, a SEO article is any content created with the goal of making it easy for people to find you in the search engines. To write better SEO articles, you must do the following:
- Carry Thorough Keyword Research
Before you start writing, do a comprehensive keyword research. Keywords or phrases are those terms that are likely to be used by the web user to find your content. For instance, if a student wants to look for an example of an essay about hotels to help him/her write their homework, they will most likely type the phrase sample essay about hotel in Google search box. So that becomes your keyword. So if you include that keyword in your article, this student will probably land in your website if you offer professional essay writing services.
- Do Keyword optimization
Simply researching keywords and including them in your article is not enough. You must know where, when and how to use those keywords. Just tossing keywords anyhow isn’t going to work. The keywords must occur naturally throughout the article. They must also be relevant to the content. Therefore, you can not use the keyword sample essay about hotel in an article that talks about Weight Loss for example.
- Organize content
You must organize your content in a logical way so that the reader can easily relate to the content. Remember if they don’t stay in your site long enough, they will navigate away, which is bad for your SEO strategy.
- Promote your content
No matter how great your content is, no one will know about it if you don’t share. Luckily, there is a plethora of ways one can share articles today including social media.
Write about something interesting
If you thought people would instantly stream to your website as soon as you publish your article no matter how bogus it is, you are dead wrong. People want to read about something that is interesting to them; something that solves their problem. You content should have a strategy so that you have clear goals on why you are publishing the article in the first place. Is it to get people to buy from you? Is it to simply inform your readers about some great idea? Do you simply want to educate or entertain your readers?
More importantly, your content should be long enough to count. Don’t be too obsessed about the word count. Rather, be more concerned about the point you are trying to make. Search engines generally give preference to longer articles of at least 600 words. In-depth content has particularly found favors in Google search engine. Therefore, if you can get someone to write you a 2,000 word SEO article, by all means go for it.
Target the right audience
Finally, it is critical to target the right audience and design your content strategy accordingly. If your business targets engineers, you might want to writer more insightful, in-depth content. You may also want to ensure you are accurate with your facts.
Need more help with your SEO articles? Do not hesitate to hire a professional SEO writer to help. Not everyone has time to pen a triumphant SEO article so it makes sense to ask for help if you need one.
Are you publishing Great Content? Try These SEO Tips
When you are writing articles for your website/blog, you have to ensure that you have got critical things covered so as to guarantee SEO-friendly articles. The aim of SEO is to ensure you optimize your content so that search engines can understand what your content is about and at the same time make it easy for your audience to find you. Having said that, there are no guarantees whatsoever that your content will rank well in search engines even if you write a mouth-watering SEO article. That is because there are critical components SEO article should have, besides producing a great story.
- Post title and Meta title
The main difference between post title and Meta title is that the post title is what the reader sees as the title of the post while the Meta title is what the search engines use to display to your readers in search engine results. If you fail to create a Meta title, search engines will treat your post title as the Meta title. Have a keyword included in your Meta title to improve your ranking fortunes. Also, keep your Meta title less than 66 characters.
- Meta description
You can add a short description to your Meta title to give your readers an idea of what your post is all about. In other words, the Meta description of your post acts as the sales copy of your post. If your post does not have a Meta description, make sure you include it to optimize your traffic. Your Meta description should not be more than 156 characters.
- Include Image descriptions
The long and short of it is that Google can’t read images. So it relies on the image Alt description to understand what the image is about. When you upload images to accompany your article, remember to name your images appropriately. For instance, if you are writing an essay about invisible man and communism and you decide to include an explanatory graphic, you can name your image as invisible-man-and-communism-illustration.
- Anchor and Interlink Text
Did you know that it is always good to link back to your other articles in your website? This enables readers to stick around for longer. This is particularly advantageous because search engines end up re-crawling the old posts. Interlinking your old pages also improves the sites readability and reduces bounce rates. When interlinking your site, remember to use appropriate anchor texts. An anchor text is the title of the link you are creating.
- Heading
A good article should be easy to read. An article that comprises of blocks of long paragraphs are not desirable. No one has time for boring stuff. Use appropriate headings especially if you are drafting a long post. It is also good practice to include your keywords in your headings.
- Length
Long articles are better than shorter ones. First of all, longer articles easily get noticed in search engines because it is assumed they provide in-depth analysis of the topic. Secondly, longer articles tend to have a wide range of long-tailed keywords spread throughout the content. It is difficult to achieve this with 200-word articles.
- Write for people, not search engines
Search engines are becoming very sophisticated, so much that it is nearly impossible to cheat them. Google wants you to offer your clients great content instead of simply stuffing your keywords for the purposes of ranking. This means that you should ensure your keywords are not only relevant to the article but also provide value to the readers.
As you can see, writing good articles takes patience, skill and time. That is why many people prefer to outsource their SEO articles needs to writing agencies, which is perfectly okay.
Top 10 WordPress Plugins You Must Have
Why WordPress in the First Case?
Did you know that WordPress powers more than 60 million websites online? Generally, WordPress is a content management system that is rocking in the online world. As opposed to the traditional HTML websites that would require a lot of time and money to set up, WordPress has made work much easier for most bloggers and website owners. Perhaps this explains why a whopping 22% new websites launched are powered by WordPress in the USA. Apart from that, WordPress makes it convenient for your to manage your content, it is flexible, and it is SEO friendly.
The Role of Plugins
That being said, you also need cool plugins to go with your WordPress website. Having the right plugins can do a lot of things for you, which includes: improving your SEO and user experience, usability, and various conversions. The following WordPress Plugins are just what you might need. As a matter of fact, these are the plugins that have been given a vote of confidence by the online community; most of them are free.
1. All in One SEO Pack: This is exactly what any blogger or website owner would want. All in One SEO Pack has been downloaded over 15,000,000 times. What it does is that it automatically optimizes your blog for the search engines. It also generates Meta Tags automatically. All you need to do is just to download it and install it, and the rest of the things will work themselves out. If you are an advanced user, you are free to fine-tune its features. Another alternative to this plugin is the WordPress SEO by Yoast
- Contact Form 7: you will love Contact Form 7 if there is need for you to manage multiple contact forms. You have the option to customize the contact forms to suit your unique needs. There is a CAPTCHA integration option for you to help you fight spam. Contact Form 7 comes in over 50 languages. If you need to create a fancy Contact Us page, Contact Us Page - Contact People, is the plugin for you. There are actually very few websites whose contact us page is stunningly vibrant.
3. Clicky Web Analytics: You’ve got to love Clicky Web Analytics if you have a lot of Google data you are handling in Google Analytics. Unlike the Google Analytic tool which is so cumbersome, this plugin is so refreshing, and it provides a clean interface for you to view your data even if you are the type of person that likes checking your statistics more than once a day.
- Secure WP: this plugin gives you thorough security check and makes a number of changes in your WordPress installation so as to make it as secure as possible. For instance, it hides your WordPress number version.
5. Buddy Press: BuddyPress lets you build a community from your visitors by enabling users to create profiles, send messages to one another, and interact through chat. It is a kind of creating a social network in a box.
6. Feedweb: Every website owner needs to get feedback from the audience on how they getting on with the content. This plugin will allow you to receive feedback from your visitors on how they are experiencing your services or who they feel you can improve on the content.
7. Members: Members is a plugin that contributes to making WordPress one of the coolest Content management systems for web sites. It extends your control a little further by letting you control the roles of members of your blog. It allows you to create, edit, or delete the roles played by various members. It gives you powers to control permissions of the members as well.
8. Social Gallery Lite: This is a great way for you to boost your social network for your blog. The Social Gallery Lite is your Ultimate Social Lightbox Plugin which is a good substitute to vanilla image lightboxes.
- Tumblr Importer:Tumblr importer helps you to import blog posts from a Tumblr blog. This is the ultimate Tumblr Importer that will maintain the format of the blogs, as well as the backgrounds. It can also import drafts and pages.
- Hotfix: Hotfix will fix common WordPress without having to wait for next WordPress core release. In other words, you’ll fix bugs quickly even if you have not updated your WordPress.
There are actually countless plugins floating in the online sea. The type of plugin you need depends on your specific needs. However, there is no need to install every other plugin you meet as this can slow down your WordPress site.
6 Traffic Generation Habits You Should Stop
6 Traffic Generation Habits You Should Stop
Traffic generation is the holy grail of online marketing. Website traffic has been cited as the most effective content marketing metric, which is why brands must understand how to drive traffic without compromising quality of content. Unfortunately, as traffic generation and SEO have changed over the years, many mistakes continue to be made. As a result, many seemingly well-established SEO practices can greatly damage your brand’s credibility and harm your website traffic.
Here are six traffic generation practices you should avoid at all costs:
1. Stuffing content with keywords
Stuffing your content with keywords can drastically hurt your website traffic. Whether it is adding high volume of keywords or irrelevant phrases and words, these are harmful SEO practices that can cause irreparable damage to your traffic generation efforts. Doing so will attract Google penalties like marking your site as spam or lower your page ranking. It will also hurt your brand image because customers will feel betrayed by your use of misleading information.
Rather than stuff your content with many or irrelevant keywords, writing high quality content should be your goal. Remember, people don’t just come to your site just for the sake of it; they are looking for valuable resources and answers to their problems. One way to find out what your readers are looking for is to think about the questions your readers type into Google search and use those questions to create powerful content that will provide the answers. You can also visit platforms like Reddit and Quora to find out what people are discussing. This will help you determine the right keywords to use. Whatever the case, concentrate on writing high quality content.
2. Building as many backlinks as possible
When it comes to backlinks, it’s all about quality over quantity. Many people think that having thousands of links pointing to their website is the smartest traffic generation tactic. However, this practice can actually be detrimental to your SEO. It is better to have a dozen of quality backlinks instead of having thousands of spam links. Use tools like Buzzsumo to determine which backlinks are top quality in your industry. For instance, if you own a blog about entrepreneurship, your best bet for backlinks should come from sites like Entrepreneur, Fortune, Bizify, Quora and Inc, among others. By all means, avoid buying backlinks if you don’t want to land in trouble with Google.
3. Focusing only on page rankings
Page ranking is an important factor when it comes to making it to the top of Google’s search results. However, one should not put all eggs in one basket. Many elements contribute to page ranking. According to a 2015 study by Moz, 88% of marketers believe mobile-friendliness will influence page rankings. 81% believe that the perceived value of the website by the visitors also plays a critical role. Other factors that influence page rankings are speed of website and the quality and quantity of instant answers provided in SERPs. Therefore, instead of worrying about whether your website is ranked at the top, you need to look at different strategies that can drive results for your brand. For instance, you can produce more mobile optimized landing pages and produce quality content that provide instant answers in the SERPs. By taking care of these individual strategies, you will be able to tweak your website so that it appears in top results.
4. Writing low-value content
Gone are the days when quantity of content was the determining factor in driving traffic. Today, marketers are more concerned about producing quality content that provide value to the users. In fact, Google introduced an algorithm that penalizes sites that produce low-quality content. In that regards, any content you produce should provide value to the readers. That is to say quality content should be your most valuable SEO tactic. There are a number of elements you need to take into consideration when implementing your content creation strategy. The first element is your audience. Understanding your audience is crucial. Are your visitors male or female? What is their geographical locations? What is their age group? Do your visitors come to amuse themselves or to learn serious stuff? Understanding your audience will help you to structure your content according to their needs.
5. Duplicating content on different websites
Writing content and then duplicating it to different sites as guest post is definitely going to hurt your ranking. Although Google can differentiate between the first publisher of content and republished content, content duplications brings more harm than good. It might succeed in increase in the number of back links but it can also become difficult to know monitor the changes to your content. Your brand’s image also suffers in the process. So the only solution is to write original content and share it is social media. If you want to publish guest posts or syndicate your content, please write fresh content for every website you want to publish your content.
6. Including complex coding on your website and installing too many widgets
Widgets, tools, analytic software, surveys, forms etc can be great tools for any website; however, too much of something is bad. Having too many widgets and tools coupled with complex coding can slow down your website yet people expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds. This is likely to be the reason you are performing poorly in traffic generation department. The average user has no patience for a page that takes ages to load. Slow speeds in websites results to high bounce rates, a factor used by Google to rank websites.