editor, Author at Mediastreet

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To Start Building a Community, Master These Two Concepts

June 27, 2022 No Comments

Increasingly, building a successful start-up involves not only building a product that people can’t get enough of, but also building an engaged, loyal community around that product. Today, most founders are acutely aware of the value of community. In CMX’s 2021 Community Industry Report, 86% of respondents (community managers from 508 different companies) said community was critical to their company’s mission, and more than two-thirds said their company planned to increase their investment in community in the next year.

But while many founders are eager to invest in community, they often don’t know what they’ll need to understand to build one the right way. Between starting and running Zyper, a platform that connected brands with super-fans, and now leading community growth strategy at Discord, I’ve built hundreds of healthy communities for businesses, brands, and creators. Before diving in and hiring a dedicated community team, I’ve learned, founders need to have a strong grasp of two essential concepts: 1) the community quadrant (to understand how community differs from other groups of people who interact with a product), and 2) the community funnel (to understand what makes a community compelling to prospective members).

To that end, I’ve put together a guide that breaks down both concepts. It doesn’t cover everything you need to know to build a successful community. Instead, it’s intended to teach early-stage founders just enough to begin allocating resources.

What a community is (and isn’t)

One common misconception, I’ve noticed, is the idea that “community” and “customers” are synonymous terms. They aren’t. Understanding how they differ is critical, so let’s start there.

The people who interact with your product generally fall into one of four buckets:

Customers/users buy and/or use your product.
Evangelists tell everyone they know to buy or use your product because they genuinely love it.
Community is the group of people who’ve found belonging and utility through your product.
Ambassadors are incentivized, through payments or rewards, to promote your product.

What distinguishes community members from those in other groups is the congregation element: Beyond using, liking, or writing glowing reviews of your product, they spend time forming connections with other people based on a shared affinity for it.

The quadrant, sequenced

Three of these groups reliably emerge in a fixed order: Users/customers come first, followed by evangelists, and then community.

Ambassadors don’t fit neatly into this sequence, so you’ll need to make a decision about their relationship to the other three groups. Even though ambassador endorsements aren’t organic, they still help spread awareness of your product to new segments and markets. Ambassadors range from nano-influencers and affiliates to well-known celebrities, and they can collectively become a community in their own right, with gamified rankings and events. Generally speaking, my advice is to build an ambassador program that functions separately from the other three groups. This article covers the basics.

The ideal time to launch a community varies, but you should wait until you have confirmed evangelists. People who love your product are your proof point. If self-professed evangelists haven’t announced themselves yet, email a group of your earliest customers (50 is enough) to find out if they love your product. Those who respond enthusiastically are your first evangelists; invite them to join your community. Evangelists don’t automatically become community members, but they’re the most obvious cohort to start with because you know that they like your product and want to talk about it.

Next, start a conversation with this founding group in a private space designed for that purpose, such as a Discord server, a Slack channel, a Telegram chat, or even a group DM on Instagram. Some community platforms are designed to be versatile while others are geared toward specific populations. Geneva, for example, is a private group-chat app gaining traction among businesses with female customer bases.

One thing you shouldn’t do is waste engineering resources on building out your own community infrastructure. At this stage, third-party community platforms will meet all your technical needs. Plus, your target community members might already use them. Meeting people where they are never hurts.

The early days of community-building should feel like user research. You’re not trying to build an audience or sustain engagement. Instead, you’re experimenting with different offerings to figure out what your evangelists want. Audio? AMAs? IRL meet-ups? Ask them directly. Not only will you learn what they find valuable, you’ll also give them a sense of belonging.

The specific offerings that appeal to evangelists vary by community. For example, members of Scream Movies on Discord — a community for super-fans of the franchise — get exclusive access to events like director AMAs. That’s a big deal if you’re a Ghostface diehard.

But AMAs might not be such an effective way to generate interest in every community. Take the SBUX Hub on Discord, an unofficial Starbucks community for baristas and fans alike. Perks of membership include behind-the-counter secrets and access to off-menu recipes. Here, learning about seasonal Frappuccino flavors months before they’re announced might drum up more excitement than, say, joining an AMA with Howard Schultz.

Once you have a handle on the quadrant, the second concept to master is the community funnel.

The community funnel: invited —> invested

Communities are primarily valuable to businesses for two reasons:

They create a built-in source of real-time user feedback, which is critical for building a product people really want.
They foster friendships rooted in an affinity for your product, which drives lifetime value and new customer referrals.

When it comes to community-building, it’s your job to spark the fire. But you can’t keep it burning alone. The key to a thriving community is members who care enough to take initiative — they pose thoughtful questions to the group, introduce new topics to explore, and sometimes even plan events, online or off, to help people bond. And they’re invested enough in the community to assume some of the responsibility of steering it forward. Early on, think about identifying folks you’d like to see take on more responsibility.

But new community members don’t magically turn into devotees. You need to set the stage for that to happen — both by letting early members play a role in shaping and growing the community, and also by creating an environment compelling enough to reel in anyone who enters. The community funnel charts a prospective member’s path from receiving an invitation to becoming an invested, active member. It’s important to think about your role in moving members through the funnel.

One priority should be optimizing introductions: A member’s first few interactions with the community can have an outsized influence on whether or not they stick around. Consider those early experiences through the eyes of a new member:

Is the initial invitation compelling? Does it spark excitement or curiosity, or make prospective members feel special? On Geneva, invites are often hard to find, which makes them fun to discover. This also gives new members something to bond over right away.

Do members land in space that’s easy to understand and navigate, and also fun to spend time in? Simply numbering channels and visually laying out the first steps a new member should take is a low-lift way to guide people through the on-boarding experience. Extra points if the space is beautifully designed. User-friendly design makes the Discord server for crypto collective Orange DAO inviting to first-timers:

The ultra-simple layout of Telegram channels, which only have one central chat, makes the platform a low-friction way to get a community going. Here’s what new members see upon joining Poolsuite’s chat:

Are members individually welcomed into the space by a human (rather than a bot) and introduced into the conversation? Stripe’s developer community on Discord exemplifies digital hospitality with an active developer relations team welcoming new members:

Once introduced, do community members feel compelled to participate in the conversation? Participation primes members to become friends, which makes them feel more deeply tied to the community and motivated to contribute to it regularly. Most people who join your community will be evangelists for your product. By the time they reach the end of the funnel, they’ll (also) be evangelists for your community.

Now that you understand these two foundational community-building concepts, it’s time to begin architecting your community strategy. Start by clearly articulating why you’re building the community and what the value exchange will be. In other words, what will community members gain from joining and participating, and how does it help your business (now and down the road) to devote resources to community that could go elsewhere?

The value of community isn’t always easy to quantify financially, but there are benefits beyond the bottom line. If you get the basics down and approach community-building thoughtfully, your company will become a catalyst for strong relationships that grow alongside it.

By Amber Atherton

Amber Atherton is a British entrepreneur and angel investor based in Silicon Valley. A community building expert and life-long founder, Amber is currently the head of strategic communities at Discord. Follow Twitter Website

Sourced from Future

In News

5 New Marketing Books Every B2B Marketer Should Read

June 24, 2022 No Comments

By Lane Ellis

Looking for inspiration and new insight to forge new B2B marketing successes as we drive ahead to 2023?

We’re taking a look at five forthcoming or recently-published books that offer an array of fascinating tactics, tips, case studies, and other insight from some of the industry’s top business marketers and subject matter experts.

A good marketing book will not only help you stay current with the latest B2B marketing industry trends, but also gain inspiration in the process — and we’ve compiled a list of books that fit the bill on both counts.

Let’s turn the page and jump right in with our list of five new marketing books every B2B marketer can learn from.

1 — Everybody Writes: Your New and Improved Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content (2nd Edition)

Ann Handley
MarketingProfs logo
Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs

The much-anticipated second edition of Ann’s popular “Everybody Writes,” which is used in college classrooms and by writers the world over, will be released on October 18, 2022, when B2B marketers will be able to read the completely revised and expanded update to this marketing and writing classic.

“Everybody Writes: Your New and Improved Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content” is slated to include all-new examples, an even-more-detailed writing framework, and new material reflecting the latest changes in content marketing since the original version was published.

2 — Change Masters: How to Actually Make The Changes You Already Know You Need to Make

Barry J. Moltz
Speakers & Author, Shafran Moltz Group, LLC

In “ChangeMasters: How To Actually Make the Changes You Already Know You Need To Make,” Barry shares his small business subject matter expertise, including an examination of just why change is so difficult, and how to focus on and complete the critical changes that will make a difference.

From the brain science behind the mechanisms of change to how various areas of business can create change and more, Barry’s book offers helpful take-aways B2B marketers can apply in multiple areas of their professional and personal lives.

3 — The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Content Marketing, Podcasting, Social Media, AI, Live Video, and Newsjacking to Reach Buyers Directly

David Meerman Scott
Limited Partner and Strategic Advisor, Stage 2 Capital, also Entrepreneur, Advisor, Keynote Speaker and WSJ Bestselling Author, Freshspot Marketing

A new eighth edition of David’s book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Content Marketing, Podcasting, Social Media, AI, Live Video, and Newsjacking to Reach Buyers Directly” has recently been released, updated with new techniques and information that will be of interest to B2B marketers.

From details blueprints and strategies for getting your ideas implemented to generating buyer attention, the latest edition of David’s book offers a helpful look at both fundamentals and the current state of marketing.

David has also published the well-received “Fanocracy” book, which our CEO Lee Odden covered in “How to Tap the Most Powerful Marketing Force in the World – Fanocracy.”

4 — The Widest Net: Unlock Untapped Markets and Discover New Customers Right in Front of You

Pamela Slim
Author, Speaker and Small Business Strategist

Pamela’s “The Widest Net: Unlock Untapped Markets and Discover New Customers Right in Front of You” explores an array of dynamic ideas for creating marketing and business customer connections that may be outside your usual field of view.

The Widest Net utilizes case studies and examples to take a deep dive into creating newfound business and marketing success.

5 — CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest

Carolyn Dewar
Global Practice Leader – CEO and Board Excellence, McKinsey & Company
Scott Keller
Global Practice C0-Leader – CEO Excellent, McKinsey & Company
Vikram Malhotra
Senior Partner, McKinsey & Company

New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller “CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest” looks at successful chief executives from global major organizations including Netflix, JPMorgan Chase, General Motors, and Sony, and explores the unique qualities that we can all learn from them.

Carolyn, Scott, and Vikram’s book provides B2B marketers a helpful look at what we can learn from the way that CEOs shape culture, and how they in turn are changed by it.

Learn From B2B Marketing Page-Turners

via GIPHY

We hope that you’ve enjoyed our exploration of five books by these leading marketing and business authors, and that they’ll help inspire you in your own marketing work throughout the years ahead.

Looking for more books to enhance your B2B marketing and related skills? Check out these other articles we’ve published:

Building award-winning digital experiences featuring elements such as those explored in the books we’ve featured here takes significant time, resources, and effort, which is why many of the world’s top B2B brands choose to partner with a leading B2B marketing agency. Contact us today and learn why for more than 20 years brands from LinkedIn and 3M to Dell and Adobe have chosen to work with TopRank Marketing.

By Lane Ellis

Lane R. Ellis (@lanerellis), TopRank Marketing Social Media and Content Marketing Manager, has over 38 years’ experience working with and writing about the Internet. Lane spent more than a decade as Lead Editor for prestigious conference firm Pubcon. When he’s not writing, Lane enjoys distance running (11 marathons including two ultras so far), genealogical research, cross-country skate skiing, vegetarian cooking, and spending time with his wonderful wife Julie Ahasay and their cat Kukla in beautiful Duluth, Minnesota.

Sourced from TopRanking Marketing

In News

6 Reasons Your Marketing Copy Isn’t Converting — and How to Fix Each One

June 24, 2022 No Comments

By Svetoslav Dimitrov

If your copy isn’t bringing the conversions you desire, you might be making a few common mistakes.

One of the most frustrating things when you’re running a business is not getting the conversions you want.

Now, it’s easy to blame design, authenticity or even load time. And while all these could influence conversions, chances are, the real culprit is your copy. So if you’re hitting a dead-end with new leads, or finding you have a pipeline full of people who look but don’t buy, you’re probably making one of a few killer copy mistakes.

In this article, you’ll find six reasons why your marketing copy isn’t converting, together with a solution to how to fix each one.

Before we dive in, here’s a quick reminder. You don’t need to be an A-list copywriter to craft persuasive sales copy. But the more you know your audience, and what they resonate with, the better.

With that out of the way, let’s dive right into the first reason.

1. You haven’t shown value

As entrepreneurs, we strive to develop a unique product or service. We want to stand out. But more often than not, something that’s unique — meaning totally different from everything else on the market — is a red flag.

Why? Because if no one else is offering what you are, this might also mean no one wants your product or service. See, competition is a good thing as it shows your clients not only need but also want your offer.

“Want” always beats out “need.”

Now, if you have the same issue, there are two things you can do:

Offer your audience something they want more (the easy way).
Create a bridge between something your customers want and something you offer (the hard way). Here, your mission is to translate your audience’s wants into the benefits your product or services will provide to them.

2. You haven’t built enough trust

This might sound painful, but it’s true.

See, your audience might want your product or service. They might understand what it can do for them. They might even know how to buy it. But they don’t because they hesitate.

Why is that? One simple reason. They don’t trust you. They’re afraid your offer won’t bring them the promised outcome, and they’d feel like an idiot.

Don’t take this personally. In today’s era of online lies and rip-offs, it’s a normal reaction.

You have to earn your audience’s trust before they decide to buy from you. That’s not an easy task, but it’s fairly simple. All you need to do is craft value-driven content. The important thing to remember here is to build content around the needs, wants and pains of your readers.

When you share enough value and establish your authority, your customers will start trusting you. Then, sales will start coming in.

The great news is that if your relationship with your audience becomes strong enough, you won’t need to be the best salesperson or copywriter to get good conversions.

3. Your copy is too fancy

Entrepreneurs tend to overcomplicate their copy. We use business “jargon” that nobody understands. And we get trapped by the so-called “curse of knowledge,” which is assuming everyone has the background knowledge to understand what we’re saying. But that’s a sure-fire way to chase your customers away.

See, no one wants to feel dumb. But a customer can feel this way if he/she reads something they don’t understand. When that happens, they quickly close the page and continue with their day.

What if you absolutely must use business terminology? Then, you have to explain what that means immediately after using it.

The rule of thumb is that if a 3rd grader doesn’t understand what you’re saying, there’s a high chance your audience won’t either. Thankfully, there’s a great tool to use to “dumb down” your copy. It’s called the Hemingway app.

4. Your readers are confused

If you’ve done your research well, and you’re certain your audience wants your products or services. That’s a great first step. But if they’re still not buying your offer, this might mean they’re confused.

A confused reader doesn’t buy. In fact, a confused reader doesn’t do anything.

See, when your customers have too many options to choose from, need to make a lot of unnecessary decisions, face an information overload or have to browse through a website that’s too messy, they freeze.

How do you fix this? When it comes to pricing, packages, or products, don’t include more than two or three options. If your audience needs to choose between A, B, C or D, they most often won’t select anything at all.

Don’t forget that the top salespeople and the highest converting sales pages don’t use business jargon or fancy language. They make everything as simple and as clear as possible.

5. Your readers can’t see how your offer will help them

Another reason your copy isn’t converting is the fact that your readers don’t see themselves as customers. Thankfully, there’s a way to fix that.

Paint a picture in their minds of how your offer will help them. To make the narrative more convincing, use concrete details, including smell, colours, sounds, numbers, location, etc.

Strengthen your copy with solid reviews and testimonials that show how previous customers have been getting all the amazing benefits of your offer.

Use simple, conversational language to show how the benefits of your products and services will make your audience’s lives better. The benefits are important, but even more important is the transformation your readers are going to experience, so focus on that.

6. You didn’t ask for the sale

The last conversion-killing reason is the easiest to fix.

When you’re trying to sell something to your audience, you have to ask them for the sale. In other words, you have to tell them or ask them to do something.

If you clearly tell your prospects to click a link, book a call, download a PDF or how many bottles to order, they’re much more likely to do it. Your copy needs to have very clear call-to-action (CTA) buttons.

Bear in mind that the best-performing CTA buttons include the benefits of your offer. A “Click here to get it” link won’t be as effective as a button that says, “Click here to enjoy a life without stress, anxiety and depression.”

The bottom line

Now that you know why your copy isn’t converting readers into buyers, and how to fix each of them, you can go back and improve your sales copy. Don’t forget to be as clear and conversational as possible, and your conversions will go up.

By Svetoslav Dimitrov

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

9 Years Ago, a Simple Marketing Decision Helped Slack Become a $27 Billion Company

June 24, 2022 No Comments

By Jeff Haden

Because the last thing founder Stewart Butterfield wanted to do was sell saddles.

Way back in 2013, the team at Tiny Speck, the developers of Slack, had a marketing problem. Sure, they had built something useful: As a group chat system, Slack worked.

But customers weren’t looking for a group chat system. Marketing the software, and its features? As with most things, people buy software to perform specific tasks or solve a problem or need they already know they have.

Why would I adopt, much less purchase, a “group chat system” for my business if I don’t think — much less know — I need a group chat system, no matter how feature-packed it might be? A solution isn’t a solution when I don’t realize I have a problem.

As Slack founder Stewart Butterfield wrote in a memo to his team:

Our position is different than the one many new companies find themselves in: we are not battling it out in a large, well-defined market with clear incumbents. Despite the fact that there are a handful of direct competitors and a muddled history of superficially similar tools, we are setting out to define a new (my italics) market.

And that means we can’t limit ourselves to tweaking the product; we need to tweak the market too.

How? As Butterfield put it, “We don’t sell saddles here.”

His premise was simple. Say your company makes saddles. You could market in terms of price. Leather quality. Comfort. Adjustability. Size, or fit, or durability.

Or, instead of selling saddles, you could sell horseback riding. The lifestyle. The feeling. The bond with a horse. The sense of adventure. You could market like Harley-Davidson: Freedom, independence, cool, maybe even badass (if being badass is your thing)….

You could sell a vision of the person your customers want to be.

That’s what Butterfield did: He decided Slack should focus — both in marketing and future product development — on what its customers could become:

More relaxed and productive by knowing information is one search away.
Masters of their own information who won’t be overwhelmed by the never-ending flow of communication.
Less frustrated by not knowing what is going on with their team.
Able to communicate purposively, knowing each question they ask can build value for the entire team.

To Butterfield, Slack was selling organizational transformation: Helping people, and teams, be more productive, collaborative, and effective… and with a whole lot less email. Slack was “just” a set of tools to get them to that place.

As Butterfield wrote:

We’re selling a reduction in information overload, relief from stress, and a new ability to extract the enormous value of hitherto useless corporate archives. We’re selling better organizations, better teams. That’s a good thing for people to buy and it is a much better thing for us to sell in the long run.

We will be successful to the extent that we create better teams.

Customers? They don’t care about what you sell.

They care about what they get. How it will solve a problem. Meet a need. Help them feel. Help them work.

Help them live.

If you’ve created something new, or are in a relatively niche market, don’t try to sell saddles.

Sell horseback riding.

The better you do that — the better you share a vision of who you customers can become — the more likely you are to be the one they choose to help them get there.

Feature Image Credit: Slack founder Stewart Butterfield stands outside the New York Stock Exchange in New York City. Photo: Getty Images

By Jeff Haden

Sourced from Inc.

In News

How Much Does it Cost to Start an eCommerce Website from Scratch?

June 23, 2022 No Comments

Sourced from Boss Magazine

Setting up any website has costs to take into account, and this is particularly true if you’re aiming to enter the eCommerce marketplace.

So what can you expect to spend to turn your shopping site from a concept to a tangible, transactional service that’s ready to welcome its first customers?

Considering platform costs

Almost no eCommerce site on the market today runs on its own platform developed in-house. This is because there are tons of robust, affordable and well-established solutions out there already to act as the foundation.

Of course each platform has its perks and pitfalls, as well as targeting different types of business users. For example, there are all-in-one solutions like Shopify which offer several tiers of license suited to everyone from individual sellers to large businesses, with prices starting at $10 to $20 per month and rising to $2,000 or more for enterprise grade setups.

Then there are open source platforms like Magento, which don’t come with licensing costs, but do require that you take charge of every other element involved in building a site around them.

Calculating Magento pricing is therefore a bit more complicated, but does provide more flexibility than the proprietary alternatives.

Handling hosting costs

There are two main aspects of web hosting which cost you cash; the storage of the data that makes up your site, and the domain name which represents it and by which customers can find it in their browser of choice.

Again, the platform you pick can influence this, with the all-encompassing services often coming with a hosting package built in with the other aspects of a bundle. However, you can choose a third party host instead, and it’s usually best to combine hosting and domain name costs together.

What you’ll pay for hosting is not just down to the provider, but the size of your site and the amount of traffic it receives. A basic deal for a small site can come with hosting costs of under $100 annually, while a sprawling site with hundreds of product pages and millions of monthly visitors might require a hosting spend of $10,000 or more each year.

Breaking down site building costs

If you have a shoestring budget and you want to launch an eCommerce site, using a basic site builder and relying on standard templates is sensible, as this could be free at best, or cost you a couple of hundred bucks at worst.

If you want to let a professional handle this, then your choice is between a freelance web designer, or a dedicated agency.

Freelancers will be more affordable, but might have longer lead times to contend with. Agencies will eat into more of your budget, but will have the peoplepower to get a project off the ground quicker.

Outsourcing the design and construction of your site could cost less than $1,000, but it’s better to be more realistic and expect a spend of $3,000+ if you are serious about making this business venture work.

Exploring marketing & more

There are lots of ways to market a shopping site, from SEO tweaks that help it to become organically discoverable on search engines, to social media campaigns which focus on platforms that are right for your brand and audience.

Costs here are just as variable as elsewhere, depending on whether you choose to do the hard work yourself, or pay someone else to tackle it in your place.

All of this means that you need to have a realistic budget to start off with, and cost out every aspect of your eCommerce site before you spend any money, to avoid nasty surprises.

Sourced from Boss Magazine

In News

Presearch Wants to Be the Next Google Search, Minus the Privacy Concerns

June 23, 2022 No Comments

By Mayank Sharma

And it’ll reward you for helping flesh out its network

Most online services, including search engines, put too much control in the hands of one single company, which is one of the ills Web3 alternatives are trying to address.

Presearch, which has just exited the testing phase, is one such option that wants to end the monopoly of traditional search engines by putting people in charge. Its decentralized network replaces company-controlled supercomputers with a network of thousands of user-controlled nodes that work together. The goal? To get you the same meaningful results for your search queries but without the privacy and monopolistic concerns associated with traditional search engines like Google.

“Through decentralized search, we’re establishing a method for anyone online to benefit from and contribute to the search engine they use,” Colin Pape, Presearch’s founder, told Lifewire in an email discussion. “Decentralization allows the user to not only meaningfully benefit from the web, but also have a sense of ownership over their experience.”

Change of Guard

Presearch came online in 2020, and although fully functional, has been in a testing phase ever since. In fact, after the European Commission imposed a fine of €4.3 billion on Google for misusing Android to increase its search engine market share, the company added the ability for people in Europe to replace the default search option with one of several others, including Presearch.

After years of testing, Presearch’s decentralized search network is now live, meaning all search traffic of the service runs over the 65,000 volunteer-run nodes around the world. According to Presearch’s press release, the search engine has 3.8 million registered users and handles 150 million monthly searches, though its network is capable of processing a lot more.

In addition to routing search traffic, Presearch also anonymizes the searches as they’re handed off to individual nodes. It touts its improved anti-abuse system and enhanced search results experience, as some of its benefits over existing centralized search engines like Google and Bing.

“For years, centralized technologies have allowed big-tech and legacy institutions to profit from our search data and build multi-billion-dollar walled gardens,” asserted Pape. “Decentralized technology is a product of the push for web3 to drive innovation around ownership, freedom, and privacy.”

Part of the incentive for running a node is earning PRE tokens, which is the Presearch cryptocurrency based on the Ethereum blockchain. Node operators are rewarded with small amounts of PRE tokens for every query they process.

These tokens are also central to how ads are displayed on Presearch. The network has introduced the concept of keyword staking that enables PRE token holders to commit or lock them against specific words. These are matched against user search queries.

Through decentralized search, we’re establishing a method for anyone online to benefit from and contribute to the search engine they use.

Michael Christen, creator of the open source distributed search engine YaCy, remains unimpressed. Unlike Presearch’s approach, YaCy’s decentralized network relies on the principles of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Each YaCy peer crawls the internet independently to build the index of web pages that’s then shared with other YaCy peers.

“You identify decentralization by the fact that there is not a central place where you search or where the index is generated,” Christen told Lifewire over email. “That is not the case here [with Presearch].”

Acknowledging the differences between the two, Pape said Presearch has taken a similar approach to YaCy by building a search engine powered by a community. However, he opined that despite being an early pioneer in decentralized search, YaCy just never took off because it’s too complicated and offers a relatively poor quality of results.

“We’ve simplified decentralized search by accessing existing data sources while we build our own independent index, allowing a better user experience and fewer complications,” explained Pape. “Nonetheless, competition in the search industry is important and good for the ecosystem, and we welcome YaCy and others to join us in attempting to make a dent in Google’s monopoly on search.”

By Mayank Sharma

Fact checked by Jerri Ledford

Sourced from Lifewire

In News

Elon Musk speaks to Twitter staff in first all-hands meeting where he turned up 10 minutes late, discussed alien existence and said he will tolerate ‘pretty outrageous tweets’ ahead of his $44 billion takeover

June 23, 2022 No Comments

By Alex Hammer For Dailymail.Com

The all-hands meeting was set to start at 9 am PT but held an hour late
The meeting, a Q&A, saw Musk speak to 7,500 employees from a shakily held smartphone, which he looked to be holding in his hand.
Musk proposed prospective policies such as having users pay for verification
The CEO said that only ‘excellent’ contributors are entitled to work from home
He was not asked by staffers about his commitment to the looming Twitter deal

Elon Musk spoke to staffers at Silicon Valley tech giant Twitter for the first time Thursday, in a virtual meeting that saw the outspoken exec set plans for the company ahead of his $44 billion takeover.

The all-hands meeting, held just after 9 am PT, saw Musk speak to 7,500 employees from a shakily held smartphone, which he looked to be holding in his hand.

Arriving ten minutes late, Musk, 51, utilized a freewheeling Q&A format for the conference, where he addressed topics ranging from free speech, layoffs, and his preference for in-person work.

Musk also mused about the existence of aliens and other space civilizations during the hour-long talk, and affirmed his stance that the social media company should strive to help ‘civilization and consciousness.’

Musk also addressed plans to take the position of CEO of the company ahead of the planned takeover, as well as his own political stance.

It was the billionaire’s first interaction with the company’s thousands of rank-in-file workers, whom he will likely soon take charge of if his buyout proves successful.

Elon Musk spoke to staffers at Silicon Valley tech giant Twitter for the first time Thursday, in a meeting that saw the exec set plans for the company ahead of his $44 billion takeover

It was the billionaire’s first interaction with the company’s thousands of rank-in-file workers, whom he will likely soon take charge of if his buyout proves successful

Reporters said Musk addressed topics ranging from free speech, layoffs, and his preference for in-person work during the hourlong call, held Thursday morning

The Musk-led meeting, much like the man himself, served as an amalgam of both humour and substance.

In it, the South African mogul set the lofty goal of growing the site’s userbase to 1 billion monthly/daily active users – more than four times its current number of users.

The company said in its Q1 2022 earnings that it had 229 million users as of March.

While outlining a plan to achieve that number, Musk declared that the social media would only be truly successful if it can somehow further civilization and collective consciousness, he said.

He further told staff that he felt advertising should remain important for the company – contradicting previous assertions that the site should not run ads, Reuters reported.

‘I think advertising is very important for Twitter,’ Musk said. ‘I’m not against advertising. I would probably talk to the advertisers and say, like, “hey, let’s just make sure the ads are as entertaining as possible.”‘

While he said he wants ads to be entertaining, Musk proclaimed that he would not allow people to advertise ‘bad products’ that do not deliver on makers’ promises.

Musk, who has described himself as a moderate in recent years but has showed increasingly right-wing views in recent months, was then asked by staffers at the notoriously progressive company about his political views, which have seemed to shift as of late

Musk responded by reiterating that he supports ‘moderate politics’ and that he’s ‘pretty close to center.’

He added that he wants to maintain users’ free speech on the platform, by allowing extreme or ‘outrageous’ views on their social media – as long as they are within the bounds of the law.

Musk went on to say that he has voted Democratic at every election until this week, when he cast a ballot for Republican Texas Rep. Maya Flores – an assertion he had already made on the platform Wednesday.

Meanwhile, world’s richest man Musk is currently embroiled in a months-long deal to but Silicon Valley social media giant Twitter for roughly $44 billion – and his stark anti-remote sentiments would likely fly in the face of the company’s more relaxed work from home rules

Just hours before, Musk announced on the platform that he was leaning toward Conservative Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a potential next president, and predicted a ‘red wave’ would hit the country come November for midterm elections.

Musk, a staunch libertarian, went on to posit that making Twitter a paid service may prove beneficial to the company.

He said that one of his goals was to make the platform too expensive for foreign entities to feasibly deploy armies of bots – such as those used by Russian agents on the platform to influence the 2016 presidential election – to influence public opinion.

The conversation then turned to Musk’s view on remote working – a subject that seemed to be on the top of the minds of staffers at the meeting, which was moderated by a Twitter executive.

Musk has previously said he would fire Tesla employees if they did not work at least 40 hours a week in their respective offices.

Musk has also hit out against remote working policies in recent months, blasting Americans for ‘trying to avoid going to work at all’ – in contrast to workers in China who stay at the factory ‘burning the 3am oil’.

In a surprising exception, Musk said that only “excellent contributors” should be permitted to work from home and that too many people were dwelling on the idea of remote work.

Meanwhile, as a private company, Musk said that Twitter would have a similar compensation structure to that of SpaceX, offering stock and options awards and liquidity windows every six months.

An employee then asked if the businessman desired to take the position of CEO if the deal – which has been approved but put on pause over Musk’s concerns of the number of fake or spam accounts on the service – does go through.

Musk, however, seemed to brush away the question with a non-answer, saying that he’s not that hung up on titles but does want to ‘drive the product in a particular direction.’

He went on to cite the level of responsibility the role demands, and the ‘chores’ CEOs typically have to deal with.

And while he said that he doesn’t really care what the title is, the mogul went on to assert that people do need to listen to him if the deal goes through.

Then, in a bizarre turn, the conversation turned to extraterrestrials, sources who attended the meeting said.

According to insiders, Musk – going on a tangent – said conceded he hasn’t seen actual evidence of aliens, but added that does not mean they do not exist.

‘I have seen no actual evidence for aliens,’ the Tesla and SpaceX CEO reportedly said.

On the more serious topic of layoffs, Musk said that any nixings would be considered on a performance basis.

In response, employees reportedly wrote in a Slack chatroom meant to send in prospective questions to be approved by the presiding moderator, CMO Leslie Berland, that many of their worries about layoffs, remote work, and diversity measures were confirmed during Musk’s spiel.

Employees reportedly flooded the chatroom with memes where they jokingly branded themselves ‘exceptional’ to fit in with Musk’s proposed remote policy, and complained that Musk was not providing any useful answers on his vision for the company.

According to a source who spoke to CNBC, the majority of the reactions on the Slack messaging board were negative in nature.

The meeting did not see Musk address his commitment to the Twitter deal, which has yet to be finalized.

Sources reportedly said he was not asked the question.

The Tesla Boss has been complaining about fake accounts or bots on the Twitter platform and said that this has complicated his bid to purchase the company for $44billion.

Musk claimed he wanted to pause the deal to verify that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 percent of the company’s 229 million users during the first quarter.

‘My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does,’ he said.

Musk has speculated that bots could make up at least half of Twitter’s users, more than 10 times the company’s official estimate – an issue that he repeatedly reiterated during Thursday’s discussion.

The tweet caused Twitter’s stocks to nosedive since his deal was announced, as analysts speculated that Musk is trying to negotiate a lower purchase price or pull out of the agreement entirely.

He is currently being investigated by the SEC for those claims.

Twitter shares climbed a bit during the meeting, and and are up 0.8 percent from Wednesday’s close. Tesla’s stock, meanwhile, is still down 7.8 percent, as many question if the mogul can successfully steer three companies ahead of the looming Twitter deal – which will cost Musk a cool $1billion if he backs out.

The SpaceX CEO has seemingly taken a break from running his businesses as the deal sits in limbo, spending time with his new girlfriend, Australian actress Natasha Bassett.

he couple enjoyed a low-key lunch in the billionaires paradise of St Tropez on Monday.

The pair were seen enjoying a meal at the Cheval Blanc hotel, where rooms cost upwards of $1,300-a-night, a drop in the ocean for the world’s richest man.

Musk, and Bassett, the CEO’s youngest girlfriend yet at 27, sat in full view of the hotel’s pool and bathers.

The couple are believed to have started dating in February this year, when they were spotted getting off Musk’s private jet in L.A.

Musk welcomed his second child with ex-girlfriend Grimes in December last year via surrogate. They called quits on their romance two months earlier in September.

Musk has been in the South of France for the last week attending galas and weddings

The pair chatted, drank wine and ate fries as they caught up in between events in the busy Riviera hotspot

Elon Musk and Natasha Bassett saunter bathers who were oblivious to the world’s richest man

By Alex Hammer For Dailymail.Com

Sourced form MailOnline

In News

8 Time-Saving Content Marketing Tools to Ramp Up Your Team’s Productivity

June 22, 2022 No Comments

By Neelam Goswami

Content marketing is an effort-intensive area of business. Creating quality content, distributing and promoting it to reach the right audience, and ensuring it delivers on your business goals is no mean feat.

From digging up ideas to measuring the performance of your content, there is a lot that content teams and marketers have to strive for. Managing all of it without the right content marketing tools is like sending an army to war without ammunition.

The Content Marketing Software market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 18.7% globally, reaching a market size of nearly USD 22.6 billion by 2028. So if you aren’t making use of the right productivity tools for your content process, you might be falling behind in the race. Productivity-boosting content marketing software can help you automate and speed up a lot of tasks for your content team, freeing up time for more strategic work.

From generating ideas to actually creating and scheduling content, there is a tool for almost every marketing activity that you can think of today. But picking the right tools from a sea of options is a challenge in itself. There’s a lot to consider. On one hand, you may be taking productivity up by a few notches but on the other, you’re probably paying a lot more than what you’re gaining – bringing your ROI down.

Here are a few time-saving tools for content teams and marketers that can do you justice, both in terms of capabilities and pricing.

1. Narrato – Content creation, planning, and collaboration

Content creation is by far one of the most challenging areas of content marketing. In a 2022 survey by SEMRush, some of the top content marketing challenges pointed out by respondents included creating content that resonates with their audience, improving content SEO performance, and producing authentic, high-quality content.

The scattered toolset that your content team has to use to plan, create and optimize content to deliver results does not make things easy for anyone. Often both productivity and collaboration take a hit, reflecting poorly on the final outcome.

This is where the content creation, optimization, and management platform, Narrato shines through. Narrato brings together all the key tools required for content planning, workflow, and team management, plus content creation and optimization – all in one place.

Narrato’s key features include:

Content creation and optimization – You can create content on Narrato itself and optimize your content too. They have a powerful AI content assistant that lets you optimize content for SEO, grammar, and readability. You can also use the AI writer on the platform to generate content for common use cases like creating blog post intros, conclusions, outlines, improving your content or turning paragraphs into bullets, and so on. The platform also has a free image search tool and a Canva integration for creating graphics to go with your content.
Content planning – The content planning tools on Narrato include an AI idea generator for generating new topics for your articles and blog posts. You can generate automatic SEO content briefs to get suggestions on keywords, topics/questions to include, references, and other SEO parameters. To help you organize and plan your content efforts better, there is a content calendar and kanban boards as well.
Content and workflow management – On Narrato, you can assign tasks and take every task through a set of workflow statuses, ensuring you are in control of the process. Workflow automation and bulk actions boost productivity and help save time throughout the content process. All your content can be neatly organized in folders under projects to manage a repository.
Content collaboration and communication – Users get access to on-platform messaging and in-line text commenting for easier collaboration on a content task.
Team management – There are different user roles with custom access to give you better control over which users can access which projects. There is a Client (Guest) role for agencies and a freelance content creator team can also be easily managed including their payment accounting and management.
Content marketplace – Narrato has a content marketplace too, with hundreds of expert freelance writers. Your order is automatically matched to the best-suited writer on the platform and the finished content is delivered within 24 to 48 hours.

Pricing:

Narrato has a free plan for individual content creators and teams just getting started. The Narrato Workspace paid plans start at $8 per user per month which include advanced features like Revision History, Automatic SEO content briefs, Freelancer payment management, white labelling, and more. The pricing for the content marketplace is bucketed under 4 service levels.

2. Easel.ly – Infographic creation

Every content marketing team needs to create visuals and infographics to go with their content. And hiring a graphic designer is not always an option, be it for budget constraints or other limitations. Neither is it easy for content creators without design experience or knowledge to learn graphic design, because the learning curve can be quite steep.

Intuitive software that allows you to easily create infographics, without any expertise in design, is a must-have productivity tool for content teams.

Easel.ly is a graphic design tool that will save you a lot of time on your infographics and visual elements. Apart from infographics, you can build reports, presentations, ads, charts, and more. There are thousands of templates for various use cases, such as health, food, travel, product comparisons, social media, financial, and many others.

The ease of use of the platform makes it convenient to operate for anyone on your content team. You can add team members to collaborate on a design. You can also share your designs directly from the platform via email, a public link, or even on Facebook and Twitter.

Easel.ly also has an unlimited graphic design service if you’re planning to outsource it, particularly handy for small businesses with a small content team. You can choose to hire a designer part-time or full-time and all you will have to do is share a brief.

Pricing:

Easel.ly pricing plans include student, individual, and business plans. The Individual plan is priced at $4 per month and the Business plan with additional features costs $5 per month. Paid plans for graphic design services on Easel.ly start at $120 per month

3. Portent’s Content Idea Generator – Ideation and topic inspiration

The first step in content creation for marketing is generating ideas. Finding new and engaging topics for your blog posts, articles, eBooks, podcasts, videos, etc. can be tough, especially if you are creating content frequently. If you have to compete in the market, your content has to be both fresh and yet something that the audience wants to read about. And the topic is the first thing anyone would look at to decide if it’s worth their time.

A good ideation and inspiration tool can be a lot more productive than having to brainstorm new topics with the entire team every time.

Portent’s Content Idea Generator is one such ideation and topic inspiration tool that many marketers vouch for. It is a simple tool with very little to talk about. But it does what it says. All you need to do is enter your subject or keyword and the tool churns out an attention-grabbing title in seconds. If you want alternatives you go on clicking on ‘See Another Title’ to generate new suggestions.

You can also click on the title generated to get some quick tips on why the title could work and how to craft better titles.

Pricing:

Portent’s Content Idea Generator is free to use.

4. Norbert – Email finder

In content marketing, you often have to reach out to people, be it influencers in your industry or another brand you would like to partner with. Reaching out is not the hard part, but finding their contact information is. It is hard to find the right email addresses for your cold outreach, and if your messages don’t land in the right inbox, it is just wasted time and effort.

An email finder tool like Norbert can be very handy for your content team in this regard.

The tool helps you find email addresses based on the contact name and company URL you provide. The platform also has a contact database that is regularly updated. Email addresses retrieved by Norbert are also verified to check for accuracy and assigned with a ‘certainty score’.

This makes the process of contact extraction a lot faster than the manual process of digging through databases and social media accounts. Norbert also helps you build contact lists for building resourceful relationships in business. In content marketing, Norbert can help you find relevant emails for reaching out to other blogs for link-building efforts, and also for content distribution.

Norbert integrates with most other platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, Google Chrome, and others.

Pricing:

The first 50 emails you extract are free on Norbert. The Norbert paid plans start at $49 per month for up to 1,000 leads and go all the way up to 50,000 leads at $499 per month.

5. Alitu – Audio and podcast editing

Podcasts are a raging trend in the content marketing world right now. Brands that are not investing in podcasts may soon be losing out on a major chunk of their audience if this trend sustains. But creating podcasts and especially editing them to arrive at something share-worthy is a painstaking task.

So if you are considering including podcasts in your content strategy, you will need an audio editing tool to ensure quality.

Unless you have a professional on your team, you should be looking for more intuitive and easy-to-use tools where you don’t have to put in much time or effort.

Alitu provides just that. It is a simple recording and editing tool that has some very useful features. The automated audio clean-up automatically reduces all background noise and levels the audio when you upload a file, for a crisp and clear final product.

You can record podcasts remotely with up to 5 guests using the call recording feature. The recorded call is added to the Alitu library, so no upload is required. You can also highlight any mistakes and silences that you don’t want in the final output and the tool will remove them for you. Intros and outros to your podcasts can be set once and will be added to every new podcast created.

You can also directly publish your podcast to your favourite hosting services directly from Alitu.

Pricing:

Alitu offers a free trial. There is a monthly and yearly plan priced at $32 per month and $320 per year respectively.

6. Hashtagify – Hashtag analytics

As a content marketer, your primary goal is for your content to be found by the right audience, irrespective of which channels you publish on. Your team may be creating excellent content but if it doesn’t reach the right audience, the effort is all in vain. For your social media content, using the right hashtags is one sure-fire way to increase your reach.

But finding the right hashtags again demands research. From finding what is trending to what your target audience may be searching for, it’s a lot for a small content marketing team to handle.

Using a hashtag analytics tools like Hashtagify can help. Hashtagify boosts your hashtag marketing by suggesting the best hashtags for Twitter and Instagram based on your target keyword. Along with relevant hashtags to use, it also shows you a popularity score for your target hashtag, a recent popularity score, and monthly and weekly trends.

It also offers hashtag suggestions based on your content and also helps identify Twitter influencers in your niche, who you could connect with.

Pricing:

The platform offers a free trial. Hashtagify paid plans start at $29 per month.

7. Tomato Timer – Time tracking

Nothing helps save time more than keeping track of time. This is why your content marketing team needs a time tracking tool that can help them be productive, take much-needed breaks between work and maintain a good balance.

The Tomato Time, recently acquired by Toptal, is a simple and easy-to-use time-tracking tool that works on the Pomodoro technique in which you break your work into 25-minute sessions followed by 5-minute breaks. With the Tomato Timer, however, you can choose between a short and a long break of 10 minutes as well.

You can change the settings to customize the work and break session times. You also get desktop alerts on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Pricing:

Tomato Timer is a free tool.

8. Murf – AI voice generator

Adding narration to your videos is a great way to add a human touch and help the audience connect better with the content. But adding voiceovers to videos is not everyone’s cup of tea. Neither is hiring voiceover artists very pocket-friendly for every business.

This is where you can save both time and money by trying a voice generator tool instead. An AI voice generator tool like Murf can help you create quality, human-like voiceovers for all your videos, animations, podcasts and similar content.

Murf helps you create studio-quality voiceovers for different use cases within minutes. There are different options available for product developers, marketers, authors, animators, podcasters, and more. The Murf library has over 130 text-to-speech voices in 20 different languages. You can easily upload your creatives, be it a video, image, or music, and sync it with the voiceover you choose. You can also change the pitch, punctuation, and emphasis where you need to so that your message is rightly conveyed in the voiceover.

Not just text-to-speech, but you can also convert your voice recordings to AI voiceovers. With the Enterprise plan, you can add your team members to collaborate on projects too.

Pricing:

The free plan gives you access to up to 10 minutes of voice generation and transcription. Murf paid plans start with the Basic plan for individuals priced at $13 per month and can go up to $166 for the Enterprise plan for teams.

Wrapping up

In the competitive world of content marketing, time is money. The more productive your content marketing team is, the more likely it is that their brilliant ideas will be put to action.

But they cannot deliver their best unless they have all the resources they need for success. If your team is overworked and stressed, they cannot be productive. These few time-saving tools should be a good place to start when it comes to empowering and enabling your team.

With a little help from these tools, you are sure to witness a noticeable difference in both productivity and your team’s morale.

By Neelam Goswami

Neelam Goswami is a content writer and marketer working with a leading content writing service – Godot Media. She has written for several reputed brands in the digital and content marketing space including Neal Schaffer, Mio, and Content Studio, among others.

Sourced form JeffBullas.com

In News

Three trends that will have your marketing department humming

June 22, 2022 No Comments

By Liz Carter

As technology transforms and industries shift, important new marketing trends are beginning to emerge.

Change is in the air. Of course, most things are in a constant state of change, but technology and digital transformation are driving bigger changes at a faster pace. This is impacting marketing departments across every industry. In response, three exciting trends are emerging that will help your marketing team run like a well-oiled machine, even as circumstances shift.

TREND #1: RENEWED FOCUS ON AGILITY

Markets are experiencing disruption, business structures are changing, customer needs are evolving, and your competitor’s product features are advancing at breakneck speeds. Many organizations are struggling to keep up with the pace of business today.

Development teams faced this reality years ago and responded by implementing agile methodologies that dramatically accelerated product development. But doing so created challenges in other areas. If adjacent departments aren’t equally agile, they can create bottlenecks. Today, marketing organizations are looking to boost agility by building flexible teams that help organizations turn on a dime.

But an agile team isn’t built overnight. Two key components are required: a company culture that supports and embraces change, and technologies that support collaboration, enable communication, and help teams adapt to new situations. These technologies are widely available, and most organizations have implemented them.

At my company, we’ve experienced several structural changes over the years, including an acquisition followed by a spinout to private equity and a shift to virtual events and digital campaigns—exactly the types of changes that require a marketing team that’s ready to pivot at a moment’s notice.

When organizations experience structural changes, customers worry. Our biggest challenge was helping our customers understand how our new business structure would—or would not—impact them. Overnight, our focus shifted, and we realized how important flexibility really is.

A FEW POINTERS ON DEVELOPING AGILITY

Increased agility comes with experience, so practice working together as a team to address challenges. This is best done in times of relative calm and not during a crisis. Start by ensuring you can internally communicate the changes taking place and the reasons for them.

Secondly, focus on process. Help teams understand how the changes will impact the projects they’re working on and allow them to set a new course that realigns their efforts with the latest corporate strategy.

Finally, promote cross-functional collaboration by bringing teams together for regular meetings that ensure everyone knows what everyone else is working on.

Most of all, train your teams to anticipate change as a constant and to understand that through change comes opportunity.

TREND #2: MARKETING AUTOMATION 2.0

The introduction of automation transformed marketing. Data collection, analytics, and streamlined processes allowed us to approach potential customers with greater precision. But automation is no longer delivering the necessary results.

Modern marketing teams are now shifting to tools that provide data insights and metrics across entire accounts. Casting a wider net with a greater degree of personalization allows us to better understand the people we’re marketing to and helps elicit the desired response.

Today, my team and I are seeing more participants in the buying cycle. There may be 10 or more people from the same company visiting our website and becoming involved in the decision-making process. To capitalize, we’re shifting from a qualified lead to a qualified account made up of multiple individuals engaged in a buying cycle.

My team has also started moving to tools that offer more information about an organization’s combined journeys across our site to identify what they’re researching and why. And we’re rethinking how leads are scored and how entire teams should be approached with the most effective messages.

The more we understand engagement across an entire account, the more relevant the content we serve them will be—and the more context and data we can provide our sales teams.

TREND #3: THE RISE OF SHORT FORM VIDEO CONTENT

My team at ServiceMax recently performed a website analysis that showed two of the top three most viewed assets on our website are videos. Along with analyst reports, videos are driving the most downloads and the most form fills—important in building a healthy sales funnel.

It’s clear that as people get busier and attention spans shorten, videos are the answer. They are easier to consume, and people seem more willing to click on them versus long form articles where they tend to just scan headlines and subtitles. Videos also provide more control over the content, as it can be very challenging to get everything you want to convey into a subtitle.

CHANGE ISN’T LIMITED TO MARKETING

In many ways, the world seems to have entered a state of rapid evolution. While it’s difficult to see exactly when or how we will emerge from this process, it’s clear there will be some new form of normal. Until then, our focus is on identifying changing situations early, understanding the potential impact of those changes, and quickly and effectively adapting to them. It’s time to prepare ourselves, our teams, and our organizations to operate adeptly, even as the sands are shifting under our feet.

Feature Image Credit: Rawpixel.com / AdobeStock

By Liz Carter

Sourced from Fast Company

In News

What is Local SEO … and Why is it So Important for Your Small Business?

June 22, 2022 No Comments

Sourced from Boss Magazine

When running a small business, your local community represents your lifeline, main profit source, and target audience. Even more importantly, your community embodies your greatest…

But, how can you tap into your local users’ spending power and loyalty? That’s where local SEO can become your most powerful tool! Here’s what you need to know to get started!

What is Local SEO? Let’s Cover the Basics

Today, Google searches for local information and services account for nearly 50% of the total volume of user queries. Of these, over 80% of local searches conducted on mobile devices convert into sales!

Local SEO is the marketing process that helps your brand appear at the top of the search engine result page or Google’s 3-pack for any relevant local search. Thanks to Local Search Engine Optimization, you can grow your website’s organic traffic and expand your customer base.

But, even more importantly, Local SEO allows your business to appear in front of the eyes of prospective customers who are already looking for your services in your area!

Should You Invest in Local SEO? Yes – Here’s Why

While Local SEO is a vital marketing strategy for all brick-and-mortar enterprises, all businesses can benefit from it. For example, Local SEO best practices should be part of all eCommerce SEO strategies. At the same time, tools like Google My Business and directory citations can help private sellers without a website.

Some of the benefits of investing in Local SEO include:

Improved business visibility on a local level
Secure a position in Google’s local 3-pack, which receives over 30% of local search clicks.
Improved conversion rate
Reduced advertising costs
Improved long-term search engine ranking

Ultimately, this strategy is a must-have for any business looking to cut through the competition, regardless of specific long-term goals, niche, or business type.

3 Ways To Succeed at Local SEO

When choosing the best results for any local search, search engines like Google seek specific signals that determine a website’s relevance, distance from the user, and prominence. So, if you are looking to bypass the competition and ensure that your business appears first in local searches, you should:

Hire an SEO Specialist in Your Area, e.g. Sydney, Australia

The specific challenges and benefits of Local SEO vary by location and business niche. That is why the most important step that you can take is to partner with a local SEO expert.

For example, if you are looking to establish a local business in New South Wales’s capital city, you should look no further than a consultant that provides SEO services in Sidney.

An expert with local knowledge can help you identify your competitors, build relevant backlinks (such as through local newspapers and magazines), and create content that resonates with your local community.

Make Use Of The Right Tools, e.g. Google My Business

There is a range of Local SEO tools you can deploy to start climbing rankings and secure your spot in Google’s Local Pack. These include:

An optimized Google My Business profile
Up-to-date and consistent NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number) information
Social media platforms
Online directories and citations
On-page signals (i.e.: services you offer and keywords)
Online reviews

Create Content That is Relevant To Your Local Audience

Localized content is essential to engage with your audience – both on your website and social media pages. What’s more, using localized tags and meta titles can help you establish more signals for Google’s crawlers to pick up and assess.

Unsure about what your content strategy should be? A social media manager or local SEO specialist can help you understand the type of information and media your audience is more likely to engage with.

Build a Genuine Community

One of the most important aspects of Local SEO is real-life community engagement. By networking with competitors, local charities, and complementary businesses to yours, your local community can become your competitive advantage and help you build a solid reputation. Make sure to carry out your Local SEO efforts both digitally and in your daily life!

Sourced from Boss Magazine