How to Find New Ideas for Your Blog Posts

Since good blogs need regular content, many blog owners find themselves struggling to find topics. Unless your blog deals with current news events of some kind, it can be difficult to think of something new to write about that will interest your audience. With a little creativity, you will be able to develop a string of topics that will constantly keep your audience coming back for more.

Use Topic Generating Engines Online

Believe it or not, the Internet is filled with websites designed to help you generate effective and entertaining content ideas. After using a prominent search engine to find some topic generators, all you need to do is tell the topic generator what you want to write about and it will give you plenty of great ideas.

Since these generators use an algorithm that tends to create waves of similar topics, you do not want to use these tools as your only source of topics. But you can get plenty of great ideas from what these pieces of software have to offer.

Use Visitor Input

Do you get questions from your blog visitors about various topics? If you do, then you are getting a steady stream of great blog post ideas that your visitors will find interesting. If one visitor is asking a question, then there is a good chance that many more people would be interested in the answer. Use visitor questions as topics for your blog, and you will create a wide variety of popular topics.

Social Media Interactions

Another way that your company interacts with customers is social media. You can use questions and comments from social media as topics, much the same way you can use visitor's questions. Just be careful to not get combative with your audience by answering questions and using topics that could ignite a confrontation.

Read Other Blogs

You should always read blogs from other people in your industry for a few reasons. For one thing, blogs from the competition help you to keep up with industry trends. Competitor blogs are also were you can find great topic ideas. If you notice that the competition is not able to answer questions to its traffic adequately on a particular subject, then you can post the answer on your blog and become an industry hero.

Use Search Engines

When you are really stuck for topic ideas, then open up an online search engine and do a search for your industry. You may find something on a news website or some other outlet that catches your eye. If you can work that into a good blog post, then you just solved your own problem.

Hire a Digital Agency 🙂

Digital Agencies have teams of professional content writers who can come up for ideas for your blog, and then generate the content for you. For a reasonable price, you can have access to a professional creative staff who can write content that will interest your readers and increase your traffic.

Finding good blog topics can be difficult if you don't know where to look. Once you master the art of hunting down topics, then you will always have the ideas you need to create engaging posts that will keep your existing traffic coming back, and constantly add new visitors to your blog.

4 Ways To Drive PPC Conversions

While all marketing is designed to sell products or services, some forms of marketing are expected to get more direct results than others. For example, the investment a company makes in pay per click marketing is considered successful when the conversion rate is high. The conversion rate is the percentage of clicks that turn into sales, and the number needs to be high if a PPC campaign is going to be considered successful.

There is plenty of talk about how to improve PPC campaigns to make them more effective, but what clients really want is information on how to increase their conversion rate and get more sales out of their efforts. Increasing your conversion rate occurs when you improve your campaign, but there are other things you can do to increase conversions when you are using a PPC marketing approach.

Be Mindful Of How Your PPC Affects Other Marketing Programs

There are metrics you can use to see how changes in your PPC program not only affect your return on that investment, but also on how they affect other marketing approaches you are using. Does your PPC changes increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign? It is important to keep an eye on the dynamics between all of your marketing programs if you want to get the most out of them.

Are You Thinking For The Future?

Is your PPC campaign designed to appeal to the customers you have now and the new customer segments you want to attract? While good marketing is only done at an identified target audience, you can expand your marketing influence by including keywords in your PPC campaign that start to draw in audiences that you plan on targeting in the future. This is how you lay the foundation for future marketing success, and how you can use your PPC keywords to grab the attention of people who don't yet realize that they need or want your products.

Are You Relying Too Heavily On PPC?

The response from PPC marketing is meant to be immediate, but it is not always the best approach to take. When you spend time examining the effects of all of your marketing programs, then you start to see what types of effects your PPC campaign has on audiences and how you can enhance your marketing results by the proper balance of all of your marketing campaigns.

Which PPC Outlet Is The Best For Each Campaign?

A professional marketing organization will utilize all of the available PPC platforms to reach your audience, but you want to identify the best platforms to maximize your campaign. If you notice that Bing reaches a more technical audience, then you can use a PPC program based on the Bing search engine to sell your more technical products. By analyzing each platform and understanding the audiences they reach, you can get great results with each of your PPC campaigns.

The point of a good PPC campaign is to drive conversions and bring in revenue. More than any other form of marketing, a PPC campaign is expected to generate revenue almost immediately or else it is considered a failure. In order to increase your PPC conversions, you need to look at how your PPC campaign works as a part of your marketing efforts, and then maximize those efforts to get the best results.

4 Social Media Tips For 2016

Social media is not going away any time soon as it has started to replace a variety of communication and media platforms for people all around the world. More people get their news and communicate with friends and family through social media than many other traditional forms of communication.

As social media evolves, you need to understand the best ways to utilize these platforms as 2015 transitions into 2016. There will be a few changes to the way users interact with social media in 2016, and your company needs to be up to date on those changes if you want to get the most from your Internet presence.

Go Mobile

If you have not already downloaded the mobile apps for your favorite social media platforms, then do so now so you can take advantage of them. Not only are mobile apps convenient, but many social media platforms are starting to offer features to mobile users that cannot be found on standard desktop computers.

For example, Snapchat is a social media platform that can only be accessed through its app. If you want to stay up to date on social media in 2016, then start downloading apps.

Make Way For Twitter

Twitter has been growing in popularity for a couple of years now and it is looking to have a breakout year in 2016. What is a breakout year for a social media platform? It is the year when that platform becomes the social media platform of choice for people all over the world.

Twitter is at the top of a lot of lists for 2016, and that includes lists that talk about the social media platform businesses will want to use. Make way for Twitter in 2016 and start learning the platform if you want to grow your business.

Dial Down On Facebook

Facebook was a great idea when it first came out and that great idea was so popular that it put Myspace on a permanent vacation. But everyone knows that Internet trends come and go, and Facebook is a social media trend that is on the way out.

Over the past couple of years, Facebook has managed to monetize and segment its service so bad that it no longer offers any real value to businesses. If you want to market your business on Facebook, then it will cost you a lot of money. For example, every post a business puts on its Facebook page must be boosted (paid exposure) if that business wants to reach its real target audience. Facebook was a great idea, until it got greedy. Now Facebook is on the way out.

Experiment With Other Platforms

While Twitter is the rise, you can start experimenting with other social media platforms to find the one that will replace Twitter some day. Snapchat, Pinterest, Instagram and Vine are just some of the emerging social media platforms that you should check out and see if they work for your business. Remember to talk to an Internet marketing expert about matching up the demographic of a social media platform with the demographic of your target audience.

As 2016 approaches, your business needs to get up to date on the latest social media trends. Your target audience is already transitioning to the newest social media site of interest, which means that your company should be on that platform as well.

Five Tips For Changing Your Website

Most website owners have no problem overhauling their website once in a while to try and update its functionality and make things interesting for their web traffic. While updating the website once in a while is essential to its operation, actually changing the site is something that should be planned and done properly.

It is true that making a wholesale change of your website could positively impact your web traffic, but it could also temporarily derail your traffic if you are not careful. There are some tips you should consider before you make significant changes to your website to make sure that you maintain your flow of web traffic and sustain revenue.

Group Changes Together

If you have a list of changes you want to make to your website, then your best bet is to group them all together and launch the changes all at once. If you have a wish list of things you want to do with the website that would lead to a complete overhaul, then you may want to consider doing all of those changes at once and launching a whole new website. It is easier for users to handle a large group of changes, instead of trying to adjust to changes happening in rapid succession over the course of several weeks or months.

Make A Big Deal Out Of It

For the most part, people love changes to websites and you can use that to your advantage. Once you have decided to make your website changes, you should create a little marketing campaign to create some excitement over the launch date. You can create pricing promotions and use other marketing tactics to turn your website change into more traffic.

Do A Test Run Of Your Changes First

Few things are more annoying to website users than a website that took out a perfectly fine website function and replaced it with something that does not work as well. New does not mean better and you need to make sure that you do a test run of your changes to make sure they enhance the functionality of your website before you allow them to go live.

Get Customer Input

Before you start doing any detailed planning for your website changes and long before you start doing any programming, you should utilize social media to see what your customers think of your website. If there are certain features or aspects of your site that are getting a lot of attention from people on social media, then you may want to consider making changes to those aspects during your website overhaul.

Consider Whether Or Not Change Is Necessary

If your website is generating good web traffic, then any changes you make are going to disrupt that. In business, you definitely do not want to fix something that is not broken. Write out the changes you want to make to your site and determine if they are really necessary, or if they can wait until you get more ideas.

Making any change to a website, positive or negative, is going to initially cause your status in the search engines to suffer. If you made good changes, then you will see your search engine results exceed what your previous web traffic numbers. But if your changes upset your traffic, then your website may not recover. Plan your website changes carefully and be sure that they are necessary before you make them.

Why And How To Change Your Company Logo

Changing your company logo is never something you do on a whim. The decision to change your company logo should only be done when it is absolutely necessary, and it should be a well-planned event. Your logo is something you invest a lot of time and money into as part of your branding efforts. When you are going to change that logo, you are going to change everything your customers already know about your company. That is why it has to be done right, or else your company will suffer.

Why Change Your Logo?

The best reason for changing your logo is if your company changes its name. Whether you merged with another company or changed your name for legal reasons, changing your logo to coincide with a name change can actually be a very effective marketing tactic.

Another reason people use to update their logo is to modernize it to fit contemporary styles. If you feel that you need to change your logo to keep up with a certain style or look, then you did not do a very good job of establishing your brand. There are companies with logos that are hundreds of years old that have never changed because there was no need to change. Instead of changing your logo to meet contemporary styles, you may want to have a professional marketing company look over your branding process and fix it for you.

How To Change Your Logo - Step 1: Design A New Logo

Unless you are a graphic design or marketing company, you should not be designing your logo yourself. A professional design company will create a memorable logo that will make your new name announcement more effective. Work closely with a professional marketing company to design a logo that best exemplifies your new company.

How To Change Your Logo - Step 2: Gradual Shift

The biggest mistake companies make when they change their logos is they choose a random date and then just change everything over. Suddenly, customers are getting invoices with new logos on them and the website has been completely changed. This is not going to give your customers time to adjust, which is why you need to use a gradual shift.

A gradual shift consists of transitional stationary that has both logos at the top and says that the old one is becoming the new one. You should develop the front page of your new website and then let customers preview the new page before you actually launch it. Let your customers ease into the new logo and it will be easier to say goodbye to the old one.

How To Change Your Logo - Step 3: Make The Change

In all of your marketing materials that talk about your transition to a new logo, give customers a date when the change will take place. It is easier to make it a significant date like the first day or last day of a month. When that date arrives, make the change by launching the new website and switching over to the new correspondence and invoicing materials.

By creating a gradual transition to a new logo, your customers will be at ease with the change and it will not disrupt your business. If you must change your logo, then hiring a professional marketing company to help you make the change properly is critically important.

3 Ways To Strengthen Your Remarketing Program

Remarketing is the process of taking visitors who have bounced from your website and turning them into buying customers. It can be an immediate result, or remarketing could take weeks to bring in a sale. But by staying touch with everyone who expressed some sort of interest in your company's Internet presence, you will be able to maximize your revenue and achieve your business goals.

Make Immediate Remarketing Contact

When a consumer is looking for products, they will usually go through several websites before they make their final decision. If your website is one of many that a consumer is using to get pricing and product availability, then you are definitely in the running to get the business. If that consumer does not place an order on your website during their initial search, then you must respond quickly with your remarketing program to bring in that business.

It is common for consumers to go through a list of websites looking for the best price and then settle on the last website they visit to place their order. When you have an aggressive remarketing program on your website, those consumers that left your site without placing an order will start to see ads on the other websites they browse. With this kind of exposure, you significantly increase the chances that the consumer will click on your ad and place the order on your website.

Get Involved In Google's Remarketing Program

Google's remarketing program is so comprehensive and effective that it is almost impossible to describe in this article. Not only can you customize what types of customers your Google remarketing program targets, but you can also collect a lot of marketing information that will allow you to update and improve your website.

Google allows you to create marketing programs based on remarketing data from past campaigns, and Google also has several different types of remarketing programs for you to choose from. When it comes to getting the most from a good remarketing campaign, it is important that your Internet marketing firm utilizes Google.

Separate Your Mobile And Standard Website Remarketing Programs

Many website owners either try to combine their mobile and standard websites into one remarketing program, or they choose to not put a remarketing program on their mobile website at all. Since the majority of consumers access your Internet presence through their mobile devices, it would be a very bad idea to ignore the remarketing potential of your mobile website.

Work with your Internet marketing team to develop very unique remarketing plans for your standard website and your mobile site. You will want to collect different types of information for each type of site, and you will want each site to utilize that information in different ways and react differently to remarketing opportunities. The best way to maximize your remarketing revenue is to develop focused plans for standard and mobile websites.

If you are not utilizing good remarketing programs, then you are letting revenue slip away. When consumers use your website, they are doing so for a reason. While that reason may not lead to a sale at that particular moment, you can use remarketing tactics to keep your company's Internet presence in front of interested customers and grab the revenue that you would have otherwise left behind.

3 Facts About Your Website Content For 2015

It seems like there is some new content rule coming out every week that caused marketing companies and content creators to have to alter the way they do business. The marketing experts who understand the changes being made to search engines and online marketing in general know that the core values of good content still remain and, in many ways, those core values have been reinforced by any changes made by search engines or other online exposure vehicles.

Companies always want to get the very best value for the content they put on their website and that can be difficult if those companies do not understand the basic values of good content. In 2015, the changes made by Google and other search engines only help to solidify the idea that content is king and the people who know how to utilize content will always grab the most traffic.

Quality Content Is Critical

For years, content written by people who did not speak English as a first language was ruling the Internet because it was stuffed with keywords. When Google cracked down on keyword stuffing, the content was still manipulated by the use of well-placed keyword phrases that sometimes did not match the rest of the content. Recently, Google has demanded that all websites utilize quality content, but the use of quality content has been something reputable marketing professionals have insisted on since the Internet was very young.

Good content needs to offer value to clients for it to be effective. Back in the early days, content that was stuffed with keywords brought traffic, but that traffic often bounced from those sites when it was realized that the websites offered no value. From the very first days of website marketing, good content has been the key to a successful website. Now that Google is insisting on good content, that only strengthens this notion that professionals have known for a long time.

Website Users Hate Intrusive Ads

Effective advertising is strategically placed around good content, but not within that content. The websites that generate a lot of traffic but then bury that traffic in pop-up ads and intrusive marketing tactics are starting to see less and less revenue, which only bolsters the notion that customers have intrusive ads.

The new organic ad and link placement techniques being used in 2015 help to get marketing content into the text of articles without causing readers to leave the website. Marketing experts are creating more non-intrusive ways to advertise to Internet users and it is those methods that are becoming the most effective.

Customized Content Works

In 2015, marketing experts were able to devise ways to use a consumer's web browsing habits to customize content and create focused marketing programs that appeal directly to those consumers. In the early days of the Internet, the desire to customize the user's experience led to the creation of a wide variety of Internet technologies and applications. Today, the ability to deliver customized content to a consumer has become important in the overall success of a company's marketing programs.

Your website content is still one of the most important marketing elements for your company on the Internet and through mobile computing platforms. Throughout 2015, marketing experts have been developing plans and programs that stick to the core values of good content and enhance a website's ability to bring in revenue-generating traffic. As long as your site sticks to the basics, you will find it easier to meet all of your marketing goals.

Best Ways To Use Printed Banners In Your Business

Sometimes success in business centers around who can call the most attention to themselves for the least amount of money. At a trade show, the company with the huge light show gets all of the traffic because it attracts a lot of attention. But there are ways to call attention to your company that are more subtle and cost-effective than a huge light show, but equally as effective.

Large, printed banners offer a great marketing value because they can be used over and over again in a variety of situations. The key is to know when to use your banners to call attention to your company and get a strong return on the relatively small investment you made in having those banners printed.

Storefront Window

Your company name is on the sign out in front of your business and all your banner does is repeat that company name. But the advantage your storefront has over your sign is that your storefront is at eye level with the people walking down the street. There are zoning laws regarding your sign, but you can hang your printed banner in your front window and attract traffic all day long.

If you feel like investing in focused banners for your window based on events or promotions in your store, then you will attract even more traffic. The next time you are planning a sale or promotion in your business, have a banner printed for your storefront window and watch how much more traffic you get this year than you got last year.

Outdoor Events

When you are part of outdoor festivals and events, it is critically important that people know where you company's booth is located. If you pay attention at outdoor events, you will see some companies with printed banners at their booths, and other companies without banners. The companies with the banners are always the ones attracting the traffic and taking full advantage of their event exposure.

Press Conferences

If your public relations people are doing a good job, then your company will host one or two press conferences each year that bring in good attendance. The key to getting maximum exposure from a press conference is to own the press conference and give the media plenty of visuals to take pictures of and talk about. A large banner at your press conference helps to enhance your brand name recognition with the media and it will also result in some free advertising when it shows up in the pictures and video from the conference.

Local Parades

Local parades are excellent marketing opportunities that companies often allow to pass by without using them. Contact parade organizers of the most popular parades in your area and offer to sponsor some part of the event. The result will be your company banner slowly moving down the street as it is seen by thousands of enthusiastic people.

A durable printed banner offers a lot of marketing opportunities to companies that know how to gain exposure. The return on the investment in a banner can be significant, provided you spend the time getting it seen by plenty of people. Even a simple banner with your company name, logo, and website address on it can gather attention and help to significantly enhance your company's brand marketing efforts.

Direct Mail vs Email Marketing

As technology advances, many business owners start to think that the old ways of doing things are being replaced. For example, it is a common misconception that email marketing is replacing direct mail marketing because of cost and effectiveness. But when you look at what is really happening in the worlds of email and direct mail, you start to realize that direct mail is just as effective now as it has always been.

Filling Up Your Inbox

There was a time when marketing companies were sending out billions of unsolicited marketing emails to inboxes around the world. After a while, Internet service providers created rules that made it very hazardous for businesses to send out mass emails and technology was introduced that could filter out those messages and prevent the intended audience from seeing them.

As email was being utilized, direct mail did start to fall off in popularity. It did not take the more creative marketing experts long to realize that email marketing messages were not reaching their audiences, but the postal mailboxes of those audience members were almost empty. Sending direct mail is more effective now because less companies do it, but your target audience is still going to read the direct mail messages you send.

Putting Real Offers In Your Audience Members' Hands

While email marketing asks customers to click on a link to find out more about the deal or to print out a coupon, direct mail offers all of that information immediately. You can send out the details of your promotion and any associated coupons or registration forms in one package. It gives your audience the opportunity to take advantage of your offer without having to do anything extra.

No Viruses In Direct Mail

Unfortunately, the world of email marketing is infested with marketing people who will do anything to make a dollar, and that includes putting spyware and viruses in their emails. If your company gets involved with an email marketer that uses those tactics, then it could ruin your reputation and get your company in a lot of trouble.

Direct mail does not deliver viruses or anything that could harm your audience. A direct mail campaign is a pure way to deliver a message that does not offer anything except for helpful information. You can also give your audience members the opportunity to opt-out of future direct mailings and help maintain a list of prospects that want to get the information your company has to offer.

Why should your company consider a direct mail campaign? Because the same technology that has helped to make text marketing campaigns and successful email campaigns effective is also being used in direct mail. You can work with a marketing professional who will develop a targeted list of contacts who are interested in getting direct mailings and who have shown a habit of responding positively to direct mailings in the past.

With direct mail, you have complete control over how your message is delivered and what it looks like. With email marketing, you have to worry about how your message looks with certain email services and how your images will look in certain browsers. But with direct mail, the message you create is the message that your prospects will receive and that will bring you a much more positive result and an increase in overall revenue.

Should You Focus On More Than Just Google?

Internet marketing experts are constantly developing new methods for developing content and websites that appeal to a broad selection of search engines. To the average user, it seems like Google is the only option out there. The truth is that there are other search engines that get enough traffic to justify making them part of your Internet marketing plan.

More Than Google

According to eBizMBA.com, Google has the most monthly unique visitors in the entire search engine world. Google brings in more monthly traffic than the next four search engines combined, but not everyone is using Google to do their online searching.

The next three most popular search engines are Bing, Yahoo! Search, and Ask. Those search engines combine to bring in approximately 895 million unique visitors every month and it is your company's best interests to not ignore those users. Some of these visitors use Google and other search engines, but many prefer to use something other than Google to get their search results. If you only cater to Google, then you are missing out on millions of potential customers.

Why Does It Matter?

What is the big deal if you only focus your website on Google's guidelines? For one thing, every search engine has its own guidelines that determine where your website will rank in their results pages. If you take the time to look over the content requirements of the top five search engines, you can create content that will increase your website's status on all of the top search websites, instead of just one.

Another thing to consider is that Google may not be the search engine your target audience is using. According to Aborg.com, audiences made up of people 35 years of age and older tend to use Bing more than Google. If you are trying to reach a more mature audience, then focusing on the younger demographic that prefers Google may not be the best approach.

What Should I Do?

The science of choosing the right search engine to appease is something that is best left to marketing professionals. If you are focusing all of your energies on Google, then you are utilizing a large search engine, but you may also be wasting your time because your audience is not using Google to do its searches.

When it comes to quality marketing approaches, most business owners tend to ignore demographics. But the need to understand an audience is something that runs through the veins of every Internet marketing professional and it can mean the difference between bringing in the traffic you need, or having your website ignored. Everything about your Internet marketing program centers around the search engines that your target audience is using and that means that you need the kind of detailed planning only a marketing expert can provide.

When you talk to business owners who have websites, you will probably notice that almost every one of those business owners talks about getting their website high up on the Google search results pages. But the problem is that those business owners have no idea if their target audience is even using Google as a resource.

A smart business owner realizes that focusing on Google is an option, but it is not always a necessity. Take a long look at the audience you are trying to reach and use that information to determine which search engine would work best for your business.