Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
2018 showed us that in web design, there is the only way forward. And 2019, must not be an exemption. Let’s claim this year as the year of web design innovations! Last year, advancements in technology allowed for more accessible websites that consistently connect the site with users. New forms of connection also paved the Read More →
The post 9 Web Design Trends You Can’t Ignore this 2019 appeared first on WPArena.
If you are in quest of a powerful pricing table plugin for your website that’s packed with brilliant features, your search ends here. Repute InfoSystems brings to you a fantastic pricing table plugin that offers you with more than 300 pre-designed free sample templates for your tables. But that’s not the only thing you get. Read More →
The post ARPrice Review – Why it worths each penny of it? appeared first on WPArena.
The WPGraphQL project, a plugin that provides an extendable GraphQL schema and API for WordPress sites, has been gaining momentum over the past several months. Creator and maintainer Jason Bahl put the project up on Open Collective last week after people frequently asked how the community can support the project. WPGraphQL already has five backers, an $800 balance, and an estimated annual budget of $2,687.
“Large well-known sites such as qz.com and theplayerstribune.com are in production with JavaScript front-ends that consume data from WordPress via WPGraphQL,” Bahl said. “PostLight Studio maintains a popular “Headless WP Starter” project that initially started as a React + REST API boilerplate, but recently added WPGraphQL support as well.”
One of the most important signs of the project’s growth are the extensions that developers are building on top of it, such as WPGraphQL for Yoast SEO, WPGraphQL for Gutenberg, and WPGraphQL Content Blocks. WPGraphQL for Advanced Custom Fields is getting very close to an initial release and Caldera Forms is also exploring integrations with WPGraphQL.
“The two most-searched things on WPGraphQL.com are “Advanced Custom Fields” and “WooCommerce,” Bahl said. “People are interested in using WPGraphQL with other popular WordPress projects, and WPGraphQL for WooCommerce is a reaction to the folks that are already looking for alternatives to the WooCommerce REST API.”
WPGraphQL for WooCommerce is an extension created by Geoffry Taylor that has started to gain some traction. Taylor is a core contributor to the main WPGraphQL plugin. He has just published a Kickstarter to help fund development of the extension and Bahl is consulting with him on implementation details and code reviews.
Taylor began contributing to the WPGraphQL project last year after discovering the repository and finding that it lacked the features he needed.
“I was looking for a solution that would allow me to create React-Apollo JS apps that could be used as WordPress themes,” he said. “And the solution couldn’t rely on a node server, because a large portion of my clients use shared hosting. WPGraphQL was a perfect fit for what I needed, but it lacked the features I needed at the time. This led to me contributing.”
Since then Taylor has also created other libraries and tools that work directly or indirectly with WPGraphQL, such as WPGraphQL Composer, a React-Apollo component library, and Oil-Based Boilerplate, a boilerplate for developing React-powered WordPress themes, plugins, and guten-blocks that use shared components.
Taylor is seeking $15K in funding for development of the WPGraphQL WooCommerce extension, which would enable him to apply 100% of his time to the project.
“The question I think a lot of people have, is what does this extension provide that WPGraphQL and WooCommerce doesn’t already?” Taylor said. “It adds WooCommerce support to the WPGraphQL server. It is being designed to match and increase the functionality of WooCommerce REST to make it as easy as possible to convert your app from the WooCommerce REST API.”
Taylor said the extension is past the initial explorations and is well into development. If a developer follows the instructions in the README they will be able to query products and their variations, coupons, orders, refunds, customer information, and (after the next update), order items from the WPGraphQL endpoint. He said that with the exception of products, none of the data is queryable for any user without shop-manager level capabilities.
“Customer-level functionality is the target goal right now, meaning customers can register/login, update the cart, and checkout,” Taylor said.
Anyone interested can follow the project’s progress on GitHub or get involved on Slack at wp-graphql.slack.com in the #woocommerce channel.
42Crunch, an API security company, recently released its 42Crunch API Platform. It is an API security cloud platform that API owners and developers can use to uncover API vulnerabilities and prevent attacks. The platform covers SaaS, Web, and IoT APIs and microservices.
Pretty often people post questions online asking “What is your favorite program: Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign?”
The truth is that, for a graphic designer, all three of them are equally essential and necessary to know and work with.
In fact, each of these 3 tools plays a specific role. Each one is built with well-defined functions that make it more suitable for a certain job than the others. Let’s be honest, too many designers out there believe that they can do everything and anything in Photoshop. There are too many designers who rely on a single tool, rather than exploring their options.
So why is this industry filled to the brim with designers that believe they can do anything and everything in Photoshop? Let’s dig a little deeper.
Quick answer: Because mainly there is a problem of education and knowledge of this software. Precisely for this reason, I decided to write this article. Which, for some, may be trivial and full of obviousness while, for others, it may be what they have been looking for for some time.
So get ready, leave … go!
As mentioned before, each of these 3 softwares are used to work in different fields and to achieve different goals.
To sum it up broadly:
Photoshop is a digital image editing and editing program;
Illustrator serves instead to work with vector graphics;
Finally, InDesign is a layout program.
You have to learn to consider these softwares (as well as all software in general) as a potential tool that you may need to use.
Think of it like a hairdresser with the razor, the scissors, and the comb. There are 3 different things, which are used according to the different needs of the job and which are often used together.
Just like a hairdresser would never use a razor to cut split ends, so a designer doesn’t use Illustrator to edit photos.
And so you can use scissors and comb together to cut hair more efficiently, so you can use, for example, Illustrator and InDesign together to work on the layout of a catalog.
Let’s see, then, in more detail, what they are for and what can be done with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.
Photoshop, created in 1990 and often abbreviated as ” Ps “, is probably one of the most famous programs in the world. Not only among those in graphic design, but pretty much the entire planet.
What is Photoshop for? Well, as the name implies (photo), it serves to work with photographs. It is, in fact, the most widely used photo editing program in the world.
Photoshop serves to modify, create and retouch “raster” images, ie those images based on pixels. In this article, I explain well the difference between raster and vector.
Over the years, update after update, it has also become one of the most advanced graphics programs, as well as photography. A program that designers and artists use to draw, sketch and even make digital paintings.
The key aspect of Photoshop (and which guaranteed its initial success) is its layered structure, which allows you to add changes to the overall image without affecting the original image.
Today Photoshop is one of the most widely used software in the world to do anything. In reality, it is good to use it mainly in these situations:
The mockups are basically those simulations of existing products. They are used, for example, to try to apply a logo to different real elements. The process of creating or customizing a photographic mockup is based precisely on the use of software such as Photoshop.
Here, we say that this is a limit case in which you can use both Photoshop and Illustrator. However, if you need to work with photographs or raster images to create these images, then surely Ps can help you.
DO NOT use Photoshop to create a logo. Use Illustrator. A logo needs to be scalable and used in any size. It must be printed on posters and t-shirts, used on a website and engraved in wood, as needed. Thus, it needs to be vector and to be built into a vector graphics program, like Illustrator.
DO NOT even use it to create things that will need to be printed. That is, obviously raster images and photographs are fine. But don’t use Photoshop to create, for example, a flyer. For those cases use InDesign or, at least, Illustrator.
Finally, DO NOT use Photoshop when you use a lot of text within a file. In those cases, use InDesign again or, at most, Illustrator. This is because Photoshop does not handle long texts well, such as paragraphs or columns of text. While the other two software has advanced text management functions.
The Illustrator software, often abbreviated as Ai, was initially created in 1986 by PostScript, one of the pioneering companies in the field of digital graphics.
It was born as vector drawing software and today it is by far the vector graphics software, that is the graphic that works with vector images, most used.
The vector images are those images based, precisely, on the carriers (rather than on the pixels) and can, therefore, be scaled indefinitely without suffering any loss of quality or definition.
Being a vector graphics software, Illustrator should be used in all those situations where you are working with vector graphics. Illustrator is then used by designers, artists, illustrators, and graphic designers.
Having a logo in vector format is absolutely necessary, given the many supports on which it must be able to be printed, from letterhead to business card, from posters to advertising on TV.
To create a vector illustration. And that is, in practice, an illustration made entirely on the computer and composed only of vector elements.
DO NOT use Illustrator when you need to edit images (we’ve seen it, that’s what Photoshop is for.) DO NOT use Ai when creating multi-page documents.
Of course, on Illustrator there is the multi-page function but it should not be used to design complex things like books, magazines or catalogs. For that, in fact, there is InDesign.
Adobe InDesign, often abbreviated Id, was created from 1999 by Adobe as a competitor to QuarkXPress. It is the software designed for editorial graphics and, therefore, for the design of magazines, books, newspapers, posters, and brochures.
In practice, any graphics project that requires the use of long texts should be processed and designed with InDesign.
As for the texts, for example, it allows you to create text and paragraph styles, manage margins and columns in an advanced way and work precisely on every single aspect of the text.
In addition, InDesign allows you to create master pages, ie page templates to be applied to each page of the projector to some pages. You can number the pages, customize every single aspect of your document, manage the pages in an advanced and professional way.
A graphic designer who does not know how to use InDesign simply does not have a complete education.
In any situation where you deal with multi-page documents and editorial graphics. Catalogs, books, brochures, magazines, newspapers, etc – all these are those types of work that are mainly carried out with InDesign. Of course, maybe the images or graphic elements to be included in these documents can be created with Photoshop or Illustrator, but they must then be “put together” in a single document with InDesign.
DO NOT use InDesign when you need to work on smaller files, such as flyers with one or two sides or business cards. Illustrator is very good for that kind of work. Of course, you can also do it with ID, there’s nothing wrong with it, but you will complicate your life.
In most of the Graphic Design jobs that you will face during your career, you will need to use these 3 softwares together, depending on the stages of your work. For example, to create a magazine, you can create the magazine’s logo in Illustrator, edit the photos you want to insert into the document with Photoshop and then lay out everything with InDesign.
The important thing to remember, when dealing with software and learning it, is that the software is just a tool to help you design better. Then learn to use the right tool depending on the type of lens you want to achieve.
Read More at When to use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign? And what are they for?
ONLYOFFICE is an open-source office suite that comprises editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The suite allows extending the functionality of third-party web apps with document editing components, thus being used within their interface. In the previous articles, we showed you how such integration is done (see the examples for Node.js, or Python).
In this article, we will show you one of the most actual integration cases, namely the integration of ONLYOFFICE document editors with its own collaboration platform.
“There isn't some way to know when—…?”
There is always a pause here. The client knows what they're asking, and I know what they're asking, but putting it into words—saying it out loud—turns unexpectedly difficult.
In the moments before the asking, it was a purely technical question—no different from "can we do this when a user is on their phone." But there's always a pause, because this question doesn't come easy; not like all the other questions about browsers and connection speeds did. A phrase like "in an assisted browsing context" doesn't spring to mind as readily as "on a phone," "in Internet Explorer," or "on a slow connection." The former, well, that's something I would say—a phrase squarely in the realm of accessibility consultants. The latter the client can relate to. They have a phone, they've used other browsers, they've been stuck with slow internet connections.
“There isn't some way to know when—… a user is… using something like a screen reader…?”
An easy question that begets a complicated answer is standard fare for almost any exchange with a web developer. This answer has, for a long time, been a refreshing deviation from that norm: "no, we can't."
The matter is, I'll offer, technically impossible; computers, you see, can't talk to each other that way. Often, there's a palpable relief here: "no" to the technical part; "no" to the the computers part. That is, of course, all they had meant to ask. I truly believe that.
Even if we could, I'll explain, we wouldn't really want to. Forking our codebase that way would put more burden on us maintainers, not less. There's an easy parallel to the "when they're on a phone" conversation, here; one we've surely had already. We can never know a user's browsing context for certain, and making assumptions will only get us and our users into trouble. Whenever a feature, component, or new design treatment was added or changed, we'd be left having all the same conversations around how to translate it over to the "accessible" experience. If those features aren't essential in the first place, well, are they worth having at all? If those features are essential—well, we'll still need to find a way to make them work in both contexts.
It could seem like an enticing option for our users, at first glance: an enhanced, fully-featured website, on the one hand, a fully accessible alternative experience on the other. That unravels with even the slightest examination, though: if the fully-featured website isn't accessible, the accessible website won't be fully featured. By choosing to have the "accessible experience" deviate from the "real website," we end up drawing a sharper line between those two definitions, and we nudge the "accessible experience" closer to an afterthought—limited and frustratingly out-of-sync with the "real" website, like so many dedicated mobile sites quickly became.
There's never any disagreement, here. Again: this is all relatable. We've all found ourselves inescapably opted into using the "mobile" version of a website at some point. We've been here before as users; we've made these mistakes before as developers. We know better now.
But this isn't a strictly technical question. This isn't as simple as browser features and screen sizes—a question of one privileged browsing context or another. Technical questions come easy. Partway through the asking—in the hesitation, in the pause, in the word stumbled over—what was meant to be a mundane development question became something much more fraught. Because there was a word that fit.
“Is there a way we can know when a user has a disability?”
The easy "no" felt empowering; a cop-out. "It doesn't matter; it can't be done" in response to a deeply fraught question was an unexpected balm for both the asked and the answered. There was, again, that palpable relief—"no" to the technical part; "no" to the the computers part. That was, of course, all they had meant to ask.
We no longer have that easy answer. In iOS 12.2 and MacOS 10.14.4, a toggle switch has appeared in Apple's VoiceOver preferences, innocuously labeled "accessibility events." It was rolled out to no fanfare—short of a brief mention in Apple's iPhone User Guide—and we're still not sure how it's meant to be used. The most generous interpretation of the intention behind this feature is that it was developed with the same intention as a "UA string"-style identifier for users browsing via VoiceOver.
We do know this much: when this setting is enabled—and it is, by default—your browser will identify you as using VoiceOver to help you browse the web. If you're using Apple's VoiceOver, both your phone and your computer will broadcast your assumed disability to the entire internet, unless and until you specifically tell it to stop.
If you're not furious at this change, you should be—not just for what it means for users, but what it foists upon you. Apple has burdened you with the knowledge that, now, yes, you can know whether a user has a disability. We can use this information to serve up a limited alternative version of a website, into which we can very easily opt people of a protected class. And once we choose to start listening for "accessibility events," well, we can capture that information, as anything else broadcast to the web. A user's disability can and will be reduced to a single data point—a cold, impersonal true, inexorably bound to their name, stored in a database, perhaps destined to be sold, leaked, passed along to insurance providers, reduced to a targeted marketing opportunity. All under the auspice of inclusivity.
At some point, the developers responsible for the "accessibility events" feature were, I'm certain, asked whether such a feature were possible. Their answer was "yes." I don't doubt that they meant well. I'm just as certain that, in the moment, it felt like the right answer; a technical solution to a technical problem, and a simple matter of browsing context.
Someday—not far in the future, I trust—I'll be asked a similar question. It will be asked hesitantly, haltingly. The pauses will ring all too familiar. I will no longer have the easy, familiar comfort of technical impossibility—no easy "no" to insulate me from the uncomfortable conversations I should have been having with clients all along. Now, there's no technical reason that I can't know whether a user is using "something like a screen reader." I—my clients, their databases, their organizations, their parent companies, their partners, their VC funders, their advertisers, and so on unto infinity—can absolutely know when a user is disabled.
But I won't play a part in helping to propagate the mistake Apple's developers made. I'll let my answer hang heavy and uncomfortable in the air: no. Not because we can't—we can. Not because we shouldn't, though, no, we still shouldn't. No—now, I will allow the word to become as coarse as I had always wanted it to be, because I no longer have the cold comfort of "well, technically" to hide behind.
No.
The post Accessibility Events appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
Do you want to lean how to get backlinks? Here are 21 ways to get links in 2019. It takes hard work and persistence.
It’s always good to get more quality backlinks—the ones that are natural because you have content worth linking to. You can build these backlinks using a few tactics.
Some SEOs engage in risky blackhat tactics, but unless you can operate on a large scale and are fine with getting penalized later on, it’s not particularly profitable.
The other main strategy is to earn backlinks by creating great content and getting it in front of the right people.
Although there haven’t been any new tactics for link building in a while, some proved to more effective than others in 2019. Plus, you can always find ways to improve each of the tactics.
Quora is filled with people looking for help. All you have to do is search for keywords related to your industry, and you’ll see hundreds, if not thousands, of questions.
For example, let’s look at the key phrase “content marketing.” With a quick search, I was able to find this question, asking if content marketing actually works.
Respond to the question, and if there is a specific blog post or article within your domain that helps reinforce your answer, you can link to it.
The screenshot above illustrates the idea. It has my answer with the link I provided to a blog post I wrote that covers a few data points relevant to the discussion.
When doing this, make sure you don’t link to your site just to gain a link. You don’t want to spam Quora as it will hurt your reputation. Instead, you want to focus on responding with a great answer and only add a link to your website when it makes sense.
You’ve heard of HARO, right? Of course you have, but are you actually on it?
In case you don’t know what HARO is, it is a website where journalist go when they need help.
They post questions, and if you can help them answer any of them, you can get some free press. You can get published on a news website or a magazine like Entrepreneur.com, which makes HARO a great place to pick up high quality backlinks.
You won’t get a ton of links from this site, but the links you do get will help drive traffic as this site links to authoritative sites.
To get these links, all you need to do is spend 30 minutes to an hour on HARO each week.
Broken link building is hard unless you focus on the right type of broken links. A lot of blogs and websites have them, but very few are willing to fix them.
Your best bet is to find resource pages related to your field and to look for broken links within those pages. I’ve found that web masters are more likely to fix broken links on resource pages as they tend to generate more traffic than general blog posts.
To find these broken links and resource pages, you can use a tool called Broken Link Finder.
The tool costs money…but it is worth it.
If you end up using the tool, make sure the keywords you input contain words like “resources” as it will help you find the right type of broken links.
Have you ever used forums to build links? If you haven’t, why not?
Chances are you are afraid of the Penguin penalty. Assuming you are participating only on relevant forums and aren’t spamming them, you shouldn’t have much to worry about.
For example, Warrior Forum and a few other marketing forums talk about Quick Sprout. Every time they do, I see an influx of 300 to 700 visitors. It’s not too shabby for just one link.
When responding to questions on forums, use the same principles as you do when responding to questions on Quora: respond to questions and link to your website when it makes sense.
Again, don’t spam these forums. Only respond when it makes sense, and make sure your answer is thorough.
When adding a link to your website, avoid using rich anchor text.
I know this may sound crazy, but linking to other relevant sites within your own content is a great way to build links.
For example, I recently published a post on competitive auditing that linked to over 20 websites.
Before I published the post, I visited each of those websites and grabbed an email address of someone who works there. If I couldn’t find an email address of a specific employee in the marketing department, I looked for an email address on the contact pages of these sites.
I then sent out a personalized email to each of those websites:
Hey [person’s name],
I just wanted to let you know that I think [insert their website] is such a great resource that I had to mention it in my latest blog post [link to your blog post].
I know you are busy, so no need to reply. But if you get a spare moment, check out the post. If you like it, feel free to tweet it out.
Thanks,
[your name]
Don’t expect people to link back to your website. Some people will do it naturally, but that number will be less than 5%. Roughly 20%-25% of the people you email will tweet out your post. This action will bring more visitors to your website, and a portion of those visitors may end up linking back to you.
Do you know what some of the most popular and linked to posts are on the Internet? It’s round-up posts.
If you aren’t familiar with round-up posts, read this one on link building, in which 50 experts share tips on how to build links.
That post generated over 383 social shares and 34 backlinks according to Ahrefs. That’s not bad for a round-up post.
How do you go about creating one of these posts? All you have to do is find a bunch of experts in your field and email them asking one question. You don’t want to ask them more than one question as it will drastically decrease your response rate.
You also want to find at least 30 experts as round-up posts that don’t contain a large number of experts don’t do very well.
I recommend making a post with at least 50 experts. When emailing these experts, make sure you give them a deadline to respond by. In addition, make sure you email at least twice the number of experts you need to complete your post as about half of them will not respond.
Once you publish your expert round-up, email each expert with an email like this one:
Hey [expert name],
I just wanted to thank you for participating in the expert round-up on [insert the topic of the round-up].
You can find the post at [insert url], and I’ve also included a link to your website.
Feel free to tweet it out and share it with your following.
Thanks for participating.
[insert your name]
Similarly to Backlink tip #5, this action will bring you more visitors from the social web. A portion of those visitors may end up linking back to you.
Any backlink tool can tell you who is linking to your competition, but very few of them sort these links by freshness.
Cognitive SEO has a tool that shows you the freshness of these links. In other words, it’ll show you who recently linked to your competition. All you have to do is select “Fresh Links” within its dashboard.
As you can see, the Cognitive SEO provides a list of the most recently found backlinks.
You can then take that list and manually hit up each of those sites with an email like this one:
Hey [insert their name],
I was just reading your blog post on [insert the post title and link to it] and noticed that you didn’t link to [insert your URL]. I’m not sure if you are familiar with it, but it can teach your readers about [insert the value their readers will get].
I just thought I would mention it to you because you linked to [insert competitor URL], but you forgot to mention [insert your URL].
Anyways, keep up the great work. I love your content.
Your fan,
[insert your name]
For every 100 such emails you send out, you’ll typically generate 7 to 10 links. It’s not a lot of links, but it adds up.
Almost every new business has the same problem: no one knows you. Even if you have a lot to offer, again, no one knows you.
One of the main objectives of the link building tactics we’ll look at in this post is to get attention.
And there are many ways to get the attention of people you don’t know.
The best way, in most cases, is to offer something of value—as big of a value as you can provide.
Here are a few options.
Option #1 – create a photo gallery: Any good blogger knows the importance of having great images in posts.
While some bloggers hire a designer for the most important pictures, it’s inconvenient and not always affordable for less important pictures.
However, most bloggers would gladly exchange a link to a site for a free picture.
That’s why I propose hiring a designer (or taking pictures yourself) and creating a free image gallery. Then, send out the link to the gallery to medium-top bloggers in your niche, explaining that they are free to use them in exchange for a link back.
For example, in the fitness niche, you could take pictures like these:
Spending a few hundred dollars upfront here will not only open doors to other bloggers but get you several dozen really good links.
A final important note is that you should create images around common points in your niche.
For example, if you were in the content marketing niche, you could create custom images for things that are often mentioned such as:
And so on…
Option #2 – create a free tool: If you’re interested in getting a ton of traffic yourself, on top of links, you can create something for your community of users rather than just bloggers. And that something is a tool.
Tools can be a great way to grow your site and earn backlinks at the same time.
For example, the keyword research tool Keywordtool.io has been linked to by over 3,880 unique domains. Honestly, that’s a relatively simple tool to build or get built.
After a bit of time, you can get links (good ones) that work out to under $1 per link, which is amazing. Add all the traffic that you can also get on top of that, and you can see why tools can be a great thing to make.
The big drawback is that it will take some time to build the tool in the first place, especially if you can’t code it yourself.
Additionally, you’re going to have to promote the tool. Write posts about it in niche forums, subreddits, and on social media.
Option #3 – do original data analysis (or research): One option that I really love, yet almost no one does, is to do original analysis or research.
Look at any good data-driven post—for example, my post about how to win on Facebook.
What you’ll see is that most posts link to someone else’s research.
It takes a lot of time and effort to do original research, which is why it’s much easier to link to someone else’s research than to do your own.
You can take advantage of this by providing the research that bloggers in your niche link to.
In that above post, the research was done by Buzzsumo, and I simply analyzed the data that they sent me. Of course, I’m going to give them a few links for that, and it also opens the door for a great relationship.
Find an interesting question always asked in your niche, dig in, and do the research. When you’re done, email the results to the top bloggers in your niche, and give them first dibs.
Most link building strategies for new sites are fairly slow.
They take consistent effort and deliver consistent results.
But you rarely get thousands of readers and hundreds of links within months unless you do them exceptionally well.
I consider guest-posting an exception to the rule. Even though you have to do it really well to get results, most bloggers have the ability to succeed with it.
And guest-blogging works for you even if you’re brand new. If you have a good pitch, it doesn’t matter what your name is.
When I think of guest-blogging to build up a new site, I think of Danny Iny, who is often referred to as the “Freddy Krueger of guest-posting.”
He got this nickname because he seemed to be everywhere when Firepole Marketing (now Mirasee) first launched.
His main strategy for getting traffic and links was guest-posting. He wrote dozens of guest posts and quickly took Firepole Marketing to the top tier of marketing blogs.
I won’t go into guest-posting in detail here because I’ve done it multiple times before:
The one adaptation that you will have to make, since you’re brand new, is not to start at the top.
Don’t start by pitching to a site like Copyblogger or Forbes. Instead, find a few smaller sites that are more receptive to pitches.
Then, you need to wow them with your post and promote that post as well.
Once you can prove that your writing is great, then you can start pitching to bigger sites, citing your other successes as proof that you’re a serious blogger.
One of the easiest ways to build links is to interview experts. If you email your prospects telling them how great they are and how much you want to interview them, chances are they won’t say no.
I myself get asked to do around four interviews each week, and I never say no. I’ve also emailed dozens of other people with requests for interviews, and it’s also been rare that they said no… this even worked when my blog wasn’t popular.
So, how do you build links when you interview an expert? Well, most experts have a website. So, once you interview them, you can ask them to share the interview with their readers or even tweet and post it on Facebook.
I’ve found that over 90% of the time, people will at least share the interview on Twitter and Facebook, and over 40% of the time, people will link to it from their website. One trick to boosting your link percentage chance is to find out if people have a press page before you ask them for an interview. If they have one, the chance of them linking to your interview is over 95%.
This is my favorite method of building links as I love making complex data easy to understand. Mint used this strategy heavily in their early days. They made complex financial data easy to understand through beautiful graphics.
We also do this at KISSmetrics, and our infographics have received over 3,741 links.
So, what’s the key to generating links from your infographics? Well, you first need to have an embed code at the bottom of each infographic so people can link back. Secondly, you should follow the promotion strategies in this blog post.
You may know Matt Inman as the guy behind the Oatmeal, but most of us SEOs know him as the master of quizzes. He got his start at SEOmoz and then moved into link creation through linkbait.
He ranked Mingle2 for all of the online dating terms by creating viral quizzes such as: how many 5 year olds can you take in a fight. He then took that same strategy and got a payday loan site ranked for all of the payday loan related keywords.
Matt currently has quizzes on The Oatmeal, and you should consider replicating the strategy if you want to build thousands of links. Just be careful as both his dating site and payday loan site got dinged by Google, but you shouldn’t have that problem if you follow these rules:
Do you remember Elf Yourself? JibJab created that campaign for OfficeMax, and hundreds of thousands of people Elf’d themselves. They uploaded a picture of their faces, and JibJab created Elf videos for them.
At the end of the video, you were given a link that you could share with others, whether through email or blog post.
According to Open Site Explorer, Elf Yourself has over 10,000 links…Not too shabby for a Christmas promotional video.
If you can come up with a creative video concept that allows people to personalize the video, you can leverage it to build links. People love sharing funny personalized videos.
One of the simplest ways to build links is to sponsor an event. Conference sites list each and every sponsor. In addition, in most cases, they link back to their sponsors.
This may not seem like a fun idea or creative link building strategy, but just think about this… you’ll be able to go to the conference. 
If you work in the corporate world, you may get a bit tired of working in the office, so it will be nice for you to get a break by attending a conference. Plus, you’ll get a link out of it.
When getting links from conference sites, keep in mind that they may be taken down in the future, which means you will have to continue to sponsor the event each year. The cost can quickly add up if you are a small company, but it’s fun to go to conferences.
I love the non-profit world because it’s a great way for me to give back to the rest of the world. If you sponsor a non-profit, in many cases, you can get a link back.
When I used to own KISSinsights, we used to give away our product for free to non-profits, and they would link back to us. We came up with this concept when a non-profit asked us for a free account in exchange for press on their blog.
The beautiful part about this strategy is that it doesn’t require an exchange of cash. You can volunteer your time, your products or even services for a link. Whatever it may be, I’ve found that non-profits are open to almost anything as they don’t have a big spending budget.
There are always people looking for images, especially high quality stock photography images. I myself don’t mind paying for images, but it can get expensive really fast.
If you have a really good digital camera, such as an SLR, take high quality photos of anything related to your industry. Then pop them up on a page on your website and let people know that they are royalty-free images. Just make it a requirement for people to link back to you if they decide to use any of your images.
The cool part about this strategy is that you will get highly relevant links as people in your industry are most likely to use them.
The basic idea behind all these tactics is to create something that your target simply has to read.
You don’t need to trick them into reading it. You just need to make it extremely interesting to that specific person.
This first tactic involves creating a positive case study. You’ll publicly show how your target blogger helped you accomplish something.
Here’s how to do it.
Step #1 – Pick a blogger to target: This technique is very personalized, so you need to know your target really well.
Pick a blogger whom you regularly follow—and with whom you would be happy to establish a relationship —even if it didn’t lead to links right away.
This strategy takes a lot of time and effort, but it can produce results much more valuable than just a few backlinks.
Step #2 – Pick one of their techniques or strategies: While you can certainly create a case study for a blogger’s paid products, you can stick to free blog content as well.
Find a technique that’s fairly recent (bloggers don’t care as much about old stuff) and that was created by the blogger.
If you are an SEO or marketing blogger, you might follow Brian Dean at Backlinko.
He has published many link building techniques, which makes it easy to find one.
For example, he has a technique called “Guestographics,” which is his own spin on infographics:
In this article, he lays out a detailed plan on how to get backlinks using infographics.
Step #3 – Practice it: Here’s where most people mess up. They use the tactic once, get mediocre results, and then create their case study.
And guess what happens when they let the influencer know? Nothing.
Why would the influencer get excited and want to share your case study when you didn’t make them look good?
Even if the technique you are trying out is good, you have to use it a few times before you fully understand how to apply it to maximum effect.
If I wanted to see what benefit I could get with the Guestographic link building tactic we’ve chosen in our example, I wouldn’t stop with the first infographic. I’d do that one, and then another, and then maybe even another.
Do what it takes to get an impressive result.
Step #4 – Execute and record all details: While you are putting the technique to the test, you need to document everything.
A case study isn’t impressive if you just say:
I did Brian’s method; here is a link to my infographic: (link). I was able to get 200 high quality backlinks.
Even though it’s a good result, on its own, it doesn’t do much for Brian. You need to create a detailed story that Brian would be happy to show his other readers.
You essentially want to be the favorite student of the teacher whom he uses as an example.
Step #5 – Let them know about it: Once you’ve gotten the technique to produce an impressive result, you’ve done the hard part.
Now, you just have to let the influencer know about it. If you did things right, they will be interested.
Send them a quick email that highlights the results. Here’s a sample:
Subject: Great results using (tactic name) – Thank You!
Hi (Blogger name),
I’m a long time reader of (blog name), and I finally took your advice (I should have sooner).
I used your (tactic name) technique and was able to (impressive result).
Obviously, I’m pretty happy with this!
I made a point to document everything during this trial so that I could put together a case study on my site – (site name).
Just wanted to say thanks!
Cheers,
(Your name)
If you say something short and simple like that, you will get a reply, often asking for more details.
Once you’ve opened a dialog, you could even ask if they’d be interested in publishing the case study on their site instead.
Or you can just publish it on your site and send them the link. They’ll usually be more than happy to share it on social media and comment on the page.
Our example for this tactic wasn’t hypothetical—it’s actually been done.
Brian previously published a full blog post highlighting two case studies of the Guestographic method implemented successfully:
And in the article, each of the subjects got a nice link back to their domain:
More importantly, Brian now knows who these people are and probably likes them as well. Now, if they asked him for a favor (a link, share, or review, etc.), he’d probably help them out.
In this case, Perrin’s site wasn’t exactly relevant to Backlinko, which limits how much that relationship could produce. That’s why I recommended at the start to target a relevant blogger.
Think back to your first school yearbook.
What did you look for first?
Pictures of yourself, of course.
People love to feel special, and it doesn’t change as you get older.
This tactic revolves around making your chosen influencer feel special by featuring them as an expert. Who wouldn’t want to read a flattering article about themselves?
Option #1 – Quote them: The simplest way to highlight someone is to quote them.
You can either email your influencer asking for a quote or take a quote from one of their previously published articles.
Including a link to their website or a social media account is a nice way to make them feel extra special.
In the past, one of the Kissmetrics‘ writers compiled a list of 50 inspiring quotes from social media influencers.
He took this tactic to extreme, and it paid off.
The article generated over 40 comments and over 1,500 Tweets on top of hundreds of shares on other networks.
When you include a quote from someone, they’ll usually share the article and often will leave a comment as well:
Option #2 – ask them to contribute to the article: If you really want someone to feel invested in the content you produce, you need to find a way to get them to contribute to the article.
I warn you: this isn’t always easy.
If you’re going after a fairly popular influencer, you have to have quite a bit of influence yourself; otherwise, there isn’t much of an incentive.
The more you ask them to do, the more invested they will be. On the other hand, the more you ask them to do, the more you need to offer.
The most common example of this option in action is the expert roundup.
You ask a bunch of experts to write short contributions to your article answering a simple question.
For example, Richard Marriott included 55 SEO experts in an expert roundup about link building tools:
He published each influencer’s content—whatever they sent him, which was typically a few hundred words:
The article generated hundreds of comments and social shares, many from the experts included in the article.
Someone who has taken the time to write content for you will be more likely to promote your post than someone you simply quoted.
Option #3 – use their work as an example: Finally, you can simply link to some of the influencer’s best content. This option works best once your brand is well-recognized.
I do it often in Quick Sprout posts:
I take special care to say something positive about the quality of the resources I link to. I do this for two reasons:
And when you mention people, they’ll get excited.
I often get comments and social shares from people I mention:
In addition, they often find places to link back to my content in their future content; so it’s a win-win situation.
After featuring someone, you don’t need to send a giant email. Just send something quick like this:
Subject: Featured you in an article
Hi (name),
Just thought I’d give you a quick heads-up: I linked to you (and said a few nice things) in my latest post. If you’d like to see it, here’s the link:
(your post URL)
Keep cranking out the great content!
(Your name)
Almost everyone will check out the article, and most will share or comment as well.
But if your post was really great, they’ll check out some of your other articles as well. Assuming that they’re also top-notch, you might have just gained a long-term reader who will link to you time and time again.
It’s really tough to get someone to link to you when they don’t like to link out.
Conversely, it’s really easy to get someone to link to you if they are actively looking for sites to link to.
Link roundups are a popular type of content in just about every niche. The author of a link roundup collects the best posts in the niche for the week or month and publishes links to all of them together.
The best part is that most authors typically create these on a regular basis. It’s relatively easy to get included in these as long as your content is solid.
Step #1 – Make a list of roundups: Although you could try a few different search strings, almost all roundups are called “roundups,” which makes them easy to find.
Search for:
intitle:roundup + (your keyword)
Don’t stop with just the first page. Keep going through the pages until you stop finding new link roundups.
In most niches, you can easily find over 20 regular roundups, which gives you quite a few targets. Add them to a list somewhere.
Step #2 – Establish contact: To maximize your chances of getting your link included in their next roundup, it’s a good idea to get to know them a bit. Comment on a few of their articles, and share their content on social media.
Once you’ve done that, you can send over your request to be included in the future roundup. Here’s a sample template:
Subject: Weekly roundup on (site)
Hi (name),
I stumbled across your weekly roundups a short while ago, and I love how much effort you put into including only the best posts of the week. I know that must take a ton of time.
I hope it’s not too forward, but I just published an epic post that I think would be great for a future roundup. It’s a (length) word guide on (topic) that is incredibly detailed and actionable.
Can I send you a link to the post?
Best Regards,
(Your name)
Hopefully they’ll respond favorably, and you’ll be able to just send over the link.
Step #4 – Help them help you: This step can be the difference between getting one link and getting several, so don’t skip it.
When you are included in link roundups, remember what the author is looking for: shares, comments, and traffic.
If you can help the author get those things, they will love you and want to include your new posts in future roundups.
At the very minimum, leave a comment on the post once it goes live, and share it a few times on social media. If you want to do more, e.g., send the post to your email list, that’s even better.
I mention Brian Dean and his site Backlinko all the time. He’s best known for his Skyscraper Technique.
He’s written quite a few case studies of his readers getting great results from it. One reader got several backlinks along with 36,282 visitors and 1,000 subscribers. Another reader was able to drive 17,584 unique visitors to a brand new website in one day.
The basic idea is to create the best piece of content by far for a particular subject. Then, reach out to people who have linked to inferior content and ask them to add a link to yours.
Here’s how it works…
Step 1 – Pick a keyword and research the SERPs: First and foremost, this technique is for you to get some high authority links. The traffic is just a bonus.
In order for this to work well, you need to pick a keyword with a decent search volume (at least 1,000 searches per month). You’ll see why this is important soon.
You’re free to use any keyword research tool you’d like, but I’ll use the Adwords Keyword Planner for this example. Start by searching for your main niche:
You’ll get a list of relevant keywords. Next, filter out any results with fewer than 1,000 searches per month:
Now that we have a list of keywords with a decent search volume, we can look for a good keyword to target with our content.
This isn’t the greatest list. Some keywords are too general (e.g., “search engine optimization”), while others are too specific (e.g., for a certain product).
One possibility is “search engine optimization tips.” This is related to conversion optimization but only loosely. So I would keep trying other search terms in the tool to find a better keyword.
Next, I inserted “split testing” into the tool and found that “AB testing” had 4,400 searches per month. That’s a good keyword to target.
Next, go to Google (in incognito or private browsing), and search for your keyword. Start looking through the results to see what you’re up against:
Don’t get put off if you see content from extremely authoritative domains ranking highly. Remember, the goal of this technique is to get backlinks. You may rank for your target term, but you may not. You can still get traffic and rankings for long-tail searches, and the links will help your other content as well.
Step 2 – Create the best piece of content ever: There are many ways to improve content. You can make it longer, more in-depth, more trusted, better looking, or improve some other aspect of it.
It’s important that you improve upon the content in the first few search results not by a bit, but by a lot.
You want to be able to reach out to site owners and say that linking to your guide will improve their articles or resource pages a lot.
Here are some great guides to producing exceptional content:
Step 3 – Use email outreach to “steal” links: Once you have your content, it’s time for an email outreach campaign. You can do this yourself or hire a virtual assistant to do it for you.
First, you need a list of competitors. Use Scrapebox or this online tool to scrape the Google results for your target keyword:
Copy the results into a spreadsheet. Next, you’ll have to run the URLs through Ahrefs or Majestic. Then remove those that have fewer than five links.
Once you do that, you’ll have to get the full backlink profile of each URL:
Export the list of backlinks, and add a new sheet for each URL’s backlink profile.
Finally, you need to visit each of these pages that link to your competitors’ pages, and send them an email asking them to include a link to your page. Brian has outreach templates you can use.
As you can see, this is not an easy technique. It will take at least 20-30 hours of work. However, you should be able to get a good level of traffic and, more importantly, 20+ great backlinks.
Do you know what the #1 objective of most businesses is?
It’s to make money.
If you can help them do that, they will love you.
Here’s what you do: Make a list of all the products you use to run your blog or business that you genuinely like.
Then, fill in the blanks in this sentence:
“(Product name) has helped my business (achievement).”
This is what businesses are looking for. They want to show testimonials and case studies from businesses who have actually accomplished something with their product.
Then, get in touch with the company (marketing director if possible) and offer to provide a testimonial. Include that sentence from above. You need to show that you have some data to back up your claims.
Additionally, offer any other data you have, or offer to do a video review as well.
If you have something to offer, there’s a good chance you can get a solid link from an authoritative domain such as this:
Not all companies have a testimonial page. You can still offer to give one—they can use it in blog posts or on various sales pages. Just mention that you’d appreciate a link with it when it makes sense.
The one constant challenge for many application developers with relational databases is the query performance. It is by far the most elusive feature because the means to resolve the query performance are often limited to what the relational databases can offer, which is either getting a larger database server and/or better indexes.
With Couchbase, N1QL query performance also relies on similar components. But unlike relational RDBMS, Couchbase architecture of services isolation means both the Query and Index services can be scaled out independently. With appropriate sizing and capacity planning, the Couchbase data platform can deliver a blistering fast performance as reported in this Altoros NoSQL Benchmark report.
This is the third part of our series on using Backendless with a React.js frontend app. You can catch up on the previous articles here: Part 1 and Part 2. If you'd like to jump in now, you can simply create a new Backendless app, clone our previous progress from our repository, and use this commit as an entry point for today's article.
Our goal for today is to showcase integration with our Real-Time (we call it RT) database for delivering changes in your data table from the server to the client. We have previously written about implementation of RT in an Angular app ( "How to Use the Backendless Real-Time Database in Your Angular App"). If you're interested in Angular or you just want to see difference between the usage of RT with React and Angular, we'd recommend you give that article a read.
Creating a content marketing strategy isn’t as easy as it may seem. You can’t just throw hundreds of articles up on the web and expect them magically to rank well on Google.
Yes, understanding that you should be leveraging content marketing is the right first step, but before you launch your campaign, there is a lot that you ought to know.
No matter how awesome your content is, if you’re not marketing it, sharing it, and promoting the heck out of it, nobody will read it.
With this straightforward guide, you’ll learn 34 content marketing tips that every marketer should know.
Let’s get started.
The first and most important thing you can do before your pen ever touches paper or your fingers touch the keys is to define the objective of your content.
As the old quote goes,
“Failing to plan is planning to fail.”
If you do not have a definite goal for your content, not only will you likely write an incoherent piece, but you will also likely have difficulty marketing it in the proper channels.
As I detail in my Advanced Guide to Content Marketing, there are several goals you need to define before you start churning out content.
A content marketing Excel sheet like the ones pictured below can be a huge help.
You can find samples and templates for these spreadsheets online.
Here’s one from the Content Marketing Institute. (Careful. That link will download the spreadsheet automatically.)
Hubspot offers a few as well. I recommend you check these out before you spend hours creating and formatting your own.
A good calendar will include not just dates but the topic, the content, and the keyword focus of the article.
The level of detail is up to you. Some campaigns are pretty simple and maybe only need a date and a title. Other campaigns can be advanced and may include details such as keyword focus, persona target, author, geotargeting, product focus, seasonal push, etc.
Keep things as simple as possible, and you’re more likely to succeed.
If you don’t know for whom you’re writing, you’re going to end up writing pointless content. Failure to know your audience is a failure to execute a successful content marketing campaign.
This failure can take place either prior to launch or during the early stages of a content marketing plan.
Content is for an audience, not just for your brand. The only way you’re going to survive is if people are actually reading and interacting with the content.
If you don’t have a target audience, then you won’t know what to write, how to write, or how to address the vague and disembodied entity of a “non-audience.”
Create a user persona. Don’t try to wrap your mind around an audience consisting of thousands of people. That doesn’t work. Instead, just think about the one person that is your customer.
Here’s an example persona that I sketched out:
She has a name, an age, and a location. She has likes and dislikes. (Jen has a nephew named Jackson, who is three years old. She bought him a Despicable Me toy off Amazon for his last birthday.) We have detail, understanding, and the power to write directly to Jen.
Now, we’re going to write content with Jen in mind. Jen is going to type in search queries that direct her to our content. Jen is going to love our content.
What’s more, she’s going to convert — she and about 291,658 other people in your target audience.
Content, by its very definition, says something. What is your content saying? Do you even know?
This takes place early on in a content marketing campaign. When the hey-let’s-do-content-marketing bug strikes randomly, it causes people to rush into the project without even knowing what their message is.
Content is meaningless unless it has a message. The message is the one thing that your content all boils down to. You should be able to sum it up in a phrase or a sentence.
If you don’t have a message, you’re going to be producing meaningless words on a screen. Sooner or later, you’ll lose motivation for content because it has no driving force.
The solution is both simple and relatively easy. You have to understand the purpose of your entire business. Content marketing should serve that purpose by communicating a specific message.
Here’s the three-step process for developing your message:
There are a lot of possibilities for content. In the subtext of every blog post, webinar, and YouTube video is this message: We can boost your website’s profits in 30 days.
Not only is the targeted traffic going to rush in, but you’re also going to be delivering a message that hits your customer where it counts.
Which would you be more likely to click on?
“How to Totally Shred Pounds of Fat and Uncover Your Dream Body in Only ONE Month!”
Or
“Burn Fat with This Program!”
The answer is obvious.
No matter whether you are creating videos, articles, or podcasts, the headline is one of the most important aspects of successfully getting your content in front of your target audience.
Make your headlines juicy and enticing, and your conversion rates will skyrocket. Bottom line: your business will grow.
Make your headlines boring and generic, and the most you’ll get is maybe hundreds of views (if that).
You’ve seen the juicy and tantalizing headlines all over the web. Even something as mundane as a pipeline can seem exciting when pitched the right way.
You don’t need to be sensational to craft a great headline. Instead, you need to be hyper-focused on what your readers want and make a promise that earns their click.
In fact, you use a simple formula to make the process easier. Try this one, from Buffer.
In your quest to create epic content, you have to realize that your reputation online is everything. It takes hard work to maintain your reputation, and it can be destroyed in a matter of minutes. Lost reputation can take years to rebuild.
EVERYTHING you publish should be well-researched and fact-checked (or have a decent train of logical thought if the concept you are trying to explain is more philosophical in nature).
If you start creating clickbait content that makes promises you cannot deliver on, your reputation will be tarnished and will be nearly impossible to recover.
However, even if you are putting out less content than the others in your industry, your content will still outperform your competitors’ if it is grounded in hard data. Telling the truth through your content, even when it’s ugly, will earn you a sterling reputation and the trust of your customers.
Have you ever noticed that I strive to offer advice you can take action on immediately?
There is a reason why.
When people read articles, especially informative articles, they don’t want theory or conjecture. They want concrete steps they can act on right away—actionable steps.
I’ve learned what my audience wants, and I try as hard as I can to deliver it.
Whether you include an “Action Step” at the end of each of your articles or simply write in a style that carries actionable information throughout an article, it’s up to you. But you have to make sure whatever you put out there, people can act on it and act fast.
The model I use for making my content actionable looks like this:
The Internet is full of crap, and if you want to succeed, you have to be the shiny diamond in the rough. One of my favorite examples of content that stands out is Craig Clemens’ article on “How to 10x Your Income Over the Next Four Years”.
Where most articles begin with something bland and generic about how you should wake up earlier, skip the Starbucks latte, and invest your pennies in some mutual fund, Craig comes out with a bang, offering the highly controversial, engaging, and original thought: the first step should be to cut out porn.
This is engaging. Why? Because most people have a visceral response to something like porn.
The content is also original because Craig is willing to say something that not many people can say.
Originality is engaging, so don’t be afraid to stick your neck out there. It’s worth it.
It’s amazing how many people go “rah-rah, content marketing” but then don’t even have a plan for creating it! The quickest way to kill a content marketing campaign is to have zero content. Or to start to produce content and then stop. I’ve seen this happen way too many times.
Failure strikes some time after the launch of content marketing. The excitement that initially fueled content marketing gives way to the weariness of producing it. It could be a couple weeks. It could be a few months.
Content marketing demands consistency. You can’t just throw a bunch of content on the web and expect it to generate traffic for the long haul.
Search engines prefer to rank sites that show signs of life. You’ll reap maximum SEO benefit if you produce fresh content consistently.
When search engines rank results, they tend to prefer pages that have historic authority and fresh content. You can get an idea of how this works by looking at the SERP screenshot below. Notice that the second position result was published just a few weeks ago. The next result down is from two years ago. The fourth result is from several weeks ago. The fifth result is from a couple of months ago.
All of that fresh content is stacking the SERPs with a lot of value. If I wasn’t producing content on a regular basis, I would be losing serious traffic potential.
Once you turn off the faucet of content, you turn off a major SEO channel.
There are a number of reasons why content marketing drops off after a while, but I’ve discovered three main reasons. Here are those reasons and their respective solutions:
A picture is worth a thousand words.
So, what is a 3,000-word article with 6 photos worth to someone?
While I will leave the math to you, it is important to realize humans are visual creatures and we process images much faster than text. If you want to increase the amount of user response and the number of social media shares, adding images and videos can be one of the best ways to do this.
I try to include as many relevant images as possible in my articles.
It’s hard work finding those pictures and adding them into WordPress, but I’m willing to do it. Why? Because if this 2,000+ word article had zero images, you probably wouldn’t read it.
We all know the power of social proof. This power is doubled when you can get it from an industry leader.
If you have created some epic content and already have built a solid platform to share it on (though this can work even if you are a total beginner), reaching out to an industry leader for their thoughts on your work is a great way to improve your content marketing through social proof and get your name associated with A+ players.
The process for reaching out to them is pretty straightforward as well.
Send them an email or message, and boom. Instant credibility.
Some people prefer to learn through watching or listening, and some through reading. If you limit your content to the written word, you are massively short-selling yourself and your audience. You are cutting out a whole portion of your audience who might love your work but might not prefer its format.
The same is true if you are a YouTuber, reading this guide. Get on Fiverr, and pay someone to transcribe notes from your informational videos so that people with different learning styles can also have access to that information.
Which piece of content do you think generates more traffic:
My advanced guide to content marketing that I spent well over $30,000 to produce and was read by 361,494 people when I launched it… or a blog post that I wrote about motivational business quotes that I created in less than two hours?
The one on content marketing, right?
Well, if you look at the screenshot below, you’ll see that the motivational business quotes article got read by 926 people over a period of 24 hours.
And if you look at this image of statistics on the content marketing guide, you’ll see that only 500 people read it on that day.
Sure, if you combine all of the traffic all 3 of my advanced guides get each day, it ranges between 2,000 and 3,000 visitors, but I spent well over $100,000 for all 3 of those guides… while that post on business quotes only took me two hours to write.
Do you know why? It’s because the business quotes blog post is more tailored around search engines than the content marketing guide.
Just think about it… are you more likely to search for “content marketing” or “business quotes”?
As you can see from the Google trends screenshot, more people are interested in business quotes than they are in content marketing.
When writing, don’t just think about people, but think about searches too. From keywords to queries someone might type into a Google search box, try to write content and titles that appeal to both people and search engines.
If you want to maximize your search traffic by pleasing both people and search engines with your content, check out this case study on Problogger. It breaks down how one company increased their organic traffic by 203.5% in 3 months.
Content is not an end in itself. It serves a purpose: sales. If your content isn’t driving sales, it may look good, but it’s not doing good.
A company can produce content for a long time without connecting it to its core message and end goal. Content can and should drive conversions.
The fail point is obvious. If your business isn’t getting conversions from your content, then your content is useless. The entire purpose of content marketing is to drive more sales to your business.
Don’t be scared of calls to action. This is the only way to get sales.
Look at what I’m doing with my site. I’m producing awesome content because I really do care about you and the success of your online business. But I also have my own business to care for and grow.
So, I use a number of calls to a variety of actions. They’re not annoying, odious, intrusive, obnoxious, or troubling. And they get me results.
First off, every visitor is going to see my first call to action, which is a tool on my homepage.
Then, from my blog main page, he or she is going to see some more calls to action.
When you scroll down, you’ll see two more:
Click on any blog article, and I still have calls to action.
They are on my persistent header, on the sidebar, and at the end of articles. They are in strategic and optimized spots.
I’m connecting my content to conversions. The solution to conversionless content marketing is simply to use calls to action, to run A/B tests on your calls to action, and to invite users to do the next logical thing…to buy your product.
Blog readers don’t like to spend money… there is no way to monetize them, right?
Sure, making a few thousand dollars here or there isn’t too hard, but no one makes millions of dollars from content, right?
In most cases you are right. Most people don’t make much money from their readers. It’s not because your readers aren’t interested in buying your products or services; instead, you just don’t know how to sell to them.
Two people who are really good at converting blog readers into customers are Ryan Deiss and Vishen Lakhiani. They do it so well that they even talk about how they are able to create income streams of over $15,000,000 a year without raising a dollar in venture capital.
One of the most interesting tactics I learned from Ryan is that a great way to convince people to buy a product or service from you is to offer a discount, but not by using the tactic in the image below:
The reason the image above doesn’t make you feel like you are getting a discount is because when you first see this product, you are seeing it for $127. It doesn’t matter that the product was originally priced at $297 because you never experienced the product selling for $297.
If you first drive people to a page that shows that the product is selling for $297 with no discounts, you may make a few sales. If you offer a discount a week later and sell the same product for $127 for a very short period of time, you should make a lot of sales because people originally saw the item for $297.
My buddy recently tried this with his real estate website, and he was able to increase his monthly revenue by 316%. This is also the same reason Groupon works because you know you are getting a good deal when you buy from the site.
Discounts and deals are a great way to monetize your reader base, just make sure they know they really are getting a deal. Putting a few slashes through a price isn’t enough. Your readers need to know that this is a deal of a lifetime and they need to jump on it now.
Ever feel like a sleazy used car salesman when creating content?
It’s not a good path to be on.
In fact, this is perhaps the number one way to turn off would-be readers and lose the readers you’ve currently got.
No one wants to be bombarded with “Buy Now!” messages when they’re trying to kick back and read some content.
It’s distracting and detracts from the overall user experience.
Here’s the thing about content marketing.
It’s one of the more long-term inbound strategies.
It doesn’t typically involve going for an instant sale.
Content marketing is about building relationships, creating rapport with your audience, and establishing trust over time.
The mentality is that if you take the time to create awesome content that’s genuinely useful, you’ll be primed to make a larger volume of sales down the road.
Therefore, it’s important to have the right mindset when approaching your content.
Here are a few techniques that I recommend:
As hard as we try to be logical and rational, we’re all emotional beings to some extent.
There’s just no getting around it.
If you can form an emotional connection with your audience, I can guarantee that your content will have a significant impact.
There’s a particular quote I love from an article titled “The Feelings Economy.”
It goes like this:
In an oversupplied economy, customer feelings drive purchase decisions and profitability.
I think this really nails it. The brands that tend to thrive are the ones that are able to elicit the right emotions and hit the sweet spot.
How exactly do you appeal to your audience’s emotions?
Well, you start by understanding which specific emotions on average generate the biggest response:
According to research from OkDork and Buzzsumo, your best bet is to create content that evokes:
More specifically, I recommend using images and stories in your content to trigger these types of emotional responses.
That’s because they’re great at targeting the limbic system, which controls basic emotions.
You might have noticed that I use a lot of images of people’s faces in my content.
Case in point:
I also place an image of my own mug on my website:
Why?
Because, as it turns out, there is power in facial expressions. It’s basically the universal language.
Allow me to explain.
Say you’re trying to interact with someone from a foreign country who speaks an entirely different language. Communicating with words is likely to be pointless.
What they’re saying sounds like gibberish to you and vice versa.
But you can always understand facial cues.
In fact, that’s how babies largely understand the world. Before they develop language, they primarily rely upon their parents’ facial expressions and tone of voice to extract meaning.
The point I’m trying to make here is that the human brain has an innate ability to process facial cues, which makes images of people’s faces ideal for conveying emotion.
Images can also help you establish trust.
Notice how Tim Ferriss’s photo gives off the vibe that he knows his stuff and that signing up for his course should prove helpful:
You can do yourself a big favor by weaving images of people into your content. Doing so can make your audience feel a certain emotion as well as perform a specific action.
What’s another way to get your audience to feel a particular way?
Using the right colors.
Each color has a certain meaning, so using the color that matches the emotion you’re looking to target can be highly advantageous.
Here are some examples of the meanings of color in the western world:
The key is to identify the particular emotion, feeling, vibe you’re going for and incorporate the relevant color(s) in your content.
I don’t have enough time to adequately explain this topic to do it justice here. But I’ve covered it in depth before, and you can learn all about it via this resource.
Conventional marketing wisdom says that showcasing the benefits of a product/service and ways it will improve your customer’s life is the best way to go.
By explaining the positives, you can target the intrinsic pleasure-seeking part of the human brain.
But in my opinion, this isn’t the best approach to take.
In one of my posts on Inc.com, I mention the fact that “neuromarketing experts say that the brain’s pain avoidance response is almost three times stronger than the brain’s pleasure seeking response.”
I also point out that neuromarketing expert Christophe Morin states that
…humans are pain-avoiding machines.
The bottom line here is that you’re usually better off explaining how you can relieve a pain point than discussing the pleasures of using a product/service.
In other words, focusing on how you can eliminate a negative should have a bigger impact.
Have you ever had someone do something really nice for you, even when they didn’t have to, without asking for anything in return?
How did you feel toward them afterward?
The odds are good that you felt a sense of gratitude and probably wanted to consciously (or subconsciously) return the favor in some way.
This is the law of reciprocity at work.
At its core, the law of reciprocity explains why we feel indebted to someone when they do something for us.
This could be something as big as saving one’s life or as small as giving away a copy of an e-book.
Much research has actually been performed on this topic.
In fact, a study back in 2002 explored how patrons tipped in restaurants. The researchers examined how people tipped under three types of scenarios:
The researchers found that “the gift of candy increased the average tip from 15 percent to just under 18 percent.”
Although this wasn’t a dramatic increase, it definitely proves the law of reciprocity and that people feel indebted when you do something nice for them when you don’t have to.
By offering your visitors something like a free trial, a free e-book, a free online course, etc., you can expect more conversions in the long run.
We humans have some interesting tendencies and preferences.
If there’s less of something, our desire for it increases. If there’s more of something, our desire for it diminishes.
This phenomenon is known as the scarcity effect.
A now-classic psychological study from 1975 conducted by Worchel, Lee and Adewole examined the effect of scarcity on people.
It was a very simple study involving cookies, but it was very telling nonetheless.
The researchers “put 10 cookies in one jar and two of the same cookies in another jar. The cookies from the two-cookie jar received higher ratings—even though the cookies were exactly the same!”
What does this mean from a marketing standpoint?
It means that you’re far more likely to maximize your impact by leveraging scarcity. For instance, you might say that there’s a limited time offer on a product/service, or you may have a sale that only lasts 24 hours, etc.
That, right there, can increase a person’s urge to buy significantly.
The amount of content on the Internet is mind-boggling.
According to Marketing Profs, roughly two million blog posts are written every single day.
If you really want to get a sense of how much content is being created, check out Every Second on the Internet. It’ll really put this phenomenon into perspective.
Here’s the thing.
Everyone is trying to outdo one another to claim their piece of the pie and get traffic.
What’s the result?
Many content marketers are grinding out content.
They have the mindset that if they slap up enough content, the leads will come.
They end up flooding their blogs with mediocre content and their social media followers’ feeds with sub-par updates.
This all results in one thing. Content fatigue.
They fatigue their audiences as well as themselves in the process.
Don’t get me wrong. Fresh content is great.
Of course, you want to post new content consistently.
But I know I feel overwhelmed when someone I follow is constantly blasting me with new content just for the sake of having new content.
I don’t have the time to consume it all.
What I suggest is to chill out with the frequency of your content creation.
Don’t worry so much about constantly populating your blog and social media with new content.
Instead, focus on creating fewer but higher quality pieces.
Try to find the sweet spot between updating your content regularly and giving your audience time to catch their breath.
The sweet spot will differ depending on the nature of your brand and the platform you’re using. Finding it requires a certain level of experimentation on your end.
I also suggest checking out this post from Buffer for advice on this topic. It will give you a better idea of how much you should be posting and how much is too much.
I love this graphic that illustrates the difference between being content-centric and audience-centric:
The difference between the two is to whom your content caters: yourself or your audience.
Here’s an example.
Let’s say your brand is passionate about obscure industry trends, so you frequently write about these topics.
That’s all well and good, but if those topics don’t resonate with your audience, you’re unlikely to gain any real traction.
It’s a fairly widespread issue, considering that creating more engaging content is a top priority for 73% of content creators.
Over time, being too content-centric will minimize the impact of your campaign.
It hinders engagement, lowers readership, and gradually drives your audience away.
Make sure you’re on the audience-centric side of the spectrum— not the content-centric.
How do you accomplish this?
Two words: qualitative research.
If you’re unfamiliar with this term, let’s start with a definition:
Qualitative research is designed to reveal a target audience’s range of behavior and the perceptions that drive it with reference to specific topics or issues. It uses in-depth studies of small groups of people to guide and support the construction of hypotheses.
Rather than merely observing what’s happening, qualitative research seeks to understand why it’s happening.
This type of research enables you to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and be highly informed when creating your content.
I’m not going to launch into a long-winded discussion of every facet of qualitative research, but let me offer a few key strategies:
I also recommend checking out this specific posts on this topic: Go Beyond Analytics to Give Customers the Content They Crave from The Content Marketing Institute.
Does your content consist of a steady stream of douchey buzzwords and complicated industry jargon only a handful of individuals will actually understand?
If so, this is guaranteed to turn off your audience.
Don’t get me wrong.
You want to come across as being intelligent, knowledgeable, and generally knowing your stuff.
But I feel there’s a fine line between being smart and being pretentious.
It can be an issue especially for certain industries such as medical, legal, and finance, where complex subjects are routinely discussed.
If you’re not careful, you can easily launch into some needlessly complicated rant and lose the majority of your audience.
It makes you appear insincere, alienates your audience, and makes it much more difficult to get your point across.
To be totally honest, I have been guilty of it myself at certain times.
However, it’s something I seriously strive to avoid these days.
What’s the solution?
First, try to stick with a natural, conversational tone when it comes to your content.
I try to approach it as if I’m sitting down with someone face-to-face and having a conversation.
That seems to work for me.
Also, don’t try to jam-pack your content with big words just for the sake of using big words.
Always look for the most direct way to say something without using needless buzzwords and industry jargon.
I also recommend asking yourself the following questions when proofreading your content:
I used to be a big believer in the longer the better approach to post writing. Heck, I used to even blog on how your meaty content can help you capture search traffic.
But then Upworthy came out. It showed us that not only can you get millions of visitors a month to your site with fewer than 100 words per blog post but that you can also rank for competitive keywords like “tattoos” with that strategy.
You don’t necessarily need text-heavy blog posts, especially if you are writing for the consumer-based market. Sure, if you are writing for businesses, you should consider writing longer posts as it will help build trust, garner more backlinks, and improve your rankings.
Focus on the quality of your content. Having high quality videos, podcasts, and images is a simple way to gain more social and search traffic. Just look at Upworthy’s growth. It’s grown faster than any other blog without writing thousand-word posts.
Content marketing isn’t the same for a consumer blog as it is for a business blog. Consumers prefer shorter content and content with more visuals, emotions, and trendy information.
Businesses, on the other hand, want How-to type of articles – dry informative pieces that are also actionable. They want to be able to read an article, apply its advice to their businesses, and see some sort of change.
There are many differences between B2C and B2B content marketing. Follow this checklist to see you what you need to do if you are a B2C or B2B blog.
Just don’t use B2B strategies on consumer blogs as you’ll probably bore your readers to death.
Internal linking is about SEO. Each piece of content you create should be integrated with the rest of your site. This happens through internal linking.
Some content marketing plans have no internal linking strategy. It’s possible that they have a legitimate content plan in place, but they don’t understand the power and potential of internal linking.
When neglected, internal linking produces a website whose SEO is not as strong as it could be.
Although it’s considered one of the most complex topics in SEO, internal linking is not hard to do. Internal link building simply involves creating links from one page of your website to another. The deeper within your navigation these links spread, the better. For every piece of content you create, add a link or two to some other content that you’ve created that is relevant for your readers.
If you know me at all, you know that I love organic search engine traffic.
It’s very consistent and typically grows over time if you’re doing content marketing right.
You can see what I mean in the 100k case study.
As you might know, search engine rankings and traffic are tied to backlinks, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.
The more high quality backlinks you have pointing to your content, the more traffic you will get.
I’ve written about how to get these backlinks and how to optimize your content for search engines many times in the past:
In this post, however, I want to focus on determining whether something is wrong with your content marketing.
If all is well, your organic search traffic should increase fairly steadily. Otherwise, we have a problem.
Symptom: Organic search traffic has plateaued or is slowly declining.
Step #1 – Check the numbers: Just as doctors turn to machines to provide them with data about their patients’ health, marketers have analytics to turn to.
Start by going to Google Analytics.
Using the left sidebar, navigate to “Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels,” and then select the “Organic Search” grouping.
The important part is to look over a long enough time period.
I’ve often had a span of 1-3 months during which traffic remained relatively constant, but if you have a plateau for longer than that, there’s probably an issue (with the exception of a highly seasonal niche):
Here’s an example that shows that there is something wrong:
There was a really nice increase of search traffic over a few months, but since then, it has either stayed the same or declined.
That indicates that there is something really wrong with this site’s content marketing.
Step #2 – Find the cure: This is a bit tougher but doable with a little bit of effort.
I’m going to assume that you know how to detect a Google penalty and that you’ve already done some basic technical SEO (like having a decent page speed).
Aside from those potential issues, the most common problem by far is not getting enough backlinks to new content.
Let me clarify – high quality backlinks. A link on a forum isn’t going to do much for your search rankings (although it won’t hurt either).
To confirm this, you need to use a link database tool. Ahrefs and Majestic are the best options.
First, input your domain into either tool:
Once the page loads, you’ll see a graph of the growth of all the links to your site.
Hopefully, it will look something like this:
As long as your backlink count (and total referring domains) are both steadily increasing, you’re doing something right, and search traffic will almost always go up.
But what if you see a downward trend or a plateau?
That tells you that your site as a whole isn’t attracting any new backlinks.
Uh oh.
That needs fixing.
It’s a clear sign that your content promotion isn’t up to par.
You should be spending at least as much time promoting your content as you do creating it. If your blog is relatively new, you should spend even more time.
Aim to get at least 20 high quality links from your promotion efforts. This takes a lot of time and persistence. You might have to send out 500+ emails per article. Do it.
You won’t see the results immediately, but after a few months, your search traffic will increase and keep rising if you keep up the work.
If you are writing articles that require you to cite lots of sources, you have yet another great way to improve your content marketing and links!
Contact the most cited sources with the article, letting them know how important their work was to you, and ask if they would be willing to share it along their various channels of influence.
Say please, ask nicely, and you’re likely to get a positive response.
Again, this can be a great way to boost your credibility and get your content out there!
If you ever see people who are constantly sharing content related to your niche and who are your Facebook friends, reach out to them and ask for a friendly share.
More often than not, if your content is good, people will be more than happy to do this, and it will likely win you a regular “share buddy” you can go to whenever you create some pretty exceptional content (which, if you remember points 3-5, should be pretty much always).
Besides, a lot of social media people and content creators are always looking for high-value stuff to share. You’re doing them a favor by letting them know about your content!
Think about the basic principles of content marketing.
Your content needs to have value in order to accomplish anything. If your audience isn’t finding your content useful, they’re not going to continue to read it.
This is something you want to catch as quickly as possible, or it can become tremendously hard to reverse.
Here’s what happens with most somewhat loyal readers:
Take a second to understand that sequence.
It’s easy to produce a less than stellar post and let it slip by because your numbers won’t take a hit. In the short term, most of your readers will still be loyal to you.
But if you let 2, 3, or 4 posts that aren’t very valuable slip by, you’ll start seeing your readership decline exponentially.
It happens all the time to even popular sites. They lose a large percentage of longtime loyal readers in just a few months because they start to cut corners.
You can’t afford to do this…ever.
Diagnosing ‘weak’ content: In order to evaluate how your audience perceives your content, you need a few different metrics to get a full picture.
There are a few different symptoms that you’ll need to keep an eye out for.
Symptom #1: Your email open rate goes down…down…and down
I suggest keeping a close eye on your email subscribers at all times. These are typically your most loyal readers, which means they provide reliable, accurate information.
Here, you need to examine your email open rate. All major email marketing service providers offer some sort of report in your account that should show you your overall email open rates over time.
Something like this:
If it’s staying steady or even going up, great. You’re doing something right.
But if it’s steadily going down, that’s a sign that people are losing interest in your content. If it’s only a slight downward trend, you may be doing okay, but you’ll want to keep an eye on it.
The reason why this is a good metric to look at is because these loyal readers will open most of your emails if they expect there is valuable content in them (why wouldn’t they if your content will improve their lives?)
If your numbers are dropping, it means that more and more of your readers aren’t expecting to find useful content in your emails.
Symptom #2: The number of “actionable comments” goes down dramatically
Truth be told, I don’t really worry about the sheer number of comments I get on posts.
Sometimes I get 20 comments; other times I get 300. A lot of that depends on whether what I am writing about is interesting to all or only certain parts of my audience.
What I do care about is how many actionable comments I get.
For me, an “actionable comment” is a comment that demonstrates that the reader not only liked the content but actually took action to apply it.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? If you want to see whether your readers find your content useful, see if they actually use it.
Cranking up the value and winning back your readers: The reason behind either (or both) of these symptoms is usually the same.
Some time in the recent past you started publishing content that wasn’t up to the standard you set before.
It’s really easy to do, and there are many things that can cause it:
First of all, know that it’s okay. Everyone (including myself) has dips in the quality of their content once in awhile.
But the best marketers spot it really quickly and fix it.
The solution is actually quite simple: start putting more effort into creating more valuable content.
If you can’t do that for some reason, it might be time to at least temporarily hire a writer or editor to help you.
If you’re just feeling a bit lost with your content creation, it may be time to learn some new ways to add value to your content. Here are a few posts I’ve written that will help you inject some new life into your work:
There is no sustainable way to do everything by yourself once your business reaches a certain size.
If you do try to, three things can happen:
All these cases are obviously bad. And if your current content marketing system relies on you doing everything, it’s broken.
It is not set up for long term success, no matter how passionate, persistent, and intelligent you are.
If this sounds like you, and you feel that one of those three scenarios is happening (or has already happened), you need to take a step back.
Know when it’s better to get help: You wear a lot of different hats as a content marketer.
Content marketing requires a lot of different skills:
And more…
Unless you’re an extremely rare exception, you’re not amazing at all those things.
Like most marketers, you’re probably good to great at a few of them and mediocre at the rest.
By all means, you can improve those weaknesses, or you can get help.
When I tell business owners and marketers to spend more on freelancers (or additional employees), they always resist, saying something along the lines of:
I can’t afford to do that.
They’re right and wrong at the same time.
With their current content marketing system, they can’t afford it. Their growth and results can’t justify increased spending.
But what they don’t realize is that by doing everything themselves, they are costing themselves a huge amount of money.
Hiring good freelancers almost always makes you more money than it costs for a few main reasons:
I really hope that makes sense.
When you hire intelligently, you make even more money, AND you’ll get to do the work you enjoy the most.
How do you hire intelligently? I’ll be honest, hiring the right people isn’t easy. If you hire people who aren’t professional, they might leave you hanging unexpectedly, which can mess up your content strategy.
My first big advice is to know exactly what you want.
Hire for a very specific position (e.g., copywriter, funnel expert, designer, etc.), and make your requirements very clear.
As an example, take a look at 3 job postings I posted on Quick Sprout in 2015:
You’ll notice that the main thing I look for, besides knowledge, is passion.
I like working with people who love their work and spend a large part of their lives doing it. These are the most likely people to act like professionals and always deliver on their promises.
As long as you return the favor by paying promptly and treating them like professionals, they will make your life a lot easier.
One more thing that you absolutely must do when making hiring decisions is to talk to the person you are considering to hire (phone, Skype, or whatever you prefer).
Get a sense of their expectations so you can determine if they’re a good fit for what you can offer.
Sometimes, you’ll get a gut feeling telling you that you should hire a particular person; other times your gut will tell you to pass. More often than not, that gut feeling is right, so trust your instincts.
Finally, don’t hire all at once.
Once those marketers and business owners see how hiring could actually help them, they often hire too many people too fast.
When you’re planning on working with someone long-term, rushing is the biggest mistake you can make.
Start with one position.
Even if you find a great person to hire, chances are you’ll still do a few things wrong. When you start with just one position, it gives you a chance to learn from your mistakes and then apply those lessons to the next person.
Slowly transition to the business structure you want instead of trying to make it happen overnight.
One of the biggest reasons why business owners think that content marketing isn’t very effective is that they don’t know how to turn it into sales.
They do a good job when it comes to creating high quality content, but then they expect that their readers would spontaneously start buying their products.
Or they don’t want to upset their audience by selling something to them.
If you relate to either of these types of people, you need to understand that the whole point of content marketing, like most other types of marketing, is to increase profits (sales).
Without any return from content marketing, how are you supposed to justify the investment in more content? You can’t.
Additionally, why would you feel bad about selling a product that will genuinely help your customers?
If you’ve been having success with your content, you understand your reader very well. No one else is in as good a position to create a useful product for them as you are.
So if you don’t have a product to sell, get one.
The more interesting problem to diagnose is when you have poor sales of an actual product despite getting a good amount of traffic.
Possible diagnosis #1 – Your conversion funnel needs work: All products have conversion funnels; some just aren’t very well defined.
A conversion funnel simply describes the path that a customer takes to become an actual customer from being a first time visitor:
Yes, there are many different paths in each step, but you should be able to define the main channels they pass through.
For example, “visitor > email subscriber > sales pages > customer.”
Once you have your funnel defined, you can use analytics to see where they are dropping off in this funnel.
You can create a sales funnel in Google Analytics or use some more advanced sales analytics software like Kissmetrics.
If you’re not sure how to build an effective conversion funnel, I have an in-depth guide that will show you how to.
Possible diagnosis #2 – You don’t have product-market fit: Now, if you actually have a good funnel but you can’t figure out why barely anyone is buying your products, you likely have a poor product-market fit.
Your product-market fit is basically a measure of how well your product meets the needs of your audience.
If no one is buying, it means one of two things:
Be honest with yourself about your product: is it really good enough to sell? I rarely see this problem with content marketers, however, since they tend to give as much value as possible.
The more common problem is creating the wrong product for your audience.
For example, if you had a blog catered to SEO beginners, would it make sense to try to sell an advanced technical SEO crawler to them?
No, it wouldn’t. Instead, a basic rank tracking tool or email outreach tool would be much more useful for them at the moment.
It’s not that your product isn’t good—it’s that your audience doesn’t have a need for it.
Instead, you should have been writing content that attracts experienced SEOs rather than beginners. Then, you’d be selling the right product to the right audience.
To fix this problem, you either need to create a different product or pivot your content marketing strategy to target the right audience for your product.
Do you know what the most engaging traffic source is for Quick Sprout? It’s not search or even social media it is actually email traffic. Over the years, I’ve been collecting email addresses through pop-ups and sidebar opt-in boxes.
As you can see, emails account for 13.91% of my overall traffic (it’s listed under campaigns). But what’s really interesting is that those people account for 41% of the overall blog comments. Also, they are 3.9 times more likely to share the content via the social web versus people who came to the site from another traffic source.
The beautiful thing is that it’s not just Quick Sprout who is experiencing this. We are also seeing similar numbers with my other two blogs: KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg.
So, how do you go about collecting more email addresses?
Through WordPress plugins like Popup Domination and Modal Dialog, you can create a pop-up that plugs into your current email solution provider. In addition to that, you can also collect emails by placing offers within your sidebar and below your blog posts, similarly to how I do it on Quick Sprout.
If you don’t have much time, focus your energy on the pop-up as it tends to drive three times the opt-ins compared to a sidebar or below-the-post offer.
If you aren’t sure how to set up a pop-up, read this article.
Here’s some interesting data that might help you create an effective pop-up:
Once you have the emails, make sure you notify your readers every time you publish a blog post. This is how I drive 13.91% of my traffic to Quick Sprout each month.
Do you know who does a great job of converting readers into fans? WetPaint. Based on an algorithm they created, if they feel that you are an engaged reader, the will display a small box over the content, asking you to like them on Facebook or Twitter to read the rest of the content.
If you don’t want to, you can just click “no thanks” and continue reading their blog. But that one approach has enabled them to get thousands of Facebook fans. Just look at their WetPaint Facebook channel: they have over 380,000 fans.
Can you guess what kind of results this is producing for bloggers? I did a quick test on Quick Sprout over the weekend, and I was able to convert 2.9% of my visitors into fans. That percentage may go down over time because I have a good amount of repeat visitors, but I could counteract the decrease of that percentage by A/B testing the copy. Plus, my version wasn’t as good as WetPaint’s, and I had a few bugs on Internet Explorer and Firefox, so I had to remove it. 
I know those numbers don’t seem huge, but if you are getting 100,000 unique visitors a month, you will be growing your fan page at a pace of 2,900 fans a month. After 12 months, you should have roughly 34,800 fans to direct to your blog or any other website whenever you want.
My test run was so successful that I will be rolling out a bug free version of that on Quick Sprout over the next month or so.
Encourage your readers to not only share your content across the social web, but also to follow you. Whether you do what WetPaint does or ask your readers directly to follow you on Facebook within your blog sidebar, there are many ways you can grow your social channel. Just pick one or two social channels and encourage your readers to engage with you on it.
In the long run, this will help your content spread more through the social web, which not only will increase your traffic, but search engine rankings as well.
Sure, this point may seem redundant, but it is worth repeating.
If your content sucks, why are you even trying to market it? What you are creating needs to offer value to the world, and even if it isn’t 100% original, it should offer insights and present the information in a way that the audience isn’t used to seeing.
You need to create great content before you can be great at marketing it.
Content marketing can be overwhelming.
There are so many different channels to market your content on that you may feel you can’t even choose which one(s) to pursue.
But relax, content marketing shouldn’t be this scary.
What’s most important is to create good content and do what you can to share it. Once you have mastered the basics, you can worry about the hard stuff.
By putting these tips to practice, you can make your content marketing more potent and get more bang for your buck.
Want more ways to improve your content marketing and get more traffic?
I’ve compiled a list of 10 more articles you should read that will not only teach you how to improve your content marketing but will also show you how to generate more traffic and sales.
Here it is:
Although everyone is using infographics these days, they are still powerful at producing results.
At KISSmetrics, we were able to drive over 2 million visitors to our site and generate 41,000 backlinks by creating 47 infographics. That’s not bad, considering we spent $28,200 to produce the graphics.
If you want to learn the exact strategy we used to create these infographics, all you have to do is follow the steps in this article. It will teach you what you need to do to generate 60,000 visitors a year from an infographic:
Content marketing is more than just writing and promoting content. There is a whole process you need to follow if you want to be successful at it.
I’ve created a 30,000-word guide that covers the A to Z of content marketing. It will teach you the following elements of the content marketing process:
Not knowing how your consumers think is a major obstacle to your success in content marketing. If you don’t know what makes your readers tick, you won’t be able to cater to them with your content creation and promotion efforts.
To help you understand how your customers think, I’ve created a 25,000-word guide on consumer psychology.
Here’s what you’ll learn by reading it:
I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago that broke down the steps I took to increase my blog traffic by 206%.
Through data and examples, I showed you the process I use to find and create content that will get shared.
So, if you want to grow your blog traffic, read the second section within that article. It discusses data points such as:
Brian Dean wrote a great article on how he increased his search traffic by 110% in 14 days by using one simple technique… the skyscraper strategy.
In essence, it teaches you:
A good example of this is his article on Google’s 200 ranking factors. In the article, Brian describes in depth each element Google looks at when determining how to rank a website.
Because Brian was able to create the most extensive list, when he did his outreach to build links, it was a slam-dunk. Bloggers were more than happy to link to him because the content was that good.
The beautiful part about online marketing is it gives you access to a ton of data. With the data, you can quickly figure out what works for others and how to replicate it for your own business.
Buzzsumo’s team published an article detailing the findings from their analysis of 100 million articles.
For example, they learned that:
And it doesn’t stop there… Read the article to learn all of their findings.
Writing content for businesses is different from writing content for consumers. I’ve created a 37-point checklist that breaks down the differences. It also teaches what you need to do in order to appeal to both audiences.
Some of the key points to keep in mind when writing for consumers are:
On the flip side, when writing for businesses:
To get a complete list of differences between B2B and B2C content marketing, read the full article.
The Harvard Business Review wrote a great article on how emotions can make campaigns go viral. Marketing is expensive. If you can make your content go viral, you’ll get more ROI from it.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this article:
If you take one thing away from the article, let it be how to create a viral coefficient greater than 1. Without that, your content won’t be going viral.
Everything in marketing needs to be profitable. If it isn’t, you can only do it for so long. You don’t have to have a direct profit, but as long as you know there is indirect ROI, you’re fine.
The Content Marketing Institute broke down 6 ways you can measure the performance of your content marketing. They aren’t just looking at direct ROI. They also show you how to measure indirect ROI.
These measurement techniques will teach you how to:
By using analytics and data, you’ll be able to create content that people want to read and share versus content that doesn’t drive sales.
Creating content is time-consuming and expensive. But what if I told you that you can get your fans to not only create content for you but also to promote it.
I’ve created an infographic that breaks down how to do that. Here are the four techniques I go over:
Not everyone will have to solve a specific problem for their content marketing, but most companies will.
You can often learn methods to make your current or prospective content marketing more effective.
The way to achieve this is to study other people who have successfully used content marketing to grow their own or their client’s business.
There are 2 schools of thought:
Study companies similar to yours and emulate their strategy. Or study companies different from yours and apply their tactics to your niche.
Both have their merits.
You need a complete view of content marketing as a whole, and to get that, you need to study a wide variety of examples.
For instance, you should study how different companies use content marketing for different purposes.
According to a recent report, the top 3 goals of content marketing are:
There are many different ways to achieve each of these 3 broad goals.
Some will come to you naturally, but others won’t make sense until you see the successful example of others.
The problem is that you can’t study just any random company because most don’t understand what your objective is.
In another report, it was found that only 30% of B2B marketers thought that their organization used content marketing effectively.
Although that’s a respectable percentage, it means that at the same time, there’s a lot of poor content being produced.
You want to steer clear of that since there isn’t much to learn from it.
This is where case studies come in. Typically, only businesses with something to actually show off create public case studies.
I’ve rounded up some of the best case studies I’ve come across that illustrate some important aspects of content marketing.
I’m going to be breaking down 12 lessons from five case studies to show you how you can apply them to your content marketing efforts.
Some may just be good refreshers, while others may be brand new for you. I think most marketers will be able to learn at least a few substantial things from these case studies.
After we explore the specific case studies I am going to give you 23 more lessons that I have learned though years of content marketing and testing too.
Let’s get started.
For me, crossing the 100,000 visitor per month threshold has always been an important goal.
If you can get to that level, you can sustainably grow just about any kind of business.
This content marketing campaign was more about brand awareness than anything else.
PTC wanted to create awareness for their new product launch in a very crowded space and had the secondary goal of getting initial sales for this product.
Most successful products aren’t brand new inventions. It’s likely that you’ll never sell one.
Nevertheless, you may sell products that are innovative—that improve upon others. Your challenge will be breaking into a crowded market.
You just may be able to learn from this case study.
A quick overview: I’m not going to go into too much depth, but let me give you a quick rundown of what PTC is.
It’s a huge software company that sells software to other companies in a variety of high-tech niches.
First, they decided to try to use content marketing to improve awareness of a new product they were about to launch—Creo.
Creo is a design software that solves many of the problems that other types of CAD software often have.
Without a doubt, it’s a quality product, which is where you should always begin.
One of the reasons that companies are afraid to really invest in content marketing is because they believe it will take away from their existing marketing efforts.
They believe that they need to get employees to spend time creating blog posts and promoting them.
Understandably, it’s tough to make this kind of commitment when most employees are already overworked.
On top of that, most employees don’t know how to create effective posts that will get results.
The companies that do try content marketing usually conclude that it’s not effective.
There are 2 good reasons to outsource your content marketing:
Content marketing can fulfill many different goals.
The actual goals that you are trying to accomplish will influence what type of content you produce and your overall content strategy.
Let’s take the company PTC as an example. PTC had one main goal that was made clear from the start:
Goal: To create buzz and launch the new Creo product (in the following 8-9 months).
At that point, their target audience had never even heard of Creo, which was another important factor.
If you create a blog for a popular product (e.g., Canva’s design school), you can be successful writing content such as product tutorials.
If you don’t have a product yet, tutorials aren’t going to draw much attention. Instead, you will need to educate the market to provide value.
As you become more trusted, you can steer attention toward a product launch.
Goals dictate what type of content to produce, but also how much to produce.
Since there was a limited amount of time before the launch, Robert and Joe were fairly aggressive with their editorial calendar. They published around a post a day (although the posts were on the shorter side).
Your content marketing strategy should always be evolving and growing with your business.
Once the product launch was complete, they shifted towards improving sales and market share.
If you go to the Creo blog today, you’ll see a different type of content:
Now that Creo is well known (and multiple versions of it have been released), content can also include product tutorials that show in what way Creo is better than its competitors.
If PTC didn’t re-evaluate their goals, they would have stopped the blog after the product launch.
Instead, they were able to continue to grow the blog and hit 100,000 visitors per month in a pretty “unsexy” niche.
Over 70% of those visitors are also new to PTC and are potential leads.
If you ever want to study a recent example of growing a business using content marketing, Groove is an excellent place to start (also check out my 0 to $100,000 case study posts).
Groove was far from a struggling company when they began their content marketing, but it still had a long way to go in order to hit their goal of $100,000 in monthly revenue:
If you’re not familiar with Groove, they sell help-desk software, which means that users pay a regular subscription fee every month.
Since they started blogging back in 2013, they’ve easily surpassed their original goal, which shows the effect content marketing can have on sales:
One of the things I always make sure to mention when I write about content marketing is that it usually takes time to produce results.
You’re not going to get tens of thousands of readers overnight, but it also doesn’t necessarily have to take months to get any traction.
Groove was one of the very notable exceptions to the normal growth of a blog.
On the very first post they published, they received more than 100 comments:
You can check out the dates on these comments, but most of them were made when it was first published.
And it wasn’t just random people. They even got Gary Vaynerchuk to chime in:
Considering that these influencers not only commented on the post but shared it as well, it’s not surprising that they were able to pass 1,000 subscribers from that single post.
These aren’t typical results, but they’re possible if you have 2 things:
One of the key things for Groove was being able to pitch the idea of a behind-the-scenes look at how they were growing their income. Even experienced marketers are interested in that if it’s executed well.
As for the second part, they identified a ton of relevant influencers and found ways to connect with them.
After that, they sent a really well-done email to formally introduce the idea and post:
If you want big results quickly, you need to implement content marketing tactics better than everyone else.
If you look at just about any of the content that Groove has published on their blog since its inception, you will get smacked over the head by the transparency (in a good way).
Now that transparency is more common these days (thanks to marketers like Pat Flynn), Groove took it a step further.
Instead of just showing their successes, like most “transparent” bloggers do (which is still pretty interesting), Groove doesn’t hide much of anything.
As long as it adds value to content, they include it for the reader.
When they try different experiments, they share the results of all of them, even the bad ones:
The real value is in explaining how they overcame their challenges and achieved their successes.
And, of course, they share that too.
One final note on this: Don’t be transparent for the sake of it. Be transparent if it adds value to your content.
Since Groove usually focuses on their marketing efforts and experiments, the private data behind them actually adds a lot of value to the content, so it makes sense to include it.
Decide what parts of your business your readers would actually be interested in, and don’t be afraid to shed some light on them.
In theory, it’s fairly simple to succeed using content marketing. Just create content that is as valuable as possible.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that in practice because there are many ways to go about it.
There are many key factors behind valuable content, but none is probably as important as its ability to be actionable.
If you can get readers to take action and achieve success with it, you will make your content extremely valuable to them.
By continuously providing actionable content, you attract loyal hordes of readers.
Any chance they get at the Groove blog, they show exactly how they tested something.
This case study isn’t of an overall content marketing strategy—it’s of one specific content marketing tactic.
Jimmy Daly of Vero used Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique and got some amazing results:
I think most content marketers would be happy to get these kinds of results with a single piece of content.
The key principle of the skyscraper technique is to look at the content that contains a particular keyword or subject and then create something on a much higher level.
If you truly have the highest quality content, along with good promotion, you’ll get great results on a consistent basis.
If you’d like to take a look, here’s the post that Jimmy made. Judge the quality for yourself, but I think it’s very high, especially compared to his competition back then.
At the time, he had the following table of contents for the post, which I think is very creative:
I’ve actually used this table of contents as an example of an effective formatting tactic a few times in the past.
Compare that to your typical table of contents modeled on Wikipedia:
Sure, it’s still useful, but it’s not of the same level of quality.
Show the 2 different tables of contents to a reader, and most will be unimpressed by the second one, but really impressed by the quality of the first.
If you actually check out his article now, he’s changed his table of contents to this:
It’s still more attractive than a typical table of contents, even if it’s simpler. I suspect that the reason for this change is to increase usability for mobile readers.
Regardless of the outcome, the intention was good. Jimmy was trying to make his content as high in quality as possible.
If you improve the quality of your content in as many ways as you can, you’ll get amazing results with your content marketing.
There are many different ways to grow a website (or more specifically, a blog’s readership).
There are 2 main types of successful blogs.
The first is the grinding blog. They do all the promotion themselves, find their readers, and convince them to come to the blog.
It works, but it can take a very long time.
The other type is the one that comes out of nowhere and becomes very popular in its niche.
Those are the ones that other established influencers love.
Once you can get influencers to support you, they can send you a great deal of consistent, high-quality traffic quickly. If you have enough influencers supporting you, you’ll have everything you need to become one yourself.
This is the ideal case; it’s very difficult to actually implement unless you’re offering something truly exceptional.
But it’s not an all-or-nothing situation.
Just because an influencer isn’t mentioning you at every opportunity doesn’t mean they won’t mention you at all.
Getting a few shares or article mentions from an influencer is a much more realistic, but still really effective, way to grow your blog.
One of the reasons why Jimmy was able to drive the initial burst of traffic to his post was that he connected with a few key influencers.
He emailed them beforehand, telling them about the post, and asked for a short piece of advice to feature in the article.
One of the influencers was Alex (the chief contributing blogger) at Groove:
Guess what happens when you feature someone in an article like that?
They are much more likely to share and help you promote the article (at least in little ways).
Look for ways to connect with influencers in your niche, and give value to them (in some form). That’s how you start to gain their support, which can accelerate the growth of your blog.
The first 2 case studies focused on the results that you can achieve with a great content marketing strategy, but I understand that not everyone is at the level where they’re aiming for hundreds of thousands of visitors per month.
This case study features good results, but nothing anyone else couldn’t achieve too.
After following their content marketing strategy, Express Writers were able to get about 18,000 search visitors per month to their blog—definitely a solid number, but nothing incredibly difficult for someone else.
They are in a fairly crowded niche: selling writing.
They offer a wide variety of writing services to businesses, such as blog post creation, press release writing, etc.
What was the strategy? In the words of one of their bloggers, Julia McCoy:
Four 2000-word pieces per week for our own blog, along with 4-6 more pieces per week for major guest blogs including such high-authority sites as Search Engine Journal, Site Pro News, SEM Rush and Content Marketing Institute.
The result of following that strategy was being able to outrank most of their competitors and getting consistent search traffic:
Unlike a few of the case studies we’ve looked at already, there’s nothing big or peculiar about this strategy.
That’s actually a really good thing.
You don’t want to count on going viral to succeed. It’s nice if it happens, but if you need it to grow your blog significantly, you have other problems.
Most marketers should be growing their blogs by consistently producing high quality content.
Express Writers created 8-10 strong posts every single week, and it led to these results. Keep in mind that the average visitor in this niche is a high value one. A business hiring a writer can spend thousands of dollars on a regular basis.
Additionally, from their regular readers, new readers from search engine results, and visitors from other places, they are able to get about 700 visits a day to their content shop (main sales page).
With a decent conversion rate, they are generating solid, consistent, and recurring revenue.
On top of driving traffic to their website with this content marketing strategy, the company enjoyed one other huge benefit—proof of success.
Since Express Writers is a company that sells content creation services, mainly to help clients improve their own traffic, this is a big deal.
A potential client can land on the blog, see that they know what they’re doing, and eventually end up hiring them based on that impression.
That’s huge.
Even more than that, I think that you should always be able to demonstrate to yourself that your product performs.
When you do that, you will never turn to cheap sales tricks to sell products; you will truly believe (and have the data to back it up) that your product or service is valuable.
It’s easy for this team of writers to sell their content and assert that it’s some of the best out there because it actually gets the results they claim it does.
If you’re advising leads or customers to do or buy something, make sure you’re the one to do it first. It will add an element of power and persuasiveness to your message.
This fifth case study is one shared by Brian Dean again, but it’s his own results.
He used a technique for which he coined a term, guestographics, in order to get more backlinks for a page and improve its search engine rankings.
Originally, he wrote a post about on-page SEO.
As any other article he posts, this was a high-quality article.
It was getting a bit of search traffic, but not as much as Brian had hoped. So, he used this technique and was able to increase organic search traffic by 175.59%.
Not too shabby. And it also would have improved his rankings for other related posts on his site.
The tactic itself is pretty simple:
So far, we’ve mainly looked at standard blog posts being used in content marketing.
Yes, those may make up a larger percentage of the content you end up producing, but there are many other types of content that you can produce.
For some messages, there are better forms of content than just standard blog posts.
In this case, Brian created an infographic.
And then, he combined it with his original article.
By doing this, he was able to promote his post again and further improve its rankings. He was able to take the original message of the article and reproduce it in an easier to digest format, which benefits his readers.
The takeaway from this case study is that whenever you create content, you should be thinking of 2 things:
If you said yes to the second, you can get creative with your repurposing to create extra promotional opportunities.
Also, by creating different forms of content, you can expose your content to a new audience that you may not normally reach.
One of the biggest aspects of successful content marketing that you need to have drilled into your head until it’s habit is that all content needs promotion.
The only exception is when you have a large audience, because your audience will essentially promote your content for you by sharing it.
Other than that, there’s no point creating content if it isn’t getting in front of new readers.
When Brian created the infographic, he was able to email new sites who didn’t already link to him, and get them to link to his article. Check out what his referring domains graph looked like shortly after:
That’s a lot of new backlinks and the reason why his organic traffic increased.
You see popular blogs all the time and may think that they must be using some secret marketing techniques.
But the truth is that marketing comes down to building connections with the right people.
In most cases, there’s nothing secret or advanced going on.
In his case study, Brian shared the simple email template that he sent to various website owners to get them to post his infographic on their sites and link to him:
You could write something like that, couldn’t you?
The difference between someone like Brian and a mediocre marketer is one of the lessons we have already studied—consistency.
He doesn’t just send these types of articles out to 10 or 20 website owners; he sends it out to hundreds.
He doesn’t just do it for one of his posts; he does it for every single post he creates.
This kind of consistent promotion is how you get the backlinks and the search traffic that comes with them.
Don’t stop yourself from taking action just because the content marketing strategy seems too simple or because you think there must be more to it.
Simple strategies are good. Execute them consistently and improve them when you can, and you will get the results you’re looking for.
Next up I am going to provide you with 23 more lessons that I have learned from other case studies and a lot of testing, and that are just as important to know.
I may have touched on some of these in the case studies above but will go into some more detail to help reinforce the ones that really matter.
I myself prefer writing high quality posts instead of writing large quantities of content, but that strategy doesn’t work well if you are trying to hit 5 or even 10 million unique visitors a month.
All of the 20 blogs I worked with focused on quantity first and then quality. They made sure crap wasn’t thrown onto their blogs, but they had quantity goals…such as posting 4 blog posts a day.
When I had access to all of their analytics stats, I saw there was a direct correlation between how many posts they released a day and how much traffic they received. The blogs that wrote more content tended to be the most popular.
It wasn’t because of social media. It was because of Google. The sites that published over 4 pieces of content a day typically received 55% or more of their traffic from search engines.
If you look at the graph above, you’ll notice two lines. The first one shows general traffic growth of their core user base at 8% each month as content is continually published each week.
The second line represents hit content pieces that caused traffic spikes. Because the blog published content so frequently, chances of hitting these traffic spikes increased, which helped take their growth rate from 8% to 10%.
Most blog owners who have popular blogs are well networked. Sure, their blogs helped grow their network, but even before they had a successful blog, they were still pretty well connected.
These connections helped them break stories and get more social media traffic. From getting their friends to tweet stuff to having them share it on Facebook, these blog owners leveraged their connections to get as much traffic as possible.
If you want to create a popular blog, you need to work on your networking. The more influential people you get to know, the more social traffic you will generate.
None of the blogs I worked with were “one-man” shows. It is simply impossible to be that popular with just one writer. There is no way one person can write 10 or even 4 quality blog posts a day.
So, you will have to staff writers to produce more content. When hiring writers, don’t just evaluate their writing ability, but look at how influential they are.
Bigger blogs love hiring people who are well-known. When I started my first blog, Pronet Advertising, I hired MG Siegler because he was a top Digg user, which helped me generate more traffic.
TechCrunch later hired MG as well, and it didn’t hurt that he had a ton of social clout as it can be leveraged to drive traffic. For this reason, he is also one of the more popular tech bloggers on the web.
If you don’t edit a submitted copy before it goes live, you won’t know if the author has linked to bad sites, submitted a plagiarized copy, or made statements that you don’t agree with.
At the end of the day, you are responsible for the content that gets published on your blog. It doesn’t matter if you were the author or someone else was. It’s your job to make sure it lives up to your standards and company values.
It’s rare that blogs get popular accidentally or by luck. In most cases, the big blogs are using data to figure out how they can grow their traffic.
One of the main metrics these blogs look at is author stats. They analyze the average traffic, number of comments and social shares per post for each author.
By breaking it down from an author level, they can see which writers drive the most traffic. They then use averages to see which authors drive the most traffic per post. This is important because some will write less than others, and the ones that have a higher traffic-per-post ratio are the ones you want to encourage to write more frequently.
This also helps them determine which writers they should fire. The last thing you want to do is pay a writer who can’t generate traffic.
Some editors spend as much time editing as they do helping massage the headline so it hits hard. Without a good headline, your content won’t be read. That is why editors are so picky about post titles.
If you want to get to mass scale, you should hire a good editor who focuses on correcting other people’s posts and ensures that the headlines that are being used on the blog appeal to both users and search engines.
This isn’t an easy skill to acquire or train someone in; instead, you need to look for editors who are creative. It’s extremely hard to teach someone to be creative, so make sure you hire someone who knows what they are doing out of the gate.
In most cases, you can find a good editor by taking someone from the magazine world.
Once you have the traffic and your high authority in Google, consider acquiring other blogs to fuel your growth. GigaOM acquired The Apple Blog years ago, which helped them drastically increase their Apple traffic.
When they combined all of the blogs – both the ones they started and acquired – under one domain name gigaom.com, they were able to increase their authority in the eyes of Google, which eventually helped them increase their overall traffic.
Acquisitions don’t have to be pricey. Blogs that generate 50,000 or even 100,000 visitors can be bought for five figures or less. You can do that because most of these blogs don’t make any money, so when you offer someone $10,000 for their blog, they get intrigued.
When I bought Gym Junkies, it was generating 170,000 visits a month, and I spent $30,000. That’s not a bad deal considering the site was making $30,000 in profit each year… so, in essence I bought it for one year’s profit.
You can write great content, but it doesn’t mean you will see an increase in traffic. You can write crap content in large quantities, and you are more likely to see your traffic numbers go up.
In the long run, however, crap content will lead to disappointed readers, which hurts your long term traffic. Yes, in the short term, things will grow like a hockey stick, but once search engines continue to see that users are bouncing away and no one is willing to tweet your content or even link to it, eventually your traffic will tank.
You have to consider your strategy not just from a direct traffic standpoint but also from a search engine standpoint. Google looks at the number of pages you have indexed, the number of sites that are linking back, and even the number of social shares you are generating. If you have a good ratio, Google will reward you with higher rankings. If you don’t, you’ll eventually see your rankings tank.
If you want to build a long term blogging strategy like the big boys, you have to focus on high quality content. Quality will help bring loyal readers who will continually share your content via the social web, and these readers will increase your overall word of mouth rate. This will help increase your direct traffic and your referring traffic.
Being aggressive with growth strategies is usually forgiven by your readers if your content is great. I’ve used aggressive strategies in the past with Quick Sprout, and I’ve continually grown. From multiple pop-ups to content blockers, I tested it all. Every time I have done so, I saw that this approach does tick off a few readers, but my traffic continually climbs up and to the right.
Another good example of a blog that uses aggressive strategies is Upworthy. Their blog is extremely popular even though they use popups to try to convince you to friend or like them on Facebook.
Now, I am not saying you should be aggressive, but the data shows it typically doesn’t increase bounce rates or cause an overall traffic decrease. Upworthy is the fastest growing blog that ever hit the web, and they are extremely aggressive.
You might now know it but we used to have a forum on Quicksprout. It that contained 346,299 users, 2,788 threads, and 12,731 replies.
The number of users may seem impressive, but over 95% of them were spam users. My developer and I kept fighting these users off, but they found more ways to sign up.
Luckily, through Akismet, very few of these spammers were able to participate. Every once in a while, however, a few would get through, and I would get notified by Google Webmaster Tools through a message similar to the one you saw at the beginning of the post.
Additionally, spam comments went through the roof. Quick Sprout used to generate 1,000 or so spam comments a day, so it was possible for me to have someone go through them to make sure legitimate comments weren’t marked as spam.
Now, I was generating 50,000 to 60,000 spam comments a day, and it’s nearly impossible for me to have someone go through them. This was preventing legitimate comments from being posted on the blog.
For this reason, I removed the forum as the traffic wasn’t substantial and it was creating too many warnings from Google.
There is nothing wrong with this as I am inherently lazy too.
But with user-generated content, it’s hard to get people to add large quantities of high quality text. This caused forum pages to have on average 327 words, which doesn’t help very much with search rankings.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, Google tends to rank pages with 2,000+ words of content on page 1.
In order to help boost the word count, I was responding to every single thread. In addition, I recruited moderators to help respond to user questions with high quality content.
But I still couldn’t get the word count high enough without adding tons of fluff, which I didn’t want to do.
For this reason, I wasn’t able to create detailed, Wikipedia-like user-generated content. When you consider that Quick Sprout gets at least 500,000 visitors on a bad month, it shows that you need a lot of traffic to build tons of high quality user-created content.
Infographics tend to get shared 42.4% more times than an average blog post. However, they receive 129% fewer comments. Additionally, every time I send out an email with an infographic, I receive 28.3% less traffic from emails.
Nonetheless, infographics do well overall. You might wonder why I would say that when most of the numbers point to them doing poorly.
The reason they still do well is that on average, an infographic generates 37.5% more backlinks than a standard blog post.
So, what does that mean? During the first 3 months after being released, infographics typically receive 22.6% less traffic than regular blog posts. Over a course of a year, however, infographics receive 35.1% more traffic.
In other words, infographics are great at bringing in long-term traffic. They continually produce even when they get old, whereas standard text-based blog posts don’t perform as well when they age.
My most popular posts by far tend to be both controversial and personal. Examples include:
Those three stories have done exceptionally well. I received a lot of hate email and comments from those stories, and in many cases, I may have been wrong, which is fine. But those posts have received more traffic than other posts I have published.
One thing I learned is that people judge you based on the titles of your blog posts. Many people don’t even read the content within the post—they just make assumptions based on the headline.
From a social traffic standpoint, these types of stories do exceptionally well. The one on clothes received almost double the number of social shares compared to the second most popular post on Quick Sprout.
This has taught me that if I want to grow my traffic at a fast pace, I have to write controversial stories that are personal. When doing so, I have to be careful not to cross any lines or offend people. I also need to make sure the content stays educational.
Over the years, I have tested posting during different days and times. The winner tends to be Monday through Thursday, at 8:00 AM PST. This doesn’t mean that 8:00 AM PST is necessarily the ideal time for every blog, but it is for Quick Sprout.
I’ve tested posting during other days and times, but the 8:00 AM slot tends to perform really well. Monday in particular seems to be the best day of the week, but Tuesday through Thursday are not far behind.
I haven’t experimented much with posting on Saturday and Sunday, but with all of my other blogs, those days tend to be bad traffic days, especially in the business-to-business sector. For that reason, I never post on weekends on Quick Sprout.
The exception to that are news posts
And not just any news…but mainstream news because more people search for it, which means the potential traffic opportunity is greater. For news posts you must actively follow trends and breaking news and post as quickly as you can find them.
One site that leveraged this strategy in the past was Mahalo. They built up a lot of their traffic when they started out by writing about everything mentioned on Google Trends.
They don’t leverage this strategy as frequently anymore; hence, you see the drop in traffic when you look at the graph. But as you can notice, it was very effective before.
On Quick Sprout, guides rank better for head terms. At first, I thought this was because they get a ton of inbound links and social shares and they contain over 30,000 words on average, but that’s not the case.
All of those factors do help, but when I went back to see what caused them to rank for terms like “online marketing,” it was one specific change that I made that caused all of the guides to rank better.
Can you guess what that change was? I added a link to each and every guide in the sidebar of Quick Sprout. Within 30 days, the rankings started to shoot up, and within 3 months, I noticed a huge increase in search traffic to those guides.
If you want to increase the rankings of your high quality posts, add links to them within the sidebar of your blog.
Out of all the text-based content I wrote on Quick Sprout, I noticed one thing. Blog posts that contained stats and data received 149% more social shares and 283% more backlinks.
This makes sense since posts that contain images such as charts and graphs also get more trackbacks and social shares.
A lot of my blog posts, including this one, start out containing lots of stats and data, so I don’t have to do much more here. Instead, I just have to continue the trend of writing more data-driven posts.
I should also consider hiring a full-time stats guy to dig up data for me to increase the quality of my posts.
The one thing I haven’t been doing is including enough graphs and charts within my posts. For example, this post contains a lot of data, and I could have inserted charts to make the post more visual and easy to understand.
I’ve just been getting too lazy, which is something I need to fix. Failing that, I can always pay someone to go into my posts and add charts/graphs for me.
The first and most common mistake is dumping everything on the marketing department. Compared to other departments in the company, the marketing department would be the most logical choice for the job if look at it from the outside. If your company does this, you’re not alone:
Content marketing, however, shouldn’t be thought of as purely an extension of marketing, editorial or public relations departments. It should pull from various departments, including design, engineering and even sales, to name a few.
Why? Because the marketing department won’t always know what the best type of content you should be creating. For example, at KISSmetrics, our engineering and design departments recommended various types of content:
As you can see from the examples above, the marketing department wouldn’t be able to write all of those content pieces. For that reason, it’s important to have many departments in your company involved in your content marketing strategy. Here’s how you can get the other departments involved:
You have the content, but is it really winning customers over? One very common content marketing mistake that’s made with even the best of intentions is to put a positive spin on every piece. For one, your customers aren’t buying it. You and they both know the product or service has flaws or isn’t right for everyone. Every content marketing effort feels more like a sales pitch.
To help avoid this, you may want to invite users to participate in your content marketing efforts. A Vermont ski resort Jay Peak did this by encouraging their users to tag Jay Peak in their instagram photos describing what they love about the mountain. The mention of Jay Peak is secondary to the users emphasizing what they love about skiing there, but the campaign does a great job of sharing the enthusiasm without hyping up the location.
So, how do you do it? You could:
Don’t make the mistake of relying completely on user-generated content. Make sure that you check the sources of uploaded pictures or videos before posting and let the customers know upfront that any content they submit becomes the property of your company to do with as you wish. This will help prevent any controversial or legal issues that could crop up if the campaign truly takes on a life of its own.
If you really want to harness the benefits of user-generated content, you should ask for (and respond) to reviews, both good and bad. For many users, knowing that the company cares and is willing to work with them to resolve the issue will diffuse any anger or frustration, which can be the spark that leads to other disgruntled customers jumping on the bandwagon.
The easiest way to gather usable content marketing metrics is to figure out which pages or promotions have the biggest impact on customers, and why. Measuring things like the click-through rate, time spent on site, bounce rate and unique visitors are all sales-focused metrics. You should also look at:
Here is an example of what we track on our KISSmetrics blog:
As you can see from the image above, content URLs are placed on the left and number of times people visit the blog after reading one of those URLs is at the top. So the higher the percentage, the better the content. If you are writing content that causes a low return visit percentage, it means that you are publishing content that people don’t care to read.
At KISSmetrics we try to optimize our blog for return visits because we know it helps create brand loyalty. In the long run, those visitors are more likely to turn into customers.
Another lesson I learned from running the KISSmetrics blog is that traffic isn’t everything. Many of our most popular posts are on social media and content marketing. But there is an issue with these topics and the type of visitors they attract.
Sure, these visitors are interested in online marketing, but very few of them buy our product. Why? Because they are not our ideal customers. E-commerce and SaaS companies are.
So, instead of focusing on building a marketing audience, we should focus on analytics-based content for our target audience. We would probably do well even with providing general marketing advice to them.
Our blog editor is doing a great job at releasing more blog posts that are targeted towards our audience. He is super picky about what he publishes on the blog. He also knows that you can’t just flip a switch and release a different type of content the next day: you have to transition slowly.
If I had to start the KISSmetrics blog all over again, I would focus on helping SaaS and e-commerce companies with their online marketing. This would help generate more qualified leads for our sales team.
Focus on creating the right audience for your blog and not just on building up your traffic.
One of the best strategies we used to grow the KISSmetrics blog was infographics. We’ve probably produced more infographics than anyone else in the marketing space.
Boy, did it pay off. As I explained in this blog post, it is the primary reason for the growth of the blog.
Within the two-year period, we’ve generated 2,512,596 visitors and 41,142 backlinks from 3,741 unique domains, all from those 47 infographics.
But the mistake we made is that we slowed down on infographics.
It wasn’t that we ran out of ideas. We simply shifted our design resources to other projects. Because we are a well-funded startup, cash has never been an issue for us. Even if it cost $5,000 or $10,000 a month, we should have hired a company or an individual to produce more infographics for the blog.
We are getting back into our routine of generating infographics once a week, but if I had to do things over, I wouldn’t have slowed down in the first place.
If you want to grow your blog at a rapid pace, consider creating infographics. They tend to get shared more than text-based blog posts.
I used to believe that you should get to 100,000 visitors before you monetize your blog. That way you can focus on building an audience without being distracted.
We actually waited till we hit 200,000 plus visitors a month before we started to generate leads from our KISSmetrics blog. The big problem we ran into was that we found that certain types of content generate better quality leads than others.
For example, webinars convert well. If we monetized early enough, we would have had this data, which would have helped shape the blog from the get go. Now we have to clean up and readjust the type of content we produce and the methods we use to generate leads.
You don’t want to monetize your blog if you have a few thousand visitors a month, but once you hit 10,000 monthly visitors, you should run tests. From there, you can shape your blog and audience the way you want.
You can turn off your monetization after the tests are complete, but before you do, try different methods to see where you stand.
I use a lot of different tools and various software for marketing. But one of my absolute favorites is BuzzSumo.
I love it!
At this point, I consider it a linchpin useful for several different aspects of marketing.
And apparently I’m not alone.
Big name brands, such as TechRadar, TechTarget and even Rolling Stone magazine, use BuzzSumo to optimize their campaigns.
And because I tend to be compulsive about certain things, I’ve gotten into the habit of checking BuzzSumo every single day.
As you might imagine, I’ve come up with some pretty interesting insights along the way.
In this post, I’ll share with you what I learned from checking BuzzSumo every day for a month.
It’ll tell you, without a doubt, which influencers to target
One of the major selling points of BuzzSumo is it allows me to perform streamlined influencer research.
If you’re wondering whom to target for a guest post, brand endorsement, etc., BuzzSumo will let you know.
Here’s an example of how to use it.
From the dashboard, enter the topic or keyword you’re interested in.
In my case, it’s “digital marketing”:
Click “Search”:
This will show you which content has received the most shares.
But I want to take it one step further, so I’m going to click on “Content Analysis” at the top:
Scroll down a bit, and you’ll see a section called “Most Shared Domains by Network”:
This lets me know which publications, websites and blogs are getting the most shares, telling me how influential they are.
I also like the pie chart, quickly showing me how things stack up.
If I wanted to pitch a few brands with a guest-posting idea, I would want to aim for some of the top brands on the list, like Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, Social Media Today and so on.
But wait, there’s more.
Go back to the top, and click on “Influencers.”
Here’s what I get:
It’s a massive list of influencers along with accompanying key metrics such as their page authority, domain authority, follower count, etc.
I can literally find thousands of influencers in the digital marketing niche.
I can then reach out to any of them by visiting their website or contacting them on Twitter (BuzzSumo provides links to both).
I honestly can’t think of a more streamlined and efficient way to find the top influencers.
If influencer marketing is your bread and butter, BuzzSumo is a godsend.
You can see where competitors are getting their links from
Backlinks are everything.
It’s a toss up as to which is more important: content or links.
But I think we can all agree that the quality and relevancy of the sites linking to you impact your search rankings heavily.
One of my favorite features on BuzzSumo is “Backlinks.”
With a simple search, you can find out who’s linking to your competitors and which specific pieces of content those links are coming from.
Here’s how you do it.
First, click on “Backlinks” from your dashboard:
Now, enter the URL of the competitor you want to check out.
I’ll use Kissmetrics as an example:
Click on “Search.”
Voila! Just like that, I can see where their backlinks are coming from.
Here are just a few:
And I can take it one step further by checking the rest of the backlinks coming from a particular website.
Just look at “View [X] More Links”:
If you see that a particular site is linking to your competitor like crazy, this is a good indicator they may be willing to link to you as well.
This is helpful because it gives me plenty of ideas for backlink opportunities.
By knowing who’s most likely to link to content in my industry, I know to whom I should reach out and who’s most worth my time.
You can tell which topics are trending in your industry
Evergreen content is definitely important and serves its purpose.
In particular, I’m a fan of long-form evergreen pieces.
But as good as evergreen content is, it’s also important to cover the hot topics trending right now.
This is especially true for fast-moving niches like news and politics.
Striking while the iron is hot is a surefire way to bring attention to your brand and grow your audience.
And it just so happens that BuzzSumo is perfect for determining which topics are trending in your industry.
All it takes is a quick search.
You first want to go to your dashboard and filter by a recent date.
I usually look at content from the previous week, but a month or even 24 hours can work as well, depending on your industry.
Click on the filter you want to use:
Type in your keyword:
Now click “Search.”
Within seconds, I can see which topics are trending and the number of shares each piece of content has received:
The more engagement content receives, the more interested I am in it because people are obviously responding to it favorably.
I know for a fact this content is resonating with my audience at this particular moment.
If I create a similar post or skyscraper it, I’ve got a good chance of getting positive results.
And believe me, this beats the heck out of manually scouring the Internet, trying to figure out what’s working.
Going that route is incredibly arduous and labor intensive.
It also involves too much guesswork for my taste.
By using BuzzSumo, I know for sure what’s trending and have access to several helpful metrics, which means I’m basing my findings on concrete data—not just a hunch.
You can determine which content formats to use
This one’s a biggie.
Which content formats should you use to reach your audience most effectively?
You could always experiment and base your content strategy on speculation.
Or you could use data to guide your strategy.
Although I think most successful marketing campaigns do require a certain amount of experimentation, I’m a fan of using data whenever it’s available.
And in this case, BuzzSumo makes it readily available.
This information is also available in the “Content Analysis” section.
Just look for “Average Shares By Content Type.”
For digital marketing, a list format is your best bet:
For “IoT” (the Internet of Things), it’s video:
Just plug your industry/niche into the search box, and you can instantly tell which type of format is resonating the most with your audience.
You can use it to find the sweet spot for content length
I’ve written quite a bit on choosing the right length for your content.
I even published an article that specifically points out what the ideal word count is according to your industry.
And quite frankly, word count is one of the most widely discussed topics in the content marketing world.
If you’re not quite sure how long your posts should be, BuzzSumo can definitely point you in the right direction.
Again, you’ll want to go to “Content Analysis.”
Then scroll down until you reach the section called “Average Shares By Content Length.”
Here’s what pops up for digital marketing:
I can see that aiming for over 3,000 words is my best bet for maximizing shares.
But this isn’t the case for all industries.
Here are the results I got when searching for IoT:
In this case, I’m better off aiming for 2,000-3,000 words.
And here’s one more random example—marathon running:
In this niche, 1,000-2,000 words would be best.
This shows you how this feature can work for almost any industry.
It lets you know which social networks produce the most shares
Another question many marketers have is which social networks they should focus on.
Should you stick with the biggest user base and put the bulk of your attention on Facebook?
Or are you better off opting for another network?
BuzzSumo will let you know for sure which platforms are best for your industry.
Just look for “Average Shares By Network” on the “Content Analysis” page.
Here’s what I got for IoT:
It’s clear that Facebook is bringing in the most shares, followed by LinkedIn and Twitter.
I would probably want to focus on those networks in that order.
Here’s what I got for digital marketing:
For this industry, Twitter is actually bringing in the most shares, followed by Facebook and LinkedIn.
You get the idea.
The only catch is you’re limited to these five platforms because BuzzSumo doesn’t currently feature Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, etc.
But it’s still a good way to gauge which major networks are most worth your time.
If you ever get overwhelmed or confused during your content marketing journey, take a step back.
No matter what niche you’re in and no matter what type of business you run, someone has done it before.
This means that you can study them, learn from them, and use this information to overcome any obstacles that stand in your way.
In this post, I went over 12 lessons from 5 awesome content marketing case studies. These are lessons that apply to just about any content marketing strategy.
I also gave you 23 more lessons that I have learned over the years, for a grand total of 35 content marketing lessons for you to learn by.
I know it is a lot but I strongly encourage you to implement these lessons as soon as you can.
You’ll reach your goals faster because of it.
In the third of our new 4-weekly Open Liberty releases, we have a full implementation of MicroProfile 2.2. MicroProfile 2.2 focuses on improving the developer experience of writing cloud-native Java microservices with MicroProfile. It includes updates to the MicroProfile Rest Client, Fault Tolerance, OpenAPI, and Open Tracing features, and is based on Java EE 8 technologies.
If you're using Maven, here are the coordinates:
A delightful and refreshing scroll experience with some experimental elements. Our pick this week.
Get lifetime free templates and plugins. Work with the best visual HTML drag and drop builder you’ve ever seen.
The results of Stackoverflow’s survey that was answered by nearly 90,000 developers on how they learn and level up, which tools they’re using, and what they want.
Test how well you know CSS selectors with this interactive quiz by Paulina Hetman.
Rachel Andrew takes a closer look at the CSS display property, a workhorse of a property that doesn’t get a lot of attention.
An amazing city building game that uses microscopic models to vividly simulate the organism of a city arising from the interactions of millions of individuals.
An interesting article by Kilian Valkhof on the limitations of modern design tools.
Stéphanie Walter shares some useful resources, tips and tools she regularly uses to build and check the color accessibility of products.
A strong, neutral, principles-driven, open-source typeface for text or display.
A mesmerizing demo by Yuan Chuan.
Claudia Romano shows how to create a custom accessible radio switch.
Areknawo explores the new data structures in JavaScript that came with ES6 and shows how useful they can be.
A Chrome extension by Amie Chen that lets you turn websites into organized data without coding.
A tutorial by Tania Rascia where you’ll learn how to code a Snake game in JavaScript.
A website that collects design conferences, workshops and meetups.
A very interesting article by Eric Lawler on the art of creating stable, long-term websites and content.
Follow this tweet by GitHub and check out Muhammad Mustadi’s amazing GIF hacked GitHub profile.
Harry Nicholls explains how you can use the upcoming CSS env() feature.
An unsettling review of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
Live JavaScript benchmarking where you can see results graphed out as you type.
Teeny-tiny, satisfying scratchy hand. Simply epic. By Char Stiles.
Chris and Sadek talk about when is it best to use JavaScript over CSS, and should we all learn CSS as we learn JavaScript? Read the transcript here.
Some valuable insights into the vulnerabilities of local storage.
Daniel Velasquez shows how to code a recreation of the sticky image effect seen on the websites of MakeReign and Ultranoir using three.js.
Collective #507 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops.
In December 2018, Microsoft announced that Edge would adopt Chromium, the open source project that powers Google Chrome. Many within the industry reacted with sadness at the loss of browser diversity. Personally, I was jubilant. An official release date has yet to be announced, but it will be at some point this year. With its release, a whole host of HTML, JavaScript and CSS features will have achieved full cross-browser support.
The preview build is now available for Windows, and coming soon for Mac.
📣 Calling all web devs and tinkerers! 📣
The first preview builds of the next version of #MicrosoftEdge are ready for you – try it out now! https://t.co/I531hfmD3G pic.twitter.com/Tvh6OGGouO
— Microsoft Edge Dev (@MSEdgeDev) April 8, 2019
Not so long ago, I penned an article titled "The Long Slow Death of Internet Explorer." Some of us are lucky enough have abandoned that browser already. But it wasn’t the only thing holding us back. Internet Explorer was the browser we all hated and Edge was meant to be its much-improved replacement. Unfortunately, Edge itself was quite the laggard. EdgeHTML is a fork of Trident, the engine that powered Internet Explorer. Microsoft significantly under-invested in Edge. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Edge’s User Voice website was a nice idea, allowing developers to vote for which features they wanted to be implemented. Unfortunately, as Dave Rupert put it, voting on the site was "like throwing coins in a wishing well." The most requested features were left unimplemented for years.
There are a lot of features that pre-Chromium Edge doesn’t currently support but are available in other modern browsers and, once they’ve made the switch, we’ll be able to use them. Many of them can’t be polyfilled or worked around, so this release is a big deal.
So just what are those features, exactly? Let’s outline them right here and start to get excited about all the new things we’ll be able to do.
Together, custom elements and shadow DOM allow developers to define custom, reusable and encapsulated components. A lot of people were asking for this one. People have been voting for its implementation since 2014, and we’re finally getting it.
The <details> and <summary> elements are part of HTML5 and have been supported since 2011 in Chrome. Used together, the elements generate a simple widget to show and hide content. While it is trivial to implement something similar using JavaScript, the <details> and <summary> elements work even when JavaScript is disabled or has failed to load.
See the Pen
details/summary by CSS GRID (@cssgrid)
on CodePen.
This one means a lot to some people. All modern browsers now support the CSS font-display property. However, you still might want to load your fonts with JavaScript. Font-loading monomaniac Zach Leatherman has an explainer of why you might want to load fonts with JavaScript even though we now have broad support for font-display. Ditching polyfills for this API is important because this JavaScript is, according to Zach:
[...] usually inlined in the critical path. The time spent parsing and executing polyfill JavaScript is essentially wasted on browsers that support the native CSS Font Loading API."
In an article from 2018, Zach lamented:
[...] browser-provided CSS Font Loading API has pretty broad support and has been around for a long time but is confoundedly still missing from all available versions of Microsoft Edge."
No longer!
Most easily explained with a code snippet, flat() is useful when you have an array nested inside another array.
const things = ['thing1', 'thing2', ['thing3', ['thing4']]]
const flattenedThings = things.flat(2); // Returns ['thing1', 'thing2', 'thing3', 'thing4']As its name suggests, flatMap() is equivalent to using both the map() method and flat().
These methods are also supported in Node 11. 🎉
TextEncoder and TextDecoder are part of the encoding spec. They look to be useful when working with streams.
These are just like rest and spread properties for arrays.
const obj1 = {
a: 100,
b: 2000
}
const obj2 = {
c: 11000,
d: 220
}
const combinedObj = {...obj1, ...obj2}
// {a: 100, b: 2000, c: 11000, d: 220}Using a function-like syntax, dynamic imports allow you to lazy-load ES modules when a user needs them.
button.addEventListener("click", function() {
import("./myModule.js").then(module => module.default());
});background-blend-mode brings Photoshop style image manipulation to the web.
I can’t help feeling that not making people feel sick should be the default of a website, particularly as not all users will be aware that this setting exists. As animation on the web becomes more common, it’s important to recognize that animation can cause causes dizziness, nausea and headaches for some users.
Admittedly a rather trivial feature, and one that could have safely and easily been used as progressive enhancement. It lets you style the blinking cursor in text input fields.
It’s nice to have consistency in a codebase. This includes sticking to either
the RGB, hexadecimal or HSL color format. If your preferred format is hex, then you had a problem because it required a switch to rgba() any time you needed to define transparency. Hex can now include an alpha (transparency) value. For example, #ffffff80 is equivalent to rgba(255, 255, 255, .5). Arguably, it’s not the most intuitive color format and has no actual benefit over rgba().
I’ve not seen as much hype or excitement for intrinsic sizing as some other new CSS features, but it’s the one I’m personally hankering for the most. Intrinsic sizing determines sizes based on the content of an element and introduces three new keywords into CSS: min-content, max-content and fit-content(). These keywords can be used most places that you would usually use a length, like height, width, min-width, max-width, min-height, max-height, grid-template-rows, grid-template-columns, and flex-basis.
Used in conjunction with the writing-mode property, text-orientation, specifies the orientation of text, as you might expect.
See the Pen
text-orientation: upright by CSS GRID (@cssgrid)
on CodePen.
placeholder-shown was even available in Internet Explorer, yet somehow never made it into Edge... until now. UX research shows that placeholder text should generally be avoided. However, if you are using placeholder text, this is a handy way to apply styles conditionally based on whether the user has entered any text into the input.
place-content is shorthand for setting both the align-content and justify-content.
See the Pen
place-content by CSS GRID (@cssgrid)
on CodePen.
The will-change property can be used as a performance optimization, informing the browser ahead of time that an element will change. Pre-Chromium Edge was actually good at handling animations performantly without the need for this property, but it will now have full cross-browser support.
all is a shorthand for setting all CSS properties at once.
For example, setting button { all: unset; } is equivalent to:
button {
background: none;
border: none;
color: inherit;
font: inherit;
outline: none;
padding: 0;
}Sadly, though, the revert keyword still hasn’t been implemented anywhere other than Safari, which somewhat limits the mileage we can get out of the all property.
Traditionally, the web has been rectangle-centric. It has a box model, after all. While we no longer need floats for layout, we can use them creatively for wrapping text around images and shapes with the shape-outside property. This can be combined with the clip-path property, which brings the ability to display an image inside a shape.
clip-path editorIf you want to apply special styles to an entire form when any one of its inputs are in focus, then :focus-within is the selector for you.
This is pretty much essential if you’re working with CSS grid. This had been marked as "not planned" by Edge, despite 3,920 votes from developers.
For both flexbox and grid, only direct children become flex items or grid items, respectively. Anything that is nested deeper cannot be placed using flex or grid-positioning. In the words of the spec, when display: contents is applied to a parent element, "the element must be treated as if it had been replaced in the element tree by its contents," allowing them to be laid out with a grid or with flexbox. Chris goes into a more thorough explanation that’s worth checking out.
There are, unfortunately, still some bugs with other browser implementations that affect accessibility.
We’ve only looked at features that will be supported by all modern browsers when Edge makes the move to Chromium. That said, the death of legacy Edge also makes a lot of other features feel a lot closer. Edge was the only browser dragging its feet on the Web Animation API and that showed no interest in any part of the Houdini specs, for example.
Of course, the other huge plus for web developers is less testing. A lot of neglected Edge during cross-browser testing, so Edge users were more likely to have a broken experience. This was the main reason Microsoft decided to switch to Chromium. If your site is bug-free in one Chromium browser, then it’s probably fine in all of them. In the words of the Edge team, Chromium will provide "better web compatibility for our customers and less-fragmentation of the web for all web developers." The large variety of devices and browsers makes browser testing one of the least enjoyable tasks that we’re responsible for as front-end developers. Edge will now be available for macOS users which is great for the many of us who work on a Mac. A subscription to BrowserStack will now be slightly less necessary.
To my knowledge, the only feature that was supported everywhere except Chrome is SVG color fonts, which will no longer work in the Edge browser. Other color font formats (COLR, SBIX, CBDT/CBLC) will continue to work though.
Uh, @GoogleChrome Are you planning to support #OpenTypeSVG soon? Supported in Safari (12+), Firefox (26+) even EdgeHTML (38+) Photoshop, Illustrator - but not Chrome
/cc @colorfontswtf pic.twitter.com/tgwJ3AqHm2— Chris Lilley (@svgeesus) February 15, 2019
Admittedly, Edge wasn’t the last subpar browser. All the features in this article are unsupported in Internet Explorer, and always will be. If you have users in Russia, you’ll need to support Yandex. If you have users in Africa, you’ll need to support Opera Mini. If you have users in China, then UC and QQ will be important to test against. If you don’t have these regional considerations, there’s never been a better time to ditch support for Internet Explorer and embrace the features the modern web has to offer. Plenty of PC users have stuck with Internet Explorer purely out of habit. Hopefully, a revamped Edge will be enough to tempt them away. An official Microsoft blog entry titled "The perils of using Internet Explorer as your default browser" concluded that, "Internet Explorer is a compatibility solution...developers by and large just aren’t testing for Internet Explorer these days." For its remaining users, the majority of the web must look increasingly broken. It’s time to let it die.
Life is about to get easier for web developers, yet the response to the Microsoft’s announcement was far from positive. Mozilla, for one, had a stridently pessimistic response, which accused Microsoft of "officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet." The statement described Google as having "almost complete control of the infrastructure of our online lives" and a "monopolistic hold on unique assets." It concluded that "ceding control of fundamental online infrastructure to a single company is terrible."
Many have harked back to the days of IE6, the last time a browser achieved such an overwhelming market share. Internet Explorer, having won the browser war, gave in to total stagnation. Chrome, by contrast, ceaselessly pushes new features. Google participates actively with the web standards bodies the W3C and the WHATWG. Arguably though, it has an oversized influence in these bodies and the power to dictate the future shape of the web. Google Developer Relations does have a tendency to hype features that have shipped only in Chrome.
Rather than being the new IE, Edge can help innovate the web forward. While it fell behind in many areas, it did lead the way for CSS grid, CSS exclusions, CSS regions and the new HTML imports spec. In a radical departure from historical behavior, Microsoft have become one of the world’s largest supporters of open source projects. That means all major browsers are now open source. Microsoft have stated that they intend to become a significant contributor to Chromium — in fact, they’ve already racked up over 300 merges. This will help Edge users, but will also benefit users of Chrome, Opera, Brave, and other Chromium-based browsers.
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Here’s a neat trick from Andy Bell where he uses CSS Custom Properties to check if a particular CSS feature is supported by using JavaScript.
Basically, he's using the ability CSS has to check for browser support on a particular property, setting a custom property that returns a value of either 0 or 1 (Boolean!) and then informing the JavaScript to execute based on that value.
Here's his example:
.my-component {
--supports-scroll-snap: 0;
}
@supports (scroll-snap-type: x mandatory) {
.my-component {
--supports-scroll-snap: 1;
}
}const myComponent = document.querySelector('.my-component');
const isSnapSupported = getCSSCustomProp('--supports-scroll-snap', myComponent, 'boolean');As Andy mentions, another common way to do this is to use pseudo elements on the body element and then access them with JavaScript, but this approach with @supports seems a whole lot cleaner and less hacky to me, personally. I wonder how many more intuitive things we’ll find we can do with CSS Custom Properties because this is an interesting case where CSS instructs JavaScript, instead of the other way around.
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(This is a sponsored post.)
Flock is a messaging and collaboration tool built for both designers and developers. With close-to-zero setup, it brings together all your team’s conversations, appointments, and files in one place, helping you spend more time on what you are best at — building awesome stuff!
Building software is hard. Building software that is a delight to use every day is even harder, given the exacting standards most of us in the design and development community have for our tools. So, when we set out to change how people communicate in the modern workplace, we had but one goal - build something that we would objectively love!
Today, thousands of design and development teams use Flock every day, validating our UX-led approach to building a team collaboration tool for all kinds of teams. But how did we get here? Here’s our story.
At Flock, our designers frequently share creatives and design assets with the rest of the organization and using email to share links to files gets real old, real fast. So we started by looking at one of the biggest challenges to efficient collaboration at work — the "app-juggling" one had to master even for something as simple as sharing a file.
"Emails on one platform, files on another, real-time conversations on yet another one, and we would often need to shuffle between these apps to find and share relevant files with team members. That was an invisible time-sink!"
—Aaron Durham, Designer at Flock
We realized that bringing together our files and the conversations around them in one place would save us a lot of time and effort, and built integrations for Flock with Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, and Dropbox. Now, it is incredibly easy to find and share relevant files from the sidebar and discuss them with the team immediately, with dynamic previews and permission controls.
The next challenge we tackled was the time spent in getting feedback on designs and prototypes from colleagues in our geographically distributed design and development team. We knew that it was difficult to convey visual feedback on creatives through plain text/emails because our designers often struggled to understand what part of an illustration the feedback was aimed at.
And then, we thought, "Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we could hop on a call and show colleagues exactly what we see?" So, we built a seamless video and audio conferencing experience into Flock that allows us to start a video call with one or more team members and walk them through the feedback by sharing screens.
Like most startups, we have a few irons in the fire at any given time. So, one group of designers and developers might be working on a prototype of our newest product while another group works on landing pages for a marketing campaign. Conversations around these projects need to happen simultaneously and seamlessly. But with a team of over a hundred rock-stars, it’s difficult to keep track of conversations on various projects and keep those conversations on track. We had to create a system that accomplished both.
So, for every project, the Project Lead creates a Channel on Flock (a group conversation) where everyone involved can discuss the project. We create other channels for shared interests and water-cooler chats, so conversations in project channels are focused and more efficient.
Another reason for the dreaded "app-juggling" act? Our designers and developers use a lot of apps and services that they have to check for updates at various times of the day. So we built integrations for third-party services right into Flock. Now, team members receive notifications from all their favorite apps in one place — Flock — and can choose to take action when required.
Our App Store has over 60 integrations with popular third-party business apps and services, so we can work with all our favorite tools in one place. And we can connect hundreds of applications and web services to Flock using Zapier and IFTTT. From Dribble and Asana to Jira and GitHub, we connect almost every service we use to Flock. Last but not least, developers can build custom apps and integrations using our open API.
Many early adopters of Flock were teams with designers and developers who were happy to share feedback. We found that a lot of these teams worked with external consultants or clients, particularly at creative agencies. And these conversations were, again, on email, on the phone or, sometimes, verbal instructions with no record for later reference.
To ensure all these conversations could be brought into one window, we created Guests in Flock, an incredibly simple way of adding external collaborators to team workflows while maintaining a firewall of access between conversations within the team and conversations with guest users. This makes it easier to collaborate with clients and consultants, feedback can be shared and acted upon in real-time, and the built-in image annotation feature allows designers to share visual feedback on creatives.
Our thinking from the get-go has been that effective communication is a basic utility in every workplace, and it should add to productivity way more than it does to expenses. Which is why we priced Flock starting from free, with an option to unlock all functionality for $4.50 a user per month on the Pro plan — a third as much as our competitors.
Our designers and developers have found incredible success in building Flock and becoming its first power users, and the business case for adopting a team collaboration platform has never been clearer. Whether one wants to discuss ideas, share collateral's, collect feedback from teammates and clients, or get code-push notifications from Gitlab, Flock just works.
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In this post, I'll show you how to receive webhooks in real time from GitHub.com, even if your CloudBees Core stuff is behind a firewall. You can generalize this to other services too — such as BitBucket or DockerHub, or anything really that emits webhooks, but the instructions will be for GitHub projects hosted on github.com. The benefit, of course, is that you can use these public hosted services if you like, but your Core instances do not necessarily have to be directly open to the internet.
Just a very quick refresher on what webhooks are: Messages (often JSON, but not always) typically posted by HTTP(S) from a server to a client that is listening for events.