1. Don't Be Afraid to Show Emotion

It's okay for your business to show some emotion online, especially during a calamity. People want to see that you're human and care about the situation. Just be sure not to overdo it, as this can be insincere.

It can be challenging to know how much is too much when showing emotion online. A good rule of thumb is to think about how you would react in person. If you wouldn't cry or get too emotional in front of your customers, don't do it online. Just a few sincere words can go a long way.

 2. Don't Engage in Arguments

It can be tempting to want to defend your business when people are criticizing it online. However, this is usually a losing battle. It's best to avoid arguments with people on social media, as there's no winning in them.

If someone is especially critical of your business, you can try contacting them personally to discuss the situation. This can often diffuse the situation and help you come to a resolution.

 3. Keep Your Communication Positive

It's essential to keep your communication positive during a time of tragedy. You don't always have to be happy, but you should avoid negativity. People are already feeling down and don't want to see more negativity online.

Try to focus on your business' good, even if it seems like a small thing. For example, if you're a clothing company, you could donate some clothes to those affected by the calamity. Whatever it is, try to do something positive to make people feel good about your business.

 4. Take a Break If You Need It

Breaking from social media is okay if you're feeling overwhelmed by the situation. This is especially true if you're starting to feel burnt out. It's better to take a step back and recharge than keep pushing through and making mistakes.

You can also use this time to brainstorm new ideas for handling the situation. Sometimes it's helpful to get away for a bit to come back with fresh eyes.

 5. Be Careful with Your Words

Be careful with your words when communicating with people online. This is true generally, but it's vital during a calamity. People are looking for someone to blame, and they might take your words out of context.

Try to avoid saying anything that could be interpreted as insensitive or offensive. If you're not sure whether something is appropriate, it's better to err on the side of caution and not say it at all.

 6. Don't Make Promises You Can't Keep

Be honest with your customers during calamity. Don't make promises you can't keep, as this will only worsen the situation. For example, if you're a restaurant and say you're going to donate all of your proceeds to the victims but only donate a portion, people will be angry.

It's better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite. This way, even if you don't meet your initial goal, people will still be impressed with what you've done.

 7. Keep Your Communication Clear

It's important to keep your communication clear during a time of calamity. This means avoiding jargon and technical terms that people might not understand while being concise and to the point. People don't want to read long, rambling messages during a crisis.

Keep your communication clear and straightforward so people can understand what you're saying. If you need to communicate something complicated, consider using visuals or infographics to help get your point across.

 8. Be Respectful

It's important to be respectful when you're communicating with people online, particularly when handling social media during tragedy. This means not making fun of the situation or those affected by it. It also means avoiding profanity and offensive language.

Remember that real people behind the screens are going through a tough time. Show them the same respect and compassion you would if you talked to them.

 9. Take Your Time

Don't feel like you have to post something right away. If you're unsure what to say, it's better to wait until you have more information. This way, you can avoid saying something that could worsen the situation. Being delicate is critical when managing social media during tragedy.

It's also important to remember that your account is not a news platform. Don't use it to break the news about the calamity. Wait until the official channels have released information before posting anything.

 10. Check in With Your Team

If you have a team, check in with them during a time of calamity. See how your team is doing and if they need anything. This is especially important if you have team members directly affected by the situation.

Checking in with your team will help ensure everyone is on the same page and feels supported. It's also an excellent way to get new ideas about handling the situation.

 11. Take Some Time for Yourself

Take some time for yourself during a calamity. It is a tough and stressful time for everyone, and taking care of yourself mentally and physically is essential. Make sure to take breaks from social media and the news. Spend time with loved ones, or do something that makes you happy.

It's also important to remember that you can't help everyone. Some people will always be more affected by the situation than you are. Don't try to take on too much and burn yourself out.

 12. Hire a Marketing Agency

There are a lot of marketing agencies that can help you navigate a time of tragedy. They can help you create and implement a plan that will help you communicate effectively with your customers.

If you're unsure where to start, consider hiring a marketing agency. They will be able to help you create content, manage your social media, and develop a plan to communicate with your customers.

 13. Monitor Your Social Media During Tragedy

After you've posted something, monitor the reactions. This means reading the comments and responding to them. It also means keeping an eye on how people react to what you're saying.

If you see people getting angry or frustrated, try to calm the situation down. If people are asking for more information, provide it if you can. And if people are praising you for your response, take the time to thank them.

 14. Be Prepared for Anything

Tragedies can happen anytime, so it's important to have a plan in place to know what to do when something happens. It also means being aware of the available resources to you and your team.

By being prepared, you'll be able to handle a tragedy in a respectful, compassionate, and helpful way. And you'll be able to do it in a way that minimizes the impact on your business.

 15. Be Empathetic

Understand how other people feel and why they might be feeling that way. Being empathetic also means seeing things from others' perspectives.

Empathy is one of the most important qualities when dealing with a tragedy. It will help you connect with people and understand what they're going through. And it will help you to provide the support that they need.

 16. Follow The 80/20 Marketing Rule

In times of calamity, it's essential to follow the 80/20 marketing rule. This means that 80% of your content should be about things other than your product or service. The additional 20% can promote your business.

It's a good rule because it shows that you care about more than making money. It shows that you're willing to talk about what matters to your customers and are interested in building a relationship with them.

 17. Don't Take Advantage of the Situation

Do not take advantage of a tragedy by using the situation to promote your brand or sell products. This can exploit people's emotions for personal gain.

Doing either is wrong and will only make people resent your brand. If you look like you're taking advantage, it will damage your reputation and make it difficult to recover.

 18. Keep Your Business Running

While showing compassion and understanding during hard times is important, you also need to keep your business running. This means making sure that your team is still able to work and that your customers can still get the products or services they need.

It can be challenging to balance showing compassion and keeping your business running, but you need to try. Your team and your customers will appreciate it.

 Conclusion

It can be difficult to navigate social media during tragedy. But by following these tips, you can ensure that you're respectful, compassionate, and helpful. And you'll be able to keep your business running while still showing support for those affected.

At Bright Vessel, we are a digital marketing company well-versed in traditional and digital marketing and understand how to appeal to customers. Contact us today to learn more about how a content marketing strategy can benefit your bottom line. You can also find our more about our  hosting plans through Bright Hosting, and our plugins at Bright Plugins.

The post How to Manage Social Media As a Business During a Tragedy first appeared on B2B Website Platform Developer - Bright Vessel.

What Are Your Goals?

Firstly, before embarking on the journey to crafting a great email marketing strategy, you need to define your goals. Determining your goals and objectives will enable you to set a definitive process from the onset.

Identify Your Target

Next, clearly define your target. Is it business to business or business to consumer? You need to determine the customers you intend to offer services to and whether they have the kind of problem your business can solve. Craft your email marketing to excite, attract and lure them into coming for your solutions or products.

The easiest way to determine who your target customers are is:

• Analyzing what your portfolio holds or who your existing clients are.
• Study who will benefit from your solution by doing online market research.
• Find out who your direct competitors' customers are.

After this, the next step is finding out and classifying your clients by determining common demographic details such as age, gender, location, income, and marital status.

Select Your Toolbox

A successful strategy will require you to use tools that will help you craft, disseminate, track and measure the marketing emails and campaigns.

For starters, you will need an email service provider. The email provider will enable you to create and send your emails and provide you with additional solutions for email tracking. Next, pick an automation tool that allows you to program and send emails at strategic times.

Once you've selected the tools needed to craft your strategic emails, write down the passwords you'll share with your team.

Qualify Your Leads

Qualifying leads involve reaching out to visitors by cold calling or using your ChatBots and customer service personnel to get them to trust you and share their email addresses. You can only do this through proven tactics to make customers want to hear more from you. A few tactics to get your customers' trust include:

Create Relevant Content on Your Website with a Request for Details

Top-notch content provides value to your prospective customers. You can choose to use educational, entertainment, or informational content that inspires them. Include a call to action requesting visitors sign up for more of your content or services.

Keep an Opt-In Form on Your Website's Service or Home Section

The opt-in button can be situated at the bottom of the page or sidebar for easy visibility while they browse your site.

Create Free Offers

One-time offers come in handy when requesting email addresses. You can offer free trials upon subscriptions or a freebie like an ebook.

Segment the Collected Email List

Email list segmentation involves demographically fragmenting your long list into smaller lists based on similarities. For example, one list can consist of ages between 30-35 or those in their thirties and forties. Don't forget to create a buyer persona for each list.

Create Customized Emails

Use the smaller lists you've created to customize your emails to reflect on your brand offerings and develop precise and on-target emails that will realize increased responses. Some tips to successfully customize your emails:

• Analyze your solutions and how they will address your clients' problems.
• Be consistent with the content on your website.
• Analyze whether your content ideas will work well in email messages.

Ready to email your potential customers? Make sure that your emails are personalized before hitting the send button. Tweak the customized emails to fit your customers' profiles and tastes before sending. Personalized marketing emails have a higher return on investment than generic emails.

How to Personalize Your Email Marketing

Personalized emails may consist of something as simple as a birthday card, which studies have shown to generate more than 300% return on investment.

To gather more personalized information, you can employ the use of digital marketing methods, such as:

• Use social media analytics and your website to get an idea of the products and services that generate the highest rate of engagement which plays a critical role in making them share more details.
• Design lead forms with additional fields that prompt your potential clients to feel in more detail on your website and social media sites. However, be cautious not to make your leads feel as if they are filling a loan application form by asking for more than is conventionally acceptable.
• Employ an email look-up tool to generate the leads' basic information such as server location, name, and social media profiles.

Use A/B Testing

Using A/B testing is critical to getting to know more about your customers. Test body copy, subject lines, layout, images, and many more, and change only one thing at a time to draw clear conclusions. This will help you determine the words that resonate better with your target market.

Set Up Trigger Emails

Trigger emails are sent out to your customers or potential customers while they're on your website. Trigger emails have proven to be more effective in generating replies because you reach out to the customers actively engaging with your content. You can set your triggered these emails to:

• Send a reminder immediately after a customer abandons their cart.
• Ask for feedback immediately after a customer completes a purchase or they've finished browsing your website.
• Send a welcoming email right after they navigate your website.

Share Your Values

Customers nowadays want to support brands they identify with and with missions that align with their core values. You can showcase the milestones of your corporate social responsibility initiatives, like how many orphanages you have supported or your company's impact on the environment, by participating in yearly tree planting events.

Use Dynamic Email Content

Using dynamic email content is the best way to personalize your email marketing. Your email content can be dynamic by including features like a countdown or a live feed from your blog or social channels.

Figure out How You Will Evaluate Your Marketing Campaigns

You have set your goals and gathered your marketing campaign creation tools. Then, you figured out your target market personas and demographics. Finally, you have qualified your leads, tested and personalized your marketing emails to achieve optimum results. Now it's time to establish how you will evaluate your marketing campaigns.

The best way to ensure this process is flawless is by creating email marketing strategy templates that will help you to keep tabs on the accurate net results. Alternatively, you can employ online tools like Hubspot to get an in-depth analysis and evaluation of what your efforts are yielding.

Conclusion

Creating an email marketing strategy is a process that involves a host of fine details that, if overlooked, will give you a hard time implementing and measuring progress and success. Employing a plausible marketing strategy template that you can tweak from time to time will greatly benefit your online store.

At Bright Vessel, we understand the importance of a spelled-out content plan. Contact us today for insights on content marketing strategy and how it can affect your bottom line.

The post Email Marketing for Online Stores first appeared on B2B Website Platform Developer - Bright Vessel.

Most people avoid adding stop words to the page title because search engines don't count them or penalize them. However, there is a way to add stop words without removing them. Simply use the hyphen (-) character to note your page title. Be careful, though, as adding this punctuation mark may result in penalties instead of rewards.

SEO stop words are "empty" words that don't add anything to a URL. You want to avoid these for SEO purposes, so the content of your web pages is relevant to people's search queries. Your URL can stay relevant by building it with keywords, metatags, or comment terms. Some common SEO stop words are:

•  the
• an
• a
• of
• or
• many

This article will also discuss that some stop words may not be as common, but you should still avoid them. In early 2017, Google began to limit the volume of URLs used in its index. This change was called the "Behave Update," but it was also known as the "Shopping Express Update" or "Google Shopping Update." The move affected many websites, and web admins everywhere struggled to remain relevant and rank well. With no new wave of updates, many web admins gave up on their sites or moved to other words of opportunity.

Are Stop Words Bad for SEO?

Google has removed stop words from the index by default, but you can force the index to include them. Other search engines such as Bing have stopped right away and included no stop words on their pages. Keep in mind that this is not a clear indication of a penalty. Some SEO experts believe that these words are outdated and not a good way to describe a page's content. The only thing you can do is test it yourself, but don't be disappointed if nothing happens.

One of the reasons Google stopped including stop words on its pages is to improve the user experience. These are used in Chrome to help users navigate a website's catalog. Many people don't know that these words are considered stop words.

There are ways to circumvent SEO stop words. For example, SEO Guy Toolkit developed the "SEO Stop Words Checker" for Firefox and Chrome browsers, showing you the words' results, including the most successful ones. The SEO Stop Word Checker uses some information from Google, so it is a good start since they have a lot of experience with this.

Do SEO Stop Words Affect Search Engine Rankings?

SEO has never been a simple process, and you should consider various factors for each SEO campaign. SEO stop words may affect a page's ranking, though it is still debatable how much it can change. When calculating search engine rankings, there are many different aspects to consider, such as the quality and comprehensiveness of a website's content.

Content quality is essential because it may increase the chances of being found in search engine results. If you are ranking high in search engine results, you need to ensure that the content associated with those pages is relevant and up-to-date.

Below, you can find some of the most important talking points when it comes to SEO stop words.

Removing Stop Words

Many experts swear that removing stop words can help them increase their rankings, but it isn't a universal take. The fact is that removing stop words can help you to improve your Google rankings, but it can also affect the site's compatibility with other search engines. It may also pose a problem with some website themes since they may not support hyphens in URLs.

SEO Stop Words in Titles

A title will look better without stop words, and it will typically be more readable. However, this doesn't apply to the content of the pages. Many SEO specialists believe that stop words don't have a functional purpose because they don't help rankings. Therefore, removing or not including them will inevitably be a better decision for search engines.

In the past, Google did not penalize pages for having too many stop words in its page titles, but it does now. The reason is that some people don't know how to include specific words in their titles when creating content.

Stop Words in URL Slugs

Many SEO specialists believe that stop words in URL slugs can hurt SEO. Many argue that it is better to remove them. In most cases, URL slugs are more difficult for search engines to index if there are too many stop words. Because of this, SEO specialists will advise you to take out some words so the page can be easily indexed and ranked by search engines.e

Stop Words as Keywords

Some SEO specialists believe that keywords should include stop words. These SEO specialists claim that incorporating stop words in web pages may help a page gain more exposure to search engines. However, this is only beneficial if the page has the right content because usually, stop words are replaceable with more relevant keywords.s

Are Stop Words Beneficial for SEO?

The answer to this question depends on many factors. The most important things you need to consider are the number of stop words on a web page and how relevant they are to the actual content. If these are terms that people may want to see on your page, you should use them. For example, if you have a page about cats and use "cat" as a keyword, it might be beneficial for you to keep using "cat" in your keywords. Google has excluded these words for a reason, so you should probably stop using them.

You can still use stop words to create relevant content or be more specific and comprehensive within your posts. And if you are looking to rank higher in search engine results, you will need all the help you can get. We have already established that stop words are not beneficial to your SEO rankings, but they can help give your pages more exposure to search engines.

Conclusion

It is not easy to choose what words to include and which to leave out when creating content for your website. However, you first need to determine if it will benefit your SEO rankings or if the stop words have no functional purpose. If you decide that they will be beneficial, you should keep them in the overall content.

We at Bright Vessels believe that you should include all the words discussed in your industry because many people are interested in the topic, not just those who want to read a review. Contact us today to discuss your SEO and SEM needs.

The post What Are SEO Stop Words? first appeared on B2B Website Platform Developer - Bright Vessel.

WordPress powers over a third of websites used today, making it the most popular website builder platform on the planet.

However, WordPress does have its disadvantages. The learning curve for developing a blog on WordPress can be difficult. Just as well, a novice to the world of blogging might struggle to figure out what to do to make their posts as profitable as possible.

Luckily, it's far from impossible to figure this out. WordPress can be the best possible content management system for your needs when appropriately used. If you want to harness the power of WordPress and build the most marketable blog possible, we're here to help.

We put together a list of our top tips and tricks for building a successful WordPress blog. Keep reading to learn how you can master the WordPress platform and create the blog of your dreams!

How to Create a Successful WordPress Blog

WordPress's learning curve can be difficult, but this platform can offer marketing ability, search engine optimization, and aesthetic design.

It's is important to be passionate and knowledgeable on the topic you are writing about. By doing so, you will keep your readers engaged and eager to learn more.  This might seem like a given, but far too many blog owners have not nailed down their niche. When blog owners don't have a niche, this can result in a blog that is packed with unclear content.

Just as well, without a solid understanding of what you are knowledgeable about, your blog posts might not provide the kind of value your readers need.

Take time to consider the topic of your blog

If you are not an expert in a particular field, pick a field that you are passionate about. If you opt for something you are more likely to spend time researching and learning about, you'll eventually become knowledgeable in that subject.

The goal here is to provide the most valuable content to your readers. Your readers will look elsewhere if your content lacks evidence and does not present value.

If you look at our blog over at Bright Vessel, you'll see an excellent example of knowledgeable content. Our top posts involve subjects that explore WordPress tips, breakdowns of WordPress plugins, and a variety of guides to WooCommerce inventory management.

We know what our brand seeks to do: Provide excellent WordPress and WooCommerce building services to entrepreneurs and businesses. As a result, our blog content revolves heavily around these subjects that our team specializes in.

Always use an A+ headline.

Once you have interesting content ready to go, it's time to pen your headline. Your headline is extremely important, as it will be what pulls the reader in and capture attention. Ensure that your headlines are urgent, unique, useful, and ultra-specific.

As with your content, your headline should establish the value that your readers will get out of reading your content. We recommend testing out different headlines to see which blog post title will pull in more readers. Once you've found which one works the best, roll with it!

Bright Vessel's blog is a great example of using a top-notch headline. We ensure that our blog post titles make it abundantly clear what the post is about and why it is valuable.

For example, our guide to Adobe XD titled "How to Export Assets from Adobe XD to Build a WordPress Website" is very direct and makes it clear what the valuable article will be about and the problem that the blog post will solve for the viewer.

It's all about establishing excellent value through your headline.

Add the right buttons and extras.

Always enable social sharing on your blog posts. This will make it easier for your readers to share your content on social media. We recommend using Jetpack to enable social sharing buttons of your choice on each and every blog post you upload.

The easier you make it for readers to share your posts, the more likely they are to actually share them.

Ensure that your blog's overall design is readable and pleasant.

The theme you use for your blog can make a big difference in its readability and popularity among readers. There are so many different types of free and premium WordPress themes out there. Many of them are easy to customize as well.

We recommend opting for a blog theme that matches your overall website theme. This will make your blog appear more cohesive. Just as well, we recommend looking into themes that offer SEO capabilities and extras. Some WordPress blog owners use drag-and-drop website builders as well.

Your final design should be relatively lightweight (with no excessive loading times) and responsive. It should also look attractive on both desktops and mobile devices.

If you're struggling with the design, coding, and development of your website, it may be worth looking into the services of a WordPress and WooCommerce design company. Bright Vessel boasts an excellent team of professionals that can handle the WordPress website design elements you need assistance with, as well as a variety of additional services.

Use clean permalinks.

A permalink is a link that appears when you visit a webpage. When you are drafting your posts on WordPress, you have the option of choosing what your permalink is.

It might seem like this isn't very important, but the look of your permalink can affect how shareable it is. We recommend choosing a clear, simple permalink based on the blog post's headline in question.

For example: "website.com/3234848" isn't as attractive or easy to share as "webside.com/website-blog-post."

Always use an SSL certificate.

This goes without saying: Your viewers are only interested in viewing and accessing safe websites. An SSL certificate is an additional layer of code designed to encrypt the connection between your webpage and a viewer's browser. SSL certificates protect the user and won't be flagged by their browser as unsafe.

An SSL certificate is pretty easy to acquire. In most cases, your hosting provider offers an SSL certificate for an additional fee.

If you take a look at our blog over at Bright Vessel, you'll notice right away that we have a secure SSL certificate in place to put our readers and potential customers at ease.

Use WordPress plugins to ensure your work is easy to read.

It may not be easy to manually proofread and code different elements into your posts. Luckily, there is a massive wealth of plugins and other tools that can help. We recommend trying out the following:

• Hemingway Editor. This free tool analyzes your blog post for readability. Hemingway will break down your word count and what grade your content stands at (the goal is to score under Grade 9). This tool will also break down different problematic sentences that you should edit, such as sentences that are hard to read, have too many adverbs, use too much passive voice, etc.
• Jetpack. As we mentioned earlier, Jetpack makes it easy to enable social sharing on your posts. This plugin offers a ton of different SEO tools as well.
• YoastSEO. This plugin optimizes your WordPress blog to show up on more Google search results pages. YoastSEO is also great for editing Twitter cards and controlling the appearance of your links on social media platforms.

How was our guide to creating the best WordPress blog possible? Tell us which tip or trick helped you the most in the comments below.

At Bright Vessel, we understand how crucial it is to have a very successful, well-built WordPress blog to market your business. We're proud to offer a wide range of services that can boost the profitability of your blog: From blog design to maintenance plans to search engine optimization. Get in touch with the Bright Vessel team today to learn more about our service offerings and to kick your current blog up a notch!

The post How to Create a Successful WordPress Blog in 2022 first appeared on B2B Website Platform Developer - Bright Vessel.

However, while it's true that search engines have changed their algorithms to focus more on quality and user experience, which doesn't mean search engine optimization is obsolete. In fact, in an ever more competitive online landscape, every little bit counts!

The lines between SEO, content and general site quality have blurred a little, but there are definite, concrete, on and off-site steps you can take to rank higher.

Get Good Quality Links

SEO used to be about getting as many links as possible. The more links you had, the more important search engines thought your site was. Those days are long over, and spammy links are a quick way to get your site penalized by search engines.

But that doesn't mean links should be completely ignored. Make sure your site is listed in relevant local directories and on services like Google My Business. A few links in industry publications don't hurt, nor do links from industry associations and organizations you belong to.

What you do need to avoid are spammy links in article comments or on completely irrelevant sites.

Use Internal Links

While lots of junky links to and from unrelated sites won't help you to gain credibility online, internal links can help a lot. Links tell search engine "spiders" when there's related content on your site, which helps them to catalog and classify your site and your content.

While we're on the topic of search engines and crawling, make sure you submit your XML sitemap to search engines and keep them up to date. Your sitemap tells search engines which pages are on your site, which helps to ensure that your pages get indexed. That, in turn, helps you to rank higher for your keywords and phrases.

Dial-In Your Keywords

Keywords for SEO have changed a lot too. Stuffing your site with keywords used to be a strategy, but with the shift to focus on quality content, that's not likely to win you any SEO prizes.

You should still do keyword research but stick to keywords that are closely related to what you do, and don't focus on things like keyword density too much. It's better to use variations of your keywords that look natural in your content than to try to shoehorn as many exact match words as you can in wherever you can.

Remember – your content should be written for humans first and search engines second!

Use SEO Tools

SEO tools help to ensure that your WordPress site is optimized and they're easy to use. If your site is built on WordPress, Yoast is one of the best and most trusted SEO plugins, and there's a free version, so you don't have to spend anything to use it.

Tools like Yoast also help to ensure that you are using keywords correctly. If you can, try to use relevant keywords and phrases in headings, subheadings, and links, because these will also help search engines to correctly index and catalog your site. The ultimate goal is to make sure that when someone searches online, your site comes up in the organic search results.

Content Really Is King

A very long time ago, internet marketing gurus declared content is king. Nothing has changed. In fact, as search engines and algorithms have changed to focus more on quality and the experience visitors have on websites, content has become even more important.

Quality content is the cornerstone of your SEO efforts. It's where you will be sending all that traffic you get, and there are some golden rules:

● Dive deep. Search engines have got very smart. They can tell when content is "thin" or low on useful information. So, try to make your content as detailed and in-depth as possible.

● When in doubt, opt for longer-form pieces. Content that is less than about 500 words is unlikely to rank well. So, write and create content that is long and detailed and really answers your reader's questions.

● Remember that content is all about your visitors. This is not a sales pitch. The content you post on your WordPress site should be valuable for the reader. So, make it interesting. Teach them something. Share your knowledge. It might not close the deal right away, but it will establish you as the go-to expert in your field.

● Break it up! Large blocks of content do not read well on screen. So, use links, headings and subheads, lists, bullets, and shorter paragraphs to keep it interesting and help people to read easier.

● Make sure you include images when relevant too, they make it a lot easier to understand and digest your content online.

● Update your content regularly. Search engines rank websites that have "fresh" content higher. You don't have to add new blog posts or content every day, but once or twice a week is ideal.

Use Metadata

The importance of metadata has decreased over time, but it's still an important way to tell search engines what your pages are about. It's also used as the description of your page in search results, so it matters to your visitors and readers too. Well-written metadata can help you to rank better and show up in more search results and entice people to find out more.

Keep Your WordPress Site Up to Date and Speedy

Over time, websites get slower. When things are out of date, or you have lots of unused widgets and plugins cluttering things up, your website won't load as quickly or smoothly.

Likewise, if your WordPress version and in-use plugins are out of date, they might slow things down or even produce errors on your WordPress site.

Make a habit of doing a little spring clean on your website from time to time. Remove old or unused items, make sure you don't have large files or images that aren't in use stored on your server, and update all your in-use widgets and plugins.

While you're at it, don't forget to audit and update your content from time to time. Some content is "evergreen," but some will need to be updated to reflect new ideas or technology.

Share and Automate

Even if you have the best information and content in the world, if no one knows it exists, it can't do its job!

Sharing content on social media and similar sites is a great way to promote your website and your content, and there's always the chance that it will "go viral." When your content is shared by other sites and people, those links to your WordPress site DO count towards your SEO, and they will influence your ranking!

There are lots of automation tools that can be built into a WordPress site to automatically post new content to your social media channels too, so you can save time and effort and still get the marketing boost!

Optimize Your Images

Images are very important to your WordPress site's usability, but they can slow things down, and if they are not optimized, they can count against you in SEO. There are a few ways you can optimize your images, such as:

● Use the smallest images possible. Larger images in high resolution take a long time to load, which won't hurt your SEO directly but can limit the time people spend on your site!

● Make sure all of your images are properly sized. Browser resizing is not good for SEO.

● Use alt text for all your images. If an image doesn't load for whatever reason, users will know what should have been there, and alt text for images can be indexed too – so it will count towards your SEO.

Always Use SSL

SSL used to be optional, but these days, it's very definitely on the list of things search engines consider when ranking your WordPress site. If your site doesn't have an SSL certificate or has a self-signed certificate, it won't rank as high as it might otherwise.

Make It Mobile Friendly

Another big change in SEO and search engine rankings was what is known as "Mobilegeddon," which was a giant search engine algorithm update that happened a few years ago. Sites that weren't mobile-friendly were automatically downgraded, and any new sites that weren't mobile-friendly automatically ranked lower.

A mobile-friendly site is often as easy as using a responsive template, so if you aren't already, start now!

Create a Checklist

A big part of good SEO is consistency, and the best way to do that is to make a checklist. Make sure that your articles, images, and content are correctly formatted from the start. Add metadata when you upload new content. Schedule regular cleanups and stay on top of everything.

It is possible to fix bad SEO, but it's a lot easier to do it right from the start. So, whether you do it yourself or outsource your SEO, make sure your WordPres site checks all the right boxes all the time.

The post How To Improve Your WordPress Site's SEO first appeared on B2B Website Platform Developer - Bright Vessel.

For well over a decade, we’ve turned into an on-the-go society. People consume content voraciously, but they’re also moving around while doing it. Everyone is continuously reading on their phones and tablets, everywhere - and that can be hard on the eyes.

As a brand, you only have a few seconds to grab a reader’s attention before they leave your site. Because of this, it’s vital to do whatever you can to keep your readers. That’s why we’ve prepared this list on how to improve your readability!

Before we delve into which details make posts more comfortable to read, it’s important to remember:

Each Audience is Different

You have to cater your content to your target audience. If you’re writing about activities for children, your language should be fun and straightforward. If you’re writing about something technical, like heavy machinery, you will need to use big words. Know your readers and what they’re looking for when going to your blog for info.

Because it’s possible to blog about literally anything, you should keep the following tips as suggestions. Still, you should always strive for exciting and highly readable content!

1. Write concise and clear paragraphs

Here's a guide on how to write sections on your copy:

• Each paragraph should be clear and to-the-point. Lead each section with the most important sentence, and then dedicate the rest of to elaborate. This way, your readers have a clear notion of what you’ll be talking about each paragraph.
• Make sure your paragraphs have a good length, as it makes them easier to read. Your readers are behind a screen, and they want something that’s easily digestible. A 10-line paragraph gives everyone pause, so make sure you separate your ideas properly.

2. Go for short sentences

For easier reading, at Bright Vessel we recommend:

• Keep your sentences short and sharp. We consider sentences too long when they’re over 20 words. Sentence length depends on the language, as they all have different structures. Still, we advise our clients to keep their sentences short and exciting.
• Keep longer sentences far from each other. You can make up your paragraphs of one long sentence and a few smaller ones.

3. Separate relevant sections

You want your copy to look as clean as possible, so:

• Add subheadings. They make the content look more fluid and less intimidating to your reader.
• Separate each post in appropriate sections. This way, your audience knows what’s ahead. It makes the content look much cleaner and easier to get through.

4. Don’t get too Technical

A few ways to avoid alienating your readers with professional slang:

• Avoid long and complicated words. If there are two words with similar meanings, go for the shorter one that’s easier to understand. Reading from a screen is unpleasant, and you don’t want to make it tougher. Words with four syllables or more are considered “difficult” by most standards, including our platform.
• When technical terms are necessary, combine them with other good readability practices. When using longer technical terms, make sure your sentences and paragraphs are short and well structured!
• Remember that long and “difficult” words don’t necessarily make great SEO keywords. Make sure the focus keyword of each post is in tune with the content. A good focus keyword is the first step towards a great blog post.

5. Transition words are your friends

Transition or signal words make your sentences much easier to read, as they connect different ideas. Think of them as the cement that glues your sentences together, helping you build a paragraph. Some of the most used transition words include “also,” “similarly,” “however,” and “unless.”

You can use signal words to agree (“in the first place”), opposition (“in contrast”), or exemplify (“notably”). If your grammar is a little rusty, the Internet is full of helpful websites. Proper use of transition words will make your content much easier to read, leading to more engagement.

6. Make your posts look fun

Your blog might be a reader’s only entertainment during a long commute, so make it count!

• Mix things up. Have longer and shorter paragraphs, add relevant subheadings, use synonyms. Remember you’re writing for people, not search engine bots, so you want your content to be visually enticing.
• Pamper your readers with material that isn’t only informative but also fun to read. Add a few jokes, without breaking your tone entirely. It could make all the difference!

7. Use the Bright Vessel SEO tool

The Bright Vessel SEO tool for WordPress will guide you through each of the best practices above. Its features include:

• Checking the lengths of your sentences and paragraphs.
• Seeing if you use subheadings.
• Looking at the percentage of transition words in your copy.
• Reviewing the percentage of passive voice sentences present in your copy.
• Calculating your Flesch Reading Ease score. It’s a formula to see how your post scores on readability.

This is how your readability score will look when using Bright Vessel SEO!

Summarizing

It all comes down to this:

• Write good content that’s easy to understand.
• Get your point across by using shorter words.
• Don’t go overboard with crazy long sentences and paragraphs.
• Separate large chunks of text with subheadings.
• Add tools like free Grammar-checking and Hemingway to your writing process.
• Make sure you check that readability and SEO are green on your Bright Vessel tool!

Bright Vessel specializes in creating dynamic and Search Engine Optimization solutions for all kinds of brands. We can work together for a grand strategy that works for your needs. Contact us today to find out more about our plans and prices!

The post 7 Ways to Make Your Blog Posts Interesting and Engaging first appeared on B2B Website Platform Developer - Bright Vessel.

Cornerstone SEO as a Foundation

Aside from impressing site visitors, cornerstone content can also play a role in SEO. When it is done right and is effective, it can be a ranking factor. Building a cornerstone content structure can give your site a boost for specific keywords as well as some of the long-tail keywords and phrases you want your site to rank for.

Think of your cornerstone content as the foundation for your building. Once you have a good foundation, you can set up the supporting stones to build on it, expanding on the subject matter and forming a solid content structure. The building is sturdy and the support all funnels back to the cornerstone, the epicenter of your site content. So how do you create solid content that ties in with SEO?

Cornerstone SEO Ranking Factors

To make your cornerstone content rank high in SERPs, a few steps can be followed to ensure that the content creation process is beneficial to your site and makes it stand out among rankings. Keep these in mind before and during the process, and you will have solid cornerstone content that you can continue to build upon in the future.

• Establish site authority. One of the most basic concepts behind creating a cornerstone content structure is establishing site authority. To do this, research relevant keywords and long-tail words or phrases you want your site to rank with and create 3 to 5 cornerstone articles centered around those words/phrases. Keywords are a vital part of SEO ranking as well as establishing site authority. Once you achieve site authority, your site will rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Set up an internal linking structure. Internal linking is an important ranking factor, and providing Google with a well-defined map to follow when indexing your site is beneficial. Cornerstone articles should be linked directly from your homepage, and all related articles should link back to that cornerstone article. Each time you create a new post with a similar topic or from a new angle, link it back to your original cornerstone as well. This link structure tells search engines how to interpret the importance of all the pages, giving Google a map to follow and increasing your chances of ranking in SERPs. As an example, if your cornerstone is “Marketing,” articles such as “Marketing to Lawyers” or “Developing Effective Marketing Strategies” would link back to your cornerstone content.
• Ensure that your customers are engaged. Statistics show that if you can get a customer to stay on your site for 30 minutes, you are more likely to retain that customer—and they are more likely to recommend the site to others as well. But if a customer visits your site and is unable to find answers to their questions quickly and efficiently, they won’t last five minutes on your site, much less 30. Good cornerstone content is easily accessible, grabs and holds a customer’s attention, and keeps them coming back to your site for more. The best way to make sure that customers get and stay engaged in your content is ensuring a good foundation and structure that allows them to navigate your site easily and keep on clicking.

Making Your Cornerstone Content Stand Out

If you already have an established blog, you know which posts have been the most read and most popular. When compiling your cornerstone page, make a list of those posts and combine, then rewrite their content into one large post. You will want to update your posts and pages regularly to ensure that they remain relevant, especially with keywords. As you create more content and gain more readers or customers, you can make more compilations of cornerstone material and keep it up to date as well. You can create one page that showcases all your cornerstone content and links to all related articles—and be sure to link the articles to each other and back to the cornerstone page.

If you’re just getting started establishing a blog or site, you will want to determine what you want your cornerstone to be and go from there. This is where researching relevant keywords come in handy the most; make a road map of where you plan to take your content and proposed future posts. Creating new content around those keywords and phrases will give you content that stands out and the opportunity to keep new content relevant. Your cornerstone content doesn’t have to be just a post, either; it can be videos, podcasts, anything you like. Just remember to start with the high-ranking keywords related to your subject and you will already have a good head start.

Importance of Creating Cornerstone Content

Cornerstone content is what will establish credibility for you and your site in the world of SEO rankings. You may have several high-ranking keyword posts, but a cornerstone page will give you more relevance and boost your site in SERPs while connecting your best content. Not only does it boost your ranking, but it also allows customers to:

• Find your content more easily based on a wider variety of keyword searches
• Discover more of your content when it is linked together
• Engage with more content on your site and stay engaged
• Become return customers and bring more business with them
• Navigate your site more easily and find answers to their questions

With all this in mind, there is no reason not to have a solid cornerstone content page on your site. Unless that is, you want to stay hidden and not experience any growth. Creating cornerstone content is relatively simple, especially when you already have content that you have worked hard on and are proud of. With just a little restructuring, your site will have a useful map for customers to follow, higher SEO rankings, and more visibility.

Conclusion

In today’s competitive market, one must look for ways to stand out and stay ahead. With so much content out there, it’s necessary to do everything you can to achieve high SEO rankings and draw people in before they lose interest or switch to a site that’s more user-friendly or interesting. Following simple steps to compile and create cornerstone content gives you a leg up on the competition by streamlining your site and rankings to achieve a better SERP position and can only increase traffic. What are you waiting for?

If you like this article try out our in-depth look at How to Build Cornerstone SEO Articles.

Are you ready to create powerful cornerstone content for your site? Bright Vessel can help you reach your SEO goals through keyword research and the creation of stellar cornerstone content. Contact us today to find out how we can help.

The post What is Cornerstone SEO first appeared on B2B Website Platform Developer - Bright Vessel.

Formalize Your Strategy

Many content marketers are content to employ an on-the-fly approach. This approach entails just coming up with ideas and deploying them. You might have some larger themes in mind, but there is not much planning into the future beyond the current campaign. As an improvement on that, try coming up with a formal strategy that will guide all your content and the ways you share it. If you can build that overall strategy, you will have some idea of what your next several campaigns should look like and what you want your content to do. The importance of having a formal strategy is that it promotes future-oriented thinking and helps you ensure that each piece of content is playing a specific role in your business. It is not enough to just push out as much good content as you can. Every publication should offer unique value and have a specific reason for existing. Moreover, your strategy can tell you what you need to do next in order to expand your business and promote growth. Try to be as concrete and clear as possible, and avoid vague statements without quantification or a link to a business outcome.

Set Particular Goals

Going along with formal strategy, you should also choose some concrete and actionable goals. That means stepping away from "getting as many sales as possible" or "improving brand strength" and moving toward "improving incoming traffic from SERPs by 20 percent" or "cutting the bounce rate in half" or "increasing conversion rates by 15 percent within eight months." Each of these goals has a measurable outcome and possibly a deadline. That way you will be able to know whether you have succeeded in meeting the goal. Each of these goals should support a particular segment of your strategic plan. For example, if your strategy is aimed at taking control of a set of keywords and becoming a thought leader in your industry, then you might have some goals aimed at traffic, others aimed at getting shares, and so on. Tie each goal to a measurable and specific outcome so that it is always clear whether the goal is met or not. Then all the content you write can be in service to one of those goals. That helps you stay focused on what will help you most and avoid wasting time on content without a defined role. It might seem harsh or restrictive, but this helps you narrow down the topics you will write about and make faster decisions about what goes into each post.

Plan Distribution

Your strategy does not just tell you what to write, but where to publish it. You need to have a clear idea of how and why you are distributing your content. Is it a blog attached to your site? An exterior blog or another platform? What's the role of social media and how does that connect with your audience's needs? Each audience and type of content has different implications for the best way for content to reach the reader and vice versa. Consider where you want people to engage with your content and why. Determine what will keep labor and time costs low so that your campaigns will be efficient. Think about whether you will be able to gather data about your readers and how easy it will be to make conversions with your chosen delivery plan. A surprising number of questions play into the decisions of where and how to distribute, and many businesses have not even considered them. Distribution needs to be a formal and full-fledged element in your plan from the beginning.

Address Mobility

There is no way around it: mobile platforms are a huge source of traffic, and they are growing worldwide. You cannot do any useful online marketing at all without taking this into account. First, you'll need to evaluate the mobile-friendliness of your content and platform. If they are slow, data-heavy, hard to read or navigate, or look bad on a small touch screen, then you will alienate many potential leads. You also need to consider what being on a mobile device means for the needs and plans of the readership. Someone who has arrived on your site from a mobile search likely wants a faster pipeline to buy and will spend less time reading than someone on a laptop or desktop. If the reader is on mobile, they want to make a decision quickly. Mobility presents a whole new range of opportunities if you can take advantage of them, and that includes respecting the amount of work and effort your mobile solution will take.

These tips are all related to making your content marketing more guided, planned, and formal. Now is not the time to publish any idea you have; it is time to trim and organize so that you can use each campaign to fulfill particular goals. Increasing sales is a fine goal, but there are other important ones connected to performance that can still provide you with a framework for what the content must do. Content marketing tips are often aimed at incremental improvements to the performance of the content on an individual basis. The key shift here is from a tactical to a strategic mindset.

Need Help?

At Bright Vessel, we understand the importance of pay-per-click in your company's marketing strategy. Ask us how we can help you establish a commanding web presence by contacting us today.

The post How to Improve Your Content Marketing in 2017 first appeared on B2B Website Platform Developer - Bright Vessel.

Document Your Strategy

According to CMI's research, companies that have a documented content strategy are much more likely to find success. Invest some time in creating a plan. After you’ve put together a plan, execute it!

Your documented strategy must include the following:

• Customer Personas - who are you speaking to?
• Content Goals - what are you trying to accomplish through content?
• Content Plan - what types of content will you create? How often will you publish? Where to publish?
• Who is responsible - make sure to designate who will write, edit, and be in charge of distributing and maintaining your content once it is created.

Speak to Pain Points

As you review your target customer personas, create a list of their “pain points.” These pain points can provide you valuable ideas for your online content. Pain points may include:

• The specific problems your product or service addresses
• Frequently asked customer questions or inquiries
• Common misunderstandings regarding the use of your product or service
• Breakdowns in communication between you and your client 

Distribution

One of the most important content marketing tips to research and absorb is the distribution and promotion of your content. It’s a waste of time creating a huge amount of well-thought-out and targeted content if no one will ever see it. Take these steps as you look for better ways to distribute your work:

• Research where influencers in your industry and your competitors are publishing their content. Check for active blogs, contributed articles in industry publications, and active posting in LinkedIn groups or industry forums.
• Check LinkedIn or community discussion forums to find out what most people are talking about. You might be able to get more ideas for your future content.
• Share your posts, articles, and e-books via social media. Your target customers are always looking for free and informative content. Use your social media channels to announce new or upcoming products, introduce a new blog post highlighting the benefits of using your service, or give away coupons or short how-to e-books that your customers will find valuable.

Reusing Your Best Content

Once you have a large bank of content, you might get a little weary of having to constantly “feed the beast.” A great way to beef up your content feed is to reuse or reframe content you have already created. Take these steps to safely reuse content throughout your distribution channels:

• Keep track of your best online content – the pieces that gain the most interactions or shares.
• Refresh the content – if it’s a listicle, update and present it every year, or target it to a new customer segment you want to reach.
• Brainstorm how to use old content in a different way – you may create a whitepaper or e-book from a well-read article, or utilize a popular guest post to create a SlideShare or quick how-to.

Content for Everyone

Making content relevant to multiple departments in your company is sometimes a lost facet of content marketing. The marketing team has a specific message to convey and goals to reach, which may be entirely different from what the sales or customer care team is trying to achieve. Your content marketing tactics and products should take into account the needs of all:

• Ask your sales team what content would be most useful to them in their interactions on the front line.
• Mine your customer service department’s interactions for pain points to speak to.
• Ask for insights from your executive team on their vision for the company, upcoming speaking events or presentations they’re excited about, or industry trends to watch out for.

Content Curation

Depending on your industry, there is probably a steady stream of content already being developed by influencers and industry publications. Supplement your content with compelling content being developed by others. Make curated content most impactful by abiding by some rules:

• Never claim it as your own in any way
• Include your opinion on the topic when posting
• Curated articles should be unique and relevant
• Make sure any commentary expressed in an article aligns with your branding
• Tag the original creator to forge potential relationship with an industry influencer

Creating content that converts is not easy. Though 88% of companies are actively creating content to meet business goals, just 32% of them would see their strategies as either mature or sophisticated. Following the tips above will set you on a path to understanding your content goals, and reaching them with intentional content development and curation.

At Bright Vessel, we have created a successful process for creating content marketing strategies that lead to better distribution and higher quality interactions. Contact us today to learn more about how an effective content can increase your company's conversion rates.

The post Winning Tactics for Content Marketing first appeared on B2B Website Platform Developer - Bright Vessel.

What Does Content Marketing Strategy Focus On Today?

Years ago, your standard content marketing strategy included mass article distribution to directories. The goal was off-site SEO and back links and few people cared if anyone ever read them.

These days, the focus is more and more on the content, not on the search engines. Businesses were forced to create more compelling brand content because of how search engines changed in the way they rank sites. Search now understands what is great quality articles and reinvented themselves while making brands do the same. Google's ever-changing algorithm steadily moves toward a total focus on human ideals rather than what the robots want. This is excellent news for any company because search engine bots do not buy anything, but people who browse through websites do.

How do I start with new content?

Although different business types, niches, and industries may have content marketing strategies that can be very different, they all come down to the basics. And those basics all have the same goals: get consumers into the sales funnel and draw them through it until they pop out the end as a lifelong customer.

Rick Yagodich of Think Info has reshuffled the sequence of the Five W’s (and H) to provide a checklist that online content strategists can use to ensure their content strategy is watertight:

• Why – Know the business case and objectives. Why are you embarking on this project?
• What – What is the message?
• Who – Who is the audience?
• Where – Where will the message be read (location, device, context)?
• How – How should we present/structure the content?
• When – Timing of the process to create and publish the content.

Bottom line: The Five W’s (and H) provide a checklist to ensure your content strategy covers all bases.

A new content plan can include all of the following:

• Press Release
• Blog Post
• Video
• Infographic
• Customer Testimonial
• Slide Show
• Virtual Reality
• Apps
• Social Media
• User-Generated Materials
• Live Events
• Webinar

Why is Content Marketing Essential for Business Success?

There is a wealth of knowledge a business can gain not only about themselves but also their customers. When you feed content for consumption you will know right away what leaves a bad taste and what a customer keeping wanting.

• Makes businesses understand and communicate more effectively to their audience.
• Educates customer/clients about product and service offerings
• Provide in-depth insights on customer patterns, trends, likes, dislikes, and demographics.

The online public is hungry for information. People have problems, and they turn to Internet sources with increasing regularity for solutions.

Attract New Customers and Clients

If you want your business to be noticed, known, and remembered, you need to give people what they want and need. You need to prove to your targeted audience that your company is the solution to their problems. In the marketing world, the things businesses want are called brand recognition and reputation. The right content marketing strategy provides the best opportunity to grow both in a positive way.

Increased Organization Leads to Success

Start building your strategy with a written plan. State the goal of your business. Identify your target market. Discover what they do and do not want, and how they intend to get it. Once you understand that, you will know what type of content will attract their attention the most.

Each step of this plan must be laid out in detail before you begin. This helps your business stay organized, save time, and realize bigger rewards more quickly. Also, as analytic information starts to appear from a new piece of distributed content, you can easily tweak the plan to improve your ROI.

Create All-Around Value

Beyond the blog post and quick, informative videos, content marketing also includes other types of content like online classes, apps, webinars, and ebooks. These help to convince your targeted audience that your company can provide them with real value for a long term. They make you look like and expert and build trustworthy relationships.

The more you share with the public, the more they will remember you. Improved value through content sharing also encourages the public to pass on your message to others.

We at Bright Vessel understand the importance of an active content plan. Contact us today to learn more about how a content marketing strategy can benefit your bottom line.

The post Why a Content Marketing Strategy is a Must Have first appeared on B2B Website Platform Developer - Bright Vessel.

At Bright Vessel, we love our community and what started out as a passion for our surroundings, turned into a great tool to use for content. Jupiter Florida Fans is a social space we use to help small businesses grow. What has been a critical role in growing this page organically is a social media content calendar.

To share consistently, it's important to sit down and plan out months worth of content for your blog as well as the content you plan on sharing on social media platforms. If you can create a plan a few weeks to a few months in advance, you'll be more consistent, engage your audience and attract new visitors and followers.

What is a Social Media Content Calendar?

A content calendar is a place to organize, create and curate content you'd like to share across your brand, whether it's on your blog, website or social media accounts. Some companies like to create a separate social media content calendar, but it can help to keep all sharing to one editorial calendar to ensure nothing is forgotten.

Here are some social media content calendar templates you can use to get started:

PDF Example of Social Media Content Calendar

Excel Example of Social Media Content Calendar

We use Google Drive to manage ours, it is the best way to share a master spreadsheet across team members.

Why Should You Utilize One?

• Often, companies use an editorial calendar to see their content in advance. At a glance, you can see how content is laid out throughout the weeks and months. Gaps will be more obvious.
• It's an effective way to keep yourself organized. If you have an industry event, sales plan or product launch, the content can be scheduled in advance to ensure that it's being covered correctly.
• If you have a marketing or writing team, an editorial calendar keeps everyone on the same page. You can distribute assignments to the correct member while keeping track of other content being crafted.
• With all content and social media sharing being done from one central location, you can adapt plans without having to inform the team individually. They'll all see the changes to the calendar.

What to Put on the Social Media Content Calendar

There are some decisions to make before you start filling in your calendar. When it comes to content marketing, you need a solid strategy for sharing your own content plus industry news that will be valuable to your audience.

First, decide the goal of your content marketing strategy. Do you want to increase clicks on your website? Are you trying to increase the number of followers? After you've figured out your goals, you'll have a better idea of where the content needs to take you.

Second, you should identify your topics as well as your audience. For example, if you're a distributor of widgets, you'll need to figure out how much content you need to write about widgets to attract new customers, and how much you'll need to repurpose for existing customers. You might want to attract new customers, inform existing ones and bring in new employees.

Lastly, you'll need to figure out what you have for current content, what topics you'll need to cover in the future and how much you can repurpose into a new format. Along with this, it's vital to assess how much content you can produce each month to ensure you're not being too ambitious.

How to Build a Process for Your Socia Media Content Calendar

It's important that everyone involved in the content marketing for your company is able to give input into the process. Some companies use a simple spreadsheet for their content needs while others use a plugin for WordPress if they have that platform.

Companies with remote workers can use a simple project management software like Asana for their content creation needs. Google calendar is a great way to remind yourself to create the content for your marketing needs.

You'll need to schedule your own content for the next few months. It's essential that you vary the type of content to be shared. Some examples might include:

• Testimonials from happy customers
• Webinars for your product or service
• Tutorials for your product or service
• Webinars or tutorials for a related service
• InfographicsPress releasesBuying guides
• Tips and tricks
• Financial advice
• Information about product releases
• Events in your industry
• Videos

Don't forget to pepper your own content with news and shares related to your industry from an authority. Make sure you're providing useful content to your followers that isn't exclusively promotional.

Find Great Content to Share

BuzzSumo is a platform that allows you to type in keywords to find the most shared content on social media regarding those keywords. With the free version, you can only find a few of the top bits of content to be shared though.

Ways to Share the Content of Others

An app like Buffer will allow you to collect all your social media platforms into one process. As you're surfing the web, you can schedule shares and links for a later date. It can be integrated with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. You can also use Buffer to share your content so it'll be scheduled in advance.

A content marketing strategy should include ways to plan ahead when it comes to your content as well as the links you'll be sharing that are relevant to your audience.

If you need help managing your social presence and brand online, Bright Vessel can help you achieve your goals.

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The post Social Media Content Calendar Examples and Templates first appeared on B2B Website Platform Developer - Bright Vessel.

An editorial calendar is a very important tool if you are going to manage a blog. Regardless of the type of blog you have, and what purpose it serves, you should have a calendar. This will ensure your posts are well balanced, that important information is uploaded in a timely fashion, and that you continue posting content at regular intervals. Here are some tips for setting up your editorial calendar.

Decide on a Posting Schedule

There are no strict rules about what days you post or how often, but you need to make this decision before starting your calendar. The most important thing with frequency of posting is to be consistent. If you decide to post every other day, you need to post every other day. Your blog is going to get regular visitors who are expecting posts on certain days. If you don’t think you can keep up with daily posts, don’t commit to it. Commit to 2-3 days a week and go from there.

Identify Your Audience

Who are you blogging for? This is an essential element when creating your editorial calendar. As you begin thinking about possible things to write about, it helps to know who you are writing for. If you are a small business owner that runs a business card printing business, writing posts for people who have absolutely no need for business cards isn’t going to be beneficial. Take some time to really hone in on your audience and find out what they are looking for.

Choose Your Categories

If your blog is new, you will also need to decide on categories. These become the main topics you cover on your blog, which can be used on your editorial calendar. It helps to color code the calendar, by assigning one color to every category. That way, when you are looking at the calendar, you can see how often you are posting about one topic. If you have twice as many red labels as blue labels, the category with blue is being left out and needs to be included more in your calendar. This is an incredibly useful tool.

Keep Note of Important Days

Holidays, seasons, events, and special occasions make for excellent blog posts. Just about every important day or holiday can be turned into a blog post, no matter what your target market is. The fact is, blog posts about the current trends or seasons are always popular. When fall hits, everyone is looking for posts about pumpkin spice lattes, carving pumpkins, the newest clothing and beauty trends, and how to decorate for fall. The same can be said for other seasons.

Include Other Content as Well

Your editorial calendar does not just include upcoming blog posts, but all marketing content for your business or brand. This includes blog posts, social media updates, themes or series you want to introduce, video or audio, pictures, and other forms of content you intend to use.

Choosing the Type of Calendar

There are many ways to set up the actual editorial calendar, from using a printed calendar to doing it digitally. If your blog is through WordPress, you can schedule future posts and create a handy calendar that way. Even your computer’s calendar program will work.

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