Hasta La Creative!

No. You’re not imagining things. Content fatigue is real. According to a new study from BuzzSumo that looked at 100 million posts published in 2017, social sharing of content has been cut in half since 2015. That’s a steep decline in a short period of time. We can blame poor quality and an increase in […]

The post Publish Authoritative Content That Adds Value, Or No One Will Care appeared first on Adpulp.

Russian hackers are now meddling in the French election. French newspaper, Libération, is fighting back with a search engine staffed by real-life journalists. Libération with the help of J. Walter Thompson/Paris came up with the anti-hoax service CheckNews.fr, a search engine trading cold algorithms for journalists for three days before the French elections. In related […]

The post Ask And You Shall Receive A Thoughtful Answer appeared first on AdPulp.

Any discussion about making a profit online will almost constantly refer to the term “niche marketing”, often describing it as one of the most effective ways to do this. It’s not a difficult concept to understand as it simply refers to a market sub-division where consumers are looking to purchase certain products or services who can be targetted online. A niche in the market can be a relatively unexploited and moneymaking resource since there are more buyers than sellers or, in other words, fewer competitors for your business. We are going to discuss how to become a niche marketer and establish your own profitable Internet business.

Firstly, you have to find a good niche and the easiest way to do that is to inquire about the possiblities using online resources. By visiting the Clickbank and Amazon web sites, for instance, you’ll quickly realize that there are a number of possible niches you can research. At these sites you can look through the product categories to find ones that are selling stongly and make a short list to be refined at the next stage.

Once you have some prospective markets to look into, you need to begin to do some keyword research to find out if there are niches you can compete in and that have the potential to make you some profit. Tools to help you perform keyword research are in abundance, some free and some you pay for, but the free Google keyword tool is just fine when starting out. The basic aim in keyword research is to start with broad category words and increasingly drill down into longer key phrases that still have a modest search volume. Usually these ‘long-tailed’ keywords will have fewer competition and are the ones you have to be aiming for in your niche market.

Having chosen those longer key phrases with good numbers of searches each month, you can now continue and find those with the least numbers of websites targetting the same phrase. To do this is simple – simply type the term within quotation marks into the Google’s search bar and hit enter. The number of search results that Google gives is an indication of how many websites out there are using your prospective key phrase. Of course, a profitable niche will be one without very many competing websites. A few of these longer key phrases will be the names and model numbers of particular products which are search terms used by people who are about to purchase rather than those merely searching for information.

Having completed the research and decided on a possible niche market, you can now begin to make a site using your list of profitable niche keywords. Numerous people, who are not especially knowledgeable about creating websites, use the WordPress blog platform to get their first site up and running very quickly. WordPress websites are easily crawled by the search engines. If you can obtain a domain name the same as one of the keywords you want to target then this can help your site to get higher search engine rankings. Don’t try to brand names since companies may well object and make you change it.

When you have everything ready, you can get started to monetize your website to produce passive income and eventually sell the website for a lump sum if you want.

Have you ever wondered why some other WordPress blogs rank better than your site? Of the various blogging solutions out there, WordPress remains at the top of its field. That’s all you need to know! The CMS system provided by WordPress is not only chosen by many for the kind of flexibility it offers, but also because it’s the easiest way to get indexed and ranked by the major search engines like Google. The WordPress platform also includes exceptional, advanced features which permit search engine optimization for your website. The best traffic you can hope to get is organic – it is 100% free and targeted specifically to your site’s keywords and key theme. This is why when you use WordPress for your SEO needs you can have benefits that many sites don’t. There are settings within WordPress which you can use to maximize the ranking that your website achieves. Every website needs targeted traffic to survive, so WordPress SEO cannot be underestimated. Read on for tips about using WordPress SEO, and how you can customize it so that it helps you the most.

Using relevant keywords in the post titles on your WordPress blog is one of the most essential (and simple) ways that you can increase your search engine optimization right away. Such keywords must be involved in the comments of your post, and not just used in the titles. Your titles have to be unique and shouldn’t be repeated anywhere on your site because if they are, then the search engine’s would be confused when ranking your pages. You will want to have an assortment of relevant keywords to use in the post titles of the different articles on your blog. Along with having your targeted keywords, your post title should be enticing and interesting to read. When your potential visitor first sees your site link in the search engine results, your post title will be the very first thing that they’ll notice. Ensuring that your titles are succinct and easily readable is a good practice. You want to deliver your objectives clearly and simply, so don’t be vague when describing your content.

Don’t forget to have a sitemap on your blog, which is important if you’re having a WordPress blog. You can use a simple Google plugin to create a sitemap, and you’ll never have to program a thing. The benefit of using a sitemap is that it will assure that Google indexes your site quickly and aids the search engine in seeking out all of your blog pages. In addition to building a map of your site, you should use different sites to ping the posts that you create. Enabling you to obtain other bloggers’ backlinks, this also will increase your exposure on the Internet. Every post published to your blog should be pinged – no exceptions!

When you write some new content, if it has any bearing on earlier material, then link to it. This will keep older content active and also help new visitors. This can easily be done through a plugin which collects related posts using tags, which are then placed under each post. All you have to do to give the search engines an easy route to all of your archived blogs by checking which of the related posts you want to show up.

So, needless to say, use the tips in this article if you’re aiming at the search engines and your readers.

I don’t always look at bar graphs, but when I do…

I look at bar graphs from Marketing Pilgrim depicting digital ad spending, which is up 18 percent over last year’s first-half revenues of $17 billion, according to IAB.

What story does this bar graph tell?

One big story is how little brand advertising there is in the digital camp. Digital is dominated by search advertising. The rest of the digital ad pie is split between display, video, mobile, classifieds and various lead generation activities.

No question, display ads are improving in quality, and publishers are finding better ways to feature them on the page today. But of all the categories in digital advertising, video is the most brand-focused medium. A brand can offer commercials, episodic content, consumer-generated content and much more in video.

Another big story is how mobile continues to experience a massive rise in spending. Mobile is the fastest growing of all digital advertising types.

The opportunities for brands to grow their digital advertising capabilities (and see greater returns) is enormous. The opportunity for agencies to get digital right and make good money doing so is also at hand.

My contention is digital is so much more than direct marketing and data analysis. Just because you can measure it, is not reason enough to make measurement the principle yardstick of success.

Digital advertising, like any great advertising has to do more than inform and perform. For brands to be built, digital advertising also must move people emotionally. There’s no metric to measure love, but love is real and getting people to love your brand is the ultimate result of any marketing effort.

The post Search Advertising Is Digital’s Big Dog appeared first on AdPulp.

This is the hype machine and the the hype machine is deafening.

Chugga, Chugga, Chugga the hype machine goes. That’s the sound of spinning yarns into memes and trends. Social media is the new this. Content is the new that. And so on.

Which is why I find this cold glass of water (or is it sand in the gear box?) from serial entrepreneur Kaila Colbin refreshing.

In the provocatively titled “Can We Please Stop Hyping Social As The Marketing Messiah?” Nathan Safran replaces assumptions with data. During the 2012 holiday season, for example, 34% of retail website visits came from search. 40% were direct. 2% — yes, a mere two percent — were from social.

Another study Safran cites has 15% of respondents always or often turning to social for shopping or product research, while 97% say they always or often turn to search. Search is obviously not the only possible marketing channel out there, but at least if your dogma is that “search is best,” you’ve got some stats supporting you.

I’m not a search marketer. And this post isn’t about search, it’s about our ability to reason and read between the lines. For instance, digital spending reports continue to baffle me. Up and up the spending goes; yet, so-called display ads are the worst of the worst ROI generators.

Can we trust our most trusted media sources today? Hell, can we trust our own media literacy?

Companies are about to spend $17 billion dollars on display ads this year, but only one tenth of one percent of the people who see these display ads will notice, or act. The information fails to justify. Either companies are throwing money down the hype-made drain for no good reason, or display ads work much better than reported.

The post Protect Yourself from Industry Hype – Search Is What People Use When They Intend To Buy appeared first on AdPulp.

On Monday we attended Google’s creative breakfast session, this one on mobile. Stats and creative examples presented by Brendan Forster drove the main points home:

Australia is a global leader(!) in smartphone penetration and usage
mobile is fully mainstream yet businesses lag in the development of mobile destinations and experiences
mobile search is very local and focused (customers […]

Google’s version of real-time search was unveiled today, where ‘live’ search results are displayed via AJAX on the search results page.
At first glance, it’s a pretty nice execution, blending real-time with relevance, rather than just real-time, which is the focus of all new social/real-time search engines.

It looks like the real-time results are surfaced when real-time […]

Yahoo! has thrown in the towel and entered into an agreement with Microsoft to use Bing as the search engine across all Yahoo sites, whilst being the paid search sales force for Bing.

It’s an acknowledgment that separately they are not threat to Google, but by combining Bing’s superior search technology and desire to innovate, with […]

Bing Tweets is a new (beta) tool “fusing Twitter Trends and Bing Insights”.
There are trending topics on Twitter in a tag cloud – click on a link to see filtered tweets and Bing search results. What’s great about this is you can see what people are saying about in real time, check out the latest […]