Product Roadmap and It's Need

Product roadmaps help organizations create a vision for product and software development cycles.

The product roadmap is exactly as it sounds, it's a document that helps layout the product vision for a period of time, typically 12 months. Before we discuss about details of product roadmaps, let us discuss why they are needed and how they created.

Product roadmaps-

Product Roadmaps are important for several reasons. Most importantly, it serves as a way to communicate key product priorities with internal and external stakeholders in a digestible and understandable way. There’s no need to get into the sprint schedule and user stories. The product roadmap gives a 10,000 ft view of the product and the key areas of emphasis.

The product roadmap also helps structure team alignment on priorities. Due to the way product roadmaps are built, it shows how product priorities align with the vision and strategy. It gives various stakeholders insight and an opportunity to contribute to the key product priorities.

Product roadmaps are also used to determine product positioning. Senior management, marketing, and product team use product roadmaps to identify gaps and opportunities vs. competitors in the market. Using a strategic framework like Porter’s Five Forces or SWOT Analysis, teams can better determine which areas should be focused tot make the product more competitive over time.

While thinking about the product roadmap, it's important to note that product roadmaps are living and breathing documents. They should always be changing according to resources available, company priorities and market conditions. Ideally, you’d want the roadmap development process to be a cycle that feeds into itself.

  1. Set Strategic
  2. Goals
  3. Key Product Priorities
  4. Prioritize Product Priorities
  5. Develop Roadmap
  6. Communicate roadmap
  7. Rinse and Repeat

What Goes while Building A Product Roadmap?

When building a product roadmap, there are many inputs needed to help inform the process.

Internal capacity and capabilities
What are your companies key strengths and weaknesses? Where does your company want to invest this year?

 Customer or Client’s Feedback
Getting some feedback on key priorities for your main customers/clients?

Partnership input/priorities
What are some of the key priorities for partners/ what are they investing in and how might it affect your company?

User Research
Do you understand the key drivers/ needs for your user? Analytics- Do you have analytics on user behavior/ user needs? Quality user research can help identify opportunities and prioritization.

Competitive Benchmarks
What are your competitor companies planning? Where are they investing compared to your cohort?

Company Priorities
Where does the company want to focus for the next year? Any potential synergies?

By synthesizing the data from these inputs, you create top-level strategic goals that drive the major product themes from there, the major product themes drive the features that need to be implemented.

Goals

  • High-level business objectives
  • Keeps company focused in one direction
  • Helps drive resource allocations

Themes

  • High-level feature areas (Checkout, Admin, Reporting, ETC)
  • Used to focus on feature research and focus work

Features

  • Small and measurable
  • Sprint level coordination

Most product managers start with the top-down approach when developing a product roadmap because it helps ensure major business goals drive the main themes and features.

Prioritization

Ideally, you’ll have a great list of themes driven by your key strategic goals. In the perfect world, you're able to attack all your goals at once but realistically, you’ll need to identify which areas hold the highest priority.

There are multiple frameworks to help with prioritization. They include but aren’t limited to:

Value vs. Complexity

Value versus Complexity model; evaluate every opportunity based on its business value and its relative complexity to implement. Based on our conversations with product managers this is a common approach, and many product managers go through this assessment instinctively every day.

Buy a Theme/Feature

Often used with stakeholders and customers, buy a feature or theme is an informal activity where you assign a price to a list of features/ themes and customers allocate funds to the features/ themes based on interest and need.

Story Mapping

Breaking down themes into tasks and thinking about how each story connects to the user experience. It used a lot for identifying gaps in the MVP process.

Weighted Scoring

Product managers have developed scoring models to help them think through priorities.

Kano Model

Kano Model focuses on customer delight and investment required. Think of a graph where you’re trying to get the optimal customer delight for the minimal investment required.

Opportunity Scoring

Opportunity scoring is similar to the Kano model where you try to match the level of importance vs. customer satisfaction by scoring each of the variables from 1-10

Affinity Grouping

Affinity grouping is a great internal activity. Have everyone brainstorm opportunities on sticky notes. Then as a team, begin to group similar items together, and then name the groups. Finally, everyone on the team begins to vote on or rank the groups.

Putting It All Together

Once inputs, outputs, and prioritization are established, developing the product roadmap document allows the team to synthesize and summarize findings. Once created, the product roadmap is used to gain consensus, present product goals, and communicate key needs on a quarterly basis.

There are many product roadmap planning tools available for teams to build out and maintain the product roadmap.

Aha!

Roadmap platform is the platform that connects strategy to execution. Aha! Helps product managers in managing everything from strategy down to PR reviews.

Product Plan

Another well-designed product roadmapping software that allows teams to manage strategy and major product goals.

Airtable

A flexible tool that is the swiss army knife for product managers. Airtable does a little bit of everything from managing spreadsheets to creating tables and kanban flows.

Notion

Another flexible tool that provides various structures to help manage and display your team’s product roadmap.

Conclusion:

Product Roadmaps are not for product success, but they are essential to ensure buy-in. It’s a tool that product teams use to communicate internally and externally with stakeholders about the product vision and its goals. It is used to give transparency and gain an understanding of key priorities for the product within a given time frame.

 


Tech Innovations for Amplifying Digital Marketing

With almost 4.4 billion active internet users online, marketers have shifted their focus on acquiring the latest online tools and technologies that will help them in engaging with an evolving online customer base.

Change has become a symbolic part of digitization, keeping that in mind, let’s look at digital marketing tools that can potentially script more successful brand stories.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM):

An explosion of contents to a wide array of prospects may presumably create a reaction or multiple reactions. But, not everyone is the same and a study reveals that people are rather irked with so much irrelevant content before them.

With Account-Based Marketing (ABM), contents are made customer-specific by understanding their trigger points and creating customized content for a particular customer. Though you may be led to believe that your reach is not as expansive, the content deployed is made to pierce the customers conscious – triggering a reaction.

Incorporating technologies like AI and Big Data may help you derive even more accurate insights into prospects – allowing content developers and designers to create compelling content customized for a particular business account or individual.

Video Marketing

“Seeing is believing”, our intrinsic nature to retain visually moving narratives and in fact buy into its message is a part of our neural makeup. With a steep rise in marketing conversion (close to 70%) due to video marketing and with videos vastly becoming the executive’s choice, it makes total sense to engage marketing budgets to the channel that pulls our natural inclination.

Videos are the most compelling storytelling channel which can encompass contents of all types, be it music, videos, images, links, etc.

Looking towards 2019 and beyond, popular modes of video marketing includes live-streaming -which is engaging more audience interactions on social media platforms, Augmented reality, Virtual Reality, and 360° videos are making visuals more immersive, and most importantly the recent developments in making video content searchable using AI technologies – could be the tipping point between switching from text related content to video contents.

Brand Asset Management:

Each digital asset is attached with measurable value; value that companies are liable to protecting.  With the surge in data traffic and with Global Asset Management set to become a multi-trillion dollar industry by 2025 – Digital Asset Management (DAM) has become an important tool in the marketer’s playbook.

The future of DAM applications is tied up to efficiency of the program; to integrate with new technologies like AI, ML to bring faster more accurate results, to increase mobility by makings assets universally accessible from just about anywhere using any device, bridging the platform divide from expensive on-premise to the cheaper cloud platform (SaaS) and most importantly ensuring a secure repository of data – bringing data accountability through improved user access systems, data audits and end-to-end encryption.

Chatbots:

Chatbots are the future of conversational marketing. With a growing millennial customer base that is technology savvier and inclined towards instantly gratifying their qualms; marketing needs to be personalized, secure, around the clock with a faster delivery module to solve queries.

Initially built for customer service engagements, Chatbots has quickly made the shift to marketing.

Powered by AI and machine learning, the predictive analytical learning process of chatbots will make conversations more human-like, and with voice-activated bots integrating with IOT, we are now open to almost controlling any connected device or process by conversing with an AI-bot.

  Artificial Intelligence:

Through all the technologies and marketing processes illustrated above, there is a single technology that is constant – Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Perhaps the most defining marketing tool of the future, AI will take marketing automation to the next level  helping us by solving complex problems in seconds, ensure that there are quantifiable results for every action or data –helping us make quick fixes and better decisions and gives us unprecedented control of assets  be it digital or physical assets.


Difference Between CSS2 and CSS3

Major changes in CSS3

The biggest difference between CSS2 and CSS3 is that CSS3 has been split up into different sections, called modules. Each of these modules is making its way through the W3C in various stages of the recommendation process. This process has made it much easier for various pieces of CSS3 to be accepted and implemented in the browser by different manufacturers.

If you compare this process to what happened with CSS2, where everything was submitted as a single document with all the Cascading Style Sheets information within it, you begin to see the advantages of breaking the recommendation up into smaller, individual pieces. Because each of the modules is being worked on individually, we have a much wider range of browser support for CSS3 modules.

CSS3 Selectors

CSS3 offers a bunch of new ways you can write CSS rules with new CSS selectors, as well as a new combinator, and some new pseudo-elements.

Three new attribute selectors of CSS3:

  • Attribute beginning matches exactly

element[foo^="bar"]

The element has an attribute called foo that begins with "bar" e.g.

  • Attribute ending matches exactly

element[foo$="bar"]

The element has an attribute called foo that ends with "bar" e.g.

  • Attribute contains the match

element[foo*="bar"]

The element has an attribute called foo that contains the string "bar" e.g.

16 new pseudo-classes:

  • :root
    • The root element of the document. In HTML this is always.
  • :nth-child(n)
    • Use this to match exact child elements or use variables to get alternating matches.
  • :nth-last-child(n)
    • Match exact child elements counting up from the last one.
  • :nth-of-type(n)
    • Match sibling elements with the same name before it in the document tree.
  • :nth-last-of-type(n)
    • Match sibling elements with the same name counting up from the bottom.
  • :last-child
    • Match the last child element of the parent.
  • :first-of-type
    • Match the first sibling element of that type.
  • :last-of-type
    • Match the last sibling element of that type.
  • :only-child
    • Match the element that is the only child of its parent.
  • :only-of-type
    • Match the element that is the only one of its type.
  • :empty
    • Match the element that has no children (including text nodes).
  • :target
    • Match an element that is the target of the referring URI.
  • :enabled
    • Match the element when it's enabled.
  • :disabled
    • Match the element when it's disabled.
  • :checked
    • Match the element when it's checked (radio button or checkbox).
  • :not(s)
    • Match when the element does not match the simple selector s.

One new combinator:

  • element A ~ element B
    • Match when element B follows somewhere after element A, not necessarily immediately.

New Properties of CSS

CSS3 also introduced a number of new CSS properties. Many of these properties were to create visual styles that would likely associate more with a graphics program like Photoshop. Some of these, like border-radius or box-shadow, have been around since the introduction of CSS3. Others, like flexbox or even CSS Grid are new styles that are still often considered CSS3 additions.

In CSS3, the box model has not changed. But there are a bunch of new style properties that can help you style the backgrounds and borders of your boxes.

Multiple Background I​mages

Using the background-image, background-position, and background-repeat styles you can specify multiple background images to be layered on top of one another in the box. The first image is the layer closest to the user, with the following ones painted behind. If there is a background color, it is painted below all the image layers.

New Background Style Properties of CSS3

There are some new background properties in CSS3.

  • background-clip
    • This property defines how the background image should be clipped. The default is the border box, but it can be changed to the padding box or the content box.
  • background-origin
    • This property determines whether the background should be places in the padding box, the border box, or the content box.
  • background-size
    • This property allows you to indicate the size of the background image. It allows you to stretch smaller images to fit the page.

Changes to Existing Background Style Properties CSS3

There are few changes to existing background style properties:

  • Background-repeat- There are two new values for this property: space and round. Space spaces the tiled image evenly within the box without being clipped. Round rescales the background image so that it will tile a whole number of times in the box.
  • Background-attachment- A new value "local" is added so that the background will scroll with the element's content when that element has a scroll bar.
  • Background- The background shorthand property adds in the size and origin properties.

Border Properties of CSS3

In CSS3 borders can be the styles we're used to (solid, double, dashed, etc.) or they can be an image in border. Plus, CSS3 brings in the ability to create rounded corners. Border images are interesting because you create an image of all four borders and then tell the CSS how to apply that image to your borders.

Properties of New Border Style

There are some new border properties in CSS3:

  • Border-radius- border-top-right-radius, border-bottom-right-radius, border-bottom-left-radius, border-top-left-radius
    1. These properties allow you to create rounded corners on your borders.
  • Border-image-source- Specifies the image source file to be used instead of border styles already defined.
  • border-image-slice- Represents the inward offsets from the border image edges
  • Border-image-width- Defines the value of the width for your border image.
  • Border-image-outset- Specifies the amount that the border image area extends beyond the border box.
  • Border-image-stretch - Defines how the sides and middle parts of the border image should be tiled or scaled.
  • Border-image- The shorthand property for all the border image properties.

Additional CSS3 Properties Related to Borders and Backgrounds

When a box is broken at a page break, column break for line break (for inline elements) the box-decoration-break property defines how the new boxes are wrapped with border and padding. Backgrounds can be divided up between multiple broken boxes using this property.

There also is a box-shadow property that can be used to add shadows to box elements.

With CSS3, you can now easily set up a Web page with multiple columns without tables or complicated div tag structures. You simply tell the browser how many columns the body element should have and how wide they should be. Plus you can add borders (rules), background colors that span the height of the column, and your text will flow through all the columns automatically.

CSS3 Columns

There are three new properties that allow you to define the number and width of your columns:

  • column-width
    • Defines the width of your columns should be. The browser will then flow the text to fill the space with columns that wide.
  • column-count
    • Defines the number of columns on the page. The browser will then create columns wide enough to fit in the space, but only the number you specify.
  • columns
    • Shorthand property where you can define either the width or number (or both, but that rarely makes sense).

Column Gaps and Rules in CSS3

Gaps and rules are placed between columns in the same multicolumn scenario. Gaps will push apart the columns, but rules do not take up any space. If a column rule is wider than its gap, it will overlap adjacent columns. There are five new properties for column rules and gaps:

  • Column-gap-                      Defines the width of the gaps between the columns.
  • Column-rule-color-        Defines the color of the rule.
  • Column-rule-style-          Defines the style of the rule (solid, dotted, double, etc.).
  • Column-rule-width -       Defines the width of the rule.
  • Column-rule-                     A shorthand property defining all three column rule properties at once.

Column Breaks, Spanning Columns, and Filling Columns in CSS3

Column breaks use the same CSS2 options used to define breaks in paged content, but with three new properties: break-before, break-after, and break-inside.

Like with tables, you can set elements to span columns with the column-span property. This allows you to create headlines that span multiple columns more like a newspaper.

Filling columns decides how much content will be in each column. Balanced columns try to put the same amount of content in each column while auto adjust follow  the content until the column is full and then goes to the next one.

Features in CSS3 That Aren't Included in CSS2

There are lots of additional features in CSS3 that didn't exist in CSS2, including:

  • CSS Template layout module and CSS3 Grid positioning module: Creating grids with CSS.
  • CSS3 Text module: Outline text and even create drop-shadows with CSS.
  • CSS3 Color module: Now with opacity.
  • Changes to the box model: Including a marquee property that acts like the IE tag.
  • CSS3 User Interface module: Giving you new cursors, responses to actions, required fields, and even resizing elements.
  • Media Queries: Media queries allow you more flexibility when defining how a style sheet should be used. For instance, you could define a style sheet that is only for handheld devices that have a viewport larger than 20em.
  • CSS3 Ruby module: Provides support for languages that use textual ruby to annotate documents.
  • CSS3 Paged Media module: For even more support for paged media (paper, transparencies, etc).
  • Generated content: L running headers and footers, footnotes, and other content that is generated programmatically, especially for paged media.
  • CSS3 Speech module: Changes to aural CSS.

 


Benefits of Quality Web Design

Websites have become a necessity in every successful business. Customers need a platform where they can access all the  details of company without the need of calling the customer care desk. Website designs, however, play a significant role in determining the amount of time a visitor spends on the website and the action likely to be taken, either subscription or purchase. There are various benefits of creating a quality web design.

Identification of Company

Having a quality website design gives potential clients the impression of a quality brand which is aware of its objectives. A well-designed website is a reflection of how a company can arrange its operation in order towards customer satisfaction. The web design for your business including the logo, slogan, social media buttons and contact pages should be well designed for more comfortable communication and definition of the company’s objective towards the fulfillment of client's needs.

Extended Visit Time

As you design your company’s website, you need a well-crafted website which will be fun for clients to spend time on your site. A site with a dull appearance is likely to have only a few visitors who go past the first past, as opposed to one which offers an attractive and simplified interface. Potential clients will most likely browse through many sites before settling on the best. You need to give clients a reason to stay the longest on your site and take action by providing a simple-to-navigate site. With this kind of a site, clients are likely to bookmark your website for a future date to take action.

Useful Content

A website design needs an interface which offers simplified and useful information to the clients. You do not need a website with long articles which are likely to overwhelm the visitors with information, but short and precise useful information which solves the visitors’ questions within the shortest possible time.

Room for Expansion

As a business owner, you need to communicate with your website designer and discuss plans for expansion of your site. Some of these details help the website designer to leave some room which will help you add more services or content to your website without affecting its functionality. Unless when changing the interface of the entire site, visitors should not notice when you make minor changes, which may affect their familiarity with the website.

 


Email Blast- the right way to do Email Blast

An email blast or broadcast is a process of sending a single email message to a large number of subscribers in your mailing list. These are extremely effective for businesses to get more sales, and bloggers use it to get more website traffic to their new content in website.

In this article, we will explain how to do an email blast in the proper way.

Email Blast

An email blast is a single email message that is sent to number of people, a large segment of an email list, or many email lists all at once. These emails target most or all contacts in your mailing list which makes your email blasts have a wide reach.

Email blasts are also known as broadcast emails, mass emails, bulk emails, e-blasts, and email campaigns. Most people are using the term ‘email campaigns’ to avoid the aggressive tone inherent with ‘email blast.’

Email blasts are mainly used for sending promotional content and newsletters. If you want to inform all your subscribers about special offers, then email blast is the most reliable and efficient form of communication.

Are Email Blasts Outdated?

Although email blasts are great for delivering any message to a large number of people, some consider this to be an outdated method of communication. That’s because email blasts are bulk emails sent to everyone regardless of their choice, priorities, and needs. At times, blast emails can be highly irrelevant and useless to the recipients of emails.

Due to the same reason, the email recipients may ignore, mark the mail as spam, and even unsubscribe from your email list.

The top reasons why users don’t like email blasts:

  1. Unsegmented: Email blasts often use the entire mailing list without segmentation. Often your email subscribers are very different, and they may be interested in different products or services.
  2. Untargeted: The email blasts send the same message to everyone without considering their personal interests, past interactions, or their needs. Users often unsubscribe from your mailing list after receiving such unwanted emails.
  3. Not personalized: All of us love to read a message that addresses us personally. Email blasts that don’t personalize the emails are often marked as spam.
  4. Unexpected: Unlike the action-based emails, broadcast emails are unexpected due to which there can be a natural feeling of resistance from the recipients.

Unlike 10 or 15 years ago, there are a lot of new marketing methods available like social media, pay-per-click advertising, etc. However none are as effective as email. Email is still the most reliable form of communication in the world. With new technology there are better ways to do an email blast which will get you higher results.

How to Do an Email Blast– Step by Step

Marketers associated with big and small companies are still using email blast to promote their product launches, discount offers, etc. And the results are brilliant. That’s because they are using email blasts the right way.

If you are not a professional marketer, you can follow the steps below to successfully run an email blast.

Table of Contents

  1. Choosing the best service for Email Blast
  2. Creating Email list
  3. Segment your email list
  4. Creating a targeted email campaign
  5. Measurement of  results and improving email deliverability

Step 1: Choosing the best service for Email Blast

First of all, you need a robust email marketing service to create an email blast. An email marketing service lets you create a mailing list, segment your list, and send bulk emails.

There are dozens of email marketing services in the market. Among them Constant Contact, SendinBlue, Mailjet, Drip, and ConvertKit are the most popular companies.

Constant Contact is the most beginner-friendly email blast software. It comes with dozens of pre-made email templates to help you quickly get started. You can choose a template, and easily customize that using their drag and drop editor.

It has simple options to collect emails, automation features to send / trigger emails based on users’ actions, and more. Plus, it lets you segment your subscribers and send targeted email campaigns.

To get started, you need to visit the Constant Contact website and sign up for a new account.

You can quickly create a Constant Contact account as it offers a 60-day free trial account Once done, you will see your Constant Contact dashboard from where you can manage your email lists, subscribers, and send email blasts.

Alternately, you can also use SendinBlue or Mailjet both of which offers a free email marketing plan.

Step 2. Creating Email List

An email list is simply a list of email addresses whom you can send emails. It is like your contact book containing the email addresses of your subscribers and prospect customers.

To create an email list in Constant Contact, go to ‘Contacts’ menu on the top and then click on Email Lists option in the sidebar. Now you will see the default email list labeled ‘General Interest.’ Click on the ‘Enter a new list’ link to create a new email list.

After that, name your email list and click on the Add List button.

Once your email list is built, the next step is to add contacts to your list. Open your new email list, and click on the ‘Add Contacts’ button.

Constant Contact lets you add contacts in multiple ways. You can type in a contact, upload from a file, or import from Gmail, Outlook, and other apps.

Step 3: Segment Your Email List

Once you have an email list, the next step is to segment it. Email segmentation is the most critical aspect of doing a successful email blast. Email segmentation is dividing your email subscribers into smaller groups or segments to send highly targeted emails.

You can segment your email subscribers based on gender, age, geographical location, interests, purchase history, contact activity, etc.

For example, a book store may create different segments for the students of arts, physics, and maths and send different emails. Email segmentation is a crucial task which must be done with a clear goal. You need to be clear on which type of subscribers to be included in a segment.

To create segments in Constant Contact, go to the ‘Contacts’ menu and click on the Segments link. After that, click on the Create Segment button.

In the next screen, you can create a segment by choosing the right criteria for your needs.

Constant Contact lets you create segments based on contact activity like emails sent, opened, clicked, or did not open. You can also include email subscribers by contact details, including job title, city, country, etc.

Step 4: Creating a Targeted Email Campaign

After creating segments, the next task is to create a targeted email campaign or an email blast. There can be different ways for you to create an email campaign depending on the email marketing software you use.

To create an email campaign in Constant Contact, go to the ‘Campaigns’ menu, and then click the Create button.

Next, you can choose the Email option.

After that, you will see hundreds of pre-made email templates ready for use. You can preview the templates one by one or simply type in your keywords to search a template.

After that, the email campaign builder page will open. First, name your campaign.

Next, click on the area above your template to open your email settings.

After that, you need to edit your email subject line. You can also personalize your email subject line by adding the subscriber’s name. Click on the ‘Personalize’ option.

Next, you can choose the first name or any other contact detail to insert in your subject line. You can also enter a generic name like Customer, User, or Friend to address users whose names are not available. Once done, click on the ‘Insert’ button.

You will see some text with big brackets added in your subject line.

After that, edit your email preheader, from Name (company or organization name), from address, and then click the Save button.

Next step is to customize your email body. You can simply point and click on any element in the email to edit or change it.

You can also drag and drop Build elements and layouts from the left sidebar.

Once your email design is complete, you can check and preview your email. If it looks good to you, then click on the ‘Continue’ button at the top right corner.

In the next screen, you will see email send (blasting) options. You can select recipients from email lists or segments. For example, we will choose the segment that we created earlier.

On the right sidebar, you will see options to send your email campaign now or schedule for later.

Step 5: Measure Results and Improve Email Deliverability

Sending an email campaign does not mean that your work is done. After posting your email blast, you need to measure your results and see how the recipients are interacting with them.

Top email marketing services like Constant Contact have built-in email stats feature. To view your email campaign stats, click on the ‘Reporting’ menu on the top.

You can also see the performance of your email campaigns individually by clicking on them.

You will see the email open rate, the total sent emails, bounces, and successful deliveries. The reports will also reveal click rate, did not open, unsubscribes, and marked spam stats.

The biggest challenge of email blasting is email deliverability. A lot of times, your emails don’t get delivered at all or sent to the spam box directly.

Here are some proven techniques to improve email deliverability:

  • Update your email list time to time to remove fake email addresses, deleted emails, etc.
  • Maintain the frequency of your emails (no spikes)
  • Avoid misleading subject lines
  • Make your emails useful with valuable and engaging content

Best Email Blast Examples

There are mainly 2 types of emails used for marketing: Broadcast Emails (Email blasts) and Triggered Emails.

The triggered emails are automated emails which are sent to the users following their action. For example, you can send a triggered welcome email after a user subscribes to your list.

Email blasts are different because you will manually create campaigns and send to a large segment at once. Email blasting is done with the belief that the single message will be useful to every subscriber in a list or segment.

It means that you cannot broadcast a welcome email to your entire email list containing your already-purchased customers.

Hence, email blasts can be used only for specific purposes. Here are the best email blast examples:

  1. Flash Sale

If you are offering flash sale, you can send mass emails in bulk to inform all of your subscribers.

  •  [FLASH SALE] Fashion Shoes 40%-60% off!
  • [LAST CHANCE] 40%-60% off sale ends today!
  1. Event Information like Webinars, concerts etc

If you conduct online training and webinars for your users, you can send mass emails.

Here are a couple of email subject lines for event information email blast:

  • LIVE Training: 10 steps to create a winning email campaign
  • Join us LIVE, tomorrow at 5 PM for a FREE marketing class
  1. Products Launch

You can send an email blast when you launch a new product. It’s best to segment your list into already purchased customers and new subscribers, so you can send different campaigns to them.

  1. Newsletters

Newsletters are the most common type of broadcast emails. News, magazine websites, blogs, as well as business or non-profit organization send newsletters to inform their subscribers about the latest news.

We hope this article helped you to learn what an email blast is and how to do an email blast the right way. You may also want to see our guide on how to get a free business email address.

 


Top WordPress Plugins for Better Mobile-Responsive Websites -2019

You can use a WordPress plugin to create landing pages, customize your login pages, adopt two-factor authentication, or even figure out how to optimize your website for you with artificial intelligence. In this post, we’re going to bringing you top 10 plug-in to create mobile-responsive blogs for you.

You don’t need to have the skills, capability or budget to create a responsible  mobile site from scratch these days. Just grab one of these plug-in, install it and start customizing the end result to suit your branding needs. All it takes is just a few clicks.

Instagram Feed

As the name implies, the plugin does allow you to add Instragram photo gallery on to any posts and pages on your website. It is responsive out-of-the-box so you can get it set up quickly.

If you’d like to customize the output, the plugin provides a a handful of options which allows you whether to show a thumbnail or the full picture, display the Instagram “follow” button, and add your own custom CSS and JavaScript.

Responsive Menu

The Menu Navigation is one of the essential elements on your website. It has to be responsive to let users easily navigate the website on any screen size easily. This plugin allows you to add “responsive” menu navigation and optimized for touch-screen usage with nice animation flare.

The plugin provides a pretty bunch of options for customization including to add the background, add custom CSS, change the animation, upload logos, set a custom trigger to display the menu, and a lot more.

Responsive Pricing Table

Creating a responsive Pricing Table can be a challenge. But with this plugin, you can set it up in a minute. You can create as many as pricing table without limitation. You can add title, subtitle, description, change the currency, add custom classes and CSS, and set the font size on to the Pricing Tables.

Page Builder

Page Builder by SiteOrigin is one of my favourite page builder plugins in WordPress ecosystem. It blends well with the WordPress interface, which makes it intuitve to use. The plugin allows you to create responsive layout with rows and columns right from the WordPress editor.

The things you can add to the layout is limitless, you can add basic content like the heading, paragraph, image, to something more complex like a Form, Button, and Image Slider through their free add-on.

Responsive Lightbox

“Lightbox” effect is a method to display image at an overlay of the content. This plugin to enable lightbox to many type of contents on your website. Not only image, gallery, and video, it also allows you to set it for the Widgets, Comments, as well as WooCommerce product images. It’s a pretty neat plugin.

Master Slider

MasterSlider is a plugin that allows you to add a set of images and videos in a form of slider. It supports touch so users can naturally navigate the slider by a swipe in touch-enabled devices. Still it’s also compatible with many browsers including the older ones like IE8+, making it a pretty robust plugin.

Tabby Tabs

With this plugin, creating a tabbed content has never been easier. You can add tabs using the short code provided for instance, [tabby title="My
Tab" icon="cog"]
. You can, of course, add tabs as many as you need. The plugin is built with accessibility in mind. It uses semantic HTML markup, ARIA attributes, and allows for keyboard navigation.

WP Responsive Table

If your content would require tables, look no further. This plugin allows you turn HTML tables on your content responsive, by enabling horizontal scroll in a small viewport. No config, settings, shortcode, or anything. It just works with simply an HTML table. Still you are able to customize the styles through the Customizer.

Photo Gallery Image

This plugin aims specifically at creating responsive gallery. You can add multiple images and videos on to the gallery and set it in a different layout available; Tiles, Carousel, Slider, and Grid. You can then add the gallery on to the page by using shortcode or a template tag.

The Event Calendar

The Events Calendar is a neat WordPress plugin that allows you to set up an Event with the announcement, ticketing, and a calendar which is nicely responsive out of the box.


Stadia: Google's game-streaming service

Imagine a world in which you don't need expensive gaming
equipment to play the next big release title. A world in which all you ever
have to do to start gaming is open up your browser, select a game and start
playing – no lengthy download required. This could soon become a reality
if Google's cloud gaming service, Stadia, delivers on its promises – you'll be
able to go from opening a Chrome tab to playing a 4K, 60fps game, in five
seconds, no installation required.

The service, which was announced at this year's Game
Developers Conference in San Francisco, got a proper unveiling ahead of E3 2019.
In a 15-minute presentation starring Google Stadia boss Phil Harrison, we
learned just how much the service will set us back – $9.99 / £8.99 (about
AU$14) per month for unlimited games and just how good a connection we'll need
(35Mbps for full 4K HDR/60fps).

At launch, Google has promised that Stadia will support
desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones  but just the Pixel series to start  without the need for a hardware box, with
games instead powered by Google's own data centers.  

About Stadia

  • What is stadia ? Google's big move into gaming  a 'Netflix for gaming' streaming service
    that's a true console competitor, one to rival (and potentially lead) the
    next generation of gameplay.
  • When is it launching? At some point in 2019, with launch territories including the
    USA, Canada and UK. Latest rumors suggest another update, teaser and more
    details will be coming in June 2019. 
  • How much will it cost? $9.99 / £8.99 (about AU$14) per month for full 4K HDR streaming
    via Stadia Pro, or you can purchase games a la carte with Stadia Base.

How it work

The best bit about Stadia is that as long as you've got a
stable and fast internet connection, and you're using a recent version of the
Google Chrome browser, you've got everything you need to get up and
running. Playing a game on Stadia is as simple as opening a new tab in
Chrome and going to the service's Stadia.com homepage, or even jumping from a
YouTube video link about the game.

To get started, Google will prompt you to run a connection
test that checks your internet bandwidth, the latency between your computer and
the servers, and any data loss. Google requires a streaming rate of 15Mbps,
latency below 40ms, and data loss below 5%. With these requirements met, you’ll
be ready to play.

The beta of Project Stream offered Assassin’s Creed
Odyssey, which is nothing short of a demanding title. When you launched the
game in your Chrome tab, it would go full screen, and run exactly as if it had
been launched on a dedicated gaming computer (except without a deep graphics
settings menu). You can play with a keyboard and mouse or a supported game
controller, and Google's Stadia controller.

All of your inputs on the computer are sent over to
Google’s servers, processed in the game, and everything happening gets streamed
right back to you. This is why that latency is so important, because you can’t
have a good game experience if everything you do in the game shows up a second
later.

The limits of Stadia are still being detailed, but Google
has stated that Stadia will eventually be able to scale up to 8K / 120fps-plus
frame rates, with 4K/ 60fps play as the norm. That's way above the standard bar
for quality PC gaming. 

All of your inputs on the computer get sent over to
Google’s servers, processed in the game, and everything happening gets streamed
right back to you.

In the case of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey on Stadia, you're
still required to log into a Ubisoft account to play, but beta testers aren’t
required to own the game.

Stadia will also work well with Google Chromecast, which
means you'll be able to stream its games straight to any TV using Google's
streaming dongle, not to mention phones and computers. . 

In addition, it'll support cross-platform multiplayer  so long as the other major game players want
to take part, of course.

It’s unclear at this point whether Google will require
players to buy games and pay for the streaming service in separate
transactions, or whether access to select games will be bundled into the
service.

Games available

The final number hasn't been released just yet, but so far,
the numbers look promising. During Google's pre-E3 event, we got our first look
at Baldur's Gate 3 from Larian Studios, plus heard from Bungie that Destiny 2
would be available at launch on Google Stadia. Add to that Ghost Recon
Breakpoint from Ubisoft and a number of new Bethesda titles, and Stadia could
have one of the best launch libraries of any platform in recent memory.

Here are all the games Google has confirmed so far:

  • Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
  • Borderlands 3
  • Baldur's Gate 3
  • The Crew 2
  • Darksiders Genesis
  • Destiny 2
  • Doom
  • Doom Eternal
  • Dragon Ball Xenoverse 
  • The Elder Scrolls Online
  • Farming Simulator 19
  • Final Fantasy 15
  • Football Manager
  • Get Packed
  • GRID
  • Gylt
  • Just Dance
  • Metro Exodus
  • Mortal Kombat 11
  • NBA 2K
  • Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid
  • Rage 2
  • Rise of the Tomb Raider
  • Samurai Showdown
  • Shadow of the Tomb Raider
  • Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint
  • Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
  • Tomb Raider Definitive Edition
  • Thumper
  • Trials Rising
  • Wolfenstein: Youngblood

PC, Laptop Configuration

Because everything runs on the cloud, it seems like nearly
any internet-connected laptop or PC with Chrome should be able to play Stadia.
That said, Google did release a set of required specs when it tested the
service last year:

  • OS: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions
    only)
  • Processor: AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz, Ryzen 5 - 1400, Intel Core
    i7-3770 @ 3.5 GHz
  • Video: AMD Radeon R9 290 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (4GB VRAM or
    more with Shader Model 5.0) or better
  • Memory: 8GB RAM
  • Video Preset: High
  • Storage: 46GB available hard drive space
  • DirectX: DirectX June 2010 Redistributable
  • Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers

In addition, id Software confirmed that Doom Eternal is
coming to the Stadia  with the team only
taking a few weeks to transfer the title onto Google's cloud streaming service.
id Software's Marty Stratton revealed Doom Eternal is capable of running at 4K
60fps at native HDR on Stadia.

If the service can handle Assassin’s Creed Odyssey at 1080p
60fps and Doom Eternal at 4K/60fps, Stadia is going to be capable of playing a
whole lot of games at these settings. Other major titles could easily see
support on the service.

A recent Chromium update also added support for Nintendo
Switch controllers to Google's browser, so it looks like we could be getting
more than just streams of PC releases.Google also announced the launch of
Stadia Games and Entertainment. This will be a new arm at Google, with the sole
aim of designing games exclusively for Google's game streaming platform.

As well as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Ubisoft has indicated
a few upcoming games will also make it on to Stadia when it's released,
including multiplayer motor-cross game Trials Rising, naval warfare game Skull
and Bones, as well as strategy game Anno 1800.

Google Stadia will also allow for developers to implement
split-stream local couch co-op easier, through Stream Connect. This should
allow players to not only view but interact in each other's worlds. 

But, perhaps the biggest development for content creators
and their viewers is Crowd Play which will allow viewers to play games with
their favorite streamers by simply clicking a button. 

The big focus here is on designing a system that's both
easy to play and easy to show off to your friends. To that end, Stadia will
send both a 4K signal to both your device and to YouTube simultaneously,
allowing you to record what you're doing.

If you're stuck, either in your game or your friend's,
Google Assistant integration will allow you to access guides and walkthroughs
on-demand.

What was Project Stream like to use?

At its best, Project Stream was good. At its worst, well,
Google won’t let you play below a certain threshold of quality, and you
wouldn’t want to anyway.

We tested Project Stream on varying setups. We played on an
unstable 2.4GHz Wi-Fi connection, a fast and nearby 5GHz Wi-Fi connection, and
on an ethernet connection held steady and offered high bandwidth. Keep in
mind this was without the dedicated hardware Google has now introduced.

The highly dated Chromebook hardware didn’t hold it back
from playing.That said, in our experience, the visual degradation came before
the latency, so we were able to continue battling enemies smoothly even if they
started to look like ghostly swarms of pixels.

Overall, the graphics were fairly good throughout,
especially when playing on a high-bandwidth connection using ethernet cables.
Colors, shadows, and anti-aliasing look fine, and the frame-rate seems to vary
between 30 and 60fps.

The low frame-rate was one of the two issues we noticed.
The other was compression. Most of the time, it’s not super jarring, but when
there’s a lot of detail in a scene and a lot of movement, the compression turns
it all into a bit of slop. Character faces become a blur and hard edges
(noticeably the character’s hair) go soft.  While the price and service
model Google adopts will go a long way in determining whether Stadia is
worthwhile, we can say right now that its prototype works, and it looks good
doing it. But, will Microsoft’s xCloud do it better?

Will it work on Phones?

Yes! Well, yes... as long as you're a Google Pixel owner.
For whatever strange reason, Google is limiting Stadia to Google Pixel phones
to start. 

That's not so bad considering there are so many other ways
to access the service (see: desktop, laptop, tablet and TV through Chromecast
Ultra), but the fact that all Android phones won't get Stadia at the same time
does feel  a bit strange.

Rivals

According to a recently accepted United States Patent and
Trademark Office patent (spotted Digital Trends) filed by Sony back in 2014,
the company is working on a "system for combining recorded application
state with application streaming interactive video output". 

In other words, a cloud gaming service which could rival
the Google Stadia (or a cloud streaming new Xbox) and could potentially launch
with the PS5.

Players would be able to stream a game through a hosting
server. So if you have a device that connects to the internet, be that a mobile
device, console, or PC, you can connect to that server and the game you're
wanting to play will be streamed to your monitor or screen, allowing can play
using your preferred input device. Imagine Netflix for gaming. 

Rather than downloading a game, it is instead streamed
directly to your device and you would play real-time, cutting the need to
delete games to make storage room on your device and reducing the hardware
requirements - although you wouldn't technically own the title.

We expect Sony would implement this cloud gaming service
alongside the PlayStation 5, although the company hasn't specified if this is
the case.


Securing Your Site with HTTPS

Running a secure website is one of the most important elements to consider for your online presence. Whether you’ve had a website for a long time, or you’ve just created one, site security is extremely important  especially for eCommerce websites.

Not only that, but any site that requires or stores any
kind of visitor information, including something as simple as login
information, should provide security to site visitors.

What does “not secure” website mean?

If you’ve visited a website, (maybe even your own), and
noticed a warning in the search bar that says, “not secure,” you’re no stranger
to feeling cautious upon entering the website.

Not secure

You might ask yourself questions like “what does ‘not
secure’ website mean?” or “what information isn’t secure?” These are both valid
questions and something that you should be aware of before entering a website
that has the dreaded warning in the search bar.

Here are some things you have to know when it comes to
websites that aren’t secure:

HTTP websites are not secure

HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is placed at the
front end of website URLs in order to display a website. It’s a protocol used
by the World Wide Web in order to fetch HTML documents or in short, display web
pages.

Unfortunately, website URLs that are preceded by HTTP are
not secure. This means that your login info, or your personal information like
credit card numbers, could be stolen, read, or modified by hackers.

HTTPS websites are secure

On the other hand, website URLs that are preceded by HTTPS are
secure. This means that when you a see a website URL starting with HTTPS, you
won’t get a “not secure” warning, and you don’t have to worry about the
possibility of hackers stealing your personal information that you use on the
website.

Popular websites like Google.com and Amazon.com use HTTPS
to show users that they are safe when browsing and making online  purchases on their websites.

What does HTTPS
provide?

  1. Encryption-        Nobody can track or steal information.
  2. Integrity-            Data won’t be corrupted
  3. Authentication- Validates website are communicating properly

HTTPS provides encryption, which means nobody can track or
steal your personal information, integrity, which means that data can’t and
won’t be corrupted during transfer, and authentication, which validates that
websites are communicating correctly with the right website.

Google has always advocated for HTTPS sites as opposed to
HTTP sites, but in 2018, they made that even clearer. Starting in July 2018,
the search engine started providing users with the “not secure” marker in the
search bar  potentially decreasing site
visitors to insecure sites.

“Not secure” doesn’t mean your computer has virus

When users see a “not secure” warning, they may think that
it’s the first sign of a computer virus or malware. That’s one thing you don’t
have to worry about!

We mentioned before, the “not secure” warning simply means
that your information is not secure on that website, and that you should
refrain from entering any personal information.

Websites that don’t utilize HTTPS could rank lower in
results

Google’s main job as a search engine is to provide users
with the results that most closely fit their search query. The results that
Google provides for any given search is based on tons of factors including
keyword targeting, domain authority of the website, number of backlinks, and
the list goes on.

But Google is also known to use website
security as a ranking factor  means if you own a website that doesn’t
utilize HTTPS, you may see your site rankings get worse.

Google wants to provide search results that not only fit a
user’s search query, but also provides them with a secure experience.

My website is not secure, how can I fix it?

Adopting HTTPS is far from difficult, so check out this
five-step process to secure your website for site visitors and customers.

1. Install Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate

In order to make your HTTP site secure, you’ll need to
install an SSL certificate on your website. When you install an SSL
certificate, a few exchanges take place, which provide a secure version of your
website to your site visitors.

  1. Your browser will connect to a website and request the server
    identity.
  2. The server will respond by sending the browser the SSL
    certificate
  3. The browser will determine if the SSL certificate is
    trustworthy
  4. If the SSL certificate is trustworthy, it will send the server
    a message
  5. The server will respond with a digitally-signed document that
    gives permission to start a session that is encrypted by the trusted SSL
    certificate
  6. The browser and server share encrypted data

2. Ensure that internal and external links use HTTPS

If you want both your internal and external site links to
continue to operate effectively, you’ll want to ensure that you change them all
to https as well. This might sound tedious, but it’s crucial to ensure that
HTTPS helps your website instead of hurting it.

3. Verify your website in Google Search Console

After installing your SSL certificate and ensuring that
your site links use HTTPS, you’ll want to verify both the HTTP and HTTPS
version of your site in Google Search Console.

In doing so, you’ll also want to be sure that your
preferred domain is set to the HTTPS version. This will ensure that site
visitors are served the secure version of your website.

4. Ensure that HTTP URLs are redirected

If you mention your website on any third-party sites that
you have control over, you’ll want to be sure that you change mentions of HTTP
to HTTPS. You’ll also want to create 301 redirects on your own website to make
sure your HTTP URLs reference the HTTPS version.

5. Update XML sitemap

Next, you’ll want to update your XML sitemap to reference
the HTTPS versions of your site pages. Your sitemap acts as a road map for site
visitors and Google alike to help them easily navigate your website. To ensure
that Google re-crawls and indexes your website with new links, you’ll want to
submit you’re updated


Impacts of Web Design in Content Marketing

The design a company chooses impacts how a potential
consumer perceives them. From color choice to style, different elements add up
to create a first impression.

This means that bad design of website, or lack of design can
have potential customers closing the browser and seeking other businesses. As a
result, your company’s design can affect several components of your digital
marketing strategy, and this is especially true of content
marketing.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the practice of publishing content
that does not directly advertise a company’s product or brand, but generates
interest in those things by providing relevant and helpful information. Content
marketing as a strategy is one of the most important sub-strategies of search
engine optimization (SEO). SEO is an affordable
marketing technique that allows you to appear higher in
search results.

How web design impacts content marketing

Although these guides are primarily driven by content, Home
Depot’s web design impacts how users access and read them.

Accessibility

One of the most important considerations in designing a
content-heavy site is accessibility. If you publish informational content on
your site, it needs to be easy to find and read. Your navigation should allow
users to find the information they want, without clicking through pages of
irrelevant content.

If a visitor has to dig through page after page to get to
the information they’re searching for, they’ll be likely to give up and visit another
site instead of staying in your site. Creating a straightforward navigation
setup with drop-down menu choices is a great way to help visitors to find what
they are seeking and access it quickly.

Appearance

Visitors will make judgments about the quality and
trustworthiness of your content based on how professional your site looks. Even
if your content is easy to find, the design can turn people away.

If your site looks outdated or is visually unappealing,
users may be hesitant to consider you a valuable resource. You need to have a
clean design that illustrates your professionalism, and gives visitors
confidence that they can trust your advice.

Readability

Along with the overall look of your site, your text should
be visually appealing and easy to read. Too many fonts can be overwhelming and
unprofessional, and you can typically stick to one font for titles and another
for body copy.

Choosing the right fonts and colors is essential for
helping your visitors read and comprehend your content. You might publish the
most helpful content available on a specific topic, but if your font color is
too similar to your background, your visitors may not be able to read it.

Your body copy also needs to be clean and large enough to
be read without struggle. These details all seem minor, but can have a major
impact on how effective your content marketing strategy is with potential
customers.

Comprehension

Many people are visual learners, and need graphics and
photos to fully understand new topics and information. This means it’s
essential to include visuals with all of your content.

Regardless of your industry, visual content like photos and
videos can help your potential customers get a better idea of how they can use
your products or services. From a design standpoint, this means that your
site’s layout should work well with visual content, and make it easy for
readers to scroll through photos and watch videos.

Designing a content-friendly website

There are many different web design elements
that play a role in content marketing, but the bottom line is that your site
should be designed  by keeping visitors
and readers in mind. The easier it is for your visitors to find what they’re
looking for, and the more enjoyable it is for them to read your content, the
better results you’ll see from your strategy


How to perform a quick technical SEO

On-Site SEO Basics

Some of the most important elements for search engine
optimization happen on your own website. You may hear a lot about link building,
but link building without good on-site search optimization isn’t going to be as
effective. Here are the bare minimum on-site optimization elements you should
put on each of your website’s main pages, including and especially the
homepage.

The Golden Rule for On-Site Optimization

Before we get started, one thing you want to keep in mind
when using any of the following SEO elements is not to overdo it. You might be
tempted to shove a lot of keywords onto your pages, but that is not the goal.
In fact, Google has unleashed an over-optimization penalty that targets
websites that have too many keywords stuffed onto one page. So when it comes to
keyword optimization, keep it simple – think of up to five keywords or keyword
phrases for each page on your website and optimize for those.

If you’re not sure what keywords to use, try entering some
preliminary ideas on Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool to get suggestions

Title Tag

The title tag on pages of your website tells search engines
what the page is about. It should be 70 characters or less and include your
business or brand name and keywords that relate to that specific page only.
This tag is placed between the <HEAD> </HEAD> tags near the top of
the HTML code for the page.

Meta Description

The Meta description on pages of your website gives search
engines a little more insight into what your page is about. There is still
debate about whether meta descriptions can help with keyword rankings.
Regardless, you want to write your meta description by keeping human audience
in mind that includes the page’s main keywords, as the meta description does
show up in search results.

Using WordPress?

If you use WordPress on your own domain, you are in luck.
Adding title tags and meta descriptions to your pages is easy using free
plugins such as All in One SEO, Platinum SEO, and SEO by Yoast. You can also
get SEO suggestions by using premium plugins such as Scribe SEO.

Additional On-Site SEO Elements

While the title tag and the meta description are the most
important SEO elements, they are not the only ones. Be sure to incorporate the
following into your website’s page content for further search optimization.

  • Internal Links – Link building isn’t just reserved for external sites linking
    to your website. You can help search engines learn more about your website
    by internally linking to other pages on your website within your content.
    As an example, this blog post utilizes internal links when linking to
    other posts on the blog.
  • Header Tags – This blog post utilizes three different levels of HTML
    header tags that help break the content into sections as well as let
    search engines know more about what each section of content is about. The
    <H1></H1> tags surround the post title – there should only be
    one set of <H1></H1> tags per page. The <H2></H2>
    and <H3></H3> tags surround subheadings on the page – there can
    be multiple instances of both. Using header tags helps both readers and
    search engines break up your content into digestible sections.
  • Image Name & ALT Tags – If you use images on your website, you should think of good
    keywords for both the image name and the alt tag. On the first image
    within the post, we use <img
    src=”on-site-search-optimization-seo-title-tag.png” alt=”On-Site Search
    Optimization SEO Title Tag” /> as the goal is to optimize it for the
    keywords on-site search optimization.
    This helps search engines find good images for their image search based on
    the keywords specified.
  • Bolded Text – You don’t want to get too crazy with this one, but
    occasionally bolding a selection of text to get a reader’s attention can
    also help search engines distinguish other important information and
    keywords in the page’s content.

2. Why You Need Content

If you keep up with the latest in online marketing news,
then you have likely read about content development and content marketing.
Content is great for both your website visitors and search engines. The more
content you have, the more likely your visitors will stick around on your
website. And the more content you have, the more likely search engines will be
to put more of your website’s pages in the search index.

The key to pleasing both search engines and visitors is to
have quality content on our website. Quality content can
include a variety of things including, but not limited to, the following.

  • Blog Posts
  • Industry Articles
  • Tutorials & How To Guides
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Podcasts

Creating quality content for your website can be a huge
investment, but it is worth it. Search engines will love it, and visitors will
love it so much that they will share it on social media, leading to even more
visitors. You can start out by simply creating blog posts on your website, and
as your audience grows, you can expand your content inventory to additional
types of media.

3. Off-Site Optimization (aka Link Building)

Link building is probably one of the most talked SEO tasks.
The basic goal of link building is to get other websites to link to yours. If
you think about ranking at the top of search results as a popularity contest,
then links are like votes saying your website deserves to be ranked highly.
Getting links with keyword anchor text will help you rank specifically for the
keywords that are linked to. For example, Adobe Reader ranks number one for the
keywords click here because so many websites linked to it using the
anchor text click here to download Adobe Reader.

So how do you get links? There are lots and lots of ways to
do it – some good, and some not so good. If you read enough about link
building, you will hear ultimately about three kinds of links and link building
techniques.

  • Organic Links – These are links you don’t have to ask for, and they are the
    best kind. Especially if you can get them on sites with high authority
    such as major news outlets and other well-recognized name websites.
  • Whitehat
    – This basically stands for good, quality link building (the kind you
    should strive for).
  • Blackhat
    – This stands for spammy, low-quality link building (the kind you should
    avoid).

Most websites will have a hard time generating enough
organic links to raise their rankings in search engines. This is why link
building is such a popular services. But you can get started on building
quality links by doing some of the following activities.

  • Submitting guest blog posts to popular blogs in your industry.
    Generally, you will get a link back to your website in an author box at
    the top or bottom of your post’s content.
  • Reaching out to related (but not competitive) businesses to see
    if they will link to you. A good way to do this is to see if the
    businesses you work with have link pages on their site for partners,
    vendors, suppliers, etc.
  • Create local search profiles (if applicable) and social media
    profiles. While the links do not always count towards search rankings,
    they can attract clicks which will generate more incoming traffic to your
    website.
  • Submit your website to applicable industry directories or,
    alternatively, buy advertising. For example, anyone in the wedding
    business could get listings with a link back to their website on The Knot,
    The Wedding Channel, and other similar sites. Bypass low-quality
    directories that have nothing to do with your industry or ones that link
    to shady websites in the adult, pharmaceutical, or online casino
    industries.
  • Create link worthy content. Infographics are a great example –
    you create a beautiful image representing important information and allow
    others to use the infographic on their own website in exchange for linking
    back to yours as credit.
  • DataForSEO – Use this tool to get raw SEO data straight to your
    custom application. You can use their rank tracker API to track keyword
    rankings, SERP results, keyword data and more.

4. How Google+ Can Help with Rankings

It goes to show that personalized search results trump even
local search results. Hence, if you want to get into the personalized search
game, your goal is to do the following.

  • Create a Google+ personal profile and business page.
  • Recommend the website you want to rank well in search results
    by giving it a +1, sharing the website on your profile and/or page as a
    status update, and linking to it in your profile information under
    recommended websites.
  • Fill out your profile information completely to make others
    want to connect with you.
  • Check your settings and make sure that your profile information
    is public along with your status updates.
  • Share other interesting updates on your profile so it doesn’t
    look too self-promotional.
  • Start connecting with people who you want to see your website
    in search results. Use the search box on Google+ to find people to connect
    with and add them to your circles. Hopefully, most will add you back.

Essentially, the more popular you are on Google+, the more
likely you are to influence personalized search results with those who are
following you. Hence, take advantage of this social network to its fullest
extent to reap the benefits.

5. Monitoring Your Results

Last, but not least, you will want to keep track of your SEO
progress by monitoring your results. The three most important tools you can use
to monitor these results are the following.

  • Authority Labs – Create a free account which you can get after using the 30 day trial of the pro account. Use this tool to track keyword rankings for your website so you can see if they are moving up in search results.
  • Google Analytics – Use Google Analytics to learn more about the visitors to your website. In particular, monitor your organic search traffic sources to see what keywords people are using to find your website in search results. By setting up goals, you can see which keywords lead to visits where visitors do what you want them to do on your website such as sign up for a mailing list or purchase a product. This will help you learn what keywords you should be targeting with your SEO campaign.
  • DataForSEO – Use this tool to get raw SEO data straight to your custom application. You can use their rank tracker API to track keywords rankings, SERP results, keyword data and more.

There are a lot of other valuable SEO tools out there, but
these are the best ones to start with to help you learn more about whether your
SEO efforts are making a difference.