A FREE, CUSTOMIZABLE CONTENT CALENDAR FOR 2016
When multiple clients have multiple content needs, it can get hairy keeping track of everything. At Globe Runner, we developed an annual content calendar on Google Sheets that allows content producers to view the entire year at a glance and plan content as far ahead as possible. And we’re sharing it with you.
How to use this content calendar template:
- If you can open it, then it’s saved onto your Google drive. To save your own copy that you can edit, simply go to File –> Make a copy to have your own. There is no need to request us for access to use the sheet. Repeat: There is no need to request us for access to use the sheet!
- Navigate the months using the tabs at the bottom of the screen.
- US Federal holidays are highlighted in blue. Weekends are highlighted in pink. Just so you don’t mistakenly schedule a blog post for the weekend.
- Key dates for the months are listed in Column C-D. We deliberately added a generous helping of silly days (hello, Barbie Day on March 9), famous birthdays and today-in-history entries for the occasional moment when we run out of clever things to say on social media. You can change these of course to the type of content that makes sense for you.
- This calendar was completed in September 2015. Obviously a lot of things can happen between then and 2016. We encourage you to check other sources in case you’re building campaigns around sports and other special event dates.
Ready to start planning content for 2016? Go.
3 THINGS YOU CAN DO NOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR IMAGES FOR MOBILE SEO
Images are like the helpful elves of content: They can aid your mobile SEO efforts by increasing engagement with users and boosting your presence on search engines. To do that however, they need to be in the best condition possible to assist you.
Here are 3 simple things you can do now to optimize images and make them fighting fit for mobile:
1. Resize your images to a size that suits mobile
It’s estimated that images make up 65% of an average page’s total size. A mobile user waiting minutes for a site to load due to 5,000 pixel pictures will navigate away to find faster alternatives. It’s critical to scale down the size of your image to allow pages to load faster.
This can be as simple as resizing images using the image preview function of your computer or using the save-for-web function in Photoshop. You can also find different tools online to resize images for social media, web pages and other purposes, or to resize/crop in bulk.
The objective is to get to as near as possible to the ideal site load speed of 1 second. Even 5 seconds can be the kiss of death for retailers.
2. Rename your files to make them more descriptive
Surprisingly a lot of people still upload photos without renaming original file names. Renaming can seem like a time waster but it actually isn’t: Many people now use Google Images to conduct a search, and we’re certain none of them involved searching for IMG688. But they are searching for the service, solution or object that your site is about.
In renaming your image files, use descriptive words and include keywords only if these are natural, not contrived.
3. Add alt text to your images
Alt text or alternative text is an attribute that allows web users to determine the contents of an image — think of it as tagging your picture with information that is helpful for viewers who can’t see it. You’ll see alt text in boxes where an image ought to be, but was stripped out.
Why add alt text? Originally alt text benefited sight impaired individuals, but now their applications have become mainstream. Like descriptive file names, alt text helps users searching for your product or service. Alt text can act as flares for your content, pointing users to your page.
You can add alt text to images and shapes very easily by right clicking and adding copy in Microsoft Office. Daunted by the prospect of adding alt text to lots of pictures? You can batch process them using tools like FastStone for PC and PhotoMill for Mac.
GLOBE RUNNER IS A PROUD SPONSOR OF THE DOMAIN CONFERENCE
Globe Runner is proud to support the upcoming domain name conference called “The Domain Conference“, taking place in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from September 26 to 29, 2015. Globe Runner will join several stellar conference sponsors, including:
Premier Sponsor
.Club
Show Sponsors
Above.com
Coffee.Club
DCG.com
Escrow.com
ionmag.asia
NameJet
Protected Parking
Domain Sponsor
Ambition Insight
NamesCon
Frakes on a Plane
donuts
Sedo
101Domain.com
Verisign
GoDaddy
The Domain Conference is taking over for the previous T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conferences, which have been held in Fort Lauderdale, Las Vegas, and in New York City. Run by the Neu family – Howard Neu, Barbara Neu, and Ray Neu -the Domain Conference offers Cabana Networking, DomainFest sessions, and some stellar speakers, many of whom I know personally, including:
Morgan Linton
Braden Pollock
Michael Cyger
Ron Jackson
Brett Napoli
John Ferber
Jeff Sass
Chris Sheridan
Adam Dicker
Fred Mercaldo
Mike “Zappy” Zapolin
Monte Cahn
Dan Schindler
Dr. Gregg McNair
Scott Richter
Michael Gilmour
Tessa Holcomb
Jothan Frakes
Alan Ezeir
Daliah Saper
Colin Campbell
Alfredo Pinochet
Solomon Amoako
Luke McCormack
George Verdugo
Andee Hill
Stevan Lieberman
Dave Evanson
Yancy Naughton
Larry Fischer
Sevan Derderian
George Hong
Ilze Kaulins-Plaskacz
Come by the Globe Runner booth while you’re at the Domain Conference in Fort Lauderdale, and we’ll have a few goodies for you. We’ll also have updated research details from our latest .Com vs. New gTLD data.
Mention that you read this post and we’ll give you a free (on the spot) verification of one of your domain names using our new patent-pending service Verified Domains.
We’ll see you in Fort Lauderdale!
LINK BUILDING EVOLUTION IN ONE INFOGRAPHIC
From exchanges to earning, link building has evolved over the course of the last decade and a half.
Link building, as Moz says, is an art, and the way we approach that art adapts in response to a fast-changing digital environment.
The quality and relevance of your links matter when it comes to building up your ranking. If you can manage to develop high-quality links that point back to your website, Google rewards you. Over time Google has refined its process in combing out ‘bad’ link building practices.
To help map that change, we created an infographic that takes you from the early days of link building and carries on to the future. Feel free to share and embed it on your blog.
Share this Image On Your Site
PREPARING FOR 2016: DIGITAL STRATEGY IN THE NEW YEAR
It may not seem like it, but 2016 is right around the corner, and with a new year comes a whole new batch of digital considerations.
Traditional advertising continues to morph into the digital realm with social media juggernauts at the reins.
It’ll be important to stay organized in the coming months. With that in mind, here are a few tips to keep your digital strategy fresh in 2016.
Keep it Social
Many of our clients use Pinterest as a tool to stay connected with their customers and share dynamic, creative content. Going into 2016, keeping up to date on Pinterest and other important social media entities means a greater ROI for your brand. Shopping a brand with promoted Pinterest pins can generate hundreds of thousands of views for hundreds of dollars or less.
On more unexplored territory, Instagram has been working with marketing affiliates on a phased rollout of its advertising platform, which should become available to the public by the end of this year. Instagram says its ad recall for sponsored posts is over two times the norm for online advertising.
We have the opportunity to leap into this unprecedented area feet forward and establish innovative ways to increase brand exposure.
New Year, New Rules
What else to keep in mind as we barrel into a new year? Mobile. Data. Ease of Access. Now that you’re tidying up and preparing new budgets, take mobile into account if you haven’t already and consider a mobile-friendly website. If users on mobile devices can access your site, that means more traffic and a boost in your search engine rankings.
We’re seeing mobile develop into a new digital frontier, and sometimes even a battlefield. In late August, T-Mobile CEO John Legere declared open battle against what he calls data “thieves” who swallow thousands of gigabytes of data.
Why is this important? More and more, it’s becoming evident that the way we interact with data online (and now through mobile devices) can have a real world impact on the bottom line of a thriving business.
Clean Up
Okay, it’s been months since spring cleaning. You enjoyed the summer, but now the dust is starting to pile up again and you might be worried about clearing your mental space to tackle 2016. Here’s a couple useful tools to keep data in check:
Infogr.am – Take client reports and mounds of data and turn them into easy to navigate, colorful infographics. You can share these internally to better understand your business or distribute externally to increase brand exposure with something more elegant than hard data.
AdWords enthusiast? Check out Google’s new Report Editor they’ve started to tease on their blog. Google’s new tool will allow you to explore, sort, segment and visualize account data so you can take control of any frazzle over the next few months.
Finally, if you haven’t already, connect with a time tracking service like Everhour to hold yourself accountable and get a better understanding of when and where to allocate resources.
SOCIAL MEDIA PRO: WHAT ARE THE KARDASHIANS DOING RIGHT?
We’ve all seen one episode or a snippet or two in our attempts to keep up with the Kardashians, and based on what we’ve seen, we know they’re doing a whole lot of wrong.
With that in mind, what are they doing right? They’ve shot to stardom and their magic lies in their ability to make their way into your phones, tablets and computers via social media. The Kardashians have mastered the art of utilizing social media to grow their brand and the good news is: you can too, without putting on layers of makeup and fake eyelashes.
Know Your Platforms
Deborah Sweeney, CEO of MyCorporation Business Services explains the difference between networks, “The goal of every social platform is to engage followers; keep them clicking on links, discovering new things, and socializing with new and familiar people. The way in which they engage their users differs with every platform. Instagram engages purely with pictures, Twitter with short bursts of words, and Facebook with a combination of the two — with an added emphasis on lengthier posts, creating room for in-depth discussion.”
You also need to take into consideration the audience for each of the popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat and others. Understanding your audience will also help you connect with them on which ever platform(s) you decide to try. The Pew Research Social Media 2013 reported that:
- Facebook is used by more women (76%) than men (66%), and more 18 to 29 year olds (84%) than any other age range.
- Twitter is used by more black, non-hispanic internet users (29%) than white or Hispanic (16%), and more high-income earners (19%) than low (17%).
- Instagram is used by more urban internet users (22%) than suburban (18%), and more 18 to 29 year olds (37%).
- Pinterest is predominantly used by women (33% vs 8% of internet users who are men), and entertains a greater percentage of college graduates (25%) than any other network besides LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn is the only network used by more men (24%) than women (19%), and more 30 to 49-year-olds (27%) than 50 to 64-year-olds (24%).
Define Success
The first step to maximizing your presence on any social channel is defining success, and developing a content strategy that speaks to your audience in the language of the platform. If you think it’s not working, don’t just abandon ship. Try and figure out what not’s working—post different things and use analytics to see what people are responding to.
Create a Social Media Plan that Drives Results
The Kardashians have a marketing team that helps them acquire business and tout it on social media. They post pics that show off their “fabulosity” and are consistent. They have pretty consistent messaging in that nearly all of their posts are ads or selfies. When it comes to your own social media plan, you need to start with your own content and brand voice and develop a presence.
Unlike the sisters though, instead of touting your own company, use and build your online presence to develop depth within the industry. The content you create for your social networks should not sound like sales pitches. You can promote your brand on social by associating your brand with a lifestyle, and promoting and discussing that lifestyle. Start and participate in conversations about the industry, the aesthetic, the lifestyle.
Original content should be complemented by shareable and actionable content as well. It’s like having an in-person conversation…you wouldn’t talk about yourself more than half the time, would you? You talk about things you learned and share your experiences so that maybe the listener can feel inclined to participate and share your story with others.
Start with a strategy, implement, test and build. If the Kardashians can do it, so can you!
TAG MANAGEMENT 101: MAKE YOUR POSTS SHINE
Finishing your blogpost or article is a feat deserving of a night out or that pumpkin spice latte you’ve been craving. But before you finish, you realize you have to tag the post to high heavens and back; how do you determine which tags to choose and are the tags becoming overwhelming? The simple practice of cleaning and managing your tags can keep you sane and help organize your blog and posts to best maximize your SEO.
What is Tag Management?
Tags are snippets of code that are usually placed in the <head> of a page which enable 3rd-party tracking, analysis, and reporting. Google Analytics and other analytics platforms are an obvious tag, but remarketing, conversion tracking, affiliates, and advanced customer insight services utilize tags as well.
Tag management involves the use of code in the backend of your platform. These codes, or tag managers, allow marketing to have control over their own little space on a web page. The 6 or 7 tags on any given page are replaced by a single container. That container holds code that listens to rules dictated in the tag manager’s backend about when to fire which tags.
Tips on Successful Tag Management
First of all, why even consider taking extra time out of your day to manage tags? For two important reasons: management and data governance. Data governance provides directional focus. No data governance and you have a mess of useless information. Tags provide insight for you and the consumer—the consumer is able to better explore your blog and lead them to believe that you are an industry expert helping them to understand why your product or service is a necessity in their lives. They are also important for your content strategy and digital marketing efforts; tags gain traction on Google as they help readers find the posts with the specific information they’re looking for.
Tags, unlike categories, serve as an index for your site or blog. They can help you understand how your content strategy is changing or needs to be changed. When you pull reports in your search for insights, you want data lined up so it is easier to read and digest and this is where management comes in. We’re not talking about simply managing which tags you use; we’re talking back-end metadata. For example, set a product ID to something that makes sense for anyone who looks at the code (myproductatthiscompany.productID). You can then tailor your analytics code to pull information about that data object and compare it to its content value for a specific piece of content or throughout your whole content library.
Google’s Tag Manager is a free tool for managing marketing and tracking tags on your site. If you need a more in-depth look at your content and digital marketing strategy in addition to something provided to you via a free tool like Google’s Tag Manager, contact Globe Runner today!
EMAIL SEGMENTATION: A QUICK GUIDE
Delivery is the foundation of good story-telling. Any comedian will tell you that if you deliver a bad joke the right way, you can make it funny. The same goes for email marketing. How you currently break up and deliver your email communications and segment your audience based on what they do (in addition to what they say) is what determines its efficacy.
Segmentation Based on Action
You may already be segmenting your emails based on groups i.e. business groups, demographic types and membership (paid, free, lapsed). Even if this has proven to be effective, it can be even more helpful to segment according to action; segment based on the behavior or action that your audience takes relative to the service you’re offering.
Why is action louder than words? Instead of connecting with people based just on their membership type or whether they’re male or female, connect with them based on what they do—helping to foster a more personal connection. For example, say someone downloaded a whitepaper or opened an article on your website. Instead of getting caught up on getting their personal information, focus on communicating with them based on what they did by offering them a next step or a subtle call-to-action.
Segment Your Segments
If the customer who downloaded a whitepaper or article identifies themselves as someone familiar in your trade of business, you can create narrowly focused segmentations based on this information. Use this information to develop engaging and relative content.
Although it may seem cumbersome, and far from the foundation of automated email marketing, you’re more likely to get results with email segmentation.
MailChimp scanned their users who use segmentation tools and compared the list of segmented campaigns to the results of the same customers’ non-segmented campaigns. “When we measured stats ‘across all segmented campaigns,’ segmented campaigns performed markedly better than their non-segmented counterparts.”
What your customers do may be more telling than what they say which can help your email communications be more relevant and successful.
Do you use email segmentation? How much do you depend on user information over their actions?
Let us know via Twitter.
CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT IN 3 SIMPLE STEPS
Executing a successful campaign is as detail-oriented and time-intensive as preparing for battle. Knowing the breakdown of successful campaign management can really take the daunting factor out of the equation so that you aren’t afraid to take the first step.
COURTESY ANDY DOLMAN – WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
With the many analytics tools and software available to us, it can be hard to know where to start. The best way to start is by focusing on one element at a time instead of being overwhelmed by the bigger picture. The three main elements involved in successful campaign management include:
1. Data for campaign management
Start with acquiring a clear understanding of your customer:
- Who are you talking to?
- How can you effectively market to them?
- What are their needs?
- How is your product or service the solution?
Other customer data includes age, gender, ethnicity, family and marital status, employment status and income level. Also, knowing which customers are your most valuable buyers is important because it helps you further focus your efforts.
The more data you acquire, the better because it paints a greater picture of your customers. Use this data to understand their needs and answer the questions that build the basic buying process:
- What do you do?
- So what about what you do? (build awareness)
- Why are you better than…
- Do I need your product/service?
- How do I get your product/service?
- I got it, I’m on it.
To get these answers, you can look at particular marketing communications to understand where potential customers are in the process and take them from one stage to the next until they become your loyal customers.
2. Content
No campaign is complete without implementing content. Now that you know who your customers are, you need to focus on what messaging to send them and how to relay that message to your customer base.
How do content and customers come together? If you know that your customer favors a certain organic product and likes discounts, you can share information in that realm that touts you as the industry thought leader. How about a blog post about when to buy organic to get the best deals? You can also share information about sales during peak season for a certain vegetable or fruit.
3. Execution
You now have an idea of what to send to whom and a better sense of your story. Although your messaging is clear, the next step is to determine how to share it in the most effective way possible. Will a push notification be more effective than a direct mail piece?
Communicating your information through effective storytelling is the way to acquire and retain customers. Reach out the wrong way and you risk turning potential customers away.
Taking the right steps toward successful campaign management means making sure you get each step right before taking the next one. Globe Runner can help you turn your campaign ideas into action by walking you through these steps so you better understand your root customers and messaging. Contact us today!
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