Sundays are for resting, so instead of making a “Weekend Reading List” that no one will be in the mood to read, I turned this post into a Monday Reading List to help you get started and inspired for a fresh online marketing work week.
If you got too busy over the past week and got yourself a digital detox during the weekend, and you have NO IDEA at all what has been happening in the online marketing industry, don’t worry I got you covered. So sit back and relax as you sip on that hot cup of joe, munching on a croissant while I let you in on what’s the latest in the world of online marketing plus some neat must-read articles about SEO, content marketing, social media, and productivity to help you with your strategy and have a more productive work week.
SEO and Analytics
1) The Twitter/Google Deal: 7 Considerations For Marketers & PR Pros. The most recent breaking news in the past week is the Twitter and Google Firehose deal: real-time Tweets will now be in Google search results (rejoice SEOs and social media marketers!). It will be the first time that Tweets will appear in Google searches after they disappeared back in 2011. However, according to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, real-time Tweets will not start appearing for another “several months”. For now, just prepare your strategy on how you can make use of this deal with the help of this article by Creative PR.
Bonus: Here’s a FAQ post from MarketingLand.com about the Twitter and Google deal if you want to learn more about it.
2) How Google Determines Your Search Rank [Infographic]. Google and its constant algorithm changes, a pain in the butt for anyone who’s goal is to keep a website or their clients’ pages ranking high in search. This infographic by Audience Bloom talks about the factors that affect your ranking in Google and best practices that SEOs can do to make your relationship with Google a bit less frustrating. According to the infographic, Google favors .com domain names, Google+ boosts search rank the most (sorry Facebook obsessed marketers), short URLs rank higher compared to long ones, and that you’ll rank higher if your website speed is faster! Quick, read it and adjust your strategy ASAP!
3) 57 Basic Marketing Analytics Terms Everyone Should Know. I have a confession to make, sometimes in team meetings, I get lost when some people mention marketing jargons that I don’t have any clue about. I’m too embarrassed to ask so I just depend on the very trustworthy Google. But what about other deep marketing words used in very technical analytics reports? Being in the content marketing team isn’t an excuse to not knowing those terminologies, especially when I need to make reports for clients. Thank God the guys over at Hubspot published this article for people like me. Rachel Sprung couldn’t have said it any better, “In the midst of analyzing your marketing, decoding the terminology you’re coming across should be the last thing you spend energy on.”
Content Marketing and Social Media
4) 2 Content Types That Will Earn the Most Shares in 2015. If you think your 2014 content strategy reports and analysis still aren’t enough to create a foolproof 2015 strategy to meet your social media benchmarks, you need to read this article based on a research done by BuzzStream and Fractl. Using BuzzSumo (this one’s a favorite of the Spiralytics content team), they tracked 220,000 pieces of content to find out which article formats yielded strong, consistent returns. Read on to find out which article format you should be incorporating in your content strategy this week and beyond.
5) How to Write an Irresistible Headline. The author of the post, Pratik Dholakiya started his article with a great point – articles are shared because of their headlines. If you have an irresistible headline, then you already have the advantage because you’re getting people to actually read your article and share it. Pratik shared some great statistics and headline-writing strategies of top blogs. I got this one bookmarked, of course.
6) 12 Places To Promote Your Content After You Hit Publish. Writing doesn’t end in hitting the publish button. Your work doesn’t exist if nobody reads it, as I’ve learned from writing for a living all these years. When it comes to the business of content marketing, our success depends on how many people actually read what we’ve created and if we got conversions from it. This amazingly thorough post teaches you that aside from your usual social networking sites, there are a ton of places and ways that you can share your post and let the world know about it. Hopefully, it won’t just be your Mom reading your work after you implement the tips from this article. (Thanks Mom for the support!)
7) Four Lessons From Creating Over $20,000 Worth Of SlideShare Presentations. Part of my work as a Content Strategist includes creating shareable content like SlideShares with the team, especially incorporating it with content for clients that are in “boring” industries. Author Ross Simmonds shares that he has created SlideShares with more than150,000 shares, resulting in new business opportunities ranging from five figure consulting gigs to public speaking opportunities around North America. What’s his secret? Read the article to find out.
Productivity
8) 10 Easy Ways to Make Your Commute More Productive. Stuck in terrible traffic? Tired of your offline songs in Spotify? Annoyed with that woman next to you yapping away on her mobile? Why don’t you take this time to be productive instead and plan out your whole day, learn something new, or clean up your accounts? This article lists down fun and creative apps that you can use to make the most of your commute time. My personal favorites include Wunderlist, Coach.me, and Feedly.
And in case you were REALLY BUSY last week and have no clue about the best thing that happened, here’s a GIF to show you. Meet #LeftShark, the scene-stealing dancing shark in Katy Perry’s halftime show in the Super Bowl last Feb 2. If you think you’re having a bad Monday, this guy had a worse Monday than you.
Have a great week ahead!
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