If you're starting an online business, you'll need to know these top 5 must-know online statistics to realize how powerful it can be to propel your business to the NEXT level, WITHIN months.

Is your business “all in” with online platforms like social media sites and video sharing site (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube)? Well, if you’ve never been online, these interesting online facts about social media sites should change your mind.

Yes, social media and video sharing sites are the place where MOST people spend their time finding information, conduct business, promote their product and services, and catch up with latest news and trends. Not to mention, most online viewers watch YouTube videos than any cable channels (you’ll find it out later in this article).

Top 5 Must-Know Online Statistics

1. Facebook


Facebook has over 1.15 billion active users, making it the number 1 social media network in the Internet today. There are over 665 million daily active users on Facebook and for the first time in history, the monthly active users have surpassed the 1.1 billion figure.

What about mobile users?

Well, as of writing this article, there are more than 750 million people using Facebook using their mobile, and almost 190 million people use it through their mobile only.

In 2013, Facebook generated 30% of its revenues from ads, which is up from 23% from the year 2012!

2. YouTube

According to YouTube blog, YouTube is the BIGGEST online video sharing platform that receives more than 1 billion unique visits every month.

There are 6 billion hours of videos that are watched every month. It is considered that YouTube reaches young adults aged between 18 to 34 more than any other cable network out there.
 
3. Google+

Were you expecting Twitter on the #3 spot as it’s the youngest of all social media site.

Although I cannot give you a scientific proven answer for this, but I would rather give a rough idea why it have garnered the second spot, with 343 million active monthly users. Just during the last 6 months, Google+ reached the #2 spot, and it is NEVER showing any signs to stop there.

Google+ is the most popular thing on the Internet after Facebook, and MORE people are becoming curious as how to use its free services for higher search rankings. That is why for the past several months, my articles on Google+ have got more likes, shares, and re-tweets, and traffic than any other Facebook or Twitter articles I have written till date.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been a favorite place to get exposure to your business, and find high paying jobs online for many. If you do NOT have a site, simply open up a LinkedIn account, submit your details and portfolio, and start to get job opportunities you never thought you would get.

LinkedIn is a silent killer and boasts of having 238 million active users.

5. Twitter

Twitter slips to the 5th position this time, but still considered to be the most popular social media platform after Facebook. The reason of its popularity is because it acts as a bridge to fill gap between mass media and social media. For instance, popular television shows use Twitter to gain real time feedback/comments from users.

According to the study conducted by GlobalWebIndex, Twitter saw over 228 million monthly active users in 2013. The total number of registered users on Twitter is more than 500 million, and more people are registering, daily.

Did these top 5 must-know online statistics blew your mind away? Please comment below!

How do you lengthen your customer’s lifespan, especially if you’re in a competitive niche where they’re plenty of other who offers similar services as you do?

According to a survey conducted by SumAll, a New York based analytics firm, thriving businesses generate 25 to 40% of their total revenues through repeat business.

“Repeating customers are your best asset,” says Dane Atkinson, CEO of SumAll. “Repeat customers spend at least 2.6 times more than a first time visitor.”

Every type of business, especially small businesses, today need loyal customers not just only to survive, but also thrive and grow. Small businesses can profit from the margins offered by the repeat customers.

In addition, they’ll also need a “word of mouth” marketing their loyal customers provide. So how do you lengthen your customer’s lifespan to turn your business from small to large?

5 Ways to Lengthen Your Customer's Lifespan:

1) Encourage Higher Initial Purchase

SumAll found that higher the customers spend, more likely they’ll come back to you. That means people who spend the most on their first transaction were twice more likely to return back than those who spend the least.

2) Offer Some Type of Incentives

Once a customer lands on your door, do offer some type of free incentives in addition to what you offer to encourage them to visit back again.

For example, you can offer a free book, information, or give a short tour on all the services you’re offering. Give them something additional to what they purchase, without charging hidden prices.

Survey conducted by SumAll found that customer who purchase a product once have 29% chance of making another purchase while a fifth time visitor has more than 62% chance of visiting back.

3) Set Aside Marketing Funds for Loyal Customers

As you already know, repeat customers are the backbone of every thriving business today. These are the people who’ll refer your products and services to their friends, family, and co-workers, and visit your business when no one else is around.

They’re the reason why small businesses grow from small to LARGE!

Most business owners spend all of their marketing funds on attracting new customers while giving little or no thought to their current visitors. That’s a HUGE mistake! “At least 25% of the marketing budget must be set aside for existing loyal customers,” says Atkinson.

4) Give More “Personalized Attention”

You already know that repeating customers are your best buddies as they’ve been with you through thick and thin. Why not make them feel special and give additional reasons to purchase again?

Making your customers feel special means giving them personalized attention, like giving a brief call to know whether their recent purchase of your service and product were good enough. Or inviting them exclusively on events and labeling them a VIP designation, or offering free shipping goes a long way to retain customers. The list can go on and on.

5) Listen to Client’s Feedback to Upgrade

Retaining customers is all about offering the best customer experience.

Listen to your customer’s deepest concerns, feedbacks, complaints, and feedbacks in general as it will NOT only help you learn their buying behavior, but over time, you’ll also improve the quality of services and products. This will make everything look fresh and enticing, giving them more reasons to keep coming back to your place.

The more people are satisfied with your customer care service, more likely they’ll feel at ease purchasing from you again.

5 Ways to Retain Customers - Conclusion

Repeating customers are the lifeline of any businesses. Retaining a customer is an art itself and it will only improve through experience you gain from their feedbacks and complaints.

Treat your customers, especially your loyal customers, like your family members by giving them special attention, and they’ll more likely purchase from you again. Retaining customers is also about building a lasting relationship. If you require, you may want to hire skilled marketers and sales people to lengthen your customer’s lifespan too.

We’d like to hear from you. Tell us the best ways to lengthen customer’s lifespan by commenting below. We’ll respond to you, promise.

Most people today know a lot about building a strong online presence – they know how to setup websites, social media profiles, get customer feedback, and so on.

But merely building a strong “online presence” isn’t sufficient enough to guarantee success online. The tough part lies in defining your company’s brand to get as much people to know about you, your products and services.

Online branding is probably one of the best online marketing strategies that will help you establish as an industry expert.

So, simply setting up a website with static pages and filling up quick information on bunch of social media profiles will create a strong “online presence,” but not a brand!

Branding deals with more than simply making it easy for your visitors to find you on the Internet. Branding is all about creating a strong image of your business to make you stand out from the crowd.

Here are 5 pointers to consider when branding your business online:

1. Identify your “idea” or “target” audience.

2. Think about services your “target” audience may require once they land on your website.

3. Think about how you will improve their quality of life, or solve their pressing problems, or add value into their life?

4. On which aspect of your product and services will they likely offer their feedback on? You need to anticipate on which topics people may write positive/negative reviews about your product so you can tackle those issues efficiently when they arise later.

5. Now ask yourself, “Am I, or my company staff, available for customer support on our social media profiles?”

All of these questions will help know identify your business brand. In addition, you may also need someone to look after it, address people’s concerns on social profiles, before you setup your website and fill up social profiles.

If you find that your staffs are fully packed, you may need to contact a professional company and outsource your online brand management campaign to them.

So now that you know what your brand is and the person responsible to manage your online brand, its time you think about your website. Your website must be the focal point for both content as well as design.

The design element of your website, social profiles, and other High PR websites needs to be consistent. That means if your Facebook fan page is about “Smith’s Plugin Company,” it cannot be “Jane’s Plugin,” on LinkedIn. This will only confuse your customers.

In addition, your business logo and other design elements have to be same. In other words, everything has to represent a single brand.

Once all the design elements are taken care of, put all your energy to craft out helpful, informative, and niche-related content. The content that is on your business site and social profiles will help you drive to the front page of search engine results, and help you establish a strong impression among your prospective customers.

Have any comments, queries, and questions about branding your business online? Do not hesitate to share your comments below or feel at ease to contact us today.

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If you have a business website, remember that it is subject to all types of reactions from all sorts of people from around the world – friends, families, colleagues, competitors, hackers, virus, etc.

Not to mention, it also opens up to those who wants to ride on your success.These people can make or break your online reputation in a matter of days.

They may post negative comments about you, or post unhelpful reviews about your product and services that may not even be true. They just want to see you come crashing down.

So, the most important question: why should you protect your online brand?


7 reasons why you should protect your online brand:

Reason #1: Your Brand Is Everything -

In business world, your personal brand image is everything. So you want to do everything to protect it. Your business name, its logo, all your products and services that you’ve spend numerous hours developing and promoting needs to be protected.

You may have to hire a legal advisor to establish your business as a formal entity through copyrighting, patenting, and trade marking procedures so that you and your business is safe from potential threats.


Reason#2: Protect Your Content from Internet Scrapers –

If you’re beginner in online marketing, and have recently setup a site/blog for your business, you need to protect your brand against programs that crawls through your site, known widely as “scrapers,” and steal your content.

As your content is stolen by these so-called Internet “scrapers,” your potential customers would have no clue if they’re on your site or someone else’s.

And that, my friend, would be a HUGE problem for you …

In today’s virtual world, these “scrapers” may be just one reason why it’s vital you protect your online brand.


Reason #3: Protect from Intellectual Property Theft –

With online hacking, cyber-squatting, domain hijacking, and content stealing – your personal/online brand is always under threat, and soon you may think if doing business online is really worth the effort.

Although MOST of these threats aren’t so serious, there are effective ways to deal with them. In fact, simply follow few precautions methods, and you’ll eliminate almost 95% of risk that may threaten your online business reputation.


Reason #4: Google Robots Can Pick Up Negative Reviews very Fast

Negative reviews and blog posts may have been written about your brand, which could damage your online profile. But bad reviews may also help provide legitimate feedback for your product and services.

So, instead of shying away from negative articles, reviews, and mentions, embrace them. Resolve the issue and turn it around into something positive.

If you’re a newbie on the internet, but don’t know how to respond appropriately to these bad reviews, you may have a tendency to skip this step. And before you can do anything about it, Google search engine robot will pick it up and display them on search result page.

Before this happens, you need to protect your online brand reputation.


Reason #5: Protect Your Content from Being Copied -

If you’ve just set up a site or a blog, chances are that you haven’t put a clear and prominent copyright notice on every page, or any other documents (PDFs, MSWord, Excel) you may have published online.

To be sure, do a quick Google search using keyword phrases that you’ve used on your site and see the search results.

If similar content pops up, scan through to see if someone has copied your content. Sometimes a JV partner may have used your documents, and that would not be a problem.

However, if you see other is using your documents, it’s time that you protect your content by sending out an email requesting to remove the page, and if they refuse, hire a legal advisor to take legal action against them.


Reason #6: Your Competitors May Use Deceptive Search Advertising

Your competitorsmay try to exploit your brand name to make profits. They pay for PPC advertisement on search engines and display it whenever someone searches for your brand name.

This will NOT only take away influx of traffic to their site, but it also confuses your customers. If you’ve seen such ads on search engine results, then it’s high time you need to protect your online brand reputation.


Reason #7: If You Don’t Protect Your Online Properties, Someone Else Will

As obvious as it may sound, if you do not protect all your online properties, then someone else will come along and set up a profile using your brand name. As a result, anyone can leave a bad review, or a negative comment, or post anything they want to destroy your brand as you will not have any control over these profiles.

There’s a high probability that your online brand could be in trouble.

So, if you haven’t protected all your online properties, particularly if you’re a newbie on the net, the next big thing you must do is take steps to protect your brand.

When it comes to online reputation management, we often talk about different tips, strategies, insights – actions that may help you boost your online reputation and increase your branded SERP.

Essentially, successful online reputation management is all about being active, doing something, taking action, and getting things done.

And if you don’t take actions, it’s easy to lose your online presence very soon.

Plus, making mistakes offline (real life) from “bad behavior” or “poor service” may be fatal but this negative experience will likely be contained within a small geographical area. For example, you can always move to a new area and start it all over again.

But on the internet? Well, not so much!

On the internet, your reach is much GREATER, and as a result, the likelihood of your reputation being damaged is exponentially HIGHER.

Heard of the old saying, “What goes on the net stays on the net?”

Here are 5 actions you can take to STOP killing your online reputation.


1. STOP Spamming People

If you’re in a business looking for quick results, you may be tempted to send out too many messages to your current or potential customers. Without building trust and relationships with your customers at first, you just can’t send sales-pitch with links to your products. They’ll be called spams and people simply don’t like them.

If this sounds like your business, we highly recommend that you STOP spamming people with text messages and learn about “permission marketing” first.


2. STOP Posting Inappropriate Content

Next time you post any content, make sure you check, and double check it to see if it contains anything you may regret later because you simply can’t DELETE your online activity.

Even though you may hit the delete button, your comments, pictures, and posts will still be there, stored forever in “Internet cache system.” If you don’t know what cache means, trust me on this – your content is still there hidden in the mystical land of the internet and people will find them, eventually.

So the best thing to STOP killing online reputation is to NOT post anything that you wouldn’t want your mom to see. It’s that simple!


3. Do Keep Track of Yourself, Online

Have you Googled lately about your business?

Depending upon on active you are online, there could be pages of your branded SERP.

If you’re planning to use online communications to enhance your online business reputation, then you also need to know how your reputation looks like to other people on the internet.

So, Googling about you or your business could be the best way to see how your online presence is been judged by other people.

For better results, use social media marketing dashboard in order to monitor real-time engagement with your clients. A good dashboard will give you information about what your clients think about you and your products, and give you the ability to respond to questions, queries, and comments immediately to engage the, try to fix issues, and even thank for their time valuable feedback.


4. STOP Being Negative

Naturally, people often tend to be negative when something bad happens.

When something goes wrong, it’s easy to complain and whine about things instead of dealing them with a positive attitude.

On the internet, you’ll be perceived by your attitude which is shaped by what you choose to put there.

But that doesn’t mean you can NOT publish controversial stuffs online, but how you choose to explain them online will determine whether your readers will interpret them as interesting or simply annoying.

But the bottom line still remains – be inquisitive and be MORE positive. 


5. STOP Rambling About ONLY Yourself

Setting up a site, blog, and social media accounts is all about “engagement.”

Engagement is a conversation!

Have you tried to have a conversation with someone before who ONLY liked to talk about themselves? At the end, you did excuse yourself politely, right?

We know that there’s nothing MORE interesting in the world than you or what you have to say, but keep in mind that your friends, followers, and subscribers have even MORE interesting things to say back to you – their feedback.

So, if you keep on rambling without engaging your readers, do you know what they’ll do – they’ll simply STOP reading and NEVER come back. If you aren’t very good at attracting their attention, you’re losing the BIG game.

The rule of thumb is to get their attention first, and they may pay attention to what you have to sell to them. Got it?

If you have a business website, remember that it is subject to all types of reactions from all sorts of people from around the world – friends, families, colleagues, competitors, hackers, virus, etc.

Not to mention, it also opens up to those who wants to ride on your success. These people can make or break your online reputation in a matter of days.

They may post negative comments about you, or post unhelpful reviews about your product and services that may not even be true. They just want to see you come crashing down.

So, the most important question: why should you protect your online brand?


7 reasons why you should protect your online brand:

Reason#1: Protect Your Content from Internet Scrapers –

If you’re beginner in online marketing, and have recently setup a site/blog for your business, you need to protect your brand against programs that crawls through your site, known widely as “scrapers,” and steal your content.

As your content is stolen by these so-called Internet “scrapers,” your potential customers would have no clue if they’re on your site or someone else’s.

And that, my friend, would be a HUGE problem for you …

In today’s virtual world, these “scrapers” may be just one reason why it’s vital you protect your online brand.


Reason #2: Intellectual Property Theft –

With online hacking, cyber-squatting, domain hijacking, and content stealing – your personal/online brand is always under threat, and soon you may think if doing business online is really worth the effort.

Although MOST of these threats aren’t so serious, there are effective ways to deal with them. In fact, simply follow few precautions methods, and you’ll eliminate almost 95% of risk that may threaten your online business reputation.


Reason #3: You Do NOT Know How to Handle Negative Reviews -

Negative reviews and blog posts may have been written about your brand, which could damage your online profile. But bad reviews may also help provide legitimate feedback for your product and services.

So, instead of shying away from negative articles, reviews, and mentions, embrace them. Resolve the issue and turn it around into something positive.

If you’re a newbie on the internet, but don’t know how to respond appropriately to these bad reviews, you may have a tendency to skip this step. And before you can do anything about it, Google search engine robot will pick it up and display them on search result page.

Before this happens, you need to protect your online brand reputation.


Reason #4: You Haven’t Protected Your Copyright -

If you’ve just set up a site or a blog, chances are that you haven’t put a clear and prominent copyright notice on every page, or any other documents (PDFs, MSWord, Excel) you may have published online.

To be sure, do a quick Google search using keyword phrases that you’ve used on your site and see the search results.

If similar content pops up, scan through to see if someone has copied your content. Sometimes a JV partner may have used your documents, and that would not be a problem.

However, if you see other is using your documents, it’s time that you protect your content by sending out an email requesting to remove the page, and if they refuse, hire a legal advisor to take legal action against them.


5. Your Brand Is Everything –

In business world, your personal brand image is everything. So you want to do everything to protect it. Your business name, its logo, all your products and services that you’ve spend numerous hours developing and promoting needs to be protected.

You may have to hire a legal advisor to establish your business as a formal entity through copyrighting, patenting, and trade marking procedures so that you and your business is safe from potential threats.


Reason #6: Your Competitors May Use Deceptive Search Advertising


Your competitors may try to exploit your brand name to make profits. They pay for PPC advertisement on search engines and display it whenever someone searches for your brand name.

This will NOT only take away influx of traffic to their site, but it also confuses your customers. If you’ve seen such ads on search engine results, then it’s high time you need to protect your online brand reputation.


Reason #7: If You Don’t Protect Your Online Properties, Someone Else Will

As obvious as it may sound, if you do not protect all your online properties, then someone else will come along and set up a profile using your brand name. As a result, anyone can leave a bad review, or a negative comment, or post anything they want to destroy your brand as you will not have any control over these profiles.

There’s a high probability that your online brand could be in trouble.

So, if you haven’t protected all your online properties, particularly if you’re a newbie on the net, the next big thing you must do is take steps to protect your brand.

Contact us to protect your online brand, once and for all.

Internet today is driven by so much web content and performing an internal audit of your content is one of the most “important” activities you can do to ensure “optimum” visibility of your site.

What are Content Audits?

Content audits, often known as “content assessments” or “content inventories,” are performed to make sure that text, images, and links are all organized and in working order.

Plus, an internal content audit can also help reveal HIDDEN problems of a site that is affecting user behavior negatively so that improvements and corrections can be made in order to make it more “useful” and “engaging” for your readers/ visitors.

2 Distinct Steps in Internal Audit of your Website Content

Two vital activities make up for a good internal content audit of your site.

1.    Making a list of existing web content, and then

2.    Making improvement and tweaking things up to BOOST the performance of the overall website.

It’s BEST to handle internal audit of your content in 2 separate steps to ensure it is done thoroughly and WITHOUT any bias at all.

The content audit of your site is performed usually by a team of site content managers and web designers whose job is to “evaluate” every page of a site.

Internal content audit is a TEDIOUS process because it ENTAILS reviewing each and every page of your site. Generally, at first, you’ll have to start with the “most critical” areas of your site, like the home page.

The audit has to identify any “glaring” issues related with the “presentation” of the content as well as the site’s overall “design.”

Once the issues are identified, the internal content audit team proceeds to the inspection of the text, all the links, images, and videos inserted on each page, while web designers will work towards correcting formatting issues.

Quick Ways to Perform Internal Audit of Your Content

If your website content hasn’t been UPDATED for years, and if you’re looking for enhancement, here are few content audit tactics I recommend.

Have these content audit goals in mind:

1.    Remove any low quality or unnecessary pages

2.    Find pages or sections that can be updated or improved

1.    “Interlink” your content to improve your site’s rankings

Besides internal content audit of your site, you might as well want to limit your word count (500 to 800). You may think web content writing is EASY, but a NEW trend is coming – “less is more.”

Content Writing – Why Less is More?

Most companies often make a MISTAKE while redesigning their websites: they try to say TOO MUCH on their pages.

It’s totally understandable why it happens as company insiders often spend MOST of their time TALKING about product features – what they offer, how their competitors fit in the BIG picture, what they need to be doing when next BIG customer comes along, and so on.

From this viewpoint, it’s NOT uncommon to assume that people coming from outside also want this type of detail information.

The problem with this type of thinking is that …

It’s mostly NOT true!

While some visitors/ readers may want to “dig deeper” for detailed information, but “most” prospects simply want the “big picture.”

In other words, they quickly want to learn what you “offer” and if you have something to help solve their woes!

Try to cram a LOT of information, and it could be counter-productive.

Our experience tells that, “light html” pages are better served than pages with wall of content. Smart use of sub-headers to break up content blocks (using shorter paragraphs in a conversational style) usually works best.

With that said, here are few ways to manage your content better so that your web pages can easily be read, while still giving MORE details for those who are interested.

·      One method is to break up longer product pages into different tabbed buckets. Your readers can quickly find MAJOR points at the introductory paragraphs, and if they want MORE drilling, they can always click on tabs. They keep your pages easier to read and clean.

·      Another method is to use sub-headers, thumbnails, and bullet points in order to make it more interesting and readable.

·      Another technique is to offer MORE detailed information by placing a link to PDF downloads, like brochures, catalogs, datasheets, and white papers, etc.

Here’s another benefit of breaking content down – if they require additional information, they MUST fill the online request form. Leads, anyone?

Everyone who owns a website often wrestles with the idea of keeping their visitors to their site as long as possible, i.e. make them “engaged” longer.

When people stay longer on your site …

1.    Your site/ page will have low bounce rate that suggest search engines like Google that it MUST be valuable, and you’re your site better for search terms.

2.    Plus, when your visitors spend more time on your site, they will likely buy something for you.

But, how do you make your content more engaging and lure them to click through the links and ads on your page?

10 Ways to Stay Engaged with Your Web Visitors:

1. Give Away “Useful Content”

Generosity can bring several benefits to your website.

Blog articles, Infographics, free eBooks, video tutorials on topics that are relevant and of interest to your visitors will make your readers feel that there is something in it for them too.

Sharing your insights, knowledge, and ideas on important aspects of your business will help build a “formidable” authority, and thereby, increasing people’s interest on what you have to say.

2. Embed Videos and Slideshows – Recently, we found that using slideshows, unlike creating an article/ page to give helpful information, often gets our message across more effectively.

In other words, slideshows help convey message better by adding visual element to your content. Your website visitors get an opportunity to learn more about the topic in a different way (through visuals), rather than reading through “block of text” they see on the screen.

In addition to slideshows, you can also use video in order to enhance user engagement.

Not only you can use videos and slideshows to “showcase your product or service,”but you can use it for several other purposes, like

1.    Introducing your company,

2.    Getting testimonials from customers,

3.    Teach people “how to” do stuffs, or

4.    Even create a video blogs, etc

Just remember to keep the length of each video and slideshow short as you don’t want to lose the attention of your visitors.

Doing it right (both videos and slideshows) can keep people hooked up in your site way longer than usual.

3. Breakup Long Posts on Multiple Pages

Do you have a really long article? Well, do us a favor – break it down (500 to 600 words each) and then place it in two pages.

Not only your visitors will look at more pages on your site, but it will increase the ratings (page rank) of your site/ page too.The more people spend time on your site, the more chances they get to become engaged with your brand.

4. Re-Format Your Content

Make it easier for your readers to read your content and digest them.

1.    While crafting/ creating content, think about using headers, sub-headers, bullets, and numbered lists.

2.    If your site has tons of posts, create a “most popular” or “most recent” list and place it on the sidebar.

Newspapers use this tactic all the time!

Just visit NYTimes.com and check out how they’ve used “Most E-Mailed” tab listing stories other people have shared.

5. Place Dynamic Content on Your Site

As discussed earlier, I encourage you to use different sidebars on each page of your site. Make it load relevant content based on the content of that particular page.

For example, if your site is a forum, pop up live replies and updates from other members on relevant topics. This gives your site an “overall busy and lively look.”

1.    Show up updated polls, rotating lists, videos and photos of other recent posts in order to BOOST your visitor’s stay on your site.

2.    Place a quick and easy comment system like Disqus to foster two-way communication!

6. Carry outPolls andSurveys

Add polls and surveys on your site. Period!

They offer an “easy and quick way” for your visitors to voice their opinions and get involvedwith your site.

Ensure you publish polls and surveys that are HIGHLY relevant to your target audience (market) in order to keep them “interested” and find out MORE about the results.

7. Start Quizzes and Games

Imagine!

How many people leave your site without posting a comment just because inserting name, email, and comment is a “BIG hassle?”

Instead, why don’t you gauge user interaction by providing them a very interesting yet easy way of entertainment?Hold competitions, or even games, and award the high scorer to keep them trying to earn the prize again.

8. Update your site/blog frequently

You can update your site/blog often with “useful,” “fresh,” and “engaging,” content so that whenever new visitors come back to your site, they will always have something new to read through it.

This method is effective as it attracts returning visitors, but most “lazy webmasters” don’t usually carry out this step, and as a result, lose a lot of customers to their site.

Just consider, would you go and browse a site that looks the same and its content never change over 10 years? Of course, NOT!

So do me a favor – “keep your site/blog frequently updated” with content that talk about new insights and perspectives of your market.

9. Connect with Your Readers

If you want to enhance your website engagement, make sure you’re generating content that are highly relevant, useful, and interesting to your target audience, and not just to your editor.

The content may take the form of articles, blogs, whitepapers, product descriptions, or simply product reviews.

Before sitting down and writing a content, step back and think about all the conversations you had with your customers:

1.    What are they interesting to learn about?

2.    What problems are they facing?

Once you have figured out some good topics to write, make it extremely user-friendly (easy and fun) for them to consume your content.

1.    Use bullets, videos, slideshows, games, and other tactics we discussed earlier to tell your story in an engaging way to your customers.

2.    Make it short, simple, yet be YOU.

Not only this will make the content highly original and personal, but it will also make it easier for you to sit down and write.

10.Use Plenty of Whitespace

It can be very overwhelming to click on a link and come across a page with wall of text all over.

Online content isn’t like essay writings or writing a novel.

People want the best information that is“user-friendly,”“easy to consume,” and “inviting.” If not, they’ll often hit the “back” button and find other sites that are “more welcoming.”

Use plenty of whitespace!

It may appear counter-intuitive to use whitespace but it helps to “remove the clutter” off your content and make it more inviting for those reading it.

Likewise, use your creativity to enhance your content and build more engagement. Underline your key points, bold to place emphasis on important points and make things stand out.

10 Ways to Stay “Engaged” with Your Web Visitors - To Sum It ALL

There you have it! We just discussed 10 ways to stay engaged with your web visitors. What about you? Which different strategies you employ to build visitor’s engagement on your site? Please comment below!

While SEO is very crucial to help your online business perform (rank) better in search engines, if you (or your SEO consultant) have been doing it the “wrong way,” it could be worse than doing nothing at all.

In recent years, Google have rolled out several “Penguin” and “Panda” updates that you may be already aware of. These updates have forced SEO consultant to revise their SEO practices and utilize only that abide by their guidelines.

In this article, we’ll be discussing top 5 common SEO mistakes you must avoid in order to be considered for better rankings or stay away from your site getting “penalized” for search engines like Google.

Top 5 common SEO mistakes you must avoid:

1. Keyword Stuffing

Many beginner website owners make a mistake of stuffing their keywords in their content – blogs and videos – thinking the MORE they use it, the BETTER the result will be.

There are 2 major problems with “keyword stuffing,” and both are serious!

1.    Firstly, stuffing keywords in your content will “lower the quality” of your site. Your readers will likely smell something “fishy” about the content as it doesn’t reads “natural.”

2.    Second, search engines DISLIKES “keyword stuffing.” Most sites often get penalized when webmasters perform keyword stuffing on their site and its content.

Google, for example, sees it as if you are playing games with their SEO guidelines and it raises a “red” flag.

Instead, focus on using moderate amount of keywords in the right places (in the post title, headlines, headers, and first and last paragraphs of your copy), and, of course, make a habit of writing content that sounds natural.

2. Duplicate Content on Your Site – There are several ongoing debate among veteran SEO experts as to how detrimental a duplicate content could be.

However, you still need to be aware of 2 types of duplicate content.

1.    The first type of duplicate content is when you post content that are also present in other sites. For example, you may publish an article on your blog and then publish in it Ezinearticles.com.

Although this type of duplicate content isn’t beneficial for SEO purposes, search engines won’t penalize you site for it, though. There are several high ranking sites, like news and online magazine sites that frequently republish their stories.

Ensure that you only post “unique” content.

One popular method is called “content curation” where you place short excerpts and links from other articles and insert your own thoughts, ideas, and expand it.

2.    Another type of duplicate content is when you publish the same content in several location of your own website. This method could be disastrous for your SEO purposes.

You have to make sure your post titles and pages don’t have duplicate names.

This type of duplicate content often happens on BIGGER sites, which, of course, is very easy to overlook as there are tons of articles on it.

Duplicate content on a site will detract its value and hence results into “lower search engine rankings.” This often happens on an e-commerce sites where owners usually generate a single product description for variation of it – i.e. the size, the color, etc.

3. Building Poor and Mass Backlinks

Are you trying to rank your website quickly by purchasing backlinks in bulk that are likely to be of “low quality?”

It’s one of the surest ways for Google to indentify your site as utilizing “black hat” SEO tactics, even though you may not be aware of it at all. These low quality backlinks usually comes from sites selling links and “link farms.”

Likewise, avoid building mass profile in forums in order to get “backlinks.” You or your SEO consultant could sign up in tons of forums, create profiles, and build backlinks through signatures box.

Why should you avoid it?

1.    Forums have become smarter ever than before, and they can catch this tactic as being “black hat SEO”, and quickly delete your profile.

2.    Secondly, generating tons of backlinks from forum, especially “low-quality forums,” will eventually raise a RED FLAG to the search engines.

You MAIN objective are to get variety of backlinks from “different sources.” Plus, the linking must appear natural.

4. Using Limited Keywords in Anchor Text

This is another common SEO mistakes you must avoid – creating anchor text using the same keyword over and over again. Of course, this method looks suspicious to search engines.

Instead, use wide variety of anchor text. Just don’t only use your primary (main) keywords, but use its variation as well, like several long tail keywords that have “high search volume” but also has “low competition.”

This will make your site not only more natural, but you can also gain high ranking quickly for those less competitive keywords too.

5. Lack of Internal Linking

Not only you need to build backlinks from other sites, but also take time to “inter-link” content on your site too. That means you will link one post to another page/ post published on your own site.

In a small site, internal linking may not be beneficial as there may not be much content, however, as your sites grows, it become imperative and beneficial for you to perform internal linking.

It is okay to put couple of external links on your page or post, but it would be even better if some of those links take your readers to other places on your own site.

Not only your reader will stay LONGER on your site, but it also tells search engines that your site/ page are really valuable. Guess what? Once you make a habit of building internal links, it gets even “easier.”

So before you write content, make sure to look for other relevant posts and link to them.

Common SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid - To sum it all

Search engine optimization is vital when you want to rank your site better. However, most beginner site owner makes these 5 commonly made SEO mistakes, as we discussed in this article.

While some of these mistakes are made because people aren’t aware about it, (like the “internal linking” method), but most SEO mistakes result from when people are looking for “shortcuts.”

Examples include “keyword stuffing” and “buying bulk backlinks” from “low quality sites” in order to “rank higher in search engines” like Google.

However, if you focus on creating valuable and original content using moderate amount of keywords (along with its variations), search engines will automatically “reward you.”

In the world of marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) continues to be one of the most mysterious and misunderstood techniques but it has also been the most effective way to generate MORE leads.

While there are tons of organizations getting interested to include SEO as their online marketing campaign, there are still few aspects of it that remains to be elusive or sometimes even difficult to execute correctly.

Most of our clients always seem to struggle with one thing – i.e. choosing the “right” set of keywords to rank better in search engines and build their brand.

Selecting the “right” keywords isn’t a one time job where you begin an SEO campaign, set it, and then forget about it.

Keyword research is an ongoing process!

It is continuous, something you would constantly analyze, tune, re-assess, and then, frequently update because the “right” keywords will help bring high quality traffic (relevant leads) to your site, while “unattainable” and “ineffective” keywords is simply drain of efforts.

So how do you choose “profitable” keywords for your business?

1. Ignore your brand keywords for a moment

First, just get one thing straight: you don’t have to target for your company name keywords in your SEO campaigns.

“Company name rankings” happens automatically so you can skip this step.

2. Select keywords that you have high chance for ranking

I have seen most organization making the same mistake: they attempt to shoot for the moon by targeting the most “broad” keywords that have high competition and impossible to rank for very quickly.

As a result, most firms end up in “disappointed” when they never see any footing in their SEO campaign.

For example, if you have been ranking lower than, let’s say, 100th position for a set of keywords, it is high-time that you look for better alternatives.

You may want to find keywords that have a …

1.    Decent ranking for, although it may not be on page 1, and

2.    Those that isn’t highly competitive

You can use free tools, like Google Keyword Tool, to analyze these attributes of keywords you choose.

Don’t know where to begin? Simply, contact a professional SEO consultant!

3. Go for keywords that are “in demand.”

I get upset when I find many so-called “ethical” SEO consultants use “unethical” SEO tactics in order to rank their client’s site/blog on Google’s 1st page.

Yes, these keywords may land you on the Google’s first page, but it will have little or no benefit for your organization when you realize no one is “searching” for them.

Instead, don’t you think you would have a better chance to bring quality traffic if you could go after keywords that are in “high demand” (high search volume) so that you are certain people will actually search those targeted keywords?

4. Choose Keywords Your Customers Use, Not Some Internal Jargon

Over the years, I have found that many organizations make a HUGE mistake: They target keywords that are known as “industry jargon keywords” as they’ve been used to it, however a first time reader won’t have a clue to its meaning.

Instead, try to find out keywords that your customers talk use while searching for your products and services and target those keywords!

5. Take a “Holistic” view with your keywords

Many companies “choose” keywords and sprinkle them all over their website – title and Meta tags, page title, headers, and so on – and they think their SEO work is “complete.”

Hardly! In fact, it’s only the beginning in your SEO work.

You still need to use these targeted keywords in other places as well, like your blogging campaigns, guest posts on partner sites (using proper anchor text), your landing pages, other inbound links, videos, and even in your social accounts.

And SEO doesn’t stop there too.

It’s an “ongoing” process and MUST be an important part of your overall online marketing strategy.

As you have already seen, the “right” keywords for you may not be “right” for your customers.

In this guide, we discussed why you need to avoid using brand keywords and internal jargon keywords, but go after keywords that are “relevant” and are in HIGH demand (means your customers are searching for it) so that …

You can hope to bring traffic (lead) to your site and increase conversion but also remember to tune, measure, and optimize your SEO campaigns so that over time you will improve the lead generation efforts for you business! Got that?

If going over these steps seems overwhelming to you, or you simply don’t have time or don’t want to put effort, then you can hire a professional SEO consultant, right now!

Okay, over to you!

Share us few tips on how to choose the right keywords for SEO (mention any tools or techniques) … any comment/idea is welcome and we’ll reply to each of them. Promise!