Social Media Content Calendar: Your Key to Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media marketing planning is key to successful content marketing. It makes your team more productive and allows you to catch all the seasonal trends and trending hashtags. Furthermore, it streamlines content planning and helps you focus more on community building aspects and other long-term goals of social media marketing.

One of the best ways to plan your social media marketing campaigns, is to create a year-long content roundup including all big holidays, related awareness weeks and trends and other seasonal trends.

Why Planning Early Is Crucial

Holidays and seasonal trends are an opportunity for savvy marketers to take advantage of a mass feeling of goodwill, positivity and cheerfulness, and make it work for them. Why else would the biggest brands in the world spend the biggest bulk of their annual budgets making holiday-specific advertisements, or running massive campaigns on social media pages? It doesn’t just work for giant corporations that are doing direct sales. It works for everyone.

Best of all, holiday posts have the three most important elements of popular social posts: they capitalize on an emotional response, they are time-specific and so generate a lot of shares and engagement, and they are ridiculously easy to produce.

The sooner you get the prepared, the better off you are going to be. So here are some tips on how to start planning your social posts today.

How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar

So how to create your social media calendar?

• Make a list of holidays, awareness days and seasonal trends you want to catch
• Come up with the list of hashtags, questions, visual marketing ideas and time-sensitive lead magnets
• Put together everything using a calendar
  

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ContentCal is a great way to create an actionable social media content calendar your whole team can collaborate on. Start with its “Campaigns” feature: Put your holidays and ideas there, specify start and end dates and create a detailed campaign brief including all the keywords and hashtags you have identified.

Once a campaign is created, it will show up as a ribbon on your social media content calendar view:

Clicking the ribbon will take you (and your team) to your campaign brief where you can see (and add) related hashtags and angles around the trend.

From there your whole team can add social media updates to your shared “Pinboard” for you (or your moderators) to review and put on the specified days.

This is a great way to involve your whole team into social media content planning for more and better results

A Note of Planning

Not all seasonal trends are obvious. I suggest running your core topics and keyword through Google Trends to get a better idea on how to time your social media content better:

Stand Out

No one is saying that you have to produce a John Lewis Christmas ad for your social media pages. That would be an insane amount of effort, and holiday posts should be simple and fairly easy to produce and share. But that doesn’t mean you can’t look at what others have done, and follow suit.

REI Coop had a brilliant holiday campaign that tried to get their followers away from stores and into nature. Their Twitter used the hashtag #OptOutside, encouraging people to comment with pictures or stories about what they were doing with loved ones in the great outdoors, instead of spending hours of their life in malls buying expensive gifts. It was a roaring success, and it produced opportunities for user made content, email newsletters, and a lot of shareable moments. Without adequate planning they never would have been able to make such an impact.

Run a Contest

Contests are always huge draws for your audience, and the holidays are the perfect time to host them. With a couple weeks of promotion and planning you can automate the majority of the contest, and just manage it in the weeks leading up to each holiday of your choice. People are already in a festive mood, and more likely to take part.

Don’t just do a drawing or giveaway. Make it something create, fun challenging, and otherwise interesting. This is also a great idea because it works and is easily adaptable for any platform that you happen to be active on. So you can customize it to most appeal to your audience.

Proceed here for some useful resources: How to Host a Successful Social Media Contest: Your Ultimate List of Tools & Resources

Get Visual

Holidays are ripe for visual content. Creating a simple, but beautiful graphic is easy, since so much imagery is already in popular culture for you to draw on. You don’t have to struggle to find things to connect with your audience; a snowman, sparkling lights, snowy mountains… they are all non-culturally specific visuals that you can use, which still immediately cause your viewers to relate. That is one of the best things about holiday posts.

Canva always offers lots of timely holiday themes for holidays

If you have the expertise or access, also consider holiday specific videos. These are passed around like hotcakes, and are a great addition to your campaign. It doesn’t have to be anything too fancy.

Wave is any easy way to put together festive videos and they have a few awesome holiday themes too. And they also have a handy calendar listing big and small holidays for you to prepare for:

Get People Spending Money With Special Coupons

Why does your social media profile exist? Branding and promotion, engagement and interaction, but mostly to improve profits in the end. Everything you do is with that end goal in mind. If you sell direct products you can vastly boost your sales over the coming months by offering coupons good only during specific time blocks until the end of the holidays.

Now, when I say specific time blocks, I don’t mean coupon codes that are good for the entire month. I am talking time sensitive super deals that last hours, maybe a day, and where you can only find them through links on social media. Amazon has a version of this, where they have deals which are good for a day that they advertise on a single page, and then post about.

Do you have any tips for creating a social media content calendar well before the holiday comes about? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Social Media Content Calendar: Your Key to Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

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If I Had to Start All Over Again, I Would…

I started young. At the ripe age of 15 and a half, I started my first online business.

Can you guess what it was?

It was a job board. I created it because I couldn’t find a high paying job at that young of an age. Heck, I struggled to find even a low paying job!

As you probably can guess, it failed and, eventually, I went on to do other stuff.

From creating an ad agency to a few software companies… the list goes on and on.

But if I had to start all over again, what do you think I would do?

Well, before I get into that, let’s first talk about what I learned a bit too late…

What I learned too late in my career

I’m really good at one thing and one thing only.

It’s driving traffic to a site.

It doesn’t matter what industry a site is in, I can drive traffic to it and make it popular. And best of all, I can do it without ads.

But because I can do one thing well, it doesn’t mean I can create a successful business. I still need amazing people around me.

For example, when I started working with Mike Kamo, my business started to take off.

He’s the CEO of my ad agency, and typically the CEO of whatever I want to do. And if he doesn’t have the time, he finds someone who does.

See, Mike doesn’t have a college degree and he’s not your typical CEO. But he is really good at building teams and hiring the right people. And best of all, he can do so on a budget.

That is his best skill!

And working with him I realized that no matter how smart you are, you’ll never build a big company unless you have a talented team.

Sure, you can get to millions on your own, but it’s hard to get to 9 figures or even 8 figures a year in revenue without an amazing team.

People help you scale and grow fast. With more brain power, assuming you are picking good people, you’ll solve your problems faster and see revenue roll in.

So what would I do if you started over again?

Well, the lesson above is one of the hardest lessons I had to learn. And I learned it too late in my career.

It’s obvious, but when you start out as an entrepreneur at too young of an age, you make mistakes (sometimes huge ones) that you more likely wouldn’t have made if you had started your entrepreneurial journey a bit later.

So, what would I do?

Well, I would spend the first 9 years of my entrepreneurial journey in the workforce.

The first 3 years I would spend my time at a startup. And ideally, one that doesn’t have too much venture funding and isn’t taking off like a rocket ship.

The reason I wouldn’t pick a fast-growing startup is that the hardest part is making a company work and then growing it. By working at a company that has amazing traction because of timing or luck, or something that they couldn’t control… it teaches you to be creative, scrappy, and how to fight to win.

You’ll learn a lot from the startup life.

After my first 3 years in a startup, I would then spend the next 2 years working at a mid-size startup that has raised at least 10 million dollars and is growing up and to the right like a hockey stick.

This will help you understand what a fast-growing company looks like. And let me be the first to tell you, it’s not sexy… it’s very messy.

So many things go wrong and keep breaking because you are growing so fast. You’ll end up finding things like your economics may not be great, or you may be working with mediocre people because you just need to hire for the sake of filling in empty positions.

And after those 2 years are done, I would spend 2 years working at a mid-sized company. One that generates at least a hundred million a year in revenue, but less than a billion.

The struggles that mid-size companies face are different than startups and large corporations. But by being in the mix at one of these companies for a few years you’ll learn everything from dealing with politics, to how to make a slow-moving company grow, to even thinking about the big picture. Such as how bigger companies look for huge markets because they know that it is easier to own 5% of a multi-billion-dollar industry than it is to own 50% of a multi-million-dollar industry.

Last, but not least, I would spend my last 2 years at a large corporation. When I mean large, I’m talking about a company that is worth over 10 billion dollars and potentially even publicly traded.

What would you do after your 9 years as an employee?

The whole purpose of working for others is to get the right mentors and to learn how the real world works.

Entrepreneurship isn’t as glamorous as most people think. Success isn’t easily achieved and it doesn’t look like what you might think considering what so many “successful” influencers might sell you on social media.

By working with others, you’ll learn what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t work.

No matter how smart you are, you will make mistakes. Just look at people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, no one is perfect. Even the billionaires make mistakes.

But once you’ve worked for a handful of companies that are all different sizes, you’ll have a good understanding of what it takes to succeed.

You’ll have a much better understanding of common mistakes people make, such as how to avoid hiring bad people, and if you do hire them, how you need to fire them fast.

In essence, you will have learned what you should do for 9 years straight, which means if you skip all of that, it will be harder for you to be in a position to succeed for lack of experience in the real world. Sure, there is always the possibility of success without all of the experience, but it is much more difficult to become a reality.

Conclusion

Entrepreneurship looks great and is amazing. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. But before you go off and become an entrepreneur, learn from companies of all sizes.

It’s not an easy road and the last thing you want to do is fail on someone else’s dime because your reputation is all you have.

By putting in 9 hard years into other people’s companies, you’ll increase your odds of succeeding.

And when you are ready to go out on your own, hopefully, you would have met a few amazing co-founders along your journey because it takes too much time and capital to do it all by yourself.

So what would you do if you were starting all over again?

The post If I Had to Start All Over Again, I Would… appeared first on Neil Patel.

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How to Think About SEO

Don’t you hate how it takes forever to get results when it comes to SEO?

Everyone says it takes 6 months to a year and even in some cases many years to see results.

Well, I have some bad news and some good news for you.

Let’s start with the bad news…

SEO is a long-term strategy. It’s not about doing it for a few months and forgetting about it. And if you stop focusing on it eventually your competitors will outrank you.

And now let’s get on to the good news.

You can get results in the short run. You may not get all of the results you want right away, and you may not rank for your ideal keywords, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get results within 90, 60, and even potentially 30 days.

So how do you get results within a few months?

Well first, let’s rewire your brain so you think about SEO in the correct way.

SEO isn’t just content and links

If you want to rank number 1 on Google, what do you need?

Well, the data shows you need to write lengthy content. Because the average web page that ranks on page 1 of Google contains 1,890 words.

And of course, what’s content without links? Because the 2 most important factors that affect rankings according to the SEO industry are domain level links and page level links.

But here is the thing: SEO isn’t what it used to be. Until 2010, you used to be able to add keywords in your meta tags and you would get rankings within a few months.

And as the web got more crowded, you could then get results by doing the same old thing but you also had to build a few links. That worked really well between 2010 and 2013.

As more businesses popped up, everyone started focusing on content marketing. That was the hot thing. From 2013 to 2017, if you created tons of text-based content, got a few social shares, and picked up a few natural backlinks you could dominate Google.

But now, there are over a billion blogs if you include WordPress.com, Medium, and Tumblr.

That means Google has their choice when it comes to determining what sites to rank at the top.

In other words, just because you write lengthy content or build backlinks it doesn’t mean you are going to ranks. Millions of other sites do that as well.

And even if you got in early and your site is 10 years old, it’s no longer that easy to dominate the web.

Just look at sites like Wisegeek. They used to dominate the web as it’s a site with thousands of informative articles.

And now look at their traffic…

According to Ubersuggest, they get roughly 49,211 visitors a month from Google within the United States. It may seem like a lot, but their traffic is continually going down.

When I met the founder years ago it was in the millions… but not anymore.

It doesn’t even matter that the site has 8,761,524 backlinks from 74,147 referring domains.

Now you may make the argument that Wisegeek doesn’t have the best content. But I have tons of examples of sites with amazing content that have the same issues.

For example, Derek Halpern from Social Triggers creates great content. Just go check out some of his blog posts if you don’t believe me.

But let’s dive into his traffic stats…

According to Ubersuggest, he gets roughly 26,640 visitors a month from Google in the United States and he has 993,790 backlinks from 5,678 referring domains.

And he ranks for some great terms. Just look at the top pages he is ranking for with terms like “how to become more confident.”

But even Social Triggers has struggled to keep their traffic over time. It’s nothing to do with Derek, he’s a smart entrepreneur, but he decided to quit and focus on his new venture Truvani, which has been doing well.

In other words, content and links don’t guarantee success.

So, what’s the best way to get rankings these days?

You have to go after low hanging fruit.

Sure, you need content, you need links, and you need to optimize for the other 198 factors Google keeps track of the optimal amount of traffic. 

But it’s UNREALISTIC for you to do everything. Even if you hire an SEO agency to help you out.

And there is no way you can wait 12 months to get results from an SEO campaign.

Which means your only solution is going after the low hanging fruit.

Now I wish I could tell you the exact low hanging fruit to go after, but it varies for every site. What I can do is show some of the simple tactics that have worked for me and are easy to implement.

Strategy #1: Don’t put dates in your URL

I used to have dates in my URL because it was a default option from WordPress. I didn’t think twice about it. But the moment I removed the dates from my posts, my search traffic went up by 58%.

Best of all, it only took 30 days to get the boost in traffic. 🙂

Strategy #2: Link to the most popular posts in your sidebar

Have you noticed that I rank for terms like “online marketing” and “SEO”?

I’m currently number 2 for the term online marketing:

And number 5 for the term SEO:

Do you want to know a hack that helped me rank higher for those terms? Well, I’ll give you a hint… you’ll find it in my sidebar.

As you can see, I’ve linked to all of my major guides in my sidebar. It helps give them the juice they need so they can rank higher for terms like SEO and online marketing.

If you haven’t done this, you should consider trying it out as it will provide a quick win.

You won’t see the results in 30 days, but within a few months, you’ll notice that those pages will climb in the ranks.

Strategy #3: Land and expand

I’ve talked about this one a lot in the past, but only because it works really, really, really, well.

It’s also one of the main reasons I’ve made Ubersuggest into a robust SEO tool. Not just for you, but also because I use it for the land and expand strategy to grow my search traffic.

It’s how I get 2,105,896 visitors a month from just Google…

So, what’s this land and expand SEO strategy I use?

You need to first log into Google Search Console.

Once you are logged in, click the “performance” link and you’ll see a list of keywords you are currently ranking for.

Then click on the most popular term you rank for. Make sure that keyword isn’t your brand name.

Then click on “pages.” You’ll see the page that is ranking for that keyword.

I want you to then head over to Ubersuggest and type in that keyword. Once the report loads click on “keyword ideas” in the sidebar. You’ll see a report that looks something like this:

You’ll see a long list of keywords that are variations of the main keyword that you already rank for. Most of those terms are pulled from Google Suggest.

If you take the popular phrases that are related to the main term you already rank for and integrate them into that page, you’ll notice within 30 to 60 days your search traffic will shoot up.

But when leveraging this strategy you need to make sure you adjust your content. You can’t just shove in more keywords, you have to rework your content so it makes sense and it flows naturally.

The reason this SEO strategy is my favorite tactic of all time is that content marketing is a hit or miss. Just because you write content and build links, it doesn’t guarantee success. But if you expand the pages that Google already loves, there is a high chance that you’ll get more traffic.

Strategy #4: Expand internationally

In many of my companies, I generate more revenue from outside of the United States than I do within the United States.

For that reason, plus it was a piece of advice I got from a Google employee, I’ve translated my site into multiple languages.

Just look at my traffic from Brazil…

And here is my traffic from Germany…

And the Spanish market…

What I learned from a Google employee is that they lack content in regions where English isn’t their primary language. So if you focus on these regions, you’ll quickly notice a quick traffic boost and your conversion rate from visitor to customer within those regions should also go up.

Strategy #5: 5-minute brand hack

Google loves brands. It really is the future of SEO. In addition, brands are more defensible.

As the EX-CEO of Google said:

Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.

In other words, if more people search for your brand name on Google, you’ll notice that your rankings will go up.

As more people typed in “Neil Patel” within Google, my traffic went from 185,980 a month:

to 454,382 visitors a month:

That’s a huge increase considering I saw the increase in a 6-month time frame. And even though I pulled that off back in 2016, it works even better today.

Building a brand isn’t easy and it is a long-term approach. But I am going to give you a head start… one that only takes 5 minutes.

Before I break it down, it follows the rule of 7. Someone needs to see your brand 7 times before they build up loyalty to it. In other words, if you can keep getting people to come back to your site in the short run, you’ll start building a brand and you’ll find your brand queries increase in the long run.

Now here’s a screenshot of my stats so you can see it in the works:

So far, I’ve gotten 42,316 people back to my site 174,281 times. That’s roughly 4 times, which means I have 3 more to go according to the rule of 7.

How did I do this?

I used a tool called Subscribers.

In which I send out a push notification every time I release a new blog post:

Plus, it allows me to generate 4,000 plus visitors for every push I send. 🙂

Strategy #6: Optimize your click-through-rate

You don’t have to write new content or build links to boost your rankings.

You can do something as simple as optimizing your click-through-rate.

Just think of it this way, if 1,000 people performed a Google search and everyone clicked on the second listing instead of the first listing, what does that tell Google?

It tells Google that the second listing should, in theory, be the first listing. And that’s what Google does… they take the listings people are clicking on and move it up to the top and move down the ones people don’t click on.

If you want step-by-step instructions to increasing your click-through-rate, follow hack #1.

It works really well and fast too. It’s how I boosted my search traffic for one of my main keywords by 1,289 visitors in 30 days.

Strategy 7: Update your old content

SEO and paid ads have something in common, in which if you stop doing it your traffic goes down.

Paid ads are a bit worse in which once you stop paying your traffic goes back down to where it was.

With SEO, once you stop you’ll see a slow decline over time.

Now, this strategy is so effective that I employ a full-time person to help me out with it and this is all they do.

Remember how I talked about there being over a billion blogs on the web now?

Well, I have one full-time person updating my old content to ensure it doesn’t get out of date.

Because Google has so many options to choose from when it comes to ranking sites for any keyword out there, they are going to rank sites that are fresher.

By updating your old content, not only do you ensure that you’ll maintain your traffic, but you’ll also get more traffic.

There isn’t any real strategy to this other than to go through your old pieces of content that get traffic and make sure they are up to date.

Sometimes you won’t have to make any changes, other times you may have to change a few sentences or links, and hopefully, not too often will you have to re-write a whole article.

And every blue moon you’ll need to delete a page or a post because it is irrelevant. For example, I’ve deleted my older blog posts that discuss social networks like MySpace that no one uses.

Conclusion

Yes, SEO does take time if you think about it the same way everyone else does.

But if you think about it from a strategical perspective, you’ll find new opportunities that can provide quick results.

You may not get all of the traffic you want tomorrow but going after the low hanging fruit will give the quickest results.

If you want help finding the low hanging fruit with your SEO campaign, you can always reach out to my ad agency and someone will help out. Or you can leave a comment below.

So, are you going to stop thinking of SEO as just link building and content and start thinking of ways to get quick wins?

The post How to Think About SEO appeared first on Neil Patel.

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How to Build Backlinks in Less Than 1 Hour

I have a question for you…

How do you build links?

If I had to bet, chances are you spend little to no time on link building.

Why? Because it’s hard.

But why should link building be hard?

Most parts of SEO are much simpler and cost-effective.

For example, if you want to write content… you just go and write it.

It may not be great content, but nothing is stopping you starting, learning, and improving.

On the other hand, if you want to build links, where would you start?

That’s a bit tricky because link tools cost money… and a lot of money if you are just starting out.

But that’s going to change in 30 days with your help!

Link building made simple

As you may know, I released a new version of Ubersuggest a few weeks ago. And with your help, I want to roll out a free link tool.

Here’s what I am thinking and, before I roll it out, I want to get your feedback.

So, with the new Ubersuggest, I made it where you can put in a URL.

Let’s say I’m your competitor… neilpatel.com.

You would head over to Ubersuggest and just put in neilpatel.com

You’ll end up with a report that looks something like this:

Now, the most useful part of the tool (and this is where I want to integrate link building) is the top pages.

It shows you the pages on your competitors’ sites that are the most popular.

The way most SEOs grow their traffic is by finding out what’s working for their competitor and then copying them or, even better, one-upping them.

So if you were competing with me, you could see all of my most popular pages based on Google traffic.

You can even click on “view all” under the Est. Visits column to see all of the keywords that are driving traffic to my site.

I know this report isn’t perfect, but it gives you a really good idea of what you should be targeting if you want more traffic.

Because if something is working for your competitors, it will probably work for you.

But there is one big issue… if you just write similar content to your competition, there is no guarantee that you will beat them. Unless you build more links than them.

So on that same report, I was thinking about adding a drop-down that breaks down the exact links that drive traffic to each specific URL.

It would look something like this:

I know the data is fake and junk, but hopefully it gives you an idea of what I am thinking.

This one report will allow you to see who is linking to your competitor’s most popular pages, the anchor text they are using, when the link was last seen, and even the authority (page score) of the backlink.

Now, before you give me feedback on this report, there is one more report I’m thinking about launching within the next 30 days.

Backlinks

For those of you who are advanced SEOs, I was thinking about making it super easy to see who links to you as well as your competition.

I want to start off with something basic so I can get you this report/feature within 30 days.

It would look something like this:

You’ll be able to see the authority of the page or a domain, the total number of backlinks, how many nofollow links, referring domains, and even referring IPs.

If you want to get granular, you can, by just looking at new links or lost links or even one link per domain.

And of course you can see all the details of the link, such as title, URL, anchor text, authority, if the link was a text link or an image link, and when the link was last seen.

If you want to drill down further, the filters will allow you to do that.

Once you have the data looking the way you want, you’ll be able to easily export the data.

Conclusion

The whole purpose of this tool would be to make link building easier for you. You’ll be able to type in any URL, find out who links out to them, and easily hit them up and ask for them to link to your site.

The reports won’t take more than 10 seconds to load… so finding opportunities won’t be difficult. Crafting emails and doing the outreach will be the hard part.

I know this won’t automate all of your the link building efforts, but it will make the process easier and much more efficient for you.

So, what do you think, should I release this feature within the next 30 days?

And if you think I should do it, what other features would you want me to release?

Oh, and the link data would be fresh and updated daily.

The post How to Build Backlinks in Less Than 1 Hour appeared first on Neil Patel.

from Blog – Neil Patel http://bit.ly/2GF8gCI