While many bloggers find themselves with a case of writer’s block, others have picked up the skill of turning daily life into entertaining content. [Read more…]
5 Tools for Making Your Content Visual
Editor’s note: Stephanie Norman is a freelance tutor from Sydney with 4 years of experience in professional writing. Also she is a content marketing specialist at Australian Writings, a company offering assignment help and assistance for students. Follow her at Facebook and Google+.
When you want to create killer content for your blog, website, or social media platforms, you spend hours in research, conceptualizing, writing, and editing. If you post the text without any visual incentives, you can rest assured that it won’t reach a great number of readers. The fact that photos attract over 50% more likes and over 100% more comments on Facebook should be enough to convince you to change your approach.
You cannot just locate any photo online and use it in your own publication. You can’t violate copyrights, remember? Thanks to this list of 5 tools to make visual content, you’ll be able to create your own images and attract a wider audience! [Read more…]
On-Page Optimization Tips to Complement Your Great Content
Content isn’t king by itself. As much as the phrase has been thrown out there, there is no denying its truth.
You can’t win your audience and customers without applying certain techniques to bring your great content out in the open. It’s not enough to write and publish the content on your site or blog and expect your target market to find your post from over billions of pages online.
One way to deliver your content straight to your readers is to implement the best search engine optimization practices. By doing so, you increase the chances of your content to rank on top of search results for your chosen target keyword. The higher you rank, the more chances that your audience searching for your keyword will click on your great content.
While we have provided a link to the best SEO practices observed by most website owners and bloggers, below are some of the more obscure but equally important SEO techniques to supplement your content.
Effective Ways to Get Relevant Traffic
Heavy traffic in real life may be a bane to a commuter’s everyday life, but when you’re running a website, it’s gold. Having internet users visit your website is a really good thing, but for your website to be effective, the traffic needs to be looking for what you have to offer. They should be seeking the product or service of your website, be it a legitimate business or a simple blog site. Driving relevant traffic to your website can be done through effective marketing, and here are ways on how to quarry this valuable resource:
Five Tips for Creating Fresh Blog Content Fast. Every Day
Blogs benefit immensely from being constantly updated, and yet it’s also one of the more difficult things to do with a fair amount of consistency.
If you are working on your own personal blog as a means of creative expression or just chronicling your own experiences, you’ll find yourself blogging on and off — depending on the ebbs and tides of your life. That is perfectly fine and understandable because it is virtually impossible to have a life where things are happening all the time and still be able to write 35o words about it.
But if you are blogging professionally, clients will appreciate a fair amount of regularity and coherence within a framework of targeted results that lead to the achievement of a goal or goals. Clients will appreciate a well thought out plan and the accomplishment of work that is consistent with the plan.
Sure, it sounds like work and it IS work, but having a plan and working according to plan can actually minimize the time you spend working and maximize productive offline time — which is, really, everything that happens outside the frame of your computer screen. Moreover, working according to a plan can enable you to have more fun while doing work.
Content Licensing 101 for Bloggers
As we talked about last week, whenever you post a blog entry, upload a photograph to your Flickr account or post a video to YouTube, you’re creating copyrighted work and sharing it with the Internet.
As the creator and copyright holder of that work, you have certain rights and protections over it, including the ability to bar others from making unauthorized copies or publicly display/perform the work.
However, you might not want to enforce all of those rights. For example, you might be perfectly happy to let others copy your work and post it on their sites provided they give attribution back. Or, you might be happy to have them print out copies for their personal use so long as they don’t attempt to sell them.
This is where content licensing comes into play. It’s the means by which you give someone (or everyone) a certain amount of rights to use your work even though that use, without your permission, would have been a copyright infringement.
As such, it’s important to understand the basics of copyright licensing and what some of the options are out there. This is so you can maximize what you get out of your writing and, equally importantly, prevent misunderstandings and accidental infringements by others.
With that in mind, here’s a basic rundown of what you need to know to be savvy about content licensing on the Web.
[Read more…]
AOL/HuffPost: We Want Real Staffers Not Bloggers
AOL’s acquisition of Huffington Post hasn’t been without consequence. 30 AOL owned brands have been squandered, 900+ laid off and others axed in favor of journalists.
The $315 Million acquisition of Huffington Post is part of a new path for AOL. In the past few months, Tim Armstrong released an internal company document detailing the new content direction AOL would be taking. The document came under fire for exploiting popular trends and churning out knee-jerk Blog posts in favor of increased traffic and revenue.
Huffington Post, which is powering AOL’s new content revamp has folded or absorbed 30 AOL brands. In the aftermath, 900+ AOL employees have been laid off and more face the axe. Freelancers employed by AOL are left wondering what their fate in the new company is.
Google Wants To Make Your YouTube Videos Look Better
Since Google has purchased YouTube, the search engine giant has focused on scaling the video sharing site. Shortly after releasing some amazing stats on hosted content — 35 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute — Google has been eyeing video quality and how to improve it. To make YouTube videos look much better, Google has bought Green Parrot Pictures.
The buyout can only lead to positive things for all YouTube users as Green Parrot Pictures’ expertise is improving video quality on content such as streaming movies. Google aims to not only improve the quality of uploaded videos but also the speed at which they are streamed.
Google Improves Content Through Search With “Big Algorithmic Improvement”
Google does not take a stance on what content it displays through search results. Content curation is something the search engine company staunchly opposes as it would dramatically alter the quality of its search results.
However, recent news reports of black hat SEO techniques have forced the company to rethink its search engine algorithm.
Google has been making preparations to improves its search engines results which would punish content farms and those that deliver poor quality content while capitalizing black hat SEO techniques.
The AOL Way Or The Highway? I’ll Take Route 66
AOL made waves a few weeks ago when an internal document titled “The AOL Way” was published and detailed the company’s intended direction for content creation. The gist of the document doesn’t look pretty: Is AOL on a content downward spiral?
BusinessInsider, which obtained the leaked “AOL Way” document breaks down the calamity. Writers are expected to put page views and revenue generation over great content. While great content and high revenue are often synonymous, AOL is taking a different approach and separating the two in the hopes of manufacturing blog posts in the most efficient way possible while expecting results only a New York Times best selling author could deliver.
