Online businesses create and distribute social media content for brand building as well as improving their ROI. They create the most valuable content to educate their audiences; however, they often struggle to:

• generate huge traffic to their websites
• choose the most effective content distribution strategy
• establish their brand image
• generate the expected leads

The reason could be anything, from wrong identification of target audiences to miscalculated content distribution techniques. Content distribution is the key to any marketing strategy. Let’s discover some of the most effective social media content distribution techniques that can make your content viral:

• Use custom GIFs – GIFs are one of the most impressive ways to tell a story. Use a relevant GIF according to your content and industry needs. (Tip – You can use GIFMaker.me to create animated gifs, slideshows and video animations with music.)
• Use Snapchat – Use Snapchat to raise your own community and share your content (you can share drawings, emojis, and captions). This is the most underutilised platform to date. (Statistics - According to research firm, only 40% of B2C businesses have accounts, compared to 93% for Instagram. Even fewer B2B companies are on Snapchat.)
• Rely on user generated content - UGC has incredible benefits, you can easily optimise and publish your UGC. (Research shows people trust user generated content more than other media.)
• Run contests – This is one of the most engaging techniques to grab the attention of your viewers on social media. You can instantly involve a huge number of your fans and followers.
• Use infographics - To remain unique, competitive and advanced, businesses need to include infographics in their strategies. (Statistics - Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.) (Tip – Use Piktochart or Canva to make the most beautiful infographics.)

Quick tips:

1. If you display UGC on your product page, it will influence your buyers’ behaviour and increase your website’s conversion rate.
2. Always use URL shorteners for links.
3. Always identify your loyal followers.
4. Use podcasts to build a stronger relationship with audiences and capture the market.
5. GIFs educate your followers.
6. Create infographics to display numerical data.
7. You can also use Gifographics to engage more customers and to promote social sharing.
8. Images and videos are hidden keys to social media success.
9. Stay up-to-date on the latest social media marketing best practices.

These are the most powerful social media content distribution techniques, which need to be incorporated in your marketing strategies. Quick facts:

1. 60% of marketers predict that the use of infographics will increase in 2016 compared to 2015.
2. 57% of marketers think that e-books are effective marketing tactics.
3. Infographic usage grew from 9% to 52% in 2015.
4. 65% of people classify themselves as “Visual learners”.
5. Social media is the most common content marketing delivery mechanism, used by 87% of marketers.

Worldwide business owners create extraordinary content for their audiences; however, they fail to distribute it which results in their failure to reach their audiences. There are certain effective tools for content distribution, which can help them to reach targeted audiences. Business owners must use these powerful tools to promote their content and improve their ROI. Quick facts:

• Users send 204 million email messages in a minute, making it the most popular way to share content.
• Content marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing; however, it generates roughly three times more leads.
• On average, content marketers are dividing their content into three areas: (61%) created, (27%) curated and (12%) syndicated.
• 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content everyday.
• 91% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content.

Here are a few well known content distribution tools that need to be utilised:

• SimpleReach – This is a renowned platform that helps publishers and business owners to smartly distribute, retarget and measure their content across the most efficient channels. This content distribution tool has amazing features such as analytics tool, real-time dashboard, historical reports, audience targeting and more.
• Outbrain – This content marketing platform offers a pay-per-click model of content distribution to publishers. Businesses also use this platform to promote their press content.
• Taboola – This is the most effective content discovery platform, which helps contentmarketers to drive more traffic to their site, blog or video and improve their leads by getting their content recommended.
• Xink – This is a well known cloud-based email signature management software that helps content marketers to take advantage of their email signatures in order to improve the visibility of their content. This tool is an ideal one if you want to drive quality traffic to your website.
• Inbound.org - Inbound.org is a feed where you can read about a particular subject as well as express your ideas and participate in a discussion. In addition, you can get answers to your questions from domain experts.

Quick tips:

• Rely on Guest blogging.
• Leverage social search optimisation.
• Strategically distribute your content to other sites.
• Test every content distribution platform you use.
• Analyse historical data to identify which content is driving more conversions.

Content distribution is much more important than content creation. So, use these tools systematically to display your marketing achievements and make your content more viral.

Backlinks are the most important part of a website. Backlinks speak volumes about your site’s authority and prominence. However, online businesses often fail to attract backlinks for their websites. Therefore, it is important to understand how search engine evaluate links. Learn how to achieve quality backlinks:

1. 1.      Write press releases - This is one of the best mediums to achieve backlinks for both small and medium size business owners.
2. 2.      Offer “embed codes" – Offer "embed codes" so that users can copy and embed your rich-media content. This will help you to build good links for your website.
3. 3.      Write case studies - This is one of the best methods to engage customers and lower your website’s bounce rate.
4. Use social media - Share your content on the top social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.)This will give your content more exposure as well as backlinks. (Search engines consider quantity/quality of tweeted links, Facebook shares, Google +1s, etc.)
5. 5.      Create a Wikipedia page – This is one of the best ways to establish authority and trustworthiness of your website. Search engines give prominence to Wikipedia.
6. 6.      Never ignore the power of Guest blogging –In order to achieve high quality links, you need to write quality and authoritative content and submit it to relevant blogs.
7. 7.      Optimise web pages – Optimise your web pages properly to achieve good visibility and traffic from the web.
8. 8.      Use calls-to-action on every page – People often ignore this; however, call-to-action  are one of the best ways to make a link worthy and actionable.
9. Use Stumbleupon - StumbleUpon is an effective platform to organise your favourite bookmarks. You can attract more traffic to your website by using StumbleUpon advertising.
10. 10.   Request links from .edu sites – Write high quality resources (articles or tutorials) for the educational purpose in order to get a valuable link.
11. 11.  Build links through community discussions – Join industry relevant communities to discuss on a specific subject. This is a great way to obtain a backlink.

All these strategies are helpful in obtaining backlinks for your website. This will also strengthen your site’s authority in its niche. Quick and easy Link Building tips:

• Discover your competitors' backlinks.
• Audit your website to remove dead pages and broken links.
• Convert your content into videos, presentations and infographics.
• Write quality research papers, case studies, manuals, guides and reviews and submit them to the top resources.
• Use powerful tools to analyse your link profile.
• Join industry specific forums, blogs or social groups.
• Publish a newsletter to increase your traffic and the amount of backlinks.

Quick facts:

• Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites.
• Search engines use links to determine how well a page should rank in their results.

Your well designed website is unable to attract the kind of traffic you expected, have you ever wondered why? The reason might be your website’s design not being SEO friendly. If you use SEO wisely, you can easily improve your search engine rankings as well as drive more traffic to your website. Here are a few elements that need to be considered to make a website design SEO friendly:

• Proper structure – Your website should have a proper structure and a well defined navigation path.
• Responsiveness – Your website should have a responsive design so that it can be easily accessed by desktop as well as mobile.
• Integrate Social Media – Integrate social media (Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Facebook icons) into your website’s design to attract search engines as well as audiences.
• Use SEO for Images – Image optimisation is the most overlooked part, so optimise your images.

• Avoid using javascript redirects - Avoid using javascript redirects and remove them if they are there. This will help search engines to easily read and rank your website.

• Make user Friendly URLs - User friendly URLs help search engine robots to identify your page and its offerings. (Prefer "hyphens" to separate words to “underscores" in your URLs)
• Make sure your web design is accessible - If your website is not completely accessible, it will definitely affect your rankings as well as conversion rates.  So, make sure it is accessible on all browsers.
• Reduce Flash elements – Too much use of flash elements on a website can affect its performance. Search engines also ignore them, so avoid it.

  Quick tips:

1. Never ignore Google Webmaster Guidelines.
2. Optimise images.
3. Always update the sitemap of your website.
4. Ensure mobile compatibility.
5. Ease the navigation and eliminate the clutter.
6. Explain images and videos.
7. Make sure every page of your website is accessible.
8. Use categories and subcategories for products.
9. Always create simple text links in the "footer section" of your website.
10. Include text on every page of your website rather than images only.
11. Use the most effective content management system for your website.

Conclusion Simple changes can make your website competitive, SEO friendly and visible on the web. However, you also need to understand the behaviour of search engines and the way they read your website (check cache). This will help you to make your website strong and search engine friendly.

A run-of-the-mill digital marketing tool will take you nowhere. In today’s market, business owners need to use the most effective and advanced tools to help their cause. In other words, thinking out-of-the-box is the order of the day. Hence, you have to keep on exploring new tools so that you can beat your competitors. Here are a few advanced tools that can help businesses to acquire new customers as well as accelerate their business:

• Buzzsumo - BuzzSumo is the best tool to check the sharing statistics of a particular search term. This insightful tool also helps you to find the most prominent authors in your particular niche. In addition, it has many special features that can add value to your content, which can increase conversions.
• Content Marketer – If you want to increase traffic to your blog, you can use the Content Marketer tool. It helps you to be more efficient and effective in your content promotion.
• MailLift – It is a handwritten letter service that is specially built for sales and marketing purposes. This is the best way to thank your customers and encourage referrals as well.
• MailChimp – Is an online email marketing solution that helps in managing subscribers, send emails, and track results. Its robust marketing automation ensures that your emails get to the right people at the right time.
• Piktochart – It is the best infographic design application that helps to create beautiful, high quality infographics. You can make product or industry related infographics to improve the overall understanding for your users.
• Prefinery – It is a viral customer acquisition platform for product launch and closed beta programs. It is also helpful in sending automated and personalised emails.
• Qualaroo – It gives marketers a comprehensive solution for collecting and acting on visitor‘s insights to improve website’s performance. It helps you to understand your customers and target your visitors more specifically.
• Optimizely – It is the best tool to measure the performance of a particular web page. On the basis of the outcome you can improve the appearance of your web page and make it more productive.
• PowToon - PowToon helps to make interesting videos and presentations that can transform any business. You can use it to explain special features of products or services and help your customers in an interactive manner.

These advanced tools are essential to improve online marketing efforts and gain organic search visibility. All these tools are highly effective, revolutionary and can help you to enhance your customer base and improve your brand image. No doubt, these tools can easily steer your ship towards success...

Google analytics is the best analytical and statistical tool. It helps businesses to analyse their websites’ performance. It presents factual data so that business owners can make smart decisions. If used systematically, it can improve business opportunities as well as minimise risk. However, most businesses are yet to explore its real potential. Businesses should use this incredible powerful tool to:

• have business insights
• analyse traffic sources
• study consumer’s behaviour
• monitor and identify issues
• research qualitative aspect,
• identify risk and opportunity factors
• track referral traffic
• stay ahead.

Google Analytics can make any website efficient and effective Google Analytics is easy to install (through a tracking code) and manage (through its properties). Businesses owners not only gain actionable insights, but can also set up goals to measure the success of their online marketing efforts. Here are a few aspects that need to be understood:

• Goal Setting – This is the best way to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. You can analyse the conversion path of your customers with the help of goal setting. In addition, you can set many goals for your website according to your business objectives.
• View data - Google Analytics allows you to read and analyse statistical data. You can learn about your website’s traffic and view audience’s report. You can monitor sessions, users, and page views, bounce rate, content, speed, landing pages, and even compare them.
• View acquisition – This is helpful to understand traffic channels as well as specific sources that are driving traffic to your website. You can learn about traffic coming from social networks, etc. If you want, you can connect Google Analytics to Google Webmaster Tools to learn more about search traffic to improve your knowledge and adjust your strategies.
• Behavioural statistics – If you want to keep a track of the top performing pages of your website, you must use "Behaviour report". You will also learn about the website’s speed through this section.
• Conversions – If you have set a goal, you can understand how many conversions have been received. You can rework on your strategies and set more goals for your website on the basis of your findings.
• Event Tracking – This is the best way to learn user’s behaviour when they visit your website. Just by adding a code on a specific tab, image, banner ad, button or text link, you can track and analyse events. (Events are user interactions with your website’s content) (Anatomy of Events- Category, Action, Label (optional, but recommended) and Value).

  Quick tips:

1. Track audience’s locations.
2. Always examine visitor’s activities.
3. Analyse keyword performances.
4. View unique visitors and their total number of pageviews.
5. Check your backlinks via referrals.
6. Understand the important concept of Goal Conversions.
7. Find and remove irrelevant backlinks linking to your website.
8. Perform multiple tests on your content for better traffic.
9. Analyse your high and low quality pages through "landing pages".
10. Manually search the source code to ensure the presence of tracking ID.
11. Export the report in pdf or excel format for further data analysis and evaluation.

Conclusion This shows that Google Analytics gives you the true picture of your website, like actual speed, traffic sources, and overall customers’ behavioural trends, etc.

Social media is the most powerful platform for business owners. It is a major driving force behind business decisions and operations. Social media platforms make you identify emerging market trends and new growth opportunities as well as improve customer service. Therefore, businesses must hire an experienced social media specialist to outperform their competitors. However, hiring a social media specialist is the most daunting task; businesses must choose the one who can handle everything meticulously. He or she should understand the technical aspects of different social mediums. Here are a few qualities that a social media specialist should possess:

• Multidisciplinary - Social media is multidisciplinary; therefore, a social media specialist should understand different social media networks and plan accordingly.
• Audience Oriented – Audience oriented social media campaigns are the need of the hour. So, a social media specialist should be capable of solving clients’ problems.
• Communication Skills - A social media specialist can’t do without good communication skills and an in-depth knowledge of the industry. This will enable them to handle all the disciplines professionally.
• Creative – Your social media specialist should be innovative, creative and open minded. He/she should know how to create buzz, should understand the process of content writing as well as distribution.
• Proactive – Your specialist should be proactive and intelligent. He/she should be able to handle audiences and engage new prospects on different social media platforms.
• Experience - A good specialist can handle all the technicalities of social sites. Experienced specialists can easily develop their strategies according to the social sites for the maximum possible reach.  
• Analytical mind – An expert should have the ability to analyse reports. He/she should be able to evaluate and measure the performance of social media posts against business goals.

Besides that, organisational skills, an acute sense of time management, patience, and sense of responsibility are the key factors when it comes to handling social media. So, hire a suitable candidate to improve your social presence. Quick tips:

• Always create meaningful content and a strong brand personality on social sites.
• Identify relevant hashtags and industry influencers.

Quick facts:

• 91% of retail brands use 2 or more social media channels.
• Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp handle 60 billion messages a day.
• Pinterest has 100 million monthly active users to date.
• Instagram has 300 million active users.
• Facebook has 1.71 billion monthly active users.
• YouTube has 1 Billion active users each month.

In today’s challenging digital world, online businesses that understand the importance of top rankings and know how to achieve it have a competitive edge. However, what about the rest? Most online business owners struggle to achieve top rankings. Here are a few ways to achieve good rankings:

1. Remove too many outbound links – Use a few relevant outbound links because they pass link juice to other websites which is not a good SEO practice.
2. Image optimisation – You should optimise images by using "Alt text" (alternative text).
3. Improve page load speed – Increase the speed of your site to serve your users efficiently. (Tip - Try to minimise HTTP requests).
4. Improve your website’s usability – Improve the usability of your site by acquiring good backlinks, getting rid of duplicate content, providing an easy navigation structure and eliminating doorway pages. (Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing).
5. Use multimedia – Use images, presentations, infographics, videos and audios to enrich your users’ experience. This will decrease the overall bounce rate.
6. Fix broken links – Broken links can damage your website’s usability. So, fix them immediately before they deter the search engines. (Tip – Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Google Webmaster Tool or W3C Link Checker to check your website’s broken links).
7. Improve readability – If you want to make your content readable, you should use bullets and small paragraphs and easy to understand language. (Tip – Use Readability-Score.com to check your content’s readability).
8. Include a "contact us" page - Including a "Contact Us" page sends a signal of authenticity. You should display your complete contact details so that your customers can contact you without any problem.
9. Use social media – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media sites should be used with the utmost care as they can influence your SEO rankings.

However, your priority should always be to improve the overall understanding and experience of your users. Quick and easy Tips –

• Use graphs and infographics to display critical information.
• Use clear and catchy headlines.
• Create original, valuable and actionable content.
• Use social proof (customer testimonials or case studies) to improve your website’s credibility.
• Use the Google Webmaster Tool to check your site’s health.

  Quick facts:

• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• There are 2.3 billion active social media users.
• More than 90% of visitors who read your headlines also read your CTA Copy.
• Social sharing influences purchasing behaviour.
• 86% of female shoppers say they trust product recommendations from real people.
• 61% of CMOs say search engines are an effective marketing channel.

Content marketing is one of the best tools to influence people and create brand awareness. It helps you to build your brand’s story and disseminate your messages. Today, content marketers are extensively creating content, without focusing on its quality. There are several tools that can improve the quality of your content and help your cause. Here a few resources that you can use to improve the quality of your content:

• The Writer - If you want to improve the usability and readability of your content, you must use the readability checker tool offered by "The Writer". This tool not only measures your content, but also gives you an instant feedback so that you can improve your content’s quality.
• Theoatmeal.com – This is the best and the funniest online tool to understand common errors, misspellings, use of apostrophe’s, semicolon’s, clauses and more. You can read their online posters to understand the proper usage of contractions, prepositions and more.
• Comma Queen – Comma Queen’s video series is the best resource to understand punctuations, commas, nouns, pronouns, and their usages. Whether you’re writing a case study or an annual report, Comma Queen video series will help you a lot.
• Ellenbrockediting.com - Ellen Brock is the most popular novel editor. She offers useful insights to writing, editing, and proof reading. You can improve your writing skills by analysing her detailed blog posts.
• Thesaurus.com – Here you will find synonyms and antonyms as well as other useful information.
• Ceros Blog – You can learn and master the art of storytelling from this blog. This blogs has thousands of blogging and creative writing ideas.
• Study writing rules – If you want to write in a professional manner, refer to the NYT blog (http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/writing-rules-advice-from-the-new-york-times-on-writing-well/?_r=0). This blog is helpful in understanding the hidden rules of writing (such as sentence formation, sentence structure, different writing styles, tricky verbs and punctuations) and editing.
• TED playlists – You can listen to the TED talks to master any language and write in a compelling manner to attract new audiences. Whether you’re blogging or tweeting, this tool is quite useful.

Most creative and technical writers use these resources. However, if you are still not using these useful resources, you are missing a big opportunity. These useful resources will help you to influence your readers and establish your brand. Quick tips:

• Eliminate distractions.
• Focus on things that really matters.
• Always stick to your own style.
• Use better techniques to edit effectively.

Visual content always fascinates customers. If you are a content marketer and using text-based content for customer engagement, you are missing something. In other words use visual content for better ROI. According to some online surveys and research, visual content is much more influential than text-based content and can easily influence visitors. Quick facts:

• Researchers found that colourful visuals increase people's willingness to read a piece of content by 80%.
• 46% of marketers say photography is critical to their current marketing and storytelling strategies.
• Shoppers who view video are 1.81X more likely to purchase than non-viewers.

Here are a few types of visual content, which you need to include in your content marketing:

• Images – Images can turn ordinary content into a compelling content. Use high quality images to attract more customers.
• Videos – Videos are used for creating effective visual presentations. Create useful and effective videos to present problems and their solutions. Videos are one of the most cost-effective ways to increase conversions and decrease your bounce rate. You can create "how to videos", “inspirational videos”, or "tutorials", according to your business objectives.
•  Infographics – Well designed infographics attract your audiences’ attention, so promote it extensively.
• Memes – Memes are the best way to instil fun elements in your articles to make them much more viral across the web. It acts as a functional unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted through writing or gestures.
• Presentations – Presentations allow you to inform, educate and communicate with your audiences. A beautifully developed presentation can engage more and more people.
• Screenshots – Screenshots are helpful in offering proof to your readers and base to your articles. You can use screenshots to guide your readers and improve their understanding. In fact, it is the best way to draw the attention of your users.

Visual content not only inspires your audiences, but also encourages them to explore your brand. If you are a content marketer, include it in your marketing strategy and see the magic. Quick tips:

• To take advantage of infographics, it is essential that the layout and design should be clean and professional.
• Choose colour schemes wisely for your infographics.
• Make your video specific and relevant.
• Think like a reader.
• Be consistent with fonts, borders and colours.
• Always track and report your conversion metrics.
• Discuss your themes or topics with content authors, editors, publishers, designers, and content strategists.
• Review and adjust your visual content marketing strategy.