Customer engagement through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram has become a vital component of any successful marketing strategy. As the world of social media marketing changes quickly, it’s important to stay up to date on trends in the industry so that you can create the most successful engagement strategy possible.

Here are 7 trends in social media marketing that will dominate in 2018.

1. A focus on hiring talent for content creation.

In the past, many companies hired freelance writers to create content for their social media accounts. They would then cross-promote new content across platforms. The increased prominence of social media platforms as a method of engaging young consumers will push marketing firms and companies to hire their own employees to focus on content creation.

As young consumers spend a great deal of time engaging with brands on social media, it’s imperative that brands post content that is not only relevant to their target audience, but created specifically for the platform it’s being posted on. The type of content that is best for Facebook is very different from the type best for Instagram, which means that companies have to hire experts in the content-creation space to manage their accounts. Marketing strategies often take time to create and implement, so hiring in-house talent for social media marketing is a great way to ensure success in the space.

2. Increased emphasis on video content.

More and more content strategists are focusing on video content rather than pictures for brand marketing. Expert marketers have found that effectively engaging their target audience is much easier through video. However, it’s important to make sure that the video content you produce is closely aligned with your brand image and connects with your users.

To do this, create videos that your customers can relate to, and focus on showing your product in use rather than showing just the product itself.

3. A focus on user-generated content.

Many brands are leveraging user-generated content on their social media accounts to better engage their followers. For example, lifestyle brands will ask their followers to submit pictures of themselves wearing a particular style of clothing or doing a specific activity. These brands will choose the best submissions and feature them on their page, giving credit to the follower who submitted them.

This is not only a great way to get new, quality content; it’s also a perfect strategy for better engaging your followers. Chosen followers will be excited about being featured, and they’ll be more likely to purchase your products and encourage their friends to check out your page. Instagram perhaps delivers the biggest ROI for UGC. You can use an Instagram analytics tool to measure which posts receive the most engagement.

4. Increased use of Stories.

Facebook and Instagram Stories have become very popular among individual users and brands alike. It’s important for content strategists and marketers to produce content not only for posting directly to their accounts, but to their story as well.
Many users who follow a lot of accounts don’t take the time to view every new post in their feed, but they will take a few seconds to view new stories. You can use this to your advantage by encouraging users to check out newly posted content in your story or by cross-promoting it in your other social media accounts.

5. Brand partnership to engage customers.

Many brands are making use of influencers on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat to promote their products to a large audience.
Brand partnerships are a great way to reach new users, and are often much more cost effective than generating new content yourself. To successfully implement a brand partnership at your company, focus on partnering with users who have a clear message and a large follower base, and who actively engage the community they post in. Brand partners often find innovative ways to get customers excited about products, and you can use their talent to your advantage.

6. Live content will appeal to the masses.

Many brands and companies are using live content to get their followers excited and engaged. Product marketers use Facebook Live to do product demonstrations and show videos of real people using their product. Broadcasting to followers in real time is a fantastic way to get people interested in your content and engaged with your brand.

7. Starting conversations with individual users.

Many brands have hired strategists and marketers to communicate with individual users and potential customers. Social media content managers have begun to talk to users in the comments of Instagram posts and reply to users’ tweets on Twitter.

Engaging with individual users directly is a great way to make followers feel important and get excited about your brand. And building brand loyalty and getting followers to actively engage with your content is the best way to convert users to paying customers.

If you work for an established brand, you probably haven’t looked at your brand strategy documents since your first week on the job. If you’re working at a startup or small business, you may not even have a formal brand strategy documented anywhere.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or simply reviewing your existing strategy to make sure it reflects the current goals and vision for your organization, it helps to guide your thinking with a few concrete questions.

Here are 7 brand strategy questions you can use to nail down your business brand.

1. Who Are We?

Maybe I was just an unusually existential middle schooler, but I remember having a serious identity crisis in 8th grade. I had no idea what type of person I wanted to be—I just knew that I didn’t like the person I was. I wrestled with the question throughout high school and eventually became someone close to the quirky nerd girl I am today.

How you answer this question is central to your entire organization. It often helps to think about your brand as a character or persona. If your company were a person, what kind would they be? What would they be interested in? What would get them out of bed in the morning? What would keep them up at night?

The more you know about who you are as a business, the better you’ll be able to communicate that to your prospects and customers.

2. What Makes Us Unique?

Once you’ve figured out who you are, the next step is to figure out where you fall in the spectrum of other businesses out there. It’s important to identify your unique attributes in comparison to your competitors, but it can also be valuable to see how you’re unique from a broader industry perspective.

Your answer to this question shouldn’t be a laundry list of features or services you provide. It should be the things that are integral to your business: How you run your team, how you interact with people online, how you approach customer support, what you value as a company, where you’re located, how you talk, how you look. All the things that make people special and different are things that can set your business apart as well.

3. Why Are We Here?

This is one of the big questions in life, and one that’s equally important for a brand to answer. Why does your brand exist? What is it designed to do? What’s your vision? Without a solid answer to these questions, your brand won’t be very meaningful or effective.

4. Who Are We Talking to?

Without understanding who your brand is talking to, your product development and marketing strategies will likely be misaligned with what delights your audience. Identifying exactly who your brand wants to serve, what their interests are, where they spend time, and what they care about will guide your marketing efforts and your business development road-map.

5. What Are We Doing?

Your brand’s mission statement should clearly explain what you’re doing and why. What do you hope to achieve as a brand, both now and in the future? Your daily business activities should tie back to these central goals.

6. How Do We Communicate?

You can’t develop solid a brand communication strategy until you’ve answered the questions above. After you’ve identified who your brand is, why you exist, what you’re doing and for whom, you can figure out how to talk to your target audience and what kind of tone your brand should have.
Another thing you can determine from this question is which communication channels you should use to reach your audience. You can then develop communication guidelines for on each channel.

7. Where Do We Invest Time?

• This is a really interesting question, and it’s one that brands aren’t always great at asking themselves. If it’s true that where we invest our time is where we invest our lives, then it’s important to identify where the brand should be purposefully spending its time, both in person and online. The answer to this question could involve:
  A digital channel plan.
• An event attendance and exhibitor plan.
• A speaking calendar.
• A list of volunteer opportunities your organization wants to participate in.

The Bottom Line
Whether you’re creating a brand strategy for the first time, or simply doing a periodic review of your existing plan, these 7 questions can help you nail down answers that are central to how your brand communicates, serves customers, and creates products and services.

You need more site traffic. If you run an online business, traffic is your lifeblood because it enables your business model to work and pay your bills.

Therefore, you need to employee multiple strategies to bring new visitors to your site and keep old visitors engaged with your content.

Here are 48 ways to drive traffic to your website in 2018.

Create New Content

The best proven way to increase traffic to your website from organic traffic is to increase the number of pages on your website that can rank for your important keyword terms. Look at where you can add new category pages, new blog posts, or new pieces of attractive content (visuals, quizzes, etc) to target specific keywords.

Optimize Old Content

Because you are tracking your keyword rankings (you are, right? If you’re not, use SEMrush), you can find the keywords that you rank near the bottom of the first page and go add useful content to those pages to help them rank better. Google also prefers updated and new content over old stale content.

Launch New Products

A great way to attract new users to your company or website is to launch products that meet their needs. The great part is that you can often charge for these as well and make money will getting new users into your full conversion funnel.

Create Online Courses

The great thing about the Internet is that you can publish any type of content you want. By creating longer form content like courses that are targeted around both user needs and specific keyword phrases (don’t forget keyword research!), you can drive more traffic to your site and convert them into email addresses that you can then take down your funnel.

Plus, online course websites exist in plenty so you can put them on places like Lynda.com to further your reach.

Write Guest Posts

By using a website like SimilarWeb, you can find websites related to yours. If they have your audience, you can usually get content onto their site that helps them build traffic while at the same time getting access to their new audience.

Accept guest posts

Similarly, many websites want links for SEO purposes and access to your customers. If they’re not a direct competitor, let them guest post on your website! Then they are invested in your company and will promote the content that they’ve produced, which also gets you in front of their own audience. Double win!

Launch Infographics

If you have a good graphics designer in your company or can find one online, create useful graphics that tell a story and help people see your content in a new way. Do outreach for links, promote on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google Plus and Pinterest, etc.

Give Podcast Interviews

Podcasting is HUGE these days, and one of the best ways to grow a podcast audience is to invite influential people onto your podcast. Think about it like audio version guest posts. So, get one or two podcasts under your belt (or launch your own) then start targeting podcast producers to get onto their shows.

Social advertising

Social advertising on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google + and other networks is still relatively cheap today as compared to Adwords. Many of them also allow you to segment down by demographics or target by keywords so that you hit your ideal audience.

PPC

Pay Per Click is usually best used for conversion-oriented keywords, which is great because it gets you a new audience that is also ready to convert.

Create and Sell Courses

What better way to show your expertise and get people reading your contents than to teach what you already know? If you have a craft, create a course to teach it, then sell it on places like Udemy while simultaneously selling it on your site from a page targeted towards a high volume keyword for SEO.

Create Pinterest boards

Pinterest is a super strong domain and your Pinterest boards can rank very well. Do your typical keyword research for your website, then take some of those keywords and target them on Pinterest. A pro tip is to use your other online resources (website, Instagram, etc) to get them indexed faster and ranking better.

Promote pins on Pinterest

Nowadays, it’s not just enough to create quality content and expect it to rank and drive traffic. Rankings are influenced by engagement stronger than ever before, so use some budget to promote pins on Pinterest to your target audience.

Partnerships

Especially in B2B and B2C spaces, partnerships can be gold for customer acquisition. Build out referral programs with complementary companies to yours and try to funnel some of their traffic back to your website, either through website mentions or even their email marketing.

Link acquisition

This feels like an old school tactic, but it’s still true that the more links you have to your site, the better your site will rank. So acquire links to your site from content, from relevant resource pages on other sites, and from outreach that you do.

Promote content via Outbrain/Taboola

Content promotion is so cheap these days that you’d be careless not to do it. I know people with content websites making literally thousands of dollars a day all from promoted content.

Create satellite websites

If your main website is around one niche yet you operate in many niches, you can build out websites specifically targeted at those other niches and use them to funnel traffic to your other websites. You need to disclose that you own those other websites, but this is a great way to spread the organic reach.

Speed up your website

A fast website not only converts better, but on a big website you will also get more organic traffic because the search engines are able to crawl your site faster and extract more content. Start with switching hosts then optimizing your code, all while making sure you are using aggressive caching and a content delivery network (CDN).

Do new keyword research

If you’re really struggling to increase traffic to your website, do new keyword research to find new content ideas, then go back to point 1 above and create new content!

Target the longtail of keywords for SEO

If you don’t have a very strong website, you can target longer tail keywords (<50 searches a month) which are often much easier to rank for. From this you can start building up a base of content that you can then use to earn links and propel rankings for more competitive terms.

Target Hacker News / Reddit / relevant forums with content

If you can get content or a product to go hot on a site like Hacker News, Reddit, or Product Hunt you can literally get tens of thousands of visitors and often signups and sales. I (John) personally make over $70k from my site sitting on the first page of Product Hunt for a day, and I’ve seen Reddit drive tens of thousands of visits to sites.

Run competitions/giveaways

One of the best ways to build an email list and therefore a new audience is through giving away high value items and incentivizing your entrants to share as well in order to get more entries. I use the Kingsumo Giveaways plugin for this.

Speak at conferences

If you enjoy speaking, conferences can be a great way to get in front of a targeted audience. If you encourage them to tweet about it (put your Twitter handle on the bottom of every slide), you also get in front of their social media audience.

Advertise at conferences

While speaking is the best way to get in front of your audience at conferences, advertising is second best. You can leverage advertising for brand recognition, offer discounts to those at the conference, get links from people doing roundups, and more. It’s a big win especially if you can tie revenue directly back to your company.

Free swag at conferences

I have constantly been amazed at how well quality swag works for advertising your brand, and what better place to give away swag than at conferences to your customers? You’ll build brand recognition and good will.

Create content for Slideshare specifically

Slideshare is its own content social network. By creating content for Slideshare specifically and promoting it, you can also land on the popular content sections of their homepage which drive great traffic. Make sure you link back to your site from Slideshare too.

Create videos for YouTube

If you can create videos in a cost-effective manner, YouTube is a great distribution platform. It takes time to build the channel but has a huge audience if done well.

Run YouTube Ads

Can’t create videos, but there are videos on YouTube that your target audience watches? You can run YouTube videos.

Run webinars

Webinars can drive a new audience for you when you invite guests, or do advertising, that have an audience that they will promote your webinar to. Try to bring on guests who already have a large audience.

Use HARO to acquire contributors

Help A Reporter Out is a great way to find great sources for stories you are writing. While this won’t directly get you a new audience, by including their quotes and tagging them on social media you can access their audience.

Teach a class

Teach people how to do what you do, put your content on Slideshare, rinse, repeat.

Mentor a startup

Mentoring startups is a great way to build goodwill within your industry. Often you can also then get guest posts or leverage their name to get content elsewhere or to be quoted as an expert/source.

Sponsor Meetups

Meetup.com is one of the most popular websites online for organizing groups of people to get together. Many of them accept sponsors, who do things like give free meeting space or pay the bar tab. This can be a great way to get your company or product in front of your ideal target audience.

Do outreach to get included in email newsletters

Some companies do daily, weekly, or monthly newsletters that curate content from around their industry, and many of these have a lot of subscribers. If you have content that fits their audience, reach out to them and see if they’ll include your article in their next edition.

User Retention

Once you’ve attracted your customers to your site, whether to a piece of content via social or a conversion page via SEO, they’ll often leave your site and come back a few times before they actually convert. Sometimes they’re doing research, sometimes they get distracted by other sites, and sometimes they’re just not ready to buy or give you the information you so badly need from them to drive your business forward.

Collect email addresses and send consistent emails

One of the simplest things to do that most people don’t actually do is send consistent email marketing to their customers who have given their email address. Whether this is a weekly newsletter or a daily piece of content to teach and sell, this is the best way to keep your users engaged. The best part is that once you set it up once, your customers will all see that same content.

Guest post on similar sites

Similar to acquiring new users, guest posting on similar sites that likely have your audience and have read your site is a great way to remind them about your site/product as well. Pro move – advertise on these sites too (see below)

Do retargeting advertising

If you’re not doing retargeting and you operate a business online, you are literally leaving money on the table. With all the different display networks available, not to mention Facebook, you can easily target people who have come to your site but not purchased to come back and finish their conversion.

Advertise on similar sites

Once again using SimilarWeb or SEMrush, find the sites similar to yours who are not competitors and see if you can advertise there. Now their audience is yours.

Bid on competitor keywords

This one is slightly greyer on the ethical scale than many of the others, but Adwords allows you to bid on many competitor branded terms. If they’re searching for your competitor, they should also know about you.

Promote content on social

You might not know this, but your followers on social media (especially Facebook) don’t see all of the content you post. If you see a piece of content being successful and getting good exposure, either boost that post or promote it to your custom audiences that you’ve put together.

Let users subscribe to content

Some CMSs, like WordPress, will let people subscribe to replies to their comments that they leave on your content. You can also use a myriad of tools (like SumoMe or Mailchimp) to capture email addresses to which you can send content when it publishes.

Email users when something happens onsite

If you’ve had someone sign up to your product, email them when something happens (a product goes out of stock or comes in stock, metrics change, etc) to get them back to engage with your product again.

Email users who abandon their shopping cart

If you run an ecommerce site, email them when they’ve left something that they wanted to buy.

Affiliates

If you run a site that has products or things directly for sale, you could consider an affiliate program. While affiliate programs take management, they are also a great way to get others to talk about your products for free and you only pay if they buy something.

Partners

If you’re a B2B company, partnerships can be a great way to drive relevant traffic that is ready to convert to your website. This has been a major way Credo has grown. Begin with outreach to sites that have written roundups of alternatives for your competitors and see if they’d like to include your site. Bonus points for getting them to add you at the top.

Influencers

2017 was the year of influencer marketing, and this will only continue into 2018. Get influencers to post about your products, blog on your site and share it, or interview them and provide it for free to your users.

We recognize that not all of these will work for every site, but many of them will. After all, marketing isn’t about the tactics you employ, but the tactics that drive your strategy forward.

One part that we recommend our clients get some basic knowledge on, is on-page SEO for their websites. We have compiled a simple checklist below for you to use as you work through your website’s on-page SEO:

• Correct use of H1-H6 tags.
• Keyword in title tags
• Keyword in url
• Keyword in alt tags for all images
• Installation of Google Webmaster tools (Check here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/)
• Correct use of 302 and 301 redirects
• Unique title tags for each page, 65 characters or less.
• Unique meta description for each page, 155 characters or less.
• Installation of a XML sitemap
• Mobile friendly (check here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/)
• W3C Validate site for errors (check here: http://validator.w3.org/)
• Link to your Social media profiles

There are other tools and plugins that can guide you towards creating strong on-site SEO, however be aware that the easier these DIY tools make it for you, the more competitive SEO will become in general.  Many people feel that by doing these things they will shoot to the top of search results.  A robust on-site SEO strategy is imperative but only a portion of what top competitors are doing.

We hope this helps you increase your SEO rankings. If you have any questions or need help with your SEO, please don’t hesitate to contact us, you can also find out more about SEO here.

In case you haven’t been doing that, here’s a list of nine things you can start implementing today that will increase your traffic, leads, and conversions, as well as enhance your online reputation. Take your business to the next level in 2016!

SEO Strategies: 9 Ways to Boost Your Business

1. Optimize for Mobile
If this isn’t one of your top priority SEO strategies, it should be. As this recent comScore study indicates, mobile has become the leading digital platform. Internet usage on mobile devices now exceeds desktop usage, and Google has made it clear that they prefer responsive and mobile-optimized websites. They’ve even started including “mobile-friendly” labels in mobile search results.

2. Stop Tracking Keyword Rankings

Well, maybe not completely, but it makes much more sense to track ROI metrics. Marketers often get excited when they look at ranking reports and discover that their website is ranking for several keywords. But are those keywords generating leads? Are they capturing new sales and business? There are tons of low competition keyword phrases out there that are quite useless.

3. Build Fewer, Better Links

Inbound links have always been a Google ranking signal. This probably won’t change any time soon. However, link quality is important. A few links from trusted authority sites are better than hundreds of links from mediocre sites. Also, relevancy is a factor. Make better link building one of your SEO strategies. In fact, focus on earning your links rather than building them.

It all starts with creating link-worthy content first.

4. Focus on User Intent

Since the introduction of Hummingbird, Google handles queries differently. Whereas in the past it would simply match keywords to pages, it now considers context and user intent. What does this mean for you as a business or marketer? It means that your content should contain conversational keyword phrases that prospects are likely to use when searching for your services, as well as broader, semantic terms.

5. Consider HTTPS

In August last year, Google announced that HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure – a secure method of exchanging web info) had become a ranking signal and that encrypted websites would have a minor ranking advantage going forward. To encrypt your site, you’ll need to get an SSL certificate, which isn’t free. Also, it may not suit every site. Still, it’s one of the SEO strategies that is worth looking into.

6. Define Your Social Presence

There was a time when having a social presence meant signing up on all available platforms and sharing a bunch of content. Today, social media is a powerful marketing tool and customer service channel. Prospects expect you to engage with them more actively and personally, and search engines like Google tend to take notice. For best results, focus on two or three platforms and be very active.

7. Improve Your URL Structure

Change your URLs to static. Search engines find dynamic URLs (those with long ID numbers and “=” and “&” characters) difficult to crawl and index. Searchers don’t find them very useful, either. Use descriptive, page-related keywords in your URLs, and keep them simple. Optimizing URLs can affect your rankings and click-through rates and could be one of your best SEO strategies. Don’t forget to use 301 redirects.

8. Boost Site Speed

Website speed affects user experience and can increase or decrease conversions drastically. In the longer term, it can have an impact on search rankings and traffic. Page speed is a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. Things that can slow page loading times include unoptimized Images, plugin/widget overload, and bulky code. Use tools like PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, and YSlow to test your site.

9. Don’t Ignore Other Search Engines

While Google may be the king of search, there are signs that other search engines are gaining traction. For example, Google is no longer the default search engine on the popular Firefox browser – Yahoo is. Also, Safari’s “default” search placement is currently up for grabs. This could go to Bing or Yahoo. Then, there’s DuckDuckGo, which is slowly, but surely making progress. Be visible on all search engines.

Know 2017 design trends and use them

Let’s start the new year fresh! If you planned to redesign your site in 2017, here are the recent trends that have been implemented by many designers. Of course, no obligation to follow the crowd, but having a look at the design trends won’t hurt, and could provide you lots of inspiration.

“Jumbotrons”: Big, bold components for calling extra attention to featured content or information.
Non-rectangular headers
Circular images with text beautifully wrapped around them.
SVG images: Despite being around since soon two decades, SVGs have gained significant interest over the last two years.
Big, bold typography and a more widespread use of serif fonts.

Speed up that website!

With more and more people browsing the web on their smartphones and the importance of loading speed in Google ranking system, a good website is a site that loads fast. How do you website ranks on Google PageSpeed Insight and Pingdom? Here are a few quick tips to improve your site loading speed.

Use caching. The W3 Total Cache plugin is a must-have on any serious website.
Switch to a quality web host (WP Engine, Hostgator, Vidahost, KickAssd…)
Optimize your images for top speed.
Get rid of unoptimized 3rd party scripts like the Facebook likebox.
Use a fast WordPress theme.
Further reading: How to make WordPress faster in 5 easy steps

More ideas… More content!

People visit blogs and online magazines for one thing: the content. All the rest is secondary. This is why creating useful content should be in your top priorities for 2017.

Finding what to blog about can sometimes be a bit tricky. Here are a few ideas:

Check out the trends on Google trends and see if people are interested in what you’re planning to write.
Make use of your real-life work experience: have you recently coded a revolutionary WordPress Theme for a client? Is your company doing cool things with jQuery? Talk about it!
Follow other blogs in your niche and read a lot of posts from quality blogs. You’ll be surprised how easily ideas will come to your mind when you read and learn a lot from others.

Revive your old posts

You probably wrote very useful articles in the past. Just because they’re old doesn’t mean that none of them is useful anymore. Here are 3 ways to easily revive your old content:

Use the Revive old posts WordPress plugin, which allows you to automatically tweet your old posts.
When writing a new post, always link to other relevant articles from your blog. You can automate this process by using SEO Smart Links, a free WordPress plugin.
Update your old articles, publish them again, and use a 301 redirection to automatically redirect the old one to the updated version. The Redirection plugin can definitely help for this.
Further reading: WP plugins to boost your traffic, leads and sales

Put more effort in your blog promotion

Writing great posts should be the priority of a blogger, but promoting the content you’ve created should always come as the close second. Promoting your blog posts will attract new visitors and clients, and could lead some of your best articles to go viral.

Have a Twitter and Facebook account for your blog, and keep them updated.
Promote your blog posts on different sites and platforms. Here’s a list of places to promote your content.
A cheap and efficient way to promote your Facebook page and YouTube videos is Promolta. Check it out!
Build and maintain an email list. Mailchimp and SendInBlue are definitely the best current services to manage email lists.

A few more tips…

Feeling perfectionist? That’s great! Here are a few more tips that I plan to apply myself and indeed encourage you to as well.

Increase your social media presence and be available for your readers on Twitter and Facebook.
Better safe than sorry: Always keep WordPress and its plugins up to date, and do regular backups. All in One Migration is a free plugin that can backup your database, themes, plugins and content. My preferred backup solution at the moment.
Invite guest bloggers on your blog: having various authors with a different writing style and different views can be very refreshing for your visitors. Many bloggers will be willing to write free of charge on your blog, or you can invest a little and find a paid contributor.
Keep SEO in mind and always looks for new ethical ways to make your blog rank higher on search engine result pages.

Fonts and typography are an essential point of any website or app design. In this post, I have selected a list of free, fresh, and totally amazing fonts for all your web design needs.

Novecento

Wow, I love this one! Novecento exists in two different versions, wide and narrow. The “wide” version, pictured here, is 100% free in both desktop and webfont versions. The “narrow” version will cost you $16 per font.

Nexa

Nexa is a commercial font ($17/font) but the two versions pictured here (Nexa Light and Nexa Bold) are totally free, so you definitely have no excuse if you don’t grab them for your collection!

Work Sans

Brought to you by Google Fonts, Work Sans is a very beautiful font that will perfectly fit most websites, blogs and apps.

League Gothic

Not really new, but still extremely relevant. League Gothic is an amazing font, especially for headlines and titles.

Oswald

Another one I couldn’t recommend enough for all your headline needs. I’m using this beautiful font on CatsWhoCode menu.

Roboto

Roboto is another Google Font with an outstanding popularity amongst designer and developers. Used by many sites and WordPress Themes, Roboto is definitely a good choice when looking for a clean and readable font with a modern feel.

Tikal Sans

Tikal Sans is a beautiful font that you can freely use. A great choice for both headings and texts for those looking for a readable but fancy font.

Australia

If you’re looking for a fancy, all caps font, then you should definitely have a look at Australia, a beautiful and modern font.

1. Be Right About What You Write

Before you begin churning out content, make sure you look into who your company or brand is. What do you stand for? What are your values? What are your inherent goals through the delivery of content?

People can tell when you’re passionate about something, and it comes through in your content. If you are a gardener, don’t write about figure skating. Unless you are a figure skating gardener, which is pretty awesome, and I applaud you.

Focus on staying true to the values you set for your brand to establish content creation.

2. Know Your Audience

Once you’ve established who YOU want to be, it’s important to figure out what your audience is looking for. What do they care about?

To go back to the figure skating gardener example, if your website focuses primarily on seasonal gardening, don’t throw in a piece about the upcoming Olympic figure skating trials. Unless you can tie it back to gardening and flowers, but then it probably wouldn’t resonate with your audience. Testing would help you figure this out, too.

Understand your audiences needs as well as your area of expertise and and own it.

3. Know Who You’re Up Against

Everyone has competition, especially online. You might be a small business, a DIY blogger, or a large ecommerce site but they all have one thing in common: there is someone else out there doing what you do. Understand who they are and how you are different. There are a lot of lessons to learn from your competition, and having a healthy rivalry often times drives you to stay focused.

Embrace your differences while keeping yourself open to change and education from the competition.

4. Timing is Everything

When putting together a strategy, keep in mind that seasonality, trending news, and other events can have a large impact on your business. Plan for things you know will happen like holidays, trending events, seasons, etc. You should also be prepared for the things you cannot expect like breaking news. On that same note, know when you need to serve up a call-to-action, and when it might not be the best time depending on your content’s focus.

Be flexible and stay ahead of the game when it comes to serving up timely content and calls to action that could impact your business.

All in all, when creating your content strategy, ask yourself the following questions and you really can’t go wrong:

What are your visitors looking for and are you engaging with them enough to deliver it to them?
Is your content valuable and relevant dependent on what’s trending or popular at the time?
Is your competition already delivering this to them, and if so, how is your’s similar or different?
If not, is this an opportunity for you capitalize on? And in doing so, will it align with your brand values?

1. Step Up Your Sharing Buttons

Are you still using the standard sharing buttons provided by the social networks? If so, using AddThis buttons could boost sharing by 22%. Better yet, our Sharing Sidebar can increase performance up to 244%!

Of course, your mileage may vary, so focus on creating interesting, original content that your visitors want to share. (Hint: you’ll know this by looking at what content performed well in your analytics.)

2. Make it Personal

Your site visitors don’t all fit the same mold. So why show all of them the same sharing buttons? AddThis tools customize which sharing buttons display for your visitors to make it more relevant.

This personalization benefits you, too. Personalized sharing buttons increase sharing up to 15% over regular buttons––and every bit helps!

3. Make it Relevant

Speaking of making it personal, you want your visitors to have a relevant experience as well. That’s why we offer Recommended Content widgets that give personalized content recommendations so they’d get hooked on your content. Here’s what one of the content recommendation widgets look like:

4. Know Your Audience

A lot of people put too much effort into optimizing their website for Facebook and Twitter. However, the smart thing to do is look at where your shares are coming from and optimize for those visitors.

Some bloggers that we talked to get 5-10 times as much traffic from Pinterest as Facebook. They tend to take that into account, and make sure they have the big beautiful photos that Pinterest users love.

5. Say Hello!

Did you know that our Welcome Bar can show a custom message to visitors from any social network? That way you can ask them to share your content on the network they just came from.

It sounds so simple, but using the Welcome Bar to customize your message asking your visitors to share your content can be more effective than sharing buttons alone––approximately 147% more effective.

Bonus Tip:

To easily activate mobile-friendly sharing, following and content recommendation tools for your website (like the one in #3), upgrade to AddThis Pro or activate your tools today!

Users are increasingly using mobile devices to search online, browse web content, interact on social media, and buy goods and services. Because that trend isn’t expected to go down anytime soon, it’s important to put the mobile user experience first.

Consider these statistics:

• 64% of Americans and 62% of Nigerians own a smartphone, and 10% of them are smartphone-dependent, meaning that their only access to the Internet is via their phone.
• More Google searches happen on mobile devices than on desktop computers.
• 80% of Twitter users access the network on a mobile device.
• Mobile commerce during the 2015 holiday shopping season was 59% higher than in 2014.

It’s important to meet visitors where they are, and where they are is on mobile. If you can deliver content in a way that makes it easy for users to consume, share and most importantly, convert, you’ll be more than ready to adapt to changes in the way people access the Internet.

Elements of a Mobile-First Website Strategy

1. Test, test and test some more.

Before you publish or send anything — an article, infographic, blog post, video, email or landing page — test it on mobile. Test it on Android, Windows and iOS smartphones. Test it on various tablets. How does it look? How does it read? Are slideshows easy to navigate? Are images too big? How’s the conversion funnel?

Desktop is more forgiving than mobile, so if you get it right for smartphones and tablets, chances are it will look fine on a computer (but make sure you test that, too).

2. Work on your SEO.

If users are getting to your website through search, there’s a good chance they’re doing it on a mobile device. Google rewards websites that are mobile-friendly with higher rankings, so it’s important to have your pages optimized for any device. Plus, you want to make sure that any page a visitor lands on from a search delivers a good mobile experience. This may be a user’s first interaction with your brand, so make a good impression.

3. Update your copy.

Mobile copy doesn’t have to be short. Users are increasingly reading long-form content on mobile devices. What it does have to be, however, is easily scannable and readable. Make headlines and paragraphs short. Break up long blocks of text with headers, and keep content on one page instead of breaking it up into multiple pages and you’ll have a winning layout for mobile devices. When it comes to fonts, simpler is better for a mobile experience.

4. Publish on social media at the right time.

When you publish on social media makes a big difference in how users interact with your content. Social users tend to consume content in real-time (or close to it). We studied social media engagement across the AddThis network in the US and UK, and found that, on average, these are the best times to post on the major social networks:

• LinkedIn: Mondays between 2:00-4:00pm ET
• Facebook: Tuesdays and Wednesdays between 9:00-10:00pm ET
• Twitter: Wednesdays between 4:00-5:00pm ET
• Pinterest: Mondays between 9:00-10:00pm ET

These time slots are just a baseline, of course. Review your social stats to find out when your users are most active, and plan your posting accordingly. For example, we recently discovered that for our Twitter account, tweeting between 12:00-2:00am ET is another great time slot for engagement.

5. Optimize landing pages for conversion on mobile.

Whatever your conversion metrics—sales, newsletter sign-ups, service subscriptions—they have to be easy to complete on mobile. That means streamlining your conversion funnel down to the basics. You may want to collect multiple data points for everyone who signs up for your newsletter, but if a user is next in line at the grocery store, you’ll be better able to capture them if you only ask for an email address. Any form a user has to fill out should contain minimal fields, and the pages they live on should be free from links, navigation bars and any other elements that create clutter.

6. Make social sharing easy for mobile users.

You’re delivering all of this great, mobile-optimized content to your website visitors—make it easy for them to share it. AddThis Share Tools are mobile-friendly and easy to install. You can also use AddThis Marketing Tools to create mobile-optimized overlays encouraging users to share content on social networks.

It’s no secret that the future is mobile, and it’s coming faster than many brands anticipated. Investing resources into making sure your business is offering the best mobile experience on your website, on social networks, through search, and within marketing emails will ensure you’re not left behind when it gets here.