The Blueprint: The Exact Links Your Blog Needs to Have to Rank Like Quick Sprout

Serious question:

Would you be happy if your blog ranked in search engines as well as Quick Sprout does?

I am sure 99% of bloggers would be ecstatic.

But you’d have to travel down a long road if you want to achieve that.

However, I can show you what you need to do if you’re willing to put in the work.

Obviously, I aim to produce top notch content, but the biggest ranking factor, as you might know, is the number and quality of backlinks a blog has. 

And Quick Sprout has a ton of links:

By taking a closer look at the links, you can develop a strategy so that one day, your blog can have similar types, quantities, and quality of links.

We’re going to look at actual links here: I want to get as specific as possible so that you leave this post with a specific link building strategy in mind.

In order to make it as actionable as possible, I picked one of my posts to break down in great detail. We’ll examine The Advanced Guide to SEO.

It has 842 referring domains and 2,690 links overall.

Not surprisingly, it ranks #1 for searches like “advanced guide to SEO”:

And it ranks highly for even vaguely related searches like “SEO guide”:

That post alone gets more traffic than most blogs get in total, so it’s a good one to conduct our analysis on.

Here’s what I did for the analysis:

1. downloaded all the backlink data that Ahrefs had on each of the URLs
2. removed the bottom 80% of links (according to the Pareto principle, the top 20% of links will produce 80% of the results)
3. removed any leftover spam or nonsensical links (about 10% of the remaining links)
4. categorized each link by type

After doing all that, which took a while, I ended up with the following results:

This by itself is very useful.

The vast majority of quality links to the page are from blog posts, resource pages, and, to a lesser extent, forum posts.

Clearly, those types of links are most abundant, so basing your link strategy on them would be a great idea.

What I want to do for the rest of this post is to break down each type of link, explain what they are (if it’s not obvious), and show you how you can get them yourself.

Some are easy, some are hard.

You don’t necessarily have to get all the types of links in the same proportions to rank well, but the more you get, the better.

Type #1 – Links in blog posts

Again, 61.4% of the links to my guide were from blog posts.

Now, I kept the definition of a blog post pretty broad, including both short—500-word—articles and massive guides.

Here’s an example of a guide on Smart Passive Income that links to my guide.

And here’s a link in a short Search Engine Watch article.

Both were counted equally here.

These links are as good as you can get:

• they have diverse and natural anchor text
• they are typically on fairly authoritative domains/pages
• they are contextual (appear naturally within the content)
• they are highly relevant

It makes sense that a post of mine with hundreds of great blog post links would rank so well.

How to get blog links for your posts: Sometimes, getting links from blog posts is a chicken and egg problem.

If you dive into the links to my SEO guide, it’s quite clear that some writers just Googled something like “advanced SEO guide” and linked to the top result.

This is why I’ll continue to get more links to that page even though I’ve stopped promoting it long ago.

However, there are ways to get the rest of those links (which make up the majority).

The most straightforward is cold outreach.

Compile a list of bloggers in your niche (Google variations of “(niche) bloggers”, and use tools such as Buzzsumo:

Then, send them an email telling them about your content and why it’s special.

From here, it’s just a numbers game.

You can typically get about a 5% email-to-link ratio.

If you want 140 links, you’d need to send out emails to 2,800 bloggers.

That’s a lot but possible.

However, like I said, many of those 140 links came after my page was already ranking—let’s say half (or 70).

Considering that you won’t need as many to rank for most terms, you can aim to get about 35 blog links with an initial push.

That brings the number of emails you need to send to 700.

That’s still a lot and will require some digging, but if you want to achieve great rankings, you have to be willing to put in more work than others.

The good news is that this changes over time.

As you build relationships with bloggers in your niche, they will start linking to you naturally in their posts. Or you can just shoot them a quick, friendly email, asking them to include a specific link whenever they can.

Type #2 – Resource collections

The results of the analysis of this SEO guide will differ a bit from an analysis of any other post on Quick Sprout.

That’s because the SEO guide is truly an educational resource.

Even though my other posts are also educational, they wouldn’t be considered “resources,” which is a special distinction given to the most thorough pieces of content.

But because it is, about 20.6% of the links to my guide came from resource pages.

These pages have large collections of the best resources on different topics (usually marketing and business in this case).

Here’s an example:

They’re not as good as blog post links, but they still have a few things going for them:

• the pages often have a lot of authority
• the pages are highly relevant because the links are grouped with similar resources

The downside is that you’re sharing that link authority with often 50+ other pages.

Getting resource page links: Some you will get naturally if you start to rank well or get discussed a lot on social media.

However, you can almost always email the person who created the list and ask to be included.

A short email like this will get a good conversion rate:

Subject: Your resource page for (topic)

Hi (name),

I came across your resource page on (site) and learned about many new great tools. In particular, I’ve already started using (resource #1) and (resource #2) from your list.

So, thank you for that.

On top of that, I wanted to let you know about one more resource. Full disclosure: I created it.

It’s called (name and link to the resource).

The reason it’s so special, and deserves to be alongside those other great resources, is because (give 1-2 sentence description of the best feature).

I just wanted you to be aware of it.

Thanks for your time!

(your name)

I encourage you to spend 10-15 minutes actually going through some resources on their list instead of faking interest. Authenticity will get you a much higher success rate at getting links.

Type #3 – Forum posts

Third on the list were forum posts, which made up about 8% of the links.

These links were mainly found on forums like the Warrior Forum and Reddit, like this one:

These types of links are:

• contextual
• highly relevant
• have good anchor diversity

But typically, they aren’t on high authority pages.

It doesn’t mean they’re not useful, but I wouldn’t spend too much time trying to get them.

How to get forum links: If you create something great and promote it well, it will get talked about in forums without you having to ever target them specifically.

However, if you want to ensure that you get links from forums, or you just want more, you can post on them yourself.

The key part of doing this is actually becoming a part of the forum. You should regularly post and become a part of the community; otherwise, members will think you’re just a spammer.

When the time comes and you release a post, you can make a few postings in different but appropriate sections of the forum, saying something along the lines of:

“I noticed that a lot of people struggle with (topic). I spent about 20 hours putting together a step-by-step guide to (doing something).”

Then, you post most of the body text in your opening and include a link back to your actual post before or after it.

That’s the safe way to do it.

Type #4 – Social media

It’s clear that while Ahrefs is one of the best backlink collectors, they have some work to do with social media.

My analysis showed about 2% of links came from social media, or just 5 links.

Considering it’s been shared hundreds of times on various social media platforms, it’s clear that Ahrefs missed some.

Regardless, these are fairly low quality links (in terms of SEO, not traffic) and likely didn’t affect rankings much.

I still think it’s a great idea to promote content on social media (which can lead to other types of links as well). I’ve written about this topic many times in the past. Here are a few of my best resources to follow if you want more social media links:

• Stop Guessing: Here’s a Social Media Strategy That Works
• Social Media Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
• Launch Your Social Strategy

Type #5 – Guest posts

There are a select few sites that I regularly guest-post on.

When I do, I look for opportunities to link to my best content (when it’s appropriate and of course no-follow these links).

For example, I linked to the post in question in a post I wrote for Entrepreneur.com.

While I didn’t purposely try to link to my SEO guide beforehand, I’ve linked to it 5 times by chance over time.

If you need help getting guest-post opportunities, start with these posts I’ve written:

• Guest-Posting on Steroids: A 4-Step Blueprint That the Top Guest Posters Use
• 7 Lessons Learned from Publishing 300 Guest Posts
• Advanced Guest Posting

When you link out from guest posts (and no-follow the links) other people see them and naturally find your pages, share your content on the social web and even link to it from their site.

Type #6 – Podcast/Interview

Another solid type of link is a link from a podcast notes page or an interview (which may not always be on a podcast).

I’ve spoken on a few different podcasts and often mention my SEO guide.

When you mention something, the host will put a link on the podcast notes page:

It’s easy to get the links you want once you’re on a podcast. The tough part is getting people to want to talk to you.

Below are a couple of resources that can help you get interviewed.

First, “How to Become the Person Everyone Wants to Interview”, which I wrote a few years ago.

Secondly, refer to tactic #4 of this post, which just about anyone can put into action right away.

Type #7 – Roundup

I also got a few links from expert roundups for this post.

In a typical expert roundup, someone will put the same question to a bunch of “experts” and post all the answers.

I don’t think anyone has ever had a problem with an answer that includes a few links.

Even mid-level bloggers get contacted to do these often, but if you’re not there yet, or want more, you can easily get included.

All you need to do is search for “(niche) expert roundup,” and make a list of all the ones you find.

Then, contact the creators with a message along the lines of:

Subject: Expert roundup on (site)

Hi (name),

I saw your expert roundup on (topic) today, and I think it turned out really well (shared on Twitter!).

If you’re planning to do any in the future, I’d love to be included.

I’m a (quick explanation why you’re an expert – include impressive metrics if possible).

Also, let me know if you need a bit of help promoting anything. I’m happy to share a great piece of content.

Cheers,

(your name)

No hard pitch required. The main thing most roundup creators are looking for are social shares and traffic, and you’re offering to help with that.

Type #8 – Image site

This is an extremely simple link to get, and you don’t even have to create it yourself.

When you create “epic” content, I hope you’re considering design.

And if you are, you’re probably not hiring a cheap designer off Fiverr.

When you hire a talented designer who wants to do great work, they also tend to want to show it off.

Most graphic designers have accounts on sites such as Behance and Dribbble, which are both authoritative sites.

For example, many images from my advanced guides have been shown off on these sites. Here’s a page with a link to my advanced guide to SEO.

If you specifically want these kinds of links, you could always encourage your designer to post them around even though they will likely do it on their own.

Conclusion

The great thing about this analysis is that you don’t have to take my word for it. If you have an Ahrefs or Majestic account, you can do this analysis on your own.

And not just for Quick Sprout, but for competitors in your specific niche.

From this analysis, you know the types of links you need to have to rank well, really well, for even competitive searches.

You also know how to get them.

The only thing left to do is go get them and reap the rewards.

Do you have any questions about the analysis or ways of getting each type of link? Leave them below in the comments section.

from Quick Sprout http://ift.tt/1MvTxbr

Should You Switch Your Site to HTTPS? Here’s Why You Should or Shouldn’t

There are two types of SEOs:

Those who love the technical stuff…

…and those who hate it.

If you fall into the first category, you’re probably already experienced with HTTPS.

If you’re in the second category of SEOs, you might be a little intimidated by it.

If you are intimidated, it’s for a good reason, and I completely understand it.

There are some parts of HTTPS that are complex, but most of it is simple.

Furthermore, you don’t need to understand the exact behind-the-scenes work going on in order to implement HTTPS on a website. 

What’s the deal? Is HTTPS important or not?

The idea of HTTPS has always been a good one, and most leading businesses implemented it a long time ago.

However, somewhat recently, Google announced that HTTPS is a ranking factor.

Obviously, that got SEOs talking about and debating the subject.

At the time, it was a very small ranking factor, affecting less than 1% of global searches. Even now, it’s not a big factor.

However, security is something that Google takes very seriously, and it’s likely to become more important in the future.

Some SEOs jumped right on it and made the switch.

Most saw little to no improvement, but there was certainly anecdotal evidence of ranking improvements:

There is a potential benefit of making the switch.

On top of search rankings, you also get a pretty lock symbol in Chrome and Firefox.

If your site isn’t HTTPS, you don’t get this symbol, and sometimes visitors may get warnings about the security of your site on certain types of pages.

HTTPS: Explain it to me as if I’m five

I’m not going to pretend to know all the technical details behind HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), but I can certainly tell you the basics.

The main benefit of HTTPS is that it makes your site more secure for your users. More specifically, it’s more secure when a user is giving you any sort of information.

It’s essential on pages where users are required to give their credit card information and/or other personal details. However, it’s a good thing to have on all pages.

The real change happens when a user submits their data. HTTPS is able to provide multiple layers of protection to that data:

• encryption – the data is worthless to anyone who somehow manages to intercept it because they don’t have the key to decrypt it (you do).
• data integrity - data can’t be corrupted, which is a good thing.
• authentication - it prevents “man in the middle” attacks, which means that it’s not possible for anyone to trick your customers into thinking they’re providing you data when they’re really giving it to a scammer. This is what your SSL certificate (more on that soon) is for.

Do you need HTTPS?

As an SEO or business owner, you understand that using HTTPS is a good thing.

But is it really necessary?

Well, there are two benefits to having it:

• a small boost in rankings (possibly larger in the future)
• a more secure site for your users

If you run a big site such as Quick Sprout, even a small boost in SEO results in tens of thousands of visitors per month. That’s one reason why HTTPS definitely made sense for Quick Sprout.

However, if you’re starting out, you’re not going to see a real difference in your search traffic.

In the future, it could make a bigger impact, but for now it won’t.

All in all, if you’re expecting to get a significant amount of search traffic in the next few years, you should plan on switching to HTTPS.

What about security?

If you just have a blog and all you require from your users is to enter their email addresses to opt in to your email lists, you probably don’t need HTTPS for security reasons.

However, if you accept payments or important personal information for any reason, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

Between those two factors, you should know whether you need to implement HTTPS on your site at all. A large portion of sites should have it, but not all do.

If you do need to implement HTTPS, I’m going to show you the steps you need to follow. I’ll provide as many specifics as I can, but there are many parts that will vary based on your site choices (I’ll lay it out for you).

Step 1: Pick a type of SSL certificate

SSL? What’s that?

SSL is the protocol that HTTPS uses. Basically, you need to install an SSL certificate on your site in order for it to use HTTPS.

There are three different types of certificates you can get:

• Domain validation – the cheapest and most basic; it only really covers encryption (from the three things we went over earlier).
• Organization validation – the middle choice in terms of price, which also includes authentication. If you’re collecting personal information, you probably want at least this option.
• Extended validation – the top of the line option, which provides the best security you can get with HTTPS. This is mainly for big e-commerce sites and sites that collect really important private information.

Here’s a nice little summary:

Google recommends that you use 2048-bit encryption certificates, so keep that in mind if you go with an organization validation certificate (which offers different levels of encryption).

Where to buy an SSL certificate: You can buy a certificate from a ton of different websites. They will offer different types at different prices, so you can shop around if you’d like.

However, I recommend buying one from your hosting company.

Why?

Because most hosting companies offer them in the first place, and many of them will also help you install them. So for convenience sake, start by looking at them.

For example, Hostgator sells a few different types of certificates:

You can see that the prices aren’t too steep.

Once you’ve bought one, you can then get them to install it for you on your hosting server (provided you have a dedicated IP):

If that’s not possible…Not all hosting providers will install the certificate for you.

At this point, see if they have an installation guide by Googling:

(hosting company) + SSL certificate installation

If that doesn’t bring up anything useful, contact their support.

The process of installing a certificate differs from host to host, which is why I can’t give you specific steps here.

Step 2: Create a URL map of your site and redirect

Take an example URL of:

http://www.example.com

Then compare it to:

https://www.example.com

The only difference is one “s” in the URL, and it’s before the actual domain name.

But it makes a difference. These are two entirely separate URLs.

What that means is that you need to create copies of all your site’s pages and then redirect all of your old “http” pages to your new “https” pages.

Although a pain, it’s pretty simple.

A URL map can just be a simple spreadsheet, containing a list of old URLs with a list of the corresponding new URLs beside it.

If you wanted to make changes to your site structure or URL format, now would be a good time to do it.

If you’re using WordPress, you can add all the 301 (permanent) redirects to your .htaccess file.

Each line should look something like this:

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://ift.tt/1VNr3Mv

You just need to fix the bolded parts.

If you’re planning to move to a brand new domain while you’re doing this, refer to my guide to moving a WordPress site for step-by-step instructions.

3. Update your internal links

You’re not quite done with linking yet.

You likely have many internal links throughout your site. These may point to your old “http” pages.

Ideally, you want these to point directly to your HTTPS pages.

Introducing relative URLs: If you’re lucky, you’ve been using relative URLs all along.

These don’t specify an absolute (entire) URL; instead, they tell your browser to add something to the end of the domain.

For example, if this link:

<a href=“/page2”>Link</a>

was placed somewhere on our domain example.com, clicking it would take you to:

http://ift.tt/TfmP3j

When you switch to “HTTPS,” the same link would take you to:

https://www.example.com/page2

which is perfect.

If your site wasn’t built like that and instead uses absolute links:

<a href=“http://ift.tt/1XSAqZR;

then you’ll need to find each link and add the correct new URL to it.

4. Update image and other links

It’s not just links to pages on your site that you need to worry about.

It’s also any other link to resources such as images, stylesheets, and scripts.

If you right-click any of your site’s pages and click “view source,” you’ll see all kinds of tags like this:

<script src=”http://ift.tt/1B6842P” />

The problem is that you need to ensure that all files used and served on your site also use HTTPS.

If those sources and image locations exist on your domain, you need to point them to the correct HTTPS locations.

If you have both HTTP and HTTPS URLs, you can use protocol relative URLs, which look like this:

<script src=”//www.domain.com/js/file.js” />

The double slash in front tells your browser to use HTTPS in front of that URL when the file is being requested from an HTTPS page.

Don’t forget about your CDN: If you use a CDN, you need to make sure that your CDN supports HTTPS.

Most CDNs do support HTTPS by now, but not all of them.

For example, Cloudflare does.

If they don’t have detailed instructions on how to implement HTTPS, so you’ll again have to contact their support.

Then, you’ll have to go back to your new HTTPS site and make sure that the source for all images is pointing to the HTTPS image location on your CDN.

To ensure that you don’t miss any links or images, I recommend using a site crawling tool like Screaming Frog SEO.

You put your domain in the spider text box at the top, and it will extract a ton of information from your site.

Then, click the “internal”, “external”, and “images” filters along the top to see what’s on your site.

If they’re all HTTPS, you’re good to go.

5. Add your site again in WMT

Now that your site is basically whole again, you want to get Google crawling it as soon as possible to limit the chances of your traffic being negatively affected.

You need to re-add your site to Google webmaster tools (Search Console) because the HTTPS site is considered a completely different site.

Then, you should submit your new sitemap in your new listing.

On top of that, re-submit your old sitemap (in your old WMT property) because then Google will see the 301 redirects and update its listings.

6. Do some quick testing to make sure everything went well

If all goes smoothly, you should see no change or a small positive bump in search rankings.

If traffic drops off significantly for more than a day or two, you likely have a problem and should go through this guide again (and ask your host or an SEO consultant for help).

First you should make sure that your SSL certificate is installed correctly.

To do that, use this free SSL server test:

Just put in your new homepage URL, and it’ll do a thorough test:

Other than this, you want to watch your rankings to make sure you spot issues.

Finally, you should click around various pages on your site and make sure that the HTTPS lock shows up correctly (green) in Chrome.

Conclusion

I know that you might not love technical SEO, but it’s important.

By now you should know whether or not HTTPS is needed for your site and how to implement it.

Although questions about the actual migration can be difficult to answer, if you leave me questions with as much detail as possible in a comment below, I’ll try to answer them.

from Quick Sprout http://ift.tt/1pLSzxT

The Very Best Of Internet Marketing March 2016

This is the 33rd post in the series which shares all of my favorite internet marketing posts from the past month.

There is an awful lot of junk to sort through every month so here are the best bits according to me!

The Best Posts Of March 2016

There is an awful lot to learn this month from awesome SEO case studies all the way through to viral traffic strategies.

Let’s not forget a few conversion based quick wins that you can implement today to start seeing immediate results.

I am also going to show you how to get $1,420 in free ad credits!

So grab a coffee, get comfortable and let’s get started!

SEO & Link Building

Let’s kick things off with an SEO based quick win in the form of HTTP2. Just make the switch and feel the benefits immediately!

The only downside to that, is you will need SSL enabled and if you haven’t switched yet this analysis of 10,000 sites should help to convince you to make the switch.

But let’s face it, we all know that links are still king when it comes to rankings and these 19 link building strategies can help you out from the link building perspective.

And don’t worry if you run an ecommerce site because you can take advantage of these 9 ecommerce link building strategies to drive significant link juice to your site.

If all else fails, take a look at this sneaky SEO approach by AirBnB – there are some valuable lessons in their strategy but I am sure Google are paying close attention.

And if Google aren’t paying attention, then I am sure the SEO machine learning revolution will be!

Traffic Generation / Blogging / Analytics

If you want to increase traffic to your website then you can take advantage of any of these 327 different sources easily.

If you would rather focus on building traffic from one source, then take a look at how to go viral on Medium.

No matter where your traffic comes from, you need to make sure that you have the right Google Analytics reports in place to help you grow faster.

Conversion / User Experience

Did you know about the sneaky tricks Microsoft used to train people how to use computers? Think about how you can implement that in your user experience.

If you need help with that, look at these great ideas or these email drip feed campaigns that you can implement to instantly create happier users and more profits.

You can also hack your Thank You page to turn it into a lead generation machine!

Other Stuff

Don’t forget with a few clever tricks you can get $1,420 worth of free ad credit to use however you wish!

And for those of you that struggle to stay focused, here is some excellent advice to ensure you hit all of your personal and business goals.

from Matthew Woodward http://ift.tt/1LEkhXc

Reacting to Metrics: How to Use Data to Make Concrete Social Media Marketing Improvements

Metrics aren’t perfect.

But if you can’t measure something, you have no idea whether it’s working or not.

While metrics don’t always tell the whole story by themselves, together, they can provide you with the whole picture.

This allows you to spot problems as well as opportunities for improvement in all areas of your business, including your social media marketing. 

There’s one issue I constantly see:

Marketers record metrics but never do anything with them.

Just recording metrics won’t do anything. You need to record and analyze them so you can take action to improve your processes, which will then lead to positive results.

That’s what I want to talk about in this post. 

By the end of this post, you should understand what to look for in your social media metrics and how to respond to that data and improve your marketing.

We will look at metrics on both social media sites and your business’ site because social media is only the top of most conversion funnels:

1. Valid subscribers/followers

One thing you’ll certainly want to track on social media is your subscriber (or follower) growth over time.

If your social media plan is working well, chances are your subscriber count will grow at an increasingly fast rate.

You can track this metric manually, using a simple spreadsheet. Just remember to record your follower count every month for all your social channels.

Alternatively, you can use analytics of many social media tools, which will typically include your follower growth.

One example is Buffer, which tracks new followers as well as many other social metrics:

Reacting to changes in follower growth: Each month, you could face three different scenarios.

1. Your follower growth may repeat itself in the last few months, which is good. Your process only requires a change if you believe there is significant room for improvement.

2. Your current follower growth may exceed your past follower growth. In this case, you need to analyze your social media posts carefully and figure out what went right.

If you understand the reasons behind the growth improvement, you should be able to sustain it.

3. Finally, your follower growth may be very low or significantly worse than in previous months.

That indicates a problem that needs an instant response.

There are two possible scenarios here, but one is easier to solve than the other:

1. If your follower growth was and still is very slow, you need to go back to the classroom.

Learn more about an effective social media plan as well as individual social media tactics. Here are some resources to help you get going:

• Stop Guessing: Here’s a Social Media Strategy That Works
• 6 Steps to Create a Bare Bones and Profitable Social Media Plan
• 6 Steps to Creating a Successful Social Media Strategy for ANY Network

2. If your follower growth is much slower than usual, you need to analyze what went wrong.

If you tried a new strategy and it didn’t work, it’s obvious that you need to either try a new one or go back to an old one.

But if the reason for the drop isn’t obvious, create a spreadsheet with the following columns:

• month
• number of social media posts
• number of posts in category 1
• number of posts in category 2
• number of posts in category 3…and so on
• changes within the social network

Fill this out for at least the last 3 months.

Your goal is to find the reason that caused the drop in follower growth.

It may be because you made more posts about a certain topic, which appears not to perform well on social media.

It may also be something out of your control. For example, Facebook has lowered organic reach in the past, which may reduce your follower growth.

In the end, you want to identify the reason for the drop and then fix it if possible.

2. Post reach (impressions)

Next up is post reach, which tells you how many users (mostly your followers) saw your posts.

Again, you can measure this with any advanced tool, but all this information is provided on all the main social media networks.

For example, in Twitter analytics, click on “Tweets” at the top, and you’ll get a detailed breakdown of your overall impressions as well as impressions per tweet.

On Facebook, go to your analytics panel for you business’ page, then go to your page stats, which show you the same sort of breakdown:

Obviously, a higher reach is better, so that is what you should always be looking for.

There are a few things to do here.

First, export this data into a spreadsheet, and then sort it by day.

Calculate the average reach for posts on each day. This will tell you what the best and worst days to post are.

Next, create a new column for all the posts, and put the time it was posted into the new cell.

Then, plot this time against the reach for the post.

On some networks, like Facebook, this is already done for you, and looks like this:

Now you know the best time to post as well.

Start scheduling your social media posts at your peak impression times, and schedule more on the days that get the most impressions.

Finally, analyze post impressions by type of post: You need to create one more column where you manually fill in the type of post.

For example, you might create the following categories:

• question posts
• image posts
• video posts
• a link to an article

Feel free to make your own categories if needed.

Then, calculate an average number of impressions per post in each category, and compare them.

You’ll likely find that your followers respond better to some types of posts than to others. Start using those post types more often.

Just by analyzing your impression metrics, we’ve identified three ways in which you can substantially improve your social media marketing strategy.

Keep in mind that you should do this on a regular basis because the optimal times, dates, and types of posts may change as your audience grows and changes. It may happen slowly, but it can happen.

3. Engagement and click-through rate

Now that you have as many people seeing your social media posts as possible, it’s time to look at metrics for the next step in a typical funnel.

Engagement tells us how many users are interacting with your posts. It varies depending on the network.

For example, engagement on Facebook could be a click, like, share, or comment.

All of these are important in their own way.

The value of a click: shares, likes, and comments are valuable, but ultimately, you need to find ways to drive social followers to your content on your website. Otherwise, you’ll never generate revenue.

That’s why measuring the number of clicks you get on each post is so important. You should also measure your click-through rate—the number of clicks divided by the total impressions for each post.

Some networks provide this information in their analytics, but you can always use a tool such as Buffer:

Clicks (and click-through rate) tell us one huge thing:

Does the user care enough about the post to click through?

On the other hand, shares tell us something different:

Does the user think this content is interesting enough to share with their followers?

It’s a small but important difference.

If a post has an above average click-through rate, that means your headline/post was enticing.

Study it, and learn why your audience thinks so.

However, if that post has a low share rate, it means that either sharing the post would make your user look bad to their followers or that they clicked through and were disappointed.

Usually, this won’t be clear, which is why we’ll be looking at more metrics in the following sections to identify the true cause of this problem.

The opposite can also happen. You might see that some posts get a lot of shares, but hardly any click-throughs.

This tells you that the users think your post makes them look good to their audience (and they know you well enough to expect good quality), but it’s not interesting to them.

This may or may not be a problem.

If that user is your business’ target customer, it is a problem. Why? Because your goal should be to create content that is useful to your customer, not your customer’s followers (who likely aren’t your target customer).

On the other hand, if that user isn’t your target customer but their followers are, it’s a great thing.

For example, if I follow a fellow marketing blogger, I’m probably not their target customer. However, my followers, who are business owners and marketers, probably are, so a share without a click from me is a good thing.

Are clicks and shares equally important? It’s hard to quantify the value of both of these metrics, but they are both very important.

Shares help you get in front of new social users, which will lead to more followers.

Clicks help you get those users further down your conversion funnel.

Both are necessary for a thriving social media account.

4. Time on page

If you’re getting followers to your site, the next step is to ensure they love your content.

One of the best metrics to judge that is the average time they spend on your page.

There are many places to find this data in Google Analytics, but the simplest is to navigate to:

Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium

This will divide your traffic by source, and one of the columns will show you the average time per page.

On top of that, you can click each name and then set a secondary dimension to the landing page so you can see whether any pages have a much better or worse time than others.

Reacting to average time on page: There’s no perfect time-on-page target to aim for. It depends on factors such as your topic, writing style, and length of content.

However, your average user should spend at least a minute on the site for most types of content (unless it is really short).

If your time-on-page metrics are low across all your content, you may have one or more of the following problems:

• poor loading time
• distracting ads/bad layout
• poorly created content (reader quickly realizes they don’t like it)

Start by getting second opinions from anyone you can about your layout.

Then, evaluate your site speed.

Finally, if that reveals no problems, you may need to learn to create better content or to write better. It’s hard to admit, but it’s necessary if you want to improve.

What if you have low time on page only on certain pages?

In that case, the same factors as we discussed above might be responsible for that (maybe you have too many images slowing down load speed), but there’s also a new one:

• you have a confusing headline (it may not match up with your post on social media)

Do your best to consider the viewpoint of your visitors. Would you expect to see your content after clicking through from your post? Or would you be somewhat confused?

This is an iterative process, and each time you iterate, you’ll learn more about the way your audience thinks and what they enjoy.

5. Conversions

No set of metrics is complete without conversions.

If you aren’t converting social media traffic into customers, then it’s worthless or, at the very least, not effective.

Luckily, Google Analytics makes this pretty easy to track.

If you go into “Acquisition > Social > Conversions,” you can click the button to set up goals (if you haven’t before).

These goals work just like others.

You can set up a goal that tracks when someone becomes a new email subscriber (counts if there’s a new visit to a thank-you page) or when they buy something from you.

It’s up to you, but you should attempt to put a value on each conversion because this will help you quantify the value of your social media marketing.

Once you have a goal plus some data, you can come back to see the number of conversions you’ve made by network:

Conversions are one of the final stages of your funnel.

If you’re getting a good number of click-throughs and your visitors are enjoying your content—but not converting—you have a problem.

Unfortunately, it could be many things. Perhaps your store isn’t obvious enough, or your content is attracting the wrong audience for your products.

Or your email autoresponder may need work.

There are too many factors to spell out here, but here are some resources that will help you investigate the issue and find the answer:

• The Definitive Guide To Conversion Optimization
• The Definitive Guide to Landing Page Optimization
• The Definitive Guide to Creating High Converting Landing Pages

Conclusion

Metrics are an absolute necessity if you want your social media marketing to be effective.

But you have to take action.

We’ve gone over the most common social media metrics as well as ways to react to several different scenarios to improve your social media marketing efforts.

To close off, I’d really like to hear from you in the comment section below:

If you’ve ever made an improvement to your social media strategy based on the metrics you recorded, please share with me and everyone else what you’ve learned.

from Quick Sprout http://ift.tt/1q2bNPL

Jake and Ryan NSP3 – A Quality-Focused Backlink Strategy

After some time away, we’re back with call #6 with Ryan Spadafora!

Admittedly, Ryan is coming along slower than the other 2 participants in Niche Site Project 3. In this call, things get heated when I call Ryan out for being a slacker.

I’m kidding.

As many of you know, Ryan is often working 2 jobs in addition to playing a full-time role of husband and dad. When you throw in the other day to day things that life brings, it’s tough to carve out time for content creation.

Honestly, I’m guessing many of you can relate to Ryan’s time-crunched reality – which is why he received so many votes from our readers to be selected as a student.

Building a profitable website around a full life is not easy!

The good news for Ryan is, even though he’s only published a handful of articles on his site – they are very good. Ryan is a little frustrated that his progress has been slow, but I encourage him to not forsake the quality of his writing because he’s getting impatient and just wants to publish as much as possible.

Ryan’s site will have a lot of evergreen content that will be relevant for years to come, so investing the extra time to make it excellent is a wise choice.

Today’s Call

Today I talk to Ryan about building backlinks for his site. In my own sites, I’ve had some pretty good luck with getting high quality backlinks – which to me is way more important than the quantity of links to my site.

As I mentioned, many of the ideas I share were things I originally learned from this post on Backlinko a few years ago. In the call, I share which ones work best for me, and how I put them into action.

Quick Overview

High quality links have SEO value, but links are ultimately about traffic. So even if you get a “no follow” link from a high traffic, relevant blog that doesn’t necessarily pass on “link juice” it is still a good link – because it drives traffic to you.

So I’m really only concerned about quality and relevance. If I can pick up a link from a really relevant blog that doesn’t have much domain authority (yet), I’ll happily take that link.

Typically, I start out by getting a handful of high quality, manually reviewed directories that I’ll submit my site to like Alltop. I also suggest taking a look for industry-specific directories as well, like the one I found for baseball in our call.

After that, I’ve really got 3 particular areas that I spend my time on:

Heads Up Emails

These are very simple. After you publish a post, send a quick email to everyone you quoted, linked to, or featured in some way and give them a “heads up.” I’ll usually keep it short and specific, so it feels personal (because it is.)

So I might say something like:

Hi Jeff,

Happy Monday to you! 

I’m writing to give you quick heads up that I just published a new article about proper stretching and I included one of your ideas about how to stretch your hamstring. I think your reverse toehold stretch technique is excellent! 

Anyway, just wanted to say “thanks” for sharing those tips. Here’s a link to the post if you want to check it out: 

LINK

Have a great day,

Jake

Heads up emails sometimes result in a backlink, many times get a social share, and almost always make a positive connection with another person in your industry – which is key for long term growth and becoming an “authority” in your niche.

Broken Link Building

You’ve probably heard of broken link building by now, and it’s one that I like to use on my own sites.

As I show in the call, I use a Chrome extension called “Check My Links” and then do some different search queries to find pages of links, resources, blog rolls, favorite sites, etc. in my niche.

I’ll check that list for broken links, and if I find one I’ll send a nice email to the site owner and let them know.

This tends to work well because people are appreciative that you pointed out a problem on their site, so they are often more receptive to your link request than they would be if you just randomly emailed them and asked for a backlink.

Many times, you are emailing people who have established domains and sites with some authority – so you can really pick up high quality links using this method.

That email might look like this:

Hey Person, 

I hope all is well! I was checking out your list of favorite recipes today and wanted to give you a heads up that the link for a Banana Smoothie recipe isn’t working. 

Also, I’ve recently added my own recipe for a banana creme pie (really my grandma’s recipe) and I’d be honored if you’d consider adding it your list!

LINK

Either way, keep up the great work and have a nice weekend! 

Jake

You can write whatever kind of email you want, I just try to keep it short and really polite as a general rule.

Help a Reporter Out

This is another free strategy, and is probably the one I’ve personally had the most success with. I’ve been able to get links from really powerful news outlets for different sites, simply by responding to a journalist’s request for information.

Start by going to the HARO website and sign up to be on their email list (for free).

You’ll get 3 emails per business day, and I’d suggest scanning those emails for any queries that are relevant to your site or your industry. If you have some insight to add, respond back to the reporter and put together your best response.

As I shared with Ryan, I try to really nail it on my first response to them. If appropriate, I’ll share links to statistics and sources to support my answer. My thought is that if I’m the most helpful response they get, I’ve got a good chance of being included in the story.

HARO is an excellent way to get links that your competitors won’t be able to touch.

Frequency of Link Building

Near the end of the call, I shared some tips on how much time Ryan should spend on link building. At this point, Ryan should be focused almost completely on content building. However, I suggested that he sign up for HARO, send his “heads up” emails for the things he’s published, and do the one-time submissions like high quality directories as soon as possible.

I know backlinks matter and can really help, but I’ve also built successful sites where I did hardly any of this! My main focus is the keyword research and strategy, as well as creating excellent content that deserves to rank for those keywords.

So if you still have a new site with very little content like Ryan, I’d suggest spending the vast majority of your time building out the site instead of doing outreach – especially if you’re working 2 jobs and have a family  

Watch the Coaching Call

You can watch the coaching call below.  Or if you prefer to listen to the audio, you can download it here.

The post Jake and Ryan NSP3 – A Quality-Focused Backlink Strategy appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

from Niche Pursuits http://ift.tt/1UCALSn