Tag: Event

Do I Need to Learn Digital Marketing?

Whether you are the owner of a startup or the CEO of a successful business, digital marketing will be an essential part. The advertising strategy your organisation undertake to improve brand awareness and increase sales.

Companies are reliant on successful digital marketing campaigns to gain visibility and sales via their online portals. Chris Brogan, CEO of Owner Media Group says, “marketers need to build digital relationships and reputation before closing a sale.” The traditional forms of one-way advertising no longer work. You’ll need to engage your online customers in a two-way conversation in order to convert them. That’s where effective digital marketing campaigns come in.

Even if you think that digital marketing is not an essential part of your day-to-day tasks, you might be surprised to realise that, in actual fact, it is. Every time you tweet, post, share or comment on social media, you are marketing yourself. You are working on building your own personal brand online using your presence in Social Media. If you tweak the wording of an email campaign, amend the imagery for a banner campaign or reach out to a potential online advertising partner, you are actively engaging in digital marketing.

By learning how to be an effective digital marketer, you can ensure you’re delivering the message you intend to. Developing these skills will also help you better monitor the work your employees are putting out. So that you can understand whether the campaigns are optimised for success, as well as identify areas of improvement.

Which Skills Do I Need for Digital Marketing Success?

There are many different facets of digital marketing. It is essential if you want to understand how different disciplines work together to drive success.

When recruiting digital marketing professionals to join your team, you should look for those who possess this general grounding and also excel in one to two specialist areas. Rand Fishkin, of leading search engine marketing site Moz, calls an individual with this basic understanding of multiple digital marketing disciplines and specialism in one or two areas a “T-Shaped Web Marketer”, and says that candidates like this are valuable assets to companies because they understand how different disciplines fit together and can step in to support in different areas where necessary.

How to Learn Digital Marketing at Home for Free: A Step-By-Step Guide

The good news is that learning the skills you need for digital marketing is often possible at home, in your spare time, thanks to the wealth of free online resources available. We discuss our favourite resources below and give our advice on how to get started.

Here are our six steps to digital marketing success:

1 – Study

Acquire the necessary knowledge to become a successful digital marketer by learning digital marketing. Need to know everything from blog posts to eBooks and must be created by experienced marketers.

2 – Practice, Practice, Practice

The best form of education is actively putting into practice what you’ve learned. Create test campaigns, monitor the results, optimise the campaigns and learn from your mistakes. You’ll be following the instructions provided by the study materials you’re using and there’s no risk involved as you aren’t yet dealing with digital advertising budgets for real businesses.

3 – Get Certified and Qualified

Now that you’re confident with the study materials, take the associated certifications and qualifications to test your knowledge.

4 – Start your own Digital Marketing Blog

Having your own digital marketing blog will help you practice what you’ve learned and demonstrated your expertise. It will also help you start to make connections in the industry as you seek out guest writers, invite opinions on your posts and offer to write for other publications.

5 – Seek Out Training and Support from Experienced Digital Marketers

Put those new contacts you’ve made to good use. To become a digital marketer, you need support and guidance from experienced professionals. They can point you in the right direction.

6 – Keep Learning and Improving

Digital marketing is an ever-changing and evolving field that requires its practitioners to be constantly evolving too. Never stop seeking out new learning materials and opportunities to improve your skills.

How Can I Practice Digital Marketing?

Get the Right Course

Join the course Start your online business & Earn Money in 100 Days. easy to follow Live Online Classes, Problem Discussion & Solutions, Video Tutorials, Articles. We will explain our strategies and show you exactly what to do, giving you practical, real-world training you can do in your own time, at your own pace and from any device. You can also read our in-depth digital marketing training guides, prepared by expert Digital Marketing Professionals who really know their stuff.

Test Things out by Starting Your Own Digital Marketing Blog or Personal Project

It’s vital to try out your own ideas and test whether they could turn into viable campaigns for a potential client or your own business. You should try your hand at SEO, PPC, social media, email and content marketing. This a great way to do this is to set up your own blog on a topic you’re interested in. Where you can test different types of content and campaign to see which are the most effective. This will give you valuable insights into the different platforms and help you really get to grips with using them.

Build Your Personal Brand

According to Matt Sweetwood in his article for Entrepreneur, “Personal branding has become a requirement for anyone looking to grow their business, get a better job, get noticed by the press, take their career to the next level or meet new, high-quality friends.”

Every Business Owner needs a strong online presence and an effective personal brand that promotes their achievements and accreditations. In today’s increasingly competitive online marketplace, customers don’t buy from businesses anymore; they buy from people. That’s why Elon Musk’s personal Twitter profile has more than three times as many followers as his three main businesses do. Why CEOs like Arianna Huffington and Richard Branson place so much emphasis on their social media profiles?

Stay Updated

As a digital marketer, part of your role is to stay up to date with key movements in the industry. You can do this by following news and stories released on major digital marketing sites. This is an essential time investment for anyone truly serious about digital marketing, as Google, Facebook and Twitter regularly tweak their algorithms and platforms to better serve their users, which means the type of content coming out on top in the search results is constantly changing. This is all while big and small players alike make moves that could change the industry in a matter of moments.

Start with our related reading list below. Then, it’s your turn to start researching new digital marketing blogs and websites to help your campaign – whether you opt for SEO, content marketing, PPC or more – be a success.

You probably spend a lot of time creating the content you publish on your blog. Obviously, creating great content is important. If you’re going to get the most out of having a business blog, but people won’t bother reading the content you create unless you create a good title.

Titles are the first part of your blog that readers will see and that is responsible for getting more clicks. They’re frequently what people use when they share your blog post, meaning that any time a reader likes your content enough to share it with their social network, it’s the part of the blog their followers will see.

Learn the Great Blog Title Formulas.

A lot of bloggers and marketers have done the research to see how different types of headlines perform in comparison to others. They’ve found some clear trends in what people choose to click on. You can benefit from the work others have done by studying up on the formulas that are proven to work.

1. Number Headline

Any headline that starts with a number, introducing a list post (like this one does – and it worked in this case if you’re reading this post).

2. How to headlines

This is a simple option, but a good one. If someone’s trying to figure out how to do something, a headline that lets them know the blog post will deliver on that need gets the most important point across (but your post better deliver on the headline’s promise).

3. Famous comparison

These headlines borrow on the popularity of a person or piece of entertainment to get people to click. Depending on the famous thing or person you choose, they can add an element of fun to your blog, e.g. # Business Lessons I Learned from Watching Beyoncé.

4. Scarcity headline

This headline promises that the reader will be getting something few people have. Headlines that start with “The Secret of…” or “Little Known Tips for…” are playing on this principle.

5. Big promises headline

These headlines are assuring the reader that they’ll be getting a lot of information if they click, this category includes headlines that start with “The Ultimate Guide to…” or list posts that have a particularly high number at the beginning.

Buzzsumo has also done extensive research into the words and phrases that perform best in headlines (at least on Facebook). Obviously, you can’t just insert these words into your blog titles thoughtlessly, but if you keep them top of mind and look for opportunities to use them effectively, they could help you build better titles.

This is a good starter list, but you can find a lot more if you do a little digging into blog title examples and formulas. It’s worth devoting some real time to studying the research that’s out there and learning from other people’s experience on this.

Pay Attention to Headlines You Like.

Every day you encounter titles – not just blog titles, but also the titles of newspaper and magazine articles, the titles of YouTube videos, the titles of emails you receive, etc. You always have a response to those titles, even when your response is to ignore one and keep scrolling.

In the same way that starting to read more can make you a better writer, starting to more actively pay attention to the titles you encounter in your life and the way you respond to them will get you thinking regularly throughout the day about what works and why. And that thinking will lead to you getting better at crafting good headlines.

So as you scroll through a blog, flip through your favorite magazine, or wade through the links people share on social media, start analyzing your response to every headline you see. Think about which ones made you click, which ones annoyed or offended you, and which ones just didn’t make much of an impression. When possible, jot down notes on how you responded and why. While you’re only a sample set of one, even just by starting with your own responses, you’ll begin to gain some insights into what makes headlines work.

Practice Writing Great Blog Titles.

Ah yes, the familiar tip that goes on most lists of how to do anything well: practice. The more you do it, the easier it will be to do it well, so give yourself the assignment of writing blog titles regularly. Not only for the blog posts you write, but just for the practice of writing titles.

Justin Blackman challenged himself to write over 10,000 headlines over 100 days and found that there was a tangible difference in the quality of his headlines and how quickly he could produce good headlines by the end of his project – which should surprise no one, of course, that’s what happens when you commit to practising something at that level.

Luckily, you don’t have to go that far to get better at writing blog titles. You could commit to doing it for 30 minutes each week or 10 minutes a day and still see a difference. Figure out what level of practice you can fit into your life and start doing it.

Use Your Keyword Research.

If you have a blog, you’re probably already doing keyword research to help you figure out what your audience is thinking about,  looking for, and the terminology they use when doing so. Put that information to work in your blog titles.

You want to be using the language your customers use. It’s good both to improve SEO of your blog posts and for getting them to click on the post. You need to be careful that you don’t try to force a target keyword into a blog title awkwardly. But if your blog post is on the subject you’re targeting, you should be able to include the keyword naturally.

Write Multiple Popular Blog Titles

I get it. You just did all that hard work of researching website copywriting tips and writing the post. You’re ready to be done and get it out there! But as we’ve already mentioned, all that hard work is worth a lot less if people don’t click to read your post. That means your title has a disproportionate amount of power versus the rest of your post and you’ve got to get it right.

Some experts recommend spending as much time working on blog titles as you do on the blog post itself. If you do that, you may well find the difference in results is worth the extra time. At the very least though, commit to writing several blog titles for every post you publish (in addition to the headline writing practice you’ve committed to). Share your headlines with friends or co-workers to get feedback. This will accomplish two things at once:

• You’ll have an easier time selecting the best blog title of the list for each post.
• Get more information on which titles people respond to.  Expanding your sample set of one to however many people you can get to review your title options and weigh-in for each post.

Don’t Oversell.

If you’ve heard anyone use the term click bait, you know it tends to get said in a tone of derision or at least annoyance. People hate clicking on a link based on the promise of an appealing headline, only to be disappointed in the content that’s actually there. For websites that have a business model where they make money based on the number of clicks they get, these types of titles may make a certain amount of sense to use. But if you have a business you want people to trust, they’re a terrible idea.

Make sure the blog title you use matches the content of the post. Don’t say your content is going to “blow your mind” when it probably won’t (how would someone measure that anyway?). Don’t say your blog post is the “definitive guide to” what you’re writing about if it’s a short post only covering the basics of the topic.

Appeal to Emotions.

Whether or not we recognize why we click and share blog posts in the moment we do so, researchers have found that it’s often an emotional decision. Blog titles that appeal to the reader’s emotions are therefore powerful, especially for inspiring shares. CoSchedule analyzed the number of shares different posts got based on their Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) Score and found that those with the highest scores got considerably more shares than those with low scores.

Where possible, use terms that evoke emotions in your readers, like surprising, exclusive, or delighted. Think about what you want your readers to feel when they click and work on providing that in the post and describe what they can expect in the blog title.

Be Specific.

People want to know what they’re clicking on. You may feel like being a little vague could make people more interested or give the blog title broader appeal. But more often it will just make it easier for people to scroll past your title without interest. A specific blog title tells them what questions you’re answering and information you’re providing. The reader will recognize if that’s information they want or need and can make an informed decision on whether or not that click is worth their time.

HubSpot’s data backs this up. In testing over 3 million headlines, they noticed that titles that give people more information about the type of content format they’re getting (e.g. putting [Interview] or [Template] in the title) performed 38% better than those that didn’t include that information.

Do A/B Testing.

You can do a lot of headline research into what generally works well. But ultimately, you need to figure out what works for your target audience. For that, you need to do A/B testing. While every blog post you publish gives you some data on what headlines work. You can figure out more detailed information by putting two headlines against each other.

Whenever your title brainstorming leads to two strong contenders, set up an A/B test and see what happens. You can make some conjectures about what makes the winning blog title work better in each test, but where you’ll really gain insights is by looking at the trends over time. Maybe your audience responds better to blog titles with negative wording in them than positive.

The more data you collect in your testing, the more you’ll know about how to get clicks in future blogs.

Great Blog Titles for your Audience.

You don’t need to think about everyone on the internet to like your blog titles. But you do need the people in your target audience to like them. General knowledge of best practices for writing blog titles is good to have when getting started. But the longer you publish on your blog and analyze what works for your audience. The more your blog title strategies should be based on your own data.

You’re not writing these blog titles for you or to sound clever to other marketers or even your boss. The only people that need to respond to your blog titles are the ones you want reading your blog. Always keep that in mind when deciding which titles you go with.