If you’re writing your own blog, whether it’s a business blog or a personal one, you probably need some visual content to support your writing. Most of the times you’ll search for photo’s and end up with some stock photo’s which you’ve seen a million times before. Or you risk using copyrighted illustrations, just because you think nobody will sue you for using their pictures. But, why would you? It’s not that hard to get high quality images and illustrations for your blog, so kick out your stock photo’s and use one of the following tips for creative and free visual content!
Where to find your visual content?
1. Creative common
There are a lot of pictures on the Internet that you could use for free, just by giving the makers of the pictures a little credit; the so-called pictures with Creative common. If you use pictures with a creative common license in your blog, you’ll be able to give your readers some nice and relevant visual content without any costs. There are multiple creative common licenses, all to be found on this special flickr page! Make sure you read the terms and conditions, you don’t want to get in trouble for ignoring them!
2. Be your own blog photographer
Why rely on the pictures from someone else? You can take some pictures yourself! Even though your not a professional photographer, you probably know exactly what kind of visual content your blog needs to be more powerful. Especially when you’re writing about your personal life, there is better you than your own pictures. So try to find out about your own photography talents and share them on your blog! This is also another way to show your personal style and why you differ from all other bloggers; your pictures will be as unique as your writings.
3. Illustrations, info graphics and schemes
If you can’t find interesting creative common pictures and you don’t feel like taking some pictures yourself, you could consider using a illustration, info graphic or schemes to support your blog. Pictures are not the only way to illustrate your blog. In fact, info graphics, illustrations and schemes can be even more effective if you use them the right way. Keep in mind that also these visual contents could be copyrighted. So be careful! If you want to be sure that your illustrations, info graphics and schemes are relevant and not copyrighted, you could also consider to make your own!
4. Audio-visual content is the way to go
Why should you use just pictures if you could give your audience a bit more of an experience? Especially when you consider that people prefer to sit back and watch something instead of reading. Video is the solution! You could create your own video(blog), but the Internet is full of audio-visual content, so why not borrow some useful video’s from other people? It’s actually quite easy, because if you just embed your favourite YouTube video, you won’t have to think about copyright. So videos are an easy way to add some visual content to your blog without a lot of hussle.
5. Get permission to use copyrighted content
Although above tips are all ways to get around copyright content, but what to do if you find a really great one that you want to use? Just be fair and ask the one who made the picture, info graphic or illustration. You can always try to get permission. Most of the people will appreciate the fact that you asked. We won’t say that every photographer would say ‘Yes!’ to your question, but at least you can try right? This prevents a lot of trouble afterwards.
What are you waiting for? Kick out your stock photos
Like showed above there is more than enough beautiful visual content on the world wide web available for you, you just need to know where to find it. So kick out your stock photos and give your blog some creative refreshments! Because good visual content will complement your writings.
In the last few years, the internet became a lot more important for businesses to communicate with their audience. And with this development, the interest in content marketing for small businesses grew very much. Every business, big or small, has a voice now and that’s exactly why online content marketing should be a big part of everyone’s marketing & communications strategy! But how do you create a successful online content marketing strategy?
What is content marketing?
If you want to be successful in content marketing, you first have to understand what using content marketing actually means. There are many definitions of content marketing, but the definition we like the most is the one of the Content Marketing institute:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
This definition shows exactly what it’s all about. Creating & distributing valuable content and building an audience!
Create, build & distribute
Create, build & distribute are the bricks of a perfect content marketing strategy. But how do you build a wall of them? Combine the following aspects to create the best content marketing strategy for your business.
Content creation
The most important thing in content creation is to look at what audience you want to reach and which info they like to read. If you know more about your target audience, you’ll be able to reach them much easier and your number of views will grow quickly. For example, you’re running a electronics web shop for students. Then you have to try to understand the way of thinking of these students. Write about subjects they like to read about, that are relevant to your website, in the language that they speak. So don’t write about subjects like ‘paying off a house’, but choose subjects like ‘how to save money on your mobile subscription’! Poor students like to save money!
If you know your target audience the best way you can, you will know exactly what to write about! So talk to, search for or do lots research about your audience! You can also easily check if you’re writing about the right subjects. If your views and interaction rate are higher on some post are better then on others, then this might be the subject in the right direction. Let the data lead the way to the best content creation!
Building an audience
If you’ve reached your target audience with your content, the next step is to bind them to your brand. But how do you build a proper audience that returns for your content? We’re lucky that nowadays most of the people connect through the internet with social media sites. That’s exactly the way how you can build your audience. If people connect to you on social media, they will be able to see and read your new content straight away. Besides that, they also feel like they connect to someone in person. If they have any questions about your brand, they know where to go to. If you show your audience that you care about them, through good webcare, then they will be able to bind with your business much easier.
Distribute your content
If you’ve build a audience through social media, you now have two main ways to distribute your content and build a even bigger audience:
-Through search engines
-Through shares and likes of your existing network
Search engines are the basic way to reach your audience. If you create content that is valuable for your audience, with the right keywords, then the search engines will lead the audience to your website. That’s exactly why we use on-page SEO to optimize your content, so your audience will be able to find you in the search engines. If you want to add these search visitors to your network, it’s really important that you provide the information they need. Otherwise the bounce rate of your content will be way to big. That’s why it’s important that you use the right keywords in your on-page seo strategy.
“Nice-to-read”-content is also important if you’re trying to get shares through social media. You have to increase the shareability of your content. There are all kinds of tips and tricks to share your sharability, but the basics are just creating interesting and creative optimized content. And another little trick is to add share buttons to your content of course. It’s also important to be active in discussions that your company has linkage with. If you’re able to show the people that you know what you’re talking about, it’ll be more likely that they’re going to see you as some kind of opinion leader!
So, why does it work? The Anatomy of Content Marketing [Infographic]
Content marketing works, but why does it work? Our conclusion is that the basic of content marketing thing is just good content. That’s the starting point and we’d love to help you with that with a free trial of our own Textmetrics! And concerning of the other aspects, you could learn a lot from this infographic: “The Anatomy of Content Marketing”.
Let’s be honest, most of us amateur copywriters think we write a lot of interesting and very good webcontent.
Of course, there are always possibilities of improvement, but we don’t really like people criticizing our content too much.
But what if we told you could improve your written webcontent, in just four simple steps? That’s a chance you should take!
Inspired by Inspired by Danny Rubin, we provide 4 simple steps to you that tell you exactly how to improve your content quickly!
Step 1 – Finish your text in the Textmetrics on-page SEO editor
The first step is to finish your text in the Textmetrics on-page SEO editor. The editor will provide some steps about headings, italic tags, keywords etc.
Textmetrics combines thousands of SEO rules to get the best results in the multiple search engines.
By using Textmetrics, you optimize your content for websites and web pages, so from now on you can call your normal content: ‘webcontent‘.
Step 2 – Check your webcontent for grammar mistakes
This next step might sound unnecessary for a lot of people, you might think, I can write a simple article without any mistakes.
But research tells us that even the best writers make a lot of grammar mistakes. Especially when you write articles in a language that you don’t natively speak.
Don’t underestimate the importance of grammar in your professional webcontent, a lot of people see grammar as a reflection of your professionalism.
Our personal favorite grammar checker is Grammarly. If you use the Textmetrics editor for your SEO friendly, you can check your webcontent immediately in your browser.
It’s pretty easy, so why would you skip it?
Step 3 – Copy to your favorite text editor and use Ctrl+F
You might think, why do I need to use Ctrl+F? Well, because we’re going to make some simple changes to your content that will improve the readability a lot.
Your webcontent is way better off without these commonly used words and sentences!
Make the following changes:
-Delete the words “very”, “just” and “really”
-Delete the words “in order” (as in “I did this in order to do that”)
-Delete the word “that” (as in “I believe that you are correct”)
-Delete the word “quite” (excess word)
-Replace the word “thing” (replace with specific word for the “thing”)
-Change the word “utilize” (switch to “use” or pick another verb)
-Change the words “get” or “got” (pick another, more descriptive verb)
-Change -ing verbs (I am writing becomes I write)
Don’t forget to check your content after making these changes, it’s possible that they don’t work out this one time!
Step 4 – Kill your darlings
Every writer has his own darlings. Words that you use way too much in your content. And the next step to improve your content is to kill your darlings.
Look for these words, expressions or sentences and change them in something else or delete them immediately.
Although it might feel like you’re totally changing your own writing style, but that’s a good thing.
By killing your darlings, you will see that your written content evolves in more valuable and professional webcontent.
Step 5 – Submit your work with confidence
Make sure that you fully support what you write. Make sure that you dare to bet your life on what you write.
Check your content and ask yourself if you like what you write, don’t just write what people want to read.
You are responsible for what you publish, so you should support your own work with the full 100%! If you don’t, then don’t publish!
We personally think that this last step is one of the most important steps to follow.
Although it isn’t specific at all, most of the people that read this tip know exactly what to change in their articles!
Follow these 5 little step and in just a few moments, your content will be optimized technically and you will get the best out yourself! Start improving your own talents! If you want to make sure that you don’t miss anything, use our free trial of Textmetrics to check your content on all the important stuff!
In the past, people saw link building as some kind of trick to raise their search engine ranks quickly. But this old style link building strategy is history now.
Nowadays, Google bots learned to see the difference between real incoming links, that people share because they want to link to a website with valuable content and links provided by old style link building.
Link building has changed and your own link building strategy should change too! That’s why we’re going to learn you how to build backlinks new style. Qualitative links are the next big thing, but how do you get good backlinks?
#1 Write valuable content to increase shareability
People share content that they like. It sounds quite easy, but it is the way it is. If you write crappy content, then you probably won’t get any backlinks unless you post them yourself.
Make sure your target audience rates your content as valuable for them and maybe even lots of other people.
If you produce valuable content and you promote it in the right ways, people will read your content and share it with their friends!
#2 Use cross promotion for quality backlinks
Back in the days when search engines were quite easy to manipulate, exchanging links was a popular way to build links very quickly.
But Google is a lot smarter now. They don’t care if you get inward links from a website if you have totally nothing in common. These links became completely useless in new style link building.
But there still is a different way to use this strategy. It only costs a bit more of an effort, this is what you can do:
Use cross promotion!
Cross promotion is a promotion technique in which two companies work together to promote their websites.
The main condition for this technique to work is that these companies must have something in common, like:
Textmetrics and a company that makes web designs or a supermarket and a butcher.
Google sees that the companies that backlink to each other have something in common and that’s why these links are seen as valuable.
#3 Register in qualitative directories for better results
In the past, building links in directories was something that you should definitely do, anywhere, anytime you could.
The more backlinks you had, the better. That’s was the motto of old style link building.
But things have changed. If your website gets linked to in too many bad rated directories, it can have a really bad influence on your search engine rank:
There is a chance that Google will give you a penalty.
That’s the reason why it’s really important that, if you decide to use directories for link building, you make sure to choose the right ones.
You have to be picky to decide which directories are valuable to register your backlinks to and which aren’t.
#4 Active attitude in discussions and forums
This next way to generate backlinks that actually will lead your target audience to your website might be the most valuable tip that we want to give you today:
Mix in online discussions about your companies specialties
You might think, what does this have to do with backlinks. Well, more than you think, but before we explain this link we must tell you something about the past of backlinks on forums and blogs.
In the past, a good way to generate some relevant backlinks was to post your links to popular blogs or discussions on forums. Marketers posted them on almost every opportunity that they saw.
But since a lot of blog owners blocked this way of creating backlinks, this technique isn’t that successful anymore.
But wait, then what to do next? Well:
No worries, there is still a very good way to promote your website through blogs and forums. The only thing that has changed is that you have to make a little bit more of an effort to create these backlinks.
Look for discussions or blogs that are relevant to your companies products, services or published content. React in a natural way and mix yourself into the discussion.
When the time is right you can post a link to your company, just the way so it totally fits in the discussion.
If you succeed to use this technique in an effective way, we can guarantee you that this gives you quite a lot traffic on your website!
#5 New style social media, best way to get new style backlinks
Back in the days that people started to use link building as a technique, social media sites weren’t that big as they are today.
For us, it looks like ages but Facebook and Twitter weren’t that popular 10 years ago.
That’s why this last step to get valuable backlinks has everything to do with this “new” way of communicating.
Google has also followed this development and that’s why social media links became way more important in search engine optimization and creating backlinks.
There are a few ways to create backlinks through social media:
Building a social community around your brand or company
The way to build a strong community is to make sure that you promote your content the right way.
Make sure that your content is shareable because the more shares and likes you get, the more Google rates your content as relevant and valuable.
Use opinion leaders to speak for you
Another way to promote your links through social media is to find some opinion leaders to speak for you.
They are people that inspire other people to do what they do, and to use what they use, so of course they are the best persons to tell everyone how great your website/brand/product is!
So, how to build backlinks new style?
As you have seen in this article, the most important words to describe how to build new style backlinks are:
Relevant & valuable
Link building isn’t about just posting links anymore, it’s about looking for and finding the most relevant and valuable ways to promote your content, company and brand.
Don’t forget, this is the way to do it now, old style link building can kill your seo strategy! New style backlinks combined with a free trial of Textmetrics will make sure that you’ll rise in the search engines even faster than you could imagine.
And by following this guide, you should be able to rock the world of new style link building! Isn’t that awesome?
Liked this Textmetrics guide? Share on twitter now!
Excellent webcontent, that’s something we all want. Lots and lots of visitors and maybe even more new clients are the wishes of many business owners.
That’s why we’re here to help. Basically, you need to do two things to make excellent webcontent:
1. Writing creative content that your target audience wants to read
2. Optimizing your content in a technical way
Why are these two things so important for excellent webcontent?
Creative content for your target audience is the most important piece of the puzzle. You need to write content that they like and share with their friends.
That’s one of the ways to create more traffic to your site, just by writing excellent and creative content.
We wrote another article about this subject, so if you’re interested in “writing to reach your target audience”, you can read our article here!
But the other thing, optimizing your content, is just as important.
If you write good content, then you want your content to be found, also in the search engines.
That’s why it’s important to focus on the right keywords and optimize your content in the right way.
But to be honest, SEO is not the most fun thing to do.
That’s why we created Textmetrics:
To make sure that you won’t spend too much time on optimizing your content!
Simple webcontent optimization with Textmetrics
The most simple way to optimize your webcontent is to follow our new infographic:
“4 steps to excellent webcontent”
SEO doesn’t have to be hard to do, and that’s why we tried to keep it simple. It’s just like we always say:
With Textmetrics, everyone can be a seo expert.
Don’t wait any longer and just read and learn from our new infographic!
Don’t forget to share it with your friends if you like this post!
![4 Simple Steps To Excellent Webcontent [Infographic]](https://www.textmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/4stepstoexcellent-mini.png)
