As part of our Bloggers Ideas interview series, Ann Smarty  of InternetMarketingNinjas discusses how to use social media for marketing and figured out how to get links from difficult sources. Ann Smarty also writes for some of the top Online Marketing sites like SEOmoz, Mashable, Social Media Examiner and many more! I know  This interview is rather long, but is worth for all bloggers & webmasters ! Thanks so much to Ann Smarty for spending the time to answer all of my questions! 

Please introduce you to my blog readers? Explain who are you apart from blogging life?

I am founder of MyBlogGuest, the free community of guest bloggers preaching high-quality guest posting. I am also community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas and co-founder of Viral Content Buzz.

My oldest site is SEOsmarty.com which is my personal SEO blog. That’s the blog that built my brand!

Please define terms “blogging” and “money making from a blog” your experience on them?

Wow, a tough one! Blogging means creating useful content regularly and sharing it with your audience. The content can be anything you have any expertise or interest in. For example, I started my blog when I was learning SEO and the main aim was to organize and apply the new things I was learning!

“Money making from a blog” is any way you can monetize your site (which I’ve never been too successful at).

What are your tips on traffic generation? Please reveal some must use techniques to get more traffic to new blogs?

The first step is to create content. It should be very unique (and I don’t mean just original). The content of a good blogger reflects his/her personality, taste and voice. If every new blogger just spent first 2-3 months of blogging just finding their voice and working on research and content creation, the web would have been a much better place!

Promoting and generating traffic comes next when you already have good content live. I’d suggest trying ViralContentBuzz.com as we are doing our best to generate valuable social media shares for your content!

Recommended: Importance of Social Media

How to get prepared for next Google updates and stay safe? What resources you read to stay updated?

I read and contribute to Threadwatch, I am also quite active at SEOchat. Those two would give any newbie a good update on what is going on in SEO world without too much cluttering.

As for getting ready… if you are honest to yourself and if you are putting high-quality content online, there’s not much you should be doing to get prepared. The only thing probably is to make sure you can filter FUD (filter, uncertainty, doubt) from real news and keep sanity!

Which social sharing sites your prefer and how to get more traffic from them?

Historically I am most active on Twitter. The best way to get results from Twitter is to participate in Twitter chats. TwChat is highly recommended for that as you can add favorite Twitter chats to bookmarks and use the calendar to plan your week!

What are your top favorite 3 tools for managing social media campaigns and why?

• Social media signals + Authorship: This tool allows me to quickly copy-paste my recent articles and measure their impact.
• Tweetdeck because it lets me tweet and interact while still actually working: I love the desktop updates and I have learned to read them without any sacrifice to my productivity
• Commun.it I love the reports there and the easy dashboard to track interactions.

Do you Pinterest for your business, what kind of Pinterest tools you use?

I am not using Pinterest too much apart from pinning images I like (basically I don;t have enough time to make the most of it).

I did cover some Pinterest tools here.

How Do You Conduct An SEO Experiment & What you do when you get your client’s project. First thing you would do is?

I don’t do too much experimenting these days as they tale time and I don’t have much.

The first thing I do when looking at the website is Google cache.

What kind of SEO Tools you are using right now.  Can you tell us?

Ironically, not many (“Ironically” because I write more on them than I actually manage to use) – mainly because I am not doing to much of SEO these days.

Here are a few:

Do you use Blackhat SEO techniques in a white hat SEO way, Like scrapebox  & Xenu’s Link Sleuth…

I have never considered myself a black (even gray) hat SEO. However they say white hat SEO actually doesn’t exist ?

I have used Xenu but only for “white” reasons ?

Do you think 3rd party blog post links and eBook submissions are playing vital role these days? How to use these opportunities?

Of course it works! I believe in guest blogging and eBook marketing. Both boost your content marketing efforts and build your assets.

On Reporting – What Kind of Reports do you Give to your Clients?

I am not doing reporting these days – All i am doing is basically blah-blah-blah (the fancier word is community management:))

On Social Media – What Kind of Things have you Done on the Social Side?

When it comes to social media, I don’t think there is such a thing as “Done”. It’s a continuous never-ending process. I did a Slideshare presentation on what I am actually doing:

What kind of Content Marketing tactics you are using to  increase user engagement? Why landing pages are playing important for increasing conversion rates?

My most successful content marketing tactic is a smart and creative re-packaging. You can turn text into an image, PowerPoint deck, video, etc. this opens up the whole new world of marketing channels (which you couldn’t have used with just text). I believe in this tactic and I think it adds value to the web while adding variety to your marketing tactics:

I hope you learned a lot from Blogging expert Ann Smarty. Dont forget to share this article in social media! You can also Join BloggersIdeas on Facebook & Google+ for getting similar updates.

In today’s world, social media is one of the best platforms for a blogger to popularize his blog, and what if you are gifted with a plugin which includes all the different kinds of microdata supported by Google. The other mode of to look at Search Engine Optimization is helping Google what exactly they need,  putting most reliable links and sites on the first page. This tool is very important because it understands what the search engines want and shows you the method of how to give it to them.

 It should be no surprise if our readers are aware of this social media utility plugin since it has been termed as ‘most important plugin of 2014’ we are talking about WP Social SEO pro. It won’t add any goofy plugin that adds floating social share options that scroll you down the page, it is the comprehensive social media utility and most significant plugin you are going to install, in recent years this is a dream package of an SEO engineer.

Getting Started with WP Social SEO Pro

WP social SEO Pro is the only plugin which adds all different kinds of microdatas to your site or blog, this honest plugin gives exactly what search engines wants, a real time systematized social connectivity, WP Social SEO Pro works with any SEO plugin, like WordPress SEO by yoast, all in one SEO and any other SEO plugin. It jointly integrates Google Authorship for single and multi author blogs.

This plugin adds Facebook open graph, Twitter card, and Google Rich Snippets to your website search engine visibility. This plugin is very fast, it can make a poor performing blog to a high ranking blog very fast.

Check out this demo by Social SEO Pro 

Further adding all meta tags from existing content gives the automatic touch to the product, Google rich Snippets integration is another feature that automatically implements the rich snippets tagging for all your content.

It also automatically adds twitter meta tags for increased connections between Google, Twitter and your blog. Apart from all these the WP Social SEO Pro automatically adds the Google plus, item prop tags to your site for better Search Engine Rankings.

Apart from all this microdatas for reviews, products, business people, software, events or videos.  It also comes with a rating system; you can rate author’s rating easily. Each option can be used generally as well as customized way. The WP social SEO Pro gives you an honest social connectivity in a very systematic method that helps you to leave your marks behind as you move ahead and improves your ranking. You also get a privilege to add the HTML5 boilerplate optimized .htaccess entries to your .htaccess file. It comes with a knowledge base guide who tells how to install and configure it. Advance versions are also available.

Features of WP Social SEO Pro

The best feature of this product is that it works with posts, pages and any kind of custom posts types. OPTIMIZE! Is what this application is made for, when social sharing and social media comes together with the powerful social indication?

Twitter card integration is another important feature of this product; it allows you to expand your thoughts beyond 140 words standard limit of twitter using the twitter card types. You can publish and share content to twitter using the summary. There are summary products, video player, gallery and the twitter cards.

These cards are the significant part, as they allow you to customize what you actually want to show to your twitter followers. This is very powerful attribute of a WP Social SEO Pro to increase the traffic dualistically.

The social sharing buttons, which are icons from Twitter, Google +, Facebook, Linkedin etc maximize the effectiveness of your blog or site. As being integrated it gives lots of ease and helps to make your blog attractive. It also supports for all open graph tags, since the Facebook Open Graph API is used by numerous social integrated sites and search engines like Google, Bing, etc.

This Facebook graph search helps you to create own custom messaging specifically for the people who follow your shared content on social media sites providing an extra network for search engines.

Further, if you sell products or generate business through Pinterest you can ask for validations for using richpins, it reflects all important information about the product you doing business, Pinterest uses Facebook open graph API for this optimization and once your graph is set using the SEO booster pro you will get the Pinterest validation meta tags for rich pins. WP Social SEO Pro is that kind of tool that does very different things than most SEO tools. That is the reason we insist that it is advised to be integrated even if you are using another SEO plugin previously, because you will likely miss out on some main profit if you don’t use WP Social SEO Pro.

Dashboard Screenshots

Pricing and conclusion

As per the official website the WP Social SEO Pro comes with a standard price of $47. This is very economical after reviewing its benefits for your blog or site. The WP Social SEO Pro is going to help you in a very crucial way in ranking out on search engines. We advise our readers not to waste time with another sliding, bouncing or jumping social button toy. Work and build your site as it should be and start dominating the ranks the right way.

As part of our Bloggers Ideas interview series, today we have Julie Joyce  of linkfishmedia  discussing techniques about social media engagement,  and other SEO strategies. She is proficient online marketer & Owner of the link building company Link Fish Media, Inc. and co-founder of SEO Chicks. I appreciate her time she took out for this interview.

Please introduce yourself to our readers. Can you tell us something about your blogging journey. How and when did you enter into blogging? And who are your blogging role models?

I started blogging when Lisa Myers and I began the SEO Chicks site back in 2007. We’d met in London and were chatting about the (at that time) lack of female voices in the UK industry and decided to start a site, and it just kind of took off.

I have several role models that I think are truly amazing bloggers, but I’d have to list my co-SEO Chicks first as I think they’re all amazing. I’d add Rae Hoffman and Debra Mastaler to the top of the list as I try and read everything they write. I think that Anthony Pensabene is one of the most amazing writers in the industry and I absolutely love reading his work, and I tend to read everything that Aaron Wall writes as well.

What are some examples of how you have worked to sell your ideas in collaborative environments?

The main collaboration has been with the SEO Chicks and I’ve honestly never had to sell them an idea. I think we’ve been lucky in that we all seem to get along very well and think about things in very similar ways. In terms of collaborating with clients or with other teams who work for my clients, it is difficult at times. Usually I try and make it clear why I’m proposing something and point out what could happen if they don’t listen. At that point, if they ignore me, it’s on them right?

What are your favorite social media tools ? Which tools do you prefer to use to increase user engagement?

I use Twitter to keep up with what’s going on and to promote content. I use Facebook more for personal things but I do promote content there occasionally. I’m still trying to fall in love with G+, and for the life of me, I can’t stand Pinterest. I love Viral Content Buzz for increasing user engagement mainly because it’s not just used by SEOs, so you can get a lot of good engagement from people in other industries.

Do people need to spend money (e.g., PPC, paid advertising, etc) to make money with affiliate marketing?

Unless they’re geniuses or really, really lucky, yes they do, at least initially.

Which of the following factors have an impact on the Google PageRank?

a. The total number of inbound links to a page of a web site

b. The subject matter of the site providing the inbound link to a page of a web site

c. The text used to describe the inbound link to a page of a web site

d. The number of outbound links on the page that contains the inbound link to a page of a web site .

I’ll start by saying that I don’t concern myself enough with their PR so I can’t really say what factors have an impact. In terms of importance, I think the first 3 are more important than the last one.

Mention some SEO myths you know and what the actual facts are ?

That the true measure of your site can be determined by Google’s Toolbar PageRank: it’s just not true. That links don’t matter: try having zero and ranking well today.

What do you see on the horizon for content marketing in 2014?

More bloat most likely, which is unfortunate. We keep telling people to do content marketing and sadly that means that there’s a lot of thin content out there that just dilutes everything else.

What are some of the best B2C content marketing examples that you like to reference?

Crowd sourced pieces that are updated yearly are my absolute favorite, and one stands out, which is Rae Hoffman’s yearly Link Building With The Experts piece. http://sugarrae.com/online-marketing/,link-development/.

How do I integrate content marketing in my own company?

Anytime we have a great piece of content to market, everything we do is easier. We try to build links to great content produced by our clients, but we don’t shop posts around, do article marketing, or try and get any infographics posted.

What’s the most underutilized content distribution tool?

Probably word of mouth.

How to increase your conversation rate ?

Increase engagement: when someone takes an interest or responds to something you’ve done, respond back. Thank them, further the conversation, etc. You may not see an immediate conversion increase but I do believe that it helps in the long run.

How to increase engagement on facebook page?

Ask people something. Don’t just post an article. Ask an opinion. Call people out, tag them, make them feel like you truly want to hear from them.

What’s your favorite website? Analyze it for me.

The Onion. Analyzing it? I’d give it a 10 out of 10 in everything possible. It’s hysterical. It’s subversive, it can be offensive, but it always makes me laugh.

What blogs do you read? Tell me about an article you recently read that stuck out to you.

I read the usual big ones like Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch but I also read a lot of smaller blogs. I really love Alessio’s blog: http://www.alessiomadeyski.com/. He writes about marketing but more about just what he happens to feel like writing about, and I just love his passion for life.

I  hope you enjoy this long interview of  Julie Joyce . She had shared her valuable strategies here.  If you have any doubts put your questions in comment section.  We will answer your queries for sure.

Dont forget to share this article in social media! You can also Join BloggersIdeas on Facebook & Google+ for getting similar updates. 

Are you looking to drive more traffic to your website? Do you want to generate more leads that you can easily convert? Are you searching for ways to increase sales and ROI?

Then, you’ve come to the right place! Here you’ll learn how to create an online quiz for social media, which will help you increase audience engagement, generate qualified leads, and supercharge your sales.

Quizzes are generally fun, which is precisely why people love them. Creating a quiz relevant to your brand can really help you increase traffic, improve online visibility and SEO ranking, and yield positive results regarding your lead capture and conversion.

 

{Detailed Guide} How to Create an Online Quiz For Social Media 2022

Without further ado, read on to explore this step-by-step guide to creating your own social media quiz.

• Set up a Goal for Your Social Media Quiz

To make sure your online quiz is effective, you need to start with your goal. What is it that you want to accomplish with your social media quiz? What data do you want to collect? What do you want your quiz takers to do?

Only when you establish a clear objective and goal of your online quiz will you be able to make sure it actually helps you achieve that goal.

Here’s an example of Airbnb’s Trip Matcher quiz to help you get the big picture.

It’s a personality quiz for helping people find their travel personality, before providing them with an Airbnb trip itinerary for their next vacation. Once the quiz takers get their results, they can explore all the other travel personalities, each coming with its own exciting trip itinerary.

Since Airbnb is a hospitality service, a quiz about travel personalities definitely hits the bullseye. Offering trip itineraries that fit the quiz takers’ interests will help the hospitality giant capture more leads, and increase sales.

 

• Consider Your Target Audience’s Needs

This is just as important as your goal. You need to create an online quiz that provides real value to your audience, and you can’t do that if you don’t address their needs.

 

Find out your audience’s biggest pain points, and thoroughly think about how you will address them in your quiz. If you manage to tap into your audience’s emotions and truly engage them in the quiz, they will gladly give you the necessary information for following up and keeping in touch.

Creating a Social Media Quiz: Step-By-Step Guide

Once you have your goal, and you know what your target audience needs, you can start creating your online quiz. Here are all the steps you need to take.

 

 

• Choose the Right Type of Quiz

There are two main types of quizzes for social media that you can choose from:

• Personality quizzes
• Knowledge tests.

 

Personality Quizzes

A personality quiz, as its name suggests, helps people learn more about themselves. Once your quiz takers are categorized into different personalities, you can provide them with personalized recommendations regarding your products and services.

For instance, if your target audience consists of bloggers, you can create a “What Kind of a Blogger Are You?” quiz. You can incentivize your quiz takers to share their details with you by offering a free eBook on better blogging, for example or anything else that will give them real value.

Knowledge Tests

Knowledge tests are types of quizzes that help people assess how much they know about a particular subject.

By creating a quiz just like the example above, you can help your quiz takers know where they stand on a particular topic – in this instance, coffee.

The incentive to get them to subscribe to your email list could be, for instance, offering them exclusive access to your healthy coffee recipes. You could also offer discounts for your espresso makers, for example.

You can easily wrap your quiz, no matter the type, around any product or service you’re offering. For instance, if you’re selling furniture, you can create a “What Is Your Interior Design Style?” quiz, and offer personalized product recommendations, specifically tailored to the answers the users gave. The options are really limitless.

 

 

• Come Up with a Captivating Title

 

This is perhaps the most important part of every online quiz. If the title is not catchy, people simply won’t click through and take the quiz.

So, you need to come up with something captivating that instantly grabs attention. You need to craft a headline that evokes emotions and makes people unable to resist taking the quiz. The title of your quiz is precisely what will help you get higher CTR (click-through rates).

How can you create quiz titles that actually get clicked? You can choose from the two main types of titles:

 

• The “Actually” titles

 

 

The “Actually” Title

When you add the word “actually” into the title of a quiz, the quiz instantly becomes a challenge that rarely anyone can ignore. 

This is a perfect title, if you have, let’s say, an eBook on online marketing. You can offer its free version, or an engaging excerpt, to everyone who subscribes to your email list.

 

The Comparison Title

These are all those “What/Which (blank) Are You?” titles for personality quizzes. You can use this type of title for pretty much any topic.

Instead of “digital marketer” in the example above, you can insert literally anything relevant to your brand that will address the needs of your target audience.

 

 

• Create Compelling Questions

 

Once you have the type and title of your quiz worked out, it’s time to come up with interesting and relevant questions that will keep your quiz takers engaged until the end. You need to make sure that they actually complete your quiz, instead of abandoning it halfway through.

To make your questions as engaging and effective as possible, you should:

• Keep them short and sweet – Don’t overwhelm your quiz takers with long, complex questions. Keep them concise, and don’t provide more than 5 answers per question.

Also, keep the quiz length between 5-10 questions, as that way it won’t take longer than 2-3 minutes for people to take your quiz. Anything longer than that, and you’ll make most of the people bounce back.

 

• Enrich them with captivating images – Adding images to each question (especially to each answer per question) will keep people engaged, and help you make a real connection with them.

• Stick to a relaxed, friendly tone – Craft questions in a friendly tone that reminds of a relaxed conversation with a friend. That way, your quiz takers will instantly feel genuinely comfortable answering all the questions.

This is great for showcasing your personality, and humanizing your brand, especially if you choose to sound a bit informal, which definitely isn’t something to be afraid of. People actually engage more in informal conversations.

 

 

• Craft an Engaging Lead Capture

 

Now, this is where the magic happens. This is where you incentivize your quiz takers to do something that will help you achieve the goal of your quiz. That’s getting them to sign up for your email list, which helps you move a step further in your marketing strategy and generate more conversions and ROI.

It is absolutely vital that you save your lead capture form for the part of the quiz that’s right before the results. There’s no point in trying to capture leads after you’ve provided the quiz results because there’s no incentive to get people to subscribe.

When creating your lead capture form, make sure you have these three crucial things in mind:

Value – If you ask for an email address, and offer nothing in return except for the quiz results, many people may bounce back. This is simply because they wouldn’t want you to potentially bombard them with irrelevant emails every single day (which you should never do).

You need to let them know exactly what value they will get if they subscribe to your email list. You can offer discounts, coupons, a free eBook, an entry to a free giveaway, or anything else that will make them want to share their details with you.

You can also choose to include the option to skip the opt-in step, like in the example above, if you’re perhaps only looking to drive more traffic to your website.

Honesty – You need to be completely transparent when it comes to your marketing strategy so that people know exactly what they’re signing up for. If you plan on sending them daily follow-up emails, let them know, so that they can make an informed decision.

Minimum information requested – Never ask for more information that you’ll actually need. If you’re only going to need your quiz takers’ email addresses, maybe even their first and last names, don’t ask for more information. For instance, don’t ask for a phone number if you’re never going to give them a call.

Requesting only the most necessary information is what will help you actually capture more leads.

 

 

• Create Relevant, Shareworthy Results

 

At this stage of your quiz, you’ve already accomplished your goal, that is, compelled people to sign up to your email list. However, the results you craft are just as important, because you want your quiz takers to actually share them on social media, and help you extend your reach.

Social media platforms give you an opportunity to reach a wide, global audience, so you need to make sure your quiz results truly entice people to share them.

To create the results that people will be more than happy to share on social media, you need to:

Implement eye-catching images – Using high-quality images that instantly grab attention is an absolute must for your quiz results. This is because the image is the first thing people will see when they come across the results someone shared on social media.

Use positive emotions – Positive emotions are precisely what will make people share the results of your quiz. Compliment your quiz takers, and focus only on their best traits, because who doesn’t like being praised for their personality? However, make sure you speak only the truth.

 

Include a compelling CTA – To get the most out of your social media quiz, you should include a CTA (call to action) at the end of the results.

Your CTA could be inviting people to check out your blog and find out more about your brand. It could be a link to your landing page or a product page with personalized recommendations.

 

Or, like in the example above, it could be a link to your guide, an eBook, or anything else of value. Include anything that will entice your audience to keep interacting with your brand, and don’t forget to add social media sharing buttons!

Also Read:

Conclusion: {Detailed Guide} How to Create an Online Quiz For Social Media 2022

Now you’re ready to create an online quiz for social media that people will absolutely love, and share. Just follow this comprehensive guide, and you’ll soon have lots of fun quizzes to share on social media and generate plenty of leads.

CRM systems, or Customer Relation Management systems, are often considered to be business strategies and are now prevalently used in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and in social media marketing.

CRM systems are used for a variety of purposes, including understanding a business’s customer base, attracting new customers, enhancing customer retention by creating better customer experiences and decreasing the cost of customer management.

                                                                    Image Credits: www.runnableconsulting.com

A good CRM system enables businesses to capitalise upon the possibilities that information bestows them with, and considering how important it is that businesses are able to effectively manage the information they’ve collected, it’s imperative that they possess an effective CRM.

A good CRM enables businesses to capture, manage and share information across different departments of their organisation. As many business managers will know from experience, this has traditionally posed problems because information doesn’t always travel easily between departments due to architectural and infrastructural differences.

CRM solutions are essential to good business practices because they enable businesses to effectively manage their customer relationships and that is very important in a crowded marketplace where consumers are seemingly forever on the lookout for better service standards.

Technological advances have aided CRM no end, especially in the field of consumer behaviour; moreover, now that social media networks are as popular as they are, CRM systems now offer businesses new and innovative ways to communicate with their current and future customer base with what is increasingly known as social CRM.

Social CRM

Social CRM is the name given to the addition of the social networking element that’s been added to traditional customer relationship management processes. It builds upon the framework provided by traditional CRM by connecting customer relationships from social media networking websites like Facebook and Twitter and adding them to the CRM process. This trend is increasingly known as SCRM, the abbreviation for Social Customer Relationship Management, or CRM 2.0.

The importance of SEO and social media marketing

Although SEO and social media marketing started as very different processes they have, like many aspects of the digital world, become somewhat intertwined over time. The importance of using SEO and social media marketing as tools of business promotion are increasingly well known and we have reached the point where it’s considered a mistake not to use these effective tools of business promotion to further a business’s interests.

SEO and social media marketing haven’t only proven effective promotional tools, because just as importantly, they’ve also proven to be cost effective tools. This has endeared them to businesses of all sizes because it’s enabled smaller businesses – which were traditionally at a disadvantage due to smaller marketing budgets – to level the playing field to a great extent.

Integrating CRMs, SEO and social media marketing

Integration has become tantamount to success with regard to CRMs, SEO and social media marketing and you’ll find that most, if not all, CRMs now combine and incorporate CRM, SEO, social media and often collaborative tools into the one convenient program like that of Micronet, well known for its Micronet job costing software. Most programs are very cost effective, with some starting from $20 per month, plus there are a few free plans available which represent a great way to try out a CRM solution before buying and implementing it.

Conclusion !

Some programs are better than others with regard to SEO and social media integration, so if you’re the owner or manager of a small business and regularly interact with your customer base on websites like Facebook and Twitter, read several CRM reviews and keep your eyes peeled for multi-faceted applications that seamlessly combine and integrate CRM with SEO and social media.

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