October 3, 2015 By Ed Pudlo Leave a Comment

Check Out These 5 Tips for Better Content Promotion

Yes, it’s done! You created awesome content that will solve a number of the world’s ills with ease. If only they get to read it.

The major obstacle to most content doing the job it was created to do is the lack of eyeballs on it. Creating the content is only half the battle: you need to actively promote that content for all you’re worth to get it to reach as many people as possible. Your content is only as good as how widely it is shared.

So how can you extend your content’s reach? Let’s take a peek at 5 ways you can do just that!

5 Ways to Promote your Content

Use your email list – Sending out an email announcing your new content is a drop-dead easy (and free) way to get more views to your content. Encourage your subscribers to socially share and forward this email to those they know who might be interested.

Post on Social Media – Your social media channels are yet another goldmine for traffic. Make a short post, again encouraging them to share and comment, and drop in a link. Since we don’t always know who has a large following, this can result in quite a few visitors.

Place Ads on Social Media – Social media channels can be a great place to advertise. Often it is very low-cost, and highly targeted. In particular try Facebook and Twitter. A recent wrinkle is the mobile ad platforms, where large amounts of traffic can be had for mere pennies!

Consider Content Amplification Services – A step further is the use of a content amplification service like Outbrain or Taboola. These sites charge you for clicks to your content only, and ads for your content will show up on major media outlets, like CNN, ESPN, Fox News, ABC News and many more. Worth considering if you have strong content that will convert.

Seek out Promotional Sites – There are a number of highly-trafficked sites that are easy to place your links on. Many of these are free or very low-cost. Some of these are sites like Inbound.org, Snip.ly, Scoop.it, Slideshare, BlogEngage, Triberr and AllTop.

Thanks for reading about these “5 Tips for Better Content Promotion”

Let me know how this article was helpful or if you need more information about anything discussed here!

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April 3, 2015 By Ed Pudlo Leave a Comment

Need to Implement Responsive Design? Here Are 5 Tips That Will Help

By this time anyone who is in the business of creating web presence on the internet has at least heard the term responsive design. The fact is responsive design in a must these days if you want your site to show up well, particularly for a mobile-friendly site. This is good, as more than half of all Web traffic is now at least originating on a mobile device of some kind, it’s high time to make sure that your pages are rendering well.

While your web designer (if that’s not you) will do most of the heavy lifting, here are 5 tips for making responsive design work well for your site.

5 Essential tips for Responsive Design

1. Make a plan – A real no-brainer there, but you’d be surprised at how often no planning takes place, resulting in far more cost and time wasted than need be. You have to be able to communicate your needs to the developer clearly, and doing so will require some work on your part.

2. Write content for mobile – One of the last things people want to do with a small screen is scroll through a mountain of text. Your mobile content should be more to the point, perhaps bulleted, and even possibly lead to the full version on the main website.

3. Visual content – Images and videos should be carefully considered when deploying them in your responsive design. First, having too many causes your pages to load slowly which results in bounces, lost visitors and revenue. Not what we want, right? Be sure you size everything consistently and properly for small devices, and test them once done for distortion and load times.

4. Aim for a clean design – It may seem like common sense but take out anything you absolutely don’t need. Mobile searchers are known for even less patience than the average Web surfer, and if your page is loading slowly because of unnecessary elements, you lose!

5. Test calls to action and button sizes – On smaller screens, the size and visual impact of a call to action and accompanying button come in to play. You don’t want them to miss it, or worse, have the button so small that it’s difficult to actually click (my pet peeve!). Not good. Test religiously. Then test again.

Why Responsive Design?

Most often, sites are designed on a desktop or laptop resulting in content that is targeted for that type of device. That’s just human nature. But more and more, the content is being consumed on mobile devices where the screen size is often much smaller.

Taking responsive design into account when working on your site is more work. But it is definitely becomes more important every day as mobile use overtakes devices with larger screen sizes.

So you do need to keep all form factors in mind when creating content for your responsive site. To do that, be sure to add these five tips to your checklist!