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Best Employee Retirement Plans

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

Starting an employee retirement plan is not too hard or expensive, even for small businesses.

Plus, these programs offer tax advantages to both the employees and the company, which leave more money in everyone’s account.

Offering such benefits is a great way to attract qualified candidates and gives your top talent a huge reason to stay. 

The sooner you start the better.

First, I’ll walk you through the different types of employee retirement plans available. There are more than just 401(k) plans helping people save for post-career life, including some types that are specifically made for small businesses.

Then we’ll take a look at what to consider as you decide on which provider you want to manage your employee retirement plan. 

There’s a little bit to know, sure, but a lot to be gained. 

For almost everyone, retirement is the largest expense of their lifetime. By offering a plan to help them save, employers provide a much needed sense of security to employees thinking about their family’s future.

Keep reading to start getting better candidates, happier employees, and serious tax-breaks every year.

The Top 4 Options for Employee Retirement Plans

1. Guideline – Easiest way to start a 401(k)
2. Human Interest – Best 401(k) for small to midsize organizations
3. Nationwide – Best for large organizations
4. Vanguard – Best SIMPLE IRA

The Different Types of Employee Retirement Plans

In terms of picking an appropriate type of employee retirement plan, employers need to pay attention to a few important details.

For all the tax law and government regulations involved, the choice comes down to the basic structure of each plan, which doesn’t take an MBA to understand.

Plus, after partnering with a good coverage provider, you’ll have someone to help you close gaps in knowledge, forecast what each plan will realize in the years to come, and steer you toward a more appropriate plan if it’s not the right fit.

Let’s dig in.

Qualified employee retirement plans—that is, those that have tax advantages—fall in two major categories, only one of which is used widely today:

• Defined benefits plans are managed entirely by employers. These are also known as pensions and pay out a set benefit each month. These were really popular until the 1980s, but are being phased out because of how expensive they are for employers to maintain.
• Defined contribution plans are much more common today. With these plans, employees contribute money from each paycheck toward their retirement. Companies may choose to match employee contributions, as well.

The amount that employees contribute, the company contributes, and how that money is taxed varies from plan to plan. Companies have some flexibility in how they enact each plan, but many of the basic rules and limits are set by the federal government.

Important note: Plans have different limits for how much employees and employers can contribute each year. These limits change periodically because the government adjusts for cost-of-living increases. The IRS provides current limitations on benefits contribution limits for every type of employee retirement plan limits for benefits and contributions maintained by the IRS.

It’s really important to understand the essential rules of each plan and how it will help people save over the long term. 

Let’s go through the most widely-used types of defined contribution plan, how they are different, and which sorts of companies use them. The ones I’m going to cover are:

• 401(k) plans
• Roth 401(k) plans
• SEP plans
• SIMPLE IRA
• Payroll deduction IRA
• Profit Sharing Plans

There are some types of employee retirement plan options that I haven’t covered here, but these are the most common plans available.

401(k) Plans

A 401(k) plan is an employer-sponsored retirement savings account. Employees contribute a portion of their salary to the account, which may or may not be matched by the employer.

Contributions are pre-tax, which means they are not taxed until the employee withdraws funds from the 401(k), typically after they retire. The amount that employees contribute also reduces their taxable income each year.

The money in a 401(k) grows tax-deferred (as in not taxed until retirement) and sets an employee’s retirement savings on autopilot. A little bit of the gross of each paycheck goes straight into their nest egg each month.

Companies may choose to match the employee contributions, but it doesn’t have to be a 100% match. It is usually based on a formula they set. An example of a common matching formula is an employer who matches 50% of contributions up to 6% of salary.

Matching contributions are tax-deductible, so a 401(k) can be part of a company’s tax strategy, helping both employer and employee save more for the future. 

It gets even better.

Thanks to new legislation in 2019, the tax credit for businesses starting a 401(k) is now as much as $5,000 and no less than $500 per year for three years, with an additional $500 for setting up autoenrollment. The credit can go towards setup and administrative costs.

There is a lot more paperwork necessary to get a 401(k) started than with other plans, so this tax credit can help smooth the transition and get everything set up properly. Once it’s established, 401(k) plans let employees contribute a lot more money each year than other types of plans.

Investment options for a 401(k) are determined by the plan the company chooses. Employees may get some say in where they invest the money, though they will most often be choosing from a limited portfolio of options.

Withdrawing funds early (before age 59½) will result in a 10% penalty on top of the taxes owed. There are exceptions to this rule, though, for workers over 55, which allows them to avoid the penalty for early withdrawals. This only includes the 401(k) of the job they leave, not retirement plans with other former companies.

There are also special rules for people who have an “immediate and heavy financial need.” This is known as a hardship distribution and means people can use money from their 401(k) without penalty for things like necessary medical treatment or to avoid foreclosure and eviction.

There are two common variations of the 401(k) available to specific types of workers:

• 403(b) plans: employees of public schools, colleges, universities, churches, tax-exempt, and non-profit organizations
• 457(b) plans: employees of state and local governments

With the exception of a few special rules, these plans are identical to the 401(k)

Roth 401(k) Plans

Employers may choose to sponsor a Roth 401(k), which is virtually identical to a traditional 401(k) except that contributions are made after-tax.

This is an important change that has pros and cons.

Employees are not able to deduct contributions from their taxes, so they’re not decreasing their tax burden as they save, which is a benefit of a traditional 401(k). 

On the flipside, with a Roth 401(k) they get to withdraw both their contributions and earnings tax-free once they reach retirement. 

Another nice perk is that you can make withdrawals tax free once the plan has been established for five years. You would still have to pay taxes on earnings for an early withdrawal, but not the money you have already paid taxes on.

So that’s the tradeoff. With a Roth 401(k) you pay taxes now, but when you retire, all of the savings and earnings are yours without a haircut from Uncle Sam..

This could work very well for a young employee who thinks they are going to earn more later in life. They pay taxes on income now and avoid paying when they’re in a higher bracket.

It’s not the best for everyone, though, as senior employees may not want to pay taxes at their current bracket. For them, it’s likely better to pay upon retirement and take the deductions now.

Some companies may choose to offer both a Roth and traditional 401(k), allowing employees to choose how best to save for retirement. 

SEP Plans

A simplified employee pension (SEP) is a type of individual retirement account (IRA) offered by an employer. 

It’s a lot less complex to manage than a 401(k), which makes it ideal for smaller businesses and people who are self-employed.

Only employers contribute to the SEP and these contributions are tax-deductible. The money is held in an IRA in the employee’s name and grows tax-deferred. 

The contribution limits are much higher for a SEP than for a personal IRA, allowing people to set aside a lot more money than they could otherwise. There are also fewer rules about income limits, which make it good for high earners.

SEP plans are nice because of their flexibility. Companies have to contribute the same percentage to all eligible employees each year, but that percentage can change. 

During a good year, for example, an employer may choose to max out contributions, whereas they might not contribute anything if the business is strapped for cash.

Because these plans are easier to manage and they let businesses contribute flexible amounts each year, SEP plans are great for smaller businesses that want to grow and help their employees save at the same time.

SIMPLE IRA

A SIMPLE IRA is an employee retirement plan for businesses with 100 employees or fewer that doesn’t offer another qualified retirement plan, like a 401(k).

SIMPLE stands for “Savings Incentive Match PLan for Employees,” and is appropriately named because the plan requires very little administrative paperwork. It’s really just the initial plan and annual disclosures. 

Employees can choose to contribute a portion of their salary to the SIMPLE IRA and employers are required to either:

• Match employee contributions dollar for dollar up to 3% of an employee’s compensation, or
• Make a fixed contribution of 2% of compensation for all eligible employees, regardless of whether the employees contribute themselves.

The low startup costs and administrative burden make it ideal for smaller companies that want the tax advantages of a retirement plan without the legwork that goes into a 401(k).

The downsides to a SIMPLE IRA are the contribution limits—which are less than a 401(k)—and the 25% the penalties for early withdrawal are steep during the first two years.

Payroll Deduction IRA

A payroll deduction IRA allows companies to set up an employee retirement plan without filing anything with the government.

Employers work with a financial institution to make it so employees can automatically divert part of their paycheck to an IRA. The employer can designate one or multiple IRA providers to receive distributions, but they don’t have a say in the investment options.

In this plan employees make all the contributions. There is no matching, but contributions are tax deductible, which can help employees save each year.

A payroll deduction IRA is a low-cost, zero-risk way for a company to encourage their employees to save for retirement. 

Profit Sharing Plans

Profit sharing plans (PSPs) can be set up by employers or with help from a financial institution. Each year, the employer contributes to the plan based on business conditions, effectively sharing profits with employees.

Employers decide how much, if anything, they want to contribute each year.

All of the assets in the plan are held in a trust, which is overseen by a trustee who ensures the integrity of contributions, participants, distributions, and reporting.

Employers have a large degree of freedom in terms of how these plans are structured, but they require more oversight than a SEP plan or SIMPLE IRA. This is true even if an employer is sharing the responsibility with a financial institution. 

Profit sharing plans can be set up in addition to other qualified employee retirement plans, like a 401(k). They are a good option for profitable companies that want to help employees save more and decrease their current tax burden.

How to Choose the Best Employee Retirement Plan Option for You

Once you know which employee retirement plan—or set of plans—makes sense with your goals and resources, it’s time to select a financial institution to help you make it a reality. 

Banks, mutual funds, and insurance companies are all appropriate options that can help businesses set up and manage an employee retirement plan.

How do you choose the right one to be your coverage provider?

While institutions offer the same basic set of employee retirement plans, the levels of service they provide are not identical by any means. They have varying degrees of support, charge fees according to their own rules, and offer different kinds of investments.

All of these factors can have a big impact on tax strategy and the health of a retirement fund over time.

Before we look at the top providers for employee retirement plans, I want to highlight the major criteria you can use to evaluate how it will work for your company. 

Administrative Responsibilities

Some of the simpler employee retirement plans are attractive because there is not a lot of administrative overhead. Other plans, like a 401(k) or profit sharing plan, have a lot of moving parts and regulatory requirements.

After the plan is set up, there are a variety of things that have to happen, including:

• Preparing benefit statements, returns, and reports required by law
• Allocating contributions
• Processing distributions (employee payouts)
• Assessing compliance with contribution limits and non-discrimination
• Amending plan documents

As you search for different plans, it’s important to understand what the employer is responsible for, what the provider is going to do, and how much all of that is going to cost.

Plan Fees 

With payroll deduction, SEP and SIMPLE IRA plans, there’s not a ton of administrative paperwork or fees. For those plans, there are likely to be low yearly rates and then other fees depending on how employees invest their money.

With any type of 401(k) plan, on the other hand, there is a lot more paperwork, larger amounts of money at stake, and fees can really impact people’s savings over time. 

How these fees break down can be incredibly complex, especially when there are multiple providers servicing the plan.

Fortunately for employers, all covered service providers are required by law to explain how they are compensated in a 408(b)(2) disclosure. 

This will show how every party is being paid out of the 401(k), including:

• Direct compensation: fees paid directly to the provider
• Indirect compensation: fees paid from plan investments

Direct fees are easy to identify, but indirect compensation fees can be more difficult to figure out. This could include revenue sharing, where a financial advisor’s management fee is paid out of investment earnings rather than directly. 

This means revenue sharing will show up as a percentage of plan assets rather than a hard dollar amount.

These fees should be explained on the 408(b)(2) in order for employers to make an informed decision, and the government encourages providers to walk employers through all of the fees.

At the end of the day, however, providers can hide fees in ways that can be really challenging to track down, even if you know what you are looking for.

This is why it is so valuable to find a retirement plan provider who is transparent and upfront about fees.

Once you have established a 401(k), you will want to keep a close eye on your 404(a)(5) Participant Fee Disclosure. This will show all of the fees that your plan faces.

Investments Options

Where is all of this money going to go? It’s not just getting parked in a savings account.

Depending on the plan you choose, your employees will have different types of options about where and how their money is invested. Typically, these include:

• Bond funds
• Foreign funds
• Index funds,
• Large-cap and small-cap funds
• Mutual funds
• Real estate funds

These options tend to include relatively safe and stable investment opportunities, but may include more aggressive growth funds as well.

With simpler plans, there are usually less options than with a 401(k). Depending on the provider you choose, you may be able to offer a limited portfolio of choices or wide selection of investment options to your employees. 

Generally speaking, a wider range of investment options requires more oversight, paperwork, and fees.

Some will offer brokerage windows, which allow employees to self-direct the investment of their retirement funds. 

This allows companies to offer a wider range of options and control to their employees without necessarily having to absorb any extra responsibility. Employees will make their own decisions and take their own risks.

This can be really attractive because people may want to save differently, depending on where they are in their career. 

It’s a healthy practice to diversify types of investments for retirement to more easily weather shocks to individual slices of the market. 

Giving employees more choice is good, but it comes at a cost. You might be surprised at how diverse a portfolio can be created from the relatively narrow options in a plan like Human Interest.

Payroll Integration

Find an employee retirement plan that integrates with your payroll. I’m talking about seamless, direct integration where your provider is communicating directly with your payroll service. You never have to update information yourself.

A lot of the time you are going to see hands-free or no-touch solutions. That’s only true if it integrates directly with your payroll or HR services. 

If not, there’s going to be a lot of data entry and administrative tasks involved with managing a 401(k). It’s worth seriously considering switching to a different payroll service if you can’t find something that integrates with a plan you like.

It could be a huge pain, especially if you are working with a HR service or PEO, but what are the consequences of choosing a plan with less-than-ideal benefits? They could be massive, in the long-term. 

Plus, you might wind up having to employ full-time staff to manage payroll functions that could be automated. 

Not having payroll integration might be okay for a SEP or SIMPLE IRA, as they don’t have as much administrative overhead. 

At the same time, the integration would eliminate dozens of steps to process monthly contributions for every employee. What small business owner wouldn’t want to save a few hours a month making sure the retirement fund is in order?

Support

If everything goes well, the relationship between your business and retirement plan provider is going to last a long time. Over the years, the quality of communication and support you receive are going to have a major impact.

Be aware that you may have to pay extra for the type of support you want. 

Human Interest, for example, will provide different levels of customer service depending on the pricing tier. It’s no accident that their different plans are called Essentials, Complete, and Concierge. 

With Essentials, employers pay less, but have to do more on their own. Concierge, on the other hand, comes with dedicated account management at a higher price tag.

Another thing to do is read online reviews from current customers to get a sense of how dependable providers are. This can give you a more authentic picture of what to expect than a provider’s marketing material, though you should take reviews with a grain of salt.

#1 – Guideline — Easiest Way to Start a 401(k)

Guideline is a 401(k) provider that doesn’t charge any fees on investments and handles all of the administrative paperwork. This makes Guideline both one of the most affordable and one of the easiest ways to start a 401(k) for your employees.

It can help employers set up both traditional and Roth 401(k) plans, with or without matching options. Employers can also create profit sharing plans that work as a year-end contribution to an employee’s 401(k), like a bonus.

The way the pricing works is that Guideline charges a base fee per month, plus $8/month per employee. There is no extra charge for annual reports, government filings, or custodial services.

This flat monthly fee makes the pricing predictable, which is markedly different from most other employee retirement plan options. There’s no complicated revenue sharing or third-party fees eating into people’s savings.

The reason that Guideline is so inexpensive is that they have built software that automates almost every 401(k) administrative task. 

Guideline has direct integrations with eight of the best payroll services, like ADP, Gusto QuickBooks, and Square. These sync your payroll and HR data in real time with no work on your part.

Guideline also provides intuitive dashboards for employers and employees, so they can monitor their retirement account and can choose from more than 40 index funds in which they can invest their money. 

Alternatively, they can invest in a managed portfolio of stocks and bonds.

Managed portfolios are entirely overseen by Guideline, so there is not a lot of freedom to pick individual investments. They simply pick the risk level—like conservative, moderate, or very aggressive—and they are automatically invested in a range of stocks, bonds, and funds that meet their goals.

This eliminates any work for employees. Portfolios are rebalanced automatically, which ensures that people are always investing in a diverse, risk-tolerant set of assets.

For Guideline, the base fee is $39/month (plus the aforementioned $8/month per employee), which includes all of the administrative fees, live customer support, and employee onboarding.

Guideline Prime has a $99/month base fee with the same per-employee charge, and comes with a dedicated account manager, customizable financial and billing reports, and additional tools for profit sharing plans.

Any company of any size can get started with Guideline today and have an employee retirement plan in place tomorrow.

#2 – Human Interest — Best 401(k) for Small to Midsize Organizations

Human Interest provides a low-cost, hands-off 401(k) solution that works really well for startups and SMBs.

The interface is modern, easy to navigate, and effortless to set up. They can handle all the administrative tasks, including recordkeeping and IRS compliance, while boasting more than 50 payroll integrations. 

The major tradeoff with this fully managed provider is the lack of investment options and retirement plans. They only offer 401(k) plans, profit sharing plans, and 403(b) plans for employees of public schools and tax-exempt organizations.

There are more than 30,000 mutual and index funds to choose from, but no other types of investment options.

Larger organizations might find the lack of diversity an issue, but companies that just want to set up a stable, no-frills retirement plan will find Human Interest to be a high-quality option.

The simplicity of the platform keeps costs low and administrative overhead to a minimum.

I recommend it for people who want to put their employee retirement plan on auto-pilot. They can focus on work and the savings will take care of itself in the long run. Low-risk index funds and mutual funds will build wealth over time with no special attention necessary.

It’s particularly effective for people who don’t want to learn about financial markets. Retirement funds are managed entirely by Human Interest, though they do make self-directed options available.

There are three different pricing tiers available, which are based on the level of administrative support:

• Essentials: $120/month base fee, plus $4/month per employee
• Complete: $150/month base fee, plus $6/month per employee
• Concierge: $150/month base fee, plus $8/month per employee

The Essentials tier offers a phenomenal price for an all-in-one 401(k) solution. Adding eligible employees at $4/month is less than even Guideline, though Human Interest’s monthly base fee is higher.

For small and midsize companies that are trying to grow, Human Interest lets them offer an affordable plan to attract good workers. As they scale that plan, costs remain low and predictable.

With Complete, Human Interest takes over a lot more of the administrative work, including signing and filing all of your IRS documents. Concierge comes with all of that, plus dedicated account management.

You can get started with Human Interest in fifteen minutes, the company says. Think about the difference those fifteen minutes could make fifteen years down the road.

#3 – Nationwide — Best for Large Organizations

Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company is one of the largest insurance and financial services groups in the United States and a member of the Fortune 100.

They offer every type of employee retirement plan I’ve talked about and they can administer other types of benefits as well, such as health savings accounts (HSAs). 

They also provide a rich selection of investment options, as well, including a wide array of funds, bonds, and stocks.

Employees have a lot of say in how their investments are handled. They can choose a hands-off approach—like professional account management—where employees just sit back and let advisors drive.

These accounts are nice for employees who are not experienced investors, though they should understand how much they are paying for management. Most of these fees will be indirect, but Nationwide prides themselves on explaining all plan fees as clearly as possible.

Nationwide offers other options that give employees more control. At the hands-on end of the spectrum, employees can open up a self-directed brokerage account and invest in virtually any publicly-traded mutual fund, exchange-traded fund (ETF), bond or stock.

I like it for large organizations because of the wide array of plan and investment options. Large organizations need to be able to offer employee retirement plans that suit workers of all ages and abilities.

Rank and file workers have the freedom to invest how they want, and employers can create special benefits packages for top talent. 

Nationwide also supports multiple types of auto enrollment. This can help increase plan participation in a way that makes sense for both the employee and employer.

You’ll have to get in touch with Nationwide for pricing. Because they already service more than 2.5 million participants and $141 billion in retirement assets, you can be confident that they will help your company grow its savings as well.

#4 –  Vanguard — Best SIMPLE IRA

Vanguard is one of the world’s largest investment companies. They offer virtually every type of employee retirement plan available and give people a huge range of investments to choose from.

I recommend Vanguard for businesses that qualify for a SIMPLE IRA and want to set one up. This includes self-employed individuals, small business owners, and businesses with less than 100 people that don’t have another qualified retirement plan.

Vanguard doesn’t charge you anything to set up an account. There is a $25 annual fee for each fund in the SIMPLE IRA, but no additional costs beyond that.

And, once you have $50,000 of qualifying assets in your Vanguard fund, the $25 fees are waived. The annual fee then shifts to 0.30% of the total assets managed.

When it comes to administrative support, there’s not much to worry about with a SIMPLE IRA. There are no reporting requirements for the IRS, although there are certain employee notifications required.

In the event that something goes wrong, however, Vanguard has a stellar reputation for customer service and investor support.

Another reason to choose Vanguard is the wealth of investment options. This is true for companies that want to set up a 401(k), SEP, or other retirement plan, not just a SIMPLE IRA.

Employees using Vanguard for retirement may invest in more than 100 different mutual funds. This includes some of Vanguard’s index funds, which have generated incredibly consistent returns for investors year after year.

Summary

The sooner you begin an employee retirement plan the sooner everyone can start saving. It provides employees with an unrivaled sense of security and helps them keep a long-term perspective when the day-to-day gets tough.

Both Guideline and Human Interest are going to work for self-employed individuals, small business owners, and midsize businesses. 

Guideline has the more diverse investment options, and a lower base fee each month. Human interest has the ability to support 403(b) plans in addition to 401(k), and may come at a lower monthly cost per employee.

For larger organizations, or smaller organizations that want to start a different type of retirement plan than a 401(k), Nationwide and Vanguard offer a wide range of options.

Nationwide is my top pick for organizations because of the deep range of investment opportunities. Individual employees save on their own terms, and employers can build out plans that help them make the most of every dollar.

While Vanguard has the resources to help any company save for the future, I wanted to call out their SIMPLE IRA because it is such a good deal for qualified small businesses. If the 401(k) is too daunting, a SIMPLE IRA with Vanguard is just the plan to start saving.

The post Best Employee Retirement Plans appeared first on Neil Patel.

source https://neilpatel.com/blog/best-employee-retirement-plans/

How to Make Money Blogging

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

Is it actually possible to make a living out of blogging? Or is it just a myth?

Here’s the good news: You CAN make money from blogging. You just have to do it right.

Take my blog as an example.

Blogging played a crucial role in my success. But reaching this point did have its fair share of obstacles, mistakes, and lessons.

Currently, my revenue is $381,772 for 30 days. 

Now, that’s a LOT of money, especially for a blog.

But how am I able to pull this off?

I was completely dedicated and put in tons of hard work to create useful and detailed content and use relevant images to provide accurate and thorough information to my readers.

This helped me become an authoritative figure and thought leader in my niche.

And no, it doesn’t have to take you years to become a successful blogger. 

Knowing the art of consistently churning out top-quality content, driving search engine traffic, leveraging social media, and generating leads is great. But you also need to know how to make money from your blog.

The process is certainly challenging, especially with the internet painted with a lot of bad advice. 

But this isn’t one of those articles.

In this guide, I’ll show you the exact way to make money from blogging by avoiding the mistakes I’d made in my 10-year journey. So not only will your blogging success be easier, but it also is quicker.

Excited? Let’s begin. 

Your 2-Minute Cheat Sheet

The very first thing you need to start making money is to come up with an idea and the name for your blog. Think through the topics you’d want to write about often.

After that, sign up for the Basic plan with Bluehost. Even if you don’t have much of a budget, this is practically a steal at just $2.95 per month. 

Set up your account, taking care to skip all the add-ons except for domain privacy and protection. A few extra dollars for better privacy and security is an investment.

And with this, you’ll have your own blog domain. Hurrah!

The next steps will have you installing WordPress and then finally writing and publishing your first blog post.

Once you’ve posted a couple of blogs and have started to attract some traffic, you can work on monetizing it to make your first dollars.

For this, you’ll have to sign up for a Google AdSense and Amazon Associates account to make money through ads and affiliate marketing, respectively. You can also sell your own products and services after successfully driving high traffic to your site.

That was the basics. Let’s get into the details now.

Step 1: Figure Out Your Blog’s Niche

The first on the agenda is to decide what your blog is going to be about. Whether you want to talk about marketing, CBD, veganism, or just random life stories, figure it out.

Remember, your idea doesn’t have to be revolutionary, but you do need a unique voice.

Here are two tips for deciding on a blog niche:

Choose Something That You Enjoy

I know that this sounds like a cliche, but it makes no sense to blog about it if you don’t love the topic.

Never start blogging about something that you don’t love–it will show in your writing and your readers will know. Moreover, you won’t be able to consistently produce top-notch content to build your audience and later monetize from it.

Make a list of things that get you naturally curious and that you enjoy learning about. Or think about what your friends and family come to you when seeking advice.

Find Out Whether a Prospective Niche Has a Readership

The only way you can earn money through your blog is if you have enough site visitors. 

Let’s assume you’ve already figured out your blog niche and want to write about arts and crafts.

You make a smart decision to niche down further and develop a blog exclusively dedicated to either paper art or scrapbooking. While you enjoy writing about both topics, you prefer to focus on one primarily.

But how do you choose between the two options? 

Answer: Do a quick Google search.

As you can see, there are far more results related to paper art as opposed to scrapbooking. Therefore, it makes more sense to write about paper art, which is what audiences are searching for. 

I would also like to add that it’s better to avoid broad or generic topics. Don’t be afraid to get specific as long as you have takers for it. 

For instance, if you want to create a food blog, don’t use words like “food.” Instead, use “barbecue” or “vegan.”

Get my point?

Step 2: Name Your Blog

Once an idea is in place, you need to work on naming your blog.

Does the name Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta ring a bell? Thought so.

But I bet Lady Gaga does.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta is Lady Gaga’s real name. She decided to go with a catchier and easier-to-remember alternative that aligns better with her music. 

That’s the power of the right name.

Choosing a blog name is equal parts exciting and daunting. After all, this will be your brand name and dictate how people will remember you.

Don’t overthink it, and don’t name your blog something random or offensive.

Keep in mind the following questions when deciding on a name:

• Does it reflect what your blog is going to be about?
• Would your target audience like it?
• Is the name easy to say and spell?
• Is it short and concise?

I chose my own name as my domain (NeilPatel.com) simply because Neil Patel is who I am, and it’s also my brand. You could do what I did or come up with something entirely different.

Whatever name you come up with, make sure it’s available as website domains. 

You can use Bluehost’s domain name checker for this purpose. Type in each potential name in the search bar, and click Check Availability to know.

I’d recommend opting for a .com whenever possible.

Don’t buy an available domain at this point. I have something up my sleeve to help you get it for free.

Step 3: Sign up With a Web Host Like Bluehost

You need to sign up for a web hosting service to get your blog live, along with a registered domain name that will serve as your blog’s address.

I recommend Bluehost as its hands down one of the best web hosting companies—not to mention affordable—that assures excellent service and a free domain.

And did I mention that as a NeilPatel.com reader, you get an additional discount?

You’re welcome.

Head over to Bluehost.com, and click on the green Get Started Now button. 

Next, sign up for the Basic plan. You can always upgrade later, but since you’re just starting a blog, it’s better to stick to the Basic plan.

Register the domain name you came up with without having to pay anything extra. Just make sure the drop-down is set to .com before you click Next.

Following this, you need to sign in using your Google account. You can also manually enter your personal credentials. 

Scroll down to choose your registration term, which can either be a 36-month, a 24-month, or a 12-month agreement. To get the best deal ($2.95 per month), you’ll have to sign up for a three-year contract.

It still isn’t over yet.

You’ll find package options like Domain Privacy + Protection, Codeguard Basic, Bluehost SEO Tools, Microsoft 365 Mailbox Trial, and SiteLock Security Essentials.

In my opinion, you only need Domain Privacy + Protection to protect your contact information against scam callers and unsolicited emails. Ignore the others.

Finally, enter your payment information, read the terms and conditions, and hit submit.

This is the point where you’ll have your blog! 

Complete all the remaining instructions to set up your account, and then move onto the next step.

Step 4: Install WordPress CMS

You have your web host, next you need blogging software.

I trust WordPress to run all my blogs as it is user-friendly, feature-rich, and free. Plus, you can install thousands of free plugins to make your blog more functional and customize it however you want.

After signing up for Bluehost, you will have a free domain and hosting account. Log in by filling in your credentials and then click on Install WordPress. 

Next, select Do it yourself (FREE) and hit Install, followed by Check Domain. Lastly, acknowledge WordPress’s terms of service and finalize your install.

Ta-Da! You now have a fully functional WordPress blog ready to roll.

Step 5: Design Your WordPress Blog

To design a blog, you need to select an attractive and affordable WordPress theme.

Why do you need this? Well, after signing up for WordPress, your blog will look something like this:

Not exactly what you’d call sleek and welcoming, right? The way your website looks can help drive more website traffic, which, in turn, will enable you to make more money.

Luckily, WordPress has thousands and thousands of themes for you to choose from. I’ve even done a roundup of some of the best ones. Here’s how you can select a WordPress theme:

1. Log into your WordPress account.
2. Click on Appearance in the sidebar menu on your dashboard. 
3. From the drop-down options, select Themes.

4. Go to Add New, located at the very top of the screen, to gain access to thousands of fancy WordPress themes. You can also click on Feature Filter to filter your search to see options more suited to your tastes.

You should choose a theme that fits your personal style, but at the same time, it should also be in sync with your blog niche.

5. Preview the theme to see what it will look like. 
6. If you like the sneak peek of a specific theme, click on Install and then Activate.

With a nice new theme, your website will get a much-needed upgrade that makes it look appealing to visitors.

Step 6: Come up With Interesting Blog Topics

If you want to increase your website traffic or encourage more email signups, you need to offer your readers interesting content. 

My tip is to make a list of questions you get often. Trust me, within just 30 minutes, you’ll be able to come up with a bunch of potential blog topics. Your priority should be to look at things from your reader’s viewpoint.

You can also focus on higher-level questions.

Suppose you want to start a parenting blog for stay-at-home moms. Below, I’ve created a list of questions to ask yourself, along with a list of answers concerning the mom blog.

Q1) What could be an intriguing or exciting talking point for your readers?

For stay-at-home moms, topics related to sleep training, homeschooling, and budget-friendly meal ideas could be a great place to start.

Q2) What are your reader’s pain points and challenges?

Common household challenges for stay-at-home moms could be meal planning, understanding developmental milestones, and so on.

Q3) What are your readers’ character traits?

Moms are typically patient and caring and appreciate a sense of humor.

Q4) What niche topics would appeal the most to your readers?

A child’s mental, physical, and emotional development could be attractive talk points for stay-at-home moms.

Q5) What topics would your readers hate about my niche?

Stay-at-home moms don’t like to be looked down on by others. So, you could write blogs about how society views them and their impact.

Similarly, you can use the above questions to come up with ideas according to your niche. While you’re at it, don’t forget to work out a catchy headline that will make the reader instantly click on your blog.

Step 7: Optimize Your Blogs for the SERPs

Search engine optimization or SEO is a crucial step to earn money via blogging. Here, you will optimize your website to rank higher in search engines for specific keywords and phrases.

If you’ve been following me for a long time, you may already know how SEO is my trump card.

By incorporating particular keywords and phrases, I’ve successfully driven more than 30 million visitors to my website. Shocked?

That’s the power of SEO.

On WordPress, you can optimize your content and blog by downloading a plugin called Yoast SEO. 

Go to the Plugins menu, and click on Add New. Search for Yoast SEO in the search bar, and then install the plugin. 

Don’t forget to activate it to complete the installation process.

You’ll find that this plugin will give you all kinds of improvement tips and suggestions based on the keyword you select to help you optimize your content. I’d recommend incorporating as many suggestions as you can to improve SEO and content readability.

Step 8: Sign up for Google AdSense

Setting up ads is the best way to monetize your blog. But you need to be smart about it.

The biggest mistake people make is to bombard their sites with blinking ads. Avoid this at all costs. 

Instead, focus on using targeted ads that appeal to your customers without annoying them.

To start earning money through ads, you need a Google AdSense account. Head over to the AdSense page, and click on Sign Up Now. If you don’t have an existing Google account, you have to set up a new one. If you already have a Google account, simply sign in.

Fill out all the relevant information before submitting your application. The AdSense team reviews every application, and if everything goes well, you’ll be in!

Next, follow the below steps to set up your account:

1. Go to your AdSense dashboard and click on My Ads > New ad unit.
2. Select the size of your ad and the type of ad. Once you’re done, select Save and get code. 

3. You’ll get a bit of code that you’ll then have to copy and paste between your page’s <body> tags. Here’s how it’ll look.

4. Once you’ve pasted the code, your ad will be live. Your AdSense dashboard will have all information about your earnings, so check it regularly.

While you can use ads on as many as you want, I would recommend starting with just one–maybe two max–to get an idea of how your audience responds to them. 

If you see a higher bounce rate on your dashboard, you should consider repositioning your current ads for better results.

Step 9: Create an Amazon Associates Account

You might have already heard of affiliate marketing. If your goal is to earn passive income, leveraging the power of affiliates is your best bet.

You can start by signing up for Amazon Associates, which allows you to start earning right away through referral links, display ads, or Amazon-based shopping carts. 

If your visitors decide to use your referral link or click on the display ads, you’ll get a small commission.

To sign up for Amazon Associates, all you need to do is visit the website and click on Join Now for Free.

This can be pretty effective. Just check out these earnings of Brendan Mace for definitive proof.

Amazon Associates isn’t the only affiliate program. 

You’ll be happy to know that there are plenty of companies with their own affiliate programs, some of which pay higher commissions than Amazon. Just make sure to research before signing up to be an affiliate for a brand.

That said, I’d also like to emphasize the importance of advertising only those products or services that you’ve used yourself or genuinely believe can help your audience.

Step 10: Offer a Product or Service for Sale (Optional)

Many people think that advertisements are the only source of income for bloggers. This might be true for a few, but you’ll also find many bloggers make quite a bit of money by selling a product or service.

Of course, this will only work when you already have a loyal readership with steady website traffic like Nomadic Matt. Once you’re at this stage, you shouldn’t be afraid to take the leap.

Here are a few things that you can consider selling:

• Training courses
• Books
• Video courses/webinars
• Coaching services
• Consulting services

Next, you have to figure out how you want to sell your product. Services like Shopify or WooCommerce plugins on WordPress, Amazon, or Etsy are great options for digital products. If you’re selling a physical product (like phone cases or clothes), you’ll have to set up a more comprehensive ecommerce store. 

Finally, let your audience know about your product or service by sending them emails. You can also consider developing lead magnets like pre-recorded webinars, PDFs, and whitepapers to build your email list.

Conclusion

There’s a difference between simply having a blog and monetizing a blog. To make this transition successful, you’ll need to adopt a more proactive and focused approach.

You’ve got this! 

Just remain focused and work consistently to keep improving your blog and build trust between you and your audience. And follow my steps above to get things started on the right track.

Remember to stick with what works, and you’ll have a successful formula.

Have you tried blogging yet? Let me know about your experience.

The post How to Make Money Blogging appeared first on Neil Patel.

source https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-make-money-blogging/

Why You Should Audit Your YouTube Channel

How do you ensure your YouTube channel is reaching the right audience and helping you achieve your marketing objectives? By performing a YouTube audit.

With over 2 billion active users, YouTube is among the world’s most popular social media platforms. Roughly 73 percent of US adults have a YouTube account, which means it’s an excellent opportunity for marketers to generate new leads and promote content.

But, if you want to make the most of this channel, you need to ensure your content is high-quality, targeted, and optimized.

Why Your YouTube Channel Needs an Audit

YouTube isn’t just a social media platform. It’s also a highly sophisticated search engine, just like Google.

In other words, you need an effective YouTube search engine optimization or “SEO” strategy to maximize your chances of:

• Appearing in video search results
• Reaching the right audience
• Converting users into subscribers and, ultimately, paying customers

If you’re totally new to SEO, you might find this video helpful.

A YouTube audit reveals how well your channel is performing and whether it’s helping you achieve your business objectives.

Among other things, it will help you understand:

• Which videos have the most views
• If people watch your videos all the way through
• How many subscribers you have
• Whether your videos appear in search results

Keep in mind that over 500 hours of new content appears on YouTube every minute, which means there’s fierce competition. Everything on your channel should be geared towards standing out and providing value.

Roughly 50 percent of shoppers use online videos to decide between different products. What’s more, a whopping 90 percent of users discover new brands just by browsing their favorite YouTube channels.

That means there’s a huge opportunity to find new customers and build brand trust— if you provide users with valuable content. A YouTube audit is the best way to check if you’re leveraging your channel to its fullest potential.

Ready to overhaul your channel and ensure you’re getting the most from your video marketing strategy? Let’s get started.  

YouTube Audit Phase 1: Analyze Your KPI Performance

You need to understand how your channel is performing right now. This is where KPIs, or key performance indicators, come in.

What exactly are KPIs, though? Well, they’re metrics that help you assess how effectively it’s generating results for your business. On YouTube, that might include watch times, views, impressions, and clicks.

With KPI data at your fingertips, you can take targeted action to improve your content, increase your subscriber base, and boost your YouTube rankings. For example, you can track where your viewer traffic comes from and your most popular videos.  

You can access these KPIs through YouTube analytics, which is the platform’s metrics tool.

• Log into your YouTube account
• Click on your account avatar at the top right-hand corner
• Choose “YouTube Studio” from the menu options to access the analytics center

At a glance, you can see exactly how your channel is performing and access specific KPIs for more advanced information.

Pay special attention to which videos are doing well — and which ones aren’t. Consider adding all your videos to a spreadsheet you can edit as you work through the optimization steps.

OK, so stage one is completed.

You have your KPI breakdown, and now it’s time to take action and improve your performance. Ready to move on to stage two? Let’s check it out.    

YouTube Audit Phase 2: Make Updates

This phase is where you get to work. Keep in mind that not everyone needs to work through every step on this list. It all depends on your KPI analysis and your specific business objectives.

In phase two of your YouTube audit, we will:

• Reaffirm your brand message
• Update and optimize your video descriptions
• Organize your videos, so they’re easy for users to find
• Include relevant, engaging CTAs where appropriate
• Cut old content if it doesn’t serve your brand message

I’ll walk you through each step.

Consider Your Channel’s Branding During the YouTube Audit

Branding is a great place to start your audit. Why? Because YouTube is a visual platform.

Color can boost your brand recognition by up to 80 percent, so it’s crucial you spend time designing unique visual branding to stand out from your competitors.

How do you do this? First, establish your brand identity and create a clear, consistent marketing strategy. Consistency can improve your revenue by around 23 percent, so ensure your messaging translates well across all platforms before moving forward.

Once you’ve established your identity, you’re ready to begin, starting with the highlight video. This video showcases what your channel stands for. It shows users what people can expect if they watch your content.

In other words, choose your headline video wisely. Here’s a good example.

Tasty is a home cooking channel. The highlight video is a product review for a home air fryer, which speaks to their target audience.

What else can we say about Tasty? Two things. They use a colorful, branded avatar, and an eye-catching channel banner.

Google recommends a minimum banner size of 2048 x 1152 px, with your aspect ratio set to 16:9. You can use platforms like Canva to resize and optimize both your avatar and your banner.

Remember, successful marketers know how important it is to consider branding from a user’s perspective, so look at your channel objectively.

Remove or Replace Offensive or Off-Brand Videos

If content doesn’t serve your marketing strategy or is not consistent with your branding, delete it!

Do any videos feel “off” or outdated? Are they inaccurate or wrong for your channel? Simply remove them and give your channel an instant uplift.

Here’s how:

• In YouTube studio, choose “videos” from the left-hand menu
• Scroll to the video you’re deleting and click the “delete forever” option

Just make sure to update links if any of your content sends users to those videos.

Update Metadata

When it comes to a highly competitive platform like YouTube, metadata is your friend. Metadata is the collection of words and phrases you use to describe a video’s content.

Examples include:

• The video’s title
• Any HTML tags you use to tell YouTube’s algorithm what the video is about
• The description, or snippet you provide in the description box

Remember, YouTube is a search engine. It uses keywords, or key phrases, to connect users with the search results they’re looking for. Using the right keywords in your metadata can seriously increase the chances of ranking in search results and finding the right audience.

Here’s an example. If someone searches for “curling iron product review,” here’s the first result:

You’ll notice the channel creator uses “curling iron review” in the title, and it’s in the thumbnail, too.

There’s also mention of curling irons in the description and caption, so all signs point to this being a curling iron video:

Every video should have a relevant title and meaningful description to help users decide if it’s what they’re looking for.

How do you edit your own metadata? It’s simple.

First, go back to the YouTube Studio and open “content” from the left-hand menu. You’ll see a list of all your videos.

Next, click the little square to the left of your video and select the “edit” button when it pops up.

Work through each option, starting with the title.

Optimize Content for Chosen Keywords

Keywords are the search terms users type in when they’re looking for videos. If you don’t use the right keywords in your metadata, people won’t find your videos.

That said, how do you know which keywords to include? It all starts with keyword research.

Let’s work through an example.

Say I have a video on how to make chocolate chip cookies. I start by Googling some terms I might search to see which ones bring up video results. (This is also a great way to find inspiration for new ideas!)

If I search “chocolate chip cookies,” or “how to make chocolate chip cookies,” Google shows me YouTube videos.

“How to make perfect chocolate chip cookies” is the top result, so including “how to” might help me rank higher in YouTube rather than just calling it a chocolate chip cookie video.

On the other hand, if I search for something general, like “baking,” I don’t see any videos. This tells me to use a more specific keyword.

Next, use Ubersuggest to check:

• How often people search for your chosen keyword
• Which other search terms appear most often

This helps you identify which terms to use in your title and description. Once you’ve identified your keywords, you can optimize your videos.

Here’s how:

• Start by renaming your video with the chosen keyword. (Make sure to use it naturally)
• Write a short description and include your keyword near the start so it shows up in the preview.
• Use other keywords as meta tags and in the description. (If it makes sense to do so)
• Customize your thumbnail to include the keyword.

Organize Videos Into Playlists

If someone likes your video, chances are they want to see similar content. This is where playlists come in handy.

YouTube playlists are like shelves in a physical store. You group similar videos together in a playlist, or shelf, and visitors browse through your collection.

Here’s why they’re a great idea.

• If someone likes one video in your playlist, they’ll watch more. This engagement counts toward your total “watch time.” The higher your watch time, the higher you rank on YouTube.
• You can increase views on lesser-watched videos by including them in a popular playlist.

Want to set up a YouTube playlist? You can create and manage a playlist in YouTube studio.

Make sure to use keywords in the title to increase your visibility in the search results, and only include relevant videos in each playlist to keep your messaging consistent.

Optimize CTAs

The best way to generate leads from your YouTube channel? Include direct call-to-actions or CTAs.

CTAs direct people take action, such as:

• Subscribe to your channel
• Visit your website
• Follow you on social media
• Comment on videos
• Download an ebook or subscribe to an email list

Here’s an example from one of my own videos. As you can see, I’m using two CTAs.

• I invite people to click through to my website to learn more about traffic generation.
• I also direct them to watch another video.

See how CTAs might generate more leads and increase your channel engagement?

Placement’s important, too. Here’s what you should know.

• Include subtle CTAs like “leave a comment below” throughout the video to increase user engagement.
• Use YouTube cards to link to other videos or include different CTAs throughout the video, like polls.
• Place a CTA at the end. If someone enjoys your content, they’re more likely to subscribe or visit your website at this point. You can use YouTube’s end screen feature to do this.

You can find these tools in the video manager section of your YouTube studio.

Watch All Your Videos and Make YouTube Audit Recommendations

Now it is time to implement everything you’ve learned. Watch every video from start to finish, noting problems and changes you want to make.

Here’s what to consider.

• Relevance: Is the video on-brand, accurate, and relevant?
• Metadata: Are you using keywords in the title, description, and tags? Have you optimized your thumbnails?
• Quality: Could the video be more content-rich? Or is it too long?
• Playlist: Does this video belong in a playlist?
• CTA: Did you include an engaging CTA at the end? If the video is old, could you update the CTA to a more relevant one?

Conclusion

The bottom line? Just because you have YouTube subscribers and people watch your videos doesn’t mean you’re using your channel effectively.

Remember, YouTube is more than a social networking site. It’s a whole search engine all of its own, so you need to keep basic search optimization strategies in mind if you want to stand out.

Remove outdated content, tweak your meta descriptions and CTAs, and ensure you’re sending out a strong, consistent brand message. Check out Ubersuggest if you need some more help with keyword research and optimization.

Have you performed a YouTube audit on your channel? What did you discover?  

The post Why You Should Audit Your YouTube Channel appeared first on Neil Patel.

source https://neilpatel.com/blog/youtube-audit/

Twitter for SEO: How To Use Twitter to Boost Your Brand

Twitter is has a massive audience, making it a great platform for advertising products and services, or sharing your content.

If you aren’t using Twitter to boost your brand, you’re seriously missing out.

According to Statista, Twitter has amassed more than 330 million active monthly users.

But there’s a better reason to build your brand on Twitter, besides the capability to reach the large, diverse audiences it provides.

Search engines actually use social signals from social media to rank your website. Likes, shares, and comments can have a massive impact on SEO.

According to cognitive SEO, the higher the average number of shares, comments, and likes a brand has, the higher their website rank actually is.

That’s crazy, right?

If you use Twitter correctly, you can boost your brand’s search engine rankings just by posting on the platform.

That’s because Twitter lets you build a large following and gain the attention you need to boost brand awareness.

More brand awareness = more searches about your company.

You might be wondering, “Where do I start?”

Exposure is key. For starters, you need to promote Twitter trends, your tweets, and your account to get your name out there to as many people as possible.

Twitter for SEO Tip #1: Promote, Promote, Promote

Twitter ads are a surefire way to gain tons of visibility, generate leads, and grow your audience. Therefore, promoting content on Twitter can help you rank higher.

The best part is that you can target specific, custom audiences.

One brand that is currently using an effective Twitter strategy is Rothy’s, a sustainable shoe company. Their Twitter content is on-brand, impactful, and engaging.

Rothy’s shoes are not only made from recycled materials, but they’re also machine washable. And the brand doesn’t let their Twitter followers forget it.

One way to enjoy the same success as Rothy’s is to promote your own trends or “tags.”

Promote Twitter Trends

On Twitter, trending or “viral” topics appear on the Discover tab, within the Twitter app, and on the left side of the page.

When you promote a trend, it will appear in those locations.

The more people that use the tag, the more exposure you’ll gain.

Promote Tweets

Promoted tweets are just regular tweets that appear for users who don’t follow you on Twitter.

The only difference is that Twitter will add a tag to these tweets that read, “Promoted by (your brand’s name.)”

Users can like or retweet them like any other tweet, but you have to pay to have them show up in a targeted audience’s timeline.

Promote Accounts

Promoted accounts put your entire Twitter account in front of users you’ve targeted to help grow your audience.

As many as 85% of people say that they find new businesses on Twitter through promoted accounts.

Promoted accounts appear within people’s timelines in the “Who to follow” section and search results.

A small tag will appear under your account name that says, “Promoted.”

You shouldn’t just be promoting your account, tweets, and tags to targeted audiences, though. Be sure to add targeted keywords so Google is more likely to recognize your tweets.

Twitter for SEO Tip #2: Use Targeted Keywords

You optimize your website for the keywords you want to rank for.

Why not do the same with your Twitter account? Add keywords right in your Twitter bio, for example, so that Google associates your account with relevant keywords.

Use these same keywords within your tweets or as a caption alongside images you post.

Users who are searching for these terms on Twitter will then find your page. Your tweets will get more exposure, which will boost your SEO.

The best part is that keyword searches on Twitter account for misspelling, synonyms, slang, and more, just like on Google.

If a user searches for “love pizza,” broad match results might include, “loving pizza” or, “I love pizza.”

You know which tweets, tags, accounts, and keywords you want to promote. But which audiences should you promote them to?

Twitter for SEO Tip #3: Select Your Twitter Audience

You can target Twitter ads to certain audiences so they appear in search and in their timeline.

You can select additional audience features and add keywords to any ad campaign. You can even import multiple keywords.

Campaigns will show up in both search and timeline by default.

You can customize where tweets appear if you prefer one over the other, though.

And adding tailored audiences only takes a few clicks.

You can upload your own list or you can put a code on your website to collect visitors, purchasers, or downloaders.

It’s important to note that uploading your own list can take up to three hours.

In addition to promoting your content, using targeted audiences, and selecting a custom audience, you should also use relevant hashtags.

Twitter for SEO Tip #4: Use Relevant Hashtags

There are several ways to use relevant hashtags.

You can be on the lookout for trending Twitter topics you can use to generate more attention.

With this one, make sure that you research and understand what a tag means before you use it.

For instance, you might not want to use the tag “#WhyIStayed” to promote your pizza, since that tag originated as a way for people to share stories about domestic violence.

You can also create a branded hashtag (that you can later promote) as Toyota has done with the tag “#LetsGoPlaces.”

It’s right in the company’s Twitter bio.

By creating a branded tag, you’ll encourage other Twitter users to use the same hashtag on posts that they share featuring your brand.

Rothy’s has accomplished the same kind of brand awareness with the tag “#LiveSeamlessly.”

You can even find out which hashtags influencers are using with the help of a few tools.

Like Twitonomy, which will show you a list of the top ten hashtags for the industry influencers you search for.

Finding trending hashtags in your industry at any given time is important, too.

Hashtagify is a great tool to try out since it will reveal the top 10 hashtags related to the keyword you search for.

For example, if you want to see the most popular tags related to the word “SEO,” type it into the search bar.

The site will show you the tag’s recent popularity and trend information.

From there, you can see a full list of related hashtags.

You can even view a list of top influencers related to that specific tag.

If that isn’t enough, look at Twitter’s tailored trends for more ideas.

Twitter for SEO Tip #5: Check Out Twitter Trending Topics

Tailored trends, which Twitter introduced in 2012, give you a list of topics based on your location and the users you follow.

Twitter trending topics can help you stay current on topics that are important to your audience. Keep an eye on these lists and make sure that your selections are as close to the audiences you’re targeting.

To change your location, just click on the “Change” button.

Then, enter the region/country and city that you want to see.

That’s all there is to following Twitter trends!

Now, if you aren’t already adding images and video to your tweets, you should. They will give you more exposure than tweets without them, which is great for SEO.

Twitter for SEO Tip #6: Add Images and Video

According to WordStream, tweets with images receive 18% more clicks than tweets without them.

More clicks = better rankings.

Make sure that you only include images that are relevant, engaging, and high-quality.

Mr. Peanut’s account using this image is a great example:

Video views can have the same effect as images.

According to Insivia, 82% of Twitter users watch video content on the platform.

Add a short video to your next tweet to promote your product, brand, or service, like this one from SMILF.

Giveaways and polls are another great way to interact with followers, find new followers, and most important of all, gain attention.

Twitter for SEO Tip #7: Run Giveaways and Polls

One simple way to leverage Twitter to boost your search engine rankings is to run a giveaway based on retweets.

To enter, people complete an action, like retweeting one of your tweets.

You can include a link to your website or your most recent blog post in the tweet to boost that page’s rankings.

Or, just add a branded hashtag like the Pittsburgh Steelers did in a Twitter giveaway.

Be sure to offer the winner a prize and announce to your audience the date that you will be choosing the winner.

Running polls is just as easy as running a giveaway, if not easier.

BuzzFeed has even created an entire Twitter account dedicated to polls, which currently has 119,000 followers.

You can use polls to settle a debate or interact with your followers by asking questions, like Airbnb.

The engagement you’ll gain from giveaways and polls will boost likes and retweets, improving your overall search rankings.

Remember how I said to include a link to your website when running giveaways? You should add those to regular tweets too, especially if you post blog content regularly.

Twitter for SEO Tip #8: Share Links

The power of links on Twitter is huge. Sharing them can maximize the reach of your content and web pages.

Since Google recognizes links, tweeting URLs is a quick way to use the power of Twitter to boost your rankings.

That’s one of the reasons I share links regularly to promote my new blog posts.

By sharing links, you’ll direct and drive traffic right to your site, which Google will love.

I like to use a URL shortener like Bitly to optimize my links before I share them so that my links don’t take up too much of my character count.

If you don’t have a blog, tweet out links to your products or web pages on a regular basis, like Free Radicals does.

Just be sure to share relevant and helpful information regularly, not just links to your products.

Twitter for SEO Tip #9: Tweet Consistently

You may think that more is better when it comes to tweeting.

But Google might actually see that approach as spam.

Plus, you don’t want to post too many tweets in a row to your followers, or you might annoy them into clicking that “unfollow” button.

Stagger tweets throughout the day and during times when your followers are the most active.

One tool that makes scheduling tweets easy and efficient is TweetDeck.

To schedule tweets, just write them out and select the date and time you want them to go live.

Another great Twitter management tool is Hootsuite. You can integrate other social media accounts with this tool, too.

You should also use a tool like Tweriod to determine when most of your followers are online. Buffer does this in their platform as well.

Those are the best times for you to tweet because your tweets will get maximum exposure and attention.

Aside from following all the rules I’ve already named for boosting your rankings through Twitter, the most important one is to actually interact with your audience and reply to them.

Twitter for SEO Tip #10: Interact with Followers

This tip might seem obvious, but people often overlook it.

Imagine if Wendy’s hadn’t replied to Carter Wilkerson? #NuggsForCarter would never have become a trending topic that brought Wendy’s tons of publicity.

It can be hard to gain interactions on Twitter. Considering that users send over 350,000 tweets every minute, your tweets can easily get lost in the crowd.

That’s why you should engage with the people who are already talking to you to gain the attention of users who aren’t yet.

By creating personalized replies that relate to your specific industry and audience, you’ll build up tons of engagement for a boost on Google.

Encourage users to interact with you by posting relevant tweets, talking to industry-specific followers, mentioning other Twitter users, and responding to mentions quickly.

By interacting with followers, you’ll gain more retweets, mentions, and likes. And that means better rankings.

You should also reach out to influencers who can share your tweets, brand, and account with their audience.

Twitter for SEO Tip #11: Do Influencer Outreach

Since exposure on Twitter is the key to gaining likes and retweets, look for influencers who can give you exposure to their Twitter audience.

Twitter influencers can boost your credibility quickly because they’re already credible within your industry.

When an influencer talks about your brand, products, or services with their Twitter audience, their trusted followers will head to your page to check you out.

When trying to reach out to influencers, it can be helpful to:

• Create meaningful content that is shareable and valuable to your industry
• Develop long-term relationships with influencers rather than viewing them as people who can give you a quick, short-term boost
• Retweet tweets from influencers with whom you want to engage
• Collaborate with influencers by writing guest blog posts for them or allowing them to write guest posts on your blog

Several tools help find influencers in your industry if you aren’t sure who to reach out to.

One of them is Klear.

Just select the social network you want to search through, the skill or keyword you’re interested in, and your location.

That’s it!

Another great tool for finding influencers in your industry is BuzzSumo.

Just search for a keyword, and you’ll find influencers that relate to that topic.

The tool will even show you the page authority, domain authority, number of followers, retweet ratio, reply ratio, and the average number of retweets for each influencer within the results.

Conclusion

Twitter is an absolutely massive social network.

But you should never think of social networks as being isolated from search engines. It’s actually quite the opposite.

Google pulls tons of information from social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

The more exposure your posts get (such as likes, comments, mentions, and retweets), the higher your search engine rankings will be.

That’s because Google uses social signs to recognize certain web pages and brands.

But you have to use Twitter in the right way.

It’s all about gaining exposure and attention. Start by promoting your account, your tweets, and your tags (sometimes known as trends).

Use targeted keywords on Twitter just like you do on your web pages and blog content. Google will recognize the keywords associated with your brand on Twitter, too.

Be sure to use relevant hashtags and research a trending tag before you tweet something that contains it.

Add images and video to your tweets to increase engagement, and be sure to share links back to your website to direct and drive traffic.

Tweet consistently and schedule out your tweets in advance to maintain a regular posting schedule. Post during times when your followers are most active.

Finally, don’t forget to engage with followers as often as possible and do some influencer outreach to get your name out there.

How do you use Twitter to boost your search engine rankings?

The post Twitter for SEO: How To Use Twitter to Boost Your Brand appeared first on Neil Patel.

source https://neilpatel.com/blog/seo-with-twitter/

Best Free Web Hosting

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

You want a quick and easy way to start a website yet have no clue how web hosting works.

Or perhaps you know how it works but don’t have the budget or urgency to invest in one. 

The good news is you can get a website up and running without spending a dime. The bad news is also the fact that it’s free.

Free web hosting enables you to set up a website with a few clicks, but don’t expect anything fancy. Ads, a cap on how much traffic you can get, sudden downtimes, and little to no customer support are just some of the trade-offs that come with using a free host. 

However, free web hosting does have the same security, bandwidth, and port speed as most paid hosting options. 

Unless you only want a basic website with no bells and whistles, I recommend spending as little as $2.75 a month on a shared hosting plan. Should you insist on a free web host, check out my list of recommended products below. 

The Top 6 Options For Free Web Hosting

1. Wix – Best Free Web Hosting with Website Builder
2. GitHub Pages – The Best Free Static Web Hosting for Developers
3. Square Online – Best Free Ecommerce Hosting Platform
4. DreamHost – The Best Free Web Hosting for Nonprofits
5. SiteGround – The Best Free Web Hosting for Teachers
6. WordPress.com – The Best Free WordPress Hosting Service

How to Choose The Best Free Web Hosting For You

Before we proceed, you have to remember that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. 

In the case of a free web host, it has limitations that don’t appeal to everyone. 

Free web hosting is designed to meet the needs of a niche market like a new hobby blogger who doesn’t intend to earn from his website or a student looking for a free platform where she can test her web development projects. 

With that being said, you can’t use the same criteria in selecting a paid hosting plan when zeroing on the best free web hosting to suit your needs. 

Remember, you get what you pay for. And in the case of a free web host, you shouldn’t expect to receive round-the-clock support, daily or on-demand backups, and 100% uptime guarantee, among others. 

However, some free options are a cut above the rest. Use the following parameters to figure out whether a free web hosting service is worth a try. 

Custom Domain

Most companies are willing to host your website for free so long as you’re also willing to use a subdomain. 

For instance, Wix is a popular website builder that requires its free users to use a subdomain (e.g., neilpatel.wix.com). 

A subdomain doesn’t look professional nor is it good for branding. So, unless you only want a stripped down website you can play around with, it would be better to opt for a company that can host your custom domain for free. 

A custom domain is one that you own (e.g., neilpatel.com). You can purchase it from a domain registrar or from any hosting provider that also offers domain registration on the side. Domains are inexpensive, and you’ll need to renew them annually.

If branding is your top priority, make sure to find a free web host that gives you the option to stand out in a sea of other freely hosted websites. 

Security

While advanced security features don’t exist in free web hosting platforms, they should at least offer a free SSL certificate.

SSL (secure sockets layer) is a technology that encrypts the information that passes through your website. It protects your site visitor’s sensitive data like passwords and credit card data from outside intruders. 

If you’re launching a basic ecommerce site on a free hosting platform, a free SSL certificate is non-negotiable. However, some free web hosting services only offer a self-signed SSL, which misleads users into thinking that it’s the same as the industry-standard SSL certificate.

A self-signed SSL is issued by servers and not by trusted authorities like Comodo, Digicert, and Let’s Encrypt. Since it’s not a standard version, websites with self-signed SSL will still show security warnings to visitors.

Hence, a self-signed SSL defeats the purpose of an SSL certificate even though it offers the same level of encryption. Especially if you’re planning to sell a product through your website, having a self-signed SSL is no better than not having an SSL certificate at all. 

Storage and Bandwidth

As a rule of thumb, never go with free web hosting unless you’ll use it for a basic website with little to no traffic. 

A free web host isn’t designed to handle huge traffic volume. This is why it’s important to read the fine print of the hosting provider’s terms and conditions before signing up.  

Unfortunately, a lot of free hosting providers tend to mislead clueless users by including “unlimited storage” and “unlimited bandwidth” in their list of features. 

Disk space or storage space is the amount of server space allocated to your website files, while bandwidth is the amount of data allowed to transfer from the server to your visitors in a given amount of time. If your website is hosted in a free platform, your disk space and bandwidth are best described as low and never “unlimited.”

“Unlimited bandwidth” is a promotional tactic by free hosting providers based on the assumption that sites on a shared server will not use up the available resources, which is rarely the case. 

Instead of being swayed by these superficial features, pay more attention specifically to file size limit and CPU limit. 

A file size limit is the maximum file size your website can upload, while the CPU limit refers to how much of the server’s central processing unit (CPU) your website is allowed to use. 

Free web hosting providers can temporarily shut down your site without warning, so make sure you know exactly what and how much your limitations are. 

Ads

The only reason why free web hosting continues to exist is because of the business behind it. And a business requires a source of revenue. 

Some of the more popular free web hosts sustain their platform through ad space. This monetization method may be effective, but it comes at the expense of your visitors.

You have no control over what appears on the advertisements or where they’re placed. Not to mention ads, in general, tend to be obtrusive and take the joy out of consuming your content.

If you want free hosting but care about your site’s aesthetics and user-friendliness, you can opt for a company that supports their free platform through other means, such as the sales of premium hosting plans. 

Customer support

Support for websites hosted in a free web host is limited at best. Unless you already have both the budget and need to upgrade to premium plans, there’s nothing else you can do. 

When looking for the best free web host to entrust your website, choose one with an active community forum. 

Check the latest posts and see how fast the response time is. The more active users the service has, the quicker you’ll get a resolution to any problem you might face in the future.

In addition to a community forum, some free web hosts also have a self-service knowledge base where users can quickly get answers to their most basic questions. 

The Different Types of  Free Web Hosting

Free web hosting comes in different forms. Let’s explore these different free web hosting options and who they’re for. 

Freemium Web Hosting

Freemium means anyone can have access to the free web host anytime. But there’s a catch: features are extremely limited, and your website will likely be littered with ads. 

Wix and Weebly are free website builders that use this strategy to acquire customers. You have the option to upgrade to premium plans to remove the ads or keep using the free product for as long as you want. Either way, the hosting company wins. 

“Free Trial” Web Hosting

This “almost free” web hosting allows users to use all or a limited number of its paid hosting features within a specific period. The time frame you can enjoy web hosting for free usually lasts anywhere from seven to 30 days. 

Choose this type of free web hosting if you intend to pay for a hosting plan but are eager to know first if the web host can meet your expectations. 

Free Site Hosting Service for Developers 

There are free hosting services specifically built for students and web developers. The type of hosting you’ll choose depends on whether you’re testing a static or dynamic website. 

Static sites are the most basic websites with fixed content built from HTML, CSS, and Javascript files. They’re the easiest sites to create for developers as they don’t need a web programming design like dynamic sites. 

GitHub Pages is a fine example of free hosting service for static sites. 

To publish a static site through GitHub Pages, you must first take the HTML files from the open-source code repository of GitHub, run it through a build process, and then publish the website. 

Although websites are usually hosted on yourusername.github.io, there’s also the option to host them on a custom domain. 

As for dynamic sites, there are hosting providers that are free to use within a limited time frame. 

For example, Google Cloud allows developers to have hands-on experience with their products for free so long as they don’t go over the free usage limit. They also have the option to fully explore the Google Cloud platform using a $300 free credit and be charged only when they choose to upgrade. 

Amazon AWS is a similar product that provides access to its free tier products for 12 months. Afterward, you will be required to pay only for what you use. 

#1 – Wix — Best Free Web Hosting With Website Builder

When it comes to building a simple blog or an online portfolio that highlights your work, Wix is the best intuitive website builder you can count on. 

With the help of its simple drag-and-drop interface, you can create a simple website in minutes. Wix takes care of your website through free hosting so long as you don’t mind having Wix brand ads displayed on your pages. 

Although free accounts can only use the Wix subdomain, there are enough templates and apps you can choose from to add a little bit of personal touch to your website. 

Should you decide to create a website with Wix, you will get a storage space of 500 MB and a bandwidth of 500 MB, enough for a low-traffic site like an online portfolio.

If you want more flexibility, you can upgrade to premium plans anytime to access custom domain, email, and ecommerce features. 

Premium plans also eliminate ads so your website will look more professional and less cookie-cutter. 

But even with ads, Wix has plenty to offer that will put the spotlight on your content. Whether you’re a writer, designer, or photographer, Wix remains the best website builder to help you establish an online presence without touching any code. 

#2 – GitHub Pages — The Best Free Static Web Hosting for Developers

Anyone with basic coding skills is already familiar with GitHub, an open-source platform where developers store their coding projects. GitHub Pages is where you can take these codes from the repository, have them go through a build process, and turn them into a simple static website. 

A static website is ideal for those who prefer a small website that doesn’t need to be updated regularly. It’s also perfect for students who want a test site to play around with or present for their school projects. 

GitHub Pages is completely free, yet it comes with a range of outstanding features:

• One site per GitHub account 
• Unlimited project websites
• 1 GB of storage plus 100 GB bandwidth every month
• Standard github.io subdomain or custom domain name you own
• Free HTTPS to prevent others from tampering with your traffic
• Built-in integration with Jekyll, a popular static site generator, for more customization options

To build your static website, all you need to do is sign in to your account and create a new repository. You can then use the Jekyll Theme Chooser to pick from one of the pre-made themes. 

If you don’t like your theme or your static website’s content, no need to worry as changes are a simple edit and push away. You can make these changes either via the web or locally on your computer. 

Whether you’re a developer or a non-techy looking for easy-to-follow instructions, GitHub Pages has all the tools you need to create a free static site. 

#3 – Square Online — Best Free Ecommerce Hosting Platform

Square Online is a free ecommerce platform for aspiring entrepreneurs who are still getting their feet wet with online selling. Unlike big names in the industry, Square Online lets you sell unlimited products without paying recurring fees.

To set up your online store hosted by Square Online, all you need to do is answer a few questions. The platform’s Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) will then automatically generate a website with a design based on the answers you give. 

The drag-and-drop editor only offers four customizable themes, but you get an assurance that every design follows your industry’s best practice. Without touching any code, you can create your online store with a responsive design that fits in any device. 

Square Online also offers the following to help you get started with your business:

• Square POS integration so you can automatically import your product catalog and let it sync with your online store for a seamless inventory management
• Payment processing system that accepts all major credit cards, Google Pay, and Apple Pay
• In-house and on-demand delivery
• Instagram integration
• Free SSL security
• SEO tools

In exchange for hosting your online store for free, Square Online requires a small commission fee of 2.9% + 30¢ for each product sold. Should you decide to scale your business, you can leave the free plan and move to the premium plans starting at $12 per month. 

Through a new feature called Square Online Checkout, sellers also have the option to sell their products and receive payment using only a link instead of a website. 

Whether you’re an established brick-and-mortar store owner or just starting from scratch, Square Online has all the basics to help you navigate the unfamiliar world of ecommerce with ease. 

#4 – DreamHost — The Best Free Web Hosting for Nonprofits

DreamHost believes in every nonprofit organization’s advocacy so much that they’re giving them a shared hosting plan at no cost. 

Aside from free web hosting, DreamHost also provides US-based charitable organizations with the following:

• Free domain
• Free backups
• Free shopping cart installation so you can accept donations with ease
• Unmetered transfer and unlimited monthly visitors
• Free SSL certificate to keep online transactions secure

To create a free hosting account, DreamHost does not require any credit card details and needs just your billing address for verification purposes. 

You also need to attach a 501(c)(3) determination letter, a document from the United States IRS proving your tax-exempt non-profit status under the applicable sections of the tax code.

Since it’s a free account, you won’t have access to reliable 24/7 customer support. However, DreamHost’s dedicated help center and ticketing system offset this, which more than meets the need for straightforward troubleshooting solutions. 

Should you want more control over your account, nonprofit organizations can also avail themselves of a 35% discount off DreamHost’s managed WordPress hosting plans. This means you can host your site under a paid plan for as low as $11 per month. 

#5 – SiteGround — The Best Free Web Hosting for Teachers 

SiteGround, one of the leading providers of top-notch shared hosting technology, is giving away its StartUp Plan for free to teachers. This way, hard-working educators can focus on what they do best while SiteGround takes care of the technology that makes online learning possible. 

In addition to a free hosting account, educators also get a free SiteGround subdomain which will serve as the home to their online course or a repository of their supplementary resources. 

The plan also provides dependable 24/7 support via chat, phone, or ticketing system, so any technical issues will be resolved on your behalf. 

This robust free web hosting also includes the following features:

• LAMP server, PHP, MySQL with PhpMyAdmin
• 10 GB space and unmetered traffic
• Free emails with spam protection
• CDN caching solution to make your website faster
• Free learning management system (LMS) to help you deliver efficient, user-friendly educational courses to your students

Whether your classes are entirely conducted online or through a hybrid of physical and online classrooms, SiteGround has the free tools you need to help your students adapt in a changing world.

#6 – WordPress.com — The Best Free WordPress Hosting Service

Often confused with the open-source software WordPress.org, WordPress.com is the free platform where non-technical users can create websites. 

Since it is powered by the same robust and world-class infrastructure behind nearly half of the world’s websites, WordPress.com is the best place to learn how to manage a website while you’re still not ready or able to pay for a hosting service.

Setting up a website is easy. You can select a WordPress subdomain and choose from any of the available themes. 

Just like Wix, WordPress.com also displays ads to sustain its free platform. While the ads may sometimes be annoying, this is a small price to pay for all the other features that WordPress.com has to offer:

• 3 GB storage space so you can publish both text and beautiful images
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Free SSL certificate for an additional layer of security
• Optional backups so you can save your files on your hard drive

While it has excellent performance for a free hosting platform, WordPress.com can’t beat the paid version in terms of flexibility. The WordPress CMS installed on websites in paid hosting plans gives you direct server access and freedom to install plugins and themes of your choice.

Still, WordPress.com is good for starters, especially if you only want a simple, stripped-down website to showcase your writing portfolio or personal diary. 

Summary

Nothing beats a paid hosting plan for all the extra support, features, and functionality. Still, if you need free web hosting or if you want to try out different web hosts before committing to an investment, there are some good free options available. 

The best free web hosting for you depends on what you’re looking for. This guide will help you narrow down your choices to end up with free hosting that satisfies your unique criteria. 

The post Best Free Web Hosting appeared first on Neil Patel.

source https://neilpatel.com/blog/best-free-web-hosting/

8 White Hat Strategies for Combating Search Engine Bias

While you may view search engines as a neutral tool for querying, in actuality, search engines are created by company-affiliated individuals and operate much like any product. They’re designed to satisfy the consumer and financially benefit the producer.

Although this realistic view of search engine intent shouldn’t necessarily raise any red flags, what might concern you is how search engines serve up results.

Google, in particular, intervenes algorithmically to remove spam results that the search engine believes are useless to the consumer. While it is arguable that less spam is a good and welcome thing, what happens if Google deems your site spam?

In addition to the removal of spam, Google is a habitual booster of massive corporations such as Amazon and Facebook. The rationale for boosting larger sites is not particularly nuanced.

Big names can outperform small companies when it comes to SEO, and they typically offer a wider selection of items that can satisfy the consumer. With that said, this Google bias can underserve your site by burying it under offerings from big names.

In the world of Google bias, you need to understand how the deck is stacked against small businesses and actively work to ensure your site performs to the best of its ability.

How Are Search Engines Biased?

When you encounter the word “bias,” you might associate it with nefarious connotations.

Although there have been claims that Google bias slants search results against particular political leanings, when it comes to search engines, Google bias overall tends to trend more toward erring too heavily on the perceived wants of their audience.

Google search algorithms are based on a slew of information, including the phrasing of your query, the reliability of sources, the relevance of pages, and countless other factors. Even your location and settings can help Google discover the most relevant information for your search.

It stands to reason that the aggregation of this information lends itself toward suggesting sources that try to match and satisfy past behavior, as well as other defining indicators.

In addition to these algorithms, Google bias can be impacted by domain authority (DA), a ranking metric that indicates both your site’s success in ranking on search engines, as well as your site’s perceived expertise surrounding a specific topic.

DA is measured by various factors, including inbound links, which are vitally important to score calculation. With an increased amount of inbound links from other relevant domains comes an increased DA score, in most cases.

The Effect of Search Engine Bias on Businesses

Unfortunately, bias (whether helpful or not) can significantly impact small businesses that have few inbound links and sparse content. For big organizations with equally big wallets, constant content creation can earn inbound links and score a high DA score, helping them land top positions on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Collectively, the above factors can severely limit your site’s search result visibility. Not only are you competing against big brand names, but you’re also losing SERP traction if you’re not actively recruiting inbound links and establishing expertise.

There is also a chance your DA will decrease when a massively popular site (think Twitter) gains a large number of inbound links, deflating your search rank and lowering your overall DA score.

For sites as large as Twitter or Amazon, there’s not much a small business can do to compete with the sheer number of inbound links and resulting high DA. However, you can aim to earn a higher score than your competitors by employing white hat strategies to combat Google bias.

Ethical Strategies for Combating Search Engine Biases

While the above may seem daunting for small-to-medium business owners looking to grab some top-SERP terrain, you can use several strategies to help you compete for those rankings.

By incorporating the following four approaches into your digital strategy, you can compete in the battle for search visibility.

Focus on a Single Subject

While it’s clear that Google bias means delivering results from big-name sites, the algorithm is also partial to sites that focus on a single subject in depth.

This strategy not only helps you earn points in Google’s algorithm, but it also helps you establish yourself as an industry expert in your field.

Instead of creating a range of content, focus on a single topic that satisfies every component of the buyer’s journey and build out a content map from there.

This task might seem overwhelming due to the sheer amount of potential content, so here are three places to start:

• Content that educates on early-journey topics
• Content that highlights your point of view on your topic
• Content that explains industry perspectives on the topic

Build Site Relevance

When we talk about search engines, the word “relevance” references how much a site’s content correlates to the active search term.

Much like DA, relevance is vitally important in determining where your site lands on the SERPs for a specific query.

To improve your site relevance score, you should determine intent around user search and create a content strategy to match those queries.

Also, make sure you are relevant to user queries by having the most up-to-date business information on your site and local search profiles.

Earn Inbound Links

Inbound links (or backlinks) are links coming to your site from an external source. This type of link does a great amount of work to improve your site’s perceived expertise. If another site is linking to your content as a point of clarification or for additional information, you’re clearly an expert in the field.

While this all sounds wonderful, how do you earn those inbound links? With many strategies available for the savvy marketer, below are our top five white hat steps for success that can help you grow your number of inbound links and reduce Google bias.

Score Inbound Links

When you write good content, good things may happen.

Editorial inbound links are the holy grail of link building: they’re free and they’re lasting.

Next time you’re crafting content, consider the true value of the piece and assess how your audience will use it.

If it’s helpful to your industry and includes a how-to, chances are it can earn you at least one inbound editorial link. It’s just because you wrote great content.

Craft Useful Infographics

Infographics are great tools. They allow rapid dissemination of information without a lot of reading.

When you create infographics on topics relevant to your industry, it can exponentially increase the likelihood that another content marketer sees your graphic and links to it in their next blog post.

Give What You Get

Although we’re talking about inbound linking, we can’t discount the power of outbound linking. By linking out to other members in your industry, you grow your community.

Not only that, but you also increase the likelihood that the goodwill outbound linking will return the favor in the form of inbound linking.

Create Unique Content

Notice missing content about your specific industry? Chances are, you’re not the first to notice content holes.

When you encounter missing content, you should prioritize taking advantage of the hole and filling in the gaps in information.

This strategy not only benefits your site by further establishing you as an expert in the field, but it also creates opportunities for others in your industry to link to your content, earning you even more inbound links.

Aid a Journalist in Need

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a service that connects journalists with potential sources. Three times a day, HARO sends emails that share topic areas and specific questions journalists are hoping to be answered, like the one in the image below:

When you share responses to these questions, journalists typically indicate your role as the source, linking back to your site and scoring you additional inbound links.

Create Long-Form Content

If you’re not writing long-form content, tomorrow is the day to start.

Long-form content can gain you more online visibility in the measure of likes and shares, an opportunity to engage more with your community, and serve as a clear indicator of industry expertise.

How does long-form content help you combat Google bias?

A serpIQ study found the best-performing content usually tallied over 2,000 words.

Research conducted by Brian Dean underlines the finding that long-form content is much more valuable to users than its shorter counterpart in many cases.

Now that we know long-form content performs better, how can it eliminate Google bias and help make your site more visible to future consumers?

Below are the top two reasons why long-form content can help your site emerge from the shadows of big brands.

Authority

We talked about the importance of establishing expertise in all content development, and this tenet is nowhere more true than in long-form content.

When you create extensive guides, blog posts, white papers, books, and other deep content dives, you not only establish yourself as an expert among your peers, but you also begin to establish yourself as an expert to search engines.

This can give your content and your site a much greater chance of being seen by an unindoctrinated searcher and overcoming existing Google bias.

SEO

When you create long-form content, you have nearly endless opportunities to use keywords to your advantage.

In shorter content, deploying multiple keywords may present a challenge, but with high word counts come more opportunities for you to make your keywords do as much work as possible.

When you start winning on some of your identified keywords, your site can begin to climb in SERP rankings, making you more visible to searchers, providing an edge over your competitors, and removing existing Google bias.

Conclusion

While it is inarguable that Google bias exists, it’s important to remember Google bias isn’t inherently bad, and it doesn’t mean small businesses are incapable of overcoming search barriers.

By incorporating these elements into your digital strategy, you can begin to surmount Google bias and start increasing your site’s rank on the SERPs.

As you implement these strategies, keep customer intent in mind and remember not to create content for content’s sake. Like most things, when it comes to content strategy, quality prevails over quantity.

Which white hat strategy have you found most effective to use against Google bias?

The post 8 White Hat Strategies for Combating Search Engine Bias appeared first on Neil Patel.

source https://neilpatel.com/blog/search-engine-bias/

The Ultimate Guide to Using UTM Parameters

Do you know which online marketing campaign drives the maximum traffic and business to your website?

Sure, you might be keeping tabs on various referral sources inside your Google Analytics (GA) reports. But, wouldn’t it helpful to have an advanced tracking option that keeps you on top of the marketing campaign that drives maximum traffic for you?

That’s where UTM parameters come into play.

By tagging your URLs with UTMs (Urchin Tracking Module), you can understand how your visitors interact with your website.

Here’s how these UTM parameters appear at the end of your URL.

So, what can these snippets of text tell you, after appending your URLs?

I’ll tell you the traffic aspects you can track in the next section. First, let me tell you one catch associated with them….

UTM parameters are stubborn entities that stick to your links, even when you switch to different networks and mediums.

That means if a visitor picked your link (tagged with a UTM) from Twitter to share on Facebook, it would still count as a share from Twitter.

According to research conducted by BuzzFeed , content actually spreads across the social web in a branching tree pattern.

Research by 33across found that 82% of online sharing is done by copy-pasting URLs.  This means that UTMs stick around and can give misleading data for cross-platform social media sharing.

There’s a potential solution – cleaning the URLs by stripping UTM codes at the end, once sharing on one social platform has occurred.

But, if this clean URL then gets shared on private social media (think Email, WhatsApp and Messenger), it appears as direct traffic in your analytics.

Again, this is misleading information – which becomes a part of your dark social traffic.

With this limitation, I just wanted you to understand that UTMs aren’t the end-all solution to understanding the performance of your content.

But, they sure make your marketing campaign picture less chaotic.

So, let’s start with generating custom URLs for your campaign and some UTM best practices. Then, we’ll move on to live UTM use-cases. 

But before we dig in deep, let me clearer on the basics.

What Are UTM parameters?

Here’s a succinct and super helpful definition from Kissmetrics:

“UTM parameters are simply tags that you add to a URL. When someone clicks on a URL with UTM parameters, those tags are sent back to your Google Analytics for tracking.”

Are you ready to get going on your UTM campaign and figure out how these insights might shape your marketing effort?

How to Generate URL Parameters With Google’s URL Builder

UTM parameters are a great way to figure out which URLs are most effective in attracting visitors to your content. So, is there a systematic way to append them to your URLs?

Fortunately, yes.

Say hello to Google’s URL builder — but there are now three different ones depending on whether you want to track data in GA, Google Play, or the Apple App store.

We’ll look at the one inside the Google Analytics help center (looks like the screenshot below) for setting up your URLs.

Here are the five form fields that you need to complete:

• Campaign Source: The platform (or vendor) where the traffic originates, like Facebook or your email newsletter.
• Campaign Medium: You can use this to identify the medium like Cost Per Click (CPC), social media, affiliate, or QR code.
• Campaign Term: You’ll use this mainly for tracking your keywords during a paid AdWords campaign. You can also use it in your display ad campaigns to identify aspects of your audience.
• Campaign Content: If you’re A/B testing ads, then this is a useful metric that passes details about your ad. You can also use it to differentiate links that point to the same URL.
• Campaign Name: This is just to identify your campaign. Like your website or specific product promotion. Here’s an example screenshot with the campaign names you might see when you navigate to Traffic Sources >> Sources >> Campaigns.

You can also use the Effin amazing UTM Builder Chrome extension (now called UTM.io) to create UTMs. It auto-populates the URL and saves your most used terms as presets.

UTM Parameter Best Practices

Here are three best practices that you must follow for tagging your URLs. It will help you easily identify where traffic comes from.

1. Create Standard Naming Convention for UTM Parameters

If you stay consistent, you can avoid a lot of confusion and ensure that your UTMs are reportable.

First, use dashes over underscores, percentage (representation for spaces inside GA), and plus signs in your URLs. Google algorithm doesn’t penalize you for using them and they work better – Matt Cutts explains why here.

Second, stay consistent with lowercase throughout all of your campaigns. For example,

utm_source=LinkedIn is different from utm_source=linkedin.

Changing to uppercase, camel case, or any other capitalization gives you an additional responsibility of remembering this convention. So, it’s better to stick with lowercase and not let human error creep in.

Third, keep your URLs clean, descriptive, non-redundant and easy to read.

For example, you might mistakenly put the same values inside source and medium parameters.

Or, you can put the specific originating aspect under medium (like the example below), but still manage to confuse yourself with the double use of ‘facebook.’

The best way is to simply make the UTMs flow like a normal sentence sans any redundancy. See how easy it is to decipher your campaign details in the URL below.

The traffic source is Facebook with post as the medium and a part of the new admin dashboard 2014 April campaign.

Here is a visual summary of the points I just mentioned.

Note: Once you’ve taken sufficient time to create data-rich URLs, I recommended that you shorten them, using tools like bit.ly or Google Link Shortener. A long and bulky URL does not make for a good user experience and might even come across as spammy.

Also, the UTM parameters are visible to the users in their address bars. So, be transparent and don’t use values that you don’t want to be seen by the user.

2. Track Your UTM Links Inside a Spreadsheet

Keeping a record of the tagged links will ensure that your marketing team stays on the same page. You can use this free spreadsheet template by Sam Wiltshire or this free link tagging tool by Rafflecopter to get started.

Additionally, create a naming convention guide document that lays out clear instructions for tagging links. This can be an iterative and expanding guide – if you come across a new scenario, you can add the example to this document.

3. Next Steps After Establishing a UTM System

The most important aspect for a business isn’t the number of clicks and traffic generated by various sources; it’s revenue.

So, once you know your way around UTMs, it’s useful to connect your tracking data with your CRM. It shows you a clear picture of how various online marketing channels are affecting your bottom line.

Alternatively, you can also set up goals inside GA. For example, if you want to measure reader loyalty and engagement, I show you the process in this article.

I recommend, though, that you track more concrete conversion-focused metrics, like leads generated and email signups.

Alright, now that you’re aware of these best practices, let’s talk about when to use UTM parameters.

Where to Use UTM Parameters

Here are tjree UTM parameter use cases you can implement right away.

1. Insert UTM Parameters to Social Media Links

Suppose you want to find your highest ROI-yielding social media platform and which links on that platform perform the best, traffic-wise. Then, UTMs can help you analyze your social media referral traffic.

For example, on Twitter, you have four options to promote your links – a regular tweet, a promoted tweet, a website field, a and profile/bio description.

Barring the profile link (since it displays the first part of the URL you enter), you can track all of these link clicks separately.

Here are example UTM parameter strings, based on Twitter with different medium values.

?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=profile&utm_campaign=email

?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=email

?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=promoted&utm_campaign=email

Once you’ve generated a custom URL, you can shorten the link, using shorteners I mentioned earlier and save the precious 160 character real estate.

Similarly, on Facebook, you can create separate UTM links for promoted posts, profile contact info, posts in a group, organic posts from your page and more. Kristin Hines shares UTM parameters for major social media here.

Once you start getting data and if you create goals (as I mentioned in the best practice 3 above), then you’ll get an enriching GA report like the one below.

2. Test Clicks From Your Email Newsletters

Want to understand the parameters inside your newsletter that contribute the majority of traffic to your website?

Then, appending UTMs to your URLs can help.

Let’s look at an example instant update email by Redfin.

All of the links inside the above email share these UTM parameters:

utm_campaign : instant_listings_update

utm_medium : email

utm_source : myredfin

But, Redfin has correctly set up different utm_content values for all of their links (the screenshot above displays the unique values for each link). So, even when the subscribers of the myredfin list go to the same page, redfin knows the link they have clicked.

Now, let’s look at a bad example of UTM.

Here’s an email from Pinterest, recommending certain boards to follow.

As you can see, every board has an author, 5 images and a follow board CTA.

All of the above links share the following UTM parameters:

utm_campaign : weekly_wkly_130722

utm_medium : email

utm_source : sendgrid.com

Note that the utm_camapign value at 13 07 22 represents the date it was sent on (22/07/2013). It’s a useful piece of information.

But, other than that, Pinterest fails to impress with its UTM implementation.

• There’s no way to find out the specific images and CTA buttons inside the email where the audience clicks. So, Pinterest doesn’t even know which of their “Follow Boards” buttons work well. The utm_content can be employed to gain this insight.
• The utm_campaign value adds a confusing overhead with double usage of ‘weekly’ and ‘wkly.’ And, sendgrid.com as utm_source does not add any value, from an analytics perspective. It’s the email service provider that Pinterest uses and they are already aware of that.

I recommend that check out the UTM analysis of 8 more companies, by Puru Choudhary, here.

You can further implement UTM parameters inside your email signature to track if it leads visitors to your website.

Gniewko Oblicki created a company-wide signature template, appending UTM parameters. Here’s how it looks in CodeTwo Exchange Rules HTML editor.

He ran five footer campaigns in the company and found that users engaged incredibly well on their website. Here’s the GA report showing the results of 1682 sessions initiated by the five campaigns.

3. Track the Most Effective Banner Advertisements

If you regularly perform paid marketing, then I am sure you would like to know the banner ads that perform the best.

With UTMs, you can not only find out the external website that brings the most traffic, but you can even find out the banner placement, design, size, color and banner types that are most effective.

For example, suppose you use two banner sizes, 300px and 600px, for advertising on a third-party website, Koozai.

Here’s how the UTM might look if it is 300 px wide.

Here’s how it would look when it is 600 px wide.

Once you’ve tagged both sizes, you can easily find the one that’s more effective and double down on it.

Kristi uses 320px banner ads in her blog’s sidebar. And, here’s how they perform against other clicks on her eBook.

Once again, I want to emphasize that if you’ve set up goals inside GA, then you can find the most valuable piece of info that affects your business.

For example, Kristi navigated to ‘Goal Set 1’ to find out how her banner ad converts to sales. And, she can compare it with her eBook sales through other links.

Conclusion

UTM parameters provide extremely valuable insights into your traffic. You can uncover a goldmine of behavioral data to help boost your sales and refine your overall marketing strategy. 

To recap here, to create UTM parameters for your links, use Google’s URL builder. It’ll help you start campaign tracking. And, remember to keep the best practices in mind as you do so.

Have you ever used UTM parameters for campaign tracking? Did it lead to insights about building a custom campaign? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.  

The post The Ultimate Guide to Using UTM Parameters appeared first on Neil Patel.

source https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-using-utm-parameters/

Best Learning Management Systems

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

What happens when people aren’t engaged in their education?

Very little, unfortunately.

It’s a stubborn problem that confronts HR staff and elementary school teachers alike.

Top talent gets bored and moves on. Students lose interest and tune out. 

All the preparation and dedication it takes to develop a good course means nothing if people aren’t buying in.

This problem doesn’t get easier when learners and instructors are meeting online instead of in a classroom or on site.

Creating a digital environment where people can really learn is challenging, even in ideal circumstances. Having the right learning management system (LMS) software in place makes this task much more manageable for everyone involved.

Administrators have a clear view of what’s happening, instructors have the freedom to create courses that matter, and learners get a relevant, unique experience that meets them where they are.

LMS software will not replace the hard work and perseverance that goes into creating lessons and educating people. The right one, however, will let everyone focus on their work instead of fighting with a frustrating system.

The Top 6 Options for LMS Software

1. Schoology – Best for K-12 education
2. D2L Brightspace – Best for higher education
3. Tovuti – Best for selling online courses
4. Looop – Best for SMB employee training
5. Docebo – Best for enterprise learning
6. Sensei – Best LMS plugin for WordPress

The Different Types of LMS Software

Deciding on the type of LMS software is not going to be too difficult for most people. 

Some of the vendors on this list offer products that span different categories, but for the most part, the different types of LMS software are aimed at specific educational settings:

• Educational LMS Software
• Corporate LMS Software
• Ecommerce LMS Software

Deciding on the particular product within these three categories is where you are going to spend most of your time.

Let’s break these three types down a little further.

Educational LMS Software

These products are designed with school students in mind. They are built to help different types of educational organizations comply with government standards and meet the needs of their varied student populations.

Educational LMS Software can be broken down into two subtypes.

K-12 LMS Software is for towns, school districts, and private institutions that want to get every student on the same platform. They are built to scale appropriately, and track a student’s journey as they advance grades.

These types of platforms also accommodate the needs of parents, who are able to view grades and communicate with teachers.

Higher Education LMS Software is for colleges and universities. These platforms are designed to give students a much more independent experience, accommodating their unique set of courses and trajectory through undergrad, graduate, or postgraduate education.

Corporate LMS Software

These products are designed with adult learners in mind, particularly for businesses who need to train employees, customers, or partners.

These platforms help administrators create and deliver courses about company content and best practices. It works much better than throwing “the manual” at new members of your business.

Courses and company resources on a corporate LMS help with:

• Onboarding: educating new employees, customers, or partners.
• Training: providing basic knowledge to learners for a position, role, or skill. 
• Development: providing advanced knowledge to upskill or specialize a learner.
• Enablement: provides educational resources to help skilled learners improve.

Some platforms will work across the organization to meet all of these needs for both external and internal uses. 

Others may specialize in a particular area, like employee training, sales enablement, or customer onboarding.

Ecommerce LMS Software

These products are designed for individuals and institutions that want to sell online courses and other digital learning content.

Instead of a heavy-duty platform designed for a school district or enterprise organization, ecommerce LMS software is sleek and oriented around self-service.

Instructors can build out exactly the content they need, and have control over the costs via subscriptions or per-course fees.

Learners can find the courses they are looking for at a price that makes sense.

Many of these platforms have less expensive options that let you do everything but charge for courses. These non-monetized plans can work well for tutors, non-profits, and other individuals who need to organize and distribute educational content.

How to Choose the Best LMS Software for You

There are hundreds of vendors who make LMS software. To make your search easier, let’s focus on the people LMS software serves:

• Learners
• Instructors
• Administrators

What do they want? What do they need? Really think about how each LMS is going to perform for each role. 

In the end, how these different types of users feel about the product is going to determine whether it sinks or sets sail. 

Let’s go in depth on considerations for each role. This is going to help you think through your specific situation and zero in on the product that checks all your boxes.

We’ll close this section with a look at some of the technical considerations that really matter when picking LMS software

Learner Experience

Much of the learner experience will depend on the type of LMS software you choose. Some platforms are going to be aimed at students, others at adult employees.

At the same time, many of the essential considerations are going to be the same regardless of the type you choose. Likely, you are going to want support for one or more of the following types of learning environments:

• Distance learning: Using online teaching to reach learners who are separated by great physical distance.
• Remote learning: Using online teaching to reach learners during situations where people cannot meet in a physical classroom.
• Blended learning: Using a mix of in-person and remote learning.
• Mobile learning: Letting learners interact with phones and tablets, and on-the-go. 
• Social learning: Allowing learners to interact and teach each other.
• Virtual classroom: An online space where learners and instructors can interact in real time, talking, sharing materials, and working in groups.

These environments are interrelated. Instructors leading a training session may make use of both mobile learning and a virtual classroom, for example. 

What’s important to your search is selecting a platform that supports the learning environments necessary for all of the students, teams, or departments who use it.

Additionally, you’ll want to consider the learning styles supported. Depending on your organization, you may want to have some or all of these options for learning available:

• Synchronous: Learners and instructors are in the same place at the same time, even if it’s a digital “place.” Everyone goes through the learning path together.
• Asynchronous: Learners can complete their work at different times and may progress through the course at their own pace. It is sometimes called “self-paced” learning.
• On-Demand: Learners have anytime access to courses and learning resources. In some cases, learners can select their own courses of study.
• Accessible: Learners with special circumstances are supported by features like closed-captions, text-to-speech, and translation. 

Instructor Freedom

There’s no lesson that’s going to work for every learner every time. Instructors need the ability to experiment, to blend the tried-and-true methods with new tactics.

If a platform doesn’t have the features or functions an instructor needs, they’re going to be spending time finding workarounds.

Find something that centralizes all the tools instructors need to accomplish their goals, and lets them build exactly what they need. This is going to be different for each department or branch of a business.

Pay particular attention to course management features and how they are going to help your instructors create an effective learning experience. These include:

• Quizzes and graded assignments
• Learner profiles and rosters
• Learner reports and analytics
• Discussion boards and chats
• Content library
• Multimedia uploads

With the exception of brand-new instructors, most will be approaching the new LMS with existing resources they’d like to continue using. I’m thinking of content from past courses as well as services like plagiarism detectors.

It shouldn’t be impossible for them to transfer their current course content (from paper or a previous LMS) to the new platform. Scanning with handwriting/optical character recognition will allow them to upload and use any type of document can be really helpful.

Here, it’s important to consider the platform’s ease-of-use. Not every instructor is going to want to become an expert in the intricacies of LMS software. Many want something that gets out of the way and just lets them teach, so to speak.

It’s about making enough online learning resources available without overwhelming instructors. If it’s annoying or constricting to use certain features, they won’t.

Administrator Control

A lot of the best LMS software is cloud-based, which means organizations aren’t responsible for maintaining the backend IT infrastructure.

Even so, administrators play a leading role in the success or failure of any platform. What you are looking for is something that gives these all-important users the visibility and control they need.

An LMS that integrates and syncs with your student information system or identity provider is going to make this task a lot easier.

Additionally, admins need to be able to pull reports quickly. This could be for an individual student, class, or entire school district, depending on your use case. How hard is it going to be for administrators to get big picture and granular insight?

Technical Considerations

The LMS you choose has to fit into your environment. It’s going to be one of a number of tools that people are using throughout their day, and if it doesn’t play nice with others, there’s trouble ahead.

This is true of any software, but with an LMS, you have to be extra careful to consider every aspect of this issue before signing on to a particular platform. 

Integrations are going to be important. Will it work with your identity provider, student information system, plagiarism detector, or cloud storage services?

Look for direct integrations, as those will be the easiest to use. With LMS software, however, you should also be aware that many come with APIs that can be used to build custom solutions. These can work well, but you want to make sure these methods aren’t going to break at scale.

The other thing to pay attention to is content compliance. This includes standards like SCORM, LTI, AICC, and others. If a platform is SCORM compliant, for example, that means instructors will be able to import any content that meets those standards.

Unless you want to build everything instructors are using from scratch, it will be really helpful to find a platform that is compliant with the content you already depend on. 

#1 – Schoology — Best for K-12 Blended Learning

Schoology has proven itself to be one of the most nimble LMS providers in a time where adapting to new learning environments really matters. 

The platform connects everyone involved: students, teachers, parents, coaches, and administrators. It can accommodate virtually any type of learning environment, from in-person, to blended, to fully remote.

With Schoology, instructors can continue to “use what they know” because it has direct integrations with more than 200 popular tools, like Turnitin and Khan Academy, as well as compliance with SCORM, LTI, QTI and Common Cartridge.

Whether the schools are open or closed, teachers can use the lessons they trust without having to reinvent the wheel. They can manage everything from assessments to attendance within a single dashboard, and share all of their content with students on their class homepage.

Students can find the information they need quickly and a space to reach out if they need help. It has the feel of a social media platform, in terms of user-friendliness and student approachability.

Within this simple framework, instructors have a ton of freedom to create unique content for their students, design meaningful assessments, and a rich set of tools for tracking progress.

They can figure out what’s working quickly, and have the ability to personalize content for individualized instruction. 

This is really important in blended learning environments where students don’t necessarily have equal access to technology. Schoology makes it easier for teachers to create different types of assessments that let students go at their own pace or access resources offline, even on the mobile app.

That’s the beauty of Schoology. It doesn’t change what teachers teach, it just gives them the tools to do it in any setting, with features like:

• Course & lesson designers
• Grading tools
• Commenting and video feedback
• Student tracking
• Online discussions

On the administrator side, Schoology syncs with student information systems, which cuts down on busy work and keeps information consistent. 

It will work especially well for districts that are already using Powerschool as their student information system, as Schoology is now part of the same company.

Students, instructors, parents and advisors can create a free Schoology account, but institutions will have to get in touch with Schoology for pricing. 

The strength of the product for K-12 schools is that it integrates with tools that teachers already use, in a format that’s comfortable for students.

#2 – D2L Brightspace — Best for Higher Education

D2L, which stands for Desire 2 Learn, makes LMS software for higher education that is used by some of the biggest universities in the country. It’s become a lifesaver for many institutions that are trying to adjust to remote learning.

For as powerful and customizable as it is, D2L’s Brightspace for Higher Education feels extremely light. It’s easy to navigate for students, giving them the ability to monitor grades, assignments, classes, and announcements from a single dashboard.

The truth is that each professor only needs a fraction of the capabilities available to create and manage their courses. D2L can be customized to meet the needs of different departments and pedagogical approaches.

In Brightspace, the interface is easy for professors to use, no matter how they want to build their course and track assessment. They’re not having to shoehorn their lectures into a mold or trying to develop work arounds to include the content they want.

On the student side, the experience remains minimalist, regardless of which features their professors using. One class may use a ton of collaborative and social tools, like discussion boards. Another might be all videos and interactive labs. 

Either way, the student gets a single, clean, cohesive experience since D2L’s mobile app is responsive and works well on any screen size. 

In short, students have one place for all their academic needs and can access the platform from wherever they are.

Whether students are going to be on campus, engaging in remote learning, or some mix of the two, D2L Brightspace comes with everything an institution needs to continue operating, including:

• Virtual classrooms
• Video assignments
• Student/Class progress dashboards
• Single sign-on (SSO)
• Disaster recovery

All of these features come with Brightspace Core. Additional reporting and tracking features are available with Performance Plus, which can be helpful for identifying at-risk students before problems become unsolvable.

Engagement Plus, another Brightspace add-on, comes with additional features to further enhance digital learning environments. Instructors will be able to deliver fully-searchable video content, which is great for lectures, and enable gamification in their courses.

You’ll have to get in touch with D2L for pricing. Call them today and see why so many public and private institutions are choosing to go with Brightspace over the competition.

#3 – Tovuti — Best for Selling Online Courses

Tovuti is a super-flexible LMS software option. I like it best for individuals and institutions that are looking to sell courses online, though it could be a favorable option as a lightweight corporate LMS.

Tovuti provides a strong blend of ecommerce LMS functionality with course management features that help instructors make sure that learners are getting the most bang for their buck.

Unlike other similar platforms, course authoring tools are included. Within the platform you can create more than 40 different types of content, like interactive videos, quizzes, and memory games.

Once you’ve built your courses, Tovuti makes it easy to manage, track, and grow your enrollment. There’s a built-in content management system, blog, and web designer, as well as plenty of features to help you create an experience that aligns with your brand.

Create extended learning paths with multiple courses or deliver your content in a microlearning format where learners are free to choose from individual PDFs and videos in your content library.

By enabling feedback (which is optional), you can let learners rate and review your courses. This puts them on the radar of learners with similar goals.

All the marketing, ecommerce, and content creation capabilities an instructor needs are centralized in one intuitive platform. 

Some of the other highlights include:

• Virtual classroom
• Personalized learner portals
• Mobile learning
• Single sign-on (SSO)
• SCORM compliance
• PowerPoint importer
• Gamification

To use Tovuti as an ecommerce LMS, you’ll need to get the Pro plan. This is going to be more expensive than the Core plan, but that doesn’t let you charge for courses.

The upside is that the Pro plan comes with a ton of features that are all exceptionally deep. For example, their virtual classroom allows for breakout rooms. Smaller groups can split up, talk about the discussion and rejoin the larger meeting seamlessly.

Get in touch with Tovuti today and supercharge your e-learning business for tomorrow.

#4 – Looop — Best for SMB Employee Training and Development

Looop helps small businesses bring new hires up to speed quickly and keep top talent engaged. At the heart of Looop’s strategy for delivering a meaningful LMS is their understanding of how employees actually learn. 

Most people’s instinct is to use search engines to find the information they need rather than in-house resources. But you can’t ensure the information they get from Google has the context, depth, and relevance to be applied properly to your company. 

Looop lets you turn company content into the on-demand resource employees crave. Quickly build engaging training modules and other resources, or integrate existing SCORM and xAPI content into your platform.

One of the standout features of Looop is that administrators can use automated campaigns to deliver content directly to the inboxes or Slack channels of employees who need it. Similar to marketing automation, these campaigns can be personalized to meet the needs of the learner.

Admins can then track which messages have been opened, which trainings have been completed, and automatically send the next training module when they’re ready.

Plus, it’s all mobile-responsive, so employees can access these resources whenever and wherever they need them.

There are also built-in survey tools that allow learners to provide feedback and dashboards for instructors and admins to keep tabs on overall progress. Continually optimize content based on how learners are responding.

Some of the other standout features that come with Loop include:

• Instructor-led training
• Unlimited content creation
• Video and screencast uploads
• Flexible roles and permissions
• Pre-created content libraries
• Automatic content backups

Companies of any size can benefit from Looop’s transparent, predictable pricing. There are four tiers, which are based on the number of users:

• Small Businesses: $299/month, up to 50 users
• Mid Size Businesses: $699/month, up to 250 users
• Enterprise: $1,199/month, up to 500 users
• Enterprise Plus: Contact sales for more than 500 users

Keeping the price down is not hard with Looop. You can archive users, which means you can keep their record without their seat counting toward your limit. 

And if your user size falls somewhere between the tiers, they’re happy to work with you to find a fitting price.

I like it for SMBs because it’s something they can stick with as they grow and it’s not nearly as expensive as other corporate LMS software. 

For small and midmarket organizations that are focused on training employees, Looop is a solid choice. Learners get the resources they need at their fingertips, and administrators can monitor progress with very little legwork.

You can try Looop free for seven days, which comes with a live demo to get you started on the right foot. The demo is only about 20-30 minutes long, which gives you an idea of how easy it is to use.

#5 – Docebo — Best LMS software for Enterprise Learning

Docebo is a corporate LMS built from the ground up to serve medium to large enterprises. Learning and development administrators will love how easy the platform is to use, manage, and evolve as new challenges emerge.

First things first, Docebo is pronounced doh-chay-bo. It’s Latin for “I will teach.” Even their name is educational.

It’s best for companies that need to train 300 or more people each month. These could be courses for employees, customers, and partners. 

High-growth companies—especially if they are on the verge of outgrowing their existing LMS—will find that Docebo provides the tools they need to scale their learning programs. 

Easy content creation, flexible teaching environments, and excellent reporting features allow companies to upskill everyone inside and outside the company. The most common use cases include:

• Compliance training
• Customer training
• Employee development
• Employee onboarding
• Partner training
• Sales enablement

It’s built to ensure that admins and instructors can securely share the information learners need and keep track of their ongoing education. Managers can quickly see how each member of their team is progressing and who may need a little extra help.

In Docebo, managers and admins get the freedom not just to create content, but to customize the user experience for their learners. With the Pages feature, managers can quickly create a unique space for learners that matches the needs of their specific audience and organizes all the relevant resources.

Using the simple drag-and-drop interface, managers can add widgets like calendars, activity feeds, reports, and other features to keep everyone on the same page.

Some of the other features that make Docebo such a good out-of-the-box solution for an enterprise LMS include:

• Unlimited cloud storage
• SSO & integration with IdPs
• 40+ languages supported 
• ROI dashboards
• Ecommerce LMS functionality
• Compliance with SCORM, AICC, and xAPI

For those who need it, being able to manage multiple languages on the platform will be critical. Docebo comes with a localization tool that helps you ensure that translations capture your intended meaning.

You’ll have to get in touch with Docebo for pricing, but it’s most certainly geared towards the needs of larger organizations that are growing quickly. 

If you need a one-and-done onboarding course, Docebo will be overkill. It works well for extended or ongoing learning programs. 

There are no pricing tiers for less than 300 learners a month, so it can be difficult for an SMB to justify the cost of Docebo, regardless of how good it is.

It’s also not intended for K-12 or higher education. The company states this clearly on their website.

If you need corporate LMS software that is going to work at scale, Docebo is the best choice available. Companies like Bose, Amazon Web Services, and WalMart have made it their LMS for a reason.

Get in touch with Docebo today and impress the sales team with your Latin pronunciation.

#6 – Sensei — Best LMS Plugin for WordPress

Sensei is a premium plugin made by WooCommerce that lets people design and sell courses within their WordPress site.

It takes just a few clicks to ingrate Sensei. Now, instead of a blog, you have a classroom with lessons, quizzes, grading, and learner management features.

If you are just interested in sharing your knowledge within an LMS rather than a blog, Sensei has you covered.

Should you want to monetize that venture, just add the WooCommerce Paid Course extension. A few more clicks and now your teaching has become a source of income.

Piano teachers, tutors, professors, even humble bloggers such as myself can build out courses within the WordPress platform as if they’re making a new page or post.

It’s as easy as you think it is. Why? Because Sensei is made by Automattic, the same people who power WordPress, WooCommerce, and other sites that continuously deliver best-in-breed products to their users.

Like their other products, Sensei is an intuitive balance of power and simplicity. There’s a lot you can do in terms of customizing courses, but it’s not overwhelming.

The ease-of-use is passed on to the students, who enjoy a welcoming interface and clear roadmap of what they need to get done. Choosing courses is as easy as shopping on WooCommerce and navigating your site is as easy as clicking around your blog.

The features are not as deep as they are with some of the more robust corporate LMS software, but it has everything an individual needs to get started selling courses, including:

• Lesson, course, and quiz builder
• Image and video uploads
• Integration with WordPress themes
• Grading
• Learner management and analytics
• Private messaging

Looking at all-in pricing to use Sensei, it breaks down like this:

• SenseiLMS: Free
• WooCommerce Paid Courses: $129/year
• WordPress hosting: starting at $2.95/month with Bluehost

The price of WordPress hosting is going to vary. I recommend going with Bluehost, because it’s affordable and dependable.

All in, the total price is still well below many other LMS software options, most of which would take a lot more effort to set up. And, if you are already paying for WordPress hosting, you simply need to make more than $11 bucks off courses each month to turn a profit.

And if you don’t want to make money sharing your knowledge, you can just use Sensei for free.

Whether you want to make money with what you know or not, Sensei will help you turn your blog into an educational environment. We all love the comment section, but what kind of commitment from your readers will you build by offering interactive courses?

Sensei can help you find out, and may turn into a source of passive income if you can find an audience.

Summary

Teaching is hard. Instructors, coaches, mentors and business leaders will all admit that with pride.

How long is a new hire’s honeymoon period where they’re really willing to learn? Or a student, for that matter? How long do you want to wait for that manager to get trained up?

Creating the conditions for learning is always going to be a challenge, but using the right LMS software is going to take a ton of the legwork out. 

Everyone can focus on their work instead of fighting with a frustrating system.

K-12 teachers have enough on their plate without having to reinvent the way they instruct. Using Schoology LMS, teachers can stick with what they know and utilize the best-in-class platform to deliver their lessons.

For higher education, D2L Brightspace is going to make student, faculty, and administrator lives much easier. Professors have the flexibility to design the exact online learning experience their courses need without overwhelming students. Administrators get the visibility and control they need to manage a constantly changing environment.

Looking at the corporate LMS software, Looop should be the choice for small business and Docebo for enterprise.

Looop is lighter but still very powerful, and it comes in at a reasonable price point for SMBs who don’t need to train hundreds of people each month. 

Docebo, on the other hand, is built to scale with enterprise growth. Learners inside and outside the company are well supported by the platform.

In terms of selling online courses, Tovuti is the complete package. People monetize and deliver engaging content, and the platform is packed with marketing features designed to grow their audience.

For people who are using WordPress to grow their business (something I endorse wholeheartedly), SenseiLMS will let them turn their blog into a classroom. A couple clicks, a little planning, and now their WordPress site is paying for itself.

The post Best Learning Management Systems appeared first on Neil Patel.

source https://neilpatel.com/blog/best-lms-software/

How to Remove Information from Google Search Results

Information is timeless. We live in a world where data never goes away. Years ago, something hit the local newspaper, it was popular for a few days, and then it was gone.

Today, if you make one wrong move, it can cause a huge ripple in your business.

There are many reasons you’d want to remove information from Google. If there’s incorrect, problematic, or outdated info about you or your business online, it can harm your site’s performance and hurt your reputation.

In this article, I’ll cover everything you need to know so you can manually remove information from Google; instead of waiting for them to do it for you.

When You Should Remove Information From Google Searches

You might find that, for whatever reason, there’s information on Google about you that doesn’t belong there. There are a few different reasons why this can happen, and most of them are harmless.

It’s still important that you get that info off the internet, so no one gets the wrong idea.

Here are four possible situations that may apply to you. If you find that any of these resonate, you’ll want to get this data off Google as soon as possible.

Penalizing Information Removal From Google

Many question whether or not Google penalizes you for certain things like bad links, keyword stuffing, and shady black hat strategies. But the fact that high-quality content always outranks its competitors is proof that it’s essential to follow white hat strategies.

Even if you didn’t mean to, you might have links from sites dedicated to building links or pieces of content that are less than “desirable.” If that’s the case, you’ll want to remove or replace them.

As for low-quality links from spammy or unrelated sites, you’ll want Google to exempt those, and I cover that in more detail below. Having too many “bad” links will tell Google that you’re using black or gray hat linking strategies, and you may get penalized for it.

Outdated Information Removal From Google

Times change, we change, and information changes. Perhaps you used to write about pop culture several years ago and ended up ranking a ton of high-quality articles within the niche.

Now, you’re trying to get noticed as a digital marketer, but every time people look you up on Google, your old content about celebrity gossip keeps taking over.

While this isn’t necessarily a “problem,” it’s outdated info that no longer applies to you. It doesn’t display who you currently are, what you represent, and what you want people to know about you.

Some examples aren’t even as complicated as that. Perhaps you own a restaurant, and a popular site that displays menus of restaurants has an outdated version of your menu on their site.

As a result, people keep calling or coming into your business expecting something only to be disappointed when you don’t have that item that was on your online menu.

Instead of having to explain yourself over and over, you can get that menu taken down from Google and replaced with the updated version.

Misinformation 

In some cases, the information isn’t outdated; it’s simply wrong. This can happen for a variety of reasons.

Maybe a business database is posting the wrong hours of operation for you, so people keep getting frustrated when they can’t reach you because you’re closed.

There’s also a lot of distrust in data these days, so it’s even possible that a news network or online outlet has posted incorrect information about you. While it might not be damaging, you may still want to remove it because it’s not correct.

Potentially Harmful Information

The worst-case scenario is that there is harmful and sensitive information about you online. You might have a news story by a local news network with your name and photo on it, or your personal information was somehow leaked online.

Even though the story was six years ago, each time someone tries to look you up, they find this information.

Unfortunately, information like that sticks around, but sometimes it’s wrong or slanderous. If that’s the case, you might be able to get it removed.

Maybe a competitor is spreading false information or even stealing content from you. If you think these types of things don’t happen, think again.

Regardless of your reason, learning how to remove information from Google is possible but it takes a bit of work.

Ways to Remove Information From Google Searches

Before I even start with how to remove information, we need to learn what we’re removing and if it’s worth it.

The first thing you’ll want to do is perform a check on your business and see what pops up.

If I type Neil Patel Digital into Google, I can see that the first few results are business pages and stories from the blog.

Great!

As we move down, I see Glassdoor reviews about working for Neil Patel Digital, and they’re mostly positive, which is also good. Even as I move further down the page and onto the next page, everything checks out fine for the most part.

Next, we’ll want to check image results. The images I see apply, make sense for the brand, and shine a positive light on the business. All is well. But, this might not be the case for you.

Let’s look at six different ways you can remove or change incorrect information on Google.

Disavow Request

Disavowing a link is when you tell Google not to consider the link when crawling your site. You’re probably thinking, “why would I ever want to do that?”

You want to do this when you have low-quality links on your site for whatever reason. Maybe you hired an agency that didn’t understand linking or you have some outdated links from old school strategies.

Either way, you’ll want to use Google’s Disavow feature to exempt that link, so Google doesn’t penalize you for low-quality linking.

Now, according to some experts, the disavow tool isn’t necessary because Google ignores low-quality links anyway. They don’t necessarily penalize, so they don’t even bother with them.

But others believe Google still penalizes users for low-quality links because the algorithm does this automatically.

This should be your last resort if you think your traffic has flatlined and you have exhausted all other options.

So, how do you do it?

First, you need to find the bad links. If this sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it is. Thankfully, we have tools to help us do it. I recommend SEMRush’s Backlink Audit tool where they offer temporary access with a free trial if you don’t have an account.

You’ll go into the dashboard, go to backlink audit, and search by root domain.

Depending on how large your site is, you should get your results in about 10 minutes.

SEMRush will label how toxic each link is and you can export a file with all the bad ones, upload them, and begin to disavow them using the tool in the search console.

Copyright Information Removal From Google Request

If you own rights to intellectual material, it’s against Google’s terms of service for someone else to take that information and post it on their site. It’s also against the TOS for them to claim ownership of something that isn’t theirs.

This policy can apply to some of the following:

• Plagiarized blog posts
• Copyrighted business processes
• Product information and data
• Patented products and services

To do this you’ll go to the Legal Help section under removing content from Google. You’ll choose which product the request relates to and you’ll choose the specific issue from there.

You can report malware, remove personally identifiable information, intellectual property, and more.

Overall, the process seems very simple and Google even says that they investigate and remove any copyright infringement, counterfeit, or trademark issues within six hours.

Replace Poor Content With Quality Content

Starting with the Google Panda algorithm update in 2011, the search engine has placed more emphasis on accurate and quality information. They’re trying to keep subpar info from reaching users and they continue to update the platform, which makes the quality of your content more and more important.

How do we determine what is or isn’t poor content?

Like everything else, Google lays it out for us!

Here’s a quick rundown of content you might want to replace:

• Content with ads featuring grotesque images
• Content lacking a direct audience
• Content lacking purpose
• When no information about the creator is present
• Unmaintained websites
• Content promoting hate
• Content promoting harm
• Content from creators with poor reputations
• Misleading content

The next question is, what should that content be replaced with? Google answers that for us as well.

Your content should be useful, informative, valuable, credible, engaging. It should also display expertise, authority, and trust.

Go over to your site and find content that consistently underperforms, doesn’t attract links, and doesn’t convert. This is content you might want to replace altogether.

If you have some content that doesn’t rank but still gets some traffic, it might need a refresh. Update the information and make sure that everything still applies in the current space.

Update Metadata

Your metadata is the information displayed when you pop up on Google. When pages perform for a long period, you might want to update this info because the original data may no longer apply.

The method you use for doing this will depend on what site-building platform you use, but most of them make it incredibly simple.

For example, in WordPress, you’ll have to install a plugin like Yoast. Once you’ve done that, you’ll just go to the page or post tab on the left, scroll down, and update the snippet.

It may take a few days for Google to crawl the site again but once they do, you’ll have your updated metadata.

Google Displays the Wrong Metadata

One of the most frustrating things is when Google refuses to display the correct meta descriptions. Even if you write them properly and update the correct fields, Google sometimes takes a snippet from your site anyway.

There are a few reasons why this can happen:

• Your source code is wrong
• The cache is outdated
• They simply ignored it

Usually, fixing your source code to include one description meta tag will fix that problem. If that doesn’t work, try updating your cache using the method below.

Use Tools to Speed Up Google’s Cache of Your Site 

As previously mentioned, Google doesn’t always apply your changes right away. If you find that they’re taking excessively long and you don’t want to wait, there are some things you can do manually.

First, you can request indexing by going into your Google Search Console.

Choose your website from the search property and expand the “coverage” section. Once you’ve done that you should see your “last crawl” date.

Click “test live URL” and if everything checks out OK, it’ll ask you if the page has changed and allow you to request indexing. This will speed up the process and ensure that only the most updated and accurate information is displayed on Google.

Conclusion

This all might seem a bit intimidating, but it’s not as hard as it looks.

Start by performing a simple audit. When you type your business or name into Google, what do you get? If it’s not good, follow some of the steps to remove that information from Google.

Next, perform an audit on your site. Find content and pages that are underperforming and see if any of the reasons above are the culprit. You can also hire my SEO team to do this for you.

Doing this may improve your reputation and your SEO, which will ultimately result in more money in your pocket.

Have you ever found anything severely harmful to your business online? If so, what was it?

The post How to Remove Information from Google Search Results appeared first on Neil Patel.

source https://neilpatel.com/blog/remove-information-google/

What is a Retail Media Network?

The marketing and advertising industry is a fast-paced industry.

With technology evolving rapidly, people have found it more convenient to do their shopping and other transactions online.

With digital interactions overtaking in-person activities, this shift in people’s lifestyles means one thing for businesses — they need to pivot fast. Failure to do so can only lead to losing customers.

Enter retail media networks.

What is a Retail Media Network?

With more and more people shopping online, retail media just makes sense.

But what exactly is a retail media network?

A retail media network is when retailers set up an advertising platform on their website, app, or other digital platforms within their network. This allows the store, and other brands, to advertise to customers on sites like CVS or Walgreens. It’s a form of in-store advertising in a digital format.

Here’s an example from CVS’s homepage. Notice the “sponsored” tag in the bottom right corner — this isn’t just a product listing; it’s an ad from a face mask company right on CVS’s website.

Ads on retail media networks can be displayed on many pages, including:

• The home page
• Category page
• Search page
• Product detail page

This enables advertisers to reach shoppers at the various stages of their buyer journey.

The reason retail media works so well is that shoppers are more receptive to ads when shopping than when they’re carrying out other non-shopping related activities.

Pros and Cons of Retail Media

Retail media is changing the way shoppers and brands interact. But is this new form of advertising and marketing a good thing or not?

Well, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of retail media and find out.

Pros of Retail Media

We’ll start by looking at the advantages of retail media and breaking them down according to the players involved.

For Retailers

The most significant advantage of retail media for retailers is that it creates a new revenue stream. Advertising is big business, and a retail media network enables retailers to tap into this $560 billion industry.

Profit margins on consumer packaged goods (CPG) have taken a tumble in the past few years. The revenue generated by retail media has been a lifeline for retailers looking to boost their profits.

Retailers that leverage retail media have become the new media moguls, thanks to the rise of e-commerce. This has opened up a new world of possibilities in how they can generate revenue.

For Consumers

Shoppers also benefit from retail media in a few ways.

The first benefit is it offers better price control for customers. With retailers generating revenue from ads, they won’t be as quick to raise their prices. An increase in pricing could result in a drop in traffic, spiraling into reduced ad revenue.

Secondly, retail media benefits shoppers by offering a better customer experience (CX). Sure, ads can be annoying. But if done well, they can help shoppers make better purchase decisions. They can also remind shoppers about related products they may want.

For Advertisers

One of the biggest advantages of retail media for advertisers is that it gives them access to first-party data.

First-party data is data collected and owned by the website owner, and in this case, that’s the retailer. It’s clean and more reliable than third-party data collected by other methods such as cookies.

The best part of first-party data is that it’s collected right at the point of sale, giving you better insight into buyer behavior.  

Why is this so important?

One word: personalization.

Personalization plays a huge role in designing and executing ad campaigns that convert. To do this, you need accurate data.

Another reason first-party data has become so valuable is because of the impending death of cookies.  

For Brands

For brands that advertise on retail media networks, the most significant advantage is that it’s easier to tie ad spend to sales. Because sales happen closer to the ads, it’s easier to attribute a sale to a specific ad and action. This is crucial to strategic decisions such as resource allocation.

Another advantage for brands is that these ads increase visibility, which helps drive sales.

Even though it’s still in its infancy, retail media is already proving to be a powerful form of advertising set to change the future of online shopping experiences.

Cons of Retail Media

With retail media looking so good, could it have any disadvantages?

One of the biggest disadvantages of retail media is that it gives more power to brands that are already big. It creates an uneven playing field for smaller brands that don’t have the traffic, budget, and infrastructure to set up retail media networks of their own.

Another disadvantage of retail media is that it’s a new field that requires infrastructure that most retailers don’t have. Because of that, it’s a learning curve for all the parties involved.

The Rise of Retail Media: Explained

Many brands had already jumped on the digital transformation bandwagon before retail media networks came on the field. They invested in mobile apps where customers could shop for products and get delivery right to their homes.

When the pandemic hit, these websites and apps became instrumental in generating sales for retailers. Research shows that 80% of people are now doing over half of their shopping online. The same study reveals that 60% of respondents said they’d continue shopping online even after the pandemic.

What does this have to do with retail media networks?

Everything.

This shift in traffic to retailer websites and apps birthed a new form of advertising.

That new form of advertising comes in the form of retailer media networks.

In short, this means brands advertising on retailers’ websites and apps. These can be brands that sell directly on the store or brands that want to reach that store’s audience.

Leveraging already warm traffic to create retail media networks is powerful. That’s because these networks benefit everyone involved, from the retailer to the brands advertising to the shoppers.

Brands with Retail Media Networks

Interested to know which brands have their own retail media networks and how they do it?

Let’s look at three brands that caught the shift early and are seeing great results with their retail media.

CVS

Originally known as the Consumer Value Store, CVS has become a force to reckon with on the American retail scene.

CVS is one of the first brands to launch its own retail media network, dubbed the CVS Media Exchange (CMX).

CMX allows brands to place their products on channels informed by CV’s first data. This includes off-site as well as on-site targeted ads. When it comes to customer data, CVS has the edge over most retail ad networks, thanks to their:

• Close to 10,000 locations nationwide
• Decades of consumer data through their loyalty programs
• High-traffic online platforms

With this huge data bank at their disposal, advertisers are better equipped to create personalized ads and place them strategically for optimum visibility.

Walgreens

Walgreens is not green behind the ears when it comes to executing digital ad campaigns for other brands.

So it’s no surprise that Walgreens has decided to formalize things and launch a retail media network called Walgreens Advertising Group (Wag).

Wag offers ad placement on their online store, in their brick-and-mortar stores, as well as on other digital platforms such as social media and Google.

Amazon

Retail and e-commerce giant Amazon is another brand that has mastered retail media and runs its own network.

It’s called Amazon Advertising.

Thanks to its massive digital footprint, Amazon can offer brands more in terms of the kind of campaigns they want to run. It also gives them access to one of the world’s largest customer data banks as well as a massive audience (over 200 million in the U.S alone).

Amazon Advertising works much like Google Ads. Brands that want to be found have to bid for keywords and pay each time their ad is clicked.

Retail Media Advertisers

Since most retailers don’t have the infrastructure and know-how to run retail media networks, how do they pull it off?

Most of them get external help. Here are some of the top retail media advertisers who are powering the retail media movement:

Criteo

Criteo is one of the leading retail media advertising platforms around. They make it easy for media buyers to purchase retail media with ease, thanks to their end-to-end service platform.

The platform gives brands and retailers full control of their campaigns and easy access to data and analytics. Robust APIs also allow you to use your marketing tool of choice.

One thing Criteo boasts of is its transparent platform. For retailers, this makes it easier to grow their retail media network, while brands have more flexibility when it comes to choosing the retailers they want to partner with.

Promote IQ

Another retail media advertiser that enables brands to advertise their products on retailers’ websites is Promote IQ.

Acquired by Microsoft in 2019, Promote IQ gives retailers full control of the end-user experience. This helps make the retail media seamlessly blend in with the retailer’s website.

Promote IQ claims they can help retailers generate 5X their revenue by cutting out the middleman and working directly with brands through their platform. Promote IQ also provides automation capabilities to streamline and increase your campaigns’ effectiveness.

Brands get more visibility and higher conversions thanks to Promote IQ’s powerful data and analytics platform. This helps create hyper-targeted ads that resonate with shoppers, driving up conversions.

Elevaate

Another advertiser shaking up the retail media world is Elevaate.

Elevaate understands the hassle retailers face setting up a retail media network. That’s why they designed a platform that’s as easy to set up as it is effective in generating revenue. With Elevaate, retailers can maximize their digital real estate profits without compromising their shoppers’ experience.

Elevaate promises increased visibility and high return on ad spend (ROAS) by offering precise targeting.

How to Create a Retail Media Network for Your Brand

So how can you create a retail media network to boost sales for your brand? If your brand has a large amount of traffic, consider using one of the tools above, like Criteo or Elevaate.  

After all, they have the infrastructure in place to help your retail network up and running quickly. Which means you’ll have more time to spend on your business.

With most of them, the process is as simple as applying to join their program. Once approved, you upload your product feed, and the ad network does the rest.

Conclusion

The world is changing rapidly.

For businesses to succeed in the future, they need to adapt to the changing landscape and buyer behavior.

This is why you must consider the retail media bandwagon if you haven’t yet — either by creating your own or advertising on major sites like CVS and Walgreens.

Not only will it give you an edge over the competition, but it will help you tap into audiences you can’t reach on your own. It will also help you maximize your marketing budget, ensuring you get the best ROAS.

Have you used retail media for your brand? What was your experience like?

The post What is a Retail Media Network? appeared first on Neil Patel.

source https://neilpatel.com/blog/retail-media-network/