Curatti Best Articles of 2017 – Part Three
4 years and going strong! And we couldn’t have done it without our readers, our contributors and our good friends. As with any website, you will see our evolution if you go to earlier posts. No doubt, this will continue into 2018.
The last year has seen a site redesign.
The most obvious changes that are coming in 2018 are:
- After the 3rd of these 3 posts goes live on January 5th, we will no longer post on Fridays. Why? Because posting articles takes time, and because quite clearly, you, our readers have spoken! Friday is easily our quietest day of the week. And 4 posts a week is still quite enough.
- You’ll see a little more advertising on the site. We hope you won’t find it obnoxious, but will be open to your thoughts.
- We’ll be promoting our services, and perhaps rolling out others.
Here’s what won’t change – or at least, perhaps because of cutting down on our publishing schedule, it will improve for the better. You’ll continue to see great articles across the Digital Marketing spectrum – from some authors you’ve heard of, and others you haven’t. And every once in a while, we’ll take a chance on posting something really quite different.
Certainly, as time goes by, we get more request from would be contributors than ever before. And sadly, this has led to our rejection rate soaring, rather than our hopper size increasing. That is not the fun part of doing this. As anyone who takes guest contributions will know, you see so many repeat article; so many rehashes. It’s an inevitable consequence of the rapidly expanding content ocean.
For now, we will present you with curated highlights from one article by each contributor who has posted 2 or more articles this year. There are so many, we had to break this into 3 parts.
You’ll find an excerpt from each, and links so that you can read the rest of the article, if you desire. Some very interesting and helpful stuff here!
Below, we thank the friends of Curatti who allow us to republish their great content.
First, in alphabetical order, the last 9 contributors are:
And as a bonus, our Lead Generation Expert Roundup
If you wish, you may click on any name to go directly to their content.
Joan Selby
10 Most Common Email Marketing Mistakes And How To Avoid Them
Before we get on with the list, we need to say that the biggest mistake pretty much all marketers make is thinking that email marketing is no longer important or relevant in the age of social media. The truth is that as many as 54% of marketing experts think of it as the most efficient marketing tool, and 89% of them rely on it to generate leads for their business.
Common Email Marketing Mistakes
According to John Roundtree, the head of marketing at Essayontime, a lot of marketers make grammar, spelling and punctuation errors. And while these might seem harmless to some, they nevertheless hurt your business. That being said, let get on to some of the more serious email marketing mistakes, and ways how you can avoid them.
Find out more about email marketing mistakes by clicking here.
Ruchika Sharma
Your Complete Content Plan Part 1: Keyword Research
As a Content Marketer working with a web push platform, at the beginning of every month, I encounter the trickiest part of my job – creating my monthly content plan. As much as I loved content marketing, I hated formulating my Content Plan. It was a nightmare for me!
However, this one thing serves as a building block to the content strategy. And there’s no way in hell I could just skip this part and enjoy a merry ride.
I came to realise that I didn’t chalk out a concrete Content Plan, I would miss out on a lot of opportunities. The that could account for the success of my content.
Every time I sat down to create my Content Plan, I would stress over where to begin. One thing I fully got was that I needed to understand and clearly define our target audience or buyer personas to ensure high user engagement.
It was a nightmare for me! I went through many blogs and read as many articles as possible to simplify the process of content planning for me and for other content marketers. From keyword research to content creation and content syndication, there were so many suggestions and so many tools. Not being able to find the right framework for the content plan, I decided to take the plunge and define the framework that helps me throughout the content process.
Click here to learn more.
Lisa Sicard
Networking: The Essential Antidote To Blogging Alone
Blogging Alone is Not the Way to Go
Do you get up in the early morning hours to start your blog writing as your coffee is brewing? Your eyes are not yet quite open as you log into your WordPress panel. You look to see if any comments are there from overnight and there are none. The traffic to your blog hasn’t really changed. You are all alone at your computer in the still of the early dawn.
Do you spend most of your time the rest of the morning and day generating content and sharing others’ content but are not getting more traffic to your blog? Do you get sidetracked when you have technical difficulties? Have you ever written a post only to find out what you wrote about is no longer valid? I’ve done that and been there several times. But if you are a new blogger blogging alone here is my solution for you.
You can click here to read more about not “blogging it” alone.
Robin Singh
9 Reasons to Adopt a Knowledge Base for Your Website
Having a knowledge base for your website is becoming more and more popular, as it can provide users with many benefits. No matter what kind of a website you have and what products or services you offer, creating a knowledge base and integrating it with your website is a great step to take. It can help you expand your customer base and significantly improve your business.
So take a look at the top reasons why you should use a knowledge base.
Find out more by clicking here.
Ann Smarty
How to Build An Influencer Driven Content Campaign
Influencer marketing and content marketing are two effective long-term ways of promotion which have all kinds of benefits beyond higher traffic (like trust, brand awareness, natural link acquisition, etc.)
Put the two together, and you have a match made in heaven. Influencer driven content is perhaps the single best addition that you can apply to any marketing campaign.
To attract influencers to your content click here.
Nicole Stelmar
5 Essential Elements Of Powerful Brand Storytelling
Brand storytelling has become an essential part of an effective marketing strategy. So, what is brand storytelling, and why is it so important? Storytelling is not intended to be a “selling” tool. It’s a method of building strong relationships with your customers and a thriving community of loyalists over time. A good story can tell people who you are, what you value, and what you do to have an impact on the lives of others. Your story identifies what your passions are and should serve as the foundation for all your future content developments.
Business brand storytelling combines five essential aspects. Let’s look at a piece of content that exemplifies each of these aspects.
Click here to see the examples.
Simon Walker
Understanding Web Accessibility & Why It Is Important
Web accessibility is the need of the hour. I realized something a few weeks back when I went to a nearby ATM for cash withdrawal. I noticed that the machine had specific buttons embossed with dots written in Braille that could be read by a visually challenged person. This feature has been made compulsory by the central bank so that all the visually impaired people can use the facility of ATM without any hassle. It is one example how our new world has finally accepted that people with disabilities should be able to do everything that those without disabilities can. And this is what web accessibility is all about.
Find out more by clicking here.
Neil White
6 Proven Ways to Create a Mobile-Friendly Website
In 2015, Wired website published an article predicted that in less than two years, smartphones would overtake actions and operations previously done by computers. Today, this prediction, as well as other very similar from other expert portals, has almost completely come true. And although Mary Meeker’s (of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) report for Internet trend this year at the Code Conference in California stated that global smartphone growth is slowing. This happened at the same time while the global Internet trends experienced solid user growth, the same report stated.
On the other hand, according to the 2017 mobile usage report from comScore which is based on the mobile minutes spent online, Indonesia leads with 91%, then follows Mexico 75%, Brazil 72%, USA and China with 71% each, Spain 67%, Italy 64%, Canada 62% and UK 61%. This proves the importance of mobile marketing and also the significance of knowing the behavior of users when using smartphones. Because of these statistics obtained through global research, it is imperative for websites to become mobile-friendly if they want to expand their audience and attract more visitors.
It may seem like a tough task ahead, but actually, there are several easy ways for creating a mobile-friendly website which will load properly and allow users to enjoy the full experience as though on computer or tablet devices.
Learn the best way to create a mobile-friendly website by clicking here.
Eleonora Zolotaryova
11 Essential SEO Promotion Stages For Your Website
Just like everything else in the world, SEO promotion doesn’t have one single all-purpose algorithm for success. This algorithm may vary depending on a country where you are promoting, a specificity of the promoted site and others. But there is still something every SEO should include in any promotion strategy. In this article, you’ll find 11 stages of SEO promotion that no webmaster can miss.
Click here to read about the 11 stages of SEO promotion.
Lead Generation Expert Roundup
The Curatti Lead Generation Roundup
For Curatti’s very first expert roundup, we thought we’d start with one of the more important topics in marketing. To state the blindingly obvious, all businesses want sales. And in order to make those sales, they need leads! Lead Generation, and it’s digital cousin, Inbound Marketing are subjects that no marketer can ever stop learning about.
For this roundup, we’ve assembled some great people. And we’ve conducted it a little differently to other roundups we’ve seen.
We’ve asked people to answer their own question, rather than limiting them to only answering what we ask. And the breadth of questions and answers has proven this little experiment to be a good one.
Here’s what we asked:
- Frame what you feel is the most important question that can be asked around Lead Gen
- Answer that question
And here’s who participated (click on any name to go to their response:
To read to full article, click here.
Friends of Curatti
We also extend a big Curatti Thank You to all of our friends who gave us permission to re-post their wonderful content:
Other Thanks
We published quite a few great Infographics this year, all presented by their creators. You can find them all here.
And of course, thank you to everyone who posted just once!
Who else is there to thank? You, the readers! We’re nothing without you 🙂
To read the previous installments of this retrospective/thank you series, click here for part one or here for part two.
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Jan Gordon
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