Curatti Best Articles of 2019 (And Happy New Year 2020!)
The end of the decade is upon us (unless you are a pendant, lol!). How marketing in general and websites have evolved! Search is unrecognizable, but the evolution has been gradual enough that you could be forgiven for thinking it was always like this. Social Business went mainstream quite some time ago but has a lot of evolving yet to do. You probably have a Social Media budget now. It was free less than 10 years ago!
But this article isn’t about all of that. It’s about our writers. We scaled back our publishing during the year, but still published about 100 articles. So, as we do every year, we want to publish a snippet of one article by every author who contributed 2 or more original articles.
Here they are, in alphabetical order:
If you wish, you may click on any name to go directly to their content.
Ben Alfrey
5 Ways Small Business Can Use Online Courses To Increase Sales
The Unique E-Learning League is a league table of some of the most successful online courses created, most of which you’ve never come across. The table boasts courses on all subjects from how to take perfect selfies and defend against a zombie attack to becoming a tour guide in your hometown.
These courses are not free and there are, of course, companies making a healthy profit off the back of them. However, the overall success of these courses stretches beyond enrolment figures and course sales.
A wide-angle lens also reveals that online courses can be used to increase sales in other areas of the business when the correct techniques are adopted. It is these techniques that will be uncovered here.
Click here to read the entire article.
Joydeep Ballachaga
How to Leverage Social Selling To Leverage Your eCommerce Niche
Social media is not just a platform for networking. It has gradually progressed to become a platform for product selling.
In fact, 30% of shoppers have admitted that they would prefer to buy a product directly from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.
One of the major benefits that social media offers to B2B eCommerce businesses is the cost-effectiveness that enables even the startups to easily list their products and start selling online.
There are two things that can define the success of your eCommerce business. First is finding a niche and the second is leveraging the power of social selling to constantly improve your sales.
Click here to find out how to choose the right eCommerce niche.
Shane Barker
How To Turn Unlinked Brand Mentions Into Links
Search engines like Google use backlinks to discover new web pages and to determine how well a page should rank in their search results. High-quality backlinks not only help Google find, crawl, and index your web pages, but also improve the authority and trustworthiness of your brand.
That’s why it is crucial for businesses to acquire high-quality, relevant links from other reputable sites. When done the right way, link building can significantly increase your chances of ranking well in the SERPs. It comes with a number of other benefits too, such as:
- It helps you build relationships with key influencers in your industry.
- Links from high traffic websites can help you get referral traffic. If the website is relevant to your niche, chances are that the traffic is also relevant. You can easily capitalize on this targeted traffic to increase conversions.
- High-quality links can help you build a good reputation and authority in your niche. They can help you get more people to trust your brand, products, and services.
That’s why brands and marketers put a lot of time and resources into building high-quality backlinks for their websites. However, there is one strategy that can help you earn hundreds of new backlinks quite easily.
You need to find, capitalize on, and turn unlinked brand mentions into links. Unlinked brand mentions are all web mentions of your brand or anything directly related to your brand that don’t link back to your website.
To find out how to turn your unlinked mentions into links, click here.
Andy Capaloff
Marketing and Sales Not Pulling in The Same Direction? This is a Thing?
Shockingly, to this IT guy, at least, it is a real thing that sometimes, marketing and sales within companies don’t work in unison. It reminded me of a company I consulted with back in my IT days. Here’s the analogy:
An IT Analogy for Marketing and Sales
Each group in the IT department had its own Y2K team. I managed one of these. I would find lots of things that could be problematic for other groups and automatically passed these things on to my peers.
One day, I found a show-stopping issue with the company-wide date routine that had somehow been missed. I took it to my manager, suggesting that I write an email to the entire IT group, explaining what I found and the simple fix.
My manager said “No!”
He explained that he didn’t like me doing the discovery work for every team. He thought that come January 1st. 2000, he would be covered in glory if his was the only group that didn’t suffer from system crashes.
What would really have happened if some or all of the other groups had encountered serious issues? If the company survived, would he look good? I doubt it!
And if marketing and sales don’t work together and that impacts your company’s bottom line, does either of those groups come out looking good? Do I need to answer that?
Click here for the full article.
Paolo Fabrizio
Why The First Customer Service Impression Matters
You are a customer. When you enter a store or visit a website or interact via digital channels you immediately have your first impression of a brand. Did you easily find the information you were looking for? Was the assistant friendly? Did s/he carefully listen to your question? Accordingly, did s/he reply in a clear and effective way?
Like it or not, there are still too many brands not listening or learning from such customer feedback. Therefore they wrongly give more importance to their assumptions because they think they really know what their customers think about them. The problem is, they don’t!
Click here to read the entire article.
Anna Fox
Five Steps to Creating Accessible Content
This is important!
An accessible content strategy is one that makes sure your content easily accessed and understood by any person with any type of disability.
When building your business, you tend to focus your digital marketing strategy on reaching as many people as possible. Leaving out an entire demographic can be detrimental to that growth.
According to the World Health Organization, about 15% of the global population has some kind of disability. A large portion of them need help in using the Internet.
In the last decade, efforts to make the Internet accessible for everyone have resulted in the World Wide Web Consortium (i.e. W3C) establishing the Web Accessibility standards.
These standards aim at making the Internet accessible to all. Creating accessible websites will not only help to further that goal but will also help businesses reach more people and increase brand loyalty.
Besides, web accessibility is being actively regulated. In the United States, failure to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is considered discrimination. This has resulted in an increasing number of accessibility-related lawsuits and fines. And it is a disaster for a company’s online reputation.
Here’s what content creators need to do to make their content accessible to avoid leaving out a huge portion of their target audience. Some appear to be standard Content Marketing advice:
Click here to read the entire article.
Susan Gilbert
10 Simple Techniques To Recapture Your Business Focus
Are you experiencing a lack of time and over-scheduling in your business? These are roadblocks to focus and progress that can be overcome with the right techniques. Whether you are writing a new book, working on your brand marketing or planning to become a professional speaker in your field, having the right mindset and discipline is critical to reaching your goals more effectively.
Recapture Your Business Focus
Like most people, you may find it difficult to balance all the tasks that demand your attention. You may even find yourself saying, “If I just had more hours in the day!”
The next time your confidence takes a hit or your urgent to-do list is growing, try a few of these simple tips to aid your business focus. They’re adapted from the book, Recharge in Minutes by Suzanne Zoglio, Ph.D.:
Click here to read the techniques.
David Gutierrez
7 Hallmarks of Successful B2B Companies
Our fast-paced digital society requires companies to operate swiftly and decisively if they want to position themselves for long-lasting growth. It is especially true for B2B organizations and their marketing efforts – while many private customers are conservative and will stick to the businesses they have been dealing for a long time, B2B clients will leave you immediately if they see somebody who does the same job better.
However, it is not enough to jump on every bandwagon and be the first to adopt every innovation. To keep attracting new customers while retaining existing ones, a B2B company has to possess certain inherent qualities. Here are some of the hallmarks of successful B2B companies:
Click here to read the 7 hallmarks.
Milosz Krasinski
What Is A Social Media Audit Audit And How To Conduct One
A Social Media Audit is like giving your business a physical. It makes sure that your business’s health and wellness are completely up to date. You can check to see that everything is working the way it should be. Better yet, you receive detailed insights with regards to your social media successes and failures.
It is an absolutely necessary part of any company. You need to be undertaking an audit at least annually to keep everything up to date. Conducting one isn’t as hard as it seems either, as the steps in this guide will be able to show you.
Click here to find out exactly what an audit is and how you can conduct one.
Christopher Nichols
Gaining a Competitive Edge With Machine Learning
Can machines think and act as humans can do? If this question fascinates you, this article is a good read for you. By now, most companies understand the value of machine learning in data processing. Those that have the means are already investing in technologies fueled by artificial intelligence.
In this post, you will become familiar with the basic concepts of machine learning and the scope of its application in business.
Click here to read the entire article.
Taral Patel
How To Better Read Your Audience To Improve Content Marketing Results
Building a relationship with your customer base should be a top priority for every single business. Making a customer feel understood, cared for, and connected to a brand can cultivate long-term loyalty that will impact sales for years to come. These are among the elements that will improve your content marketing results.
However, many businesses simply fall short when it comes to getting to know their customers. Nearly half of all content marketers agree that the content and experiences they are offering are not meeting their customer’s expectations. Many brands, unfortunately, stick to a generalized list of buyer personas and they base the majority of their content around what they think customers will like, rather than what they know their audience is looking for.
Getting to know your entire consumer audience through-and-through is by no means an easy task – especially given that businesses are able to reach wider markets than ever before thanks to global eCommerce. However, one of the best ways to engage with customers is by knowing their priorities, interests, and motivations and using those factors to drive your brand’s content.
So, how can you get to know this information about your customers for better results?
Click here to find out!
Nathan Sykes
The Benefits of Showcasing Company Culture in Digital Marketing
Having a strong sense of company culture in the workplace is more important than ever before — especially when your business is trying to stake a claim in today’s competitive and overcrowded marketplace. When everything a consumer could ever want or need is an Amazon Prime order away, how can you prove to would-be customers that you’re different and worth choosing over the competition?
The difference increasingly comes down to the quality of your company culture. Thanks to digital marketing and the power of the internet, it’s easier to showcase that culture than ever before. Here’s why it’s so important — and how your own company can get it done.
To find out ways to showcase your company culture, click here.
Thank You!
There were so many other authors who contributed a single article. We truly appreciated you and you will always be welcome back.
To anybody contacting us to contribute for the first time, please accept this advance apology. We have little time and simply don’t get to all of the emails. And then, with so few discretionary articles left in any given month, we must apply really high standards for the few we are able to publish.
Of course, if not for our readers, nobody would want to write for us! So the biggest thank you goes to you.
Happy New Year!
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Jan Gordon
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