Live Webcast: The Click-To-Call Playbook For Facebook Ads

Nearly 80% of Facebook ad revenue is mobile, and thanks to smartphones and click-to-call, Facebook and social ads will drive more than 12 billion calls to U.S. businesses this year. How can you leverage the exploding mobile opportunity in Facebook advertising to drive more calls and sales?...



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Moz Content Launches New Tiers and Google Analytics Integration

Posted by JayLeary

When we launched Moz Content at the end of November, we limited the subscription to a single tier. At the time we wanted to get the product out in the wild and highlight the importance of content auditing, competitive research, and data-driven content strategy. To all of those early adopters who signed up as Strategists over the last few months, a big thanks.

Since then, we've made a long list of improvements to both Audit performance/stability and the size of our Content Search index. Along with those updates we also added two new subscriptions for larger sites and agencies handling multiple clients: Teams and Agencies. The new tiers not only increase page and Audit limits, but also enable Google Analytics integration with Tracked Audits.

More data for Tracked Audits

For those that aren't familiar, Tracked Audits let you trend and monitor the performance of your site's content over time. On the backend, Moz Content re-audits your site every week in order to discover new pages and update site metrics. This allows you to compare, say, the average shares per article across your entire site from week-to-week or month-to-month.

To date, Moz Content Audits have focused on links and shares. We did that intentionally, since a major goal for the product was to enable the analysis of any site on the web, including competitors. We also wanted to give agencies the freedom to prospect or audit clients without painful integrations or code snippets.

That said (and I'm guessing you'll agree), figuring out your content ROI usually requires a deeper look at site performance.

With Moz Content, we stopped short of a full, conversion-focused analysis suite with custom tracking code and the like. Instead we're focused on a product that delivers content analysis and insights to our entire community of online marketers -- not just the select few that can afford it. Besides, there are plenty of big-ticket tools out there filling the niche, great products like Newscred, Kapost, SimpleReach, and Idio.

So while we're not jumping into the "enterprise" ring (just yet), we did want to give data-driven marketers a leg up in their analysis. The good news: if you're a Teams or Agencies subscriber, you now have the added option of integrating Google Analytics with Tracked Audits.

It's easy to get started, and if you're a Moz Pro subscriber you're probably familiar with the authentication flow. Just go to any Tracked Audit you have GA data for, scroll down to the middle of the report, and click "Connect Google Analytics":

Once you've connected a profile, Moz Content immediately pulls in key metrics for each URL in the Inventory:

You'll probably notice we're only displaying page views in the inventory. While we didn't have the real estate to include all of the metrics we're collecting in the interface, we've added them to the CSV export:

Once you dump the data to Excel you'll see the following metrics for the Organic and Paid segments, as well as a rollup of all referrers:

• Unique Page Views


• All Page Views


• Time on Page


• Bounce Rate


• Page Value

After we've collected multiple audits, Moz Content also starts trending aggregated metrics so you can get a sense of performance over time:

We're hoping this added reporting gets you a step closer to that all-important ROI analysis. Some of you will already have a sense of how much a page view is worth, or the impact of a unique page view on a specific conversion. And for the Google Analytics pros out there, properly configuring Page Value will give you a direct indicator of a page's effectiveness.

This is just the beginning, and we'd love to hear about other ways we could make the GA data more useful. Please reach out and let us know what you think by clicking the round, blue Help button in the lower-right corner of the Moz Content app.

More to come!

We're pushing out code every day to improve the app experience and build on the current features. We're also growing our Content Search index with new sources of popular, trending content. If you haven't tried it for a while, we encourage you to take a second look. Head over to http://moz.com/content and start a search or enter a domain to preview an Audit (be sure to sign into your community account to access both the Dashboard and increased limits).

On the feature front, we're pushing to integrate Twitter data into both the Audit and Content Search. As I'm sure you've noticed, this has been missing in our reporting to date. While we won't have exact share counts for individual articles (see Twitter's decision to deprecate the share count endpoint), we're confident we can provide related information that'll be useful for your Twitter analysis.

As we develop this and other features, we're always on the lookout for feedback from our community. As always, feel free to reach out to our Help team with any issues or feedback about the product. And if you've used Moz Content and are interested in beta testing the latest, shoot us an email at mozcontent+testing@moz.com and we'll add you to the list.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Meet the man behind Loser.com, the Internet's OG troll

You might have never heard of Brian Connelly, but you certainly have seen his contributions to the Web. As the owner of Loser.com, Connelly could be the internet's most underrated prankster, having used the domain as a redirect to sites of famous figures he dislikes. It started as a joke with his co-workers back in the 90's when he first purchased the domain and rigged email accounts of those who didn't pay him to work under Loser.com. Decades later, he would use it to target the likes of Reddit, Kanye West, Al Gore, and most recently, Donald Trump. "The reason why I…

This story continues at The Next Web

AuthorityLabs: Helping You Track and Choose the Right Keywords by @sejournal

AuthorityLabs focuses on conversions & ROI through a combination of rankings, Google Analytics, volume, & competition data to see marketing opportunities.

The post AuthorityLabs: Helping You Track and Choose the Right Keywords by @sejournal appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

How to Write Conversationally: 7 Tips to Engage and Delight Your Audience

How often do you shrug your shoulders and press delete after reading a marketing email?

Many marketing messages make us cringe. They don't sound like a human being wrote them. They don't engage. They lack personality and feel cold-hearted.

It's not surprising.

At school, we learned grammar rules. We learned how to write and spell, but we didn't learn how to use language to connect with our readers. We didn't learn how to engage, persuade, and inspire.

But readers crave a human touch.

When we read conversational content, we instantly feel a connection with the writer. We feel like we're getting to know him. We start to like him.

As content marketers, we know this is our aim. When readers get to know, like, and trust us, we create opportunities to market our services and sell our products. We know we need to write conversationally, but how?

You might think writing in a conversational style requires recording yourself talking and typing out what you said. But have you ever seen a word-for-word transcript of an interview?

It's full of wishy-washy words, grammar mistakes, and unfinished sentences. People rarely speak proper English when they talk. That's normal.

Conversational text is a lot tighter than spoken language. So, writing conversationally doesn't mean you write as you talk. Instead, edit your text so it doesn't sound like writing.

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." - Elmore Leonard

Specific editing techniques help make your content sound more conversational.

Shall I show you how to use them?

1. Quit writing to everyone

Imagine writing an email to a list of 10,000 people.

When you think about those 10,000 faceless subscribers, you probably sound like this:

Thank you to those of you who have donated to our charity appeal. You can still donate here.

It sounds like you're addressing a crowd, right? The phrase "those of you" feels impersonal.

Now, let's choose your favorite subscriber. Imagine your biggest fan — she often replies to your emails with praise, and sometimes with questions. Even though you've never met, she's a friend:

Have you already donated to our charity appeal? Thank you so much. If you haven't donated yet, you can still donate here.

A conversational tone makes readers feel like you're addressing them personally. As if you two are having a drink at your local Starbucks.

"I'm going to have a green tea. What would you like to drink?"

2. Don't write to impress

When you talk with your best friend, what kind of words do you use?

Do you try to impress with MBA jargon? Do you use complicated words?

To write conversationally, skip the gobbledygook and make your content more specific. For instance, look at this copy:

Pioneering software from the market leader. Schedule your social media updates with our award-winning all-in-one app.

Now, here's the conversational version:

Save time with our new app. Schedule all your social media updates in one go.

Empathy is the foundation of a good conversation. Understand the problems your readers are struggling with, and address those problems using their words.

Write to engage and help.

"Would you like a ginger cookie with your coffee? Or a blueberry muffin?"

3. Make it a two-way conversation

When writing, we can't see the person on the other end of the conversation. So, we forget to engage our readers and merely write from our own perspective.

Here's an example of how self-importance sneaks into our content:

Sign up to get on our list, and we'll send you our weekly email with marketing tips.

Note how "we" and "our" are both self-referring pronouns. Here's how to focus on your reader instead:

Grow your business with smarter marketing. Sign up now to get weekly emails with marketing tips.

To spot your self-important sentences, look for the sentences with "I" and "we." Edit them to highlight benefits for your reader.

But don't feel you need to replace all instances of "I" and "we." You don't need to hide yourself.

If you're a one-person business, use "I," "me," and "my." And if you write on behalf of a team, feel free to use "we," "us," and "our," when appropriate.

A good conversation goes two ways: A little bit about "me" or "us." A little more about "you."

"How was your weekend?"

4. Add a dollop of personality

Think about your friends or favorite colleagues. Why do you enjoy chatting with them?

It's the small stories you share. You might discuss a bad referee decision in Sunday's match, the movie you went to yesterday, or where you can get the best steak.

Your friends talk about more than their specialty subject.

It's the same with your content. If you only discuss your topic of expertise, you show yourself as a one-dimensional expert. It's kind of boring.

Think about how you can inject your personality into your blog posts, emails, or sales copy:

• Share the mistakes you've made so your readers can learn from them.


• Use a personal anecdote to illustrate a point.


• Create your own style of metaphors.


• Tell readers why you're on your mission to change the world.


• Add a personal P.S. to your emails — even if it's an unrelated comment about the weather or your latest cycling trip.

When you sprinkle a little bit of yourself over your content, readers get to know you.

That's when content marketing becomes magic.

"Yeah, my weekend was good. My sister came over from the Netherlands. Luckily the weather was good."

5. Engage with questions

Do you pose questions in your writing?

Research has shown that questions in tweets can get more than double the amount of clicks. And what's more, they can even boost your persuasiveness.

In his book To Sell Is Human, Daniel Pink explains that a question makes readers think — they process your message more intensely. And when readers agree with you, your question is more persuasive than a statement.

Note the difference between:

You ought to include questions marks, so your writing becomes more conversational.

and:

Want to make your writing more engaging? Add a few questions.

Questions are a powerful technique for engaging and persuading your readers. They keep readers invested in your content.

"The weather is nice today, too. Shall we sit outside?"

6. Shorten your sentences

A standard tone of voice in marketing often sounds boring and robotic, and an academic tone creates a certain distance, too, as if you look down on your readers.

Both styles tend to use unwieldy sentences — and those long sentences are tiring to read. To make your content more readable, chop up long sentences.

Here's a long academic sentence:

Presenting yourself only as an expert makes you one-dimensional, but when you tell short stories about yourself in addition to sharing your knowledge, you become a multi-dimensional human being, and you become a more fascinating person in your reader's eyes.

Phew. Did you run out of breath? That's forty words in one sentence.

Here's the conversational version with only nine words per sentence on average:

Presenting yourself only as an expert makes you one-dimensional. Perhaps even a bit boring. But when you tell itty-bitty stories about yourself, your hobbies, and your life, you become a real human being. You become more fascinating.

In grade school, we received praise for using difficult words to write complicated sentences. In college, we read verbose sentences stuffed with words derived from Latin and Greek.

That's how we learned to write to impress.

We didn't learn how to communicate our message, write with clarity, and be persuasive. To engage our readers, we must unlearn what we learned in school.

Put your readers first. Make your message simple. Chop your sentences down.

"Nice shirt you're wearing. I like the color. Suits you well."

7. Don't drink coffee with your high school teacher

Just thinking about my high school teachers puts me on edge. I get nervous about making mistakes. I worry about sounding crazy. I fear not living up to their expectations.

And that's how writing becomes stilted.

Following grammar rules usually makes content easier to read. However, certain rules may actually hamper readability. So, give yourself permission to break them:

• Use broken sentences. Broken sentences don't necessarily befuddle readers; they often add clarity. By stressing words. (Like that.)


• Start a sentence with "and," "but," or "or." Because it makes your content easier to read and less monotonous. More dynamic. Enthusiastic.


• Create one-sentence paragraphs to stress specific statements and give readers room to breathe. A short silence in a conversation is okay, right?


• Feel free to occasionally use … uhm … interjections like "Ouch," "Phew," and "Duh." They add emotion and a touch of casualness to your writing voice.

Writing is not about sticking to grammar rules. It's about communicating ideas with clarity and personality.

So, please come along for a cup of tea and a chat, but don't bring your grammar teacher with you. She'll strangle our conversation with her pedantic remarks.

"Your hair is getting long. You should get a haircut."

Embrace the power of your voice

Do you ever think back to a conversation you had with a friend? Do you hear her voice in your head?

That's how readers should experience your content. Let your words linger in their minds. Inspire them long after they've read your words.

In a world of endless pixels and meaningless likes, we crave human connections and voices that resonate with us.

So, be yourself. Brew a cup of green tea. Offer your readers a slice of homemade cake.

And have a cozy chat.

"Sugar?"

The post How to Write Conversationally: 7 Tips to Engage and Delight Your Audience appeared first on Copyblogger.

What Is a Content Marketer?

Long ago, copywriting legend John Carlton told me that the best copywriters didn't just master their own discipline; they also mastered related disciplines — like marketing, SEO, and negotiations.

This is true for content marketers, as well.

A content marketer is a master of many disciplines. But what exactly does that mean? What sort of disciplines and skills are we talking about? And what types of knowledge and experience are necessary to be a content marketer?

I'll answer those questions and more, but before I do, I'll first loosely define the term "content marketer."

Then, I'll tell you how I uncovered a successful content marketer's five essential skills.

A working definition of "content marketer"

A content marketer is responsible for the planning, creating, and sharing of valuable content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content the content marketer shares depends upon what he sells. In other words, he educates people so that they know, like, and trust him enough to do business with him.

If a content marketer is responsible for marketing content, then let's look at the classic definition of marketing, which involves the four P's:

• Identify, select, and develop a product


• Set the price


• Select the distribution channel to reach the customer where she is (place)


• Plan and execute a promotion strategy

Using this model, content would be the product. The price could range from an email address (to receive blog updates, join an email newsletter) to payment for access to a content library, ebook, or online training course.

The place would be your blog/website, email list, and social media channels. And promotion would be how you share the product.

A content marketer is someone who understands how to position and promote content so that it reaches the widest audience and converts those people from prospects to subscribers to customers — and keeps them coming back.

Now, the art of content marketing has been with us for a while, but an actual person who is a content marketer is a rather new phenomenon.

To put this list together, I had to draw from my own experience, the wisdom of content marketing authorities, and I even reviewed about a dozen job descriptions for content marketing positions.

Let's explore five of the common core skills of content marketers.

1. Storytelling

First and foremost, a content marketer has a nose for a good story. She knows that a great marketing story involves a hero, mentor, goal, obstacle, and moral. And she can uncover her own business's story — and even help other organizations do the same.

This is important because, as C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley write in their book Content Rules, "[Good content] creates value by positioning you as a reliable and valuable source of vendor-agnostic information."

In other words, stories help an audience get to know you, like you, and, ultimately, trust you — before you sell them anything.

The content marketer studies the storytelling techniques of movie screenwriters, novelists, and short story writers, so that when she writes content (see skill number three below to learn more), she knows how to lift prospects out of their ordinary worlds and invite them to consider a journey that ultimately leads to a transaction.

One storytelling method we are quite fond of around here is the Hero's Journey. It’s content marketing that educates your audience through the storytelling arc.

2. Strategy

A great content marketer is also deliberate: she understands and communicates the overarching objective of an organization's content marketing strategy.

In addition, a professional content marketer will set editorial goals. She might:

• Work through these 13 questions


• Create an empathy map


• Put together a customer journey map

The content marketer will understand the need for buyer personas and create them, if necessary.

She will know how to audit a website in order to fix any broken, old, and neglected content.

And let's not forget that all content marketers have exceptional research skills.

Want to take a closer look at that last point?

As Ann Handley advises in her book, Everybody Writes:

"Think before you ink means finding your key point by asking three questions about every bit of content you're creating.

• Why am I creating this?


• What is my key take on this subject?


• Why does it matter to the people I am trying to reach?"

I'll add a fourth: Who are you writing to? Know your audience. That is research at its essence.

While it won't be her chief skill set, an adept content marketer can also manage a content project through planning to execution to promotion.

People skills, like empathy, listening, storytelling, and negotiating, help her navigate those tasks.

3. Writing content

Often, content marketers will not only direct strategy and storytelling, but they'll also be responsible for writing content for blogs/websites, ebooks, and infographics.

It pays to be a remarkable web writer — someone with essential traits like an:

• Average understanding of SEO


• Average understanding of usability


• Above average understanding of social media (see skill number four below to learn more)


• Outstanding understanding of copywriting (yes, copywriting is different from content marketing)

This is important because she will more than likely also be the one writing articles for other websites as a guest posting strategy.

A content marketer will master writing magnetic headlines, selecting old articles to update and republish, and reimagining old content in new formats (like flipping an infographic or blog post into a SlideShare).

She will naturally set and maintain the editorial tone and voice.

Since she's an excellent storyteller, you might find her reading a selection of unorthodox books to help hone her craft and inform her creativity.

4. Social media

Content marketers understand social media.

Some content marketers might even make this their speciality, meeting the rising demand in the number and variety of different platforms. But most content marketers master one or two platforms and have a basic understanding of others.

See, a content marketer likes to tinker with the new shiny social media objects that come out. This allows her to evaluate a new platform's potential and then translate this potential to the proper client.

She'll understand which type of content works best on each platform. For example, Twitter is good for promoting new content. Facebook is good for engaging your audience in discussions and surveys. Pinterest is excellent for sharing images.

Of course, a smart content marketer is also aware of the dangers of digital sharecropping — and not afraid to warn clients.

In addition, "don't waste time delivering content where your audiences don't actually want you to be," writes Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, authors of Content Strategy for the Web.

Know where your audience hangs out. And get their permission to interact.

5. Subscription assets

Content marketers understand the need for building subscription assets, including email subscriber lists and private community memberships.

Not only will they be responsible for writing the content for these subscription models, but they may also need to have a firm understanding of how each one works — or even have the ability to manage, measure, and monitor each model.

For example, a small business might assign the responsibility of writing, editing, uploading, monitoring, and measuring the emails for their email marketing campaigns to just one content marketer.

So, dear content marketer, prioritize wisely. Otherwise, you'll spread yourself too thin.

Stay one step ahead of your customers' desires

Let me end with a quote from Catherine the Great, who took sole control of Russia in 1762 after deposing her husband, Emperor Peter III:

"One must govern in such a way that one's people think they themselves want to do what one commands them to do."

According to Robert Greene in his book The 48 Laws of Power, "to do this she had to be always a step ahead of their desires and to adapt to their resistance."

Now, while Catherine the Great is talking about governing citizens, the core concept here is leadership. Thus, I think this advice applies equally well to the content marketer, who is, in a sense, a leader — a leader of content.

As a leader, she must champion the cause of content and then rally resources to create that content — and ultimately, create content that her audience wants.

Are you up to the task?

So, content marketer, keep this in mind: we must be one step ahead of our customers' desires, and we achieve this by building an audience before creating a product.

And we must adapt to their resistance by becoming masters of empathy, which means understanding their hopes and fears. Stepping into their shoes.

Are you up to the task?

By the way, any characteristics of a content marketer you would put on this list?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The post What Is a Content Marketer? appeared first on Copyblogger.

Website 101: How to Grow Your Website Revenue With Native Ads by @megcabrera

Any website owner, whether you are a small start-up or a big one, would want to monetize the website in one way or another. There is no hard and fast rule in generating site revenue, and there are many ways to do it.

The post Website 101: How to Grow Your Website Revenue With Native Ads by @megcabrera appeared first on Search Engine Journal.