What is an SEO Article Writer?

SEO article writers are writers specializing in providing small business websites with articles designed to ensure maximum search engine optimization.  This is an important service for any business needing to draw people to their site. Businesses need that traffic to visit their sites, stay there, and purchase their products and services.  One way to achieve this is to hire a professional SEO service. This service will provide you with freelance writers who will know exactly how to design your articles more effectively for search engine recognition.  The search engines will then acknowledge your website as a valid website. An article writer will provide specific written content which in turn will make business websites gain higher search engine rankings. Well written content includes well-chosen keywords or phrases, proper positioning of keywords and phrases, original text, length of the article, and key word density. When this is done properly, the content will raise the websites relevancy for directing search engine hits and send traffic the site.

After gathering the content, the article writer must then write the article to gain the interest of the reader. The writer’s goal is to provide clients with the service of well researched content for the website articles.  This process is the key step in grabbing and keeping the consumers’ attention. SEO article writers compose the articles in such a way to provide the best results to target both search engines and target audiences. This is an investment every business should consider as a way to increase their website traffic and subsequently, expand their client base.

Paula Nazarian is a published freelance writer who specializes in SEO article writing, cocktail hour and self-inflicted bruising. She typically locks herself out of her car and house by always managing to lose her keys.

Source : http://teamwildflower.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/what-is-an-seo-article-writer/

Tags : seo malaysia, search engine optimization, malaysia seo company

Email Marketing: 5 Ways to Sabotage Your 2014 Holiday Campaigns

Email marketing is one of the most powerful promotional tools available to online sellers. When done well, a good holiday email marketing campaign can increase sales, which in turn will require ecommerce businesses to pick, pack, and ship many more orders than usual.

But all of those extra orders will likely increase customer service questions, emails, phone calls, and chat messages. If this is too much hassle, you might want to sabotage your 2014 email marketing before it is too late!

So, rather than list tactics to improve holiday email marketing, in the post I’ll rely on sarcasm — and, hopefully, humor — to list what not to do. Here are five tips for encumbering, constraining, and, perhaps, disabling an otherwise excellent marketing vehicle.

1. Write Bad Subject Lines

Several factors — including list quality, message relevance, email frequency, time of day, or even day of the week — can impact open rates for holiday email marketing campaigns, but almost none of these things will get a potential customer to click “delete” faster than a crappy subject line.

To write a truly wretched subject line, consider the following.

Use more than 150 characters. Both MailChimp and the Maximizer CRM blog recommend using fewer than 50 characters for a subject line. Subject lines with about six to ten words perform the best.

Misspell something. Nothing says spam like misspelled words.

Capitalize every letter. Open source spam blocker SpamAssassin considers excessive capitalization to be an indication of spam, so do this and your messages might not even make it to the recipient.

Include poor performing keywords. In 2013, digital marketing technology firm Adestra sampled about 2 billion emails to learn which subject line keywords improved open rates. For retail and ecommerce the words “latest,” “free delivery,” “new,” and “% off” all performed well, while “cheap,” “free,” “win,” and “buy” all tended to scuttle open rates.

2. Don’t Bother to Proofread Your Email Messages

If some over-zealous Christmas shopper gets past your sabotaged subject line, consider making your actual email message incoherent.

Perhaps, the simplest approach would be to write a stream of consciousness. As an example, imagine that a particular holiday email was supposed to promote a sale on toys. Rather than coming right to the point and explaining the offer, type out the first few hundred words that come into your mind when you think about toys, including anecdotes about unfulfilled Christmas wishlists from when you were eight are fair game.  Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, or grammar. When you’re done typing, call it good and click send.

Concise, properly punctuated email messages that have a clear call to action will likely get shoppers to click through to your site and, perhaps, even make a purchase, so if your aim is to subvert holiday email marketing success, you definitely don’t want to bother proofreading your holiday email messages.

3. Bombard Your Customers’ Inboxes

Email frequency is something of a balancing act. If you don’t send subscribers regular email messages, they might forget that they even subscribed. But send too many emails, and they are likely to unsubscribe.

In fact, according to a 2013 survey cited on the Econsultancy blog, email frequency was the most common reason that former recipients gave for unsubscribing from an email list. Also mentioned in the Econsultancy post is a MailChimp study from April 2013 that found that as a marketer sends more emails, customer engagement drops.

With this in mind, bombard your customers with email messages. Consider scheduling messages for every 30 minutes from now until at least New Years Day. And don’t try to reinvent the proverbial wheel, just send the exact same message over and over again.

4. Treat Everyone the Same

Your customers are individuals. They have different needs, wants, and reasons for buying. So treating them like generic lemmings should pretty much cripple your holiday email marketing.

Personalized email messages improved open rates by 29 percent and unique click-through rates by 41 percent according to a 2013 Experian Marketing Services study. So for poor email performance, don’t even come close to mentioning the recipient’s name, local, or similar.

Also send the exact same message to everyone on your list. Segmenting an email list around customer type, known shopper interests, sales history, or even geographic location might significantly improve email performance.

5. Don’t Actually Send Any Emails

Email marketing, according to a recent INC Magazine article, is mobile friendly, easy to customize and integrate with other marketing tactics, inexpensive, and a real sales driver.

A holiday email marketing campaign is likely to boost site traffic. It can be automated so that messages are sent in response to particular customer actions, and it is very easy to measure and optimize.

With all that it has going for it, perhaps, the best way to sabotage an email marketing campaign is to avoid actually sending any email messages — no sale notifications, no gift suggestions, no reminders, nothing. Even just an average email campaign would likely improve sales and create far too many annoying orders to process.

Source : http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/74449-Email-Marketing-5-Ways-to-Sabotage-Your-2014-Holiday-Campaigns

Tags : email marketing, email blast, edm software, email marketing software, email marketing company, email marketing service, email marketing malaysia

Top Email Marketing Initiatives and Challenges in 2014

Email marketing is slated for an increase in budgets, according to results from a recently-released StrongView study [pdf]. So what will be the top priorities for email marketers this year? Interestingly, the study reveals that respondents are paying more attention to increasing subscriber engagement (a leading 44% naming this one of their top-3 priorities) and improving segmentation and targeting (36%) than to growing their opt-in email list (31%). (See here for email marketers’ most popular – and effective – list growth tactics.)

When it comes to email marketing challenges, a plurality 40% said that one of their top-3 is accessing and leveraging customer data from multiple channels and data sources. Issues with coordination across marketing channels (34%) and developing more relevant engagements (32%) also appear towards the top of the list of challenges, with these pointing to the emphasis being placed on targeting and engagement. Of note, significantly fewer (17% of) respondents said that maintaining high email deliverability is a top-3 challenge this year.

The study looks further at how email marketers are using data in their programs, a particularly salient area given that leveraging data from multiple channels is their top challenge. According to the results, demographic (53%) and purchase history (49%) data are most commonly leveraged to power email marketing. After that, there’s a fairly steep drop off to the proportion using web behavior (31%), location data (26%) and life stage (25%) data. More respondents would like to use web behavior data, though: a leading 34% named this the most valuable type of data that they’re not currently able to leverage.

What’s holding email marketers back from using more data in their campaigns? The cleanliness and quality of their data is the top challenge for the largest share (22%) of respondents. Data hygiene (or lack thereof) was fingered as a pain point for marketers in a few studies last year, and ought to be a point of emphasis this year.

About the Data: The StrongView “2014 Marketing Trends Survey” was administered online in conjunction with StrongView’s survey partner SENSORPRO. The poll, which gathered feedback from 387 business leaders across a wide range of industries, was conducted from November 18 – 27, 2013. 75% of respondents come from companies headquartered in North America.

Source : http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/top-email-marketing-initiatives-and-challenges-in-2014-38921/

Tags : email marketing, email marketing service, email marketing singapore, mass email, email list, bulk email, email database

10 Tips to a Powerful Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing is thriving thanks in large part to the channel’s familiarity, flexibility, and universality. A whole new generation of mobile smartphone and tablet users are also driving anywhere, anytime email usage. Indeed, when you dig into the data, any assertion that email is “dying” with consumers is laughable. Evolving—yes. Dying, absolutely not.

Listed below are what we believe to be the top ten tips to a powerful email marketing strategy. It starts with building a list, continues with data management, and ends at revenue generation.

1. Build an acquisition strategy
If you’ve prioritized audience growth, begin by analyzing the places where customers are already engaging with your brand. Then, determine how to enhance those experiences and drive interactive engagement with new tools and techniques. For example, always optimize acquisition forms for mobile. If a customer is on a tablet or smartphone and can’t fill out your form quickly and easily, you’re sure to lose the opt-in. For information about which audience growth strategies are working for marketers -- and which ones aren't -- check out The Audience Growth Survey.

2. Optimizing for mobile is extremely important
For brands that do not optimize email for mobile, the penalty is stiff. Return Path points out that 63% of US consumers delete emails immediately if they are not optimized for mobile. Offer an elegant mobile experience from the start. If your initial welcome email is perfectly optimized for mobile, subscribers will know they’re in for a pleasant mobile experience for the duration of their time spent with your brand.

3. Your data should always be relevant
Assess your current data to make sure you’re sending targeted communications, not “batch and blast” messages. Using simple data points like gender and location can dramatically improve the subscriber experience. Similarly, on social media, use Facebook’s geo-targeting features with status updates. Strive to never regurgitate the same promotional messages on social media that you are using in email, as customers are looking for different information in each of those channels.

4. Personalize email whenever possible
Your website visitors, email, and mobile subscribers, and those who have connected with you on social media will appreciate your messages even more if they’re personalized. Inject personalized recommendations into marketing emails for the ultimate in one-to-one communications. For example, you can create a unique email containing personalized recommendations based on each subscriber’s browsing behavior on your website. Adding personalized recommendations into marketing emails can increase sales conversion rates by 15-25%, and click-through rates by 25-35%.

5. Email drives accessibility across-channels
The ability to easily archive and access messages at a later time influences consumer channel preferences. While smartphones and tablets replicate much of the desktop messaging experience, many consumers purposely “park” messages to take later action from their computers (which may have faster internet access, larger screens, full keyboards, etc.). Email marketing remains a powerful channel for its ability to bridge the three-device environment of smartphone, tablet, and PC.

6. Get their permission to use it
Thanks to the good work of Seth Godin, the email channel is permanently linked with the concept of “permission marketing”—namely, that brands should first seek permission before sending customers email marketing messages. Once you receive permission the next step is personalization and building of data around the consumer.

7. Email drives deals
If you’re not making deals available via email, you are ignoring the largest, direct audience for this content. According to the 2012 Channel Preference Survey, people prefer email to Facebook for deals because it’s harder to miss deals in the inbox than it is in the waterfall of posts that is the News Feed. Use social networks to spread the word about your offers, and push consumers to your website for email subscription. At present, other approaches leave money on the table.

8. Sharing isn’t just for social networks
If your brand is emphasizing only that consumers share via social networks, you’re reaching just the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface are the introverted, the private, and the cautious consumers who share content off your radar via email and word of mouth. These private sharers don’t get as much press as the “likers” and “retweeters” precisely because their activities cannot be seen publicly and they are difficult, if not impossible, to track. Private communications, however, are extremely valuable to brands, as a friend’s thoughtful personal endorsement will often realize a better response than one broadcast to thousands.

9. Did they abandon before they bought?
Tailor the frequency and number of abandoned cart emails to the purchase at hand, and that item’s typical purchase window. For example, some expensive purchases require more time to justify the spend, so the purchase window is larger. Conversely, an abandoned cart email about a heating or cooling system should be sent quickly to be helpful, as people with dysfunctional furnaces or air conditioning will likely want a quick solution. Pay attention to your industry’s typical purchase window, and send abandoned cart emails accordingly.

10. Automate your post-purchase messages
Automate a re-engagement campaign for a week, a month, and 90 days post-purchase. Determine the point when subscribers typically purchase from your brand again (or disengage), and start from there to personalize the send dates even further.

Email, in combination with a strong website and customer experience, forms a stable foundation for interactive marketing. Remember that your audience is made up of both smartphone owners and non-smartphone owners, so make sure your strategy accommodates both segments. Rather than relying on single sign-on products to gather opt-ins, build your own consumer database by gaining consumers’ permission through your website. Email’s ability to deliver targeted and exclusive content continues to make it a sound investment of your brand’s marketing energy to reach your audiences where they anticipate hearing from you.

Source : http://www.exacttarget.com/blog/email-marketing-strategy-tips/

Tags : email marketing, email marketing service, email marketing singapore, mass email, email list, bulk email, email database

6 Big Myths About SEO

Your understanding of the way Google works is probably three or four years out of date--and that's an eternity in Web time.

Don't get stuck with old ideas about search engine optimization.
In the world of online marketing, misinformation abounds--and it gets compounded exponentially by an incredibly dynamic and rapidly evolving world. Most of the things you think you know (but don't) about search-engine optimization, or SEO, may have been true a few years ago but have changed; one of the following was always a myth.

Here are some of the myths you need to move beyond to get smarter about SEO.

Myth 1: Metatag Descriptions Help Your Rankings

Not anymore; in fact, metatags are no longer even indexed by Google and Bing. But don't ignore them altogether: Your metatags form the text that is displayed along with your link in the search results--and a more compelling description will compel more users to click on your listing instead of on others.

Here's example of ours; the metatag is everything below the URL.

Myth 2: The More Inbound Links, the Better

False. In all the recent updates to Google's algorithm, the search giant has made it a core priority to have quality trump quantity. Gone are the days of having thousands of superlow-quality links driving up rankings; in fact, creating those links can look spammy and get your site penalized.

Focus on obtaining links from sites that are relevant to your products, services, or industry--and on having those links be surrounded by relevant text. A blog review about your "blue widget" that links to your site is far more valuable than a rogue link for "blue widget" stuck in the footer or sidebar of some site--even a highly ranked one.

Myth 3: PageRank Still Matters

Google's infamous PageRank (named after Google co-founder and now-CEO Larry Page, mind you) is a 1-to-10 ranking of the overall authority of every website; the bigger the number, the higher the rank. In years past, this seemingly all-powerful number dominated the attention of SEO experts.

But today, Google's algorithm has evolved well beyond any single indicator. The PageRank still exists, and if all things are equal, a higher PageRank trumps a lower one--but factors such as relevance and context matter, too.

As with inbound links: If you run a dental practice in Los Angeles, it's better to have a link from a site that reviews doctors and dentists in L.A., even if it has a PageRank of 4, than to have a paid link with no context in a huge site with a higher PageRank of 7. 

Myth 4: Google Prefers Keyword-Rich Domains

In years past, Google seemed to put a disproportionate amount of emphasis on keywords in the domain name (what you may think of as the URL). For example, vinylhousesiding.com would almost certainly be ranked first in a search for vinyl house siding.

Not anymore, says Google. If vinylhousesiding.com is in fact the more relevant, authoritative site on the topic, it will probably still rank first--but not because of its domain name alone.

Myth 5: Websites Must Be 'Submitted' to Search Engines

In 2001, yes, this was the case--indeed, this was the first service that my company, Wpromote, ever provided. But in 2012? Not at all. At this point, if there is any connection from any site to yours, your site will be quickly discovered by Google.

Note that being indexed is a far cry from achieving high rankings--but that initial step of submission is no longer needed or helpful.

Myth 6: Good SEO Is Basically About Trickery

False, false, false. Although there are still some SEO experts out there who go about their business trying to "trick Google," this is absolutely not the way to provide good, lasting SEO.

Good SEO is about creating a relevant, informative website, with unique content and great user experience, and encouraging the sharing and distribution of great content to drive organic publicity and links back to your site.

In the end, this is exactly what Google explicitly wants to reward with high rankings--so it is anything but "tricking" the search engines.

Source : http://www.inc.com/michael-mothner/seo-marketing-myths.html

Tags : seo malaysia, search engine optimization, malaysia seo company, seo company malaysia, seo services

I’ve Got 99 Reasons…

Email continues to rock and this week special guest contributor Jay Jhun provides some reasons why email is as powerful as ever - maybe even better than ever.

Email marketing can sometimes live in its staid corner of the digital universe. Jay Jhun of BrightWave has a great knack for taking email out of this zone and displaying his passion while also helping email marketers be more remarkable, so I asked Jay to share with me some of his thoughts.


Unlike the well-known hip-hop hit that talks about problems, I believe that marketers should understand there are at least 99 reasons why email marketing has a bright and bold future (and social media ain't one!).

As I embarked on my professional journey with a focus on email marketing, much of what I felt was missing was a swagger among email marketers. The complexity, the measurability, the artistry, the technology, the permission-based nature - all make email marketing a powerful channel. I had a boss at my last digital agency accuse me of thinking that email was the center of the digital marketing universe. Without flinching, I asked, "Isn't it??"

Some of us probably face a deep existential question whenever we go home when our family members ask, "So what is it that you do again?" It's not like we're the only esoteric professional craft in existence, but for being a channel that drives so much business for so many brands, we're overdue for a reality check on being able to clearly articulate what we do, what we love about it, and why our friends and family should sit up and pay attention.

On August 20, the 2014 Litmus Email Design Conference will be wrapping up with a closing session titled "99 Reasons Why Email Rocks" and I'll have the unique privilege and opportunity to rally 400 of the world's brightest digital marketing professionals around all that is great about email marketing.

Did you catch that?

The truth about email marketing practitioners is that we are, first and foremost, digital marketers. In fact, I'd venture to say that we are digital marketers who often or eventually choose to focus on email.

I have yet to meet an email marketer who didn't have a clear grasp of other digital marketing areas like websites, search, display, mobile, or social media. I don't know that the same can be said in the reverse. And frankly, that's a huge problem that needs to be addressed and an even larger opportunity that is now front-and-center with the onset of marketing cloud warfare.
Consider that the arms race in the marketing cloud only reached a fever pitch when email marketing software companies like Eloqua, Responsys, Silverpop, Neolane, and ExactTarget were being acquired over the last two years to the tune of almost $6 billion. While all that SaaS goodness was categorized as cross-channel, multi-channel, or marketing automation platforms, the truth of the matter is that they all have email marketers as their power users and they are at the core of all the measurable return on investment (ROI) for outbound campaigns. Not SMS, not social. Every brand-new responsive website is nothing but a field of dreams that nobody will visit without email and search. Any e-commerce business would attest (albeit anonymously) that email marketing drives a significant portion of their revenues.

Here are just a few additional reasons why I am certain email will be rocking and rolling well into the future:

• People use email more than they use Facebook on their smartphones
• Email has the power to monetize every mobile app
• Everyone loves their inbox on their birthdays
• Email marketing is one of just a few real-time media that consumers will tolerate

Source : http://bit.ly/1AQdnaO

Tags : email marketing, email blast, edm software, email marketing software, email marketing company, email marketing service, email marketing malaysia

What Are Good Open and Click-through Rates for Email Marketing Campaigns?

We get this question all the time. The answer is: It depends. It’s like asking, “What’s a good price for a car?” So many factors go into what drives open and click-through rates. Here we list examples of benchmark statistics for these metrics. Plus, we suggest some areas in your email marketing program to focus on to help optimize your open and click-through rates.

Examples of Average Open and Click-through Rates

The following recent email marketing studies show some of the wide variations in email open and click-through rates based on different industries and types of email campaigns sent:

• According to the 2012 Silverpop Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study, open rates in the United States averaged 19.9%. Out of 20 industries studied, computer software was a top email open rate performer at 24.7%, while education emails demonstrated the lowest open rates at 15%. Click-through rates averaged 5.4% in this study, with media and publishing at 8.9% and travel and leisure at 2.3%.
• MailChimp tracked 65,536 email campaigns with nearly 6.7 million email sends and compared open and click-through stats by industry: Average unique open rates ranged from 21.6% (games industry) to 48.6% (religion industry), while click-through rates ranged from 1.3% (gambling industry) to 5.5% (photo and video industry).
• In the fourth quarter of 2012, Epsilon’s quarterly analysis of 7.3 billion emails sent across multiple industries showed an overall open rate of 27.4% and click rate of 4.5%. Open rates for triggered emails averaged 46.7%, however, which was 70.5% higher than “business as usual” (BAU) emails. Plus, click rates for triggered emails were more than double the rate for BAU emails.

Email List Quality Has a Major Impact on Open and Click-through Rates

Even when we can pull data that compares similar email blasts across an industry, there are still many other factors that influence both open and click-through rates. These include:

• The quality of your email list
• How proactively you manage your email list for inactive subscribers
• The extent to which new, high-quality subscribers are added to your list.
• Whether you refine your email blast targeting by segmenting your email list.

Improve Your Own Open and Click-through Rates by Testing and Optimizing

The bottom line is that you should focus on improving your own open and click-through trends by continually testing and optimizing such factors as:

• Subject lines and from lines
• Copy, including headlines, incentives and offers
• Calls to action
• Design, including preview pane, layout, and graphics
• Day/time sent

Source: http://www.fulcrumtech.net/resources/email-open-rate-and-ctr-benchmarks/