Let’s face it: a picture really is worth a thousand words, but an image you made yourself?

Priceless.  

Compelling images create a connection between you and your audience and help you build on that relationship. They encourage discussion and shares.

In short, images convert.

According to Venngage, 64 percent of marketers say images are “very important” or “essential” to their marketing strategy.

Yet, 40 percent of marketers use stock photos in their content.

While there's nothing wrong with the occasional stock photo, businesses that want to stand out need to make the effort to create unique, stunning visual content.

The good news? You don't have to drop thousands on a graphic design pro. With the right tools and knowledge, you can create stunning visual content on your own.

In this guide, you’ll learn which tools are the best for creating the most in-demand graphics (like social media cover photos, infographics, and trendy header images) and basic graphic design principles to help your visual content stand out.

Graphic Design Tools to Create and Optimize Visual Content

You know you need to be able to create stylish, professional-looking results – but how do you do it?

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of tools offering easy-to-use graphic design platforms.

The best part is that there’s no graphic design experience needed to create stunning, share-worthy images. You can simply drag and drop the elements you want to get surprisingly good results.

Even when you’re done, you can optimize the finished graphics to load fast and look great on any device; no designer necessary!

Here are a few of my personal favorites, along with the types of images you can create with them. 

Tools to Design Your Own Graphics

Creating graphics doesn't require a degree in visual arts. Drag and drop editing tools make it easy to create infographics, blog photos, social media posts, and more.

Canva

This is a full-fledged graphic design program distilled into a simple, drag-and-drop platform. It works right from your browser, so there’s no huge software download or complicated licensing scheme to wade through.

Canva lets you create a whole host of graphics and sizing and dimensions are already taken care of.

Create everything from flyers to business cards or social media images and infographics. Use your own photos or browse Canva’s 1 million+ stock photo library where you can license images for as little as $1 each.

Simply choose a template as a starting point (or create your own if you’re feeling brave). Then, customize your colors, icons, photos, and fonts to design your own perfectly built graphic masterpiece.

Beyond photos, Canva also has a fully stocked library of graphical elements and shapes that form the perfect backdrop for any image. Simply search, drag and drop your way to an image you’ll be proud to say that you created.

A wide range of images and styles are available – ranging from social network graphics to collage-style images and everything in between.

The best part is most of Canva is free to use, apart from the photo licensing fees and added features. So you can create as many graphics as you want without restrictions. You can even log in using your Google or Facebook account – saving you from yet another password to remember.

PicMonkey

If Canva isn't your jam, I suggest PicMonkey. It's a pretty similar platform, but slightly more in-depth. If you want to erase backgrounds, add fonts, and even edit photos, it's a great choice.

Pricing starts at $7.99 a month for their basic plan, which includes 1GB of cloud storage, video editing, tons of fonts, and premium effects, templates, and touch-up tools.

Tools to Optimize Your Graphics

Slow load times can clog up your site and eat up your bandwidth.

What’s more, every second your visitors spend waiting on your page to load is a lost conversion or a lost sale.

Fortunately, several resources can help you tame large images without the help of a graphic pro. You can even resize or rescale them in bulk.

Optimizilla

Drag and drop up to 20 images and quickly optimize them on the fly. You can click/tap through the images and then use the slider bar to adjust the quality and compare the two files:

Optimizilla works with both JPG (photos) and PNG (logos and transparent images) formats since both of these file types tend to be larger in size. All of the images you upload are automatically deleted after an hour and you can download the optimized versions selectively or all at one time.

Optimizilla is perfect if you have a limited number of images that need a size change and also tweak the quality of those images visually.

EWWW Image Optimizer

This WordPress plugin lets you optimize images fast. The end result shows you how much space was saved, as well as the percentage of reduction.

It works with other popular WordPress image plugins too, like NextGen photo gallery. If you don’t like how a reduced file size image looks, you can either re-optimize it with different settings, or restore the original.

The plugin leverages several unique optimization utilities in one complete package. Because each individual image format has different ways of conserving file size, each one has its own unique utility to compress images without sacrificing quality.

Even as a graphic designer-in-training, you can still be inspired by unique website and graphic designs. Trying to save them directly from your browser can be a download nightmare, though.

You end up saving a lot of extra scripts, content, and other junk that clutters up your hard drive. What if you could just have a screenshot of the page instead?

Page2Images

This site takes a screenshot of any page for you or converts multiple URLs into images.

It's great for saving images for inspiration and for creating more engaging how-to content.

Page2Images also lets you see what your site looks like on mobile devices via its mobile emulator:

If you’ve ever wondered how to get that trendy “my site on a smartphone” look – this is how it’s done. It’s also a quick and easy way to tell whether or not your page is optimized for mobile devices.

If you’d like something beyond the typical computer screen and mobile device as your choices, check out:

PlaceIt

PlaceIt lets you drag and drop your site to a variety of smartphones, monitors, tablets, and other devices. Don’t have a screenshot? No problem. You can choose an image and enter your URL to have PlaceIt grab an image of your site.

Want to show a group of people interacting with your app? Done.  

Want to show off your new smartwatch program? Easy.

From billboards to bus stations, Placeit lets you put your site anywhere.

If you need a more human touch, PlaceIt also includes headshots of people of all ages and in a variety of situations. You can even narrow down your search to a specific gender, location, job, and much more.

Data Visualization Tools

Good data makes a larger impact when it’s visually relatable. When people see the numbers in a tangible, interactive way, your mission and goals go from being abstract terms to meaningful information.  

These tools make it easier to use data visualization to create appealing charts, tables, and graphics.

Chartblocks

A tool that helps you create colorful, full-featured charts. Data can be imported from spreadsheets, databases, or even live feeds and every aspect can be customized.

The charts are designed using HTML5 and Javascript, so they’re optimized for mobile devices and can be embedded directly into third-party sites, like websites and social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

What’s more, the finished graphic can be saved in a vector format, meaning it can be resized to any height and width without a loss of quality or resolution.

A free plan is available which lets you create up to 50 charts as transparent PNG files. The free plan includes up to 50,000 monthly views and your charts are viewable publicly.  

Paid plans give you more monthly views and the ability to make charts private. On the lowest-priced plan and the free plan, charts are branded with the Chartblocks logo.

Timeline

Timeline is an easy way to create an interactive timeline of events on just about anything.  Timeline can pull media from sites including Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, and Wikipedia as well as video sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo.

It can also pull sound files from Soundcloud, letting you create a rich media experience that’s interactive and informative.

Using a Google Spreadsheet, you’d simply enter the data into the pre-made template, including major and minor events, dates, and associated media. Timeline then builds the finished product for you.

When it’s ready, you’ll get a finished URL that you can embed in your website, showing off a timeline with an associated media slideshow in a similar format to the example above.

Social Media Graphic Design Tools

Whether you want to create awesome images for Instagram or interesting social media profile photos for Facebook, there’s a social media tool for that.  

Here are a few of my personal favorites:

Social Image Resizer

This web-based tool features a quick and easy way to take your existing images and resize them for use in just about any social media context. You can turn images into icons (even favicons), as well as Facebook and Twitter images.

What if you need more social network-ready images beyond Twitter or Facebook?

Desygner

This tool helps you create images for a variety of social networks. In addition to Twitter and Facebook (both cover and profile photos), you can make images for use on Snapchat, YouTube, Tumblr, and Pinterest.

They offer a free plan with thousands of free images.

With these tools, you’ll never run out of unique professional looks for your social network pages.

Of course, now the question becomes – where do you find graphics?  

There are plenty of stock photo sites online, but for those just getting started with graphics, there are also plenty of free (even for commercial use) images and photos you can use.

Where to Find Images for Visual Content

One of the biggest challenges to overcome when designing your own graphics is finding pre-made images that you can use as a starting point. Fortunately, these sites will make finding images and icons for your projects (even commercial ones) as easy as searching and downloading.

Flat Icon

Flat Icon contains over five million icon and stickers to choose from. These include all of the common computer-style icons (cursors, pointers, and the like) but also include icons of a variety of other things like people, objects, animals, and more.   

Many of the icons are free to use with proper attribution to the author.

The Noun Project

An icon-illustrated repository of graphics depicting just about anything. Anyone can volunteer and artists from around the world have created miniature works of art on anything you can imagine from summer camp to tattoos.

Just because you have all the tools at hand doesn’t necessarily mean you can create great graphics (although it certainly helps!).  That’s because none of them teach you how to actually design.

While the subject of how to design graphics from scratch is far more involved than this guide can cover, there are nevertheless a few basic principles to keep in mind.

Graphic Design Basics: Principles and Elements

There are six basic principles to graphic design. These apply whether you’re designing a logo for your website or a print brochure.  

Graphics of all sizes and styles use one or more of these principles, so knowing them and how to apply them to your design will help you create the kinds of results you can’t wait to show off.

The Line

Lines are the building blocks of graphics. They separate and create borders. Thin, straight lines give the impression of a more corporate and professional look, while hand-drawn lines can show a more artistic, or even childlike flair.   

These days, many websites trend toward segmenting content in large “blocked” areas, dividing each one with a line to keep the user scrolling. Not only does this give you a visual separation, but it lets you transition from one thought to another without losing your visitor in a sea of content.

The Shape

Shapes can impart meaning. Think about the octagonal STOP signs; you don't need to see the word STOP to know what the sign is. Or, the cross symbol that denotes first aid tells you that is a place to get medical help.

Shapes impact our world, our feelings, and how we interact with the world around us.

Sharp, angular shapes are seen as being more rigid and forceful, whereas gentle sloping or curved shapes have more of a feminine appeal to them. Keep these points in mind when considering your target audience for your new design.

Texture

Textures create a wide range of design possibilities and still remain popular on web pages to this day.  

From natural patterns like wood and leaves to background designs like paper or chalkboards, texture communicates a great deal about the page itself, even before you read a word.

If you’re looking to create a certain impression in the minds of your users, consider the available textures that lend themselves to that type of design.

Color

Color is one of the most important, but also one of the most overlooked, aspects of graphic design. It’s important not just in logo and website design, but also in print.

Color and its various shades (see more on that under Color Values below) have very different meanings to visitors around the world.  Depending on language and colloquialisms, colors can impart feelings as well.

For example, many people associate “going green” with doing things that are good for the environment. But when someone is “green” with envy, it can convey a sense of jealousy.

That’s why it’s important to properly balance color with other aspects of your page or design so that you create a positive association in the minds of your visitors.

Even if you’ve gone to great lengths to choose an appropriate color scheme, there’s still the shade, hue, and degree of lightness or darkness of the color that can change its perception.

Color Values

A color’s value is the intensity of its lightness or darkness. For example, orange may be perceived as a color of warmth, friendliness, and confidence, but once lightened into more of a peach tone, can give off more of a feminine, comforting vibe.

Darkening a color can make it seem more foreboding or unapproachable. Many corporate sites follow the “dark blue and grey” color scheme which, while it seems “safe,” can also be off-putting to consumers and make them feel as if the company is cold and uncaring.

It’s a lot to keep in mind, but having some basic knowledge of how colors affect your user and how you want your design to be visually perceived and understood can make a significant difference in how well it resonates with your chosen demographic.

Space

Space is the last of the graphic design principles, but it is certainly not the least. You may have heard the term “white space” before – meaning the area of a page with no graphic elements or color.

Having enough white space on a page gives each individual element a sense of “breathing room.” Having too much white space can make a page seem like the elements are floating all over the place with no real cohesion.

Like all of the other graphic design principles covered here, you need to carefully balance your use of space to avoid making your graphic look too cluttered or too empty.

How to Improve Your Graphic Design Skills

Once you have a firm understanding of the basics, you’ll want to branch out and try new things.

Even if your artistic ability ends at drawing a stickman (and a shaky one at that!), improving your graphic design skills is more about being observant and perceptive rather than having amazing artistic ability.

Study Famous Graphic Designers

Having the tools and knowing the basic principles of graphic design will take you far, but one of the most crucial ingredients of a great graphic design is creativity. Contrary to popular belief, creativity is not born, it is learned and made through practice.

What better way to practice and learn than by seeing what others have done?

For example, you may not have heard of a graphic designer named Paul Rand, but you’ve most certainly seen his work:

Largely self-taught, Rand’s best advice to aspiring graphic designers was the “you don’t have to be original. You just have to be good.” Even if you weren’t familiar with the brand’s logo, Paul was determined that eventually, you would be.  

One of his most famous corporate poster designs reflects that insistence:

Create a Swipe File

The best way to start is to look around. Check out sites like Dribbble and Behance for design portfolios you like and then follow those designers so that you’ll get updates when they add new selections to their portfolios.

Create your own little “swipe file” of ideas, concepts, and images that you like. Remember, even the most complicated designs can be broken down into their core pieces — shapes and lines.

When you learn the process behind the design, you can work on how to recreate it on your own.

If you like what you see, stretch your skills a little more and learn about filters and layers — core components of top-tier graphic design tools like Photoshop and Illustrator.

Obviously, I’m not advocating that you infringe on someone else’s copyright. Everything in this guide is meant to walk you through the learning process to create your own graphics with no experience starting out.

Don’t be afraid to emulate those whose style you enjoy. Over time you’ll come to refine it and create your own style.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Feedback

It can be hard to ask for feedback on your work – especially when you’re just starting out.  

You’re anxious. Unsure of yourself. Afraid of criticism.

We’ve all been there and experienced that. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. However, instead of saying “What do you think about this?” ask “How can I make this better?”  

People won’t want to openly criticize your work, so asking what they think is bound to get you some praise – but praise isn’t what we’re going for – we’re going for improvement.

Some feedback is well-meaning, but when put into your design, it would make the end result look terrible. That’s okay, too. As the designer, you’re free to dismiss any or all feedback.  

However, take the time to reflect on criticism before dismissing it. Is something lacking from the piece? Does it communicate the brand and message well? Is it something that others would want to share on their own social media pages?

Remember, everyone was a beginner once. Some may have more artistic or creative talent than others, but it’s not something that can’t be developed over time.

Taking the time to learn the skills behind great graphic designs will help you appreciate and admire the work that goes into them even more.

Visually Stunning Content: Frequently Asked Questions

Can I learn graphic design myself?

Yes. There are a number of tools and guides (including this one) that can teach even non-designers the basics of graphic design. Using a tool like Canva or PicMonkey, you can create visually appealing content for your blog, social media channels, and more.

What's the fastest way to learn graphic design?

The fastest way to learn graphic design is through practice. Use a tool like Canva or PicMonkey that offers templates. Then create a swipe file of graphics you like and use those for inspiration.

What is the best graphic design tool for beginners?

PicMonkey and Cavna are easy to use for beginners. They feature drag and drop functionality and templates you can customize to fit your needs.

What is white space in graphic design and why does it matter?

White space refers to the space between design elements. It can be used to direct the eye to important details or make websites easier to use.

Guide to Visually Stunning Content for Non-Designers Conclusion

As you can see, getting started designing your own graphics doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

A basic sense of how colors, lines, space, and other principles play together on a canvas is only the beginning. Today’s most in-demand graphic designers spend years perfecting their skills and building upon these core concepts.

For the rest of us, however, the web has made it easier than ever to craft beautiful, interactive designs that don’t take an artistic touch.

If you want to build upon what you’ve learned in this guide, there are plenty of fantastic resources, portfolios, and graphic design tips out there waiting for you.

Have you tried out any of these tools? Which one is your favorite?

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: The Complete Guide to Designing Visually Stunning Content (Even If You’re Not a Graphic Artist)
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/the-complete-guide-to-designing-visually-stunning-content-even-if-youre-not-a-graphic-artist/
Published Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2021 15:00:00 +0000

Article sponsored By PayPal.

Gen Z, which refers to those born between 1996-2012, makes up 20% of the US population. They account for $143 billion in direct expenditure. It's time to pay more attention to Gen Z consumers than you are to millennials. These are five ways you can attract and retain Gen Z customers.

1. 1.

Generation Z is digital native; they have always had access smartphones and social media. They are also the most diverse generation in history. This influences how they think and how they spend money.

Your company must learn about this generation in order to be able to sell to them.

These resources will help you and your team learn more about Gen Z.

• Knit: Instant feedback and Gen Z insights
• NYTimes: Gen Z in their Own Words
• #GenZ Podcast: Stories, perspectives, and experiences of Gen Z
• Pew Research Center: Gen Z Trends and Demographics Study

2. Social Media Managers and Social Media Firms That Employ Gen Z'ers are available to hire

Gen Z buyers are smart and can spot fake advertising. Gen Z representatives in your marketing team or at the firms you work with will help you strike the right tone.

You should look for Gen Z'ers who are the best by offering the perks that they value.

• flexible working hours
• Opportunities for growth
• Involving them in projects that make an impact in the world

3. Purchase Now, Pay Later (BNPL), Payment Options

Flexibility is what Gen Z customers are most interested in. Offering BNPL options such as PayPal's enterprise BNPL is crucial to attract the Gen Z market. They are less likely to be able to spend more money as they are younger. Gen Z will make up 47.4% of BNPL users in 2025.

Gen Z has access to BNPL, which allows them greater flexibility and little or no interest rates. This flexibility is important because most of the group works from paycheck to paycheck.

4. Get a Stand on Social Issues

Gen Z is politically active and politically aware. They prioritize spending money on brands that reflect their values and views. Find causes that align with your brand and make a stand on them.

You risk alienating the next generation if your brand is involved in social issues you don't fully understand. Instead, find ways to promote and sponsor causes that you are passionate about.

5. You can make your brand trustworthy and authentic by taking these steps

Gen Z shoppers value trust. They will not respond to direct advertising, as they often use ad blockers. Brands that are transparent are more appealing to them.

Here are some ways to increase transparency

• Share your data collection and storage habits for ads.
• Make authentic ads and marketing campaigns. Don't try to trick Gen Z clients.
• Your contact information should be easily accessible on your website as well as your social media accounts.
• Use influencer marketing to find smaller and more trustworthy influencers to work with.

Trust can also impact the payment options Gen Z'ers will use. PayPal is a significant competitive advantage. As a matter of fact, 53 percent (between 18 and 39) of respondents trust PayPal to protect their financial information.

Conclusion

Already, Gen Z'ers have a significant impact on consumer spending. Their buying power will only increase over the next few years. Executives must market to Gen Z by educating their brand about Gen Z's thinking and inviting them to join a movement.

PayPal's BNPL can be used to build trust and give Gen Z'ers the financial freedom they desire. Find out more.

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: 5 Hacks to Attract Gen-Z Consumers
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/gen-z-consumers/
Published Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Do you love to write? Draw? Create in any way? Do people tell you that you should try using your creative skills to make a living?

Do you shrug them off because you don't know how to get started or because you don't feel you have the time to commit to unpaid work? After all, many people get their journey started writing free content in newsletters and blog posts. 

That’s where Substack comes in. You get to write and get paid—even if you don't have a following yet. 

If you’re curious to know more, stick around. I’m breaking down Substack and its many competitors to help you determine if this is the path for you. 

What Is Substack? 

In 2017, Substack took the market by storm by allowing creatives, journalists, and bloggers to make money from their own email newsletters. Substack provides a way to build an email marketing list, write newsletters, charge subscribers, and manage payments. 

This platform offers an intuitive email creator that helps writers create interesting emails with links, images, content, and more. It lends itself towards all sorts of creators, including:

• bloggers
• comic book creators
• investing and business writers
• podcasters

We will focus on writers and bloggers today, but you should keep this site in mind if you're involved with comics or podcasting. 

You can begin using Substack for free. However, as you begin to build a following, you could opt for a premium option, running $5 to $75 per month.

When you use a premium level, you can charge your readers. Substack only gets paid when you get paid, taking a 10 percent cut. Stripe takes an additional 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. As you can likely tell, you need to have a solid following to make a decent buck on Substack. 

Even with that amount taken out, Substack has the potential to become a viable profit source.

Substack Features

At the core, Substack is an email marketing platform. Whether you choose to go the paid or free route, that’s up to you. Here are some of the ways that you can make use of Substack. 

Free Newsletters 

Using a free Substack newsletter is a great way to grow your brand, develop your voice, and build a name for yourself. If you don’t have a large following, this is a great place to start. Create valuable content for your small following and offer it for free.

Don't use Substack in a vacuum; pair it with a website. This allows you to invite readers to your site using a CTA and potentially turn them into buyers. 

Paid Newsletters 

While a free newsletter has the potential to make you money on the backend, you can use paid newsletters to make money on the front end.

You can publish as many newsletters as you want, and there are little to no guidelines on what you can write. Remember that people will factor in how much value they’re getting based on how much you’re charging them. If you’re charging $75 per month but only publishing two newsletters, you may lose subscribers. 

If someone is willing to pay to read your writing, it means they want to read it regularly. Therefore, getting in the habit of publishing consistently is the best strategy. This way, the readers know what to expect, and you can plan accordingly. 

Who Is Substack’s Audience? 

The best thing about Substack is the wide variety of subscribers for you to tap into. The writers on Substack include journalists, celebrities, political analysts, food writers, world travelers, and more. Most of the writing you’ll find on Substack would classify as personal writing, opinion, or research and analysis. 

In the interest of transparency, Substack has experienced some controversy relevant to portions of its audience. Writers accused of transphobia, harassment, and other negative behaviors have found homes on the platform, as it isn't heavily moderated. While your audience is your own and not tied to any other creator's, this is something to factor in when considering how your particular audience may respond.

As for the audience, you have your choice of writing whatever it is you want because chances are, there is someone out there willing to pay to read your writing if it’s valuable. If you’re targeting a more niche audience, you may be able to charge more to a small set of subscribers because they need more resources. If you’re after a broader niche, you could charge less but reach more people.

You have the freedom to choose the direction you want to go with your Substack newsletters, but the options are nearly endless. 

3 Tips Using Substack for Marketing 

There is serious potential to make a lot of money and reach a lot of people on Substack, but you have to know how to do it. So, here are some tips for marketing on Substack. 

1. Start With Free Newsletters 

You can’t introduce yourself out of nowhere and expect them to subscribe for a monthly fee if they have no idea who you are. You have to provide something valuable. 

Eventually, readers could become enticed by your content and want more of it. Once you get to that point, start thinking about charging people. 

One of the biggest mistakes people make is moving from free to paid too soon. You need to be strategic, making sure your audience is genuinely engaged and would be willing to pay for your work. 

Even if you wait until the perfect moment, you may still lose followers. People used to getting something for free may balk when asked to pay. But, if you provide excellent content, have a committed following, and charge a reasonable price, you increase your chances of keeping the majority of your subscribers.

2. Have a Strong Offer

Offer more than a newsletter; give your subscribers something they can't turn down. For example, you could have an exclusive social media group for subscribers or even offer one-on-one conversations or coaching, depending on your field. You could also offer subscriber-only discounts for any products you may sell.

Write to your audience and include a CTA to get people to click on your offer. This could be an excellent way to convert these hot leads. 

3. Consider Multiple Publications 

Substack allows you to have as many newsletters as you want—meaning you could have a free and paid version. This strategy allows you to continue to engage with your entire audience.

To get readers to move to your paid option, you need to offer a little bit more. Make the content more exclusive, valuable, and personal. 

You can also have multiple free publications if you want to spread yourself across a few different niches. For example, digital marketing is highly diverse with a variety of different subjects. So, you could have a newsletter about SEO and another about social media marketing, both driving readers to your website.

Substack Competitors 

There are a ton of Substack alternatives, so making a decision can be challenging. Let's take a look at some of their biggest competitors so you can choose the platform that's right for you.

Substack Vs. Ghost 

The goal of Ghost is to help you build a loyal following to generate income you can rely on. As with Substack, you charge subscribers a monthly fee in exchange for your content.

What separates Ghost from Substack is the way they take payment. Ghost charges nine dollars per month and takes none of your revenue. This makes the platform highly scalable. You also get custom email addresses, domains, and access to a referral program. 

Substack Vs. Patreon 

Patreon is a subscription platform allowing creatives to charge for their work. The platform looks like a social media feed to users, and they get to scroll through the work of everyone to whom they subscribe rather than trying to go from place to place.

Patreon's biggest perk is its tiered package option. You can provide people with various options to appeal to their budget and how much they want from you, all from one location. For example, at a $1 level, you could send subscribers one newsletter per week. At a $5 level, you could send them two newsletters or a newsletter and access to a video.

Patreon plans range from five to 12 percent of your monthly income plus processing fees of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. 

Substack Vs. Medium 

Medium is well-known for being a haven for creatives who simply want to make their voices known, and much of it is free to access. As a bonus, Medium articles often rank pretty well SEO-wise.

If you upgrade to a paid Medium profile, you can charge for some or all of your content.

Rather than any kind of flat fee or percentage, Medium pays based on “reading time.” The more time people spend reading your content, the more money you make. You can also get paid by referring people to the platform through your unique code. 

Substack Frequently Asked Questions 

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about Substack. 

Is it free to access Substack?

Substack is free to write newsletters and build a following on. It only costs money when you upgrade to paid and start to generate revenue from your subscriptions. 

Can I advertise on Substack?

Substack does not run ads. The only way Substack makes money is through their cut of subscription fees.

Should I make a Substack?

Only you can answer this. Do you have great content ideas? Do you have a small following that you can nurture and grow? If yes, starting a Substack could be a great way to grow that following and eventually profit from it.

Does Substack own your content?

No. You retain ownership of everything published on Substack. While you cannot export content out of Substack once you publish it, you maintain ownership even if you use a different platform later.

All About Substack: Conclusion 

Building a following is not an easy task, and that’s why we offer assistance to marketers and creatives looking to build or grow their following quickly. 

Whether you're going it alone or getting help, you need to be consistent and patient as you grow the following. Of course, building an email list is easier said than done, but with some hard work and focus, Substack could help you get your writing career off the ground.

What advice do you have for new writers wanting to build a following on Substack?

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: All About Substack: Competitors, Features, and Audience
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/substack/
Published Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2021 18:00:00 +0000

How did I get over 942,000 subscribers without spending money on ads? Plus I am not famous, I'm not funny and I'm not a male model. 😉

I use a formula and it works well to get more YouTube subscribers for any industry and any account.

Even my clients at my marketing agency are using it and it's working wonders for them. So much so most of them have over 100,000 subscribers now.

Now before I teach you how to get more subscribers, let me give you a quick overview…

How to Get More YouTube Subscribers

There's a simple formula that I go into this article to getting more YouTube subscribers (which you can read below.

1. Hook people with your intro
2. Ask them to subscribe
3. Create videos that are around 10 minutes long
4. Ask people to leave comments (this is how you go viral)
5. Respond to every comment with an answer and question
6. Leverage YouTube shorts
7. Run contests
8. Do keyword research and use keywords within your title
9. Optimize your thumbnails for click-through
10. Promote your video hard in the first 24 hours through email/push notifications
11. Don't forget to upload the transcription

If you want to learn formula in-depth just keep reading below and I will go over what I just covered above. Or if you want the short version you can also watch the video below.

Give Your Channel a Theme to Gain YouTube Subscribers

Before you do anything, you need to give your channel a theme.

If you look at many of the top YouTube channels, you’ll notice that many of them stick to a theme.

Take a look at Derek Halpern‘s channel, for example.

Notice how a lot of the YouTube videos he creates are on topics related to business and success.

Having a theme makes it easier to create consistent YouTube content.

On top of that, you can make your channel the ‘go-to’ place for specific content. This is the goal of a social media platform.

If your channel caters to a specific niche, then people who care deeply about that niche will want to become subscribers.

For example, imagine your videos are all about Facebook marketing, and you aim to help business owners.

If a business owner who wants to learn more about Facebook marketing subscribes to your YouTube channel, they’ll get an update any time you post content.

This helps them stay ahead of the curve without having to do a lot of work.

If you’re struggling to come up with a theme for your channel, think about the problems your business solves and who it solves those problems for.

Then, produce videos based on the topics you know will help the people your business serves.

Post Incredible Content to Gain YouTube Subscribers

Many marketers agree that video converts better than other forms of media.

If you want to drive conversions, you need to learn how to create incredible content on your media platform.

Plus, if you can create incredible content, then a lot of the work related to growing your subscriber count is already done.

When people subscribe to your channel, they’re essentially signing up to get updates whenever a new piece of content is posted.

If your content is great, people won’t mind hearing from you again because their initial interaction with you and your content was positive.

Whether that’s a learning experience, an entertainment experience, or both — it’s worth watching your videos.

And remember that people take the time to watch great content.

According to Hubspot, 54% of people want to see more video content from marketers. This is a good foundation for your media platform that will expand social networks.

If your content is excellent, then you’ll benefit from the fact that 54% of senior executives share content with their social networks.

So how do you produce incredible content that makes viewers want to subscribe and share?

Start by focusing on producing content that is relevant to your target audience.

Provided that you’re sticking to a theme, as mentioned before, it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with a way to produce valuable content.

Then, use these tips.

Look for Popular Keywords on YouTube

Let’s say that you want to create a channel that covers the topic of ‘pencil drawing.’

One way to develop content ideas is by simply entering the broad keyword of ‘pencil drawing’ into the YouTube search engine.

YouTube is the second-largest search engine globally, so we know there’s going to be some relevant data here.

When we type in the keyword, we see the suggestions above.

Now, those topics might seem a little broad, so you may want to pick one of those keywords and go through the same process again so that you can generate something more concise.

Let’s add the word ‘tutorial,’ for instance.

By adding the word tutorial, we are now provided with more concise keywords.

The fact that these keywords appear in the suggestions lets us know that people are searching for these videos.

You might argue that there is a lot of competition for such keywords.

And while that may be true, later on in the post, we’ll figure out how we can get people to view our videos, even when there is a lot of competition — so don't let it be a concern for now.

The great thing about the approach above is that it gives us a place to start.

If we want to produce content for a certain niche, this technique lets us know what kinds of content people will already have an interest in viewing.

My tool Ubersuggest is another great YouTube keyword research tool. Simply type in your main key term and click “Keyword ideas” in the right sidebar, and it will deliver more than 400 keywords for you to consider.

You can also use the Google Keyword Planner tool to come up with content ideas. That’s because there will be some coherence between Google search results and YouTube search results.

Let’s stick with the topic of ‘pencil drawing.’

In the ‘Your product or service’ box, enter a keyword-based on your business. If I were running a business that taught people how to do a pencil drawing, I’d enter ‘how to do a pencil drawing.’

You want to keep the keyword broad at this stage because it’ll allow for the keyword tool to develop a wide range of ideas for you.

Once you’ve entered the keyword, you’ll then see this page. It shows several ‘Ad groups’ of keywords.

Each group of keywords centers around a certain topic.

As you can see, I’ve arranged the groups in terms of ‘Average monthly searches’ and descending order. This gives us a sense of where there might be a lot of competition.

Let’s click on the mid-range group called ‘Drawing Techniques.’

I’ve highlighted a few keywords that might represent good YouTube content opportunities.

I chose these keywords because it’s clear to see how you could create a focused, high-value video centered around these keywords.

You might think that these keywords don’t have that many searches and, therefore, aren’t worthy in terms of effort required.

However, remember we’re not just going to post a handful of videos and then be done with it.

Cultivating a YouTube channel so that it eventually has many subscribers often requires posting a lot of content. In fact, the biggest YouTube channel has over 4,200 videos.

If you want to publish massive amounts of content while keeping it relevant, you need to be able to niche down your content as much as possible, so each video provides value.

If you niche down, it’s only natural that the level of searches per month will go down.

Even if you focus on low-volume keywords, they’ll all come together to help you build momentum and establish yourself in a YouTube niche.

You’ll also notice there isn't a ton of content for those lower volume search terms, which represents an opportunity.

Look at what happens when I type in the ‘Simple drawing techniques’ keyword.

There’s a playlist there, but other than that, there aren’t any fully optimized titles or even videos based solely around the topic of ‘simple drawing techniques.’

Improve the Production Quality of Your YouTube Videos

Production quality shouldn't be a top priority, but it can definitely increase the number of YouTube subscribers after a certain point.

As long as your videos are rich in value and provide the viewer with the information they need, you’re doing a good job.

When the videos start to bring you a return, then you can focus more on production quality.

Here are a few tips.

Ensure what you’re saying can be easily heard. You must speak clearly and enthusiastically. You’ve got to project your voice.

Otherwise, people might not be able to understand what you’re saying. They might even get bored.

You don’t need to act like an extrovert; just try and prevent your voice from becoming monotonous.

If you’re recording your content using a phone or a laptop, the microphone might not be enough. So, you may want to invest in a quality external microphone.

However, test it to see how things actually sound before you make this investment.

You also need to ensure that your video is easy to watch.

You don’t want to make it hard work for your viewers to see what is going on. This means you need to ensure lighting is adequate.

If you’re recording a talking head style video where you’re talking to the camera, ensure that your face can be clearly seen.

If someone is recording you, then ensure the camera isn’t shaking.

If you’re recording your laptop screen, make sure your actions can be clearly seen and that anything you type can be read.

Use Video Editing to Improve the Quality of Your YouTube Videos

When it comes to video editing, you have a couple of solutions. When speaking about video editing, what we’re referring to is improving your videos' style and not so much about removing minor mistakes.

More often than not, you’re going to make minor mistakes when recording your video. You don’t need to put tons of focus into removing these bits, as they don’t harm your video all that much.

In fact, they might even help your video as they let other people know that they’re dealing with a real person rather than a sly media marketing salesman.

Where editing can come in handy, though, is when you need to create cuts in your video or add a title screen.

If you’re not an accomplished video editor, you could seek someone from Upwork or perhaps even Fiverr.

Alternatively, you could purchase a video editing suite and learn to do everything yourself.

That method might save you a bit more money, though you might end up spending a lot more time learning how to edit videos on your own. This takes time away from your media marketing.

That might not be the best trade-off, depending on your circumstances.

As mentioned, you don’t want to over-edit your videos, though you want to give them a sense of style that separates you from the crowd.

Often, the easiest way to do this is by having custom intro music and a custom title screen.

Another way that you can post incredible content is by creating videos based on your product being used.

Demonstration videos can go a long way in showcasing your product as something worth buying.

You can even turn some of your blog posts into videos. Nearly 59% of executives would rather watch a video than read a chunk of text.

Okay, so that’s the basics of creating incredible content.

The next point will be essential if you want to ensure that your YouTube subscriber rates grow consistently over time.

Get More YouTube Views by Posting Often and Consistently

This is probably the hardest part of growing a YouTube following — though it can also be one of the most important.

The average company posts 18 YouTube videos a month. Posting content consistently is a great way for you to compete.

Plus, if you’re constantly posting new content, then people have a reason to become a subscriber and share it on their social networks.

After all, people are less likely to subscribe if you’re not going to post any more content — why should they?

If you use the tips mentioned earlier, then coming up with ideas for posting new content is pretty easy.

You just need to set a schedule and stick to it.

How Often Should You Post New YouTube Videos?

If you want to keep things simple, look at what your competition is doing, and then one-up them. If they are posting twice a week, aim for three times a week.

Sometimes, however, the best plan is the one you can stick to.

Consistency in your media marketing campaign is important, as it’ll keep existing subscribers coming back for more. This will result in more YouTube views — and also improve engagement.

Engagement on a video tends to come in the following forms:

• Thumbs up or Thumbs Down
• Social sharing
• Subscribing
• Commenting
• Favoriting

Ideally, you want to improve the engagement levels in each of these categories through any social media site.

People like to engage with content on YouTube; did you know that over 100 million people per week take a ‘social action’ on YouTube every week?

Another mind-blowing fact is that 700 videos are shared every minute on Twitter. So while YouTube is not a social media site, it is a valuable tool for any social media marketing platform.

Great engagement will help make the video more visible in the YouTube search engine.

This will expose your video to more people, who can then become subscribers themselves.

If you want to view some statistics in terms of how your videos perform, you can use the YouTube analytics dashboard.

You don’t have to be at a computer to post content consistently. That’s because you can use the scheduling feature provided by Google.

To gain access to this feature, you must first turn on monetization for your videos. This means that you are willing to show ads on your videos.

If you don’t want to show ads on your videos, don't worry. You still have control over which videos are monetized and which ones aren’t.

Let’s take a look at how you can get that done.

• Sign up for a YouTube account and then go to the ‘Creators Studio’ section.
• On the left sidebar, under the ‘Channel’ option, select ‘Monetization.’

• Choose ‘Enable My Account.’

Now, you'll be able to access the scheduling features provided by YouTube to program your media platform.

You’ll also be able to access a lot more in the way of YouTube analytics.

If you want to schedule a video, click on the ‘Upload’ button.

Then click on the dropdown menu and select the ‘Scheduled’ option.

Then drag and drop your video, or click the icon to upload it.

On the next screen, you can adjust the scheduling options.

Now enter the date and time you want the video to go live.

If people are subscribed to your channel, they'll get a message when your video goes live.

Make sure to schedule that date into your social media management platform, if you have one. This will ensure that Tweets, Facebook updates, and LinkedIn posts are sent out simultaneously.

If you have an email list relevant to your video, you might even want to send a message out to those folks.

Consider staggering the messages, so you’re not bombarding people on multiple platforms all at once.

Consider Turning Long Videos into Multiple Short Videos

If you’re struggling to develop content ideas daily, consider splitting up longer videos into several shorter ones.

In long videos, you likely cover several points about one main topic.

You could edit out certain topics and then create mini videos using those topics. Shorter videos are more convenient for social network sharing.

In fact, Hubspot found that 2 minutes is the optimal video length on YouTube for their audience.

You’ll notice that the channel ‘Inside Quest’ does this a lot. Here’s one of the videos on their channel. Note how it is nearly 49 minutes long:

For someone new to the channel, that video length can be pretty intimidating.

So, they have broken down the video into some ‘highlight clips,’ covering interesting points and topics.

Note how short each of these videos is — just around a minute.

Short videos can be a great way to introduce people to your channel by giving them a taste of your content and building your media marketing campaign.

Create Evergreen YouTube Videos

A great way to consistently generate subscribers is by creating evergreen content.

These are videos that will be relevant whether they are viewed today or five years in the future.

This will apply to some niches more than others.

For example, I spoke earlier about the pencil drawing business, which naturally lends itself to producing a lot of evergreen content. A video about Instagram marketing, however, might be out of date in five years.

Take a look at your niche and see if you can create ‘how-to’ videos that will stand the test of time.

Even if you’re not looking to create evergreen content, it’s worth creating ‘how-to’ videos to provide value.

Optimize Your Videos to Increase YouTube Subscribers

Before anyone can become a subscriber to your channel, they need to first click on your videos.

No matter how good your video is, once it is seen in the YouTube search engine or sidebar, it will have some competition in the form of other videos.

So how do you get people to pay attention to and click on your video?

You need to focus on three areas — the headline, the thumbnail, and the description.

These three elements will have the biggest impact on influencing YouTube users to click on your videos. Be sure the meta tag is relevant and includes key points.

This is because they’ll help your rankings in the YouTube search engine. They'll also improve your videos' ability to entice users to click on them and share them on social media.

YouTube categories and cards can also drive clicks, so we'll cover those too.

How to Create a Good Headline for YouTube Videos

If your video is based on a certain keyword, then the video's title must include this keyword.

When you do this, you increase the chances of someone clicking on your video.

If the video's title matches what they were searching for, they’ll assume that the video covers everything that they need to know about that topic.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that you should be ridiculous in how you’re creating your titles.

‘Keyword stuffing’ can hurt you much more than it can help you.

One way you can get around this problem is by using a colon.

For instance, earlier, we identified the keyword — ‘simple drawing techniques.’

If we had a video on that topic, we could write the headline like this — ‘Simple drawing techniques: 5 tips that will make drawing easier.’

Side note: An interesting experiment might be to split the ‘simple drawing techniques’ title into separate niches. This is a common social media marketing technique for blogs and helps videos too.

For example, ‘simple drawing techniques for cars’ or ‘simple drawing techniques for eyes.’

This is a great example of how you can take a big niche or keyword that is receiving a lot of traffic and identify opportunities within that niche.

As I mentioned, you'll have to experiment a little when you do things this way. But, there's no telling what kind of opportunities you might uncover.

As you can see in the example above, the video title uses a colon to separate the text.

You’ll also notice that there are videos where the ‘|’ symbol is being used.

You’ll have to test which one works better, though it could just be that this symbol serves a similar purpose to what the colon would have done.

When it comes to creating YouTube headlines, you’ll want to follow the rules that already exist for blog posts.

You need to have a mix of something that people are searching for and something that grabs their attention. This is core media marketing that can lead to social network inclusion.

You can do that by using the keyword your video targets in the headline and then including power words in the gaps.

As we've discussed, the style of your videos is going to influence the headline. If you have a ‘how-to’ video, then you’ll need to account for that in your headline.

Similar to blog post headlines, numbers also tend to work well in YouTube headlines.

Use Engaging YouTube Thumbnails

When it comes to the thumbnail, there are a couple of approaches that you could take.

The first is to show a clear image of whatever the video is about. For example, if you're talking about a laptop, you'd want to include a picture of a laptop.

Like this:

Alternatively, you could just show a picture of a person interacting with whatever the video is about.

Like this example:

However, one of the increasingly powerful ways of creating video thumbnails is by adding text, like this:

Don't just drop some text and call it good. You can also heavily edit the thumbnail image so that it clearly stands out.

Here's another one:

If you want to create thumbnails like this, you need to follow these rules.

How to Create a Custom Thumbnail for YouTube Videos

You can create a thumbnail using Canva.

If you want to learn more about using Canva, going through their initial setup process might be helpful.

They have a YouTube thumbnail template, so use that to get started.

If you have some images of your own, you can upload them and then overlay text onto them.

I’ve just gone with the option of creating a basic thumbnail from scratch. Obviously, you can create something much better than this.

If you want to upload a custom thumbnail for a video, just go through the normal upload process.

On the page where you can adjust the video information, pick the ‘Custom thumbnail’ option.

You’ll then have a custom thumbnail that will be shown around the YouTube platform.

Create Better YouTube Descriptions

Creating a description for your YouTube videos could become an entire post in itself. We're going to cover the basics here.

You need to keep in mind that you have a lot of space here, and YouTube tends to use what you say to rank your content. Don't ignore the meta tag and its importance.

The first couple of lines on your description should be written so that they are easy to read in the search results.

Here’s a great example.

In this section, you may want to use some of the keywords you used in your title. That way, you can ensure that it has some coherence. This will also improve the ranking ability of your video.

When people click on your video, they have the option to click on the ‘Show More’ text.

This will expand the description. You can use this space to insert a ‘subscribe to channel’ link.

If you want to do that, use the following link format: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=

Make sure that you enter your channel name after the ‘=.’

So, for Kissmetrics, it would be: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=Kissmetric

When people click on this link, they’ll be taken to your channel page, where a subscribe box will pop-up.

You can also enter some other information, such as your other social media profiles, important links, and even your content posting schedule in the description.

You can also describe the things that are being discussed in your video, like this —

You could even highlight what is discussed at certain time sections in your video like this: 21:48 – How to prevent your website from being penalized by Google.

These timestamps will actually take those who click on them directly to the specified location in the video.

Add Tags to Increase YouTube Views

It’s also important to add tags. This will help improve the chances of your video appearing in the YouTube search engine.

You don’t want to use anything that is misleading here. Have a mix of some really specific tags that describe your video. Then, add a few broad tags that are still related to the genre.

There’s no harm in using some of the suggested tags provided by YouTube, as long as they align with what your video is actually about.

Use YouTube Cards

YouTube Annotations used to be the best way to engage users by directly adding links and other content to your video.

However, annotations were disruptive and were discontinued and then deleted in 2019.

Today, you have the option of using YouTube cards. You can add up to five cards to your video with a customized image, text, and call to action.

Here’s how you would go about creating a ‘YouTube card’ for your video.

Select the ‘Video’ option inside of the ‘Video Manager.’ Then click on the ‘Edit’ drop-down menu for the video you want to add a card to.

Then select the ‘Cards’ option.

You should then see this screen.

Click on the ‘Add card’ option and then choose the ‘Channel.’

Then, enter your channel name and add text.

The teaser text is the text that appears on the little graphic that appears in the video.

Here is how it will look:

If you want to adjust when the card displays the ‘teaser text,’ adjust the slider below.

You’ll notice, however, that the ‘i’ will always be visible in the video.

If people hover their mouse cursor over the ‘i,’ they’ll see the following.

This card will also appear at the time that you have chosen above.

Clicking on this will take users straight to your YouTube channel. However, no subscriber box will pop-up.

Engage Your YouTube Audience

Another way to boost your YouTube subscriber numbers is by engaging with your audience and creating a community.

There are several ways that you can do this.

Respond to YouTube Viewer Comments

Responding to comments is a simple — but effective — way to engage users. This will show YouTube viewers that you value their opinion. Plus, the fact that you’re going through this effort might encourage them to subscribe.

You could even argue that this counts as customer service work that improves the customer experience.

When you look at it through that lens, you use the fact that 22% of people post positive things on social networks about a company after having previously posting something negative — all because they got a response.

If you’re getting any negative comments on your YouTube videos, address them promptly.

This can increase YouTube subscribers because people see this interaction and appreciate the fact that you engage.

Host a Q&A Session

You can do this using Google Hangouts on Air or YouTube Live. You might even just ask at the end of a video for viewers to post their questions in the comments section.

Then, in the next video, you could spend some time going through the questions you received.

Ask Viewers What They Want

Another way to engage your audience is by creating videos based on what they want. For example, you could use a survey to ask your audience what they want to see you talk about.

You can then create a video based on a viewer's suggestions and call them out in the video to say thank you.

Consider Collaborating With Other YouTube Video Creators

When it comes to boosting subscriber numbers, you also have the option of doing collaborations with people in your industry.

Collaborations can massively boost your video marketing efforts.

If you go about things in the right way, you may just end up joining the 18% of companies that regard their video marketing as ‘very successful.’

The best way to go about this is to find channels with a similar audience.

Both of you could then arrange an event where you can both benefit from the interaction.

When you collaborate, you must encourage people to subscribe to your channel.

Also, make sure the videos you publish immediately after the collaboration are amazing, so they want to subscribe.

Host Interviews to Increase YouTube Subscribers

Alternatively, consider doing interviews on your channel. If you can find a way to interview the top people in your niche, you’ll be able to attract their audience to your channel.

When your channel has a decent number of subscribers, you’ll have a greater ability to attract these opportunities.

Of course, you shouldn’t let low subscribers be an impediment that stops you from trying.

Email a few people who might be worth having on your channel and ask them if they’d be willing to be a guest.

If they say no, respectfully ask if they’d be willing to do a show when your channel has more subscribers. See if they can provide you with a ballpark figure that they’d be happy with.

You don’t want to be rude, but there's nothing wrong with asking for a potential future way to make it happen.

Consider YouTube Ads

I’ve already spoken extensively about using YouTube Ads.

To get the most out of ads, target keywords your videos are created around.

This will ensure that your videos appear at the top of the search results when people enter that keyword.

If you are just getting started, you might want to get a feel for the platform first. But, if you've got a solid YouTube monetization plan, ads can be an effective way to drive subscribers and YouTube views.

How to Get YouTube Subscribers: Frequently Asked Questions

How many followers do you need to monetize your YouTube videos?

You need at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in a year to make money off YouTube videos.

How do I become a successful YouTuber?

You can become successful as YouTuber by employing strategies such as producing great content, optimizing your YouTube videos for the algorithm, and sharing your videos across multiple social channels.

What are some ways to make money as a YouTuber?

You can make money from YouTube by publishing popular videos that run ads; becoming an affiliate; offering paid memberships; and more.

How do you get YouTube subscribers?

You can get YouTube subscribers by creating videos on pop culture and tie them to your niche; optimizing your videos for the YouTube search algorithm; posting and promoting your videos across multiple channels; and simply asking viewers to subscribe.

How to Get YouTube Suscribers Conclusion

Ignoring the potential on YouTube is a huge mistake.

One of the keys to consistent success on YouTube is increasing your subscriber count — but don't fall victim to those buy YouTube subscribers scams.

Instead, work to create exceptional content that will keep your audience coming back for more.

Then, make people want to click on your content using brilliant thumbnails and killer headlines that draw them in.

When people finally click on your video, then you can ask for a subscription.

Once you’ve got those fundamentals down, you’re free to experiment with things like collaborations and YouTube Ads.

If you put enough effort in, you'll see those subscriber numbers start climbing — which can lead to website clicks and more.

All you need to do is get started!

What have you found to be useful when it comes to boosting subscriber numbers on YouTube?

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: How I Got Over 942,000 YouTube Subscribers (And You Can Too)
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/the-real-secret-to-growing-your-youtube-subscribers/
Published Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2021 13:00:00 +0000

If you’re looking to increase your organic SEO rankings, meta descriptions might be the answer. 

That is, if they are written well! 

A great meta description should compel users to click on your page in the search results to learn more. 

It should also contain keywords to boost your SEO.

Below, we'll explain the best practices for creating meta descriptions to help you dominate Google search results.

What Are Meta Descriptions?

Meta descriptions are 160-character snippets used to summarize a web page’s content. Search engines display these snippets in search results to let visitors know what a page is about before clicking on it. 

Meta descriptions help users decide if they want to click on your website in a search result. They are also an important factor in where your website ranks in the search results. 

Below, you can see a quick example of a meta description on our site.

Why Are Meta Descriptions Important?

Meta descriptions are important because meta tags (including meta descriptions) are used by the Google algorithm, which helps determine what pages should rank well for certain keywords. 

If you’re using meta descriptions properly, you have an opportunity to add a meta tag that isn’t in your content. This could be the difference between ranking on page four for “best shoes,” or on page one.

Meta descriptions help:

• Increase click-through rates, which in turn will boost your conversions and sales.
• Improve indexing so you rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Make it easier for visitors to find the content they're looking for without scanning page titles or meta tags. 

Pages with meta descriptions see an average of 5.8 percent more clicks than pages without.

Even search engine giant Google recommends writing meta descriptions on your site.

On the user-experience side, meta descriptions show searchers what your website is all about and what information they can expect to find if they click. 

Meta descriptions can also show up on social media sites when a link is shared.

If a meta description is not present, or if you have written it outside of best practices, a search engine may create one for you. The problem is, it might not be as accurate or compelling as the one you write yourself. 

That's why it's crucial to write your own meta descriptions. 

Tips for Writing Great Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are a great way to engage users on the SERP and improve your organic traffic.

How do you write meta descriptions that drive clicks and improve your ranking? Here are eight tips to help you create more compelling meta descriptions.

1. Include a CTA in Your Meta Descriptions

Using a call-to-action (CTA) in your meta descriptions is a great way to compel people to click on your website. You can use phrases like “Learn More” or “Click Here” or “Shop Now,” when they see it come up in SERPs.

CTAs help readers understand what the page offers and what they can expect if they click. They can also give users an incentive for clicking through and engaging with your site. 

CTAs can be used to sell a product, offer an email sign-up, or direct readers to your social media pages.

This example from Automattic on LinkedIn asks users to join LinkedIn to apply for their positions.

2. Focus on Value Your Meta Description

Adding words that describe the value you offer is a great way to entice people to click. 

When someone reads a meta description, they should be able to understand what is on offer and whether it is worth their time.

Include words like “learn,” “see,” or “watch” when appropriate to interact with your content. 

Other words, such as “best,” “deal,” “new” or “popular,” can also make your meta descriptions more compelling.

3. A/B Test Your Meta Descriptions

A meta description is a great place to experiment with different keywords, phrases, or CTAs.

This will help you determine what drives more engagement without doing anything permanent or drastic in your site's design itself.

You can A/B test your meta descriptions by making two meta descriptions for each page.

One meta description could use one variation of a keyword, phrase, or CTA. The second meta description could be your current meta or focus on a different offer or term. 

Run each meta for a few weeks, then check your Google Analytics to see which version earns more clicks. Then, use that information when crafting new meta descriptions.

(If clicks are close, consider looking at other metrics, such as bounce rate, time on page, or conversions. Traffic isn't the only thing meta descriptions can impact!) 

4. Experiment With Character Length

Meta descriptions are limited to 150 characters. Going over this length will result in your meta being truncated in the search results, which means users won't see any content after the cut-off.

Here's an example of a truncated meta. Notice the ellipses:  

Even though you can't go over the limit, you can experiment with your description to see what works best for each page. For example, in-depth guides may actually get more clicks with the truncated results because users want to learn more. 

You may find shorter meta descriptions work best on your home page, while blogs perform better with a higher word count. Or, you may find meta descriptions with a higher word count work best for your recommended products page.

Try not to exceed the recommended character length, as it can negatively affect your rankings. 

5. Make Your Meta Descriptions Unique and Interesting

Meta descriptions provide an overview of what content is contained on a page, so they're important for attracting readers' attention. 

Try different approaches to grab user attention, such as using a clickbait title or asking a question users want answered. 

Try using eye-catching words or phrases that will grab a user's attention such as “shocking,” “hilarious” or “life-changing.” Just be careful not to overpromise and under-deliver. 

As you can see in the example above, they use a very active voice that provides a momentous push for the reader.

You’re told what you can expect but without any unnecessary details. If you’re looking for a simple way to help your SEO, you would most likely click on this link. 

You’ll also notice the example above is very specific and doesn’t contain any fluff.

This is especially important if you want to rank high in the SERPs.

Most importantly, make sure the description matches the content of the page.

6. Include Keywords in Your Meta Descriptions

It's important to include keywords in meta descriptions for two reasons: 

1. It helps search engines understand the page and better rank your content. 
2. It reassures users that the page covers the topic they are interested in. 

Use a tool like Ubersuggest to find the best keywords for your site. Then, add them to your meta descriptions to improve your ranking.

Note: Each page should use different keywords in the meta descriptions to ensure your page shows up in all relevant searches.

Keep in mind, Google does not use keyword meta tags directly in its rankings. That doesn't mean they aren't valuable for users. 

Also, avoid keyword stuffing in your meta descriptions or you risk a search engine penalty. Each meta description should contain one or two keywords per phrase and they should be relevant to the page. 

7. Implement Structured Data 

Structured data meta tags are HTML tags you can add to your website to provide additional context for search engines and social media platforms. 

The most common types of structured data meta tags used by marketers are the business name, address, phone number, email address, a product description with price points (if applicable), an image URL and a Twitter handle.

There are plenty of ways you can start implementing structured data.

One of the most popular ways you may have seen is when websites implement reviews in their meta description:

This provides an immediate signal to your viewer that they can find something of value on the site.

Since social proof is such a powerful way to sell and grow your brand, this is a fairly easy hack that lets you start capitalizing on user behavior with ease.

​​Structured data can help you build a more powerful meta description that will help you rank higher in search results. They can also help you snag Google snippets.  

8. Do Not Duplicate Meta Descriptions

A meta description is crucial to ranking, so make sure to write unique meta descriptions for each page. Unique meta descriptions increase the probability that search engines and other browsers can understand what content is on a page and how it compares to other pages. 

For example, if a user sees duplicate meta descriptions on every page of your website, they won't know what kind of content is on what page. 

This is especially important for e-commerce sites, which may have several pages with similar content. Even if the products are similar, the metas should be unique. 

Duplicate meta descriptions can have negative effects on your website as they make it difficult for meta description crawlers to crawl your site. You may also face indexing penalties because crawlers are not able to determine which page is original.

Examples of Great Meta Descriptions

The best examples of meta descriptions come from search engines themselves. Let’s look at Google’s own meta description for starters.

Here's the coding for Google's own meta description: 

<meta name=”description” content=”Search the world’s information, including web pages, images, videos and more. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you’re looking for.“>

It is exactly 159 characters, including spaces. Google’s meta description is displayed as follows in the top three search engines.

In Google: 

In Yahoo: 

In Bing: 

Here are a few branded meta descriptions that do well: 

Tesla

Tesla’s meta description quickly and efficiently tells you everything you need to know about the company and its values. The meta description fits perfectly within the SERP and none of the words are cut off.

Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet starts with a question to draw readers in and encourage clicks. From there, they explain their unique value propositions and get you excited about traveling the world!

Meta Descriptions Frequently Asked Questions

How many characters should a meta description be?

A meta description should be approximately 160 characters in length, including spaces, and include a concise but compelling description of the content on that page. 

Where does my meta description appear?

Your meta description appears on the search engine page when a user searches for your site's keyword. It is directly under your meta title.

Do meta descriptions affect SEO?

Yes, meta descriptions affect SEO as they provide search engines with information about your page and impact user experience. 

Should my meta description be the same as my page's title or H1?

No. Use unique meta descriptions and meta titles for each page of your website. Remember, the meta description is right under the title, which is generally your H1. Don't waste that space! 

How to Write Meta Descriptions: Conclusion

Meta descriptions are an important part of your onsite SEO. They should be compelling, descriptive, and unique to each page. 

Meta descriptions may be short, but they can help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) by helping search engines and users better understand what your page is about. 

Remember to include meta descriptions on every page of your site, including blog posts and product pages. 

What tips do you have for creating great meta descriptions?

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: How to Write Compelling Meta Descriptions That’ll Boost Your Rankings
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-write-meta-descriptions/
Published Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2021 18:00:00 +0000

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

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be complicated or overwhelming for the average business owner, but it doesn’t have to be.

With a decent SEO plugin for your WordPress website, the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic will be a breeze. 

An SEO plugin offers you tools and powerful features like audit checklists, sitemaps, and content insights to optimize your website. 

I’ve compiled a list of the best SEO plugins for WordPress options, making it easier for you to find the best tool to suit your company’s needs. 

#1 – All-In-One SEO (AIOSEO) Review — The Best Way for Beginners to See Their Pages Rank Higher 

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the original WP SEO plugin, and it’s been helping people with no SEO experience get their pages to rank higher ever since it came out.

Over the years, it’s grown to handle every aspect of SEO you could possibly want to manage. But don’t worry, you’re not going to get bogged down making tons of decisions about sitemaps and JSON schemas.

For as powerful as the plugin is, it’s remarkably easy to use, even if you don’t have any SEO experience.

Simply download the plugin and follow the setup wizard. If you can answer basic questions like whether you have a blog or an online store, you’re good to go. 10 minutes later, your site is going to have all the fundamentals locked down.

Troubleshooting and fine-tuning things from there is a walk in the park. AIOSEO is constantly auditing your site, explaining the changes you need to make in plain English.

It automatically prioritizes issues, showing you what needs to be addressed immediately as well as missed opportunities for optimization. Simply follow the steps outlined in the checklist and you’ll be well on your way to maxing out your site’s potential.

There are explanations for everything you do, if not links to guided walkthroughs. You can really learn what you’re doing as you go.

Compared to Yoast, another solid plugin that covers WordPress SEO across the board, AIOSEO is just a little bit easier to use, especially for people who are new to the space. 

Yoast is what I use. It’s definitely got more features for the power user close at hand, whereas the AIOSEO interface is going to be more intuitive for novices.

One of the reasons this plugin has more than 2 million active downloads is that the free version is loaded with helpful features:

• XML sitemaps
• Titles and meta descriptions
• Basic schema markup
• Custom titles and meta descriptions
• Bad bot blocker
• Basic WooCommerce SEO
• Search engine notification

If you upgrade to AIOSEO Pro, you’ll get a lot more hands-on customer support, and additional features to manage SEO across all of your sites:

• On-Page SEO
• Social media integration
• Advanced WooCommerce SEO 
• Local SEO
• RSS SEO
• Video SEO
• Google AMP SEO
• Structured Data (schema markup)
• Redirection manager

Even with the full spread of powerful features, AIOSEO is very competitively priced. The pricing tiers are mostly broken down by the number of sites you need.

For the most part, all of the paid plans have the same set of features, but you only get priority support with Pro and Elite plans. There are a few things that don’t come with the Basic plan, such as Local SEO and the redirection manager, but not much is left out.

It can be really hard to choose between the various SEO plugins that “do it all,” but if you are new to SEO or WordPress, nothing is going to be as easy to get started. 

The free version is very powerful and the pricing on paid plans is definitely less expensive than Yoast. While advanced users might be able to get more out of Yoast, AIO has everything you need to get your site to start ranking higher. 

Get AIOSEO today. If you don’t think it’s 100% worth it, the company offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

#2 – WP Rocket Review — The Best for Ranking Higher With Site Speed 

Site speed impacts your search rankings. People don’t like slow sites. They’ll leave if it takes more than a second or two for the page to load. Google notices that people are bouncing and moves you down in the rankings.

Speed is one of the few ranking factors that WordPress SEO plugins don’t typically address. But you definitely want to make sure you are doing everything in your power to keep your site fast.

This is why I recommend WP Rocket. It’s a cache plugin, not an SEO plugin, but it’s going to give your pages a performance boost which will help your page rank. You can learn more about cache plugins here (and see why I like WP Rocket the best), but for now I’ll just say it lets you deliver data to visitors a lot faster.

All you have to do is install WP Rocket. It’ll get cracking on your site right away, optimizing your files, media, and databases to make sure your site is as fast as possible.

Have an ecommerce site? No problem. WP Rocket will keep things speedy without getting in the way of your shopping carts and user experience. 

I highly recommend installing WP Rocket in addition to your SEO plugin. WP Rocket has compatibility with popular options like Yoast, so you can get the increased site speed without any plugin conflicts.

Go ahead and build a complex interactive website. Add videos and don’t worry about load times. With WP Rocket, you can design really cool pages without leaving visitors in the lurch.

All of the plans come with the same feature set, you just need to pick one based on the number of sites you have. Single is good for one site, Plus works for three, and Infinite will work for unlimited websites.

Because it’s a paid plugin, you get top-notch customer support. Submit a ticket from within the plugin and you’ll have an answer shortly.

When it comes time to renew WP Rocket, you’ll get 30% off the sticker price. If you let it expire, you’ll have to pay full price again.

It’s a really good deal on a truly plug-and-play product. There’s not much you have to do in order to see a benefit. If you are a veteran WordPress user, you’ll find that there is a lot you can configure to make your site even faster.

No matter what your experience level, if you are serious about SEO, you need a good cache plugin. Don’t leave such an easy win on the board.

And if you have a cache plugin that’s not getting the job done, it’s time to make a switch.

Get WP Rocket today. If you don’t see the results, the company will offer a full refund within 14 days of signing up. There’s no risk, only reward.

#3 – Ubersuggest Review — The Best Web App for Domain and Keyword Research

If there’s a drawback with SEO plugins for WordPress, it’s the vulnerability and bloat they can cause. Plugins can open up new security concerns if they’re not kept updated and stable and a whole lot of plugins on your WordPress site can cause it to load slower for visitors, undoing any gains you make in SEO.

So, why mess with a plugin when you can use a web app to do detailed keyword and domain research? That’s exactly what Ubersuggest accomplishes.

My team has built one of the best SEO tools out there. Just plug in a domain name or keyword into the search bar and see all the detailed information you can glean.

The keyword analyzer shows you front-and-center the search volume, average cost-per-click for running a Google ad campaign on the keyword, and scores for how crowded the field of competitors is overall and in paid search.

You also get a handy graph showing historical search volume, plus keyword string ideas for finding less crowded opportunities and content examples to generate ideas of your own.

The same goes for domain searches. Plug one in to see how many keywords it ranks for in organic search, how many backlinks it’s generated, and stats for traffic and domain authority.

There’s even a great chart for breaking down how keywords rank in groups, split out between those placing in the top three of search results, between positions four and 10 on the first page, and so on.

And that’s all on the free version of Ubersuggest. You’re allowed three free daily searches.

Unlock even more data by paying for Ubersuggest, including longer historical search and ranking metrics, tracking, deeper competitive analysis, backlink opportunities, and a whole lot more.

And, guess what? It costs around 90% cheaper than competitors like Moz and Ahrefs.

Seriously, you can use all the features of Ubersuggest for as little as $29 per month. That’ll allow you to manage up to three websites. You can also pay for a lifetime license at that tier for just $290.

Need to manage more sites? The Business plan can handle between four to seven websites for $49 per month or $490 lifetime. Eight or more websites will require the Enterprise/Agency plan, which is still very reasonably priced at $99 per month or $990 lifetime.

So now there’s no need to add bulky plugins that can add security vulnerabilities to worry about. Use my web app Ubersuggest and get all the insights and data you need, no plugin required.

#4 – SEOPress Review — The Cheapest WordPress SEO Plugin That Covers All Your Bases 

SEOPress is an approachable solution for people that are new to SEO and aren’t looking to spend the big bucks on one of the more established WordPress SEO plugins. 

And it’s not just for US-based users either—SEOPress is available in 17 languages with professional translations in UK English, Chinese, Hindi and more.

Let's talk about sticker price. SEOPress is less than half the cost of what other “do-it-all” SEO plugins will run you. And those are typically only good for a single site. 

SEOPress is $39 per year for unlimited sites. That’s right. Unlimited sites.

This is a major cost difference that adds up quickly. Five sites with Yoast or AIOSEO is going to be several hundred dollars. With SEOPress, you don’t have to worry about that at all.

So you might be thinking, there’s no way SEOPress can really cover all my bases at that price. You tell me. 

Even the free plugin from SEOPress lets you handle:

• Installation Wizard
• XML and HTML sitemaps
• Mobile/Desktop preview
• Facebook/Twitter preview
• Image SEO
• Redirections
• White label
• Titles with dynamic variables
• Twitter cards and 
• Content analysis

And some of these are really deep features. You get unlimited keywords in the content analysis. Yes unlimited with the free version. Usually you are limited to a single word or phrase unless you buy premium.

And you can white label services with the free version. This is a big deal for developers and agencies because they can put their own branding on SEOPress tools they use for clients.

Think about it, unlimited sites plus white labeling means you can build your brand without breaking the bank.

And if you go for SEOPress PRO, you’ll be able to address a much fuller scope of issues, including:

• Video SEO
• Structured Data Types (schemas)
• Breadcrumbs
• Local SEO
• Broken link checker
• Deep WooCommerce integration
• 404 Monitoring
• RSS SEO

For those of you keeping score at home, you’ll notice that AIO SEO and Yoast have slightly larger feature sets. So there is definitely a tradeoff, no doubt about it.

But here’s the thing: for a huge number of users, SEOPress has everything they need, and it’s not freighted with tons of features they’re not going to use.

Pricing could not be more straight-forward or fair:

One quick thing about the pricing for SEOPress Pro. You pay $39 for the license, which comes with a full year of automatic updates and customer support. 

If you decide not to renew, you can still use the plugin, you just won’t get the updates or access to customer service. And when you renew, you’ll pay $39, regardless of whether there has been a price increase since then.

For people looking to get deeper into keyword analysis and backlink research, SEOPress offers the Insights add-on for $99 per year per site. You’ll be able to track keyword rankings with information about cost per click and search volume.

With Insights, you’ll also get a much closer look at backlinks on your site. At a glance, you can see who is helping increase your domain authority, or get rid of low quality links that are hurting your reputation.

Insights is obviously a big increase in price, but it’s actually going to cost a lot less than comparable tools from Semrush or Ahrefs.

There’s no way to spend as little and get so much. Take advantage of the 14-day free trial of SEOPress today.

#5 – Semrush Writing Assistant Review — The Best Way to Draft SEO-Friendly Content

Semrush is a leader in SEO. The company offers one of the most comprehensive platforms for analyzing keywords, researching competitors, digging into paid search marketing, and much more.

Semrush also makes a free WordPress plugin called SEO Writing Assistant, or SWA. Once you install SWA, you’ll get to draw on Semrush’s amazing platform for help and guidance as you draft content for your sites.

Simply enter the keywords you are targeting and then start writing. You’ll get recommendations and see your content score broken down into readability, SEO, originality, and tone of voice.

It’s all really intuitive. The factors that contribute to your score are broken down in plain English, and SWA gives you concrete actions you can take to improve. Below, I’ve grouped four separate screenshots together so you can see what kind of guidance you get for each category:

On the left, the tone of voice is rated as between neutral and formal, with 83% consistency. In this case, the writer is probably fine, but SWA calls out the most casual sentences in case they want to make it even more consistently formal throughout.

Similarly, SEO-friendliness, readability, and originality are clearly described. These terms are sometimes hard to figure out, especially for newer writers, but SWA makes it easy to see.

You’ll need to create a Semrush account in order to use the plugin, which you can do for free. I will tell you right now that the free account is very limited. You’ll only be able to make a single content template, which is more of a novelty than a tool to really improve SEO across your site.

I think a Semrush account is worth it, personally. My team uses Yoast, which has integration with Semrush, and I don’t know what we’d do without it.

Tackling issues like readability, keyword-density, and plagiarism is really important. If your articles aren’t original, or Google thinks you scraped them from someone else, your sites are going to take a major hit in the rankings.

Now a Semrush account isn’t free by any means. It’s definitely an investment you make in SEO that can pay huge dividends by bringing higher quality traffic to your site.

One thing to be aware of is that the Pro license doesn’t come with the content templates necessary to benefit from SWA—you’ll need a Guru or Business account.

The good news is that you don’t need a paid Semrush account for everyone in order to benefit. You could get a single Guru account for your content manager, and once they connect a document to a content template, any writer working on that document will have access to SWA.

With a Guru subscription, you can create 800 content templates per month, and with Business the limit is 2,000.

I know it’s expensive, but I really only recommend using a paid Semrush account with SWA. Like I said, the limits of the free plan don’t really give you the range to really see a benefit.

In that sense, I look at the free plugin as more of a free trial rather than a useful freemium license. Pretty much all the one-star reviews I read were people frustrated by the free version. On the other hand, people using the paid version were blown away by how helpful it was.

And, if you do spring for the paid version, you’ll get access to more than 40 other tools to help you improve SEO. I’m not going to lay everything out here, but you should definitely explore the entire Semrush platform.

#6 – Schema Pro Review — The Best for Getting More Clicks With the Rankings You Already Have

How do some sites wind up with a way more appealing piece of real estate on search engine results pages? 

You know what I’m talking about. These sites have images, videos, map screenshots, and other attention-getting features. Here’s an example of what happened when I searched “best grilled cheese”.

I don’t have the metrics on it, but I’d bet you a dollar that these top three results are absolutely killing it compared to the grilled cheese pages near the bottom of page one.

So how do you get your pages to show up like this?

You need to use schemas, which tell Google how to interpret your content. It used to be really challenging, but if you use a plugin like Schema Pro, you can get these killer search results for all of your pages with a couple of clicks.

That’s why I love Schema Pro. Instead of trying to learn and navigate the rules of the road for schema markup, you just select the type of content you're working on, and the plugin takes it from there.

The content types that Schema Pro supports include:

• Articles
• Books
• Courses
• Events
• FAQs
• How-To’s
• Job Postings
• Local Business
• People
• Products
• Recipes
• Reviews
• Services
• Software Applications
• Video Objects

If you are consistently publishing any of these types of content, you absolutely need to check out Schema Pro. 

There’s just no way that plain text search results can compete. For local businesses, wouldn’t it be nice for your store to show up automatically located on Google Maps? Boom, there’s a picture of your storefront, it’s location, and the drive time’s already calculated.

Or say you are a food blogger. Wouldn’t it be better if your pages showed up as rich results with a perfect image, cook times, and star-rated reviews?

There is zero coding required. Schema Pro handles all the backend legwork.

You already work so hard to get your pages to rank. Whether you're on page one or page three, you want to put your best foot forward. Schema Pro lets you optimize your pages to ensure that Google gives you the best chance of getting those rich results.

Schema Pro is a paid plugin. Brainstorm Force, the company that makes it, also offers a free plugin called All-in-one Schema.org Rich Snippet.

The free version might be interesting to check out, but it’s a little dated at this point. It doesn’t use the latest JSON LD code, which is what Google favors. Schema Pro does use this code (although you don’t have to worry about writing it yourself) and you don’t have to do any manual entry at all. With the free version, there’s a lot more work for you.

And the paid version is not very expensive at all, especially considering how big an impact it can have on SEO.

Schema Pro is just $63 for a full year. This includes 1-on-1 support from the customer service team. If your license expires, you can still use the plugin, but you won’t get updates or the free customer support.

You can also purchase a lifetime license of Schema Pro for a one-time fee of $249. You’ll continue to get updates and support for as long as you use it.

Alternatively, you can opt for the Growth Bundle, which includes Schema Pro along with other excellent WordPress tools from Brainstorm Force. You get the Astra Pro theme, a bunch of beautiful pre-made websites, WP Portfolio, Convert Pro, and more. 

The Growth Bundle is a great deal for agencies and developers who can get a great price on tools they need to help clients.

If you are just handling schema markup on your site, Schema Pro is all you need.

Another thing to be aware of is that Schema Pro is not an SEO plugin, which means you can use it with plugins like Yoast. You’ll have to be a little careful to ensure that there’s no plugin conflicts, but it's definitely possible to use Schema Pro to complement your other SEO plugins.

There’s no free trial, but there isa 14-day refund policy. If you are not getting the beautiful and attention-grabbing search results your sites deserve, I would go out and get Schema Pro right now.

#7 – Yoast SEO Review — The Best Free SEO Plugin for WordPress 

Yoast SEO is the most downloaded SEO plugin on WordPress. The free version has helped people learn and conquer SEO, and the premium versions help businesses take their content to the next level.

This is what I use for my sites. I’m a Yoast guy and have been for years. Because I have a bunch of huge sites, I use the premium version and it’s totally worth it. But if you are wondering which free SEO plugin is the best, I say Yoast.

And I’m not alone by any means. Yoast has more than 25,000 five star reviews on WordPress. 

It’s incredibly easy to use. Maybe it’s not quite as effortless for new users as AIOSEO, but it’s not significantly harder. 

And the free version includes a few things that AIO and SEOPress do not. Without spending a dime on Yoast, you’ll be able to tackle:

• XML sitemaps
• Titles and metas
• Canonical URLs
• Schema markup
• Breadcrumbs 
• Keyword analysis
• Readability analysis
• Google/mobile preview

If you have a large site and you want to get by with a free plugin, Yoast is what you want. With AIOSEO and SEOPress, you have to upgrade to premium to handle schema markup and breadcrumbs. With Yoast it’s all free.

And it all makes a difference. Breadcrumbs help readers navigate a site, and they show up in search results. Here’s an example using the search “best treadmills”.

You can see the breadcrumbs in the orange boxes. Readers love these because they help them navigate the site. They know exactly where they are. Google loves breadcrumbs because they tell it how your site is organized.

It’s an easy win to help your pages rank higher, and only Yoast includes it for free.

Should you outgrow the free version, premium Yoast is worth every dollar you spend. I couldn’t dream of running my sites without it. You’ll get:

• Internal linking suggestions
• Content insights
• Redirect manager
• Elementor integration
• Automated publishing
• No in-app advertisements
• 24/7 customer support

You’ll also be able to take advantage of extensions like Local SEO, News SEO, Video SEO, and WooCommerce SEO. Do note that these extensions are paid add-ons, which aren’t included with your premium subscription, whereas AIOSEO and SEOPress include them with paid versions.

Premium Yoast subscriptions start at $89.

As I mentioned, Yoast is what I use, so I fully endorse the premium SEO plugin. There’s a lot my team does to make sure our pages continue to rank highly. With Yoast, it’s easier to consistently implement best practices across all of our sites.

So I love the premium plugin, but it’s not going to be for everyone.

If you are in the market for a free plugin, I highly recommend Yoast SEO. For zero dollars down, you can start addressing SEO right now. What are you waiting for?

#8 – Ahrefs Review — The Best SEO Plugin for Advanced Users 

Ahrefs SEO is a WordPress plugin from Ahrefs, one of the best known names in SEO. This is a super lightweight plugin you can install for free, but you’ll have to get an Ahrefs license to really take advantage of everything you can do.

Think about it as a way to audit the content on your site. But instead of getting surface level information that’s free from Google, you get the benefit of Ahrefs deep databases. You’ll be able to dive into your pages’ performance at the most granular level.

Here’s a screenshot of what I’m talking about:

For each page, you can see where it’s ranking (position), total traffic, what percentage of the traffic is organic, and the number of backlinks. On the right hand side, you’ll see a list of clear suggestions based on the page’s performance.

If a page is under-performing, it may make sense to update it with fresher content. Or maybe you should merge several low-performing pages with one that’s doing better.

Yes, you always want new content, but sometimes less is more. This post from Ahrefs explains some of the benefits from culling and merging underperforming pages, and how it can actually boost your traffic.

But let’s not lose sight of how amazing this is. Tracking backlinks and rankings on your own is incredibly time-consuming. With Ahrefs, everything you could possibly need is right at hand.

If you go with the free plugin, you’ll be limited to auditing the content on your own site. This is really useful if you are just starting off, but for advanced users, I highly recommend paying for an Ahrefs license and taking advantage of your ability to backlink research, content gap analysis, and getting a complete picture of how your competitors’ sites are ranking.

Say you want to dive deeper into the backlinks you have to figure out what’s helping and what you might want to drop. Simply pull up it up in Site Explorer:

You can see each link, along with its domain rank (DR), URL rank (UR), the number of referring domains, total traffic, as well as the anchor text to the backlink.

Don’t know what those are? Don’t worry, just go with one of the other SEO plugins and think about Ahrefs down the line.

But if you are trying to go the extra mile with SEO, your link building team will love all of this information. And you could get just as detailed analysis of your competitors’ sites. Figure out what they are doing well and adjust your strategy as needed.

Paid Ahrefs subscriptions start at $99 for a single user.

You’ll note that additional users only $30 each, which is definitely a plus. That said, Ahrefs is not an all-in-one price. You may have to pay for additional features, and there are limits on the number of sites, keywords, and other factors you can track.

For the most part, the various plans all come with the same set of tools. You get higher limits with the more expensive plans.

It can definitely get pricey, which is why I really recommend it for advanced users. They’re going to get a ton out of it.

People who are newer to the space might not be able to get the bang for their buck. And if you don’t want to pony up for an Ahrefs subscription, you’ll probably find the free version limited. Especially when you consider everything that comes with the free version of Yoast or AIOSEO.

But if you are trying to compete in a lucrative space, you need the detailed information Ahrefs provides.

Check out the free plugin today, or test drive a premium Ahrefs subscription for $7. That will give you one week to try out every amazing tool the company offers.

It’s not cheap, but if you are really trying to take your SEO game to the next level, there’s hardly a better plugin out there.

What I Looked At To Find the Best SEO Plugin for WordPress 

Now that you know my top seven best SEO plugins for WordPress, it’s time for you to make a decision that aligns with your company’s needs.

Identifying these criteria is the most critical part of your decision-making process because it will dictate whether it will improve your website traffic and engagement and inform your strategies. 

Consider the following factors and whether prospective tools align with your personal preferences to make the right decision for your business. 

You Can Handle All Aspects From a Single SEO Plugin

Getting the best SEO plugin for your site is the key. You really don’t want to try and cobble together a few different SEO plugins to handle various areas.

The reason is that having multiple plugins with overlapping functions is going to cause problems. So-called plugin conflicts can slow your site down, if not crash it altogether.

Plus, all plugins take up resources. The fewer you use, the less strain put on your site.

Everyone loves plugins because they do amazing things for your site. But you have to be thoughtful about what you use—especially with SEO plugins.

Some plugins will explicitly call out that they’re compatible with others. That can work. But unless you really know what you’re doing, I’d stick to a single SEO plugin to reap the benefits and avoid the issues.

So head into your search with a list of all the aspects of SEO that you’re looking to address. There’s a lot out there, and you may find capabilities you didn’t know existed. Here are some (not all) of the different areas that WordPress SEO plugins can help you tackle:

• Keyword SEO: Discover which keywords matter and work them into your content.
• Backlinking: Check, evaluate, and build backlinks to your site to increase domain authority.
• On-Page SEO: Make your page easier to read and find for Google bots and human readers.
• Google AMP SEO: Optimize your content for mobile users.
• SERP SEO: Use schemas to claim a coveted spot on the first search engine results page (SERP) with a featured snippet or spot in the carousel.
• Local SEO: Get found by people searching in a specific area and rank higher on Google Maps.
• Video SEO: Give your videos the best chance to rank highly and show up even if people aren’t using the video search.
• Social Media SEO: Integrate your plugin with social media channels to preview how posts will look or see how they are performing

Now, since you know that you can’t use multiple SEO plugins, it should come as no surprise that some of the most popular options can handle everything. The three I recommended are SEOPress, Yoast, and the aptly-named All in One SEO.

If you have a big site, lots of sites, or you are really trying to get after SEO, I’d choose one of these options and not look back. 

Maybe you’re not pursuing every avenue right now, but you probably will be. And that option will be open to you without having to jump ship to a new plugin later. SEOPress actually lets you deactivate the aspects you're not using, which is more efficient for your site.

Plus, SEO is always changing. These “one-stop-shop” SEO plugins have to change with the times in order to keep their reputation as a complete solution. Again, switching plugins is a pain, but you probably won’t have to by going with the multipurpose SEO plugins.

Not everyone is going to need the full arsenal. If you are just starting off, you can probably get by with a leaner plugin that targets the specific areas of SEO that really matter to you. 

This is going to be less resource-intensive and way cheaper. Don’t pay for something loaded with powerful features you aren’t going to use.

Key SEO Metrics Available At a Glance

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. 

Good SEO plugins give you clear visibility into your site’s performance.

Look at Ahrefs Rank Tracker tool, for instance. You can see how different pages have performed over time with a few clicks:

All the relevant metrics are plain as day: referring domains, referring pages, organic traffic, organic keywords, the value of that traffic, and all your social shares broken down by channel.

Tracking this on your own would be a full-time job. Now, you have tons of intelligible data to make informed decisions about your content and outreach strategy. 

What’s working? What’s not? Now you know.

More than just information, the very best SEO WordPress plugins offer concrete steps you can take to improve.

All in One SEO gives you a site score based on an SEO audit checklist. This reflects how well your site is doing score that reflects how well your site is doing:

If something major has happened, you’ll know immediately. You’ll also know why.

At the bottom of that screencap, there’s a Complete SEO Checklist. This shows you why you have the score you do, broken down into Good Results, Recommended Improvements, and Critical issues.

Clicking on any item in the checklist brings up a short explanation of what’s happening and how to fix it:

With the right WordPress plugin, SEO goes from being this mysterious black box to something you can manage at the tactical level.

There’s a lot of metrics and tools to help you. SEOPress* and Yoast both work inside your WordPress editor to make the process of writing SEO-friendly content easier. Everything from making sure your keyword density is on point to crafting meta descriptions that look good in Google.

I could go on for pages, but what’s important for you is finding a plugin that reports performance metrics in a way you can turn into results. Businesses don’t optimize their sites in the same way, they have different audiences and markets to reach.

Which plugin gives you the toolkit to understand performance and make effective decisions?

You Don’t Have to Hire a Specialist to Use It

SEO is its own speciality. There’s a lot to know, and it’s always changing, so “knowing SEO” is an ongoing battle. If this is your first time trying to optimize a site for search engines, I’d pay very close attention to how easy the plugin is to use.

Good options for beginners include AIOSEO and SEOPress. Both of these have install wizards which guide you through a quick setup. Even total rookies will be able to get their site’s fundamentals in order.

Say you’ve never built an XML sitemap. It’s really important, especially for bigger sites with a lot of pages. AISEO creates these for you, and makes sure they are up to date. It’s all clicks on your end—no code required—and now Google’s going to get your readers to the right page automatically. Readers getting what they want quickly is a very good thing.

I really favored options that run SEO audits of your site and give you simple checklists. Sometimes you’ll be able to troubleshoot issues right there, but what happens when you need more help?

I highly recommend using the knowledge base of the different plugins you are considering. Can you find the information you need and make the changes necessary? 

This is really important if you are going with a free option, as there’s understandably limited support. With paid options, you can get the one-on-one help, but being able to learn how to solve things on your own is ideal.

Trends in SEO change like the weather. Google and Bing constantly update the algorithms that drive search. You can have everything optimized and running great only to see rankings drop a few weeks later. 

If you, your teams, and clients are comfortable with the plugin, it’s going to be easier to recognize and respond to issues faster.

Can You Get By With a Free SEO Plugin?

Most of the WordPress SEO plugins I’ve reviewed have a free and a paid version. And there are a ton more both kinds out there.

If you are just getting started with SEO on your site, I would highly recommend test-driving a free version of the plugin that makes the most sense given your goals.

The free plugins I reviewed don’t all cover the same ground. The free version of Yoast lets you address breadcrumbs, whereas AIOSEO and SEOPress do not. SEOPress, lets you optimize your posts for social media, which is an add-on for Yoast.

In my reviews, I’ve broken out which features come with the free version and which you have to pay for. You may find that a free plugin is all you need for now, and you can cross the upgrade bridge if it makes sense later.

Do be aware that you’re going to get very limited customer service with a free plugin. You can ask questions in forums, but you may be waiting a few days or more on an answer.

So if you are really new to WordPress and SEO, it may make sense to spend the extra money to get priority support and premium knowledge resources included with paid SEO plugins.

For more experienced users, I think it’s best to jump right in with one of the paid versions. This way there won’t be limits on what you can do. 

If you’re ready to start executing on SEO, you’ll likely find the freemium versions constraining, and you won’t get a full sense of what the total plugin can do. 

Most* of the premium SEO plugins offer a refund if you aren’t happy within the first few weeks, so it’s pretty risk-free. Yes, it’s going to take a lot longer to start seeing results, but at least you’ll know if you like the interface and it’s tackling all the issues you have.

Looking at free vs. paid SEO plugins, you need to strike a balance. New users don’t want to pay for an overwhelming amount of features they’re not going to use. Experienced users can’t afford to start using a tool that only lets them implement a piecemeal strategy.

If you can afford a paid SEO plugin, I would definitely recommend it. Given how big an impact it can have on boosting traffic to your site, the cost will be a drop in the bucket.

Conclusion

My top recommendations for the best SEO plugin for WordPress are AIOSEO and Yoast SEO. To recap the full list:

1. All-In-One SEO (AIOSEO) – The best way for beginners to See their pages rank higher 
2. WP Rocket – Best for ranking higher with site speed
3. Ubersuggest – Best web app for domain and keyword research
4. SEO Press – The cheapest WordPress SEO plugin that covers all your bases 
5. Semrush Writing Assistant – The best way to draft SEO-friendly content 
6. Schema Pro – Best for getting more clicks with the rankings you already have 
7. Yoast SEO – Best free SEO plugin for WordPress 
8. Ahrefs – Best SEO plugin for advanced users

AIOSEO is the perfect toolkit for an expert looking for extra help, while Yoast has a unique page analysis functionality and is great for any size business.

WP Rocket makes your site so much faster, helping you pass the crucial first test for ranking well on Google.

Our very own Ubersuggest tool eliminates the need for a true plugin. Just enter keywords or domain names into the web app and see all the data you could need to spot opportunities.

Semrush offers content strategy features and is affordable. SEOPress is an excellent choice for novices and is very straightforward with some customization options.

Ahrefs offers great customer service, and Schema Pro has diverse functionality. 

No matter what you decide, any tool in this guide will be on the right path to optimize your website and increase traffic.

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By: Neil Patel
Title: Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/best-seo-plugins-for-wordpress/
Published Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2021 15:00:00 +0000

Who says you have to spend money to get more traffic?

There are tons of free SEO tools that can help you drive more traffic. Sure, you may know of some, like Ubersuggest, but there are many more options than just my own tool.

Before I dive into the tools, I’ve broken them down into the following categories:

• Keyword Research
• Content Marketing
• Rank Tracking
• Link Building
• Technical SEO

So, are you ready to dive in? Let’s get started!

Keyword Research

All of the tools in this category will help you find more keywords. Many of them have different ways of coming up with keyword suggestions, so you may want to check them all out.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest has many different keyword research options and a free Chrome extension you can use from the SERPs. First of all, it shows you how many searches a keyword has had over the last 12 months, so you can see any seasonality.

In addition to that, it pulls keywords from a few different sources such as Google Suggest and its own database, it shows you all of the keywords your competition ranks for, and it provides keyword suggestions based on questions, comparisons, and prepositions.

My favorite feature of Ubersuggest’s keyword research capabilities is that not only can you see how competitive a term is, but it also tells you how many links the average ranking website contains. Here's how you do that:

Step #1: Enter Your Keyword and Click “Search”

Step #2: Click “Keyword Ideas” in the Left Sidebar

Step #3: Click on a keyword from the provided list

Step #4: Review the data

For the keyword phrase “content marketing strategy,” the average web page that ranks in the top 10 of Google has 479 backlinks. This provides a clear idea of how many links you need to build to rank well.

What’s also unique about Ubersuggest is that it provides local keyword suggestions. This is great if you are trying to do local SEO.

Answer The Public

Answer The Public leverages Google Suggest to find all of the questions people may have related to any industry or keyword.

Just type in a keyword, and it will give you a laundry list of questions people are searching for related to that keyword.

Similar to Ubersuggest, it also shows you comparison and preposition-related keywords.

I like the tool because compared to any competing tool, it represents the data in nice visuals.

KeywordTool.io

SEO doesn’t just exist on Google. You can also rank higher on Amazon, YouTube, Bing, and tons of other sites.

KeywordTool.io uses the same concept as Google Suggest, but for a handful of sites like Amazon, Play Store, and YouTube.

If you are performing SEO on sites other than Google, you should check out KeywordTool.io.

FAQfox

FAQfox is a neat little tool that finds you questions people want to be answered based on any specific site you want information from.

For example, you can type in the word “cat” and quora.com as the URL, and it will show you category-based questions people are asking on Quora.

You can do this for Reddit or any other site you want keyword ideas from.

Great content should answer users' questions. This free SEO tool can help you find the questions users are asking so you can address them.

Google Keyword Planner

Of course, the search giant, Google, has its own keyword research tool.

Google Keyword Planner gives you suggestions as well as CPC data and click estimates.

You’ll also notice that many other keyword tools have CPC data, but chances are they are pulling it from Google Keyword Planner.

When using Keyword Planner, look for terms with a high CPC as they tend to convert well when you rank for them organically.

Google Trends

Out of all the tools on the list, I probably use Google Trends three to four times a week. That’s how much I love it.

What I love about Trends is that it shows you what is hot right now. In addition to that, it tells you if an industry is getting less search volume or more over time.

You can also filter your data based on a specific country or look at the data from a global perspective.

Soovle

Soovle takes the concept of Google Suggest (autocomplete) but for many popular sites around the web.

Soovle pulls all popular keywords on Google, YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia, Bing, Yahoo, and Answers.com.

AdWords and SEO Permutation Generator

The AdWords and SEO Permutation Generator is a super simple tool that helps you get creative with your keyword research.

You enter in a handful of terms you want to target, combining them to make different variations for you.

Not all keywords will be popular in search volume, but it will give you a sense of how you can go after long-tail variations within your site.

Keyworddit

Reddit has many categories (subreddits), and Keyworddit helps you find all of the keywords within that subreddit.

What’s neat is it even breaks down the volume for each of those keywords. That way, you can quickly see if any are worth going after.

Generally speaking, you’ll want to use tools like this as it will give you a new perspective on keyword research.

Pulling results from Google is something that all SEOs already do. Because of that, you need to use other sources if you want to get a leg up on your competition.

Bulk Keyword Generator

The Bulk Keyword Generator by Higher Visibility does keyword research a bit differently than most of the keyword tools out there.

First, you pick a business category. Then you select the type of business you have and enter in any locations you are targeting.

You’ll then be given a list of keywords that you can potentially target.

I like this tool because it makes things super simple, especially if you are new to SEO.

WordTracker Scout

WordTracker is a browser extension that gives you a list of keyword ideas from any web page.

Just browse any site or check out your competition, click a button, and boom, you are given ideas on keywords that other people are using.

It breaks the keywords down by relevance and volume.

SearchVolume.io

When you are doing keyword research, how do you know a keyword is getting enough searches?

SearchVolume.io lets you bulk upload up to 800 keywords, and it tells you how popular each keyword is.

The tool also works for a handful of other regions, such as Brazil, France, and Italy.

Google Location Changer

SERanking has a neat tool that works well if you are doing international SEO.

Their Google Location Changer allows you to search Google in any country or city. Just type in a keyword, and you’ll see who ranks.

Using this tool in combination with WordTracker Scout can give you unique keyword suggestions.

Content Marketing

Content is the one thing we all have to create if we want more search traffic.

Here are free content marketing tools that can help you get the most out of your search traffic.

Google Analytics

If you’re not yet using Google Analytics, I recommend you start as soon as possible. There is no other data source that provides high-quality and detailed information like Google Analytics.

In a Google-dominated era, it’s what we have to work with. Most of the other data tools simply piggyback on Google’s data using the API.

You can’t ignore Google Analytics for content marketing or SEO. Virtually all the actionable and important data about site visitors, traffic, etc., comes from this critical source.

ClickFlow Content Decay

Have you noticed that your rankings decrease over time?

It’s not just because of Google algorithm updates. In most cases, your old content won’t perform as well because it’s old.

The ClickFlow Content Decay Tool is different—it shows you old pages on your site that are no longer performing well. These outdated posts are great candidates for a content refresh.

First, you'll want to connect the Content Decay Tool to your Google Search Console.

Once ClickFlow imports your data, you'll see a report that shows you the pages on your site that have lost the most search traffic over the past 12 months.

From there, you can update these posts to win back lost traffic. Simply expand upon your content, add examples to make it more thorough, and cut any outdated references.

If you choose to upgrade to a paid ClickFlow account, you can even measure your content refreshes.

ClickFlow will show you the impact that updates have on your traffic and rankings on a page-by-page basis.

What’s cool about this tool is it will save you a lot of time. For example, my team updates 90 pieces of content a month. The last thing you want is to spend a lot of time and resources on content that never had much traffic.

Google Search Console

Most people use Google Search Console to see which keywords are driving them traffic.

My favorite way of using Search Console is to see which one of my blog posts is getting a lot of search impressions but has less than a four percent click-through rate.

I then modify each of those pages to include the right keywords in my meta tags. Then I look to see which keywords I am ranking for but not really targeting yet, and then create new content around those terms or modify existing content to target them.

Content Ideas

Ubersuggest has a feature similar to Buzzsumo, but it is 100% free. It’s called Content Ideas.

All you have to do is enter in a keyword or phrase, and it will show you all of the popular blog posts that contain that term.

The blog posts are then sorted by social shares, backlinks, and search traffic.

This helps you create content around topics people want to read, which means more traffic.

Hreflang Tag Generator

One of my biggest traffic gains has come from translating my content.

A lot of people ask me if they would be penalized for duplicating and translation their content.

The answer is no.

All you need to do is use the Hreflang Tag Generator.

This tool creates tags for your HTML code, so Google knows you are targeting specific languages and countries with certain content pages.

SEOPresser Title Generator

For every 10 people that see your headline, only 2 on average will continue to read your content.

In other words, content marketing is all about the headline.

If you are struggling to create headlines, check out this title generator.

Just insert a keyword or phrase, and it will generate dozens of suggestions for you.

Title Capitalization Tool

Not sure which words in your title should be capitalized?

This Title Capitalization tool will take care of that for you.

It may not sound important to you, but if your titles look off, people may not click through from SERP results to read your content, which can decrease your rankings over time.

Grammarly

Every SEO should be using Grammarly.

Which do you think Google prefers? Ranking a blog post that reads well or one that contains a lot of spelling and grammar errors?

Grammarly helps you avoid spelling mistakes. This is really important if you want to rank on Google.

Google SERP Preview Tool

Have you noticed that some listings on Google get cut off because the title is too long?

A big misconception is Google uses character counts for meta tags. In reality, they count pixels.

Google SERP Tool will tell you how many pixels your meta tags contain and if they will get cut off by Google.

It also shows you a preview of what your web pages will look like on Google.

Rank Tracking

Google Analytics is a great tool to show you your overall traffic, but it doesn’t tell you where you rank.

If you want to track your rankings, you’ll need to use other (free) SEO tools.

Google Search Console

I know I mentioned this tool above, but Google Search Console is the most unique rank tracking tool out there.

Because this tool is from Google, they can tell you your average ranking for any one of your pages per country.

And because the data comes from them, they average it out to give you accurate information.

You can also go back 16 months and see how your rankings have changed over time.

Ubersuggest

I know I also mentioned Ubersuggest above, but it now has a free rank tracking feature. You can get to it by doing the following:

Step #1: Enter Your URL and Click “Search”

Step #2: Click “Dashboard” on the Left Sidebar

Step #3: Click on “New Project” and go through the flow to add your website and keywords you want to track.

Step #4: Click on “Tracked Keywords”

Step #5: Monitor Your Rankings

It provides the same features as those paid rank trackers. You can track your rankings daily for any keyword or groups of keywords for any country, city, or county.

It also saves your data for you to go back as far as you want to see if your rankings have been increasing or decreasing.

Link Building

You used to have to pay for tools if you wanted link data, but that’s not the case anymore. Here are the free link tools you can use.

MozBar

This is probably my favorite link tool.

Even though Google doesn’t use domain authority, in general, the higher the authority of a site that is linking to you, the better off you are.

MozBar shows you the domain authority and page authority of every page on the web.

If you are going to build links, focus on the sites with the highest authority.

SEOgadget for Excel

If you are like me, you probably love using Excel when you are building links.

SEOgadget for Excel makes it really easy to pull in data from Majestic and Moz.

If you haven’t tried this yet, you should consider it. It will make it easier for you to find new insights and run your own calculations.

Backlinks

Backlinks is a free tool that shows you all of your backlinks. There are no limits in row count or anything like that… you can just see everyone who links to you.

You can see if any of your links are dofollow or nofollow as well as the anchor text.

You can filter the results to find backlink opportunities when researching competitors, and you have the option to look up link data on a domain, subdomain, or a specific URL.

It will also show when a link was first found and last crawled and the authority of each link.

ClickMinded Domain Authority Checker

Tired of looking up the domain and page authority manually on each of your pages or sites?

This Domain Authority Checker helps by allowing you to check multiple pages at once.

Just add a list of URLs, and within seconds, you’ll have a list of your page authority per URL. You can also do the same for domains and upload dozens of domains at once.

SEOWorkers Analysis Tool

The Analysis Tool allows you to plug in a website URL — any website, even if it’s not yours — and generate a report.

SEOWorkers doesn’t provide anything new, but it does help to save a lot of time in analysis. Also, it provides background information on the data.

The report is quick and detailed.

Some of the data, like the HTTP Headers Check is under-the-hood stuff that you wouldn’t normally think to check for.

Other analyzed features provide helpful icons to show you if you’re doing well or if you need to pay attention to something:

Here is SEOWorker’s unique feature. They teach you about SEO in addition to showing you the SEO data that matters. Within each analyzed category, the report provides a detailed discussion.

The keyword analysis is comprehensive. It displays head terms (single keywords) and two-, three-, and four-word keyphrases (longtail keywords).

SEOWorkers provides a lot of information, some of which is different from other SEO and reporting tools. However, it can be information overload.

For the experienced SEO, the discussion in each section is superfluous. For new SEOs who are still learning the tricks of the trade, it could be useful.

Technical SEO

SEO has changed. You no longer can do just a few things and expect your site to rank well. You have to do everything if you expect to beat your competition.

And when I mean everything, that includes technical SEO.

SEO Analyzer

If you haven’t already, try running your URL through my SEO Analyzer.

It will tell you what’s wrong with each of your web pages.

From duplicate meta tags and redirect errors to sitemaps and much more… it pretty much looks at every major factor when it comes to SEO.

It will even tell you your overall site speed and what you need to fix to get the maximum results.

And if you register for a free account, it automatically checks for errors each week on your behalf.

Google Analytics Referrer Spam Killer

When you are doing SEO, there is a good chance that your Google Analytics gets messed up by referral spam.

Google Analytics Referrer Spam Killer solves that problem by connecting with your Google Analytics account and blocking the most common referral spam.

Once you connect it, you’ll find that your data is much more accurate, so you can make better SEO decisions.

Pagespeed Insights

Speed is everything. The faster your site loads, the better you will rank, especially regarding Google’s mobile index.

Pagespeed Insights tells you what you need to fix for your site to load fast on any device.

It doesn’t matter if you are optimizing for tablet devices, desktop, or mobile… it will tell you what to fix.

Pingdom

Fixing your code is one thing, but you’ll also want to make sure your site loads fast overall.

Your overall load time is affected by things like your server and CDN.

Pingdom tells you your actual load time.

With Pingdom, you can pick which location to test your load speed from, and it tells you what code on your site is causing the biggest slowdown.

Website Penalty Checker

With over 3,200 algorithm updates each year to Google, how do you know if you have been affected by an update?

Is it related to a core update, your content, or link building?

Website Penalty Checker tells you that.

In a nice graph, you'll see your traffic over time and if a Google update has caused your traffic to go up or down.

Structured Data Markup Helper

A simple way to increase your search traffic is to use schema markup.

However, schema markup is a bit complicated to implement. Which is why Google created a Structured Data Markup Helper to guide you.

All you have to do is select what kind of markup you want to use, type in your URL, and go through the walkthrough wizard.

And at the end, you’ll be given code that you just paste within HTML.

Woorank

At first glance, WooRank's Website Review appears to be just another freemium website analyzer. Upon closer, inspection, however, it gives handy insights into some not-so-obvious stuff.

You can analyze any website and generate a report in seconds.

WooRank first displays a “Top priorities section. Unfortunately, here’s one of the downsides of the tool. Somehow, it thinks I have a 404 error, lack a favicon, and don’t have a robots.txt file. All of these are inaccurate.

For example, when I click on “Blog” in the SEO report section, I receive this message.

I’m not worried since content marketing is kind of my middle name, and my website definitely has an active blog.

On to more positive things.

The geodata is insightful, although Analytics provides similar information.

Social shareability is another helpful section. Few free analysis tools can aggregate this much social network data in a single place.

The most outstanding feature of WooRank that I want to point out is the mobile section. Few free SEO analysis tools provide this level of data and perspective.

That being said, Google does offer a free Mobile-Friendly Test.

For its ease, interface, and amount of data, WooRank gets high marks. Unfortunately, not all the data seems to be accurate.

One of its major tools, the mobile optimization overview, can also be viewed using free tools from Google, so it's not really revolutionary anymore.

SEOptimer

Just like Woorank, SEOptimer is a simple tool that gives you a technical overview of your on-page SEO as well as your content. If you aren't sure where your SEO is going wrong, this tool will break it down for you.

It breaks down things like page speed and how your website loads on both desktop and mobile devices.

You can even see social sharing data.

301 Redirect Code Generator

When you are doing SEO long enough, eventually you find yourself changing your older URLs.

However, if you don’t add a 301 redirect, you’ll lose your rankings.

301 Redirect Code Generator creates the code you’ll need to tell search engines your URLs have changed.

Neil Patel SEO Analyzer

We've already covered Ubersuggest, but there's another tool in there that you need to be aware of — our SEO analyzer. (It used to be a separate tool, which is why I gave it its own number.) It really is a valuable tool — and it's totally free.

Just plug in your URL, and the tool will spend about 10 minutes crawling your site.

The visual layout is clean and intuitive, providing plenty of crucial information including estimated traffic score, SEO score, and backlinks.

It will also tell you if you have any broken or blocked pages.

It will also share SEO issues, see how your site performs on mobile, and give you tips on how to improve your site.

Personal bias aside, I think my website analyzer provides a very helpful perspective both on your own site, and especially on a side-by-side comparison of your competitors.

Google Search Console

I have to include this tool again. Why? Because if there is something wrong with your site, such as it getting hacked, it will notify you.

It even tells you the pages that were indexed and which ones aren't.

One thing that you have to do within your Search Console is to submit an XML sitemap.

XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps generates a sitemap for you that you can submit to Google Search Console.

You'll need to do this so you can get more of your content indexed.

Submitting a sitemap doesn't guarantee that Google will index your content, but it does help.

Free SEO Tool Frequently Asked Questions

What's the best free SEO tool?

It depends on what you need! Ubersuggest is ideal for backlinks, keyword research, and competitive research. XML-sitemap.com makes it simple to create XML site maps, and Google Analytics provides tons of information about how users interact with your site.

What tools do I need for SEO?

You'll want a keyword research tool, such as Ubersuggest, and an overall tool like Google Analytics to track your efforts.

Do I have to pay for SEO tools?

Not at all! There are tons of free SEO tools including Answer the Public, Ubersuggest, and Google Analytics.

What's the best free SEO tool?

Google's suite of tools is powerful and free. Google Analytics and Google Search console are must-haves.

Free SEO Tool Conclusion

Tools don’t have to cost money. I got into SEO because it was the free traffic source I could leverage to compete with the big companies.

If you want to grow your search rankings, you can leverage one of the free SEO tools above.

If you’re serious about SEO, you’ll need to pony up the cash to get the right tools. You won’t be able to do thorough SEO work without a paid subscription to something.

Here are the things that are typically not available for free:

• Heat Maps: If you’re interested in usability, conversions, and SEO, a heat mapping tool like Crazy Egg is crucial.
• Rank Reports: Knowing where your site ranks in the SERPs for certain keywords is an important part of good SEO. Rank trackers allow you to see what page and position you’re on, and track your rank over time.
• Backlink Analysis: Crunching all the data behind backlinks — anchor text, DA level, site quality, webmaster contact info, velocity — is necessary when you’re doing any sort of backlink audit. The tools that provide such analysis are sophisticated, but usually not free.

Before you start paying, however, I strongly recommend starting with these free SEO tools!

What other free SEO tools do you use?

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: The Ultimate List of Free SEO Tools
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/free-seo-tools/
Published Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2021 16:00:00 +0000

If you want your blog posts to perform well, one simple way is to achieve this is by writing magnetic headlines.  By playing around with your title after publishing a post, you may significantly increase the post's conversion rate.

In this article, I’m going to share a step-by-step process to get you producing consistently great headlines.

Why Should You Care About Headlines?

Traffic to your post will vary depending on the power of your headline. If you fail to make it impactful and clickable, every other marketing step that you take will be a total waste of time.

Step #1:  Use Specific Numbers and Data in Your Headline

Integrating specific numbers and data into your headline is an effective way to make your article more enticing to readers. Several research studies have shown that headlines with numbers tend to generate more social shares and engagement.

According to Debra Jason, one of the reasons why using numbers works in your headlines is because numbers are like “brain candy.” They are addictive, and our minds can’t get enough of them.

Additionally, it’s very important to understand the science behind odd numbers in particular. Often, you find viral blog posts with seemingly random numbers in the headlines and you may have stopped to wonder why the authors didn’t use even numbers in their list post. For example, from Buzzfeed.com:

According to the Content Marketing Institute, the brain seems to believe odd numbers more than even numbers. Odd numbers help people digest and recall information more easily.

What’s more, when they tested their hypothesis and tweaked their headline to include the number 7, click-through rates increased by 20%.

We’ve also found that instead of using the word “seven,” you should always replace it with the numeral “7” in headlines. Meaning instead of writing “Seven Steps To Start A Home Business,” use “7 Steps To Start a Home-Based Business” to appeal to the number-craving side of our minds. 

We’ll also let you in on another secret. If you’re writing a step-by-step guide, don’t include more than nine steps, because the human brain typically finds it difficult to process more than nine items at a time. However, if you’re writing about tools or different ways to do a thing, there is no limit to the number you can use.

Step #2:  Utilize a Unique Rationale

I’ve used unique rationales to write great headlines (if I say so myself) that went viral. The word “rationale” simply means “an underlying reason why something should be done.” If you want people to read your content, do you have a good reason why they should?

With 59% of people sharing content without reading it first, we need to make sure our headlines appeal to people who will. To avoid wasting time on content, give people a strong reason why they should click, read and above all: share your content. Businesses that have a blog experience twice as much email traffic as businesses who don’t. 

Some of the rationales that you can include in your headlines are:

• Tips ✅
• Reasons ✅
• Lessons ✅
• Tricks ✅
• Ideas ✅
• Ways ✅
• Principles ✅
• Facts ✅
• Secrets ✅
• Strategies ✅

Here are some examples of our rationale in action:

• 5 Tips to Write Blog Introductions Like a Pro
• 15 Lessons I Learned the Hard Way as a 3-Year-Old Blogger
• 8 Principles for Designing a Perfect Landing Page
• 17 Facts About Content Marketing That You Didn’t Know
• 6 Insights to the Future of Search Engine Optimization
• 3 Secrets to Make Your List Post Sing
• 4 Headline Writing Tips to Make Your Titles Soar

Step #3: Call for Attention

The purpose of the headline is to get your viewer to read the first sentence. Every headline should call for attention. “Attention” simply means mental focus and serious concentration on a given task.

Keep in mind that your customers are human beings with thousands of ads, blogs, articles, and more vying for their attention every single day. Unfortunately, people’s attention spans have been decreasing year by year.  The average person’s attention span now falls between 12 and 8 seconds.

If you’re a small business owner, one of the ways to acquire and retain customers is by engaging them with great content. 

After all, great content always starts with a headline that captures your reader’s attention.

You’ve got to convince your customers and prospects to keep reading. The headline can build that momentum for you.

So, instead of putting all your time and energy into getting email subscribers and making sales, start focusing on using headlines to get people to read the first sentence.

That should be your headline’s true purpose. If you accomplish that goal, the introduction, the subtitles, the bullet points, and the storytelling will take care of the rest and convert the reader into a customer.

Before I show you some simple ways to write headlines that will call for attention, here are four rules to follow. They’re considered the “4 Us” of writing attention-driven headlines:

The four Us are:

• make the headline unique
• be ultra-specific
• convey a sense of urgency
• provide something useful

1) Make the Headline Unique

A blogger friend of mine once told me that anytime he finds a compelling headline while reading, he will tweak it and make it unique for his audience.

“Unique” means being “one of a kind.” In other words, your headline has to be different from others.

But, how do you test for uniqueness?

Simple: plug it into Google and enclose the headline in double quotation marks. Here’s an example:

Note: You’ve got to use the double quotation marks in order to get the exact result you want. In the above Google search results, the headline has “no results found.”

Of course, thousands of people may be targeting the same keyword (conversion rate optimization), but your goal is to write a headline that no one else has.

2) Be Ultra-Specific With Your Headlines

The second rule for writing a headline that calls for attention is: be ultra-specific.

Your content’s headline drives every piece that you put out there, no matter what format or platform you use to publish it.

Your prospects have questions and they want answers. If you can provide them with an ultra-specific headline and the answer to their questions, you can convert them into loyal readers and customers.

The more precise you can be, the more authority you’ll command in your industry and the easier you’ll find it to build a strong connection with customers.

There are times when you might want to mask the content’s real purpose from your target audience and use click triggers, such as power words and strong adjectives in your headline.

There’s nothing wrong with this, exactly. However, headlines that are ultra-specific give the reader a sense of what they should expect, when they click to read the content.

Whether you’re an established content marketer or a beginner, you need to set specific and realistic objectives. Don’t confuse your readers with your headline. Avoid vagueness. Get straight to the point.

If you’re sharing five steps to achieve something, go ahead and make it known in the headline. This is another reason why you need to choose your niche carefully.

Unless your blog is about “everything technology,” you don’t have to write headlines on different topics the way Mashable and TechCrunch do.

Know your audience and write headlines that indicate your posts will about topics that meet their needs.

So, how do you write such ultra-specific headlines?

Let’s assume that your target keyword is “small business plan.” Here are specific headline variations that would work:

• 3 Simple Steps to Write a Small Business Plan for Beginners
• Top 10 Small Business Plan Templates That Succeeded
• Learn How to Write a Small Business Plan From Scratch
• Step-by-Step Process for Writing a Small Business Plan in 30 Minutes

Do you see how specific the above headlines are? The bolded portions contain phrases that make the entire headline ultra-specific (directed at something). Admittedly, they may not be unique – it’s very difficult to achieve both uniqueness and specificity in a single headline.

Steve Kamb, of NerdFitness.com, writes specific headlines about meals that help you stay fit and healthy.

I’ve studied Peep Laja’s headline styles for a long time, as well. He uses only specific titles that help his conversion rate optimization community. Here’s an example:

3)  Convey a Sense Of Urgency: Don’t miss out!

Derek Christian, founder of Cleaning Business Today, once said that “effective marketing boils down to creating a fear of losing out on an amazing deal.”

Unless you infuse your headline with urgency, your readers are likely to put off reading your content or possibly bookmark it and never come back to it again. The purpose is to get readers to click your headline now.

Your own case may not be health-related, but we’re all in the same boat. Everybody is looking for the propelling force that will nudge them to do something right now and not put it off until tomorrow or next year. That’s what urgency does, when you use it in your headline writing.

A sense of urgency is not only applicable to content marketing. It cuts across your personal life and productivity as well. Hyatt simplifies it:

Copywriters usually improve conversion rates when they strategically use a sense of urgency in their copy. Potential customers tend to respond quickly, because their psychology is wired to persuade them to buy based on emotions, but to justify that decision based on logic.

Scarcity and urgency are two powerful copy elements that usually go together to produce outstanding results.

Ecommerce sites use urgency and scarcity a lot. This is how Amazon uses both elements, to sell more physical products, especially in the electronics and gadgets category:

Urgency-based headlines will always grab attention, because it makes the reader anticipate what comes next. Consider Upworthy’s well-known headlines:

Ideally, you want to tailor your message to where your customers are in the decision process.

They’re not going to ignore your headline, because they don’t want to miss out on what’s on the other side of the headline. The only way that they can find their answers is to click and read.

4)  Provide Something Useful

The last rule that you should definitely follow, if you want your headlines to grab attention and get the job done, is to make them useful. The above three rules – uniqueness, ultra-specific and urgency – all correlate with usefulness.

If your headline and content aren’t useful, no matter how much urgency you employ, it will fail. In fact, there is no way to write a specific and unique piece of content, without it being useful at the same time.

Useful can mean several things – practical, helpful, valuable, informative, worthwhile, beneficial, advantageous and so on. The bottom line is to help the readers experience hope, knowing that their problem can still be solved.

Just remember: Don’t forget to include plenty of data in your blog posts, capture screenshots and write in-depth posts, because studies show that content length affects search rankings and conversions. Adding data creates credibility, traffic and above all: usefulness.

Do you understand 4 Us of writing attention-grabbing headlines? Are you ready to put them into action?

It’s time to look at the various ways you can write powerful headlines that generate qualified clicks and leads for your business.

1)    State the Obvious in Your Headline:

Write headlines that are easy to understand. The moment a potential reader stumbles on your web page from anywhere, they shouldn’t need any help to figure out what you’re talking about.

I have to point out here that most headlines with a sense of urgency usually lack clarity of purpose. The purpose of the headline is to get people to click, so that you can earn a better ROI. The purpose is not to appear clever or educated.

Another way to confuse readers is to use words and phrases that aren’t common. Readers don’t want to know which university you attended or your academic status (unless you run an educational blog, of course).

Instead, demonstrate your cleverness through your ability to explain complicated issues and make them simpler for the ordinary person.

Use simple words to express yourself and convey your message. If your readers are hungry for useful information, don’t ask if they’re famished. Both words mean the same thing. But one is more commonly used than the other (and it’s great for SEO!)

Examples of confusing headlines that you should avoid are:

Don’t use: 12 Meticulous Savings Tips For The Financial Amateur

Instead use: 12 Effective Saving Tips For Those Who Want Extra Cash

Never use: How to Annihilate Inflammation of Skin Due to Unfavorable Weather

But use: How to Get Rid of Acne and Other Annoying Skin Conditions

Never ever use: Top 10 Ubiquitous Places to Find Ravishing Blog Post Theses

Feel free to use: Top 10 Places to Find Useful Blog Post Ideas

Sure, you’ve got to raise the bar in your content.  But, always use common words and adjectives that people can relate to. That’s how you can encourage fellow internet marketers, content marketers and bloggers to share your content, especially on LinkedIn.

Now take a look at the screenshot below. You’ll notice that this article appears in the Harvard Business Review, but the headline is a bit confusing. Let’s see if we can make it better:

Quick problem: The above headline could be written much more clearly. Let’s do it:

• How To Move Up And Not Get Stuck In Your Boss’s Shadow
• How You Can Move Up Easily in Your Workplace

A typical landing page headline, with both clarity and simplicity, is this one, from Rainmaker.fm:

Digital Photography School, a popular content-rich site that was founded by Darren Rowse, has some clear and clickable headlines. Even though the photography niche/industry has some technical terms, the authors ensure they don’t confuse readers.

2)   Use Interesting Adjectives in Your Headlines

Adjectives are important in both spoken and written English language.

Adjectives are great for emotive writing and pulling your audience along with you on a story, keeping them engaged and interested. 

As a content writer, you can use adjectives to give your headline a boost and make it super-attractive to your audience’s needs.

Jeff Goins provided some examples of interesting adjectives that you can use to create your headline:

• Fun
• Painstaking
• Free
• Strange
• Incredible
• Effortless
• Absolute
• Essential
• And so much more…

Here are some headline examples that use the adjectives:

Fun headline:

“Incredible” headline, at DPS.com:

And, here is the “free” headline:

3) Flag the Reader in Your Headlines

Dan Kennedy once introduced the “flagging technique” and it’s a powerful way to write headlines for both copy and blog posts. You already know one of the basic techniques, which involves addressing the readers as “you.”

Personally, I use “you” in a lot of my headlines. I discovered that for every headline that contains ‘you,’ the engagement is very high. The word “you” connects and captivates your readers, on a personal level.

Since the majority of your competitors are also using content to reach and attract customers, you’ve got to reach your prospects on their level, whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer.

Beyond that, address your readers and write headlines specifically for them. I’ve used this approach several times and it works. Here are examples:

• For Clickbank Affiliates Only: Double Your Affiliate Commission in 15 Minutes a Day
• WordPress Fashion Bloggers: 4 Ways to Secure Your Blog Against Hackers
• Struggling Bloggers: Create an Endless Stream of Content Ideas With This 1 Website
• Calling All Struggling Bloggers: Use These 3 Strategies to Get More Blog Visitors

4)   Use Emotional Words in Your Headlines

All words are not created equal. Some words have the power to prompt change, while others simply reaffirm the status quo. Some words can make people cry, while others can evoke joy.

Emotionally impactful words are popularly referred to as “power words.” Here are some emotional power words that you can use to give your readers a pep talk and spur them into action:

Here are a few examples of unique headlines that use some of the power words:

• How to Conquer Writer’s Block in 6 Simple Steps
• Case Study: How Courage Helped Me to Build a 6 Figure Online Business
• The Best Way to Write From Your Heart and Connect With Customers
• Audacity of Content Marketing: 3 Secrets to Outsmart Your Competitors

Note: You can use one or more power words in your headline. But, make sure that they’re useful for the user and read naturally, so you don’t get a Google penalty for “keyword-bombing”.

Be warned, there are people who use emotional words in the wrong way – to deceive and manipulate consumers, or even create “clickbait”– that’s not what we’re trying to do here.

Your purpose is to use power words in the right manner – to increase the conversion rate for your emails, blog posts, copy and adverts. Words have power, so use them wisely.

Appealing to your customer’s emotions should increase your sales and social shares in a significant manner.

Once you understand that, you’ll quit pushing sales messages to them all of the time. Instead, focus on answering their questions. Legit marketing is about building relationships, not chasing customers away.

Your prospect’s brain is hard-wired to repel any message that’s not clear and realistic. However, as you begin to appeal to people emotionally, they’ll be more likely to trust you.

Step #4: Use Headline Formulas

What makes a headline good is it’s structure – aka “the formula.” Every authority blogger and content marketer has one or more formulas for writing headlines.

I have mine and, sometimes, I tweak and test different headlines, before deciding which one works best. When using formulas, make sure to include power words that will get people to buy your product or join your waiting list.

Some bloggers prefer to write their content first, before crafting the headline. I don’t do that. However, there is no hard and fast rule. What works for me may not be the right approach for you.

We’ve addressed some ways to write a powerful headline. But, I also love the way that Bronn outlines a simple approach to make your headlines stand out, using the acronym “SHINE“:

• S – Specificity
• H – Helpfulness
• I – Immediacy
• N – Newsworthiness
• E – Entertainment value

To make it easier for you, consider adopting the headline formula used by many fitness experts. They first identify the problem, then offer a solution and then make a promise.

John Caples’ headline formulas also include these three components. Here’s another example:

Lars Lofgren advises that you:

That’s not all. There are plenty of easy solutions to powerful headlines, such as:

1) The “Little Known Ways” Formula

How many times have you used this formula to write a catchy headline? Each of the words in the formula is emotionally driven. These types of headlines usually pop into people’s minds, even well after they’ve seen them.

People like simplicity and appreciate when little things build up to something significant. Big Data is the by-product of little data, collected over time, eventually becoming a giant database of data.

Here are a few “little known ways” headlines digital marketers are likely to use:

• 3 Little-Known Steps to Monetize a Brand New Blog Successfully
• How These 5 Little Known Secrets Increased My Search Traffic by 54%
• 17 Little-Known Ways to Increase Conversion Rate

2)  The “Get Rid of [Problem] Once and For All” Formula

Who wouldn’t want to permanently get rid of an annoying problem that they’re faced with on a daily basis? When you write your headlines with this strategy in mind, you’ll captivate your audience from start to finish, because they want to know the secret, too.

This headline formula is mostly applicable in the health industry, where people are looking to treat, cure, remedy or alleviate a physical problem – e.g., acne, skin scars, high blood pressure, eczema, bad breath, etc.

This is quite similar to the formula introduced by Sherice Jacob, known as “How to Survive Your First [put the topic here].” Headlines that promise to help the reader get rid of a particular problem will persuade the reader to take three steps:

• Click the headline
• Read the first paragraph to determine if you truly have the answer
• Read through to the end or scroll down and take action

Even though the “Get rid of” headline formula is mostly used in healthcare niches, you can reverse-engineer it and still use it in online marketing topics, such as blogging, CRO, affiliate marketing, self-publishing, SEO, social media, web traffic and so on.

Here are examples:

• How to Get Rid of Content Marketing Failure and Drive Search Traffic
• Stop Wasting Time: Get Rid of Flashy Social Media Tools and Get More Done
• 7 Smart Ways to Get Rid of Affiliate Marketing Struggle and Make More Money

The “get rid of” headline formula usually goes viral, especially when promoted strategically by the author.

3) The “Who Else Wants” Formula

This headline style works because it asks a question and the right question usually generates the right answer. 

The formula brings your target audience into the discussion and makes them feel comfortable; it's like you are there having a conversation with them. Copywriters often ask several questions in their copy, just to get the targeted customer to pause and consider the product; the same principles apply to headlines, too.

Just like finding and sharing timely content and including at least one image in your post, simply asking the right question can increase your social shares and engagement level.

Here are some examples of the “who else wants” headline formula:

Some of the headlines that you can tweak, to appeal to your target audience are:

• Who Else Wants to Learn About Conversion Rate Optimization [Step-by-Step]?
• Who Else Wants the 6 Steps to Master A/B Split Testing?
• Who Else Want to Raise Capital for a New Startup?

Step #5: Measure Your Headline's Success

People love to share articles that are lengthy (usually 2000+ words). But, as a smart marketer, you wouldn’t simply assume that longer posts would work for you. The best way to make your own decision is to write a similar, in-depth article and see how it goes.

What’s the benefit of using a headline formula or rule that doesn’t produce results for you?

It’s essential for you to measure your headline success. You want to make sure that your time isn’t wasted – or your money, if you hired a professional to write the content.

You can measure content and headline success through:

i). Client/customer inquiries: Within a period of 2 – 3 months, did your content generate any client inquiries? It doesn’t have to be much.  But, the very fact that you got a handful of clients is a sure signal that your headline style is working. All you’ve got to do is just optimize and improve it.

ii).   Social media stats: Are people commenting, liking, and sharing your content? Most social media platforms provide engagement statistics at the click of a button, and it’s important to keep your eye on what your audience enjoys the most. 

By making social sharing buttons visible you can increase engagement  by 7x, especially when the post is insightful.

iii) Other forms of digital statistics: Another thing that you may want to measure is the amount of inbound links that you generate through your powerful headlines and content.

Editorial links are the best kinds of links to get, because you don’t ask for them.  And, they mainly appear within content, thus passing significant SEO value to your web pages and improving your search rankings.

iv) Measure direct responses: A lot of content producers prefer to turn comments off, but really they can be a brilliant way of generating and following up on leads, engaging with your audience and seeing which articles are working and which aren’t.

If you have a piece of content generating insane amounts of comments, it means you've done something right.  

Figure out what’s delivering your success, and repeat it. Maximize your powerful headlines.

Powerful Headlines Frequently Asked Questions

Why are powerful headlines important?

The average person has an 8 second attention span, and you need to pull your audience in from the second they start reading – you can do this by following our 5 step headline guide. 

How can I get more people to see my article?

It often involves a combination of marketing techniques including SEO and “being in the right place at the right time”. One easy life-hack to improve conversion rates is using emotive language or numerals in your headlines.

What makes an article interesting for a user?

It’s often as simple as using the 4 Us detailed in this article. Uniqueness, ultra-specific copy, conveying a sense of urgency and above all: providing something useful to your readers. 

How to Write Headlines Conclusion

With new and emerging content marketing strategies emerging everyday, it’s becoming difficult to focus on what works. This is why smart digital marketers are disciplined. They understand the importance of great content and whether it generates search traffic and leads.

It’s a given that the headline is an integral element of your content, no matter what format the content may take. Then, you can focus on making the introduction, subtitles, bullet points, and call to action equally important.

Your overall focus should be to educate prospects and customers, by teaching them new things. It’s not enough that they click your headline. They need to read the information you’ve provided them in the body of your content, as well.

The best approach is to use storytelling and data-driven content to build your authority, while solving their problem. Above all, be consistent and keep learning new ways to turn a good headline into a catchy headline that begs to be shared.

Do you have any other headline writing tips? What’s been most helpful for you in producing great headlines? 

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: How to Write Headlines: a Step-by-Step Guide
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/the-step-by-step-guide-to-writing-powerful-headlines/
Published Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2021 13:00:00 +0000

We marketers would like to believe we dominate the web, but we secretly admit to ourselves that cats and memes are the true rulers. It can be frustrating to pour hours of work and money into content, only to watch the next Evil Kermit or Sponge Bob meme pull more traffic. Is there a way to learn from the memes without pandering?

As it happens, a cottage industry is popping up. Specialists like Matthew Inman and Jack O’Brien are approaching viral content and how to go viral as a product in and of itself. Meanwhile, researchers like Jonah Berger are studying the science of virality and uncovering what makes memes tick. Leveraged properly, this knowledge can propel you to “the front page” of the web.

But beware. Make a wrong move and you could become the web’s next sacrificial lamb.

Meet Jonah Berger, Viral Scientist

Image by The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania

Professor Jonah Berger researches marketing at the University of Pennsylvania. But he’s not studying the science of advertising or market research. He’s asking a more modern question: “What makes ideas viral and products spread contagiously?”

Even New York Times writers assumed that, of course, the answer would be “to write anything about sex,” or “to title articles ‘How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage,’ and ‘Why It’s Bush’s Fault.’”

But when Jonah Berger and his colleagues analyzed New York Times articles sent via email for three months, they uncovered some unexpected results. While these three traits of viral content shouldn’t be all that shocking:

1. surprising
2. interesting
3. intense

The next two discoveries might be a bit more eye-catching:

4. positive
5. actionable (practically useful)

Remember, this was an analysis of a news website, where the headlines are all doom and gloom and the stories are about other people, not us. While the intensity of emotions had a lot to do with whether the content was going to get shared, the most shareable content elicited strong positive emotions, like awe, and offered practical advice.

In fact, the power of awe was so overwhelming that one type of article outperformed all the others, to everybody’s amazement: science articles.

As Berger told the New York Times:

We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.

While stories that evoked intense feelings of anger or anxiety were more likely to be shared, stories that evoked feelings of sadness were not.

But the power of awe was one of the most measurable differences between viral content and non-viral content. Awe was distinct from surprise in the sense that “it involves the opening and broadening of the mind.” And it beat equivalent levels of anger and anxiety every time.

Jonah Berger isn’t the only one to suggest this. Will Natha is a former developer at BuzzFeed. Will Nathan didn’t perform any kind of study, but at WMILESN, he shared his sudden insight that viral content “represent[s] or uncover[s] something pleasurable that we could never have conceived with our own minds.”

But what is perhaps most interesting about all of this is that the most emailed articles actually tended to be longer than average. Berger was careful to caution that this could have been because the topics were more engaging in the first place, but it certainly flies in the face of the “everything above the fold” mentality prominent on the web.

How to Go Viral According to Matthew Inman, Creator of The Oatmeal

In 2009, Matthew Inman created a webcomic called The Oatmeal. By 2010, the comic was receiving four million unique visitors each month. In 2012, the site netted him $500,000. But the comic, quiz, and story site wasn’t how Inman got his start. Inman learned how to attract attention online a few years earlier, when he launched a dating site called Mingle2.

Inman’s dating site grew from zero to 2 million page views in 6 months. His secret? Viral marketing.

The site was instantly scooped up by a competitor, but he continued to market the site for them. In the first year, it was bringing in 40 million page views each month, with over a million registered users. How did he do it? With quizzes like this:

Inman’s quirky quizzes were designed to appeal to social news sites like Digg (now replaced by the larger descendent: Reddit). They spread like wildfire, and with badges that linked back to his dating site, they also skyrocketed it to the top of Google.

Inman’s linking tactics were eventually seen as underhanded by Google, and many of the sites he did work for were penalized. Inman doesn’t recommend using this spammy tactic, but the implications are clear. Viral content, executed properly, can build massive exposure.

The Oatmeal is evidence of this. The site uses none of Inman’s underhanded link-building tactics, relying instead on its ability to continue replicating through emails and social networks. What was the secret to his content’s success? Inman has called it “basically just comedy 101.” His slide show for Gnomedex explained:

– Find a common gripe

– Pick things everyone [your target influencers, anyway] can relate to

– Create easily digestible content

1. lots of visuals
2. not too text heavy
3. top 10 lists
4. read crappy magazines (How to get six pack abs by exercising only 5 seconds a day!)

– Create an infographic

– Talk about memes and current events

– Incite an emotion

But, in my opinion, the real gem of the presentation was this:

Which results in things like this:

This formula may sound like it’s reserved for the comedians of the internet, but consider the work of New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, the influential writer behind Blink and The Tipping Point. While Gladwell doesn’t abstain from humor, his articles are far more serious. But they often point out bizarre connections between subjects we might think of as unrelated. His article “Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football?” and his wildly popular TED video “Choice, Happiness, and Spaghetti Sauce” have a similar ring to them.

Inman’s tactics seem more akin to what we think of as viral. In contrast with Jonah Berger’s research results, he emphasizes short content, audience rapport, and visuals. But we can’t ignore the elements of surprise and positive emotion (humor). Inman’s work sometimes even goes so far as to elicit interest, discuss science, go on at length, and maybe even inspire awe.

So are we kidding ourselves and insulting the intelligence of our audience when we assume things need to be short and simple?

How to Go Viral According to Jack O’Brien’s, Founder of Cracked

Many people are aware of Cracked, which used to be one of the most popular humor sites on the web. What many people may not realize is that Cracked’s articles are, for the most part, and for lack of a better phrase to describe them, “guest posts.”

The site, which ranks in the top 1 percent of traffic on the web (according to Alexa), is built around a simple idea. Get enough people suggesting topic ideas, and some of them will be interesting. Weed out the chaff, put it into a list format, cite your sources, and make it hilarious.

Why the list format? According to Jack, “When a piece of content gets shared on a social media site, or forwarded in an email, the title is usually the only thing the reader has to go on when deciding whether or not to click. The lists say ‘here is what you’re going to get, and here’s how many of them you’ll be getting.’”

In line with Jonah Berger’s research, Cracked articles can actually be quite informative. Consider 6 Ridiculous Myths About the Middle Ages Everyone Believes. From this piece we learn that:

1. Scientific progress wasn’t dead.
2. They were perhaps too into bathing.
3. Knights were so out of control even the Church had trouble controlling them.
4. Prostitution was legal.
5. When it came to household duties, men and women were equals by default.
6. People who lived through birth could be expected to reach the age of 50 rather easily.

The post is about 2,500 words long, which is fairly typical for the site.

It has been viewed about 1.5 million times, and it’s been liked on Facebook about 17.8 thousand times.

Here again, we see the same properties. Humor. Surprise. Mind-expansion. Interest.

You might think a site like Cracked would have fairly loose guidelines, asking for little more than “make sure it’s funny.” But their Writer’s Workshop actually has very rigorous guidelines; guidelines that have made the site one of the most successful on the web. Some of the takeaways include:

• Keep the structure simple, like “What You Think You Know” “But Actually.”
• Read the article out loud.
• Read your sources and don’t say something that they didn’t say.
• Use trustworthy sources, not personal blogs, Yahoo Answers, or Wikipedia for anything but general knowledge.
• The editors will likely update the article to make it funnier and easier to read.
• Mine the sources for the most incredible information and ditch everything else.
• Spell check.
• Aim for 2000 to 3000 words.
• Start the intro with a joke or something clever. Don’t waste time introducing the subject.
• Keep biases out.
• Don’t be time sensitive.
• Don’t use other people’s jokes.

Notice that Cracked starts with things like interest and authoritative sources before emphasizing humor. Humor is merely a spice to dress an already interesting concept and make it even more shareable. Once again, we’re seeing the theme of awe. Start with a concept that will blow people’s minds, then find a way to make it even more interesting.

We’re seeing definite themes here. Viral content isn’t always short, it’s often actually very informative, and in many ways it’s not what we expect it to be. So, what about the memes? The amateur cat photos, the badly drawn recycled comics, the completely ridiculous videos? The things on the web like…

How to Go Viral According to Eric Nakagawa, Creator of I Can Has Cheezburger?

In 2007, a software developer named Eric Nakagawa posted a photo of a fat cat he found on the internet to his site. He attached a caption: “I can has cheezburger?” It was meant as a joke, and he went on to post similar cat photos with captions over the following weeks. As soon as he transformed the site into a blog, allowing people to leave comments, the site went viral.

He started in January. In March, he saw 375,000 hits. By May, the figure was 1.5 million. Investors acquired the site for $2 million in 2007. The site is now a component of the Cheezburger Network, which also includes the wildly popular FAIL Blog (which popularized FAIL as an exclamation) and Know Your Meme.

Cheezburger’s success was as much a surprise to Nakagawa as it would be to anybody. The cause of the success apparently remains a mystery to him, but he has argued that the reason for its sustained success was community building. Readers rate and comment on posts, as well as create them through a user interface that allows people to make their own memes.

What was the cause of Cheezburger’s success? A hint at the answer comes from the underground internet forum 4chan, a place where the “I can has cheezburger” baby/internet-speak clearly drew its inspiration.

According to a study by Christian Bauckhage of the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, this probably isn’t uncommon. After analyzing the history of 150 internet memes, collecting data from Google Insights, Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon, he concluded that internet memes spread through homogeneous online communities and social networks, not the internet at large.

It’s worth pointing out that what we tend to consider “social networks” don’t necessarily play a big part in the creation of memes. Memes become popular on sites like 4chan, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Imgur, and of course, YouTube.

All of these sites share a common theme: they are more or less anonymous for the majority of the users.

And this, perhaps, is a crucial part of what makes memes tick. They don’t start out on Facebook, where they would quickly spread through a tight-knit group of friends and then die. They start in online communities, where they are shared with large anonymous groups of people who share a common “internet culture.”

How to Go Viral According to Limor Shifman

But this isn’t all that makes a meme. According to a study of YouTube videos by Limor Shifman, memes often have:

• a focus on ordinary people
• flawed masculinity
• humor
• simplicity
• repetitiveness
• “whimsical” content

Shifman argues that these traits make memes seem “incomplete,” which, paradoxically, demands further dialogue and mimicking. Like this:

Original Video

Mimic

Memes are viral, but aren’t quite the same as “viral content.” A piece of viral content is shared. A meme is mimicked, emulated, and reproduced. Memes are a source of creative outlet for online communities, and their message and content can’t be controlled.

Resolving the Relevancy Paradox

It’s impossible to use a meme to target consumers because consumers control the message of a meme. And how relevant can viral content be if it needs to fit the restrictions of being hilarious, surprising, and awe-inspiring? Is it possible to resolve virality and relevancy, or are the two forever at odds?

We’ll get to that, but first we need to ask a controversial question.

Is Targeting Overrated?

The answer to this question depends on who you ask, how you define targeting, and the product you’re selling. Here, when I’m talking about targeted content, I’m talking about sales messages intended for people already interested in buying a product like yours. Here are some cases where targeting can be especially important:

• Consumers don’t think they need the product until, suddenly, they do, and they make a purchase very soon after this realization.
• Consumers need to buy the product only once, and retention is unimportant.

Without a doubt, targeting should play a part in any marketing effort. But there are reasons why less targeted efforts can sometimes be more fruitful:

• The audience is larger, so you can reach the people who don’t know they need the product yet.
• To the majority of people, highly targeted content is spam. While you should build a sales page around targeted content, building a brand around it is a mistake that will make most of your potential customers unreachable.
• Audience retention is virtually impossible with targeted content. Most people will not subscribe to a blog about a specific kind of product, even if the product is exceptional. Very few people are that obsessed.

So perhaps it’s okay to broaden things out a bit and appeal to a wider audience. If pure content sites like Gawker, Mashable, and The Wall Street Journal can earn a profit with advertisements, surely your business can earn a profit by selling products that you own.

When you’re on a tight budget, it makes sense to spend a small amount on a very targeted campaign, as opposed to a lot more on a mass-media campaign. The great thing about viral content, though, is that it can reach a wide audience with the same investment as a targeted audience, if it’s done right.

But surely there’s something to be said for relevancy. There’s no point in attracting an audience of followers who would never have any interest in your products or in chasing virality without any branding considerations.

How to Go Viral: Creativity Meets Relevancy

To produce relevant content that has any chance of going viral, you’ll need to get creative. Remember, viral content tends to be:

• Surprising
• Interesting
• Intense (ideally awe-inspiring)
• Positive
• Actionable

How can we address all of these and stay within the bounds of what could reasonably be called relevant? Let’s go down the list, shall we?

How to Go Viral: Surprise

Remember the Oatmeal noun formula? Suppose your topic of interest was shoes. What might we come up with if we combined it with some random nouns?

• What role did shoes play in the invention of the fire hydrant?
• 15 reasons shoes are better than peanut butter
• What would happen if jackrabbits wore shoes?

These ideas probably won’t lead to anything substantial, but tossing two or more ideas together and seeing what comes out is a tremendous creative exercise. In fact, according to some definitions, that is precisely the definition of the creative spark: finding concrete connections between seemingly disconnected ideas.

Obviously, if you know of anything about your own topic that would surprise people, you must share it. But if you want to be surprising on a consistent basis, you’ll need to distance yourself from your own subject of expertise every now and then. Seek knowledge from other disciplines, and think about how it might relate. Mix and match. That is where surprise comes from.

You probably don’t need to hear this, but you can go overboard with this. Mix and match excessively, and your content will come across with all the quality of a Mad Libs exercise. The ideas above may be funny, but you’ll be appreciated more if you find concrete connections between the unexpected.

How to Go Viral: Interest

What makes a subject interesting? It’s harder to answer that question than to answer a similar and more actionable one. How can you make a subject interesting? And the answer to that question is simple: ask interesting questions about it.

You can start with the five “W”s (and “How?”):

• Who chooses to wear what kinds of shoes?
• What can we learn about a person from the kind of shoes they wear?
• When did humans decide that they needed to start wearing shoes?
• Where do shoes come from? Where do they go when we throw them out?
• Why does our brand of shoe say more about us than our brand of t-shirt?
• How do shoe designers come up with their design ideas?

And we can make things more interesting by matching these up a bit:

Who cares about shoes so much that they buy dozens of pairs? What compels them to do so? When did this start, or has it been happening since the dawn of time? Where do they get the money to afford them? Why is this obsession a problem, or is it? How can somebody curb their shoe buying behavior?

Interesting questions may also be a bit controversial:

• Can you guess a man’s performance in bed by his shoe size?
• Does a bad pair of shoes say anything about you as a person?
• Is an obsession with shoes superficial?
• Is it really possible for shoes to “look gay?”

Rely on this too much, and you’ll be seen as a shock doctor, alienated from most of your target audience (though quite possibly loved by a small and rabid fan base). But avoiding controversial questions altogether will probably make you uninteresting.

I also think it’s important to mention that, while I’m going out of my way to demonstrate that it’s possible to make a subject like “shoes” interesting, I strongly believe that you should expand the topic of your content into broader categories like “fashion,” “sports,” “skateboarding,” or other topics that your target audience is likely to care about.

How to Go Viral: Intensity and Positivity

Viral content elicits emotion. The more intense that emotion, the more viral it is. If the emotion is positive, even better. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can give posts an emotional spin:

Tell Stories

Transforming a post idea into a story idea is a great way to “emotionalize” your content. Stories are about people who face problems, struggle with them intelligently, and overcome them (or fail tragically). If your post doesn’t have a human element, personify your subject. Write about an organization or a subject as though it were a human. This isn’t always possible, but you’d be surprised how often it is.

Write in the Active Voice

Write your sentences about the nouns that are taking action, not the nouns that are being affected by actions. “James pounded out the website in less than a day,” is more engaging than “the website was pounded out by James in less than a day.” Content excites people when you write it this way.

Be Funny

Explaining humor in a single bullet point is next to impossible, but it’s closely related to surprise. Humor is often a form of surprise that occurs when you make nonsensical connections, which is one reason why the “Oatmeal noun formula” works so well. Furthermore, if somebody says something familiar to you in a surprising way, there’s a good chance you’ll laugh. Exaggerated content has a way of doing this as well. Finally, offensive or uncomfortable content can also be hilarious, but things can go south fast.

Get Outraged

Find a creative way to articulate something that angers you and your target audience. Combine this with humor for added effect.

Fear

Write about an imminent threat or tell a scary story. Don’t go overboard with this. Fear has a way of turning into sadness, which isn’t associated with viral activity. Besides, fear is all over the news and people are increasingly desensitized to it.

Build Suspense

This is closely related to fear, but I’m separating it for a reason. I love what Lee Child has written on the subject. Asking how to build suspense isn’t like asking how to bake a cake, it’s like asking how to make your family hungry. You delay gratification. You ask a question, build a mystery, and then solve it.

You do this with the structure of your entire layout, the structure of each section, and to some extent, the structure of each paragraph. (Less helpful for guides, obviously. At the same time, since guides are built to answer a question, suspense is almost built-in, to some extent). In short, suspense is much better than outright fear, because it keeps people reading to the end.

Be Cute

There’s a reason the internet loves cats, and this is a huge part of it. What’s better than a cute picture? A cute story.

Be Awe-Inspiring

As we’ve said, awe appears to be the most viral emotion out there, at least according to New York Times sharing behavior. When a piece of content blows your mind and changes your perspective, you almost have to share the experience.

How can you inspire awe? With a mixture of intense research and an open mind. You need to approach your subject from as many perspectives as possible and pull in insights from other fields in order to stumble upon that sudden burst of insight that can genuinely be called awe. Seek out new paradigms, and explain your topic in a way that most, if not all, of your readers haven’t heard before.

How to Go Viral: Actionable

Finally, shareable content is often actionable, practical, and personally useful. Most content marketers are already well aware of this, so I won’t go into extensive detail. Suffice it to say:

• Solve problems for your readers.
• Do your research and make sure you know the topic.
• Explain how the reader can use this information in their own life.
• Try to avoid ambiguity.
• Point readers to other resources for elaboration.
• Again, solve problems for your readers.

And that about wraps up this section.

The Role of Relationships in Viral Content

When we discussed memes, we pointed out that they tend to spread through more or less isolated online communities, rather than the web at large. And the fact of the matter is most online communities are actually fairly small: a network of friends, a forum, a blog, etc.

We like to think that viral content will actually spread the way a virus does, passing between strangers who don’t exchange words. In reality, it spreads only through the channels that connect people together.

Memes tend to propagate through the largest strictly online communities, the ones that can actually be identified as belonging to “internet culture.” Reddit, StumbleUpon, 4chan, and similar sites make up large communities of people who, while they are mostly anonymous, tend to share a common language. When a meme goes viral, it reaches the entire community, but it tends to stop there. There is spillover onto Facebook and the web at large, but at this point it’s no longer “viral.”

Marketers should, for the most part, avoid playing the meme game. The message of a meme can’t be controlled, and the marketer who tries to seem trendy by attaching a corporate message to an existing meme will almost always be vilified. Dos Equis may have seen an uptick in sales as a result of “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” but they clearly have no control over what the internet has done with him:

And things are almost certainly better that way. I can’t image the backlash that would result if Dos Equis hijacked its own meme and tried to use it to sell beer. Marketers who did the same with a community meme would find themselves in a world of hurt.

Viral content is different. It’s not necessarily designed for internet culture. It’s designed to be shared with people who care, or would care, about the subject matter. And that means you don’t necessarily want to start with the relationships between anonymous people in wildly popular internet forums and social news sites.

Launch your content in the online community that will love it most.

We aren’t as connected as we think. Remember the Milgram experiment that supposedly demonstrated how everybody was connected within 6 degrees of separation? That statement is an outright myth. In the real experiment, when the message got through, it was within 6 degrees on average. But the message made it through only 30 percent of the time. Seventy percent of the time, the message never even got through.

Even an intrinsically viral piece of content won’t go viral unless it reaches somebody influential. The easiest way to make that happen is to be connected with those influential people.

Relationship building deserves a guide of its own, but here are a few tips to make it work:

• Search Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, forums, Google+, and more for people with a large following.
• Google your topic and find the most influential bloggers on the subject.
• Identify a need that these influencers have, and figure out how you can help them with that need.
• Contact the influencer directly with a solution to their problem.
• Be helpful, but don’t conceal your motives, or you will appear manipulative.
• Flattery can help, but save it for after the reason you contacted them. Everybody knows you have an agenda of some kind, and they’d rather hear it upfront.
• Draw attention to your similarities and point to some of your previous work.
• Don’t be too formal and stiff. Don’t craft the email like an advertisement. Talk to them like a human being in the same manner they speak with other people online.
• Work on projects that are helpful for both of you.
• Involve influencers in the production of your viral content and give them credit.
• Stay in touch.

Do all of this on a regular basis with several influencers. The more influencers you work with, the more opportunities your content has to spread virally through as many communities as possible.

What a Minute, What About the Memes?

Did I waste an entire section on the nature of memes, only to tell you in this section that marketers should never get involved with them? Not quite. Instead, it’s crucial to understand that memes are a community phenomenon. I Can Has Cheezburger may have taken off because of a viral meme, but it kept moving because the site opened up and let other people share their own versions of the meme. Remember the key aspects of a meme?

• a focus on ordinary people
• flawed masculinity
• humor
• simplicity
• repetitiveness
• “whimsical” content

Memes demand to be mimicked because they are open-ended and easily adapted. They also tend to be created by ordinary people.

Most brands shouldn’t bother trying to create memes of their own, but they should make it easy for their surrounding community to create memes. They can also cultivate this type of audience by sharing memes they like but did not create themselves. Consider the success of QuickMeme. The site doesn’t create its own memes, but it makes it incredibly simple for visitors to create their own.

QuickMeme is one of the top 1,000 sites on the web according to Alexa.

What can brands learn from memes? They can build an online community by giving visitors the tools to create something of their own without too much effort. This encourages participation and keeps people coming back.

How to Go Viral Frequently Asked Questions

What are some of the top ways to create viral content?

Some of the top methods for creating viral is creating content that is useful, credible, humorous, and interesting.

Should marketers use memes to try to go viral?

Marketers should focus more on viral content than on trying to create viral memes. This is because the nature of memes means they are controlled by audiences and not brands.

Where should marketers post and share content they hope to go viral?

Marketers should post their content to social media channels, but they should also try to get their content in front of online niche communities that relate to their brand/the brand they’re trying to promote.

What qualifies as viral content?

Viral content is content that is shared widely and quickly in internet communities or on social media.

How to Go Viral: the Science of Virality Conclusion

Memes and viral content are not the same thing. Viral content is shared, while memes are mimicked. Viral content is surprising, intense, positive, interesting, and actionable, often because it is awe-inspiring and hilarious. Memes, on the other hand, are amateur, simple, funny, flawed, repetitive, and whimsical. Brands can take advantage of these two kinds of virality by learning the skills that make content shareable and by cultivating communities that create memes.

The path to mastery demands creativity, research, and curiosity. It’s not an easy path, but the financial costs are low. The payoff goes deeper than short-term ROI, offering companies an opportunity for long-term success.

Anything to add? Let’s hear it in the comments. And pass this along if you learned something new. Thanks for reading.

About the Author: Carter Bowles’s love for data is powering him through a degree in statistics while he contributes to Northcutt’s inbound marketing blog, and his own science blog. He lives in Idaho, of all places, with his beautiful wife and daughter.

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: How to Go Viral & the Science of Virality – Marketing Lessons from Internet Cats & Memes
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/science-of-virality/
Published Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2021 18:00:00 +0000

If you are looking to build up your professional brand as an authority in your niche or industry, one great way to do so is to answer people’s questions. 

Even if you’re not the top expert on a particular topic, chances are you still know more than others. Quora is a great place to start. This question and answer network allows you to help others on any topic, from digital marketing to Zumba. 

Learn how to get the most out of Quora, from creating the perfect profile to submitting the best answers.

What is Quora?

Quora is a question-and-answer social media platform where users can ask questions, get answers, and interact with other users. It was founded in 2009, and now boasts millions of users and hundreds of thousands of questions on questions topics ranging from the “what is the creepiest text you've ever received?” to product reviews and how to start a blog.

Why Should You Use Quora for Marketing?

Quora is fantastic for marketing. Here's why:

1. Get exposure to Quora’s 300 million monthly users.
2. Direct high-quality traffic and leads to your website.
3. With over 300,000 topics, you can demonstrate your expertise on almost any topic.
4. You can give direct answers to anyone asking about your business, products, or services.
5. You can share content from other websites (including your own) in topic-focused boards on your profile.

Now that you know why you should join, let’s look at how to get the most out of Quora, starting with your profile.

Step 1: How to Set Up Your Quora Profile

Sign up for Quora with your email address or by connecting your Facebook or Twitter account. Once that’s done, your first task is to create your profile.

There is no purpose of getting exposure by demonstrating your industry expertise if people go to your profile to learn more about you, and there is nothing there.

To edit your profile, click on your profile picture in the top right corner next to the search bar. Then, click on your name from the drop-down menu.

It will open a new tab, where you can:

• add your headline
• edit your name
• profile credentials
• change your profile picture
• edit your topics
• write a description about yourself.

Be sure to include links in your profile to your main website or main social accounts. This should help drive traffic back to your website from Quora.

Step 1: Find and Follow Topics Related to Your Industry

Once your profile is ready, you will want to start finding topics to follow. To find topics, use the search box at the top and start typing in a keyword.

Quora will give you instant suggestions based on what you enter.

Select a topic page, and you’ll see:

• Related topics on the right-hand sidebar.
• Quora Spaces related to the topic.
• Most recent questions people have asked.

Click on the “Follow Topic” button, and you’ll get the latest activity for that topic on your Quora home page newsfeed.

Step 3: Describe Your Topic Experience on Your Profile

After you’ve followed the topics you are interested in, go back to your profile and click on the edit icon next to Credentials and Highlights.

Click on the “Add Credential” button and select “Topic”

Here, you can describe your experience with each one of the topics you are following.

You can also select this credential to show when answering an individual question.

Step 4: Use Quora for Customer Service, and Reputation Management

Remember, topics can be brand-based as well. Use the search functionality to see if anyone is talking about your products or services.

You’ll want to follow any topics specifically about your business so you can join in the conversation when new questions about your products or services are asked. 

You may find potential sales opportunities too, as people are likely to ask the difference between your products or services compared to others. 

Be prepared to make your answers shine and convert!

Step 5: Submit Questions & Answers

Once you’ve followed your favorite topics, you can start submitting questions and answers.

Adding Questions

Adding questions to a question and answer network is a great way to find out more about your target market. 

Simply go to the appropriate topic, then click on the red “Add Question” button on the top right-hand side of the page.

Once you start receiving answers, be sure to let people know you appreciate their help by clicking on the “Upvote” arrow button beneath each answer.

Not getting any answers? You can ask specific Quora members to answer your question.

Hover over a user’s name, and a profile pop-up will appear. Click on the “Ask a Question” button, and you can request the user to answer your question.

Adding Answers

Ready to demonstrate your expertise and start answering questions? You can do so by clicking on a topic, and selecting the “Answer” tab.

Here you’ll see a list of the most recent questions.

You can choose to answer the question or pass as well as downvote it or share it to Facebook or Twitter.

When writing your answer, you can:

• Tag other people, topics, and spaces by using the @ symbol.
• Upload images from your hard drive.
• Add a URL link with a footnote to support your answer.
• Save your answer to drafts if you need more time.

Remember, this is a great way to promote your blog content, products, or services, but only if applicable to your answer. 

Be sure to make useful answers and try not to look spammy.

Step 6: Use Quora Spaces

Topics in Quora are specific subjects you want to follow and answer questions about on the site. Quora Spaces, on the other hand, are communities that share common interests.

The feature allows you to share content on the topic from around the web as well as answer questions.

Once you’ve joined a Space, you’ll get updates on all the content and updates posted on the Spaces feed.

Sounds similar to Facebook Groups, right?

However, there is one key difference.

Space owners can specify that only certain members can contribute content and reply to questions.

Other Spaces have rules like admins will review all submissions, and you have to follow the Space to contribute. 

Looking for people to follow in your niche on Quora? Click on the “following” link underneath the Space name and you’ll get a list of people following the Space. 

Click on the “+” icon next to their name, and you’ll get updates from the profile in your newsfeed.

Quora for Marketing: Frequently Asked Questions

How is Quora used in marketing?

Start by setting up your profile. Make sure to include information about your brand and what makes you an expert in your industry. Answer questions related to your industry and engage in conversations. You may also consider using Quora ads to increase reach.

Does Quora have ads?

Yes, Quora has several paid advertising options that can be used to drive traffic, brand awareness, conversions, app installs, or leads.

Are Quora Spaces like Facebook Groups?

They are similar. Both are communities created around specific topics. However, not everyone can contribute to Quora Spaces.

How can businesses use Quora?

Businesses can use Quora to:

• Establish themselves as thought leaders
• Communicate with their target audience
• Ask questions to better understand what users want and need
• Provide customers service
• Do market research
• Use ads to reach a wider audience
• Perform keyword research

How to Use Quora for Marketing Conclusion

To recap the online marketing potential of Quora, here are the ways you can use Quora to market your professional brand and your business.

• Create a great profile so anyone who wants to learn more about you can do so and be able to click through to your website or other social profiles.
• Follow topics in your industry. Become an active participant on these topics by posting thought-provoking questions and valuable answers. When appropriate, include links back to content on your website for more information, but don’t spam.
• Find people to connect with on Quora by looking at the top answers and followers of a particular topic and in Spaces.
• Create and contribute to Spaces in your industry. Share content off and on Quora to create valuable information that other Quora users will want to follow.

Do you use Quora to promote your professional brand and your business? What results have you seen so far? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

————————————————————————————————————————————–

By: Neil Patel
Title: Quora Marketing: Why and How to Use It
Sourced From: neilpatel.com/blog/blog-quora-marketing-guide/
Published Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2021 13:00:00 +0000