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Awesome list of top 28 social marketing resources
The content provides a detailed list of tools essential to digital marketing including areas of social automation, organic outreach, content creation, research, content discovery, and search engine optimization. Key tools like Hoot Suite for scheduling social media posts, Social Quant for driving engagement, Buzzsumo for content popularity, Envato for content creation, and SemRush for SEO analysis were highlighted as particularly useful in their respective fields.
Social Automation and Scheduling
- Hoot Suite – Our favorite tool for scheduling our social posts to sync between all our devices has to be Hoot Suite. It doesn’t take a second’s thought to make sure to post regular content to all of our platforms. A little-known benefit of the tool is that when used for social media outreach, you can schedule all your posts periodically so that your current followers aren’t bombarded all at once when you send tweet copies to twenty different influencers.
- Social Quant – NOW (Click Minded) – One of the single most effective social media tools behind our Breathe Life campaign. The tool is, in a sense, a bot that, based on your keyword research, performs a set amount of follows and unfollows per day. How well the tool performs in terms of engagement around your content relies on what you put in. For managing engagement and partnerships that might be generated by the tool, you’ll still need to take the time to form connections and follow up with those who want to know more about your project. At the moment, the tool only works on Twitter, and to date, I’ve not found a comparable tool for Instagram. As well as the tool works, I do think they could improve upon the billing and KPI dashboard from a usability perspective.
Organic Outreach, Research, and Content Discovery
- Social Bakers Analytics – Easily the most comprehensive tool we’ve used to find every popular Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube account worth knowing about, divided by sector, genre, and country. Whilst using this to find the most popular accounts out there will leave you at the mercy of their own advertising placement fees, the tool is best used when finding smaller niche communities to contact.
- Zest.Is – A human-curated tab takeover of the best digital marketing and tech articles, updated every day. The quality of the app is very high thanks to the curation aspect of the platform, so much so that you may even forget to check The Drum and MarketingLand at times because you’ll have already bookmarked so much reading material just from opening a new tab!
- Growth Hackers Community – An incredibly well-thought-out platform for content creation and curation. The highlight of Growth Hackers is the vast and varied range of marketers and senior entrepreneurs who are selected for regular AMAs. It is amazing how you can so seamlessly share your conversations straight to Twitter to show that you are talking to some of the most influential marketers today.
- FollowerWonk – Find the most relevant influencers in your sector by taking a list of common keywords used and organizing results by location and popularity. Also provides wider analytics on your own account as well as that of competitors.
- Buzzsumo – Discover the most popular content in the past year for your sector; the free plan is limited to only one page of results per day. Make sure to take into account that any fake blogging networks that pay for tens of thousands of fake likes will appear as “popular” results. For results like this, the tool isn’t perfect and should be taken with a pinch of salt. One nice little extra that they have recently implemented is drawing in backlink data for top content results directly from Majestic SEO.
- Pingroupie – If you’re looking for group boards on Pinterest (and you should!) Pingroupie is your only option for searching effectively through the noise. The biggest reason to include group boards as part of your Pinterest strategy is that it only takes a few shares to triple or even quadruple your monthly views on the platform. This also leads to more engagement across your pins if you happen to curate visually stunning content.
- Twitter Lists – For everything the Social Bakers miss, Twitter lists have – for free! The quality of a list varies from user to user. When you get it right, though, selecting the right list that includes a major influencer will also connect you to ten, twenty, or maybe even the top thousand that are most similar. You can find the lists connected to any account by entering /memberships to their profile URL.
- Similar Web – A great free tool for website overviews, providing everything from traffic referrals to similar sites in your sector and more in-depth data about how different social networks are performing for you and your competitors. Audience insights are probably one of the most underrated aspects of the tool in letting you know what percentage of your traffic is actually relevant to your site.
- Hunter.Io – This is one of my top essential plug-ins currently taking up space in my toolbar. When I’m performing outreach, Hunter saves me a huge amount of time looking at third-party sites for the contact details of prospects and bloggers I want to work with. With a single click, the tool gives me a list of emails for all contacts on any webpage. Invaluable when you need to send hundreds of emails on a given day.
- Check My Links – When using a broken link-building strategy to support your wider content promotion, a link checker such as Check My Links is essential and a very quick way of sorting through a page that may contain up to around 3,000 links. Combine with Ahrefs to locate high-quality resource pages in order of ranking authority.
- Hashtagify – The perfect hashtag research tool. Use the site before posting your content to Twitter/Instagram to find like-minded audiences connected to the keywords you already know and love. My favorite part of the site is where you can see the crossover between audiences between two or more hashtags by percentage. The Top Recent Media sidebar also shows you the type of content your post will sit alongside. This can be highly important for reputation management and keeping on top of current trends or controversies.
- Google Trends – Have you ever been interested in finding out exactly when a word started trending? Are you also interested to see if that term has yearly ebbs and flows to help plan when you create content? Google Trends is yet another free tool that proves essential in providing real insights on what people are actually searching for, when and where those searches are more prominent, and can help predict patterns of purchase intent from consumers.
- Profiles Lite from YouGov – Whilst this popular audience insights tool supports a much smaller data set than the professional platform, YouGov Lite is a great starting point for those venturing into researching their current customer base. Striking visuals really bring the site alive, something you can’t get from viewing audience insights through a tool like Google Analytics.
Content Creation and Mockups
- Envato – These guys over the years have really built the one-stop spot for content and themes for your site if you haven’t heard of them visit them now they offer a subscription that gives you access to Videos, Audios, Fonts, Photos, 3d all sorts of templates and a mad collection of WordPress themes, add-ons, etc…
- Giphy – Create gifs to use on social media from existing video content in a matter of seconds from your most stunning video content.
- Promo Republic – Create beautiful social media posts from a suite of assets that look fresh and interesting. The inspiration section is great for examples of social posts to promote your site and even includes ideas for flyers and assets for newsletters.
- Botsociety.Io – Get a mock-up of your brand’s chatbot before launching.
- Plagiarism Checker – A tool you might not think to use whilst writing but should. Plagiarism isn’t just a matter of hurting the feelings of content creators and search engines. With duplicate content penalties, it is important for your site’s quality to ensure that while you may be writing on an already well-documented subject, take an original stance or face the wrath of Google!
- Afterlight (for IOS) – Gorgeous, social posts that are curated by an art director are little needed when Afterlight brings the artist to the palm of your hand. My favorite reason to use the tool when I’m out on the go is that your audience is always looking for exciting content. The app is easily the most comprehensive free tool I’ve used to make sure my Instagram posts are perfectly color-balanced before posting to keep them key with any existing branding. I rarely use the more in-your-face elements of the app, but if bold frames and burn effects are your things, then you’ll also find them in this self-contained editing platform.
SEO
SEO is one of those areas where I’m not too loyal to any one source of data. As you’ll most often find, not all websites are crawled equally. I’ve found many domain exceptions in which Majestic outperforms Ahrefs and vice versa. Below are the tools we most often use in both their free and premium formats.
SemRush – The most useful aspect of SemRush is the amount of technical and on-site detail that they provide. From blank meta descriptions to dead links and errors that the previous two tools never alerted me to, it is the major thing that kept it in my arsenal. Out of the three tools, I also prefer SemRush’s newsletter format for weekly rankings I’m sent just for being a free member. Breakdowns between competitor and keyword rankings are more concise and perfect for viewing whilst out of the office.
- Majestic – One of the more affordable backlink and authority checkers out there, the tool is very good for an overview of your own and competitor activities. Use Clique Hunter to find an audience and link crossover between up to five comparable domains of your choosing.
- Ahrefs – The pricier of the most popular backlink comparison tools provides more insights on yearly activity, anchors used, referring content, and even has a discovery tool that works in a similar manner to Buzzsumo included within the package. The single most valuable function of Ahrefs isn’t its use as a link scraping tool but its superior functionality for keyword discovery, unlink Advanced Web Ranking which relies on data you have to discover yourself, Ahrefs cuts out the middle man by pulling the data in for you before you even have time to think of linking Webmaster Tools!
- YoastSEO – Yoast is one of the few plugins that is used alongside WordPress on the WPcult site. It is so often used to optimize our pages and articles that it can be easily forgotten as one of our staple tools. Whilst a few of the metrics they judge upon have been outdated by Ahref’s 2 Million Keyword Study (which you can read here), it provides excellent guidelines to any beginner in SEO who creates regular content.
- Advanced Web Ranking – One of the best keyword ranking tools out there. It is especially valuable for agencies in that it can be used for white-label reports for your competitors. Weekly rankings are supplied as standard, with daily and on-demand keyword results available for premium subscribers.
- StoryBase – If you are looking for some new insights and are tired of relying on Adword’s keyword planner, StoryBase might just be for you. They are hardly short of data, with 5 billion long-tail keywords, 100 million question keywords, and 2 billion related LSI keywords! The aspect I like most about the tool is that questions are clearly separated from the rest of the keyword results. This can make answering a customer query a lot easier to view than in Adwords, as in Adwords, you have to specify terms that would be most often included in a question (e.g., who, what, why?) to get the same results. This can be a bit fiddly to sort through, especially in results that may not use who, what, where, and why in their sentence structure.
- Moz (specifically their toolbar) – The free Moz toolbar is great for searching and discovering new linking opportunities for your SEO strategy. Finding the difference between followed and no-follow domain links is done in a fraction of the time. It also provides you with the site authority and spam score almost as soon as the webpage is loaded – very helpful when avoiding harmful websites.
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Guest Post
How to Incorporate a Website into Your Website Marketing Efforts
In today’s techno-centric culture, you simply must have a business website, no matter how small or “local” your restaurant business is. Consider the fact that the Yellow Pages (yes, that big book that you use to swat flies) has even gone the way of the web. Just as you wouldn’t dream of operating a restaurant without having a telephone number, you shouldn’t miss the boat when it comes to having a business website. Here are some great tips for how to incorporate a website into your restaurant marketing efforts:
The makings of a good website. You don’t need fancy graphics and a complex sitemap to have a good website for your restaurant. Really, you just need to incorporate some basics into your web design to have a site that can effectively speak for your business. At the very least, you should include details about your location, contact information, hours of operation, pricing, and menu items. Ideally, you can also use your website to spotlight members of your team, express your philosophy, detail the history of your business, and show web surfers what your restaurant looks like.
Promotions. You can use your restaurant website to promote upcoming events, seasonal menu items, and special discounts. By highlighting promotions on your site, you encourage your customers to check in regularly for updated information. This is a great way to stay in regular contact with patrons who may otherwise slip off your radar.
Reservations via the website. Most people these days use the Internet to decide on everything from which family practitioner they take their children to to which restaurants they eat in. You can offer them a major convenience (and snag those potential customers who may be just “shopping around”) by allowing them to make dinner reservations via your online interface.
Include your URL on all of your marketing materials. Once you have your website up and running, you need to put it to work for you. That means spreading the word. The best way to make people aware of your website and inspire them to pay a visit is to include your URL on everything from business cards to menus to signage. To really impress patrons with your modernity, incorporate QR codes into everything related to your restaurant; one quick scan from any smart phone will deliver customers straight to your website.
As you can see, there are many exciting ways you can use the web to improve upon your restaurant marketing efforts. Try not just one, but all, of these methods to get the most out of your business website.
About the Author: Brian Rage recently opened his own restaurant. He set up his new restaurant point of sale system, created stunning elegant menus, and finally had his website designed to match his theme. Talk to a marketing expert if you aren’t sure how to create or run a website.
Guest Post
WordPress Tips for Photographers
Photography is the art of capturing naturalistic images with the help of photographic cameras. It is the science of framing up visible images along with factors like light. Photography entwines itself with illumination, lighting, darkness, and shadows, much like how nature and spirituality are entwined. Over time, photos and pictures become cogent evidence for the changing aspect of nature and time. The only property in our lives that is untouched by time is the moment captured in a photo. Anything that is unaffected by time in this universe is immortal and divine.
Photographers in a way are artists who capture the aesthetic occurrences of this world. For a successful photographer, it is always a gamble between what he feels is necessary and what he feels is unnecessary. For an avid photographer, vision is his treasure and camera is his Holy Grail. For such a divine profession, storing and keeping track of those captivating moments caught on film is inherent. With the invention of groundbreaking cloud storage technologies coupled with the emergence of the internet as a data storage platform, photographers need not ponder over the issue of photo storage. By utilizing such technologies, photographers can build portfolios, maintain websites, generate leads, and attract prospective clients.
Social networking and photo-sharing websites such as Picasa and Flickr serve the purpose of saving and storing all your photographs online. But when you are looking to generate business leads and attract prospective clients, having your own website with a URL to your portfolio will be an inviting option. WordPress is one of those notable online platforms that help photographers manage their portfolios. Most of us know WordPress only for blogging but of late, it has developed into a reliable content management system. A content management system allows you to upload and store various types of content on your website.
One of the most prominent features of content management systems such as WordPress is that they allow you to change the appearance of your website without altering the content. For photographers, WordPress allows you to update and publish new photos and you can post them instantly. And to top it all off, WordPress can be downloaded for free from www.wordpress.org. Probably the only time you have to spend money is when you select a domain name and choose a hosting package from a website hosting service.
The theme speaks volumes about your website and portfolio. So make sure you select the right theme, there are countless free and premium WordPress themes with which you can customize your website depending on the niche of your portfolio. Here are a few free WordPress Themes in 2012 that will best suit photo-based websites:
- WidePhoto – A free HTML5 fullscreen WordPress theme for photographers that want a visually impressive website to showcase photography.
- Grid Photo – A fully-responsive HTML5 grid-based theme for photographers and photography fans.
- Minimatica – A very stylish, modern, and minimalist theme with a beautiful image gallery slider and an optional blog view.
- F8 Lite – A multimedia and photography portfolio theme for WordPress.
- Hatch – A simple and minimal type of portfolio theme for designers, photographers, illustrators, or photobloggers.
You may also take a look at these few tips for photographers using WordPress:
1. Avoid images being suppressed every time you change a theme by adjusting your media settings as required by the theme. The Viper007Bond’s Regenerate Thumbnail plug-in automatically resizes your image as per the requirements of the theme.
2. As photographic websites tend to have a huge collection of pictures and the load time of the website is affected drastically. Installing the W3 Total Cache plug-in will enhance the load time of your website.
3. All versions released after WordPress 2.9 have a special option with which you can select featured images for your posts and web pages. Select the best picture in your portfolio to attract visitors and prospective clients.
4. Create readable and descriptive file names for your images as it is important for search engine optimization.
Hope these tips and suggestions will help you to efficiently manage your WordPress-based Photography website.
George Webber writes about Entertainment, Technology, and the Internet. He writes on behalf of www.1800cabletv.com – your gateway to the best cable companies across the nation.
Guest Post
10 Best Digital Marketing Plugins for WordPress 2022
Have you opened up a new website or a business and want to drive more traffic towards it? Check out these 10 best digital marketing plugins for WordPress and see wonders!
If you are an avid user of WordPress, you are surely affiliated with the Word plugin. Nevertheless, let me explain the term simply for brand-new users.
A plugin is a software application used in WordPress to add new features to the user’s website or to extend and modify the existing ones. There are literally thousands of plugins available for users on WordPress, both free and paid versions.
It is safe to say that there are hundreds of plugins for every activity related to content management or conducting business, and this is true for digital marketing as well. There are a plethora of WordPress digital marketing plugins.
You must be thinking now. Which of these would serve most of your purposes effectively? Which of these are the ones trending in 2022 for their best performances?
We have singled out 10 of the best digital marketing plugins for WordPress for you.
Get into the article to know more about these!
Benefits of using digital marketing plugins for WordPress
There are tons of benefits of plugins in general. And when it comes to digital marketing strategies, these can prove to be gems. Some of the notable advantages of digital marketing plugins are identified below-
- Availability: This might be the biggest benefit of a WordPress plugin. Whatever problem you might feel with your WordPress website or whatever additional functions you might want to add, there is a big possibility that WordPress has a plugin for that. This enhances your functionality by a great deal.
- Affordability: Although there are some plugins for premium uses which are ought to be bought, there are hundreds of effective plugins which are absolutely free of cost. That is why it becomes very much affordable for anyone willing to modify their website on a shoestring budget.
- Adaptability: The adaptability of the plugins for WordPress can bring wonders for you. You can adapt these plugins very easily, following your needs and preferences. The plugins are unbelievably easy to use for beginners as well.
- Clarity: All the information that you need to know about the plugins is open and ready for you to explore. You can easily judge the functionality and performance of a plugin by assessing certain parameters, which makes it less likely to get into trouble or have a hassle installing any plugin.
10 Best Digital Marketing Plugins for WordPress 2022
Now, let’s get further into the article to learn about 10 of the best-known digital marketing plugins that are being used widely in 2022 by millions of WordPress users-
#1 OptinMonster
This is undoubtedly one of the very best lead generation plugins available on WordPress. OptinMonster comes with different options of opt-in forms which can be adjusted and adapted easily as per your website’s requirements.
What is the major goal of any business? More and more conversions, of course. OptinMonster can be a great pick for that. This plugin helps you tailor the most attention-grabbing website, which will definitely turn viewers into customers.
The various features of the OptinMonster plugin help you catch the eyes of users instantly. This plugin can be easily adapted to your requirements and can be personalized to suit the comfort and needs of the users.
Nowadays, it is extremely important that your website is mobile-friendly and seamless to navigate, and OptinMonster can help with that too. The best thing about this plugin is that it is amazingly user-friendly, which lessens almost half the hassle for the website owners.
#2 All in One SEO
When you own a website or a business you obviously want it to stand out and to be visible to the maximum number of people. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, improves the visibility and reach of a website and assists in grabbing the attention of the targeted people.
The All in One SEO plugin has been crafted to do that for your website. An extremely popular plugin, All in One SEO comes with a plethora of tools and features that will allow you to stay long ahead of the curve.
If you have a WooCommerce store or business, this plugin can come in handy for you in so many ways. It has all the necessary attributes to optimize your product page, product details, product images, and so on.
The multidimensional functions of All in One SEO will definitely lead your website to be in the top searches, allowing you to have increased conversion rates and sales, too!
#3 Hustle
Hustle is the ultimate marketing solution for business owners. This plugin can make your life so much easier. Whether it is offering hundreds of beautifully crafted and efficient templates or helping you with your social following and pop-ups, hustle covers you everywhere.
This WordPress digital marketing plugin has been designed to give you the ultimate comfort of marketing your business and products by social sharing through a wide number of channels. Hustle helps you style your business page in such a way that is spectacular and systematic at the same time.
This digital marketing plugin has the option for inside analytics which allows you to understand the performance of your taken actions from time to time, which can be really helpful if you want to enhance or be consistent in your performance and quality of services.
Moreover, Hustle is integrated with several popular email service providers like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Sendy, and so on, which is most definitely a great way to increase conversion.
#4 CTX Feed
This plugin is basically the ultimate WooCommerce product feed generator that can take away all your hassles regarding product feeds within minutes. The significance of a well-arranged and systematically built product feed needs no explanation, and CTX Feed is a combination of abundant features and functionality that can help you create the best product feed.
You can put in all the information related to your products, price, images, and availability in the product feed with great ease, and the plugin also updates any changes you make automatically to the feed, which can save you a lot of time.
There are 100+ templates for you to choose from, and you are not limited by any number as to how many products you would like to display. Doesn’t that sound like a dream come true?
The 5 different formats offered by this product feed plugin cover the requirements of any shopping channel. This makes your product feed much easier and quicker to get approved. This digital marketing plugin supports over 100 marketing channels and can give you the leverage to reach customers from a wide range of areas.
CTX Feed has both a free and a paid version. The paid version, CTX Feed Pro, comes with some modified and updated features that can prove to be very helpful for you. One of the best things about this plugin is that it is absolutely error-free, so you can have full trust in it!
#5 Envira Gallery
This is one of the most popular gallery plugins for WordPress. Envira Gallery has been built to help you make the most pleasant-looking gallery for your products, which includes both photos and videos. The integration with the already-built templates has been made extremely smooth and fast for this plugin.
There is no need to be specialized in developing for using this plugin. Literally, anybody can use it, which is why the popularity of Envira Gallery is increasing day by day among entrepreneurs, bloggers, website builders, and so on.
The super flexible nature of this WordPress marketing tool also gives you the leverage of image proofing, providing your customers with the best kind of service. Whether you want to upload photos and videos into the gallery directly or you want to integrate with other sources from outside, like Instagram is completely your choice.
Like many other digital marketing plugins for WordPress, Envira Gallery also comes with a free and paid version. However, the paid version is reasonably cheap as well.
#6 SEMrush
SEMrush is basically a writing assistant plugin. This plugin is immensely helpful in creating optimized SEO-friendly content.
With the help of this plugin, you can get instant suggestions and recommendations while you are creating content. These recommendations are given based on the ten best content ranked by Google, depending on what keywords you give and from which location.
SEMrush basically takes care of everything when you are writing something, including keyword selection, tone of writing, use of words, plagiarism, readability, and so on.
When you are finally done with your writing, you can also get to see your overall score, which can help you in making decisions regarding alterations and modifications.
This beautifully crafted plugin guides you step by step on how to write overall optimized content that can reach millions of targeted viewers at the same time, different tools of this plugin help you in promoting your content on social media as well.
#7 Mailchimp
Mailchimp for WooCommerce is undoubtedly a big YES for anyone owning a WooCommerce website. This marketing automation plugin can do wonders for your business if you intend to keep consistent and effective communication with your potential stakeholders.
Wondering how that works?
When you integrate your WooCooomerce business with your Mailchimp account, different information related to the customers, like their name, email, purchase, etc., gets synced with Mailchimp, and it is done automatically without demanding any of your efforts.
This digital marketing plugin for WordPress can assist you in sending recommendations and announcements to your customer base. You can keep regular and good communication with all your existing customers through this plugin, and at the same time, you can also identify new customers.
Mailchimp also allows you to analyze your overall performance in promotion and marketing.
#8 MonsterInsights
If you are running a website, you would definitely want to know how it is performing and the statistics as to its acceptance from the users. That is what MonsterInsights does.
MonsterInsights is basically a tool for Google Analytics in WordPress, which can even provide you with real-time data and statistics.
When you are in charge of a site, it becomes extremely necessary for you to analyze and observe it. When you become able to know this, you also become able to bring in necessary changes and modifications to your website which can offer the customers an even more seamless experience. This ultimately leads to the generation of more leads and sales.
The process of Google Analytics is not at all easy, but with MonsterInsights, it surely is! With the proper use of this digital marketing plugin, your website will surely bring more success to you.
#9 WP Call Button
The primary target for any business or store is to make sales, right?
Usually, when a buyer gets interested in a product, they want to call the product company. Now, if the process is not easy and the buyers do not find a quick call option on your website, it is highly likely that you will not get the call and you will not make the sale.
WP Call Button comes as a rescue in this. This WordPress plugin gives your website a quick click-to-call action option when the users are on their mobile phones.
The plugin is very fast and lightweight and the amount of skills you would need to operate the WP Call Button is basically zero. The plugin is extremely easy to install and use, and you would not need any developer for that.
#10 Smash Balloon
The importance of social media for businesses in today’s age needs no separate mention. Now, think how great it would be if you could combine your social media feeds with your website on WordPress.
The WordPress plugin Smash Balloons Digital Marketing Plugins has been created just for this.
The plugin allows you to display your social media feeds in your WordPress account in the most pleasant way possible. When you combine your social media accounts with your website, your website or business automatically becomes more relevant as well as more trustworthy.
People can easily relate to your business and with you, as a matter of fact. This can bring in an increased number of sales and can also help you get more known in the industry.
Conclusion
Digital marketing has become an inseparable part of any business today. The WordPress marketing tools take away all the hassles that might have to be faced to initiate the most engaging digital marketing campaigns.
So, which one of these digital marketing plugins for WordPress do you think can work the best for your business?
Author bio:
Maliha Tasneem
Maliha Tasneem is a professional content writer who has been writing creative and technical content for 4 years. Currently, she is working at Webappick – a giant WordPress Plugin development company, as a content writer.
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