Social Media Influencers

Online marketing is a very dynamic area and moves and innovates very rapidly. Until recently it has been a immature market but as the importance of and understanding of the online world has become more widespread it is now very much a mainstream area. So what does the future look like?

Like it or not the importance of big business and big brands are going to only increase in their importance this is because Fake News and legal disputes over user generated content (UGC) is rising and the law around the world is now moving to hold the publisher of this problem content responsible. Big brands are more likely to have their own quality control teams, online marketing teams, and other online professionals than smaller outfits and also to have larger promotional budgets.

Video content has been very popular from day one, but now high speed fibre broadband is really spreadingly large players are starting to make their moves to capture the offline world, ie television audiences. Brands such as Facebook/Youtube and the like are after breaking into the setting room next!.

How can this trend be of use to non big brand business wanting to do well with online marketing? Well the answer is to grow your own brand, by using a multi-channel approach you can expand using different channels to market your business and create and promote content that includes video. That means creating semi professional promotional videos for your business and making use of that to promote your product around the web.

The other important change is the performance of website, both in terms of speed and of user experience, Google has been refining its online marketing algorithm since 2010 with both of these factors in mind, increasingly the younger generation expect websites to be very responsive and mobile friendly. With the vast amounts of data available to it Google, not to mention the huge number of Phd’s they employ they have been able to infer users experiences using metrics they have access to. Google is able to gather data from its Chrome browser and combine it with data it buys in from ISP’s and other browsers such as Firefox, plus of course Google Adwords, Google Search Console and Google Analytics data. All of these sources together gives it very significant insight into what pages on a site users visit, for how long, and where they go next.

What is the future for Online Marketing

Online marketing – SEO

From its Google streetmap data it knows the IP addresses associated with each area and can therefore work out if a website appeals to a location specific area or for more national or international audiences. By comparing the results for the same query it can identify sites that users like the most and the least, based on their bounce rates, time on page and what happens to the user in future, if their IP regularly visits a site that is a sign of either an association with it or one that has a loyal customer. Crunching these huge datasets then allows Google to assign a user metric quality score to a website based on the “experience” as measured by all of these factors.

A trend that is increasingly important for online marketing is the user experience, Google the leading search engine has invested a lot of time and effort into measuring this in a quantifiable and scientific way, they are using measures such as Time on Page, Bounce rate and time to last contextual paint (load time) to compare websites to their peer groups, sites that don’t then measure up and pushed down in the rankings and therefore loose out on traffic. Users are increasingly expecting sites to be responsive and fast, particularly the younger age groups, generation X for example, and Google is responding to that by rewarding sites that are fast.

Building links from quality sites is also a great way of increasing the Authority of your website from the Search Engine point of view. If you need help in areas like this, then why not contact us we offer Finance Directors on a part time / Portfolio basis but also have FD’s who also have more than 15 years on online marketing experience, that is a one of the Unique Selling Points of an FD Capital FD! To learn about what Domain Authority is and why it is important for SEO read our recent blog post on it. Quality links are hard to acquire particularly from diverse websites within a niche, and so again are an indicator of a sites quality. The rate of link acquisition or loss is also a useful indicator as it highlights if a site is on its way up in the world or is a former well known site in decline. Measuring link velocity in this way then gives Google another insight into how users rate a site, and how active its owners are in its promotion, all again indicators of quality, or at least quality as defined by Google.

What is the future for Online Marketing

So the future is likely to be dominated by larger corporates who have the budgets to market their websites building significant backlink profiles and having the resources to invest in high quality user experiences with fast and slick websites that work perfectly on different devices, PCs, tablets, phones, watches and more. There is always of course room in the market for competition, but to succeed in the new online world, you need a strong understanding of how the Search Engines work, and the capability to build a website that users truly enjoy using and find the products or services they want from it.

I used to own an run a couple of successful Ecommerce / Search marketing businesses. I built up these businesses at the same time as building up my knowledge of Search marketing. I find that knowledge of great value now as I work as a Finance Director because almost every business I get involved with is not making the most of their web site and its potential, which I guess is a statement that could be made about every business and website. However most businesses I deal with have very underveloped sites!

A concept that is helpful to learn about is known as Domain Authority and a related concept Page Authority. The idea is that ever domain name is allocated a score by Google the leading search engine, based on the strength of sites linking to it, this concept has been developed by Moz, who run a great community and have created an Analysis tool which is believed in the SEO industry to closely model the google algorithm, their website is known as Moz.com. I am a member of their community and you can find my moz profile here. What the team at Moz have done is built a tool that helps you determine how authoritive a domain name is, and the related concept of page authority for each web page within that website. That score has value because with it that then tells you how likely a page or phrase is to peform on Google.

search engine 411105 1920A domain with a high DA score will rank above those with lower scores, everything else being equal. DA scores range from 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest.

Domains with a score of less than 30 are consider weak, those in the range 31-60 are medium and those with 61-75 High, there are very strong sites with scores over 76, but these are amongst the strongest sites in the internet, examples include Google itself whose score is 100, Facebook, Amazon and the like.

A websites authority passes through links (known as backlinks) so when a site links to your domain, some of its authority passes to your site, so it therefore follows than the more links you have from high authority sites, the higher your own domain names authority score becomesm and hence the better able your site is to perform in the Search Results known as SERPS (Search Engine Results Placement). For this reason there is an active marketplace on the internet for online marketing, a big part of which comprises building backlinks. There are different approaches used, the reputable ones who attempt to follow Google’s guidelines and blackhat ones who follow any approach to get results. Only whitehat approaches work in the long term, as Google constantly gets better and better at identifying attempts to came to manipulate their system.

SEO professional

Only on topic links actually help a website perform but using the moz tool is a great way to focus your efforts on to building links from sites that actually “push the dial”.Domain Authority and its importance for SEO

To get better results you need to actively build high quality links to your website, that believe me is no easy matter and it is a whole industry and world in its own right. However success will never come to your websites unless you market it.

There is also a whole area of Search Marketing expertise which involves how to efficiently pass your domain authority around your website so your key pages get to perform as well as possible. Link popularity dilutes with each level of link depth, so structuring a website is and important consideration as in that way your Domain Authority is targetted to the pages that you want to perform the best – ie your “money pages” or the pages that you wish to push the most.

Not all links pass Domain Authority, links can be dofollow which means they do pass authority or nofollow which means they don’t. Sites that are open for public publishing typically use nofollow, so if you are creating content with the intention of using it to build links, make sure they sites you publish on such as directories are giving you dofollow links.

Link building has become increasingly expensive, its not uncommon for links to cost $300 or even as much as $1,000 from leading USA websites, and serious E-Commerce sites need to be planning for a budget of £10-£15K monthly. There are ways to build high quality links for free or low costs, but these take time and often unless the links are from very strong sites, the results are disappointing.

Links need to be built consistently, as part of the Google algorithm is based on link velocity the concept being that as site that is consistently bulding links is more interesting and worthy of higher rankings than a site that previously had a lot of links but is now loosing them at a steady rate, and is therefore yesterdays story.

Domain Authority and its importance for SEO

You can get good results by pitching to journalists directly who are looking for stories and in exchange for an interview or a quote can earn you a link from a very high profile publication including the BBC and places such as the Huffington Post, but to get into these places is not easy and often you are better using a professional marketing company to do the work for you.

AhrefsA good approach is to use a tool such as ahrefs.com or Moz.com as both of these allow you to study your competitors and your own site and get a good understanding of where their links come from and how active they are on a regular basis. In the ahrefs example shown here, the site has a rank of 813,411 which means its that place in their database of sites with backlinks. The domain has a DR (Ahrefs version of Domain Authority) of 47 which is a result of having 6,1K backlinks from 656 unique domain names. The site in this example is Reporting Accounts which offers news and insights into more than 4.9 million UK companies.

The number of referring domain names is important, as its a barrier to entry in this market, it is far easier to acquire a lot of links from a single domain, for example another one you own, than from 100’s or 1,000’s of unrelated domain names.

Teens and Bed-Wetting:Dealing With Diapers and Plastic Pants

  Being a teenager can be a stressful time in life. Theres the pressure of fitting in,preparing to get into college,going to prom,learning to drive. Now imagine if you also had to tell someone of the opposite sex that you have to wear diapers and plastic pants because you still wet the bed?

 Teenagers can be very cruel when it comes to people being different. I think its important for teenagers to be able to talk to other people with similar problems. There are many online support groups for various health problems and teenagers suffering from bed-wetting should take advantage of the many online health resources.

 You can also start an online support group if you want. Many older children,adolescents,teenagers,and adults deal with bed-wetting every night so there are a lot of people who would be interested if you do decide to start a bed-wetting support group.

 I think it would help if teenage celebrities(as well as adult celebrities) started talking about subjects such as bed-wetting-it would make it less taboo.

Right now Id like to talk about one teens experience with wearing cloth diapers and plastic pants. This person felt extremely self-conscious about wearing the garments. There are several aspects that made him feel babyish-the bulk of the diapers between the legs,the safety pins,and the crinkling sounds of the plastic pants. I thought Id talk a little bit about because its possible that many teenagers have similar feelings regarding wearing diapers and plastic pants for bed-wetting.I believe in this particular case its possible to see the glass as half full. For example instead of viewing these attributes in a negative manner one can see them in a positive way. Instead of viewing the bulk of the diapers as a bad thing a person could see them in a positive way-thicker diapers are more absorbent and therefore they provide better protection. This in turn will make the wearer feel more comfortable and secure. As far as the plastic pants are concerned it should be stressed to the teen that some plastic pants and disposable diapers make a rustling sound. Although many people are self conscious about this crackling sound the teenager should be reassured that since the product is only worn at night this shouldnt be a concern. However iff the child or teen is sharing a bedroom with another sibling they might have some misgivings about this. If they do share a room with another sibling the parents need to tell the sibling in no uncertain terms that if they make fun of the bed-wetting or diapers and plastic pants theyll be punished. Finally, as far as the pins are concerned,these should be viewed no differently than other methods of fastening clothing such as buttons, zippers,or snaps. I hope this helps other teenagers who might be feeling embarrassed about wearing the diapers and plastic pants at night.

 I also think its important to be able to confide in people about this problem-whether a family member or relative,a teacher,or friend. Sometimes talking to people helps a great deal.. Its important to be able to gauge the depth and quality of a persons friendship. There are some people who are real compassionate and understanding. These people are very accepting of other peoples problems and theyre easy to confide in. If you feel you have friends of this nature and if youre having difficulty coming to terms with wearing diapers to bed then you might want to consider discussing this with them. Its important to remember one thing-there are plenty of people of all ages who wet the bed so the next time youre getting ready for bed and putting on your diapers and plastic pants keep this in mind!