Pinterest Rolling Out Promoted Pins For Marketers 

 

Pinterest is so much more than just sharing images. Think about it; people on Pinterest are more interested in what they want (probably in the future), as opposed to what they're doing (as on Facebook, Twitter etc.). And with Pinterest Guided Search, users can look through billions of pins to find things they've probably never seen before! This makes Pinterest the perfect tool for marketers. Pinterest has announced that it will now start rolling out promoted pins, so that marketers can fully benefit from the network.

Imagine looking for possible birthday gift ideas, or new home decorations, or even cooking up a new dish. Now imagine you're running an online gift shop, decorations store or a cooking channel. Pinterest is a great way for people to discover new things, and with the right effort, you can connect millions of new customers with your business.

Pinterest introduced the Promoted Pins feature a while back, but it was still in its beta. Starting with the new year, Pinterest has announced that it will be making the feature publicly available for all, so that more and more people can benefit from the power of advertising and connect with new audiences.

Starting January 1, “reservation-based” Promoted Pins will be available to all US users. The model is CPM-based, meaning that advertisers are charged based on the number of impressions of their promoted pins (i.e. how many people have seen a pin).

Why Promoted Pins?

• Promoted Pins perform as good or better than organic Pins.
• Brand advertisers achieved about a 30% bump in earned media from people who saw a Promoted Pin and saved it to one of their own boards.
• Promoted Pins are repinned an average of 11 times or higher.
• Promoted Pins continue to draw engagement from users even after a campaign has ended.
• Businesses outside of Pinterest’s core categories were successful with Promoted Pins.

In an effort to make itself even more of a useful marketing tool for businesses, Pinterest is introducing what it calls the “Pinstitute” — a new program for businesses to learn how to connect with users and see an even greater return on investment.

Through two tracks focused on creative and measurement, you can learn what kind of Pins perform well, what users care about and what kinds of products Pinterest will be rolling out in the future.

A select group of brands and agencies will be invited to attend quarterly Pinstitute workshops. If you’re not among that select group, Pinterest will also be rolling out a series of webinars and other online learning tools for small businesses.

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6 Easy Ways to Bring Traffic to Your Blog from Twitter

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Twitter is undoubtedly the #1 social media site to engage with others. When it’s done right, twitter can bring quality traffic to your blogs. How to drive twitter traffic to your own sites using simple tips then?

Here are the top 6 ways to bring twitter traffic to your sites. Do implement them right after reading the blog posts and share your ideas in the comments section.

Image source: www.telegraph.co.uk

1. Use twitter sharing buttons:

No matter how great your content is: it has to be shared on social media sites like Facebook and twitter to get more online visibility. Especially twitter plays a vital role in bringing social media traffic to your sites. All you need is to place the twitter sharing buttons inside blog posts.

You can place them;

• Right under the headlines,
• End of the blog posts,
• At left side of the blog post etc

You’ll get more shares on twitter when you place the twitter button at the left side of the blog posts. Why? Because the sharing buttons will be scrolled downed along with the blog posts – thus your readers can’t ignore them. If your content is too good, they’ll certainly share it on their networks, thus bringing more readers to your site.

So how can you do this?

Use either digg digg or share bar WP plugin to make this happen. They’re simple and elegant and most of the bloggers use these plugins on their blogs.

2. Integrate twitter box at the end of the post:

How you tried this before? Here’s a small screenshot of twitter box at the end of the post.

Your readers will get motivated when you use these kind of twitter boxes at the end of your blog posts? Why? Because you’ve made it easy for them to share your contents on twitter. They’ll tweet and share content with their friends and followers if you add value to your content.

Here’s the best plugin to embed twitter box at the end of the blog posts.

3. Tweet the best links in your niche:

Most people don’t get much CTR’s (Click Through Rates) on their twitter links – though they’ve good no. of twitter followers. Do you know why? They always SELF PROMOTE their contents. So why would anyone give importance on clicking though your twitter links if you’re using your twitter profile just to spam with your own links?

You must be sharing and tweeting other people links too, this way you can gain more credibility and high CTR on your twitter profile.

Always tweet the BEST stuff on your niche. And keep your followers updates with the latest stuff on regular basis.

4. Follow the professionals in your niche – retweet them often:

Undoubtedly there will be so many professionals, legends and gurus in your niche. Follow them. Tweet their links with your readers. And be in regular touch with them. Ask them the questions which are relevant to your niche – take their advice. This way you’re not only building healthy relationships with the professional bloggers in your niche, but also sharing the best stuff with your followers.

This makes your twitter profile more branded and can bring your more twitter traffic to your blog posts.

5. Always write attention grabbing headlines to get more clicks:

There are thousands of links will be tweeted on twitter (if not more than that!). Then how can anyone get a chance to click on your twitter links if they consist generic headlines (which not at all attention grabbing)??

So.. always make sure you’ve great headlines for your blog posts.

According to Brian Clark, 80% of the readers will decide whether or not to click on your blog posts (links) just by looking at your headlines.

Headlines are SO vital. They can bring you traffic or can show EXIT to your readers!

So.. spend quality time on writing killer headlines which send get more CLICKS on your links.

How can you create great headlines then?

Here are few simple tactics to use to create captivating headlines all the time.

Use numbers: “7 Ways to Drive More Traffic from Twitter” can send get more clicks than using a headline like “Ways to Get Twitter Traffic”

Start with How to: How to headlines also have the tendency to get more clicks. For example, when you’ve a title with “How to Create Great Headlines All the Time?” – you’ll surely get more clicks on it. Because it’s compelling and attention grabbing.

6. Tweet your old blog posts using this plugin:

Do you know how to bring twitter traffic to your old blog posts?

It’s so simple. You need to tweet your old blog posts regularly. But what if you’ve so many no. of blog posts in your archive?

It’s not possible to find and tweet them, right?

Here’s a great plugin to bring twitter traffic to your blog which help you tweet the old blog posts.

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Social Media Vs SEO: Which Is the Best Way to Bring Traffic?

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Social media and SEO both are playing a vital role in driving traffic any blog. It’s essential to spend your time wisely on these two different online mediums to reap the best rewards.

Lets dig into the details without much ado..

Why social media is the best?

Social media sites like Facebook, twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn have very large audience. You can bring massive traffic from any of these sources, but all you need is to have thriving fans in all your networks. The key factor to bring traffic from social media sites is to work only on one social media site at one time, not on all the sources.

When you work only on one source, you can show much variance and spend quality time to build audience around your blog using that medium. In other case, you can’t build great connections when you’re spending time on all the networks simultaneously.

One more major reason to consider social media sites to bring traffic is this, there’ll be no panda or penguin updates 

You just need to work on connecting with other bloggers, sharing and promoting their links to get noticed. They’ll also help if you’re ever in any need.

How to boost your online reputation using social media?

Be personal: Interact with your readers and engage with them using social media sites on a regular base. This will not only improve your fan base, but also provide great platform to make more sales.

Always provide great information: No matter how busy you’re with your blogs, spend quality time to share great information on social media sites to let your business grow. They will trust you and become loyal to you on social media sites when you’re offering great quality of contents all the time. This way you can make your online visibility go viral in no time.

Respond to your fans: This is the best way to give yourself a great online boosting for your blogs. Try to respond to everyone who keeps in touch with you. Offer them the best to gain their loyalty. In the long run, this will create a great impact on your online businesses and bring in more fans and followers on social media sites like Facebook, twitter or Google+

Work smart, not hard: This is the tricky part to boost your online reputation using social media sites, be interactive, don’t spend too much time on social media sites and kill your productive time. Instead, make social media sites work for you, connect with your readers, fans and followers at the peak time (where more users gather online). This way you can engage with more audience in less time.

Why SEO is REALLY important for your business?

No matter how flexible the social media traffic is, it can’t beat search engine traffic, because it’s the best traffic resource that’s available to you at free of cost, agree?

But bringing in search traffic to your blog posts, take time and your SEO skills to rank high for the desired keywords. So always make sure you’re spending quality time to learn new SEO practices to bring long lasting organic traffic to your blogs.

How to get more out of search engines?

Search engine traffic mainly depends on two factors.

Back links to your sites: The more quality back links headed toward your blog posts, the better ranking you’ll get in the search pages, simple as that. So, focus on writing quality blog posts and engaging with other bloggers to get quality links from them.

Time: Search engine traffic takes time, you can’t expect search traffic flowing through your blog within 5 minutes you publish a post on your blog, right? Some time it does take weeks, even months to get quality search traffic for the desired keywords. So patience is the key here.

Social media Vs SEO: Which is best?

I’m not going to dig into the details of which media platform is the best for your online businesses. Simply, they BOTH are required to succeed online, agree?

But, the key factor here is to decide where you can gather more users online. Is it social media sites or through search engines?

If you’re a newbie to online business or blogging, focus more on social media engagement because you’ll always find it easy and effective gather more people online. When you focus on search engine traffic when you don’t know anything, you could no results, because search traffic does take time. You need to work hard and optimize, get quality back links to your blog posts to reap the reward from the search engines.

Conclusion: No doubt, you need to focus on SEO, but solely don’t depend on search engines to drive traffic. Don’t prefer over optimizing your sites, it can really give bad results for your sites in the long run. Instead, also focus on user engagement on social media, because social media sites are becoming so important these days. You can’t simply ignore those sites to bring quality traffic, sales or leads.

Social media sites give instant traffic to your posts, whereas, search traffic does take lot of time to drive traffic. But both traffic sources are the best when you work according to your goals.

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How And Where to Get Social Media Jobs Online?

As I have been in the internet marketing field for long time, I’ve found that the companies offer jobs in social media space to the well established bloggers and people who thrive in their online business. Today, I came here to discuss on the topic on “How and where to get social media jobs online?”.

Grabbing a social media job online is not a cakewalk and this is why you are reading my post. However, after reading this whole post, you will not feel the same. I am trying to bring into your notice some major aspects of your profile and steps needed to get a job as a social media marketer online. Also, I will let you know some places to look for the social media jobs on the web.

Before getting into the detailed talk on getting social media jobs, I wanna tell about some common social media job titles that will be big in the upcoming years.

5 Common Social Media Careers

Social media has become a gateway in the digital marketing and advertising field. It helps the businesses to build relationship and reputation for their brands and, personalities to reach out & interact with the like-minded people. I would say that the social media is a revolutionary marketing medium which has limitless potential for the online businesses.

More companies are joining in social networks to get a public image and thus thesocial media jobs salary is still on the rise. Some of the hottest social media careers are as follows.

1. Social media manager

Social media manager implements the social strategies and responsible for the social presence of the company. Also he would handle the latest social media trendy tasks.

2. Community manager

Community manager would act as a liaison between the company and communities like forums, e-mail groups, social networks etc. In simple words, a manager of community understands and assists the customers of the company. Persuading active management of the community members, calculating performance of the company by using analytic tools and generating reports are some of the major tasks of the online community manager.
With these activities, the community manager would increase brand loyalty and web traffic of their company. Moreover, this employee works closely with the marketing director of the company to discuss and give ideas for future innovation.

3. Content Creator

Having company’s goals in mind, the content creator produces engaging and factual content through blogs, social networks, e-mail campaign, message boards etc. As this worker use keywords in the content, it would easily attract the readers and followers. Along with written and verbal communication skills, the content writer possesses project management and organizational skills to meet the company requirements. This staff member might be a blogger/copywriter.

4. SEO Specialist

To attract the potential customers by boosting the website rankings, companies need SEO specialist. Thus this person has knowledge in HTML, CSS & blogging and knows how to optimize the content for maximum exposure.

5. Marketing Analyst

Marketing analyst also called marketing manager has the skills to dig & analyze the data of the company to draw feasible insights. Experimenting new strategies is needed to give best social media campaigns and hence this employee analyze the results in a consistent way to improve the marketing efforts. A creative person with data analyzing skill can be a good social media marketer.

Depends upon the business size, social media offers some other job titles like Social media strategist, Social media marketing co-ordinator, Marketing consultant, Social media lead and so on.

Tips To Grab Social Media Jobs On Web 

Here are a few ways that can help you fetch well paid jobs in the field of social media. It only demands a little attention and effort in the following ways:

Be on the top

One of the best ways of enhancing your profile as a social media marketer online is being creative. There are many fish in the sea, then why should an organization catch hold of you only. You should look for creating creative genius in your resume and cover letter. The online engagement with the organization should always be as relevant as possible. Always remember that companies engaged in this type of business know it all. So, you will need to stick to your skills that make you different from the rest. You should always think of different ways of bring creativity in your blogs and posts in various social media websites.

Create your presence online

I have always been intrigued to read different kinds of social posts and blogs that trigger the grey matter of my brain. Any content on social media that catches me off guard is a sure shot success for me. You will also need to follow the same rule. Establishing a presence online is guaranteed by knowing the social media like the back of your hand. Always keep in mind that your social presence is the only thing that will get potential employers interested in your profile and skills.

Network your relations

If you are looking to swim with the big fishes in the market then you will need to use every social media connection. Your biggest asset is your social media connections, which can actually take you greater heights if used in a proper manner. Meet and engage with people who are the stalwarts in the market to gain experience and knowledge in the industry you are. Here, you will need to know thoroughly about the company you are working for.

Gain knowledge with basic programs and lingo

Well, there are many social media programs and platforms that you will need to know about in order excel in your skills. Cropping photos, video editing, basic html programs and WordPress are some of the things that you will need to know beforehand to get the best out of social media. I would also recommend you to know the different types of acronyms and terms that are used in social media to increase your versatility in this domain.

Learn the art of managing

The online activity never stops; therefore, it will require you to be on it constantly. You will need to juggle yourself between different browsers and messaging applications. Being an expert multi-tasker is the only way you will survive without getting overwhelmed with all the activity. Learn the shortcuts and change your work patterns as and when necessary to ensure an organized social media presence.

The above tips will help in gathering the best skills that you require to shine in the world of social media. These will also help to attract potential employers easily. Now, let’s see where to grab the social media jobs online.

Places To Find Jobs In Social Media

There are tremendous opportunities available to work with social media as its usage spreads like wild-fire. Below are the places to get a suitable social media job based on your skills.

Apart from top trending websites like Elance, Odesk, Mashable, Craigslist, LinkedIn, Simply Hired etc, you may look at the following websites to get a job on social media. If you’re a native American, you may find a job related to social media from the below sites.

Media Bistro

Social Media Job Wire

Jobs In Social Media

Dice

Get Social Media Jobs In India

Here are the places for Indians to search social media jobs online.

Media Jobs Daily

Work n Hire

Social Samosa

Paid Social Media Jobs

Conclusion:

A career in social media was unheard of past years. But, as the growth of social media has occurred rapidly over the recent years, companies have started to understand the importance of social media and needs qualified people to manage their online presence.

Especially, to establish trust and provide customer service to their targeted audience, businesses are utilizing this inexpensive media. Thus career paths in social media have exploded a lot. Almost every company has plans to market their business on social media and hiring full-time employees for different social media job titles.

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5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

1. Increase your linkability – This is the first and most important priority for websites.  Many sites are "static" – meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront.  To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content.  Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy – Adding content features like quick buttons to "add to del.icio.us" are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
3. Reward inbound links – Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings.  To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards.  From using Permalinks to recreating Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you
4. Help your content travel - Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site.  When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.   
5. Encourage the mashup – In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason).  YouTube's idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth.  Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.

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