2015 Year In Review – A Magical Year of Travel, Speaking and Partnerships

10 of the most popular SEW guest articles from 2015

A compilation of the most popular articles from Search Engine Watch guest contributors in 2015.

from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1kclibu via transformational marketing

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1OjoFeJ

Dedicated thank you pages are no longer optional for PPC

Are there technically ways to get around having a dedicated Thank You page on your site? Sure, it’s come time to quit taking short cuts and get yourself a dedicated landing page. Here’s why.

from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1YlUFDJ via transformational marketing

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1Pe3auY

Three ways we failed at B2B PPC in 2015

Nobody’s perfect and heck, let’s be real, B2B PPC can sometimes be even more challenging and have even more gray areas than B2C.

from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1O8OWWZ via transformational marketing

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1lUtKy0

Guess What Happened Next: Koozai TV Video Outtakes 2015

That’s another great year done for Koozai TV, but it wasn’t without it’s mishaps.

With many muddled speeches, forgotten words, a bit less profanity and a whole lot of messing around, we wrapped up almost 50 videos throughout this year.

So sit back and enjoy this compilation of some of the moments behind the scenes at Koozai TV.

We’ll be back in 2016 with a brand new format for our videos so make sure you subscribe to our website updates, newsletter, YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

The post Guess What Happened Next: Koozai TV Video Outtakes 2015 appeared first on Koozai.com

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1mnHFfU via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1IUUcBk

Customer journey from search to checkout - Star Wars: The Force Awakens tickets

In which we take a look at the experience of searching for a product, looking at a brand’s paid search ad for the item and its subsequent landing page, all from a customer’s point of view.

from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1UtuVjc via transformational marketing

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1TN8Ta8

Why you shouldn’t forget to update your Universal Analytics tracking codes

With Google announcing that it will be retiring its classic Analytics, if your sites and apps are still using old and outdated tracking codes and libraries, you’re going to miss out.

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1XYXavH via transformational marketing

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1RH46IV

Top 10 Content Marketing Tools

It can be all too easy to focus solely on results when you’re working on your digital campaigns. Although without the right tools in your arsenal you’re going to fall short every time.

Here we’re going to look at the top 10 Content Marketing tools that you should be using to boost the performance of your campaigns.

1. Gorkana

Site: http://ift.tt/1NOGAUe (Paid)

In the past, I’ve talked about the value that Gorkana can bring to your Content Marketing efforts and now, thanks to a recent update, it’s better than ever before.

By using the ‘Database Search’ function, you can segment your search and find the most appropriate journalists and bloggers to reach out to. This saves you from the painstaking task of crawling sites looking for contact details, which 9 times out of 10 don’t deliver. The site is updated on a regular basis so you can be sure that you’re contacting the right company, department and person.

The beauty of Gorkana is that it gives you all the information you need in one place. Looking for a monthly UK publication that specialises in consumer tech and has a strong social following? Gorkana makes these requests a doddle.

This accuracy has a knock-on effect to the success of your campaign. For example, using it when creating your Content Marketing strategy means that you can easily locate the sites and publications that your target audience reads. It can also be used to identify those key people who are most likely to share, link to and host your content.

Filters include:

• Sectors
• Country
• Social Media
• Language
• Interests
• Keyword
• Media Type
• Frequency
• Circulation
• Keyword
• Social Media

2. Copyscape

Site: http://ift.tt/I3vzgJ (Paid)

If you’re not already using Copyscape then you really should be. Sites like Copyscape are helping make duplicate content a thing of the past – or at the very least they’re making a considerable dent in the issue.

Using a debit card, credit card or Paypal account, you buy a certain number of credits, depending on how many your budget allows. Then simply copy and paste the content that you want to check into the text field. Next, click ‘Search Private + Internet’. This clever piece of tech will instantly identify any lines of text that have been duplicated, and provides their location.

What’s more, you can also compare the two versions of the content. This is great for checking if your content has been scraped so that you can pro-actively work to prevent a Google penalty for duplication.

A trap many Content Marketers fall into is unintentional plagiarism. It’s all too easy to read a piece online when researching for your own work, only for the odd line or phrase to accidently wheedle its way in. Copyscape helps to eradicate these instances and ensure that your content is 100% unique.

3. HARO

Site: http://ift.tt/fslNCK (Free)

Help a Reporter Out – more commonly known as HARO – is a powerful sourcing service connecting journalists, brands and industry experts. Every year HARO helps introduce over 475,000 sources with just over 35,000 journalists, making it an essential tool for brands and reporters alike.

So how does it work? Well, you just need to visit the site, sign up for the service and state your fields of interest. Then you will receive a minimum of three emails per day with the latest media requests for your chosen subjects.

HARO sends out over 50,000 media requests from high-quality outlets each year. This free tool is perfect for those looking for newsjacking opportunities. Journalists on deadline will provide a short description of what they need help with, or require a comment on, the kind of expert they have in mind and the deadline for entries.

This straightforward pitching approach works well for content marketers looking to increase their client’s reach and showcase their expertise. It’s also an effective way to facilitate your SEO campaign. So it’s a win-win situation for everyone involved. Content Marketers can provide comments and statistics related to their client’s expertise and journalists get high-quality content to include in their articles, thus saving time on sourcing data from multiple sites.

Preferences include:

• High Tech
• Energy and Green Tech
• Sports
• Public Policy and Government
• General
• Travel
• Business and Finance
• Biotech and Healthcare
• Lifestyle and Fitness
• Entertainment and Media
• Education
• Giftbag
• UK

4. #journorequest

Site: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23journorequest&src=tyah (Free)

Twitter is an undoubtedly powerful tool that many Content Marketers utilise every single day, but are you aware of the #journorequest feature?

Type #journorequest into the search bar on Twitter and you’ll be greeted with countless tweets from journalists all over the globe looking for help from brands and industry experts. This is a great tool for sourcing news stories to contribute to.

To use the hashtag to its full potential and make your search more defined, just type #journorequest and then a topic relevant to your client into the search bar. For example, for a business insurance client, you might type ‘#journorequest insurance’.

The #journorequest is fantastic because both parties involved get something positive out of the experience. Journalists who are often working to a strict deadline have less research to carry out and gain a quote from a credible source. You or your client, on the other hand, gets to increase their brand’s exposure, share their expertise and acquire high-quality links. As always, make sure that the link is natural. Keyword stuffing in anchor text just isn’t good enough.

#PRrequest is also a great hashtag to search for in Twitter. This is more for clients who want to gain exposure for a certain product or service. An example would be a consumer technology provider wanting to boost sales of their key products and a journalist looking for tech products to review for a Christmas gift guide.

It’s worth noting that links included in any product reviews must be no-followed so that Google doesn’t deem them as paid-for links and dismiss them entirely.

5. Buzzsumo

Site: http://buzzsumo.com/ (Paid)

Buzzsumo is an effective tool for a number of reasons, the first being that it’s perfect for checking how your content is performing. Just enter the URL of the content into the search bar and, hey presto, you’ll see the social shares it’s acquired. You can also view the backlinks that the content has acquired.

Another reason that Buzzsumo is a great resource for Content Marketers is that it’s extremely effective for identifying which sites and publications are talking about subjects relevant to your business, or that of your client. This can then help when it comes to newsjacking. It saves a huge amount of time spent on trying to find targeted articles to contribute to.

It can also be used when creating your Content Marketing strategy. Type your chosen topics into the search bar and you’re instantly shown the existing content that’s out there. This shows what is and isn’t working and will hopefully inspire you to create something even better now that you’re armed with information on how to make it more effective.

Filters include:

• Date – 24 hours, past week, past month, past 6 months, past year or specific date
• Language
• Country
• Content type

6. Ahrefs

Site: https://ahrefs.com/ (Paid)

Ahrefs is a wonderful resource for Content Marketers. You can use the ‘Content Explorer’ to search for a topic relevant to yours or your client’s brand. You’re then provided with a list of content that has gained the most social shares.

The effective tools allow you to tap into the mindset of your intended audience. You can see what grabs their interest and causes them to share online, and then use this to help boost your marketing strategy. It’s also a great source of inspiration. Ask yourself: “Can I improve on this?” If the answer is yes, you could potentially create a powerful piece of content. However, make sure you find a hook, an angle, to make it unique.

Ahrefs is also a brilliant tool to use when newsjacking. Again by typing in topics relevant to your client, you can see the posts out there that you could potentially add a comment to. You can also filter by date and location to make your search more defined.

The search results include the title of the article, the author, the date it was published and a link to the content. So next time you’re searching for leading sites to work with as part of your Content Marketing efforts, keep Ahrefs in mind.

Filters include:

• Date
• Domain name
• Language

7. HootSuite

Site: https://hootsuite.com/ (Free)

Hootsuite is so much more than social media scheduling software. It’s also a powerful aggregator, making it an essential tool for Content Marketers. You can add a whole host of social media platforms to the software and assign each one its own tab. That way you can keep up-to-date with all your social platforms in one place.

Hootsuite provides you with the capability to add streams to your dashboards so that you can keep on top of not only the latest industry updates, but also your social media activity and interaction. This is perfect for analysing how a social media campaign is performing, for example tracking a hashtag connected with a competition.

Of course, Hootsuite is known for its social media scheduling. It’s still one of the best scheduling tools  around and given the effective additional features it offers, it has developed into an essential piece of kit for marketers.

If you want to improve your Hootsuite skills, there’s also a great ‘Hootsuite University’ course you can take to get the most from your social campaigns. There’s a fee attached to this, but it’s well worth the investment.

You can add the following social networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+
• LinkedIn
• WordPress
• Instagram

Feeds options include:

• Home
• Mentions
• Messages (inbox and outbox)
• Your tweets
• Likes
• Retweets
• Scheduled posts
• New followers

8. Feedly

Site: https://feedly.com/ (Free)

Feedly is an invaluable tool for those looking to collate news stories that are relevant to their clients. The site provides a minimalist, user-friendly experience, optimised for productivity rather than style.

With Feedly you can discover fresh, authoritative voices on both niche and broad topics. You can easily share or schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and more by using a Hootsuite or Buffer plug-in. Remember that a brand which only shares its own content is somewhat one-dimensional. Sharing stories connected with your brand helps define it as an authoritative one that passes on valuable information.

There’s also the capability to monitor news about your client and their competitors by connecting Feedly to Google Alerts. Feedly can be used as a resource of information too, enabling you to stay informed about all the latest news related to your brand. It helps you keep your content relevant and competitive.

In addition to these useful features, you can also share the collections that you create with colleagues and networks. This can be used to discover what other thought leaders and teammates are reading.

9. YouGov Profiler

Site: http://ift.tt/1zV3doa (Free)

YouGov Profiler is a fantastic tool to have at your disposal. Enter the brand, person or subject that you want to research and it will segment the data into a series of fields.

You’re presented with a multitude of insightful data based on your search term, including where the average amount people interested in that term live, their earning power and their social grade. You’re even given a glimpse into their interests and online behaviour.  The data is 100% accurate and based on information given by YouGov panel members.

Content Marketers can use YouGov Profiler for a variety of different tasks, the most important being audience identification when you’re creating your Content Marketing strategy. For trustworthy data on your intended audiences, YouGov Profiler is one of the best tools around. It provides an unparalleled breadth of data, which is why it’s used by a wealth of agencies and brands across the UK.

The paid version gives you access to exclusive information from YouGov Cube, a data vault that holds over 120,000 data points on a group of over 250,000 UK YouGov panel members.

Results include:

• Demographics
• Lifestyle information
• Personality traits
• Brands they are invested in
• Entertainment preferences
• Online activity
• The type of media they consume

10. TweetDeck

Site: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ (Free)

TweetDeck is an extremely powerful Twitter tool that provides real-time tracking, organisation and engagement data. It allows you to create a customer Twitter dashboard where information on how your brand is performing on Twitter is just a click away.

The free tool means that you can create custom timelines to keep track of everything from lists and searches you’ve created to follower interaction activity and more, all in one place.

You can set up custom searches to track topics, events and hashtags connected with your brand and then refine the results with TweetDeck’s filtering system. For example, you may have a search column set up showing people tweeting stories or mentioning your brand’s name or account. That way you can see in real-time how people are reacting to your content.

What’s more, you can share your account with your marketing team without having to share your password, meaning that a vacation or sick day doesn’t mean giving others access to the valuable data.

Columns include:

• Mentions
• Activity
• Likes
• Followers
• Messages
• Trending
• Collections
• Lists
• Collections
• Scheduled

Get in Touch

These are just a handful of the Content Marketing tools we use to deliver award-winning results at Koozai. Have you come across an effective tool that hasn’t made it onto our list? I would love to hear from you. Leave your suggestions or comments below.

If you don’t have the time or expertise in-house to reach your Content Marketing goals, then get in touch with Koozai today.

The post Top 10 Content Marketing Tools appeared first on Koozai.com

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1XYKLb1 via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1OTmwoP

Brand name bidding: should you buy ads for your brand terms?

Why do brands bid on their own brand terms? Is it a good idea, or a bad one? Aren’t you just paying for traffic that you’d otherwise get for free?

from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1R4Nhbn via transformational marketing

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/21JPih3

How to create custom segments in Google Analytics

Segments allow marketers to interrogate Google Analytics data more effectively in a way that suits their business needs. This post explains how to create segments.

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1Ir1n45 via transformational marketing

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1OADCrB

Content Writer vs Copywriter: What’s the Difference?

A Content Writer and a Copywriter is the same thing, right? They both write words used in online and offline content, so surely they’re just fancy names for what is essentially a writer?

In actual fact, they’re very different. They both act as a cornerstone for the other; think of them as two different sides of the same coin, as although there are similarities in the two skill sets, there are also some clear differences, too.

From a traditional marketing perspective, the answer is pretty simple. Let’s explore…

What is a Content Writer?

Put simply, they write content. Although there must be more to them than that, surely? Well, yes, Content Writers create a range of different content types using written word; usually long-form, rich-content that is search engine optimised.

When a Content Writer creates a piece of content they are most likely considering the use of keywords, Meta, and how shares and links to the piece will amplify the content. A Content Writer can also be known to create ‘evergreen content’; articles, blog posts, newspaper pieces, magazine features, whitepapers and any other types of long-form, content.

Content Writers are quite journalistic in nature, with editorial copy tightly in their remit, generally writing pieces of content with longer word counts and intricate details – these authoritative pieces perform better when being shared online too.

And how, you might be wondering, is that any different from a Copywriter?

What is a Copywriter?

A Copywriter is of a similar vein in that they also write copy. However, Copywriters are usually used as advertising vehicles, typically specialising in short-form copy, such as straplines, headlines or press ads.

Now that’s not to say that Copywriters shouldn’t have long-form copy in their arsenal. In fact, what we’re seeing is a transition of Copywriters to web writers in marketing, such as display advertising, creating an even stronger online presence. Over time, these will naturally migrate to Content Writers.

Copywriters are praised for the creation and ideation of words in campaigns, where the marketing material is used to persuade a person or a group to think or act a particular way. This is generally achieved in short-form copy or storytelling, evoking emotion and a personal connection with the audience; it also lends itself to a humorous or jovial tone – perfect for straplines or headers. In fact, for a Copywriter, brevity is vital.

That being said, there is a cross over in remits.

How Do Content Writers and Copywriters Work?

Arguably, they’re two of the same and in no uncertain terms is one easier than the other as a profession. However there are definitely differences that seem to be overlooked and these can come in handy if you’re looking to hire a writer for specific work.

These days, it’s crucial to be well versed in both.

Further differences between the two lie with the submittal deadlines. Although this isn’t always definitive, Content Writers appear to have longer lead-times than Copywriters. Their work is a result of well-planned content with the help of road maps, timelines, content calendars and the like. Whereas a Copywriter can be called on at the last minute to provide copy. Whilst being agile and reactive should be in both skill sets, Copywriters are less likely to plan in their workload as concisely as a Content Writer.

Saying this, Content Writers should not remove working to tight deadlines from their skill set either and Copywriters won’t always have the luxury of a working extension.

Going forward, Content Writers and Copywriters must work arm in arm to build traffic, create relationships with customers and consumers and ultimately build the brand. So although they have slightly different responsibilities, it’s paramount to include them both when building websites. However, as Copywriters grow to combine strategic writing with great content, they may just have the best of both worlds. As the term Content Writer is still in its infancy, perhaps we’ll continue to see a cross over as it evolves.

What Do You Think?

What are your thoughts? Do you agree with how the terms have been split? Are you a writer and feel that it’s more about perspective, or do you think they are much of the same and a Content Writer is just marketing jargon – probably at some point thought up by a Copywriter?

Please add your thoughts to the comment section below or tweet me @coco_nicol. I’d love to know what you think.

The post Content Writer vs Copywriter: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Koozai.com

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1lxSF9D via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1HHEPw1

The Future Of Search

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Hi there. Today I want to take you through the future of search. It’s going to be a quick overview of what threats face Google in the next sort of decade or so from existing competitors as well as new entries to the market.

First off, let’s have a look at the existing competitors. So we’re talking about Yahoo! Bing mainly in sort of the UK/US markets, but we’re also seeing a massive growth in DuckDuckGo as well as Baidu, the Chinese search engine.

So if we look at Yahoo! Bing, the way Windows 10 ha integrated Bing is a massive step forward for the search engine, and there’s also been sort of complaints again that they’re limiting competition. But this does present quite a good opportunity for Bing to grow its market share. As well as this, it’s had a tie up with Spotlight, the Apple search software, which means that it basically is integrated into Apple iPhones and iPads and any devices running the iOS software, which is a monumental market to be the default search engine on.

We also want to look at the threat from the newer competitors on the market. So DuckDuckGo have formed a huge, comprehensive search engine based on the whole idea of privacy being a huge issue and that Google infringes privacy too much with its existing products. DuckDuckGo has seen a massive, massive growth and recorded four million searches per year. So it’s seeing sort of huge inroads in terms of becoming a big competitor to Google.

As well as this, Baidu is a huge competitor in China. It absolutely dominates the search market, much like Google does here. That search engine is available for users outside of China. So anyone in Western Europe, America, or anywhere, in the same way that Google is, can use Baidu. It would just take a good sort of marketing push to start integrating that wealth of knowledge and expertise that Baidu obviously have into becoming a real competitor to Google and causing it some real issues.

As well as the existing competitors, Google has also got to be slightly aware of areas such as Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.

So Amazon is becoming one of the biggest competitors, and one of the heads of Google has already stated that Amazon is their biggest competitor. The reason he said this is because the product search on Amazon is huge. The market it has is massive, and one of the issues for Google is that product search is one of the main reasons why people advertise on Google. Bringing in that revenue is a huge part of Google’s advertising module, which brings in $58 billion every year for their business, and this is a core driver of Google.

So that’s a huge threat that Amazon have been able to pose. They’re really going to push forward with that, especially now they’ve started to exclude Google AdSense in Amazon as well, and they have started to exclude products such as Google Chromecast, for instance. It shows how much of an influence Amazon want to become in that market.

Facebook also have over a billion users, and they recorded a billion active users in one day, which again is not far off the numbers of Google. It’s just presenting another major opportunity for advertisers and Facebook itself to come together and create a real competitor to Google.

One of the big areas that Facebook could really excel at is local. It has a lot of location data. A lot of people like things from their local areas, and the knowledge it has on users is incredible. Even competitor Google, which has a lot of tracking features, but it doesn’t have the actual raw information per user that Facebook has. You can see through Facebook advertising at the moment how strong that data is to advertisers. So that provides a humongous opportunity for Facebook to really rival Google, especially in local searches and again probably moving into more web searches in the future.

There are also rumours that Apple may be using its Spotlight search feature, which has grown massively in the instruction of the new iOS, to create a web competitor for searches to Google. There’ve been a lot of rumours about job posts for specialists in search. This is one area that Apple, with its many billions in reserves, could give Google a real fight in terms of the iOs devices having inbuilt search software that bypasses Google completely.

So it’s a huge threat to Google, especially as mobile devices are becoming so popular. It would sort of mean Apple versus Android when it comes to mobile searches. So it presents a massive opportunity for Apple and a major threat to Google.

So the future of search is looking a bit more diverse than it used to be, especially for the UK and the US markets that have a massive reliance on Google. The competitors are growing in number and in ability and posing a much greater threat through specific types of searches, rather than Google sort of collect all search version of its algorithm.

So hopefully that gives you a little bit more information on the future of search. We’ve also written a blog post on it as well that you can have a look at. And if you’ve got any questions, please feel free to follow me @JamesaChallis. Thank you.

The post The Future Of Search appeared first on Koozai.com

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1NHk8CI via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1SwrSW8

Why do you have a website? Balancing your site's intentions with the visitor experience

What seems like quite a straightforward and possibly ridiculous question is meant as a ‘gut-check that shouldn’t just be identified only once by an organization, but periodically over time.

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1lrZMAC via transformational marketing

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1NovUjb

A Guide To Gmail Sponsored Promotions Ads

Today I will be guiding you through one of the more recent features within Google AdWords called Gmail Sponsored Promotions (GSP). GSP is a way of targeting users based on their Gmail account activity. GSP previously lived in their own UI, but Google realised how successful a platform it was and recently released it from Beta to all advertisers – which means that everyone can now have a play!

This guide will cover the advert layout, targeting options, top strategies, how to set up a campaign in Google AdWords and tips to get you started.

Advert Layout

The Gmail advert is set out in two sections in the Gmail inbox – a collapsed ad and an expanded ad, but essentially this is the same advert. The collapsed ad appears as a ‘new message’ in your inbox and when you click on it, this then leads you to another ad – the expanded ad. You pay for the cost per click (CPC) every time somebody clicks on the collapsed ad. The expanded ad then leads the user to your landing page; however, you do not pay for the click from the expanded ad to the landing page (this is free).

The screenshots below are taken from my personal Gmail account to show you the layout. It’s quite clever really; as you can see there are two adverts targeting my search history – mortgages and mobile phone companies – so it’s an extremely personalised method of targeting!

Collapsed Ad

Expanded Ad

Targeting Options

There are many targeting options you can select when using GSP, including the use of keywords, topics, interests, remarketing (including Customer Match) and demographics.

Advertisers were previously able to target based on recent purchases made by the user and their job title. However, this feature was removed when GSP moved from the independent UI to the standard AdWords interface.

Top Strategies

The best strategy to use – which many people are getting excited about – is to bid on your competitors’ domains by uploading them into the keywords section. This means that your ads will appear to those who are receiving e-mails from your competitors. Be prepared to bid aggressively and tweak bids to gain impressions using this strategy, as there will be a lot of competition now GSP’s out of beta.

Another great strategy is to target the domains that have the same target market as you, but are not necessarily competitors. For example, if you owned a garden machinery company, you could target gardening magazines’ domains, as you would both share a very similar audience. This is another fantastic way to place your ads in front of the right audience.

Google has recently released Customer Match, which is another effective strategy to use. For Gmail ads, this works by uploading a customer’s e-mail addresses to a campaign in order to make your ad pop up in your customer’s Gmail inbox (sneaky I know!). Check out Dean’s post on Customer Match to find out more about this.

It’s important to try different strategies to find the one that works best for your business. Utilise the targeting options including keywords/topics alongside the Gmail placement.

One thing to note with these strategies is that you shouldn’t try to use the targeting methods too narrowly: if the targeting is too granular you won’t gain enough traffic. For example, you do not want to be targeting topics on top of keywords and the Gmail placement, as your targeting would be too narrow. Try to stick to using the Gmail placement and one other targeting method per campaign.

How Do I Create A GSP Campaign?

Now to the fun part that will help you get started – setting up your first GSP campaign!

First of all, you need to make sure you have a Google AdWords account. When you have filled in the relevant details, you can start to build your campaign. Select “Campaigns”, then “Display Network only”.

From here, you need to name your campaign and select “Display Network only” (ensure all features are ticked) and you can also choose to upload settings from your existing Display Network campaigns to save time. You then choose the locations you want to include and exclude, and the language you are targeting.

Choosing the bid strategy is the next step. I would normally advise starting out with the basic options and selecting the option “I’ll manually set my bids for clicks”; this is so I have more control over how much I want to bid, rather than letting Google run away with my money! When your campaigns are live and accumulating over 15 conversions a month, you can explore the “Advanced Options” and turn on “Enhanced CPC” to increase your conversions.

You then need to set the budget for the campaign. If your campaign is limited by budget, the best strategy is to initially set your budget low and increase it as time goes on. However, if you start out by using the competitor domain strategy, be prepared to spend a little more than the average Display Network campaign, as this can be competitive. You can set your delivery method to “Standard: Display ads evenly over time” to conserve your budget.

I recommend using Ad Extensions in all campaigns, even if they may not appear half of the time. So ensure you fill out the Location and Call extensions, as this is great for increasing your click-through rate (CTR). For the ad schedule, choose the days and hours you want your ads to run. Ad rotation needs to be changed to “Rotate evenly”, as you will be split testing your ads to find the best ad text variations.

Frequency capping is where you cap the number of times somebody sees your ad. It’s always best to set a frequency cap in your campaigns to limit unwanted impressions. I generally aim for three impressions a day per campaign, but this depends on your business model and what you are selling. Another way to set your frequency capping is by using the reporting in Google Analytics to see how many visits it usually takes for someone to convert.

The last options can be left as they are unless you have any specific requirements.

From here, you can save and continue, and then create and name the first ad group. You could split your ad groups up by naming them after different sections of your business. For example, for Koozai there could be a “Digital Marketing” campaign and another for “PPC”. This can also be reflected in your ad creative. We then go on to select our targeting options. Select your Gmail placement under “Use a different targeting method” and add the website mail.google.com.

Select the option “Narrow your targeting further (optional)”, then “Display keywords” and add in the domains or keywords you are targeting. If you want to use other methods of targeting, you can do this here too.

Make sure you select “Conservative Targeting”, which lets AdWords automatically find new customers. Click “Save and continue”.

Once you have saved this part, you’ll come to creating the ads. However, you need to skip this part as AdWords hasn’t integrated creating ads into this section of the set up yet. Continue to confirm the campaign.

Now the creative part – actually making your ads! Dive back into your campaign, select “Ads” and then “Ad Gallery”.

Select “Gmail Ads”.

You have four options to choose from. I would advise starting with the simplest template “Gmail image template” which is essentially a big banner ad that targets one landing page. I would also recommend testing the “Gmail single promotion template”, which includes a call to action button for you to add in an additional landing page. The last two options are for more advanced features. The “Gmail multi-product template” creates an ad unit similar to an e-commerce category page that displays multiple products and links out to different landing pages. The “Gmail custom HTML upload” option allows you to embed videos, forms and click-to-call capabilities and must be formatted as a zip file.

If you were to select the “Gmail image template”, it would look like the example below. Name your ad, choose your display URL and destination URL. Upload your logo (or you can be creative with this and upload a different design) and upload your main image. Remember to include a call to action in your ad text and image.

After you’ve saved this, create another ad to split test against your original ad and you’re ready to rock!

Tips

I will now go through some of the best practices to take into consideration when running your GSP campaigns.

Gmail Reporting Columns

Enable the Gmail reporting columns in order to measure your campaigns accurately. The options are “Gmail saves” (when somebody saves your ad to the inbox as if it were a real message), “Gmail forwards” (which shows the number of times somebody forwards your ad on to somebody else as a message) and finally “Gmail clicks to website” (which indicates the number of clicks that go through to your landing page). It is vital to track the “Gmail clicks to website”, as this is essentially your real Cost per Click (CPC). The CPC recorded in AdWords for Gmail Ads relates to the Cost per Click on the initial collapsed ad.

Be Creative 

Optimise the ad image by split testing against another ad, or if you need calls to your business, add your phone number to the expanded ad image. The “Advertiser” and “Logo” sections don’t need to be filled in exactly as they are – you can be imaginative with what you upload. Gmail Ads allows you to be creative with text and images – so make the most of it!

Exclusion Types 

Use exclusion types, which can be found under “targeting” in your campaigns. You could exclude certain keywords or topics depending on what campaign type you have set up. Don’t go too wild on this, as your targeting is narrow as it is! Site category options are also best to review and switch off, in particular “Parked domains”, “Error pages” and “Gambling”, as in the example below:

Desktop 

Start your campaign by targeting desktop users only by setting a bid adjustment of -100% on mobile in the devices section. This will save costs in the beginning – after a few months you can then test whether mobile devices are worth having switched on.

Target and Bid 

Within the targeting settings, always make sure you choose the option “Target and Bid” when selecting your targeting options. This is because you want your ads to show based on your targeting selections – especially the Gmail placement, as otherwise your ads won’t show.

Frequency Capping 

Remember to set your frequency capping, like you do in your remarketing campaigns. You don’t want to waste too many impressions on a person who may be getting fed up of seeing your ad!

Embedded YouTube Video 

If you have a relevant video, make sure you include this by embedding your YouTube video into the ad. This will improve performance and expand the reach of your video.

There we have it – your complete guide to Gmail Sponsored Promotions Ads. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me on the social profiles below or alternatively contact Koozai for help on setting up your Gmail Sponsored Promotions campaigns.

The post A Guide To Gmail Sponsored Promotions Ads appeared first on Koozai.com

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1HCkW9F via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1PqTJJy

6 Key Areas to Focus Your SEO Campaign

An effective SEO campaign needs a clear strategy that addresses the main issues that exist with a website. This should be straightforward but is often overlooked or not properly analysed before a campaign is begun.

One area that should be prioritised – but is often overlooked – involves analysing what the search competition is doing to rank; after all, any site would rank first without any competition! Having a well-researched view of competitors’ sites allows you to plan how to rank above their websites on the first page.

To do this, you’ll need to look at all aspects of SEO and build a profile of what the competition does well and where it could improve. This could become more difficult as Google relies on entities instead of backlinks. However, it’s still possible and remains vitally important.

Once the data – that demonstrates what is required to succeed – has been collected, it’s important to identify the major problems that exist with your site. If a competitor is ranking effectively even though both their site and yours have duplicate content issues, then this is unlikely to be the place to start when it comes to prioritising a campaign. Without this information, a huge amount of time could be spent resolving internal or external duplicate content issues that may not provide any significant benefit to the site visibility.

Content

One of the major areas for SEO is to look at the site’s content, including any blog or news sections. Content should become a priority area if competitors are producing quality information that’s shared by others or including a large amount of relevant text on important pages that rank well.

If your site is unable to match or improve on what your competitor is offering, this will be a major setback for a campaign that aims to rank above them. Producing content frequently and keeping it fresh and up to date will have a significant influence on the search results.

Any information on product and service pages should also be a priority when it comes to building a successful SEO campaign. If other results for your primary terms have content that is up to date, this will be a key issue to resolve.

Backlink Risk

The threat from a poor and unnatural backlink profile is real: in the past, this has almost certainly caused some huge multinational brands to lose a fortune on their share price because their search visibility had taken a tumble. Google uses algorithms and humans as well as the competition for each SERP vertical to determine whether the link profile will damage the site visibility.

This is another reason why understanding competitors and your own site from the start is important: it allows you to identify whether backlinks are really holding the site back or whether they are similar to the rest of the search results.

Authority Building

Does the site have a strong existing search presence or does Google barely recognise that it exists? This is often a priority for a new company: search presence should be established by getting quality websites linking to the site. This is usually achieved by creating content but also by engaging with local/national events, working with existing communities and ensuring that citations are in place from leading industry sources. If the site does have a presence, it’s important to establish whether it’s strong enough to compete.

Some business owners can’t understand that their organisation is an industry leader and yet doesn’t appear on the first page of relevant searches. Only by examining the site’s position and comparing this with the competition can you establish the need for good quality backlinks and citations as a leading priority.

Page Relevance

Most of the time, a web page will have some relevance to a keyword it’s trying to rank for. However, when mathematical calculations and rules determine the ranking of a web page, this may not be enough, especially in competitive search verticals. A detailed review of key pages is required, which involves looking very closely at the content on page and analysing where and when the page is referencing important terms and how the page is internally and externally linked. The days of external exact match anchor text may be fading but relevant linking sites and strong internal navigation are still hugely important.

Remember to analyse the importance of page relevance by comparing your site with others, and make sure you understand how those sites are seen to be more relevant by search engines. This review should also help give you ideas regarding how to improve your own site.

Technical Improvements

Sometimes huge gains can be made by resolving technical issues that prevent or restrict search engines from crawling important parts of a site. This happens all the time with both new and old websites and usually involves issues related to mainstream Content Management Systems. By controlling the pages that a search engine indexes and by correcting site structure, navigation and layout, a website can really improve on its existing search visibility.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is usually a prime candidate for e-commerce stores selling branded goods, as the product descriptions are often the same across the web. That said, this issue may be less important for sites specialising in unique goods or services that have less serious duplication or where only some pages are affected. It’s always good to ensure your site is as unique as possible but if there are other issues, it’s crucial to understand which would provide more value. Carry out an initial review and check what’s common amongst other sites in the same search vertical to help determine where to focus your resources.

Conclusion

The six areas listed above should give a clear guide into the priorities of any SEO campaign. A solid platform of initial research encompassing competitors and a detailed analysis of your site will help form a strategy for a successful campaign and, potentially, a greater return on investment.

The post 6 Key Areas to Focus Your SEO Campaign appeared first on Koozai.com

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1OhYZ0E via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1MFRgHm

Are Thanksgiving traditions a relic of the past? A Google Trends investigation

Using Google Trends data, here’s a look into what the most popular traditions are and find out just how much things have changed since 1621.

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1T3H6lp via transformational marketing

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1R6w14v

5 Common AdWords PPC Mistakes

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Hello. I often get asked about quick wins when it comes to PPC, and I really think that the quickest wins are fixing some of the most common mistakes.

So when I first get hold of a PPC project, these are the sorts of things I look for, and more often than not I find issues in at least one or more of these areas. Fixing them can actually have those quick wins that you’re looking for, and you can see a quick turnaround and improve ROI in a short the short term.

I’m going to talk you through the top five mistakes that I see all the time. The first one is brand and more specifically not bidding on your brand.

So many companies are using AdWords and they’re bidding on all the target keywords and the keywords in their niche and all the things they need to be bidding on, but they think that they don’t need to bid on their brand because they rank first organically for their brand name. If people are looking for them, they’re going to find them anyway. Why should they pay for that?

But really you’re missing a really big opportunity. There are a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, when it comes to relevancy, there can be no more relevant keyword. As such, you’re going to have a really great quality score. You’re likely to be always at the top of that paid listing unless someone is aggressively trying to outbid you.

The result of that high quality score is that you’re going to be paying less per click, a lot less per click. So typically, brand campaigns have really low cost per click. On the flip side, they have a really good CTR, a really good click-through rate as well, because it’s really relevant. People are looking for you.

So you’re not paying very much. You’re getting a really good CTR. What that does is it improves the quality of the campaign and therefore the account. It brings your average click-through rate across the campaign right up, and it gives you a really good advantage there.

Of course, there’s the added value that you’re taking up more real estate in the search engine results pages. If competitors are bidding on your brand, you want to make sure you are as well, or you could be losing out to them in that area anyway. So it’s really important that you do bid on your brand. It’s cheap, it’s effective, and it improves the quality of your campaign.

Negatives, this is a big one especially with old accounts. Sometimes they can’t work out where they’re going wrong, why they’re wasting so much budget. They’re doing a lot of other things right, but they’re completely forgetting about negative keywords.

It’s really important that you’re using lots and lots of negative keywords. You should be scouring through your search term report to find things that aren’t relevant and making sure that you don’t show up again and waste budget. Or even if people aren’t clicking, because the ads aren’t relevant for certain keywords, you’re still wasting impressions, which means your CTR, your click-through rate is going down.

So effectively using negative keywords is really, really important, and you should be adding them in regularly. There’s always going to be more coming up, and even when you think you’ve completely saturated it, you’d be surprised what you see in the Search Query Report. So be really vigilant when it comes to negative keywords and make sure you’re not wasting any budget or impressions.

Split-testing. A lot of time people put one ad in each ad group and they run that for a long period of time and then periodically they might change it. But they’re not constantly running two or more ads at the same time to see which performs better at that time. If you’re not doing that, then you’re missing an opportunity to improve your ads.

So you should be running at least two ads in each ad group all the time. Once you’ve got enough impressions, at least over 100, ideally over 100 clicks if you’re running a bigger campaign, then you can really see which is performing better.

If there’s obvious discrepancies in the CTR, then you can pause the underperforming one, make a duplicate of the one that’s performing better, and then tweak something else to see if you can find further ways to improve. So this is a really good opportunity to improve click-through rate and then obviously all the other metrics that go along with it.

Ad extensions have been around for quite a while, and they’re increasingly important. A lot of brands still aren’t using them or aren’t using them effectively or aren’t using all the ones that are available to them.

You definitely want to be using ad extensions. There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t use at least two or three of the available ad extensions. There’s quite a few out there now — location extensions, call extensions, call-out extensions, site link extensions to name a few.

There’s going to be some that are relevant for you for all businesses. Using them gives you more real estate in the ads so you take up more space. It makes your ads stand out more. It gives your users more information. They all do different things.

But the important factor to remember with ad extensions is that they now also contribute to your quality score. So using them is going to essentially help you bring your costs down as well. Failing to use them and your competitors are using them, they’ve got an advantage.

There’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be using them. Make sure that you’ve gone through and you’ve checked all the ones that are available and you’re using all the ones that are appropriate, which is going to be a good few of them, probably three or four at least.

Lastly, mobile. We go on and on about mobile at the moment in the whole digital marketing industry, specifically on the SEO side. But we cannot forget mobile on the PPC side either. It’s increasingly important. The search engines are making lots and lots of noise about it all the time. It’s not dying down. People are using more mobile searches. It’s only going to grow, and it’s going to continue to grow on the paid side as well.

So there’s no reason that you should be thinking about mobile on the SEO side but neglecting it on the PPC side. What that means is having mobile specific ads, mobile specific ad extensions, all of which are available, making sure you’ve set your bid adjustments accordingly so you’re bidding where you want to be bidding for mobile searches, and most importantly that you’ve got mobile friendly landing pages that are optimised and are showing properly for your mobile audience.

It might be that you have different landing pages for your mobile ads, or it might be you have a responsive design and it’s the same landing page, but as long as it renders properly on any device. So it’s really important to consider this so that you’re not either wasting budget or neglecting a growing audience when it comes to your ads.

So if you go through these five things in your AdWords campaign, I expect you’ll find something that you can tweak to improve performance. A lot of these have got some quite quick wins associated with them. So I recommend going away and having a look at your campaign.

If there is any more help you would like with that, then please feel free to get in touch, leave a comment at the end of the video, send me a tweet, or give us a call.

The post 5 Common AdWords PPC Mistakes appeared first on Koozai.com

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1XfBZVJ via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1R6vYpr

Boosting Your SEO by Helping Googlebot

What’s the secret to Google loving your website and indexing it? The secret is to steer crawlers to the most important and useful pages of your site and ignore those pages with little value to searchers. You may think that you want Google or Bing to index every URL of your website but you could be preventing it from crawling your most important pages by using up your ‘crawl budget’ on poor or irrelevant pages.

What is ‘crawl budget’?

When Google’s crawlbot (or Bing’s for that matter) comes to your website, it has a finite amount of resources to spend on accessing your website’s pages; after all, Google has millions of other websites to crawl that day too.

Your crawl budget can be determined by the value or quality of your website already, including but not limited to the quality of backlinks to your website. I won’t speculate on more factors here, but there are some good research pieces on the web where people have tried to identify these factors.

Why control access?

Give important pages priority

By controlling where Googlebot is allowed to crawl within your website, you are increasing the likelihood that important and valuable pages will be crawled every time Google visits your website.

Examples of these could be your product or service pages, blog post pages or even your contact details page. All of these are pages you want to have ranked highly in the search results so users can find this information quicker.

Ignore pages that don’t need to be ranked

There will be pages of your website that have no need to be indexed in the search results. These include pages that a user wouldn’t typically look for in the search results but perhaps will browse to whilst on your website. These could be your privacy policy page, terms & conditions page or your blog tag or category pages.

How to help Googlebot access the right pages of your website

There are a number of different ways in which you can help Googlebot access your website. The more of the following you can adjust or implement, the more control you should have over Googlebot or Bingbot.

Robots.txt file

The first thing to look at is setting disallow rules in your robots file for all pages, folders or files types on your site that do not need to be crawled. Upon visiting a site, the first place a crawler will look at is your robots.txt file (provided it is always located at http://ift.tt/1aTsSRf). This will help indicate to various crawlers which parts of your website it should not attempt to crawl. You can set rules depending on what crawler bot you want to control.

You can learn all about robots.txt and common issues in this Koozai blog post from Irish Wonder. Always test your rules in Google Search Console’s robots.txt tester tool before you set live any changes as some rules could block your whole website or pages you didn’t want blocked.

NoIndex tags

To help prevent certain pages from being indexed, it is also recommended that you add the NoIndex tag to the header code of those pages. Once added to a page, you should test these tags by doing a ‘Fetch as Google’ request on the URLs in Google Search Console.

URL parameter rules

If your site is powered by a CMS or an e-commerce system, you’ll need to be careful with dynamically generated URLs causing duplicate pages. Googlebot can easily get caught up and waste time crawling these URLs. The URL parameters section in Google Search Console can help you tell which of the dynamic URLs are found by Google and set a preference over those it can ignore.

Be aware that this is a powerful tool and you must use it with caution as it could prevent crawling of important parts of your website.

Up-to-date XML sitemaps

Although Google won’t take your XML sitemap as a rule of which pages to crawl, it takes it as a hint – so make sure it’s up to date to help reinforce which pages of your site it should be indexing.

Remove any old pages from your site and add any new pages.

Fix internal links

Googlebot will follow links it finds in your webpage content so make sure you aren’t going to waste its time by letting it crawl links to missing pages. Use a crawling tool such as Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider tool to find these broken internal links and fix them at the source.

Page load times

Googlebot will need to load each of your pages when it visits them so by reducing the load time of each you can allow it to crawl and index more pages within the same overall time. There are a number of free tools available to help you analyse and improve site speed.

Site Structure

A good site structure is an underrated method of helping Googlebot crawl your website a lot easier. Clearly categorising page content and not hiding pages away too deep in your site structure increases the likelihood they’ll be found by the crawler.

The SEO Benefits

If you’ve managed to implement some or all of the above recommendations and tested them using the tools mentioned, you should begin to see some changes in crawl stats shown within Google Search Console.

Here we’re looking for the number of pages crawled to be similar, or just over, the number of actual pages on your site in the first blue graph. The reduction in kilobytes downloaded (in red) should mimic the reduction in pages crawled if you previously had lots of pages being crawled.

Below is an example of a site with a significant number of URL parameter issues in which Googlebot crawled up to 12,000 URLs when in fact there were just a few hundred actual pages of the site. Through the application of URL parameter rules and the other factors mentioned above, the number of pages crawled became much more consistent and realistic.

If Google is crawling your useful pages each time, the rankings of your pages will be more likely to change frequently, and most likely for the better. Fresh content will get indexed and ranked a lot quicker and time won’t be wasted from your ‘crawl budget’.

The post Boosting Your SEO by Helping Googlebot appeared first on Koozai.com

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1MPayrv via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1OemOGt

What are the busiest times for stores on Black Friday?

If you want to avoid the crowds on Black Friday, avoid shopping between 2pm and 4pm. At least, thats what Google’s location data says.

from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1PM2Xjs via transformational marketing

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1P6mtXL

Google announces new store visit metrics in AdWords

Google has today announced new features for its store visits metric for AdWords users.

from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1ShD1Kh via transformational marketing

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1YrZmZl

Beginner’s guide to paid search and PPC

This will hopefully touch on all the various elements you might hear uttered in the same breath as paid search, taking in such puzzling acronyms as PPC, CPM, CPC and SERP.

from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1MMZhrJ via transformational marketing

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1Him7e8

61 Places to Find FREE Visual Content Marketing Resources

Calling all Content Marketers! Are you bored of using the same old stock images? Looking to spice up your content without spending a penny?

If that’s the case, listen up, because this post is for you.

Stocked and Loaded

Let’s face it – the majority of standard stock photography isn’t great. At its best, it’s generic and bland, and at its worst, well, things just get plain weird. I’m tired of stale boardroom pictures filled with fake smiles and phony actors; and baffled by the deluge of random images which make absolutely no sense.

Disillusioned by the quality (and often extortionate price) of images on offer, I decided to search elsewhere, to see if there was such a thing as high-quality, usable, royalty-free stock images.

The results blew me away.

There are so many sites out there with such amazing images freely available, that I felt the need to put together the following mega-list, compiling all my research into one easy-to-browse blog post.

But why stop at images? I’ve also gathered a number of free resources to help spruce up your content even further, including free stock video, free data visualisation tools and free web design templates.

A Quick Note on Legality

Licensing is a huge issue when it comes to the use of images. Before you use any images or content from the following sources, be sure to check whether you need to give credit to the original creator, or whether you’re allowed to alter the images in any way.

The brilliant Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence allows you to both use and edit images for private or commercial purposes, completely free of charge. However, it’s still worth checking with the source of the photos if you’re unsure of where you stand. Do this now, and avoid a nasty fine turning up on your proverbial doorstep at a later date.

So, with that settled, let’s get cracking.

Free Stock Image List

Barn Images

A great resource for both free and premium non-stock nature photography.

http://barnimages.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Crow The Stone

Candid photos from across the world. Subscribe to their newsletter and receive new photos in your inbox each week.

http://ift.tt/1FhzYgp

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Death To Stock

Another subscription-based service, you can either sign up to receive a free batch of photos each month, or go premium and have access to everything.

http://ift.tt/Ivxz8B

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Designer Pics

High-resolution stock photos, free for both commercial and personal use.

http://ift.tt/1pEuIwv

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Free Nature Stock

Looking for stunning snaps of the outdoors? Look no further than Free Nature Stock. Updated daily.

http://ift.tt/1C8C8eI

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Get Refe

Find royalty-free, high-quality photos for free, or purchase pre-curated packs for all your visual needs. You can even use the site to start selling your own snaps!

http://getrefe.com/

Restrictions: Royalty-Free Licence

Gratisography

Photographer Ryan McGuire has set up this brilliant collection of weird and wonderful images that he offers completely free. Updated weekly!

http://ift.tt/16yV85U

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Iso Republic

Fantastic free resource filled with creative images. Sign up to get the latest pictures delivered directly to your inbox.

http://isorepublic.com/

Restrictions: Bespoke Licence

Jay Mantri

Jay manages to perfectly capture the magic of his surroundings in these gorgeous shots. As he says on his site: “Free pics. Do anything. Make magic.”

http://jaymantri.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Jé Shoots

Free and premium photos sent directly to your inbox as and when they’re uploaded.

http://jeshoots.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Kaboom Pics

With 1,153 photos and 439,444 downloads at the time of writing, Kaboom Pics is an amazing resource for free photos.

http://kaboompics.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Life of Pix

A stunning collection of high-resolution photos that have all been donated to the public domain.

http://ift.tt/V9DkiB

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Little Visuals

A saddening entry on the list, as Nic, the creator of Little Visuals, tragically passed away in 2013. His family, however, have been kind enough to maintain the site and its beautiful collection of nature photography.

http://ift.tt/15hxUDN

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Lock & Stock Photos

AJ Montpetit does his bit to give back to the online community by posting freely downloadable photos on a daily basis.

http://ift.tt/XXiHay

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Move East

Follow one Portuguese man’s journey through life by downloading all of his photos for free.

http://moveast.me/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

My Stock Photos

Enjoy a collection of stunning photos for free, because, as the site says, “not everything in life has a price.”

http://mystock.photos/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

New Old Stock

If you’re looking for vintage photography, this is the ideal resource for you. All photos are taken from public archives and free of any known restrictions.

http://nos.twnsnd.co/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Pexels

Download and submit awesome free stock photography!

https://www.pexels.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Picjumbo

A brilliant resource that offers hundreds of free photos. You can even pay a small fee to download all of their photos in one go!

https://picjumbo.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Picography

Awesome free photos offered by Irish web design studio Hidden Depths.

http://picography.co/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Realistic Shots

With 7 realistic new photos added every week, there’s plenty to see at Realistic Shots.

http://ift.tt/1ALOxYg

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Shutteroo

Fantastic free images from Australian web developer Klaye Morrison. Sign up to their newsletter for special, exclusive photos.

http://shutteroo.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Skitterphoto

The Skitterphoto team have been posting original photos every day since May 2014, and because of that, they’ve built up an amazing collection of authentic images.

http://ift.tt/1oW5w4A

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Skuawk

Artistically loud images that stand out from the crowd.

http://skuawk.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Snapwire

Can’t find the images you’re looking for? As well as housing a decent library of free photos, Snapwire lets you submit a request for a specific photo which you can then buy.

https://www.snapwi.re

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

SplitShire

A cool selection of copyright photos from all over the world.

http://ift.tt/1pwoGvp

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Startup Stock Photos

If you’re looking for office-based images that aren’t completely banal, check out this site.

http://ift.tt/1m6GBtW

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Stocka

As the site’s by-line says: “stocka.co wants to be your source for free stock photos.”

http://www.stocka.co/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Stocksnap

With its beautiful collection of free, high-resolution photos, Stocksnap even lets you see which photos are trending, giving you an insight into the most popular images.

https://stocksnap.io/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Superfamous

If you’re looking for something a little different, Superfamous is ideal for abstract landscapes and patterns.

http://ift.tt/1F3zHuf

Restrictions: CCA3 (Personal Use With Credit)

Tookapic

Tookapic has an insane collection of over 13,700 free and premium stock photos!

http://ift.tt/1iaJUBk

Restrictions: Bespoke Licences

Travel Coffee Book

Submit and share beautiful travel photography from all over the globe.

http://ift.tt/1siYPec

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Unsplash

Unsplash publish jaw-dropping images of the outdoors, completely free to download.

https://unsplash.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Stock Image Search Engines

Still can’t find the images you were looking for? Try these handy stock image search engines:

• Compfight: http://compfight.com/
• The Stocks: http://thestocks.im/
• Pixabay: http://pixabay.com
• Findaphoto: http://finda.photo/
• CC Search: http://ift.tt/wf3cdS
• Freerange: http://ift.tt/20ounzr
• Librestock: http://librestock.com/

Gif Search Engines

Static images are so last summer. Gifs are the new black.

Giphy

Giphy has a huge library of readily accessible gifs, paired with a powerful set of advanced sharing options:

http://giphy.com/

GIF Mood Board

Find a gif for every occasion with this handy mood search engine from Buffer:

http://ift.tt/1EXTAsN

Still can’t find a suitable reaction in gif form? Make your own instead:

Gif YouTube

Turn any video into an awesome gif with this handy tool:

https://gifs.com/

Data Visualisation

Of course, you don’t just have to rely on awesome photographs to spruce up your content. If you’re working with some interesting data, why not turn these into a slick visualisation by using one of these handy free tools?

Word Clouds:

• Tagxedo: http://www.tagxedo.com/

Diagrams:

• Creately: http://creately.com/

Maps

• Leaflet JS: http://leafletjs.com/
• Google Fusion Tables: http://ift.tt/214y1Pl

Timelines

• Knightlab: http://ift.tt/1eIvMrg
• Read Write Think: http://ift.tt/1X0Qz3q;

Infographics

Ah, infographics, the format everyone loves to hate! Knock them all you want, but these colourful visualisations are still a powerful and effective way to showcase data. The below sites allow you to create fast and free infographics in all shapes and sizes:

• Easelly: http://www.easel.ly/
• Piktochart: http://piktochart.com/
• Infogram: https://infogr.am/
• Good Labs: http://labs.good.is/
• Venngage: https://venngage.com/

Free Video Footage

Take your visual game to the next level with awesome free video footage from one of the following sites:

• Videvo: http://www.videvo.net/
• Dissolve: http://ift.tt/1I0uJAS
• Motion Elements: http://ift.tt/NML3PJ
• Free HD Stock Footage on Vimeo: http://ift.tt/1juk3jr
• Free HD Footage: http://ift.tt/1aFjMZI

Web Design Resources

Last but in no way least, the following two sites offer a wealth of free web design resources, including templates, patterns and audio:

• IM Free: http://ift.tt/1goZPIY
• All The Free Stock: http://ift.tt/Yy2gSp

Crunch Time

Phew, what a list. I know what you’re thinking now though: “Harry, how am I meant to remember all these sites when it comes to crunch time?”

Don’t panic, dear reader, I’ve got you covered. You can download your own copy of all the links listed above in a handy Google spreadsheet, right here. Alternatively, bookmark this page and visit any time you need to find new resources.

Have I missed something off the list? Let me know in the comments below, or tweet me your favourite visual resources @hr_gardiner.

The post 61 Places to Find FREE Visual Content Marketing Resources appeared first on Koozai.com

from Donald Jarrett digital marketing news http://ift.tt/1X0QzjM via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1LoiFtg