Tag Archives: audience

Brands, Drive More Blog Traffic with These 5 Video Ideas

Posted on March 8, 2019 by Hosting

The post Brands, Drive More Blog Traffic with These 5 Video Ideas appeared first on HostGator Blog . 5 Ways Brands Can Drive More Blog Traffic with Video Video content plays an integral role in people’s lives. According to a Wyzowl survey , respondents said on a typical day they watch 1.5 hours of video. Take advantage of this trend by adding video content to your blog. Explain how to cook a new recipe or earn their trust with a heartfelt confessional. It’s time to use video content to benefit your corporate blog. Here are five ways to drive more blog traffic. 1. Grab Attention Between breaking news and cute puppy GIFs, it may seem downright impossible to gain any attention from your audience. Video helps break up the monotony of text and adds a new flare to your blog. Before you spend countless hours shooting a video, it’s vital to understand what actually grabs your visitors’ attention. Do the research to learn what content appeals to them and how you can insert your own brand personality to the mix. Also, think about what emotions you want viewers to feel. Kimbe MacMaster , former manager of content marketing at Vidyard, explains: “Video is the most powerful way to evoke emotions online. It’s King because it offers a slew of attributes above and beyond traditional content like tone of voice, face expressions, and music, to name a few.” Stay away from superficial tactics to draw people to your video content. (So, no throwing a toilet off a five-story building.) Doing absurd stunts or saying ridiculous phrases will leave your audience confused and possibly upset. Instead, share a unique story about your brand , employees, or customers. Grabbing (and maintaining) your visitors’ attention starts with video storytelling.   2. Boost Engagement Enticing people to visit your blog is one hurdle to jump, but keeping visitors engaged requires another level of strategy. To avoid high bounce rates , your brand must continually captivate your audience’s time. Video is one solution to grow your engagement. Effective video marketing centers around information and entertainment. Today’s consumer enjoys learning something new and having fun in the process. Your short-term goal may involve getting the person to smile or laugh in the first 30 seconds of your video. By doing so, the viewer becomes comfortable and more willing to continue watching. In the video below, content unicorn Brittany Berger introduces her audience to the idea of repurposing content. The description even includes a link to a free download for viewers to further their engagement with her. Your team can execute a similar technique by driving YouTube viewers to your blog. It will inspire new visitors to explore about your brand, and you’ll have another high-quality traffic source.   3. Explain Concepts The Internet is a hub of information for people to learn everything from how to build a rooftop patio to how to pass a Calculus class. Using video to explain concepts is a surefire way to drive more visitors to your blog. “How-to videos catch viewers with prime buyer intent. They have a problem they want to solve or something they want to learn. It is up to you to show them how to do it…For example, explain to consumers how to tie a tie or show home cooks how to make certain recipes for your ingredient,” writes Anton Eliasson , director of marketing at Shakr. Retailer Lowe’s uses video to show its customers how to complete home improvement projects. In this example, the viewer learns the steps to building a raised garden bed. When creating how-to videos, think about your audience’s level of expertise. You may decide to segment your videos into beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Avoid forcing every little detail in your video. It’s perfectly okay to link to supplemental material, like a guide or checklist.   4. Answer Questions In this moment in time, online search engines help people find directions to a local grocery store, purchase movie tickets for the weekend, and recreate unicorn cakes with detailed recipes. If someone wants answers to their burning questions, most people respond with “Google it!” This simple response offers your brand an opportunity to create content for people seeking answers on search engines. Your videos will stand out if they offer immediate value. When creating a Q&A video, provide clear and concise answers. A long-winded response will only annoy your viewers and send them to another blog. Start with common questions answered by your customer support team. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box to differentiate your Q&As from the competition. AT&T gets creative with this format by posing a question and then answering it with a video. These short, original videos work well on social media channels.   Quick! What’s ∞ x ∞? Answer: https://t.co/6O3dGoCFHX #GalaxyNote9 pic.twitter.com/EvY0vSVuvw — AT&T (@ATT) August 9, 2018 You also can experiment with unrelated product questions. Enlist the help of your employees to answer silly questions about your brand culture. A little variety offers an appealing charm.   5. Build Trust People buy from companies they trust. Establishing trust means showing a genuine interest in your audience’s interests. Video makes it easier to build that authentic connection. Unlike text, video can translate into an intimate experience for viewers. If it’s an interview between experts, your audience can see the sentiment behind their words. So, how can your brand mix trust into your video production? For starters, be honest with your audience. Steer clear from using any misleading or false information in your content. Plus, disparaging your competitors isn’t a good idea; it only emphasizes your brand’s weaknesses. It’s also important to respect your viewers’ time. It shouldn’t take five minutes to explain the main point of your video. Nathan Ellering , head of marketing demand generation at CoSchedule, agrees: “Length is an important element of video (and definitely ties into distribution). Shorter videos tend to perform better. And if you do it right, you can create one video and share it in multiple different channels.” Try asking your loyal customers to participate in your video content. Their sincere experiences will be relatable to blog visitors, too.   Earn More Blog Traffic Video marketing is a powerful way to attract visitors to your blog. Video content holds readers’ attention, builds trust with your audience, and opens doors to more engagement. Upgrade your blog with video today. Get started by turning your current blog posts into videos. 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How to Use Content To Build Trust

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Hosting

The post How to Use Content To Build Trust appeared first on HostGator Blog . Running a small eCommerce business is hard. Every day it feels like competing with the big guys is a bigger challenge than ever. You can’t afford offer the convenience and low prices of businesses like Amazon and Walmart, so how are you supposed to compete? One of the areas small businesses can win on is trust. But where past generations would develop trust by getting to know the person behind the counter each time they came in to shop, today you need to figure out how to build a comparable relationship online. For most businesses, the best option is with content marketing . Why Trust is So Important to Business Consumers have limited money to go around, so every spending choice they make has to count. If you’ve ever had the experience of buying something only to realize the product didn’t perform as needed or the business didn’t offer adequate support, then you know how emotional the experience can be—it can feel like a betrayal, even if the financial cost itself was small. Consumers want to buy from brands they can trust. This is backed up by research. PwC found that 43% of consumers name trust as an important factor when choosing a brand—falling only behind price. And if anything, finding ways to build trust is even more important for eCommerce businesses, since your customers can’t see and feel the products they buy before they hand over their money. How do they know they’ll receive their order and that it will be what they need? Or if it’s not, that they can work with the company for a painless return? They have to trust you.   How Content Marketing Builds Trust If your main source of interaction with customers is your website, you have to use that space to show your customers who you are and why you’re trustworthy. And telling them they should trust you isn’t as powerful as showing them. Content marketing is how you show rather than just tell. And it works. The Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) 2018 research found that 96% of the top performing B2B marketers say they’ve built trust with their audience, and 81% of B2C marketers that do content marketing say their audience views them as a trusted resource.   Content marketing successfully builds trust for a few main reasons.   It emphasizes helping over selling. One of the core tenets of good content marketing is that you can’t make it all about you. CMI’s research found that 90% of the businesses that are most successful in their content marketing efforts say they put their audience’s needs first . If you think about all of the people you trust in your life, you’ll probably realize that a key feature of those relationships is that they’re not all about what the other person can get from you. Good relationships include mutual care and effort. While the relationship between a business and a consumer is obviously different, this part holds true. If the only messaging your audience ever sees from you is pushing the hard sell, you’re not giving them any reason to trust you. But when you commit time and resources to creating content that’s genuinely helpful to them, you show them you care about them beyond the bottom line.   It demonstrates your expertise. This is especially important for service-based businesses. You can use content like blog posts, videos, podcasts, and ebooks to show your audience that you have the necessary skills and knowledge to do the work you want them to hire you for. Even for businesses that sell products, content gives you a chance to show your audience that you understand what they care about—a necessary step in providing products designed to better meet their needs.   It shows the humans behind the brand. People will never feel the same kind of connection to a logo or brand name that they do to another human being. But your business isn’t just a brand, it’s made up of people. Creating original content gives you the chance to show more of the people behind the business and humanize the brand for your visitors. When consumers associate names and faces with your business, as well as products, it makes you more trustworthy.   5 Tips for Creating Content that Earns Customer Trust Doing content marketing isn’t enough on its own to earn customer trust, you have to do it well . To help you put together a content strategy that will earn you the trust of your audience, here are five important strategies to employ.   1. Put the customer first. It’s human nature to think about your own needs and priorities, but when it comes to content marketing, you have to put real effort into putting your audience’s needs and interests first. Take time to understand who your audience is and what they care about. Then craft your content strategy around them . That means not centering your products and services (although you can mention them anytime doing so is useful to your audience). Focus first on providing value and building a relationship with your audience, and only later on selling. If you build trust first, you’ll be more successful when you do make the sales pitch.   2. Create unique content. This was one of the main suggestions Cathy McPhillips, Vice President of Marketing at the Content Marketing Institute, offered on a recent call. She’s noticed way too much content out there from different brands that cover all the same topics. “Why would you trust one company over another if they’re pushing out the same information?” she asks. There’s no room for differentiation if you’re repeating information someone else has already provided, and it doesn’t give your readers any good reason to trust you over another brand. So look for gaps in the information that’s out there. Or make sure that if you do tackle a topic your competitors have already covered that you bring a unique spin or angle to it.   3. Use your subject matter experts. This is another point Cathy made: marketers aren’t always the best experts on the industries they’re working in. “Just because they’re the best writers and the best communicators in the business does not mean they know their product the best,” she pointed out. But you don’t have to create content entirely on your own. “Lean on your other departments,” Cathy said. “Use all your internal resources to help you be an expert and be someone your customers trust.” As an example, she brought up  Indium , a company in the specialized and highly technical industry of solder supply. The marketing team there will never understand the products and industry as well as the engineers in the company do. So they made the engineers a part of their content by creating video interviews . The video content provides valuable information to their audience while also positioning the company as experts in the industry. 4. Be authentic. People can recognize pandering. If it looks like you’re trying too hard to relate to your audience—while they always know that just underneath your actions is the desire to sell you something—it will drive them away. That means you have to find the right mix of focusing on what they care about, while also staying true to yourself in your marketing. If your research suggests your target audience is full of people likely to love Star Trek, slipping a reference into your marketing can be a way to connect with your audience on a more human level—but only if you’re also enough of a fan to get the reference right. Do try to incorporate the language and interests of your target audience into your marketing, but only insofar as you can do so naturally. If a marketing choice feels forced, you’re probably better off not using it.   5. Be transparent. People have come to expect the worst from many companies they work with. When you hear about a big company covering up a data breach or attempting to silence employees that complain about harsh working conditions, are you ever surprised? You can set yourself apart by embracing radical honesty . Some brands are already doing this with their content marketing and seeing great success. Publishing about your failures, providing the numbers about where your earnings go, sharing employee salary information, or even highlighting use cases where your competitor’s product is a better choice are all ways to boldly tell your audience who you are. Someone who’s just as upfront about their flaws as their strengths will always be more trustworthy than someone’s who’s all bluster. If you’re not ashamed to admit the truth, even in areas where it’s not entirely flattering, that shows your audience that they can trust what you have to say.   Build Trust, Build Business For the customers that will never meet you in person, you need to find a way to still connect with them as a human being. Content marketing provides that opportunity and enables you to build relationships with your audience while demonstrating all the reasons they can trust you. That’s more valuable than just making a sale, it’s the path to creating loyal customers.   Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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The Best Ways to Advertise Your Website

Posted on November 1, 2018 by Hosting

The post The Best Ways to Advertise Your Website appeared first on HostGator Blog . You’ve put a lot of time into creating an awesome website. Now you need people to find it. Frankly, that’s the hard part. The web is huge. With millions of websites on just about every topic you can imagine, you’ve got a lot of competition to capture people’s attention. You can’t expect to launch your website and wait for your audience to find you. For people to visit your website, you have to work to get it in front of them. Luckily, there are a lot of different tactics you can use to make that happen and some of them are even free! If your website doesn’t have a budget to put toward promotion, you still have some powerful ways to start reaching new website visitors. The catch is that, what you save in money, you should expect to spend in time. Most of these tactics will require a significant time commitment (although notably, you can save the time if you have money to spend on hiring a professional to do these for you). 1.     Prioritize SEO. Google is the main way people find most of the websites they visit. Over 90% of all web searches start there. One of the best ways to make your website easier for people to find is to get it showing up in the search engines. To be clear, this isn’t easy. Search engine optimization is competitive and requires doing a variety of tasks on an ongoing basis, including: Doing audience research to identify the people you most want to reach. Doing keyword research to learn the terms and topics your audience is interested in. Optimizing each page on your site for your target keywords. Creating relevant, high-quality content on a regular basis. Promoting your website and content to bring in more visitors and gain the attention of influencers. Performing link building campaigns to increase your website’s authority. It requires creating a strategy and putting in the work, but SEO is one of the most valuable tactics for making your website more discoverable online. We know that SEO can feel intimidating. Maybe you know that you need SEO, but don’t know where to start. Check out the HostGator Business Cloud package . It comes with a free SEO tool that will generate a personalized step-by-step SEO plan for your website. The SEO tool will show you how to improve your search ranking, and will send you real-time updates to your website rankings and monitor your competitors’ rankings as well.   2. Do social media promotion. Creating accounts on the various social media sites is completely free, as is sharing your content with followers on those sites. You don’t have to be on every single social media channel—for most website owners that would be overwhelming. Take some time to research where your audience is most likely to be and how they use the different sites. And consider which social channels are a fit for your website . If your audience generally prefers written content over video, then you may not need to be on YouTube. A photography website should definitely be on Instagram, but one that’s light on images may do better on Facebook and Twitter. Whichever social media channels you decide to go with, there are a few best practices worth keeping in mind: Tailor your messaging to the channels. If you promote your website on both Instagram and LinkedIn, you’ll need to take different approaches to each. Promote your content more than the general site. Including your home page in your social media bio makes perfect sense, but tweeting out a link to just the homepage usually doesn’t. You’ll get more results if you drive people to pages on your website that include helpful content. Do more than just promote your site. A common mistake people make on social media is to treat it only as a platform for promotion, when it’s supposed to be social—it’s right there in the name. Do drop your website link into your bio and share your awesome content with your followers, but also devote some time to interacting with other people on the site. Share and respond to their stuff and look for opportunities to join conversations and communities. Think before you share. Social media faux pas are far too common. Don’t let the fast, transitive nature of social media make you lazy. Proofread your social media posts and make sure everything you share is something you’re willing to stand behind. Social media is one of the most powerful free tools for promoting your website, but getting something out of it without sinking all your time into it can be a challenge. Be thoughtful and strategic about which sites you use and how you use them.   3. Create high-value content. Consistently producing great content is useful for both SEO and social media promotion , but it’s also good for drawing new visitors to your site in and of itself. The more content you create that helps people, the more reasons they have to visit your website. Blogging is a great tool for consistently producing fresh content that shows Google your website is current and relevant, while also giving visitors something useful to read and return to. And you can use especially high-value content like an ebook or course to stand out in the crowded content space, draw in new visitors, and potentially get email addresses for your list.   4. Start guest blogging. Creating content on your own site is a smart strategy for giving people more reasons to visit, but usually it works best if you combine it with creating content on other relevant websites that give you the chance to reach a new and bigger audience. Many websites accept guest blogs because it means free content for them. For you, it means an opportunity to build links (good for SEO) and drive new visitors to your website. Be strategic in your guest posting to make sure you get the most out of it: Look for websites that cover similar or related topics to yours, whose audience will overlap with the one you’re trying to reach. Prioritize pitching websites that have a large or dedicated audience (ideally both). Take some time to get to know the website before you write a piece for it. You want to be familiar with their audience and the types of posts that generally perform well there. Include relevant links in your guest posts back to your own website, along with the link you include in your bio. Make sure your guest posts are high quality—you want to make a good impression on the new audience you reach. Guest posts help you build up the authority of your website and attract new visitors at the same time.   5. Join and participate in online communities. Online communities are valuable on a number of levels. They give you the chance to connect directly with your target audience. You can learn how they talk and the kinds of questions they regularly ask. You can turn that knowledge into a content strategy that ensures you’re creating content you know your audience needs. And then you can go back and share that content in the communities the next time someone needs it, driving people back to your website. But as with social media, it pays to spend time participating in the community and becoming a valued member before you start pushing out your stuff. Depending on where your audience hangs out, you could find worthwhile communities to join on Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, Facebook, or in industry-specific forums. Decide which ones to join and start spending a little time in them each day or week to learn from your audience and start becoming a part of the community.   6.     Connect with influencers. A lot of getting your website in front of other people depends on other people wanting to share it. That’s part of what makes successful promotion difficult. You can share content on your own site all day, but people are more likely to care if someone else they follow and trust shares or links to it—giving it their endorsement in internet terms. And people who have a lot of authority or followers online are more likely to share content from people they know and trust. You want to be one of those people. You can pinpoint some of the influencers in your space by using tools like Buzzsumo or Followerwonk to find the people with the most followers in your niche. Follow those influencers and pay attention to the people and websites they share. Over time, you’ll become familiar with the top websites in your topic area and the personalities behind them. Look for ways to interact with them. Share their content, respond to their status updates, or leave comments on their blog. If you notice them participating in Twitter chats or social communities, join and participate as well. By interacting with them, you can start to get onto their radar and, ideally, begin to develop a relationship with them. This step takes time, and you need to be careful not to get pushy or ask too much—your interactions need to be genuine. But relationships are a crucial part of promoting your website and content, so this is an important step to incorporate into your strategy. Plus, you may get a few friends out of it!   7. Become a source. Journalists and bloggers often look for quotes and anecdotes from sources to add depth to the stories they write. If you can position yourself to be that source, you can gain a link back to your website and some attention from a new audience. The easiest way to become a source is to sign up for Help a Reporter Out . You can select the topics relevant to your expertise, and receive emails daily that collect all the requests writers around the web have for sources. When you see one that’s a match for you, follow the instructions and share your knowledge, along with the name of your website and a link. If the writer uses a quote from you, they’ll often (but not always) include a link back to your website in the piece.   8. Use expert sources. When you quote somebody in the content on your website, they’re more likely to take an interest in what you’ve written. Even better, they’ll often share it with their network of followers. When you’re working on a new piece of content, consider if it could be strengthened by a quote from an expert—bonus points if you can identify an expert on the list of influencers you’ve been working to connect with—and reach out to ask them for their insights. Try to keep your ask small. Most people that make a good expert source are busy. A quick answer by email or a 15-minute phone interview should do the trick. Work their insights into  your piece, and then let them know once it’s published.   9. Do email marketing. Email marketing isn’t exactly a strategy for finding new customers since it requires someone to have already visited your website and signed up for your email list. Keep in mind that people signed up for your email list because they already liked something on your website or something from your business. This is where email marketing comes in handy – getting them to come back to your website or business. Look for places around your website and in your content to encourage people to sign up for your email list. If you created an especially high-value piece of content like an ebook or course, you can put that behind a form that requires a visitor to provide their email address in order to access it. You can even promote your email list on social media . Once people start to sign up for your list, you can use your emails to drive them back to your website whenever you add new content or, if you have a business website, new deals and products. If you use email marketing, make sure you send emails consistently to keep your website top of mind for your subscribers. Make your emails as valuable and entertaining as possible. And, as with social media, don’t make them all about promoting yourself or your website. Fill your emails with information that will be genuinely valuable to your audience. A note on email marketing: many email marketing software services have a free version , but as your list grows, you’ll likely need to upgrade to a paid version. This is a tactic that can be free to start, but may require a budget with time.   10.  Do link building. This is part of SEO, but also worth mentioning on its own. Link building provides two key benefits: It makes your website look more authoritative to Google—links are widely considered to be one of the top ranking signals for the search engine. It drives more traffic to your website from people who follow the links from other sites. You have to be really careful with link building that you only use legitimate tactics. Links on low-quality sites could hurt rather than help you in the search engine rankings and wouldn’t drive much traffic your way anyways. But including some smart white-hat link building tactics in your strategy can help boost your rankings and raise awareness of your site to readers around the web.   Conclusion Creating your website isn’t enough. You need to make it easy for people to find. You don’t necessarily need to do everything on this list, but use it as a starting point to figure out the best tactics for you and put together a strategy that will ensure your website reaches more people. 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How to Create a Forum for Your Website

Posted on October 29, 2018 by Hosting

The post How to Create a Forum for Your Website appeared first on HostGator Blog . Whether you run a business website or a personal blog, one of the main reasons to build a website is to reach other people. If you want your website to become a place people regularly want to visit, then your goal should be to build a community around it. That’s a big goal, and you can help achieve it and even go a step further by creating a forum for your website. By enabling communication that goes more than two ways, a forum can create an active online community that not only engages with your content – but also allows users to interact with each other. In essence, a forum can become a valuable part of achieving your website goals. 5 Benefits of Creating a Forum For Your Website A forum does require extra work, so you want to be confident it’s a good choice for your particular type of website before diving in. If done well, creating a forum for your website can yield some significant benefits.   1. It provides a place for a community to grow. Having a website that gets visitors is nice, but if most of what you learn about your visitors is what you see in Google Analytics , then there’s a lot you still don’t know. Getting visitors isn’t the same thing as having a community. A community is active and engages with your website on a regular basis. The members of a community feel like they’re a part of something when they come to your website. They have a higher level of investment than someone just passing through. That makes them valuable partners in the overall success of your site.   2. It gives readers a reason to keep coming back. Many websites struggle with turning one-time visitors into regular traffic . Anyone who participates in your website’s forum cares about what others in the community have to say. They’ll want to see responses to the posts they make and follow conversations on topics they’re interested in. To stay a part of the conversation, they’ll keep coming back.   3. Your readers can learn from each other, as well as from you. You work hard to provide valuable content to your visitors. As your community grows, you’ll have a difficult time answering every single question they have. And sometimes, other people in the community will have better answers anyway. Giving community members direct access to each other can be especially useful for any business that sells complicated products. Your customers can help each other do general troubleshooting, offloading some of your customer service burden while still resulting in satisfied customers. We see this at work in the HostGator forums . When one web hosting customer asks a question, another often chimes in with the answer. Newer members get the help of more experienced members, and long-term participants are able to distinguish themselves as helpful and knowledgeable in the community.   4. You can see what your followers are talking about. If you do content marketing , then you know that coming up with relevant topics your audience cares about is an ongoing challenge. But even if you don’t, any glimpse into the questions and issues your audience has can translate into useful feedback on your website and products. Businesses frequently spend money and time on market research to try and figure out what their audience is thinking. When you have an active forum, all you have to do is follow the conversations your members have there to gain the same information. The forum in Carol Tice’s subscription community for professional writers helps fuel her blog posts. She can reference forum conversations and answer common questions she sees members ask. Because of the discussions in the forum, she knows the topics her audience cares about and can make sure her website provides the answers they’re looking for.   5. An open forum can improve SEO. Private forums can make sense for businesses that want to create a subscription community or membership website, but if you go that route you do lose out on this benefit. If you create a forum for your website that’s accessible on the open web, then every new conversation your community members have creates a new page to be indexed by search engines. Not only is regular fresh content good for SEO, but as your forum begins to cover more and more topics (using the language of your audience, no less), those forum pages and user-generated content could begin to show up for search terms you haven’t covered yet on your main website.   How to Create a Forum on Your Website Ready to set up your website forum? Here are three steps to get started.   1. Choose the right web hosting plan. If you’re ready to get started and create a forum on your website, then one of your first steps is to evaluate if your web hosting provider is up for the job. If your forum accomplishes the goal of bringing a community of regular visitors to your website, then you can expect an uptick in traffic. Make sure the web hosting plan you have now can support the forum software you choose to use and the increase in traffic likely to occur. If your current plan isn’t going to cut it, take time to figure out a better option before you start building your forum.   2. Choose the right web forum software. Next, you’ll need software to create your forum with. Many of the most popular options are free and offer open-source software. A few of the top solutions to look into are:      phpBB      MyBB      Flarum      Simple Machines      bbPress Spend some time researching the different software options to get a feel for which will work best for you.   3. Create your forum. The right forum software should make this part relatively easy. The software you choose should offer resources to help you get started. Use them to get up to speed and start getting the basic structure of your forum in place.   How to Make Your Forum Successful For your forum to achieve your goals, you need to approach it with a strategy. These seven steps can help your forum go from a promising idea to a successful community-building tool.   1. Clarify your forum’s themes. What is your forum going to be about? People need to know what they’ll be joining before they can decide if it’s right for them or not. Before you launch your forum, clarify the primary themes and topics that people will be discussing there. When you launched your website, you (hopefully) took some time to figure out your unique positioning statement – what makes your website different from similar ones and why your visitors should care. Now you’ll need to do the same thing for your forum. Think about why it’s valuable from your audience’s point of view. What topics and issues will they want to discuss? Why should they do it on your website’s forum? Obviously, your forum’s themes should relate to what you cover on your website. Beyond that, get more specific in working out what the forum’s purpose and focus will be.   2. Create a structure. Now turn the themes you settled on into a clear structure. Decide on the main categories and subcategories to divide your forum into. Your URL structure should be intuitive. Organizing discussions into a few main topics will make it easier for your members to find the information they need. So again here, have your target audience top of mind. What categories will make the most sense to them in helping them find what they’re looking for? The structure you create in the beginning doesn’t have to be set in stone. As you see how people interact in the forum over time, you may find that adding new categories or re-arranging how they’re organized works better. Know that your forum structure can evolve as needed, but do your best to make it intuitive and clear to begin with.   3. Develop clear rules. You may hope your target audience consists of nothing but the most pleasant and respectful people on the internet – but it is still the internet we’re talking about. When people can interact with others anonymously behind their screens, some inevitably show their worst sides. You can’t just launch your forum and hope for the best. You need to start out planning for the worst. Think about what you want your forum conversations to look like, and explicitly what you don’t want them to include. For that latter question, a look at active comment sections around the web will show examples of what you want your members to avoid. Spend some time reviewing the rules of other forums around the web as well. Their rules can serve as a jumping off point for you to develop yours. As an example, some rules you may want to include could be:     Be respectful to other community members, even when there’s a disagreement     No slurs or other discriminatory behavior     No name calling     No links to or recommendations of illegal items or activities in the forum     No NSFW (not safe for work) material     No spamming Make sure you post the rules at the top of the forum where everyone will see them. Add a note that everyone who participates in the forum is agreeing to abide by the rules. And develop a process for what you’ll do when someone breaks the rules. How many warnings will you provide before banning a user? Are there steps a banned user can take to be reinstated? Your rules won’t be worth much if you don’t have a system in place to enact consequences when people break them. Write out what that system will be and make it accessible to your users in advance to avoid issues later.   4. Promote your forum . For discussions to happen, people have to show up. Create a strategy for letting people in your audience know about your forum. Many of the same online marketing tactics you use for your website will be valuable for promoting your forum as well. Announce the new forum to your email list. Create content promoting it on your website and other sites around the web. Promote it on your social media accounts. Consider investing in PPC or social media advertising to get the word out. Once you have a decent number of members, this step will become less important. But it should make up the brunt of your efforts in the first days and weeks your forum is available.     5. Create some good discussion topics to get the conversation started. You know when you’re at a party and everyone’s hesitant to get out on the dance floor until the first brave few souls start dancing? New members of your forum who are still getting a feel for the place are unlikely to jump right into starting discussions. It will be your job to get the ball rolling on the first few conversations while people get comfortable. Have a few discussion topics in mind and start posting them with encouragement for others to chime in. Some forums also have consistent weekly discussion threads that can bring people together at an expected time to get talking. Consider basing a weekly thread around industry news, new member introductions, or other topics you know your audience cares about.   6. Moderate the discussions. Moderation is a big part of the job of running a forum. Without moderation, your forum can fall prey to spammers and trolls. If the forum messages are dominated by people trying to promote scams or a toxic culture of insults – no one’s going to stick around. In the early days of your forum, you may be able to do all the moderating yourself. Keep an eye on all the active threads and react quickly to any that break the rules. Don’t be afraid to delete inappropriate comments and issue warnings and bans to users when needed. Over time, if the job becomes too big, you may need to hire someone or recruit active members of the forum to help with moderation. Be warned that moderation can be tricky. If people feel like they’re being deleted or banned unfairly, you may face dissension within the community. That’s what makes having clear rules so important. As needed, you can point back to the guidelines everyone in the community agreed to by choosing to participate.   7. Solicit feedback and improve as you go. Running a forum can get complicated and you’re not going to be able to plan for everything in advance. You can’t predict what your members will do or want, or what issues will arise as the community grows. So be willing to actively ask your community for their input and listen when they give it. Conduct surveys or start threads in the forum soliciting people’s suggestions and complaints. Even if your forum starts off strong, there will always be ways to improve it. Do your best to find out how you can make it better and improve the forum experience over time. Ready to start building your forum? Choose your forum hosting plan today and start creating a forum for your website . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Email Drip Campaigns for Blogs: 7 Best Practices to Follow

Posted on October 4, 2018 by Hosting

The post Email Drip Campaigns for Blogs: 7 Best Practices to Follow appeared first on HostGator Blog . For your blog to succeed, you don’t just need people to stumble across it. You need them to keep coming back for more. To become a successful blogger, getting readers is step one. Building a community around your blog that keeps coming back for more and actively engages with your content is the long-term goal you should really aim for. To stay connected to your visitors and keep them more engaged, use email marketing . Even if a visitor really loves the first blog post they read on your site, hoping they’ll come back on their own is a long shot. There’s a lot of other content out there and most people will need a nudge to remember to come back to check out yours again. Promoting your email list gives new visitors a way to let you know they like your stuff enough to hear from you again. And once they take that step, it’s up to you to really seal the connection. The best way to do that: setting up a solid email drip campaign for your blog.   What is a Drip Campaign? A drip campaign is a series of automated emails you send to your blog subscribers. Drip campaigns are triggered by a specific event – most commonly, when a new subscriber signs up, but it could also be something like signing up for a course or downloading an ebook. Pretty much any email marketing software you use should have the option to set up a drip campaign, including Constant Contact , MailChimp, or Aweber. You can write and design the emails in advance and automate the process of getting them to subscribers at the right time to get and keep them engaged in your content.   4 Benefits of Setting Up a Drip Campaign for New Subscribers When someone chooses to sign up for your email list , it’s a big opportunity. They’re showing you they not only like your blog, but they like it enough to actively choose to hear from you about future posts. That’s a big deal and an opportunity you want to make sure you take advantage of. A drip campaign is a good way to make the most of it for a few main reasons.   1. You introduce subscribers to what your blog is all about. A new subscriber has probably read a post or two from your blog, but they’re still learning the basics of who you are and what your blog covers. Your drip campaign gives you a chance to provide an introduction to what your blog is all about that makes a case for why they should get on board and pay attention. It gives you the power to define your blog for them on your terms, which is valuable at this stage in the relationship.   2. You develop a relationship with your subscribers. If you meet someone once at a party and then don’t see them again until a year later, you’re much less likely to remember them than if you saw them again three or four times in the first couple months after you met them. In the same way, someone who signs up for your email list and doesn’t see anything from you for weeks is less likely to recognize you and remember their connection to you than someone who hears from you a few times in the weeks after signing up. If you give people time to forget you, then your emails will look like confusing spam, rather than something valuable they’ve asked for. A drip campaign gives them several opportunities to interact with you soon after they sign up, so you become someone they know and recognize when they hear from you again.   3. You can set it and forget it. Drip campaigns have the added benefit of being easy.  You put the work into creating some really solid introductory emails once, and you can automate the process of sending them to every new subscriber who signs up. Your subscribers get helpful emails that solidify their connection to your blog, while you can focus more on creating the new blog posts that keep your blog current. Since drip campaigns are automated, you can set it up once and use it for new subscribers for months to come.   4. It helps your most popular posts stay popular. Some of your blog posts are going to be higher quality and resonate more with your audience than others – that’s just the nature of blogging. You don’t want those to get buried over time as you keep adding new posts. Your drip campaign gives you a way to get the best content you have in front of your new subscribers so they get a solid first (and second and third) impression of what you can do that makes them more likely to stick around.   7 Ways to Make the Most of Your Blog’s Drip Campaign If you decide to set up a drip campaign for your blog, make sure you do it right. Here are some of the most important best practices to follow.   1. Make sure your email list is opt-in. First things first, good email marketing requires that you only contact people who have actively made the choice to join your email list. Buying emails or adding people you found online that you think might be interested will not only result in people deleting or ignoring the drip campaign emails you send, it will get them marked spam – something that could get you booted from your email marketing platform. Your drip campaign should only be triggered when a visitor to your blog knowingly signs up for your email list.   3. Use it to define your positioning and create camaraderie. What sets your blog apart from similar blogs out there and makes it worth following? That’s your unique positioning. Use your first emails to lay out your positioning and humanize yourself to your subscribers. They’ll be more likely to connect with a blogger they feel they can relate to. Don’t be afraid to show some personality.   3. Highlight your best work to get your subscribers on board. This is your chance to win subscribers over and hopefully turn them into followers for the long term. Break out your best work to show them what you’re capable of. This helps you impress your new subscribers, as well as a way to drive new traffic to some of the blog posts you’re most proud of.   4. Make it one part of a larger email marketing strategy. Your drip campaign shouldn’t be the last thing you send your subscribers. Develop an ongoing email marketing plan to keep communicating with your subscribers long after they first sign up. You can email them to alert them to new blog posts, start a monthly e-newsletter, or create unique content just for your email list. Whatever route you choose; just make sure you stay in touch. That’s the whole point of an email list.   5. Pay attention to your email analytics. While a drip campaign technically only has to be created once and will keep working for as long as you want it to, you’ll want to revisit it at least once or twice a year to look for ways to improve. Check your analytics to see which emails people open, which they respond to, and which they click on the links in. You may want to tweak the wording, change subject lines, or update your drip campaign with new content and links based on what the analytics show you.   6. Ask your readers to take action. Ideally, you don’t just want your subscribers to read, you want them to engage. One way to get them more actively involved is to directly ask for feedback. You can make a survey part of your drip campaign, or include a CTA in your emails asking for subscribers to reply with their input or add comments to your blog posts. Subscribers that provide feedback are valuable because they clearly care about the direction your blog goes in. And their responses can help you improve your blog and make sure you provide what your audience is looking for moving forward.   7. Personalize your emails. If your blog covers an array of topics, then you may have some subscribers more interested in one subject area than others. In that case, it could pay to set up different drip campaigns that each emphasize specific topic areas. That way you can be sure that everyone who signs up is getting information relevant to their interests, which makes them more likely to stick around and stay a subscriber.   Connect with Your Blog Readers Drip campaigns provide a low-effort way to make a connection with every new subscriber you get. A good drip campaign can sell new subscribers on your content and make them feel like part of your blog community. You probably can’t manually contact every person that reads your blog to show them you appreciate them, so this is the next best thing. Are you a HostGator customer? Learn more about how you can get started with Constant Contact email marketing . Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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