Deadlines are a part of every freelancer’s daily grind. But not everyone can honor timelines graciously. Most freelance writers, bloggers, Internet marketers, and SEO professionals hustle up to meet deadlines and end up botching their assignments. This can cause you to make mistakes and also gets you mentally exhausted. In addition, the work churned out is often low in quality. If you are having hard time meeting your timelines, here are a few tricks that can help you set things right. 1. Create a time table This is the most important part of getting an assignment done on time. Break up the work into specific tasks and mete out time for each activity. You can create a detailed timetable with hourly tasks or just make a rough weekly sketch. Create a checklist of all tasks and tick each one when you complete it. Thus, you will know how much work is done and what is still pending. 2. Understand your – Read the full article
Content marketing can be used to attract more traffic and build a better online reputation for your business. Here are a number of tips to help you do just that: 1. Be consistent in providing new and valuable information One thing that you need to do with content marketing is to make sure that you actually have new and valuable content to market. So, write up some articles, publish them, make sure you consistently provide useful information to your audience, and establish your expertise on the topic you’re writing about. 2. Always create keyword-targeted content Don’t just create any content. Your content must be optimized for the search engines, using certain relevant keywords, in order to be found and read. Remember that we are working with search engines to attract more (and better-targeted) potential customers to your website. In this case, if you are not doing SEO for your content, if you are not optimizing the textual content you’re writing, – Read the full article
As a local business owner, you know exactly how important SEO is for your web presence. What is the use of having a website when you cannot be found anyway? And when it comes to SEO, your online content plays a huge role. However, optimizing your website isn’t as simple as posting your random thoughts on your page. The entire act of creating content for SEO can be so perplexing that even the most internet-savvy business owner may still end up confused. Here are a few tips for creating content which will please not just the search engines but also your human readers. Think about your readers It’s very easy to get caught up in the entire SEO process especially when you get too focused on keywords. Some people think of optimization as an end all, be all that they write content which isn’t pleasing to human readers anymore. They forget that the main reason for why they – Read the full article
There are ways to monitor changes and updates to your favorite websites, blogs, social networks, classifieds, and local business listings (including Google Places pages) – without having to watch the Web 24/7 or pressing the Refresh button every minute. And while RSS is today’s most popular way of syndicating content automatically, not all websites have it. (And not all users prefer it.) That’s where this list comes in: to be able keep up with what’s happening (in real-time) on any place across the entire Web; to monitor what customers and competitors alike are doing and saying; and to listen and respond to reviews and feedback as they are generated. Here are some of today’s best tools for monitoring changes to any website. Page2RSS Page2RSS is a free service that lets you create feeds for web pages you wish to follow or monitor – pages, specifically, that are static or don’t offer any RSS/Atom feeds. Page2RSS also serves as a way – Read the full article
Great content comes from great authors. At least that’s what Google thinks. That’s why, in an effort to recognize the people who write original stuff on the Web, the search engine company has recently rolled out a new authorship markup feature. “(It’s) a way to connect authors with their content on the Web,” wrote Google software engineer Othar Hansson in a company blog post. “We’re experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.” It gets a little technical, but the development is in line with Google’s attempt to encourage more original content to be published on the Web, all while minimizing the influence and performance of low-quality content (from content farms) in search results. Google’s support for authorship markup extends to include: Prominently displaying the names of authors of articles within search results Enabling people to use Google search results to learn more about, find other works by, or contact and – Read the full article
Writing content for your website, company blog, and social media networks? Unleash your inner comic. If you don’t have one, hire a writer who has one. That’s because a great sense of humor will go far in helping you get noticed on the Web. Sure, your brand may be as serious as serious can get. Maybe you’re in the business of selling insurance, or dental services, or something of the sort that makes you sit straight up in boardroom meetings, wear a crisp suit to work every day, and conclude that funny does not bode well for the bottom line. But in the age of the Internet, in the vast and competitive landscape known as social media, it’s probably a good idea to take a cue from those who can make people laugh. Why? Because humor lengthens the attention span: Thanks in part to Twitter and to our link-clicking habits, Web content has been reduced to a matter of 140-character – Read the full article
Establishing – or enhancing – the presence of your business online will require a lot of text. Let’s see: website copy (with multiple pages), product and service descriptions, blog entries, tweets, Facebook wall posts, E-mail newsletters, pay-per-click ads, etc. So who’s going to do all that writing? Hire a web content writer. That’s the simplest solution, right? It’s also one of the most efficient. You hire the writer for a specific content creation project, maybe even an outsourced writer from offshore. It’s cost-effective, and you’re also able to free up a lot of time for yourself – time that you can spend focusing on running and growing your business, as opposed to playing the role of a copywriter or communication agency. Before you handpick a writer, though, you have to make sure that he or she is your best candidate. An interview may even be necessary. The most important thing, of course, is that the writer has what it takes – Read the full article
Old-fashioned PR professionals will tell you that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Well, this no longer holds true, at least not in the age and realm of the Internet. Thanks to Google, it has become so much easier to search and find customers, clients, employees, employers, readers, fans, and business partners online. It’s become so much easier to “Google” a name or a brand and find out everything there is to know about it. The downside? It’s also pretty easy to get misrepresented online. Just ask the boss who has to deal with an undiplomatically-mouthed ex-employee. Or the brand owner who’s facing an angry, dissatisfied ex-fan. Or the business owner whose troubles from many years ago have come back to haunt him. Negative search results on Google – or on any other search engine – can potentially cost companies and business organizations thousands, even millions, of dollars. A number of online reputation management companies promise to remove – Read the full article
