10 Tips For Getting More Followers On Instagram

With millions of unique, active visitors and up to 70 million uploads every day, Instagram is undoubtedly one of the most popular social platforms on the internet today. It’s no surprise that both individuals and brands are working beyond themselves to maximize its features and benefits, and that many have tripled their sales and engagement expectations with it.

The real deal for any Instagram user is in getting more followers for their account. Whether you want your product or brand to get a wider audience or just want your personal photos seen by more interested people, the answer is in getting more people to follow your account.  The more followers an account has, the more views and likes its photos and videos will get.

That translates to more sales over time in case of a brand account. But how can one get followers beyond their circle of friends of relatives and relatives? Most people are stuck with a handful of followers yet they need to have their photos seen by more people every day.

This article shows you a few Tips you can use to get more followers on Instagram in no time.

In summary

  1. Publish content regularly
  2. Make use of the right hashtags
  3. Make your photos stand out
  4. Share your content to other social networks
  5. Make use of videos too
  6. Repost content from other Instagram users
  7. Like and comment on other users’ posts, and use direct messages for engagement
  8. Use some cool tools like Websta
  9. Post your content at optimal hours
  10. Get people to tag their friends

1. Publish Content Regularly

Get More Followers On Instagram

To have your photos and images seen by more people on Instagram, it’s important that you post as much as two times every day. Research shows that people who post content regularly gain more followers over time.

 Here’s how it works: By posting more than once every day, your content isn’t buried under other photos and videos in people’s Newsfeeds. It’s always visible to potential followers, and that increases their engagement and curiosity.

2. Make Use of The Right Hashtags

use-hashtags

Like any other social media platform, Instagram supports the use of hashtags, which help users find and organize the content they want to see. They are a simple of having your photos and videos discovered by interested users, who are most likely to convert to followers with proper engagement.

To get more followers for your Instagram, you’ve got to identify the right hashtags that other accounts in your niche are using and put them to maximum use. Just a few hashtags may not produce results. Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post, but you only need 11 to 15 hashtags per post to widen your reach.

Here’s what you should do:  Discover the tags that successful accounts in your niche are using most and add them to your list of tags. Always add some of the most popular/common tags such as #selfie, #love, #tbt, #tagsforlikes, etc.

3. Make Your Photos Stand Out

use-filters

Instagram is a visual medium. There is a lot of imagery on display, which requires your photos to stand out if they are to be noticed and found engaging. Take high-resolution photos from proper angles and touch them up with the right filters, appropriate effects, and strong, but emotionally appealing captions.

A study carried out by TrackMaven revealed that the filter you apply on a photo actually has a big effect on how many views it will get, with warmer filters such as Mayfair attracting the most people. Attractive photos directly increase engagement, likes, and sharing, which translates to more followers over time.

4. Share Your Content to Other Social Networks

share-content

Instagram allows you to connect with other social media accounts where you’re most likely to have more followers, including Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, FourSquare, and even Vkontakte.

That provides you with the opportunity to cross-link your account with these profiles and draw wider viewership to your content by sharing each post you make with your friends and followers on these social platforms. Even if you buy real Instagram followers, for you to keep them, you will have to have engaging content that is fresh and regularly updated to meet expectations. Don’t rest on your laurels, things move fast in this world.

 Make use of the option you’re given to automate cross-sharing whenever you post a new photo or video. Additionally, market your brand on these social platforms by using links to direct people to your account.

5. Make Use of Videos Too

use-videos

Videos of up to 60 seconds can be uploaded to Instagram too. Draw more followers to your account with simple, relevant videos about your brand or life, and make sure they’re engaging enough to entice people to watch until the end.

Videos have always been known to drive even more engagement, especially if they are funny or show people how to make their lives easier. Remember to add a ‘catchy’ call to action at the end of the video.

 It can be wording that displays your web address, requests users to follow your social media accounts and more ultimately, a request to follow your account for more engagement.

6. Re-post Content from Other Instagram Users

repost

There are lots of other Instagram accounts with large established follower numbers in every niche and large archives of content you can choose from. This tip involves reposting content from such accounts to your page and using the right hashtags so that people can find it.

 You should also look out for posts published by both your followers and random Instagram users and repost them. This method easily drives more viewers to your photos and translates to more followers over time.

7. Like, Follow and Comment on Other Users’ Posts, and Use Direct Messages for Engagement

direct-message

This is the oldest trick in the book. Reach out to more people, and they will reach out to you. For better results, look out for bigger related accounts and like their photos, and comment on them. 1 in every 4 accounts you like and comment on is more likely to follow you back. You can also make use of direct messages to reach out to the managers of those accounts.

8. Make Use of Some Cool Tools Like Websta

websta

There is a large assortment of tools you can use to make followers run to you on Instagram. Tools such as Websta help you identify your competitors and the most popular tags while others such as Crowdfire help you copy followers from other accounts. Look out for tools such as IconoSquare which tracks the views and performance of each post and Schedugram, which allows you to schedule posts for publishing at certain times.

Recommended: The Most Comprehensive List of 101 Social Media Management Tools

9. Post Your Content at Optimal Hours

optimal-hours

It is important to understand your niche’s audience and know what time they usually use the platform, what kind of photos they usually like and the exact time these photos or videos are usually published.

Knowing this helps you to determine the time of the day during which your potential followers are most likely to be online. Research shows that most business people check out business-related content during work hours and everyday content during off-hours.

 Post your content only during those hours to prevent it from being buried under piles of other photos without being seen.

10. Get People to Tag Their Friends

tag-friends

Finally, you should remember to tag different people on every post you make. Besides tagging your established followers, you should request them to tag their families and friends to introduce your content to a wider audience.

Tags are a smart way to attract new people to your content and make one sure way of getting followers when used properly.

Advanced Methods of Getting More Instagram Followers

Unlike the methods mentioned in the former section, the methods listed here are not as easy to use and may cost you a penny or two.

Buying Fake Followers

followers

It’s a proven psychological fact that people will lean toward offers or products that other people have already shown interest in. The fact rings true for Instagram too, where hundreds of likes on a single post is a major draw for others to like it too. To make this work, you can buy new fake followers to act as social proof for unsure would-be followers and attract them to join hundreds of other followers by following your account.

Getting Featured on Established Accounts

get-featured

This method requires you to pay a fee to larger accounts to have your content featured in their posts. This usually works for brands using Instagram to market their products. The fee varies with the account in question, with bigger accounts charging more and having higher like-follower conversion rates. All you need to do is search for large accounts, look out for those displaying email addresses, and reach out to them.

Before You Go.

Getting more followers on Instagram shouldn’t be difficult at all. By integrating these tips and ideas in your daily posting schedule, you can guarantee more engagement for both your followers and random visitors, and rake in more likes and followers in due course.

To sum it up, take high-quality photos, edit them with the right filters, post them at the right time for your audience and make good use of relevant hashtags every time you post. Remember, the trick is in engaging other Instagram followers well enough with your content to entice them to follow you. Following the above tips above will help you triple your follower count in no time!

Now it’s your turn.

What are your tips for getting more followers on Instagram? Share your thoughts below!

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10 Strategies For Pinterest Marketing in 2017

Do you think that Facebook and Twitter are the only channels for Social Marketing? If so, think again because you may be missing out on a little more than “just a lot” of customers, that you could reach if you were to tap the power of Visual Content.

Pinterest, in its entirety, is a Social Discovery Platform that allows marketers to create Image Pin Boards, which they can share with their followers.

Speaking of how effective Pinterest pins can be, they are 100 times more effective than a Twitter tweet, and they annihilate Facebook Posts by a massive margin with the half-life of a Pinterest pin being 16000x timed longer than that of a Facebook Post. Ever since Instagram has been purchased by Facebook, the popularity of Pinterest as an Image Sharing platform has also surged. It is becoming the go to place for marketers from all industry dimensions.

Other than that there are quite a few reasons, apart from these statistics, that should make you want to hop onto the Pinterest bandwagon…

Why Should You Use Pinterest?

Why Pinterest

The Pinterest community has grown to more than 150 million active users around the globe every month.

Despite this expeditious adoption, I often hear, “I don’t get Pinterest like I get other social networks.” And I too felt the same way when I come across this platform.

But let me tell you a secret. Pinterest is insanely simple and easy to use software that has a great influence on your business.

I am not saying this for the sake of pushing you onto this platform like others. Pinterest is not like a regular social site to have maximum followers or likes. It is different. It is performing really well for driving traffic and leads and uplifting sales.

Before jumping right into the matter, here are some crazy Pinterest statistics to consider:

  1. 87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest
  2. 83% of Pinterest users would rather follow a brand than a celeb
  3. Those who interact with a promoted Pin spend 7x more than others
  4. 70% of sales due to Promoted Pins are from new customers
  5. 67% of Pinners are under 40-years-old.

Here are 5 reasons why you should consider marketing on Pinterest for your business:

1. Discover Customer Behavior 

Pinterest is a great source of discovering customer behavior. People are open to brands, and their perceptions have a high degree of commercial intent. Thus, marketers have the opportunity to connect with people who are honestly interested in their products and services. I keep hearing people say that Pinterest has changed our mindset of purchasing products.

For sellers, the route to purchase from a social network is no more direct than on Pinterest. ‘See it, like it, buy it’ happens very often. You may notice the path to purchase is not as straight, but you get to see purchase-linking of an item from a social network.

When you see an image of your favorite product on Pinterest, and you are only one or two clicks away from landing on an e-commerce site.

2. Easy To Manage

Brands have a genuine concern for adopting a new platform because of the expenses related to hiring an employee. The coolest thing about Pinterest is that it comes with easy to operate dashboard, which you can manage single-handedly. Except for pinning, sorting, and tagging pictures, you don’t have to worry about anything.

3. Engage Over Visual Elements of Your Audience

Pinterest is all about visual content. So, it attracts the part of the audience, who prefers pictures over texts. This part of the crowd relates more with the images than with written words.

The perk of using visual content is that you can tap a new segment of consumers, who might be interested in your product but never come across it. You can attract people by maintaining a community around your pinned images and encourage them to buy your products and services.

4. Augments Content Reach

Over 80% of pins on Pinterest are re-pins. That means if you are the creator of a pin, your pin is already being repinned multiple times amongst a wide range of users. Most re-pined words on Pinterest are a recipe, DIY, chicken, cheese, cake, step, fashion, etc. Pinterest amplifies your pin reach with a larger audience.

5. Addictive User Engagement

Pinterest is highly addictive. I find myself hooked onto Pinterest for Sunday Brunch recipes on every weekend.

You get to see the latest trends in the market and make your marketing game plan based on popular trends.

An increase in 94% click-through’s is seen in pins that are related to trending topics.” Observe the popular section on Pinterest and your Pinterest analytics to see what is trending and pin similar images.

These should be reason enough for you to make you want to join the Platform today, but if you are still considering otherwise, check out the strategies that are bound to give even the most off-beat businesses a push from the fifth dimension.

Strategies for Pinterest Marketing.

pinterest-marketing -2017

Unlike others, Pinterest also comes with its own set of rules and regulations. Make sure to check them out before embarking on your Pinterest journey.

Most Important Thing to keep in mind before signing up on Pinterest

Never, ever use Pinterest as a tool for self-promotion.”

If you don’t want to get your pins unnoticed, then don’t use Pinterest for self-promotion.

Here is our blueprint for promotion on Pinterest.

  1. Online Prospectus

For most businesses that have a physical product to sell, an online prospectus/catalog is the most obvious thing for them to create. For example, if you have an apparel business, you can showcase your clothes with a price tag. Don’t forget to link each product to its description page.

  1. Create Boards Dedicated To Your Customers

You can create boards devoted to your prospects and where you can boast your prospect’s best pins they love.

  1. Create Pins About Your Upcoming Event

If you are hosting an event, then create a dedicated board for the event and pin images related to the event. Users can curate content on topics like conferences, speakers, and highlights of the conference.

  1. Create Board On A Product Launch

Pinterest is an open platform for showcasing new products. This is the reason why startups find it a perfect fit for their product launch. You can keep a user interested in your products this way.

  1. Optimize Pin Descriptions

Besides creating user-generated boards, you should also focus on pin descriptions. Pin descriptions are frequently overlooked, but it helps users understand the context of the picture. “Pin descriptions of about 200 characters are most pinnable.” – says Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella.

  1. Run A Contest

Propose your followers to create boards about your brand on their accounts and pin pictures that resonate why they like you. “Pin To Win” – has been a successful formula for increasing user engagement for many businesses.

  1. Integrate Rich Pins

Rich pins come in 6 varieties: Recipe, Movie, Product, Article, Place and App. Applying for rich pins gets you instant information update on your pins automatically. This leads more people to your site if you linked your website to those pins.

  1. Cover Your Face

Statistics have proven that images lacking human faces get repinned 23% more than images that contain faces.

Take a look at this infographic beautifully explained by Curalata.

    9. Include Watermarks To Your Pictures

An average image gets repinned multiple times. So, it is quite easy to forget the original creator. If you add your brand’s watermark to your images, the chance of getting unrecognized becomes less. On top of that, your brand name revolves among users, and that simply increases the user reach of your site. I recommend using the Site name because that makes your brand significant.

     10. Install Pin It Button

Have you ever noticed the “Pin It” button on top of images of various websites?

The Pin It button allows users to pin an image from the website making the pinning process quicker, better, and a lot easier. To integrate the “Pin It” buttons, all you need to do is to install the “Pin It” plugin on your website. And voila! Your readers can pin directly from your site, blog, or product catalog This is good for businesses and retailers because it means your pins are more likely to be seen, engaged, or go viral.

5 Tools To Help You Treasure Great Content For Pinterest

Pinterest_Fotter

Most of us come across great content while surfing the internet daily. However, curating content for your site needs a little push as for pinning. Here are 5 tools I vouch for.

  1. StumbleUpon
  2. Tumblr
  3. Facebook
  4. Google+ 
  5. Twitter
Final Words

Do not use Pinterest for the sake of using it just like other platforms. Use it if you are ready for it and can benefit your business out of it.

Pinterest is clearly here to stay, and it opens new doors to boost your business. It may not be suitable for all businesses, but if you find yourself a perfect fit for the platform, you have ample of ways to go about marketing on it.

As you intend to scale your business, these 10 Pinterest marketing strategies will help you drive more traffic to your website.

Have you leveraged Pinterest marketing for your brand? How did it go? Which strategies have worked for you? Let me know in the comments below!

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Top 10 Free Project Management Software Of 2017

Project management tools – So, you are here in search of open source and free project management tools because you are juggling with managing projects with your team.

If you are one of those, who is still struggling with To-Do lists and emails to communicate with clients or team for a project and gets stuck in the middle and all tasks as TASKS become a horrible nightmare, then you are not alone. We all have been through that phase.

Whether you are a small business or an enterprise, a team management tool will help you to complete tasks within the deadline and reach your milestones more efficiently than ever.

So, without further ado…

What Is a Project Management Software?

Project management software is an online platform for collaborating with team members on projects in real time. This workplace is designed to help with better communication with clients and the team and to keep an eye on the progress of each task. It simply provides you an overview of laid-out tasks to the corresponding person.

How does it help?

This will help each member to stay organized and bring a project to fruition. You can track and measure the performance of an individual employee or overall team at the end of the month.

Our Top 10 Free Project Management Tools Picks of 2017 are..

With a vast array of project management applications available online, here are our top picks in the market. These software are free for you for unlimited users and projects. You always get the opportunity to upgrade these tools in future.

So, get your hands on this free project management software to get the most out of your team performance in real-time.

Asana

Asana

Asana, created by Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook and Justin Rosenstein, former teach-lead of Facebook and Google, is a project management workspace that lets you break your projects down into small-small listicle tasks along with easy to understand dashboard to track the progress of the tasks.

Features:

  • Create a task for yourself or assign task to team members
  • Organize tasks into shared lists for your meetings
  • Add new workflows with pre-made templates
  • Break up the work of a task into smaller parts
  • View progress of any project at a glance
  • Due dates set the deadline for a task
  • Add files from your computer, Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive
  • Get team updates
  • Compatible with desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
  • The free version is limited up to 15 users.

Pricing:

Free Premium Enterprise
Up to 15 team members $8.33/mo

No team member limit.

Contact Asana
Trello

Trello

Trello is a free project management software that helps in organizing your projects in Kanban boards. You can start out by organizing Trello Cards or Boards containing to-do lists of tasks and break down the project. Trello lets you add tasks, checklists, comments, due dates, and more to shape them any way you like and keep track on the progress of your project to bring a task to fruition.

Features:

  • Include comments, attachments, and more to Trello cards
  • Manage multiple projects
  • Trello Power Ups integrates the app that your team use
  • Add voting options on tasks
  • Older and completed task gets deleted automatically
  • Sync across all IoT devices
  • Free for unlimited projects and users

Pricing:

Free Business Class Enterprise
$0 Forever. $9.99/user/mo Contact Trello
GanttProject

Ganttproject

If you need a place for project management, a collaboration of the team, and get your work done in real-time, consider GanttProject. This free open-source platform was created by Alexandre Thomas in 2003 and this platform has been through many developments and recycles phases since then.

Features of GanttProject:

  • Create and manage tasks and milestones
  • Break down tasks into smaller tasks and work in an organized manner
  • Add a lag or draw dependency constraints between the tasks
  • Create a baseline to compare between two projects
  • Generate PERT Chart for only reading purpose
  • Generate reports in HTML or PDF foprmats.

Pricing:

Absolutely free! No Sign-up required.

Freedcamp

freedcamp

This open source platform lets you create tasks, reach milestones, manage events all in one place. You are free to create multiple projects with multiple users with unlimited storage. It helps to stay organized and complete a project on the due date.

Features of Freedcamp:

  • Issue tracker helps to solve issues like unique user ID, save searches, extra statuses and perform bulk actions.
  • Send invoices to clients
  • Create a rich and shareable document
  • Use templates to create and differentiate multiple projects
  • Organize tasks or to-do lists or a Kanban board.
  • Discuss inside a project and include attachments
  • Free for unlimited projects and unlimited users.

Pricing:

Free Lite Business Enterprise
$0 $4 $8 Contact Freedcamp
Wrike

wrike

Have you ever tried managing projects in spreadsheets?

Wrike is a free and open source project management software that lets you outline your tasks into a spreadsheet. You can jot down every bit of details of a task into columns of spreadsheet and keep an eye on the progress of the tasks.

Features of Wrike:

  • Easy to use dashboard
  • Mark on-going task status as in-progress, deferred, completed, canceled or any status of your choice.
  • Add text notes to tasks
  • Collaborate with team members and set goals for company improvement

Pricing:

Free Professional Business Marketers Enterprise
$0 $ 9.80 / user / mo $ 24.80 / user / mo

 

$ 34.60 / user / mo

 

Contact Wrike
Podio

Podio

Podio is a project management tool that lets you create and customize tasks on the simple table to dynamic cardboards and create project reports that keep you up to date on the progress of a task.

Features of Podio:

  • Drag and drop style builder
  • Visualize your projects in lists, calendars or cards
  • Monitor the overall progress of your team
  • Integrates with Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, Microsoft Exchange, Zendesk, and many more.
  • Sync Podio with your mobile device to track from anywhere you want
  • Streamlined communication with team members
  • In-built search to find custom apps.

Pricing:

Basic Plus Premium Enterprise
$9 $14 $24 Contact Podio
Meistertask

meistertask

Meistertask is an online task management tool that offers easy-to-use and customizable dashboard or Kanban boards. Its intuitive interface makes tasks look more fun and even increases the productivity of team members with its task automation features.

Features of Meistertask:

  • Integrate MindMeister, a mind-map app that helps to plan a project and drag each step of the project in Meistertask to complete it
  • Overview on-going tasks and focus on completion
  • Discuss projects, upload files, set due dates, add checklist items, and a lot more into your task
  • Integrate with other apps such as Slack, GitHub, Google Drive, etc.

Pricing:

Basic Pro
Free $7.5per user/mo
Bitrix24

Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is an online project management system that has extensive organizational features to manage and monitor tasks for the completion of a project in an effective manner. Bitrix24 lets you delegate tasks to employees, dedicated a group to a project. It also offers Gantt Charts, listicles task management ad time tracking to reach the milestone in due date.

Features of Bitrix24:

  • Perform bulk action in sending emails in one go
  • Share editorial calendar and generate CRM reports
  • Get notified by email on any update on the assigned task
  • The intuitive interface makes file sharing convenient
  • Bitrix24’s task automation helps you automate regular responsibilities and recurring work schedule
  • Add checklist and breakdown tasks into smaller points
  • Aggregate, filter, and sort report data to display them in an organized form.

Pricing:

Free Plus Standard Professional
$0 $39/mo $99/mo $199/mo
Zoho Project

zoho

Zoho Project was launched in 2006 as a comprehensive project management system, which has been evolved since then and has been adopted by many enterprises to plan, track and collaborate with a team for the completion of a project.

Features of Zoho Project:

  • Manage tasks and track time delegated for a task
  • Take control of subtasks and recurring tasks
  • Gantt Chart provides an in-depth insight of progress of the task
  • Collaborate and communicate with team members easily with Collaboration Tools
  • Generate invoices automatically from timesheets
  • Inspect bugs and track them as they get fixed
  • Google Apps and GitHub integration

Pricing:

Free Express Premium Enterprise
$0 $25 $50 $80
Allthings

Allthings

A great alternative to Basecamp, Glasscube, and Zoho is AllThings. The platform lets you manage your plans, projects, tasks, lists, and meetings under a single roof. You can view project status in many ways and stack, filter, categorize, group and search for tasks and files in Dashboard. Stay up-to-minute using the apps for mobile and tablets, along with the desktop version. Perfect for Startup to Intermediate businesses.

Features of Allthings:

  • Free to try, no CC Required
  • Task Management
  • Work/Resource Planning
  • Customizable and Real-Time Alerting
  • SaaS Platform
  • To-do Lists
  • Create Shareable Lists
  • No Contracts, Easy and Affordable
  • Group collaboration feature
  • And more..
Milanote

Milanote

Milanote is a tool for organizing creative projects into beautiful visual boards. By design, it feels a lot like working on the wall in a creative studio – visual, tactile, and sometimes a bit messy – Milanote is a great fit for designers who work in teams remotely.

Key Features of Milanote:

  • Write notes & to-do lists, upload images & files and save things you find on the web
  • Organize visually using the flexible drag and drop interface.
  • Boards by default are a private place to think, but with a single click you can create a shared workspace for collaboration with your team
  • Milanote is filled with hundreds of built-in templates to help you get started with a variety of different projects, from creating a mood board to writing that perfect creative brief.

Pricing:

Basic Pro
Free (no time limit) $9.99per user/mo
On The Move..

As you can see from the above list, there is a myriad solution for Task and Project Management. Whether you are looking for dashboard functionality, group collab, search features, category listing, to-do lists, and more, all these solutions are more or less present in every Software. Don’t be confused, based on your budget and feature requirements, select any three platforms from the list above and…

  • Google for Product Reviews for the selected Platform. Reading user opinions on these platforms will let you narrow down to the one perfect solution that will best fit your business.
  • Try using the Free/Freemium Models to test out the features of the platforms that you have selected. This will give you an understanding of how it’s really like to use the platform. The UI of a certain feature rich platform might be confusing for you, so stick to the one which is easy to follow and understand.
  • Once you select a platform, test it out with your team for a few weeks, and don’t be afraid to move onto a better option, if you face problems along the way. After all, the idea of having a Project Management Dashboard is to solve problems and get work done, not to be a problem in itself.

Looking to create your own Digital Marketing Team? Why don’t you join us in our Project Management Dashboard, as we would love to be your Digital Marketing Partner? For any questions, feel free to reach out to us on our Official Facebook Page, and to know more about Digital Marketing Partnership Perks, visit the following page.

Have a good day!

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Top 20 Amazing Websites To Download Royalty Free Stock Photos

As Digital Marketing continues to grow, so does the quality and the presentation of content. Visual marketing will entirely dominate 2017 as people tend to look for visually appealing content rather than reading a plain block of texts.

So, in order to engage people, we must take care of visual elements in the content we provide. And the first step towards spicing up your content starts with adding relevant images because – “A picture is worth a thousand words.

picture-worths-a-thousand-words

You might have noticed the featured image of this post before even reading the headline. We, bloggers, use featured image in the context of the topic of the article and to make the article attract the attention of a casual surfer. This in return makes a marked difference in how the content we provide is consumed by the masses.

When dealing with images online, always ensure that you read the Terms of Service and Licensing rules of the websites before collecting them for your own purpose.

I will not discuss the licensing part as this post is solely dedicated to websites that provide royalty free images. These are my personal favorite sources for image aggregation.

So, without further ado and in no particular order here they are:

Pixabay  

A Creative-Common Zero site that offers over 500,000 images that you can incorporate into your personal and professional use for free. They offer great resources such as Images, vectors, illustrations. As they have no commercial use of restrictions, you can download, change and use them in any way you want.

Pixabay

Freepik

Freepik has a huge database of royalty-free images licensed under Creative Common CC0. So, whenever I’m in a rush to download relevant images for my article, the Freepik comes to my rescue. You just need to put the term in the search box, and Freepik will show you all relevant results, which you can download in a different size. Apart from images, you get vectors, icons, illusions, templates, and a lot more under this platform.

Freepik

Unsplash

Unsplash offers a vast array of free images in high quality for free. All images are licensed under Creative Common CC0 that simply means that you can download, edit and use for personal and professional purpose without asking for permission of giving credits. They offer quality images snapped from different angles that make images simply breathtaking.

Unsplash

Gratisography

Gratisography is owned by the photographer Ryan McGuire. The images that you find on the site are photographed by Ryan himself and are free from copyright restrictions. You can find pictures categorized into animals, nature, objects, people, urban and whimsical. All pictures are of high-resolution you can use for your personal or commercial projects.

Gratisography

Well, you can take a look at his quirky panache by looking at this snap!

gatisography-photo

IM Free

IM Free offers a vast assortment of free pictures from around the globe. Their collection includes web templates, people, business, icons, technology, health, food & drinks, sports & fitness, education fashion, beauty, inspiration, black& white, and a lot more. Its button-maker feature makes it unique to stand out from other sites. You can easily create and design a button and implement it in your web pages. Just copy the CSS code at the end of the process and paste it into your page.

IM-Free

Picography

Picography is one of my favorite websites to search and download free images for websites. All photos are licensed under Creative Common CC0. It has an amazing collection of pictures including premium ones where you can purchase brand new collections every month at $15 per month or 120 per year. If you are a photographer, you can submit your photos and showcase your portfolio on Picography as it provides an open platform and if they approve, they will showcase your name and a portfolio link.

Picography

Negative Space

Negative Space keeps its users updated with the new stocks of images every week, and all of them are royalty and attribution free. You can sort out free images by their category (including abstract, architecture, street, work, landscapes, etc.), color, and copy space position.

Negativespace

Freestock

Freestock offers really high-resolution image that you can use in the form you want to. All images are released under creative common cc0. You might need to reduce the size of an image before use because every image is uploaded in its original size.

Freestocks

MM Stock

MM Stock is an array of high-resolution images by Jeffrey Betts. You will mostly find pictures of flowers as Jeffrey is fond of these beauties as they full of colors and life. I like to view images in a grid layout, but you can use it as it is.

MMT-Stock

SkitterPhoto

SkitterPhoto offers a wide collection of free royalty-free images ranging from flora and fauna, landscapes, urban, low light, and a lot more. All of them are licensed under Creative Common CC0. The images can be used for any purpose of your choice. Pictures are authentic and are owned by SkitterPhoto itself. Attribution is not necessary, but they appreciate it if you do. They also provide an open platform to submit your photo to showcase your talent in photography. For more information, please visit the website.

Skitterphoto

Stockvault

If you are looking for a people picture with a white background for your business, then look no further. Stockvault provides over 40,000 stock images including amazing textures, 3D renders, constructions, people, object seasonal and much more. No login detail is required to download their resources, which is a plus point of this site. You can also upload photos and share with the community over 90,000 designers and photographers and can make money by sharing your pictures. I admit it’s a well-designed platform for photo junkies.

Stockvault

Lock and Stock Photos

Free Stock Photos. Use in Any Way, Anywhere, Anytime.

This is what the site claims. It was a venture started by AJ Montpetit. With a huge stash of free stock images, this website releases images under Creative Common CC0 where no attribution is required. (Credit is always appreciated if given J). Images are categorized into animals, people, sculpture, city life, family, boats, coffee and so on.

Lockandstockphoto

Kaboompics

Kaboompics offers a wide variety of high-quality royalty-free photos that can be used for the purpose of your choice.  They provide images of abstract, fashion, architecture, nature, food and drinks. You can search an image by typing keywords, tags or categories.

Kaboompics

Pexels

Pexels offers high-definition free stock photos under the CC0 license. They provide a wide variety of images to choose from and allow us to use them commercially. Their upload section lets you submit your own photographs if you have a passion for photography. Pexels also offers a range of video clips mostly based on animals for fun. You can download and share them with your friends anytime.

Pexels

Life of Pix

Life of Pix offers a huge collection of copyright-free stock-free images of high resolution. They keep their site updated with new pictures every week. You can discover a fine collection of images under the features section. Life of Pix also nominates its photographers as the Photographer of the Week and highlights the top 10 photographies on its website and social networks.

Lifeofpix

StockSnap

StockSnap offers mesmerizing photos of high resolution. You can sort the images by date, trending, no. of views, no, of downloads and the all-time favorites. It also provides an easy-to-use Graphic Editor – Snappa to modify images according to your choice but the editor has no free plans except for 7 days of a free trial. StockSnap keeps adding hundreds of photos on a daily basis, and all photos are free from copyright restriction.

Stocksnap

TookaPicStock

This site offers both free and premium stock photos. It has a huge collection of photos that you can filter by free photos, and the free ones are released under CC0, i.e., no attribution is required but is appreciated if given.

Tookapic

Splitshire

Splitshire is created by Web Designer Nanescu to give life to the photographs that may go into oblivion without any use. It offers an assortment of stock-free photos and free videos released under CC0. The photos are categorized into abstract, cinemograph, automotive, technology, wedding, interiors. Still, life, mock-up bokeh, and a lot more. The website has over 2.000,000 downloads, and over 6,000,000 page views and also been live on Huffington, CNN posts as well as reputed magazines and covers.

Splitshire

Freeimages

Formerly known as Stock.XCHNG, Freeimages has now over 400,000 free stock images contributed by thousands of photographers. Since the site was acquired by Getty Images in 2014 and thus renamed Freeimages and the former URL redirects to the new URL. You can browse by keywords, tags, free photos, and premium photos and also upload a photo if you want.

Freeimages

Imagebase

Photographer David Niblack’s created this site for easy to browse and download free stock photos. It offers absolutely free photos for commercial, education, or personal use. It also offers instant image preview, so you can quickly take a look at the thumbnails before browsing individual pages and downloading them. They keep adding new photos every week to their stash.

Imagebase

Wrapping Up!

Let me give you a quick recap.

I want to reiterate one thing about stock photographs, whether you pay or not, whether attribution is required or not, I would like to suggest if you attribute the site or author or photographer from where you are taking images. And if you have any doubt regarding licensing terms of any particular photo, contact the site immediately. (You don’t want to take down the image that gets traction to your content.)

There is a pool of other websites that provide free stock photos — but these 20 are my picks.

What are your favorite websites for finding free stock photos?

Discuss them in the comments below!

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How To Create An Effective Business Plan In 2017

It goes without saying that, if you want to unveil and grow a business, you will have to put a few words on the page, (probably more than a few). Writing a Business Plan is perhaps the most essential, albeit the most difficult task you need to get done, once you are pretty serious that you are going to own a business.

I will discuss it elaborately later on, but Business Plans, to put it briefly and simplistically, require strategy and vision. It is your only chance to make a strong start in the already competitive market. Write a Business Plan that banks cannot resist! Write a Business Plan that makes your friendly neighborhood rivals shake in the boots (okay, maybe at least consider you as the new shark in the waters!).

Now on a more serious note, the question arises as to how am I going to write that one BP that is going to change my life as well as the future of my business?

Well, to be completely honest, you cannot wake up one fine morning and write yourself a perfect little Business Plan that gets you everything you wish for, it does not work that way. It needs patience, forethought, and more importantly a lot of confidence in yourself.

So, I will start with the ‘building confidence’ thing and then move on to the “biz talk”.

LOSING THE “I CAN’T WRITE” ANXIETY

overcoming-writing-anxiety

Do you have that dreadful “I am not a writer” syndrome? Do you feel like you know all the right words, but those are always in your head and you cannot translate those onto paper? Do you get major anxiety before writing down your thoughts? Congratulations! You have come to the right place.

  • If you are someone, perpetually stuck in a Writers’ Block, the first thing you need to believe is that anyone can write! Yes, I get that your writing will not hold a candle to that of Plath or Hemingway, but nobody expects you to be an actual great writer when you write a Business Plan. Tell yourself over and over, “I am absolutely capable of writing this myself” until you believe it!
  • Like I previously said, nobody expects you to be a great writer, so don’t fret too much about the perfect words. In fact, do not wait for the perfect words. Start somewhere. As they say, writing is like cleaning a messy room, you start from a small corner and eventually, you get the whole room cleaned.
  • Start with writing disjointed notes, you can always revise later. Use short, smart, personal language. Speaking from experience, once you have completed your first draft, it gives you a lot of confidence which helps you churn out an impressive final product.
  • Most importantly, as you sit down to write a pitch deck, make sure you have done research to the core that helps you to convey exactly what you want to. (And then, get off the internet and begin writing!)

Now, another compelling question for you must be, “What exactly is a Business Plan and what do I write in it?” Well, hold on, that is what I am going to talk about here.

 

WHAT IS A BUSINESS PLAN?

Business-Plan

Like I previously hinted at, a Business Plan is a written portrayal of the present status of your business, your aspiration for your business’s future, a document that helps you to get your thoughts organized, sets your business goals, and tells you how you plan to achieve it, and why you need support from some other people, and how and how much. Business plans differ in size and scope depending on the type of businesses involved as well as the operating history of the small business.

Business plans are innately planned. You start today, with certain capitals and skills, from POINT A. You want to get to POINT B, a point in the near future when your business will have a different set of capitals and skills along with increased exposure and maximum equity. Your plan shows how you aspire to reach from POINT A to POINT B.

 

CHOOSING THE AUDIENCE

know-your-target-audience

Before you even commence writing a business plan, you should choose who it will be targeted at. Business plans are of two types, externally focused and internally focused. When I assert “externally focused”, I mean it should entice advertisers, investors, money-lenders, and maybe collaborators, people outside of your company.

And when I say “internally focused”, that means it should aim at the people inside the company (e.g. Employees or Managers), people who must understand and share your vision and aspiration. Understanding the target audience of your business plan will help you keep the plan relevant and efficient.

 

KNOWING THE MARKET AND USING BUSINESS ANALYSIS

knowing-market-size-and-business-analysis

By analyzing your business by different methods, you discover various internal and external aspects, which might have been overlooked. PEST, SWOT, and STEEPLE are some of the analyses, that will help you to understand and find the missing link in the market. A thorough competitive analysis narrows down your research and helps you understand the market you want to tap in. It also gives you a measure of the scalability of your business and the market share of your products.

The Tech field is viciously competitive, as you already know, and you have to be specific and unique about what you are actually selling and how are you solving a “need” for your market.

 

WRITING AN EXECUTIVE START-UP SUMMARY
  • Within the overall outline of the business plan, the executive summary will follow the title page. The summary should tell the reader in brief about what you are going to elaborately say later on in the plan.
  • Talk about your total start-up expense (including legal costs, website and logo design, stationery and related expenses).
  • Include the approximated numbers for a total start up funding, total funding required, total assets, total capital and liabilities, and total planned investment.

 

COMPANY OVERVIEW

You can add a company overview to the summary or you can keep it separate. For a company overview, you write a short description of your company, a review of your company’s legal structure and ownership (Are you a sole proprietor? Or are you in partnership?), a brief history of the company if it is an existing company and a summary of the business location.

 

BEING REALISTIC, GOAL-ORIENTED AND KNOWING YOUR WEAKNESS AND STRENGTH

set-goals

A good business plan depends on realism.

You don’t get points for ideas that can’t be implemented. For example, a brilliantly written and excellently researched business plan for a product that cannot be produced in reality is not a good business plan.

It is disheartening for your workers, and you want to make sure your employees do not lose faith in you. The plan which requires millions of dollars of investment, but does not have an efficient management team that can actually achieve that investment, ultimately becomes a joke.

Ask yourself, as you evaluate a business plan: how will I know later on if we followed the plan? How will I track the results over a predetermined time frame and compare them against the plan? Let me tell you this, if you fail to give manifestation to what you promised, you will lose both external and internal commitments.

Engage with your audience.

Maybe, write a short, personal anecdote about why you decided to launch this particular business, what you expect from your employees and how you plan to treat them and manage the business; what you expect from the investors and how you plan to serve them, or how you plan to serve the consumers.

You have to be extremely convinced about your goal that you want to reach, make no mistake.

  • Know your strength and weakness, and be frank and honest about it. Focus on your strength, talk about the quality and efficiency of yourself and your employees, and don’t be shy about your weakness, which for most tech-based business start ups, is the fund (or the lack thereof).
  • Include your plans for tasks, deadlines, dates, forecasts, budgets, and metrics.

Here are few resources that can help you to get started with your Business Plan and fine tune the existing one:

 

Ending Notes

At the end, I will say that you better accept the fact that all businesses have competition. The more attractive you make your business plan, the closer you are to success. Make baby steps, and try not to get disheartened even when you face rejections. Make one small victory your stone number one and build on it. Good luck for the adventures in 2017!

 

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The Entrepreneur’s Checklist For Digital Marketing In 2017

Running a marketing campaign is not what it used to be in the early years. Earlier, starting a campaign meant planning, spending the money and then praying that your strategy hit a home-run.

Marketing has forever been a game of analytics, and with the advancement in technology in the recent years, it is easier than ever to measure the output of your digital campaigns in real time. This factor also makes survival tough for the unorganized.

The aim of this free checklist is to help you connect all your various channels for Marketing, so that your prospects do not feel left out during the lead nurturing life cycle.

By following the steps mentioned in the Extreme Checklist for Digital Marketing in 2017, you will be able to:

  1. Stay on top of key industry trends and make changes to your brand strategy in advance, to be better prepared for the future.
  2. Connect your Digital Efforts, so that your Online, Search and Social Presence work together to enhance the return on your marketing spend.
  3. Be in a better position to review the results of your marketing, and make critical changes that will increase the value of your customer acquisition process.

For ease, I have broken this checklist into five parts namely, Web Design, SEO, Analytics, Content Marketing and Social Media Marketing.

So, without further ado, let’s move onto the first section of your checklist, i.e., Web Design.

 Web Design

Web Design

Color Scheme

Does your website have a consistent and attractive color scheme?

Are you using the right color combinations for your website?

Never go overboard with colors, unless your business calls for it. If you are using more than 5 colors on your site, then use it wisely. Take help of web Designer and maintain color consistency in your site.

After all, you don’t want to end up with a site looking like an art of a 2-year-old.

My recommendation is never use more than 5 colors. 3 colored website is a standard practice in the industry.

Typography

Is your website readable on every platform?

Choose the right fonts. If people have difficulty in reading your content, they will leave your website immediately.

Marketers these days are paying more attention to their site’s typography. Why?

Read Here: The Effect of Typography on User Experience & Conversions

Social Button Integration

Have you integrated social sharing buttons into your posts?

Perks of having social sharing buttons is that, if your readers like the post that they are reading, they can immediately share with their friends on social channels. If you are using a WordPress website, this can easily be achieved with a plugin. Always give your viewers the quick and easy option to share your articles.

Free Opt-In Form

A free opt-in form asks a visitor’s name and email id in exchange of free resources. Install this feature on your site to build credibility towards prospects, by giving them value in return for their contact information.

Optimize for Mobile

A detailed insight by ComScore shows how people are accessing the internet through smartphones, as opposed to desktops. So, I am sure that you don’t want to have a website that is not accessible via mobiles. A mobile friendly site increases the usability of your website for smartphone users.

Is your website responsive? How does your website look on mobiles and tablets?

Takeaway: Consider using responsive themes or implementing mobile-first CSS to make your site user-friendly. Review your website using Google Mobile Site Checker.

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Analytics

Analytics

Website Traffic Insights

Website traffic is directly correlated to the success of your marketing campaign. Review your website’s top performing pages and analyze the traffic. Understand how many visitors come to your site, how many of them are unique and what elements have helped you capture leads or convert visitors the most.

After all this scheming, you will be able to understand, which traffic sources are most beneficial for your business.

Did you review your website performance?

Takeaway: Use these  Top SEO Tools to review your website performance.

Watch Over Competitors’ Websites

Run an audit of your competitor’s website. Keeping an eye on your opponent’s activity will give you a clear picture of what is pushing them on top. You can take a hint from them and implement certain things from their strategy for your business. This will keep you on the edge, and you won’t miss out any chance of being ahead of your competitors.

Review competitor strategy to understand how they fare against your website?

Takeaway: Use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs or SEO SiteCheckup for auditing your competitors’ websites.

Perform Full Website Checkup

Monitor your websites broken links, loading speed, cross- browser compatibility and navigation. Fix problems, if you find any. Make your navigation smooth for visitors as well as for Search Engine Spiders.

Does your website have broken links? Remember to check broken links, plagiarism, loading speed and browser compatibility for your website.

Takeaway:  Use tools like HubSpot Website Grader or Woorank to find out issues and fix them.

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Search Engine Optimization

SEO

Okay, so your website has top of the line design, great content and images. But, what if I tell you these don’t matter if your SEO is not in place.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your site looks if prospects can’t find your website. All your effort will be go down-the-drain, if you don’t optimize your content for Search Engine. It is extremely crucial to optimize each page of your site if you want to attract more traffic.

Check your website for the following On-page SEO Factors:

  • Title Tags – Are you using focus keywords in your page titles?
  • Meta Descriptions – Do all your web pages contain meta descriptions?
  • Content with Buyer Intent Keywords – Include Buyer Intent Keywords in your main landing pages.
  • Header Tags – Have you followed the six-heading tag format to give your page some structure? (i.e. <h1> to <h6>)
  • Image ALT Tags – Use Image ALT Tags for SEO purpose.
  • URL Structure – Make sure your URL is short and related to the page and includes keywords.
  • Sitemaps – Use sitemap to allow users to navigate around your site quickly when at the bottom of the page.
  • Navigation – Make your navigation easy and smooth, so that Search Engine bots can crawl smoothly.

Have you optimized your site for Search Engines?

Recommended: Read about creating a proper navigation structure for your website here.

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Content Marketing

Content Marketing

Does your content attract enough traction for your brand?

Content is the King! You need to publish fresh content for both visitors and Search Engine Bots. Publish 4-5 blog posts a month, between 1000-2000 words. Make sure, your content is free from grammatical mistakes and spelling errors and should include eloquent CTA’s.

Have you put the important information in the first two paragraphs of your content?

Consider Reading: Here’s Why You Need to Focus On Content Marketing In 2017?

Headline and Titles

 Do the headings on your web pages describe what the content below is about?

Research has shown that 8 out of 10 people only read the headline. Make sure, your headlines include keywords and have an engaging tone to attract an audience.

Publish Content for Prospects

Optimize your content for your visitors, not just bots. Don’t just stuff keywords for Search Engine Robots, but provide value to the readers. If visitors can’t make head or tail out of what you publish, it is better to not publish at all.

Check if you are producing consistent and valuable content for readers?

ReadWhy should you focus on making your content better for the coming year?

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Social Media Marketing

social media marketing

Does your website produce shareable content?

Address the pain of the target audience, help them solve problems, and answer questions being asked about your brand.

Don’t forget to use target keywords in your social media posts.

Review your brand’s Social Media Profiles to find areas for improvement?

Facebook

Update the profile image and cover image of your Facebook page.

Promote content and offers of the page to increase the traffic of your site.

Invest in paid advertisement and run a campaign to create awareness about your brand.

Run contests and quizzes to attract people to your page and use a referral chain for registration to the contest. Do not hesitate to spend few $$$ in organizing giveaways. People love getting pampered by gifts. You can do this occasionally at special events.

Try posting different types of content like images, videos, gifs, blog posts, offers, etc.

Twitter

Post at least 3-5 tweets a day. These may also include retweet’s from influencers and blog posts including CTA’s.

Monitor mentions and thanks to them.

Add images and #hashtags to your tweets to get found.

Pro Tip: Use automated software like Twittercounter, Tweepi, IFTTT to automate your tweets and manage your Twitter Profile.

LinkedIn

Update your company profile. Circulate articles and job openings.

Take part in discussions.

Upload relevant content weekly.

Promote your services and post valuable information.

Encourage your employees to establish an online reputation and expand their networks.

Google Plus

Follow new people or companies to be on the trend.

Circulate your blog posts, share other content, and promote your services and events.

YouTube

Find new videos to share on your page.

Publish one video weekly. Try to make whiteboard presentations, DIYs, tutorials, etc. to engage the audience.

Subscribe to new channels of your industry monthly.

Circulate your videos to different channels. Try replying to comments under your videos.

Wrapping Up!

There is no shortcut to success. If you want to make your mark in 2017, then this checklist should help you reach your core objectives.

But, before you begin, you should take the time to evaluate your progress in 2016. What strategies worked for you this year, which channels performed better, which sources contributed to most of your qualified traffic etc.

You can use these metrics along with our Checklist to understand what you need to do to nail your marketing and get ahead of your competition in 2017. And if you face any problems along the way, I am just a nudge away. Shoot me your queries in the comments section below, or get in touch via our Official Facebook Page.

If you found this Checklist helpful, do not forget to share it with people in your connection who will benefit from it.

And before you leave, here is the Free Link to The Digital Marketing Checklist for 2017!

[button title=”Get Free Checklist Now!” link=”https://www.primeone.global/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Extreme-Checklist-of-Digital-Marketing-in-2017.pdf” target=”_blank” size=”” color=”” class=””]

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Why Everyone’s Focusing on Content Marketing in 2017 and You Should Too!

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Content marketing can take the marketing game to a whole new level.”

But can you tell, why?

Let’s start from the beginning..

As you can see, content marketing is there since ages.. It’s of no surprise – Content has been there to help marketers let their messages reach their audience.

Content is the base of any marketing strategy that brands not only imply to drive leads, but also to increase their overall bottom line by building credibility amongst the audience.

While it’s true that brands and their content has to flow in the same direction but, most of the marketers don’t know why. Before we get into this, let’s take a look at what content marketing really is, now, since it has come a long way from the start.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing strategy of producing and allocating valuable, relevant and reliable content to attract and acquire a potential audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer deeds.

It’s about developing and leveraging relationships with people of influence within a particular industry to help spread your brand message or to help build on the same foundation as content marketing. It’s no wonder content marketing is seen a truly effective form of marketing.

Let me break it down for you!

Content Marketing Growth In The Industry

Without a doubt, content marketing, once done properly, can produce striking results for your business.

“51% of B2B buyers depend more on content to research and make B2B buying decisions than they did a year ago.” – says DemandGen Report.

Content builds trust among the buyers by helping them understand your brand’s psychology and ethics before making a purchase decision.

According to research done by DemandGen, “47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative.”

As they say, use your words wisely and carefully to get noticed. Those 3-5 pieces of content should have enough convincing power to make the customers understand the value your brand can bring to the table.

Here’s what our Industry Experts have to say about content in 2017.

Synopsis of the Video – “In this video, Content Marketing Gurus are sharing some insights on how it is going to take a turn in 2017.”

According to a report by Curata “75% of marketers are increasing investment in content marketing.”

Still need more reasons to focus on Content in 2017?

Keep Reading.. 

Content Marketing Demand In The Industry

“94% of the marketing professionals surveyed said it is critical that content marketing be part of a company’s business strategy.” – says PR Newswire.

Content marketing can be time taking process for B2B marketers but, it’s an enduring approach to get remarkable results and to refine your brand’s discernibly online. It also helps you cherish a longer relationship with your clients.

According to a report by Pagefair, “Approx. 200 million internet users have installed ad-blocking software globally.”

So, if you are among one of those Ad-savvies, probably thinking of getting quick returns on paid advertisements, sorry to say this but you won’t be able to survive for too long, especially when the marketing techniques are taking twists and turns in 2017.

Period.

To thrive your business in future in all aspects, you have to stick to content marketing to the core, and there is no way around it. Because today’s people are looking for information before they can rely on your services.

If they leave your website having a feeling that this company understands me, you can be assured that you are on the right track of Content Marketing. Make your content consistent that can engage with the audience. You’ll definitely succeed if will be able to achieve this milestone.

5 Brands That Made it Big With Content Marketing

Content marketing is getting a bigger picture because you don’t sell anything directly. People who are coming to your website don’t experience that irritating selling tone rather than that; they leave your site with the exact information what they have been looking for.

ADP

ADP

ADP is a leading solution provider of human resource management to businesses. The company leveraged their expertise to create white papers, which have proven to be highly valuable to their customers. They provide whitepapers on human capital management to their customers.

Key takeaway: If you’re thinking, White papers don’t have any impact on marketing, then you are wrong my friend.  It might be overlooked in the industry, but not dead. If your customers prefer more whitepapers then, you won’t mind creating a huge number of this resource for your customers.

Cisco

Cisco

Cisco is an IT solution provider that sells networking hardware and high-technology telecommunication equipment. The company came to know the power of content marketing when they launched a new product on social media and promoted it.

Key takeaway: With the evolving world, Social media has become a center of attraction of billion people, and it is obvious to draw attention from this platform, once done properly. Promote your products through social media with right strategies for a successful campaign.

DemandBase

Demandbase

DemandBase is an account based marketing technology provider that leverages the expertise in serving B2B brands by using white papers, SlideShare, infographics, and webinars for new leads for their campaigns. And, it generated over $1million through content marketing.

Key takeaway: To get the remarkable results in ROI, you need to develop a content strategy for your audience over a period.

Cox Media Group

Coxmediagroup

Cox Media Group is one of the largest integrated publishing, broadcasting and digital media companies in the world. Though having maximum exposure on television, Cox Media Group has generated new technique of “Success Kit” online that provides a solution to SMBs through eBooks and videos and got more than 2000 leads through 5000 downloads.

Key Takeaway: You’ll surely get more leads by creating an informational content for your audience. This might take some time to get started, but it will be worth it for a longer run.

Toshiba

Toshiba

Toshiba is a Japanese conglomerate corporation that provides products and services including IT and communication equipment.

In 2011, Toshiba created a “Smart Community” endorse awareness of its renewable energy solutions. They invested in a massive SEO campaign to boost their rankings. Their campaign generated over 160,000 followers on LinkedIn worldwide.

Key takeaway: Investing in SEO to push your services on top of SERRPs is a great strategy for content marketing to get maximum traction.

 What worked for them may or may not work for your business, but they are surefire inspirations to get you started with your Content Marketing efforts in the coming year.

Mistakes To Avoid In Content Marketing

If you are doing it wrong, then better not do it at all.

1. Your Content Sucks

Still writing for the search engines? Merely stuffing keywords and writing for the bots is not going to cut it anymore. You need to have content that is well received by your audience. At the end of the day, poor content doesn’t achieve anything.

2. Your Content is Useless

Now, you might be saying that your content is really high quality, but consider again. If your content doesn’t help solve a problem or answer a question, then it will not get any recognition from your audience.

3. Your Content is Promotional

No one ever came to your blog or gallery to read 2 pages worth of features about your product and how you are the “Best + ________ + Company in + Area.”  The focus of your content should be to educate your readers and give them information. In most cases, you should never even mention about your product or service until the end of the content.  There is nothing better than being able to teach your reader to solve a problem.

4. You Are Not an Authority on Your Subject

Well, there is no point in trying to be someone who you are not. If you are not good at something, it is always a good idea to have an expert do the task for you. If you do not have complete knowledge about your field, then your audience is going to apprehend you. And once they know that you are not a guru, they are going to stop coming back. One of the biggest mistake businesses make is it have rookie bloggers or cheap artists create their content. This is actually worse than not making an effort at all.

5. You Are Not Mixing Your Content Marketing Efforts With SEO

Far too many businesses, see SEO as an avoidable expense for their business. But, they are totally wrong. Enterprise Grade SEO is and should be the foundation of your online marketing efforts. One, because it helps reduce the overall cost of consumer acquisition in the long run, and Two, because SEO helps spread your business in a completely new market, the Search Engines. I am a content marketer and an SEO consultant, so I know how these two fields are equally dependent on each other to be most effective.

Best Places To Find Content Creators

Content development can be a very resource-intensive task unless money is no bar, hiring designers, writers, coders, developers, animators, etc. in-house can seem to be a massive burden on small businesses and startups. If you are starting out, it’s always better to hire freelancers on a contract basis to get your work done for you. There is no dearth of freelancers on the internet. Here is a list of places where you can get artists and content developers at exceptionally affordable rates:

These are some of my goto places for exceptionally good content at exclusive rates. Disclaimer: Use these services at your own risk, because not all sellers on these platforms are delivering good work. So be sure to check out reviews, a number of sales, reply time, orders in progress, etc., before you try any of the services listed on these platforms.

What’s Going to Work and What’s Not Going to Work in 2017

Coming onto our takeaway from this post. Many things come to our mind when we think of consumable content, be it whitepapers, blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics and more. But there are two factors that can impact your bottom line when you start out content marketing:

  1. What used to work a year back, may not be a great option today. Maybe you have better alternatives.
  2. What works for someone else, may not necessarily work for you: A brand might be leveraging Pinterest, by creating more infographics and images for their consumers, but what if your consumers are on YouTube? So, it would be a wise decision to create videos for your brand, instead of Infographics. You get the idea, right??!?

distribution-channels

So, keeping these two factors in mind, let’s look at the best practices for 2017:

  • Live Streaming Increasing in Popularity:

Recorded videos will never go out of fashion, but the recent trends in 2015-2016 show that live streaming is now the most easily consumable content available to viewers. The rise of applications like YouTube Live, Facebook Live and Snapchat, make it all the easier to host live product tours, launch events, tutorials, briefing and another form of content.

  • Virtual Reality Will Set the Stage:

With companies like The Outdoor Clothing Company and The North Face embracing VR Technology to showcase their clothes and athletes, we know that VR is already being accepted. Though this feature will not be available to small and mid-sized businesses anytime soon, due to the cost, we are sure to see all big companies taking advantage of it. You too should keep this in mind, if you can afford this technology.

  • Native Advertising to replace Push Advertising:

AD Blockers and the genuine hate for banner advertisements is making it difficult for companies to take advantage of Pop-ups, Pop-under, Banner and Exit Intent advertisements. This does not mean that banner ads are dead, but consumers are evolving and so is advertising.

  • Storytelling Will Be the Most Important Form of Marketing:

Consumers are tired of reading advertisement copies and bland content. They want more. Good Storytelling is and will continue to be the source of prime brand inspiration for consumers. Storytelling doesn’t only refer to case studies, but a lot more. Brand’s need to think outside the box to promote themselves in a manner which is better accepted. So simply blogging for the sake of blogging or updating social networks is not going to cut it, you need to find better ways to engage with your audience.

  • Email Newsletters Are Not Dead:

Nor will they be, anytime We have been discussing the death of email for the past few years, but with the rise of open-rates in 2016, it feels that we are having been making a premature decision. Again, sending out emails for the sake of sending them is not going to work, needless to say, it never did. You need to write your emails in a way that each one connects with a previous, letting your audience keep waiting for more.

How You Can Make the Most of What’s Going to Work!

Now since you know how top brands are leveraging content marketing, mistakes beginners tend to make and places where you can get affordable content developers and also what is working in 2017, you have all the right ingredients for the recipe.

Remember, the food can only be as good as the cook, so you need to make the most of these pointers that I have mentioned in the post. Give it a try. When doing business, there are bound to be cliffhangers and risks, so don’t be afraid to take an attempt and fail. After all, with failure comes perfection.

I believe that 2017 should be a real fruitful year for businesses that are thinking of stepping into the online marketing scene because a lot of evolving technology is setting the stage. And with this evolving technology, there is an advantage of starting out early and being head to head with the big fishes.

If you want to take advantage of the Online Marketing Scene in 2017, you should be planning ahead to spend in Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing, Story Telling via Blog and Newsletters, and of course Virtual Reality showcasing, if it fits your brand strategy.

With that said, I will close this overly long post because I am sure you are left with more than one idea tingling in your head. Moving to you: If you were to bet your money on that one marketing strategy in 2017. What would it be?

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How To Get A Feature Box In WordPress

Have you seen those beautiful looking sections on websites that have creative icons and images with small patches of text? Usually, you will find them showcasing important selling points about products and services. These boxes or modules as you would call them have been in fashion for quite a few years now, and most all premium WordPress themes have the option to create WordPress featured box. However, if you do not want to buy premium themes, you still can get them on your website with the help of a free plugin and a little bit of customization.

feature-fox-screenshot

What Are WordPress featured box or Modules?

It is the tendency for most people to scan websites, instead of reading word by word. This goes onto say that if you are a business owner, you should focus on presenting your key selling points in an extremely easy to grasp and scanable manner.

It has become a common trend for websites to start with a large hero-style slider image with a call-to-action button, either inviting people to scroll down or click the button to visit an important page.

In most cases, just below the button, you will find a series of feature boxes, that display the critical selling points of the product or service being offered on the website. Sometimes, these boxes might also have individual CTA buttons, which can lead users to find out more about the particular feature.

Here is an example from a website that my friend is developing. It is for a Sleep Analytics Device.

WordPress featured box

Had they written a huge paragraph to mention all the things the device could do, most people would have skipped over that section. But, with the strategic use of colorful imagery along with small patches of text, one glance over the section is enough to tell you all the benefits of the product. This is the power of a feature box.

How to Add Feature Box with Images On Your WordPress Homepage

First thing you need to do is install a free plugin called Column Shortcodes from the WordPress plugin repository. Once that is done go ahead and activate it. After activation, you are all set to create beautiful-looking feature boxes for your website.

In the above example, the author has used images, but you can also use icons for your feature box. To get high-quality icons, download and install a plugin called WP SVG Icons.

Now, head over to the page where you want to create the Feature Box. I will be recreating the section from the above for this guide. I am using going to be using colors png icons, with the size of 200x200px.

Inside the back-end editor, you will notice a new [ ] icon right next to add media. That is the Column Shortcodes icon.

feature-box-column-shortcodes-plugin

When you click on that, you will be presented with a screen like this.

column-shortcodes-screenshot

As you will notice, there are various options for dividing your page into columns. You can split the width into two columns by using “one half” or four sections by using “one fourth” and so on. For the purpose of this demonstration I will be using the “one third” column.

Clicking on the “one third” icon once will insert a shortcode like this into your WordPress editor.

one-third-shortcode-columns

You can either copy and replicate the short-code, two more times, or you can go ahead and do the same steps to get something like this.

one-section-columns-shortcode

Now this my friend, will be the foundation of your feature boxes in WordPress. However, this is just one part of the section. If you want to do something like the example I have shown above for the sleep sense device, you can simply replicate the process to reach the desired result.

Now, comes the interesting part. I am assuming you guys know how to work with the default WordPress editor, so I won’t be going into details about how to insert the images or write the text. Moving on…

Now click your cursor between the ] [ brackets of the first column. To be precise your cursor should be at A. Clear?

Now, click on Add Media and insert the image. Once the image is inserted, click on it and align it to the center by clicking on the icon shown in the image below.

aling-image-center

Once that is done, click the cursor just after the image, but before the [/one_third] shortcode. Type the text that you want to show with the image. Once you are done, select the entire text that you just typed and center align it, just like you did to the image.

Tada..

This should give you, your first feature box.

one-feature-box

Do your due diligence now, and follow the same steps inside the second and third column sections that you had created earlier. Till you reach this state.

top-section-feature-box

Repeat the same process again, for the next row and you will get the exact same layout from the example image.

So, this is as simple as it can get. No rocket science or confusing web development there.

Hope you found this tutorial helpful. For more such interesting tutorials and guides, stay tuned to our Facebook Page, where all the super cool stuff happens.

Until next time, have a good day.

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Top 20 SEO Tools To Surge Your Marketing Game In 2018

How do you feel about the result of your SEO techniques through 2016?

Starting a Digital Marketing Campaign is easy; anyone can do it. However, managing campaigns, building an audience, and implementing the right SEO strategy is not so easy task. Running an SEO campaign is crucial for you to get found in SERPs. And, it’s high time to evaluate the effectiveness of the tactics and measure the good or bad over the previous 11months.

No campaign is complete without effective SEO tools. Fortunately, there are plenty of great web-based SEO platforms out there that would make your life easier.

21 most powerful top SEO tools in 2018 that can boost your search engine strategy.

Before I spill the beans about the Top 21 Web-based SEO Solutions that you should try, I would like to give a worthy mention to my post – 101 Social Media Management Tools, which will help you up to your social game and 25 Social Media Influencers to Follow in 2017, which will help you stay on the zenith of Social Media News and Discoveries.

Without further ado, let me share the 21 web-based tools that I promised.

[Note: These tools are listed on the basis of their features, expert reviews, and their functionality. These are in no particular order. Each one of them has its own unique feature.]

Woorank

Top SEO Tools In 2017

Why should you be using this tool?

The answer is simple –  Woorank provides analysis of On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO with tracking traffic, backlinks and find out issues that need to be fixed boosting your online visibility.

With Woorank, you get a variety of features as mentioned below:

  • In-depth Reports
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Smart Dashboard
  • KPI Monitoring
  • Marketing Plan
  • Continuous tracking
  • Backlinks Analysis
  • SEO Tool
  • Keyword Tracking
  • SEO Audit
  • White-Label Report

Woorank-1

When you put a website’s URL, it does an in-depth analysis of the website and gives you a brief report. The report is easy to understand, and with this report, you can easily understand your website issues and fix them in real time.

Price:

ProPremiumEnterprise
$49/mo$149/mo$249/mo

Like Woorank? Consider Reading:

  1. 5 Ways To Amplify SEO Juice From Existing Backlinks
  2. 5 Most Important SEO Strategies For 2017

Raventools

Raventools

Why Raven Tools?

Raven tools offer you a full set of SEO toolkit to research, track, and optimize your SEO campaign. Their interface is entirely web-based, so it is convenient to use this platform from anywhere you want and monitor your campaign metrics.

Raven tools provide you following platforms to help you in your campaign:

If you are a newbie in the SEO world, nothing beats the excitement to measure the performance of your SEO campaign. And, if you want to increase your website’s visibility and want an all-in-one solution for your marketing campaigns, then Raven tools is worth a try!

Price:

ProAgency
$99/mo$249/mo

Like Raven Tools? Consider Reading:

  1. 5 Most Common On-Page SEO Issues and How To Fix Them
  2. How to Track Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales

Quicksprout Website Analyzer

Quicksprout-website-analyzer

I recommend this tool to all my SEO Clients and will continue to do so for the rest of the years because it is backed by one of the most trusted names in the Digital Industry, Neil Patel. Ever since its launch in 2013, the tool has only grown more in popularity. This tool helps you understand what you are doing right and wrong in terms of your SEO and Social Media execution. Very recently the tool was augmented with advanced features that also give you actionable insights to improve your marketing as compared to your competitors.

Some of the features include:

  • See where you stand in Social Media Reach as compared to your competitors.
  • Learn how to get more social media traffic with actionable insights
  • Detail Social Media Chart gives a breakdown of shares of your competitors and your website
  • Displays page-level results to show which of your pages are performing well against your competitors
  • Displays key metrics to show why your competitors are doing better
  • Gives a complete competitive analysis table with a breakdown of all metrics of your website as compared to your competitors.

Still, need more reasons to try this tool?

Price: Free, Only for you!

Like Quicksprout? Consider Reading:

  1. The Ultimate Blueprint For A High Converting Longform Blogpost
  2. Stop Building Traffic and Start Converting It, Here’s How!

Similarweb

Similarweb

I mentioned so many tools in this list, but if there is one tool that will accurately predict the amount of traffic on a website, app, or platform – it is Similarweb. This feature along with its ability to give accurate insights about your competitors, their traffic, demographics, interests, main market channels etc., is what makes this tool a must use for SEO and Online Marketing.

Features:

  • Compare traffic statistics of two or more competitors
  • Check the primary traffic sources of your competitors
  • Also identifies other important competing websites in your niche
  • Get actionable insights from what is working for all your competitors to create your own master blaster SEO Strategy
  • Understand more about your Target Audience, their interests, and behavioral data

Similarweb-adobe-report

Price:

FreePremiumCustom
Free PlanOn DemandOn Demand

Like SimilarWeb? Consider Reading:

  1. Similarweb and Comscore Partner To Bring Similarweb Next
  2. How We Improved Our Rankings By Losing Half Million Organic Visits

Semrush

Semrush

Another reliable tool in the arsenal for competitor research, organic ranking tracking, and ads keywords. I use this tool time and time again to understand what my competitors are doing and how I can use the things that are working for them, to get ahead of the game.

Features of SEMRush are:

  • Complete analytics and insights into competitors strategies in display and organic paid to advertise
  • Uncover competitor ad strategies and budget
  • Find our competitor ad copies
  • Find out top publishers and advertisers
  • Conduct in-depth backlink analysis
  • Complete Video Advertising Research
  • Create effective ad campaigns
  • Find best keywords for SEO and PPC
  • Collect phrase match and related keywords
  • Get detailed insights into PLA competitors product feeds
  • Uncover keywords with less competition
  • Compare your domain to your competitors
  • Export complete analytical reports in Excel Format
  • Complete website audit and position tracking in search engines
  • And more.

Semrush-adobe-report

Price:

ProGuruBusiness
$69.95$49.95$549.95

Like SEMRush? Consider Reading:

  1. Ultimate Calendar of Digital Marketing Events in 2017
  2. 7 Mistakes That Kill Ecommerce Conversions

Ontolo

Ontolo

Powerful, powerful, powerful is just the word for this all in one complete marketing Dashboard for any business. Ontolo helps you discover prospects for Link Building, SEO, Content Marketing, Social Media Management, Competiton Analysis, Sales Pitching, Ecommerce, Multimedia and also Reputation Management, and more. I have been using this dashboard for around 2 months straight and I admit that it’s well worth the price you pay.

Some Features Include:

  1. Discover prospects from over 80 Sources to ease your marketing efforts.
  2. Get unrivaled prospecting details with in-depth parsing details for all prospects like Navigation, Comments, Article Count, etc.
  3. Get complete Social Media Contact Information from 9 Sources for all Prospects
  4. Get all Contact Information like URLs and Emails
  5. Find out accurate outbound link statistics
  6. Discover content language patterns in competitor’s content
  7. Find out Advertising Opportunities for Display/Banner Ads, AdSense, Paid Content Ads, Advertising, Donations, and Sponsorships.
  8. Technical features include GEO-Ip Tracking, Language Translation, Live Chat, Search Form, User Login, User Registration, Video Analytics, and Web Analytics.
  9. Community Engagement, Affiliate Program Management, Prospect Meta-Analysis, and more….

Price:

ProAgencyCustom
$97/mo$297/moContact Us

Like Ontolo? Consider Reading?

  1. Machine Learning Part 1: How Documents Are Ranked For Keywords
  2. Influencing The Influencers: Donald Trump and Reputation Management With Ontolo

Moz

Moz

Now, this one is pretty self-explanatory. For those, who are not aware of this robust tool, then, let me introduce you to the ‘Guru’ of SEO word.

Moz is one of the best SEO tool providers on the web that practices both basic and advanced research tools to help you in your search engine optimization process. The list of features that are provided by this SEO toolkit can be difficult for those who have just started out with SEO thing and some features are so advanced that they may even deter experienced users.

It is designed for both small to enterprise business and it helps you monitor your website’s SEO performance and detects your ranking on SERPs.

Its ranges of free tools are as follows:

  • Open Site Explorer
  • Keyword Explorer
  • MozBar
  • Business Listing
  • Business Console
  • Research Categories

If you are on a tight budget, you can check out their Free tools, or I’d highly recommend to check out their premium tools, which won’t disappoint you.

Take some SEO inspiration with the wizard of Moz himself!

Price:

Check out different pricing plans of Moz here.

Like Moz? Consider Reading:

  1. 5 Takeways From Earning Links in 130 Countries
  2. 7 Citation Building Myths Plaguing Local SEO

WebCEO

Webceo

WebCEO is one of the best SaaS platforms made for tracking and managing Search Engine Marketing Campaign. This tool lets you build and manage links, optimize keywords, and track your competitors’ SEO activity.

With WebCEO, you get a variety of features, including but not limited to:

  • Keyword Optimization
  • Link Building
  • Competitor Analysis
  • SEO Performance Reporting

So, if you are looking for a tool that is worth your penny, you have to try this out!

Its intuitive features make it one of the best picks in SEO platforms in 2017.

Price:

StartupCorporateAgency FixedAgency Unlimited
$99/mo$199/mo$499/mo$99/mo + scanning fees

Like WebCEO? Consider Reading:

  1. The 7 Most Overlooked Fundamentals of SEO
  2. WebCEO Special: Win the SEO Race with Competitors on Vacation

SEO Profiler

SEOprofiler

Have you ever used SEO Profiler?

If your answer is ‘yes, then you must be aware of the features of this jam-packed tool.

SEO Profiler is an online web-based tool that helps you in your Search Engine Marketing Campaign. It points out technical errors of your web pages, helps you to find the buyer intent keywords and its Top 10 Optimizer helps you to optimize your pages to push them towards the top of the search engage ranking page.

It offers the following unique features:

  • Organic ranking Insight
  • Keyword Research
  • Link Manager
  • Ranking Monitor
  • AdWords Intelligence
  • Website Audit
  • And much more…

SEOprofiler-adobe-report

With SEO Profiler, you will have all the necessary SEO tools under one platform, which makes your SEO campaign effective and you will have a much better chance of reaching on top of your industry.

Price:

StandardSmartProfessionalEnterprise
$49.95/mo$99.95/mo$249.95/mo$999.95/mo

Like SEOProfiler? Consider Reading:

  1. How Your Website Design Influences Rankings Of Your Web Pages in Google
  2. Four Things You Can Do To Get Banned On Google

SEO Site Checkup

SEO sitecheckup

When the time comes to analyze your site, no other platform is more valuable than a comprehensive search engine optimization tool.

I recommend monitoring your site from day one once visitors start flooding in. And, what can be better than SEO Site Checkup tool?

SEO Site Checkup is a robust web-based SEO tool that fetches data from the search engine and gives you score on the performance of your website.

It offers a range of features like:

  • SEO monitoring
  • SEO issues repairing
  • Competitor Analysis
  • SEO Reporting

Take a closer look at how it works

SEO Sitecheckup-report

I really like its user interface and easy to understand dashboard. It is definitely not the best tool available, but it does give you all the necessary details that you need to have from an SEO perspective along with the chance to improve your site’s performance.

What if you get a low score?

Don’t get disheartened by the poor numbers on the screen; you always have a chance to fix it up. As they say, it’s never too late!

Pro Tip: Don’t forget to click on the “Improve Score” button.

Price:

ProfessionalWebmasterBasic
$79.95/mo$39.95/mo$24.95/mo

Like SEO Sitecheckup? Consider Reading:

  1. How To Find Right SEO Keywords To Optimize
  2. Everything You Need To Know About Search Engines

Conductor

Conductor

Although plenty of SEO tools are available on the web, Conductor comes very handy when it comes to vast features packed under one roof.

The conductor is a SaaS based SEO platform, and its in-depth site analysis helps marketers divulge opportunities for optimization and development. This analysis takes into account the performance of existing SEO initiatives, social media, and more.

It offers a variety of features:

  • Site Optimization
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Reports
  • Integration
  • Keyword Research

So, if you are looking for something that will help you in the journey of your SEO campaigns, You should head over to this giant platform that has never-ending features for your marketing campaign.

Price:

StarterStandardPremium
$1995/mo$3750/moContact Conductor Team

Like Conductor? Consider Reading:

  1. B2B Marketers Say Content Marketing Success Comes From These Two Factors
  2. Watch SEO and Content Go To Couples Therapy [VIDEO]

gShift

gShift

Do your monthly SEO reports look bland and unprofessional to clients?

I know the pain of making SEO reports by copy-pasting your brand logo on Clients’ PDF reports. If you are in the same loop, then you should head over to this amazing tool naming gShift Labs.

gShift is a SaaS-based platform that fetches data from multiple platforms to make an easy overview of your website’s performance. As well, it is a real time-savior that provides top-notch SEO reports that satisfy clients and retain them.

gShift offers you a range of features like:

  • SEO Analysis & Reporting
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Active Data & Reporting
  • Content Tracking
  • Influencer Identification
  • Site Audit

Want to add that extra touch of professionalism and credibility to your Client’s SEO Campaign Reports? Then look no further than gShift Labs.

Price:

BrandAgency
$325/mo$999/mo

Like gShift? Consider Reading:

  1. 8 Common Misconceptions Of SEO
  2. 28 FAQs About Influencer Marketing

Topvisor

Topvisor

Now that your website is properly optimized, traffic from the search engines is probably coming in. This raises the most important question: how best to track your SEO progress?

Well, Topvisor is a cloud-based solution accessible from any browser with multiple levels of billing depending on your needs. Furthermore, Topvisor also prides a mobile app that lets you view rankings & analytics dashboards from anywhere, and this makes it more unique.

Topvisor offers a range of tools like:

  • Rank Tracker Tool
  • Keyword Grouping Tool
  • PPC Bid Manager Tool
  • Website Watcher Tool
  • Keyword Suggestion Tool
  • Keyword Research Tool
  • Website SEO Audit Tool

So, if you want an SEO and PPC tool to keep the best ROI in your online advertising under one roof, then stumble upon to this simple and organized platform Topvisor.

Price:

XSSMLXL
$0/mo$29/mo$89/mo$299/mo$599/mo

Like Topvisor? Consider reading:

  1. How To Find Powerful Keywords With Free Topvisor Magnet Tool
  2. Segmenting Keywords Made Easy With Topvisor

Serpstat

SERPSTAT

Want an all-in-one solution for your SEO campaign?

Head over to Serpstat, which is packed with 5 different SEO tools with decent pricing.

Serpstat provides an amazing user experience with multiple projects – single view, international search engines, organic keyword tracking, excellent competition research, and finds top pages from your site.

With Serpstat, you get:

  • Position Tracking
  • Backlink Analysis
  • Keyword Research
  • Site Audit
  • Competitor Research

SERPSTAT-reports

As you can see above, there is a lot of data including organic keywords, Ads keywords, Visibility, traffic, and a lot more. You may land up with new keyword ideas, which could be implemented into your marketing strategy.

So, if you are looking for a more streamlined tool without the unnecessary frills, stumble upon to Serpstat and it won’t let you down!

Price:

Plan APlan BPlan CPlan D
$19/mo$69/mo$149/mo$299/mo

Like SerpStat? Consider Reading:

  1. Five Reasons Why Positions In Google SERP’s Differ From Rank Tracker
  2. 50 Free Places To Promote Your Website

Positionly

Positionly

Why Positionly?

As a Digital Marketer, it’s your job to track the performance of your SEO campaign consistently so that you can keep moving on with the right strategy for your company to generate more traction.  And when it comes to checking backlinks, track rankings and analyze competitors online, Positionly is the best pick for you!

With Positionly, you get a variety of features like:

  • SEO performance management
  • Dedicated mobile app
  • Website position tracking and API
  • Keyword research, analysis, and rank tracking
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex compatibility
  • Beautiful, user-friendly dashboard
  • Google Analytics Integration
  • Customizable Reports
  • Visual data reporting
  • Branding and White Labeling Options

So, if you want a user-friendly, SEO monitoring solution for your brand, you should definitely go for Positionly!

Price:

BasicMediumStandardAgencyPlatinum
$15/mo$39/mo$79/mo$159/mo$399/mo

Like Positionly? Consider Reading:

1.     How to Boost Conversions With Content Upgrades and Opt-ins

2.     How to Retain Keyword Rankings When Re-Launching Your Website

UpCity

UpCity

Which method do you employ to generate traffic for your business?

If you want an all in one solution for your marketing program, then you must be aware of UpCity.

UpCity offers an SEO toolkit packed with needful resources to run and manage search engine optimization campaigns. It provides a local inbound marketing solution and SEO report card for free to show your rank versus your competitor’s rank.

With UpCity, you can track up to 3 competitors at one time to view their unique domains, backlinks, and keyword rankings.

How can UpCity help you?

UpCity help you to –

  • Optimize Your Presence
  • Manage Your Reputation
  • Become an Authority
  • Convert
  • Retain & Grow

If you want to stay organized, save time, and manage your Digital Marketing Campaign, then UpCity should be on your bucket list for the upcoming year.

Like UpCity? Consider reading:

Price:

BasicAgency ProAgency Pro PlusEnterprise Agency
$50/mo$150/mo$300/mo$800/mo

Like UpCity? Consider Reading:

1.     Help! My Client Wants SEO Services. Now What?

2.     Google’s Penguin Real-Time Update: The Lasting Effects

SpyFu

SpyFu

Who doesn’t like to take a peek inside a competitor’s insights?

With SpyFu in hand, you can do it all. You can simply keep a watch on your competitor’s activity. Isn’t that cool?

SpyFu is a comprehensive SEO tool packed with data and features pointing towards online marketing, sale, and digital marketing.

Just put a URL on the homepage of SpyFu, And, there you go with the insights within a couple of seconds.

SpyFu-adobe-report

This is what it looks like. You will have data like:

  • Organic Search
  • Inbound Clicks
  • Paid Search (PPC)
  • Top Keywords

With SpyFu, you can easily uncover your competitor’s keywords, backlinks, the number of searches and a lot more. By doing this thorough research, you can come across with some potential keywords that will help you boost your visibility in SERPs.

Price:

BasicProfessionalTeam
Starts from $44/moStarts from $74/moStarts from $199/mo

Like SpyFu? Consider Reading:

  1. How To Use Spyfu As A Sales Hook
  2. Manage your keyword research and tracking together

Site Analyzer

Site-analyzer

Are you using the Site Analyzer tool?

Site Analyzer is yet another easy-to-use SEO tool that performs in-depth analysis of a website and finds out critical errors, gives you an overview of the website including, On-Page score, Backlinks Details, Crawl and Rank Tracking Details.

It provides a variety of features, including but not limited to:

  • Page Analysis
  • Crawl Analysis
  • Rank Tracking
  • Backlink Analysis
  • SEO Benchmarking
  • Site vs. Site Analysis

Site-analyzer-adobe

Its simple and easy-to-use dashboard makes it a hassle-free experience for beginners.

With this tool, you’ll always know where your site stands, from an SEO perspective. Follow their guidelines to get rid of common problems, with the anticipation of ranking towards the top of the SERPs.

Price:

StarterProAgencyReseller
$39/mo$99/mo$259/mo$559/mo


Authoritas

Authoritas

Authoritas is a revolutionary platform that delivers actionable Big Data Analytics for businesses. The technical module of Authoritas helps you build a robust foundation for your SEO by identifying key SEO and website performance issues.

Features:

  • Big Data Research
  • Technical Auditing
  • Crawling
  • Combine your own Internal Systems and Dashboards with Authoritas API
  • Content Auditing
  • Content Optimziation
  • Backlink Profiling
  • Competitive Link Analysis
  • Link Building and Removal
  • Analytical Integrations
  • Multi-site Management and more

Price: Request Demo | Free Account

Like Authoritas? Consider Reading:

  1. What Will Ok Google, mean for SEO?
  2. SEO in 2020, Interview Series – A Series of Influencer Interviews

SiteMogul

SiteMogul

Another awesome tool to gain insights into the secrets of your competitors and what is making them so successful. The SiteMogul database uses a proprietary range of tools to give webmasters insights into what is helping a website rank so high on search engines.

Features of SiteMogul:

  • Complete Site Information, like how many errors in code, what nameservers it uses, broken links, user ratings and reviews, and other information
  • Gather KPI’s like website rankings, position changes, page views, alexa stats, trustworthiness, and reputation.
  • Explore and Identify Similar Websites in your industry to uncover more competitors.
  • Learn about the performance of your website in Social Networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Pinterest, and Linkedin.
  • Tools include Website Tools, Traffic Statistics, Mobile Testing, Website Midgets, and more.

Price: Temporarily The Registration is Closed, will be back soon! Click Here To Find Out.

Some Honorable Mentions That Are Tools, Plugins, and Lists

  1. GTMetrix
  2. Xenu Stealth Link (Broken Link Finder)
  3. Web Developer Toolbar
  4. SEO Book SEO Toolbar
  5. SEO Quake Toolbar
  6. Builtwith
  7. FeedTheBot
  8. Moz 100 List of Free SEO Tools
  9. 101 SEO Plugins By Experts
  10. SEO Powersuite

Wrapping Up!

All in all, these are some of my all time favorite SEO Tools that will continue to shine in the coming years. I do understand that it is not possible to use all these tools at once, but if you are me, you would stick to QuickSprout, Serpstat, Similarweb, and Moz and I use Website Auditor from SEO Powersuite to make my reports.

I hope you find this list helpful. I made this list to keep you ahead of 2017. Don’t hesitate to try out new tools, which might become your weapon in pushing you towards the top of Search engine rankings.

What do you prefer –  web-based tools or plugins? I’d love to hear from you.

Have you used any of these tools before? Let me know your experience in the comments section or if I missed something out, don’t hesitate to give me a nudge about it.

P.S: If you’re interested in even more tools—like, top 50 or 100!—Shoot a comment below.

Good day!

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Top 25 Inbound Marketing Influencers You Need to Follow in 2017

Want to up your Social Media game plan in 2017? Here is a list of my favorite Social Media and Inbound Marketing influencers that are a must-follow for any business.

For people who have been following my blogs lately, you will see that I am more into lists these days. Previously I wrote on 101 Social Media Management Tools, and then on Top 10 CRO Tools and Top 10 Ecommerce Platforms in 2017.

I love writing listicles of my favorite things or people because it helps me in a variety of ways:

  1. It’s a time saver when I need to get something done.
  2. It acts as a great swipe file for on-demand industry research
  3. It helps me find the right Twitter handles when I want to target my Twitter advertisements
  4. Lists of people are particularly helpful to keep updated about industry news

The digital world has drastically changed how businesses market their services and how consumers behave. Traditional marketing is still in practice, but Digital marketing has taken marketers to a whole new level. Previously, I wrote on Top 5 Digital Marketing Predictions for 2017 to keep you ahead of the game.

By 2017, the Internet is expected to overtake TV to become the world’s largest advertising medium. TV ad spending will be 35.8% of total media ad spending in the US. Meanwhile, total digital ad spending in 2017 will be 38.4% of total ad spending.

According to a ComScore, the adoption of Social Media is increasing steadily. According to Smart Insights, 80% of users own a smartphone that is directly proportional to the accessibility of social media networks and this percentage will keep on increasing in 2017 as well.

In order to stay up with the competition, you need to be tuned in to those who are, themselves, in the lead of the game. The good thing is, due to the increased connectivity of social channels, you’re now able to do, keep you up to the fore.

So, who are the people lashing innovation in the marketing world? Keeping up with who’s already on top can be hard, which is why I have listed the top marketing influencers.

Thanks to the hard work of the Prime One Global research team, who carefully analyzed the profiles of over 5000 top social media influencers on the criteria of engagement levels, followings, contextual relevancy, fan appeal, industry reach, and hashtag power to distill the top 25 marketing mavens you must follow in due 2017.

Note that while some influencers only talk about their area of expertise, others talk about Inbound Marketing as a whole. Experts were discovered using a combination of Twitter follower count, engagement across social networks, and Klout expert rankings.

Without further ado, I would like to start the list with non-other than the co-founder of Vayner Media, Gary Vaynerchuk.

Gary Vaynerchuk 

Gary Vaynerchuk

An Entrepreneur, Co-founder of VaynerMedia, Investor, Author, Public Speaker, and Internet Personality

Apart from co-founding VaynerMedia, Gary has also authored several books including, Crush It! Why Now Is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion and The Thank You Economy. He is one of a kind Social Media Guru because he has embraced a number of social media channels to showcase his expertise over the Socialverse. His Twitter feed is always lively and buzzing with content streams, meaning there is always something for everyone.

Follow Gary on    

Seth Godin

Seth-Godin

American author, entrepreneur, marketer, and public speaker

Godin is an ultimate entrepreneur, because he is as focused on spreading ideas, and he is about the ideas he has. Godin was first to launch a direct sales company called Yoyodyne, with the motive to make companies rethink the process of customer approach. The company was later acquired by Yahoo, after which Godin went on to form Squidoo.com, a platform for sharing ideas. Godin has been responsible for writing some highly acclaimed books like Permission Marketing and Purple Cow. If you love listening to Podcasts, you can listen to free celebrity guest podcasts at Earwolf, which is Godin’s brainchild again.

Follow Seth on    

Matt Cutts 

Matt Cutts

Head of Web Spam Team at Google

If you have been in the SEO Biz or are somewhat even closely related to it, you will know Cutts. Matt Cutts is the former head of webspam at Google, and is currently on leave from the search quality team, to spend more time with his wife and to try out new things related to search, and how it can be made better. Don’t be disheartened by the news of his leave because that doesn’t deter him from sharing awesome SEO insights in his Twitter feed, or in his personal blog. Matt is one of the key influencers from Google, who sheds light on everything related to Search Engine Optimization and the role of authentic white-hat marketing.

Follow Matt on    

Larry Kim 

Larry Kim

Founder & CTO of WordStream, a provider of PPC management software, including the AdWords Grader and the 20 Minute PPC Work Week

Larry is the top columnist for WordStream Blog, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, MozInc. Magazine, Small Biz Trends, Marketing Profs, Inbound.orgmobilemonkey.com, and many other online business and technology publications. If that is not reason enough to make him a must-follow Social Media Maven in 2017, then you should also know that he has authored 4 award-winning books on Software Development like Professional Java Server Programming J2EE Edition, The Official XMLSPY Handbook, Java Server Pages Application Development, and Professional JSP 2nd Edition. He was also named as one of the most influential PPC Experts of 2013, 2014, and 2015.

Follow Larry on    

Danny Sullivan 

Danny Sullivan

Co-founder of Search Engine Land, Chief Content Officer at Third Door Media

One thing to note about Danny is that he is in Google’s good-book, meaning he has a great relationship with the company and is always one of the first people to make a statement about recent algorithm changes. He started Search Engine Land after his previous website Search Engine Watch was sold to Incisive Media for $43 Million. Danny was able to grow Search Engine Land from scratch to 93000 UVs in a year, by 2007. His Twitter feed is always lively and buzzing with great information on Search.

Follow Danny on     

Kim Garst 

Kim Garst

Founder and CEO of Boom and Author of “The Quick and Easy Guide to Branding Your Business and Creating Massive Sales with Pinterest.

Kim has been recognized as the Top 200 Leading Moms in Business by Startupnations.com and also as the Top 100 Branding Strategy Experts to follow on Twitter by the entrepreneurial coaching leader, Evan Carmichael. Kim made it to the Forbes Social Media hall of fame in 2012, and her Blog on Boom! Social is ranked as the Top 10 Social Media Blogs by Social Media Examiner. She is famous for providing actionable training and hand guides to her followers through her online contributions.

Follow Kim on

Ted Rubin 

Ted Rubin

Social Marketing Strategist, Brand Evangelist, Keynote Speaker & Acting Chief Marketing Officer of Brand Innovators

Ted is the most followed Chief Marketing Officer on Twitter according to Social Media Marketing Magazine. He is famous for his enthusiastic, spirited, and irrefutably personal connection with his followers. Ted is the go-to man if you want to learn how to build a great relationship with your blogger community, employees, and clients and drive growth in epic proportions for your business. Ted was also featured on the 13th Position on Forbes Top 50 Social Media Influencers 2013 and Top 25 Most Mentioned people by digital marketers in Leadtail August 2013.

Follow Ted on 

Chris BroganChris Brogan

CEO of Owner Media Group, a sought after public speaker, and the New York Times bestselling author of nine books and working on his tenth

Chris provides the right tools and education to help make a business thrive, by giving actionable insights for things that clients want to achieve. Chris is dedicated to helping his clients get the most out of their marketing efforts and to reach their next milestone, no matter where they are in their execution pipeline. His website was featured on the Top 100 Websites for Entrepreneurs by Forbes, and if that is not reason enough to follow him, Chris has consulted with some of the biggest brands ever like Disney, General Motors, Titleist, Scotts, Coldwell Banker, Microsoft, and Google.

Follow Chris on

Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin

Founder and former CEO of Moz, co-founder of Inbound.com, board member at presentation software Haiku Deck

Rand ‘a.k.a’ the Wizard of Moz, is the founder of Moz, (formerly known as SEOmoz), a SaaS-based company that sells inbound marketing and marketing analytics solutions, along with sharing key industry information that is not limited to content marketing, social media, community management, brand tracking, and other inbound channels.

Rand has authored books like Beginners Guide to Seo, and the Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization (Theory in Practice). Rand is also a $6K Investor in Techstars Seattle. Apart from speaking at events and contributing to Moz Blog, Rand is also famous for his White Board Friday Series, which is a weekly free webinar on everything Inbound Marketing.

Follow Rand on

Glen Gilmore

Glen Gilmore

Digital Marketing Strategist, Author, Speaker at Rutgers University

Glen has been featured on the Forbes Magazine as the Top Social Media Influencers of 2012 and on the Inc. Magazine as the Top 30 Experts in IoT Technology in 2015. His Twitter feed is always buzzing with great information and content related to Information Technology, Marketing, and Social Media News. He is the author of Social Media Law for Business and the co-author of Strategic Digital Marketing. You will find information related to Crisis Communications, Digital Marketing, Reputation Management, and Social Media Law across his hugely popular social media accounts.

Follow Glen on 

Dharmesh Shah

Dharmesh_Shah

Co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, Author, Coder, Speaker and Angel Investor in over 60 Startups

Apart from co-founding HubSpot, which has been declared the second-fastest growing software company in the Inc. 500, Dharmesh co-authored “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs,” in 2009, which ranked the Top 50 Marketing Books on Amazon for three years. Dharmesh also writes on www.onstartups.com, a popular startup blog that has over 500,000 members in its online community.

Follow Dharmesh on 

Pam Moore 

Pam-Moore

CEO and Founder of Marketing Nutz, Best Selling Author, Entrepreneur, Trainer, Social Media Speaker and Thought Leader 

Apart from founding Marketing Nutz, Pam has 15 years of experience in helping budding entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 Companies, build a successful brand and business that sustain both life and business. Pam is a contributing author for many online publications like Social Media Today, Forbes, and USA Today. Her Twitter is always lively with great insights on thought leadership, social media, and business.

Follow Pam on 

Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse

An Australian Speaker, Blogger, Podcaster, and Founder of ProBlogger and DigitalPhotographySchool and co-Founder of B5Media

Darren’s main focus is on Blogging, but his social shares highlight a deep connection between social media and content marketing, either in the form of his own content or through content that he finds relevant to his topics of interest. In 2009, ProBlogger was named the second best-favorited blogs by Technorati. Rowse also earned the title of Forbes Web Celebrity in 2007. He also founded TwiTip, which is a blog dedicated to Twitter tips. You will find great insights on Blogging, Photography, and Social Media in his blogs, and Social Media Accounts.

Follow Darren on 

Neil Patel 

Neil Patel

Co-founder of Crazy Egg, KISSmetricsQuickSprout, and Hello Bar

Neil was recognized as the Top 100 Entrepreneurs in the world under the age of 30, by former President Barrack Obama and the Top 100 Entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by United Nations. Wall Street calls him the most influential man on the web, and Forbes calls him the Top 10 Online Marketers in the world. If this is not reason enough to follow him, I do not know what is. Neil has consulted with companies like Amazon, NBC, HP, Viacom, and General Motors. Following him will give you access to a dearth of top-notch digital marketing, SEO and analytics information.

Follow Neil on

Jay Baer

Jay Baer (1)

New York Times best-selling author, keynote speaker, digital media entrepreneur, and the president of social media marketing firm Convince

Apart from providing social media strategy to the leading brands through his blog Convince & Convert, which has been voted among one of the top 5 social media blogs worldwide, he is also a founder of Twitter 20 series of live interviews of the platform itself. Baer has been showcasing his expertise in Internet Marketing since 1994 and has helped more than 700 evolving companies including, John McCain, Nike, and much more. He has also co-founded azfamily.com, which is one of the largest local websites and also, vice president of the world’s first web hosting company.

Follow Jay on 

Susanna Gebauer

Susanna Gebauer

Founder and CEO of ExpolreB2B, Writer, Marketer at The Social Marketer

Susanna is one of the Social media influencers, whose Twitter feed is dedicated to business ideas and marketing strategies, which leads the budding brands to exponential growth. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Math and then, shifted to management consultant for utility and energy corporations. Later, In 2010, she founded ExploreB2B with her brother Jonathan to provide business strategies to the growing companies, but it resulted in bankruptcy at the end of 2014. But, her undying passion for Digital Marketing led her to found The Social MS in 2014 dedicated towards content and social media marketing. And, in less than a year, The Social MS got featured in the Top 8 most influential marketing by Onalytica.

Follow Susanna on

Hiten Shah

Hiten Shah

Co-founder of Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and Quicksprout

Hiten Shah has co-founded 3 SaaS companies CrazyEgg, KISSMetrics, and QuickSprout since 2005. He is also an investor and advisor to help companies to expand their businesses. Hiten has worked with many reputed brands like AppSumo, Buffer, Boostable, Brighten, and much more. Undoubtedly, his Twitter feeds are lively engaging that making him to our list of top 25 Inbound Influencer t following Twitter.

Follow Hiten on

Bryan Kramer

Bryan Kramer

CEO and Social Business Strategist of PureMatter

Bryan’s leading agency PureMatter has been featured in Silicon Valley Business Journal for his company’s exponential growth. Bryan’s expertise in social media led him ranked 43rd most talked marketer by seniors in the industry and has also made it to rank 26 by Kred as Global Top CEO Influencer on Social Media. No doubt, Bryan holds authority in the industry and provides you with some thoughtful insights into the industry.

Follow Bryan on 

Brian Clark 

Brian Clark

CEO of Rainmaker Digital, Founder of CopyBlogger, Host of Unemployable, and Evangelist for Rainmaker

Brian Clark has been ranked in the 3rd position of the Top 100 Most Influential Online Marketers and his thriving venture; CopyBlogger has been featured in Power150 list of Advertising Age. According to The Guardian, CopyBlogger is one of the most robust blogs in the world, which mainly focuses on providing online marketing strategies to developing businesses. Apart from that, he is also the CEO of Rainmaker Digital solely dedicated to providing tools and training for content marketers and digital entrepreneurs. Most of the Entrepreneurs follow Brian on Twitter for some handful of Industry tactics to empower themselves to sustain their online business.

Follow Brian on 

Avinash Kaushik

Avinash Kaushik

Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google and the co-Founder of Market Motive Inc

Avinash is one of those influencers, who has established authority in the field through his blog Occam’s Razor and his best-selling books, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0.

With his veracious strategies, many brands like P&G, Dell, Porsche, Class Bank, and IBM have leveraged the power of the online platforms for their exponential expansion. Apart from Digital World, Avinash has lectured at many reputed universities at the University of California, Stanford University, University of Virginia, and many more universities. Avinash has always been awarded Statistical Advocate of the Year from American Statistical Association, Most Influential Industry Contributor from the Digital Analytics Association, and Rising Start Award from Direct Marketing Educational Foundation.

Follow Avinash on 

Peter Shankman

Peter Shankman

An Entrepreneur, Author, and Founder of HARO

Peter Shankman is recognized as a “Global Connector” for connecting people by implementing new tricks in the trade. He is an all-in-one personality, who has all the solutions for frenetic social media, customer service, and PR. His successful endeavor HARO ( Help a Reporter Out) is an online platform for reporters and journalists to receive feedback from the audience. HARO offers a powerful journalist database of sources for the latest stories to be covered around the world. Back in June 2010, HARO was acquired by Vocus Inc.

Follow Peter on 

Marsha Collier

Marsha Collier

An Author, the Educator, specialized in Technology, Radio Personality

With over 1 million copies of books printed in 2007, Marsha is the top-selling eBay author with her bestselling books on eBay for Dummies and Social Media Commerce for Dummies. Apart from that, Starting An eBay Business For Dummies has been featured on the bestseller list of BusinessWeek Magazine. Marsha is also one of the top columnists on American Express Open and Entrepreneur.com and inspires hundreds of businesses on how to use online platforms for eCommerce and marketing. Her website CooleBayTools offers vital tools to augment Online Customer Service, eBay Sales, and eCommerce business. Collier keeps updating her followers with interesting reads and customer reviews.

Follow Marsha on 

Neal Schaffer

Neal Schaffer

Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Maximize Social Business

Featured in Forbes Top 35 Social Media Power Influencer, Neal is the founder of Maximize Social Business, a platform that provides business marketing resources to Social Media Professionals to help them grow their business. Apart from his marketing blog listed in AdAge as a top 100 global marketing blog, he is also the author of the Top 3 best-selling books on Amazon. Schaffer has offered on Social Media at more than 150 events globally and taught some insights of Social Media strategies at Rutgers University.

Follow Neal on     

Mark Schaefer  

Mark Schaefer

An Author, Podcaster, Speaker, and Business Consultant at Business grow

Mark is one of the top Marketing Influencers, whose blog Business Grow is one of the Top 5 robust marketing blogs in the world. His books The Tao of Twitter, The Content Code (featured in INC. Magazine), and Return of Influence are the top-selling books on Amazon. He gives lectures on marketing secrets at Rutgers University. Mark has worked with many reputed brands like Dell, US Air Force, Adidas, etc. Mark is also a persuasive speaker at many conferences including Marketing Summit Tokyo and Institute for International and European Affairs.

Follow Mark on     

Michael A. Stelzer

Michael

Founder of Social Media Examiner, Author and Serial Entrepreneur

And our list has come to an end with Michael Stelzer. Michael has founded Social Media Examiner, where he showcases social media marketing tactics to increase sales and boost Branding using Social platforms. He has written over 100 whitepapers for Globally reputed companies including Microsoft, Motorola, HP, SAP. Michael has authored books like Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition and Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and keep them Engaged. Apart from writing whitepapers, Stelzer is also a host of the Social Media Marketing Podcast and a weekly talk show Morning Social Media Marketing.

Follow Michael on     

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Conclusion:

I wanted to make a top 100 or top 50 list, but I decided to make something more concise and narrow. Following these 25 people will give you access to the powerful insights and practices that will give you an edge over your competitors. Once you do follow them, don’t be just overwhelmed by the notifications in your news feed. Take some timeout in regular intervals to keep a tab of what these pros are suggesting you should follow.

Don’t be afraid to comment back on each of these profiles.. and surely use @mentions to ask them questions and sort out the confusion. Try to establish a relationship with these influencers, without getting too clingy.

So, what do you think about the list that I have made? Do you already follow any of the above Inbound Marketers? Would you like to read more Inbound Marketing on our blog? What kinds of topics are you interested in? Let us know in the comments below.

Let’s try for a top 50 next time! Comment down below with who you would add.

Have a good day!

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