Be Aware and Beware: Your Competitors Can Hurt Your Rankings

Most people believe that finding a great SEO campaign that does its job well is not all that you need. In fact, it is only a small part of your ranking battle. Once your website gets hosted and established, its time to think about competitors seriously. They can simply swoop in and disturb all of the hard work you had put in. Although unfair and unethical, it does happen. Each website owner should be aware of these things and know how to stop it too!

Various types of competitors can hurt your rankings. Some may be ethical and other unethical. However, the key to online business success is to know how to handle this well. Here's what you need to do in this respect:

Out Rank

If a competitor has a better marketing campaign and rankings than you do, they will certainly out rank you. It is a two-way competition. Just as you pushed others down to climb up the ranking ladder, your competitors will do the same to push their business forward. You need to continue with good marketing and ethical SEO tactics. This will help you outrank your competitors.

Understand that not everyone can hold the number one position. It is better to aim for top five. This increases your odds to get to the top and marketing gets simpler. Also, there are dim chances of being pushed out by a competitor while staying aggressive and updated with your marketing campaign.

Link Building is Important

Link ONLY to reputable sites while undergoing a link building campaign. It is also important to check back on the websites to ensure these are worthy of your link. In case, a website loses authority via using bad SEO tactics (linking to poor quality sites / creating spam to increase traffic), everyone linked pays the price and suffer from lower rankings.

Competitors tend to follow the strategy to lower the ranking system and bring down competitors. They may have your link backs placed on non-desirable sites. So keep constant tabs on your link backs. Also use disavow tool from Google to remove links. Always be vigilant while monitoring your website. Contact website owner and ask to have the link removed.

Review Sites

These are the best options to build your brand. These help in driving traffic to your website and establish authority on a specific industry. However, these may even destroy your reputation. Your competitors may be writing these reviews.

In case, an actual consumer writes a negative review, comment on the review and visually display your plan to rectify the situation. For competitor review, speak to the review site directly, and ask them to take down the reviews. Also try to respond to each review personally. Review all the top review sites regularly.

Find Bad Links

Trust the backlink monitoring tool for locating bad links.  It will display all of your backlinks. These can be sorted by backlinks passing PageRank - ones having no SEO value (nofollow) absolutely and those that get completely ignored by Google.  Pay attention to those Google acknowledges and ones that link back to you.

You can check backlinks profile manually. Also sort these by anchor texts and check the ones that look suspicious. Make sure you sort links by social shares. This helps with locating bad links. Remember that 95 per cent of bad links have 0 social shares.

Common Bad Links

Here are some of the common bad links to spot:

- Auto approved comments from un-moderated sites
- Links from pages with less or no content
- Link directories
- Social bookmarking websites
- Websites offering duplicated content
- Links from irrelevant websites

Check Anchor Text

Since many of the backlinks come from images or hidden from users, these may really tough to spot. You can find these by checking the anchor text used on that specific link. The location of the link will be highlighted once the anchor text is copied and pasted into your browser. To find hard to locate links, simply view the page source.

Tag bad links you see and eliminate after checking them.

Get Rid of Bad Links

It is easy. You simply need to get in touch with the webmaster and ask them to remove the bad links. In most cases, webmasters do not have any problems (especially if you are polite). They will remove it without bothering you much. However, if they do not do so, there are other ways you can get rid of these.

There are webmasters who will simply ignore your request. So instead of wasting time returning your request. Remember that the longer bad links are associated with your website, the longer rankings suffer. Also, if a webmaster wants to respond to your request, he/she will do it within 48 hours. In case, you don't get any response within this period, proceed to the next step and get the links removed.

Contact the hosting company and place a request to remove your link. Let them know that a specific site they host has been spamming your website.

Disavow

Using the Google disavow tool can be helpful. It is an effective and easy to use that comes absolutely free of cost. You can go through the tutorials on 'how to use the tool' offered by Google. Although it may take longer, the tool is quite effective. When no one is ready to adhere to your instructions / rules and you simply cannot remove links removed using normal communications, the tool is just the right and best way to get what you want (without any foreign assistance).

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Easy Yet Brilliant Steps to Improve Your B2B Leads Through PPC

There are a number of ways to produce leads for B2B company. PPC is certainly at the top of the list,  especially when you expect instant results. However, PPC is not easy to manage. In fact, the project can get very expensive if you don’t know what you are doing.

According to experts, PPC management is a skill set. It takes time for a person to learn and develop a strategy that produces results without getting expensive. So are you ready to follow the process? You can read and watch all the tutorials, but there will be one definite, you will experience trial and error going through this. Yet, this will surely be worth your while because not only will you learn a lot, you will learn strategies that will work well for you and your business.

Mastering the skill of PPC management will let you produce revenue at higher volume as compared to other techniques. Also other techniques tend to eat up your resources. Enhancing B2B leads through PPC will help increase your ROI while reducing wastage of resources dramatically. While using this technique, you don’t require spreading resources out.

Here are some important steps you can take to boost your B2B leads using PPC:

Know Your Clients

It is important that a business knows their audience (B2C or B2B). There are several ways in which you can improve B2B leads. Several features can help you with your PPC campaigns. However, first, you must know your target customers. Here, it is crucial to develop buyer personas and proper messaging.

A Buyer Persona will allow you to paint a portrait of your ideal customer. The info gathered can be used to target audience, making sure that you are not wasting resources. It also makes sure that the right people see your ads. So no more wasting time and effort on showing ads to people who are not interested.

The next step is to determine the keywords used by your target audience to search for your product or service. You will get insights on websites they frequently visit. It helps with Display campaigns and AdWord Search campaigns.

Articulate Your Offer

This is crucial for B2B sales. When it comes to providing solutions for clients, most B2B organizations have absolutely no problems. Spreading awareness is really important as most customers aren about the benefits of your products or services. They might now know how they will use those in their own't actually aware of benefits of products / services sold by businesses. Under such situations, the customers may not be able to engage immediately as they don’t know what to do about your services and products. For instance, if you offer weight loss and health guidance, you should help the market understand the benefits of engaging with products or services. Invest ample time organizing webinars, various videos, customer testimonials, and even blog posts. While busy with PPC ads, don’t ignore content marketing campaigns that help educate your niche audience.

Create Customized Landing Pages - The moment a visitor gets to one of your landing pages, you have already paid for the click. So it indicates that so called strategies for reducing the number of poor quality leads such as addition form fields, validating email address for business are actually misguided. Your main focus should be on maximizing conversion rates of landing pages. This can be done via optimizing the following elements:

Tailor Landing Pages to Ad Groups - Tailor your landing pages as per the needs and challenges of your ad groups.

Result Driving Offers – It is crucial to test multiple offers to see the one that gets you the most traction.
Test – A/B test your landing pages. This helps determine variants that driving maximum conversions, consumers, opportunities, and ROI. Make sure you always do A/B test for a single element at a time to isolate the overall impact of that specific element on performance. Additionally, focus on testing just two page variants of the page at a time. The most crucial elements to run tests on are above the fold. These include:

Headline – You can test varied versions of the main selling point, offer / benefit.
Call-to-Action (CTA) – The key is to try out a variety of CTA copy, colors, sizes and placements.
Background / Hero Shot - Test a variety of images or videos for hero shot or background.
Form - Test varied lengths and placements for lead generation form. You can also display your form as a pop up, or bottom of your page.

Adjustments to Mobile Performance

Once you have implemented device tracking, you can easily determine the devices that drive opportunities. In case, you feel mobile leads aren't getting converted into opportunities, simply stop running your campaigns on mobile devices. You can also reduce bids. This helps devices receive the bulk of your traffic.

Develop Ad Schedule

In case, you are running ads 24/7, simply set up an ad schedule for your campaigns. It is possible to add days of the week or break down your schedule. All you need to do is add hourly segments for each day of the week. Thereafter, you can track performance for each hour and day that you define.

After combining opportunity data and ad schedule, it is possible to determine days or hours that produce maximum opportunities. This will help you adjust bids for each segment. It also stops running your campaign for the specific segments.

Make sure you have a close look at the data from time to time. In case, you fail to generate opportunities on weekends / weeknights, stop running campaigns during those times. Thereafter, you can move your budget for regular business hours.

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9 Best Ways to Optimize Your Images For an SEO Boost

Do you run an online store? If yes, then image optimization is an art that you want to master. Right from attracting target audience to perusing Google images for minimizing website load time, image optimization makes for a crucial part of developing a successful eCommerce website.

Many times, you must have noticed that your product pictures never show up while doing a Google image search. Have you been wondering if adding "Alt Tags" to images will do good for your website?
JPEG, GIF and PNG - What difference does it make?

Here, you will get to know about the 9 best ways to optimize your images to boost SEO:

1. Name Your Images

Make sure you do it descriptively. Also use simple plain English while doing so. Do not get into the habit of keeping the default file name given by your camera. Use of acceptable keywords will help your webpage rank well on search engines. Effective image optimization demands highly descriptive, keyword-rich file names. Search engines will crawl the text on your webpage. They will also search for keywords within image file names.

2. Optimize Alt Tags Wisely

Alt tags are a great text alternative to images, especially when a browser is unable to render them. In cases, where image is rendered, hovering over it with mouse pointer will let you see the alt tag text developed for that image. This depends on your browser settings. The alt attribute adds SEO value to the website. Better rankings for a website can be achieved by adding appropriate alt tags to the images and associating keywords with images. Use of alt tags is the best way for eCommerce products show up in Google image and web search. For image optimization, fill out each alt tag for each product image on your website.

Make sure you follow simple rules for alt tags:

- Describe images in plain English.
- Selling products with model number or serial numbers? Use these in your alt tag too.
- Strictly avoid keyword stuffing in your alt tags.
- Do not use alt tags for decorative images. You may be penalized by search engines for over-optimization.

Carry out a sanity check on your website on a regular basis. You must take a close look at the source of your web pages. Assess properly to see if your alt tags are filled out.

3. Create a Strategy for Image Dimensions and Product Angles

Displaying multiple angles of a product is a trend that has caught up really well these days. The best way you can capitalize on these pictures is to fill out alt tags. Simply create unique alt tags for each product shot. Add descriptions to base alt tag. This will help potential searchers land on your website. Google will reward you with searchers.

Avoid placing the largest image on your webpage as it lengthens the page load time owing to the larger file size related to the large image. The idea is to shrink the dimensions using source code. Give an option to view larger image in a pop-up or let it displayed on a separate webpage.

4. Reduce the Image File Size

Making your target audience wait for 3 seconds for a website load is ok. 5 seconds is too much! It is a sin! As per a research report published by Amazon, the company lost around $1.6 billion in a year if their pages slow down by 1 second. It is important to understand that Google uses page load time as a crucial factor in their ranking algorithm. So if your images take a lot of time to load, you are actually bidding adieu to your customers.

The best thing to do here is to decrease the image file size on your webpage. "Save for Web" command in Adobe Photoshop is a good way to do that. Ecommerce images should be kept under 70kb. Adjust the image to the lowest file size acceptable when using the command.

Use some of the other online tools if you do not have Photoshop. image editing. Some of the best image editing tools include PicMonkey, Pixlr, and FotoFlexer.

5. The Best Image File Type to Use

Three most common file types used to post images include:

- JPEG
- GIF
- PNG

JPEG (or .jpg) images are the old file type. These have turned into standard image of the World Wide Web. These images can be compressed significantly, resulting in high quality images with small file sizes.

GIFs (.gif) are lower quality images. These are used for more simple images. For instance, webmasters use these as icons and decorative images. The format supports animation and using these for plain and simple images on a webpage is a great option. However, for complex images and pictures, GIFs do not make for an attractive option.

PNG images are gaining popularity faster as an alternative to GIFs. The format supports a wide range of colors as compared to GIFs. The best part is that these do not degrade over time with re-saves. The file sizes may be larger as compared to JPEG images.

Be cautious while using PNG-24 image which is over three times larger in file size than the PNG-8 version.

Here are some tips to follow when choosing file formats:

- JPEGs make for the best option for most ecommerce sites. These are high on quality and the smaller file size.
- Strictly avoid using GIFs for large product images. The size is very large and cannot be reduced. Use of GIFs for thumbnails and decorative images is good.
- PNGs are a good alternative for both JPEGs and GIFS. PNG-8 is better than PNG-24 when using pictures for a product. PNGs are great as simple decorative images owing to their extremely small file size.

Use of an image editing software will let you save images to any of the file types discussed above.

6. Learn To Handle Thumbnails

Most ecommerce sites use thumbnail images. These provide an excellent way to scan category pages fast sans taking up too much space. Although thumbnails are great, you need to be careful. These can affect page loading times negatively. You may lose customers when they hold up category pages from loading. So you need to reduce the size of thumbnail file sizes as far as possible. Also vary the alt tag text. Duplicate text use bigger versions of the same image. Create the different alt text. Lastly, Allow thumbnail to be indexed instead of the large image.

7. Decorative Images – Beware!!

Most websites have an assortment of decorative images. These may include buttons, background images, and borders. An image that's irrelevant or unrelated to product / service is tagged as 'decorative'.

Decorative images tend to add aesthetic appeal to a webpage. However, these usually lead to huge combined file size. Also it slows down the load times. Hence, you need to take a closer look at decorative images to stop them from impairing your website's capacity  to convert visitors into customers.

The first thing to do is assess the file sizes of decorative images on web pages. Thereafter, you must make use of a template that reduces file sizes for website pages. Some of the best ways you can reduce file sizes of decorative images include:

- Convert borders or simple patterns into PNG-8 or GIFs.
- Use CSS for creating colored areas instead of using images.
- Large wallpaper-style background image should be reduced in size as far as possible sans ruining the quality of the image. Try cutting out the middle of the background image. Try converting it to a flat color or transparent. This is one of the best ways to reduce file size to a significant amount.

8. Be Cautious While Using Content Delivery Networks

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are now categorised as the most profitable place to host images and other media files. These help increase load times for your page and help fix bandwidth issues. The only drawback is backlinks. Backlinks are critical for SEO. The more you have, the better your website performs in the search engines.

Placing images on content delivery network will remove the images from your domain and placing it on a content delivery network domain. This means when someone links to your images, they link to the content delivery network website. In short, you must keep yourself from the temptation to follow anything just because it is "trendy". Assessors if it is the best move for your business before joining the bandwagon.

A CDN makes for a great choice if your website does a lot of business each month as it fixes bandwidth issues. For a website that gets "thousands" of visitors a day, simply continue with present hosting situation as it will easily handle the load.

Getting professional help will strategize your move in a way that's best for your business.

9. Test Images

The ultimate aim of image optimization is to help boost your bottom line. Once you have focussed on reducing size of files and getting search engines index these, it is time for testing images and see what precisely converts into more business.

You should test number of product images per page. Many non-hosted ecommerce sites face problems with loading time, the main thing to focus on is to reduce the number of images on a single page. This helps boost click-through rates and sales. However, in some cases, supplying a lot of images per page may actually boost user experience and result in more sales. The best way to find out what works is to test.

You can test angles preferred by your target audience. Providing views your clients wish to see will ultimately increase overall loyalty. Try surveying customers about their preferences while viewing product shots.

Also test the number of product listings you need to have on category pages. This will help you see what works best for your target audience and their shopping experience.

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Value of Money – A Facet of Service Web Design Freelancers Should Focus On

So you are a freelancer and satisfied with your work? This situation seems like as if you have a perfect professional life. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. A lot of freelance web designer feels that they have reached a plateau. There are times when they like to take up more challenging tasks. Another important thing is to work with clients who will pay more and appreciate the efforts made. Every hardworking freelance wants to work with clients who realize and respect the concept of value for money.

This is precisely where you start off with your journey from a freelancer to entrepreneur. The transition takes time, but you need to keep making efforts. It involves taking on more work, additional projects and learning simple yet effective ways to market yourself. These small steps will lead you to establishing your own business.

Being a theme pre-built websites user will help. It helps you know the overall cost of your work. You also know that using the right tools in the appropriate manner will help you save time and deliver excellent results.

Passion is Power

Passion is what can take you to the path of success. It should be topped smartly with business thinking.
Since the concept - 'value for money' is powerful, a freelancer must understand it well prior to applying it. Start off by having a close look at your work process. Make sure you realize the value against time, energy, and creativity (know the amount of time spent for each). Start by showing clients why your work and efforts were worth more than what they pay.

Value of Tools

Know the overall value of tools. Start by having a look at a WordPress theme of your choice. Try assessing if it is functioning the way it should. Is it really helping you provide value for money for clients. Are you travelling that extra mile and spending extra time installing themes? Have you thought of setting up new options? Customizing layouts are another thing you should focus on.

Assess the Theme

Prior to using a theme or a prebuilt website, assess it on all aspects of functions. It should be customizable, easy to use, and should not demand any complex coding. You should be well aware of the features that help you most in your work. Do you think the tool provides an effective way for spending resources?

Pick Wisely

Pick a pre-built theme wisely. Look for one that offers professional-level designs, matches your client’s niche, and customizable. Know the amount of time you will save. The best thing to do is show your clients editable layouts. It saves time.

Three Basic Elements

For delivering superior services, you need the following the three basic elements:

- Skill
- Experience
- Communication Skill

If you aren't getting enough requests for additional work from previous clients or they aren't referring you to others, there are areas you need to look for improvement.

Work Smarter

This is important whether you are a freelancer or not. Working harder may get you results, but working smart will attract success. Keep your eyes and ears open. The moment you see an area that requires improvement, start working on it. Also, research areas that demand help. You need to learn and explore more about the latest design trends, standards, rules, and much more. Listen to your clients well and adhere to their instructions keeping in mind the value for money concept.

Develop Yourself

Once you are capable of producing more value for yourself, you actually work towards offering benefits to all. Invest your time and money wisely. So start assessing your investments individually,  especially in terms of value for money. Towards the end of the month, you will get an idea of things that work well and the spots you require working on to improve. It is all about paying attention. When you pay attention, you facilitate the process of transition from freelancer to entrepreneur. This way, you become your own marketing resource.

Enjoy Your Job

Avoid doing a job just because you have to do it. Taking up a project and accomplishing it successfully is important. However, you should pay attention to small yet consistent improvements on a personal level. Remember, you have multiple skills and talents. Each of these can work for a resource that helps you supply value for money. All you need to do is understand these resources better and the best way to put these into use.

Take-away Ideas

It is crucial that you use value for money as criteria for a test to see the way your work impacts others. This will help you assess relationship with clients in a different light. Also the tools you use should be analyzed well to know if they are providing ample value for money. One of the best examples of such tools is 'Be Theme'. It offers over 220+ pre-built websites to users. When used wisely in conjunction with your niche skills and talents, you can make a huge success out of each project. Studies have revealed that over 50,000 designers love it.

In a Nutshell

It is important that you set a goal towards being a dynamic human resource that clients would look forward to for 'real' value. The mission is definitely achievable with dedicated efforts and using tools.

Good Luck!

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Costliest Mistakes Businesses Make On Social Media

Social media have been labelled and proven as a powerful tool. However, the power comes with a huge baggage of responsibility. Most of the time businesses simply fail to understand the damage social media mistakes can do. Also the long-term damage and issues can disturb growth.

Thankfully, these costly mistakes businesses are preventable! Try doing good things as positive exposure is helpful to your brand.

Here are some ways you can avoid making costly mistakes:

Irrelevant Posts

Stories about companies making social media faux pas and then deleting posts or tweets is common. They even end up making an apology to make things look fine later. Strictly avoid posting anything that will label you or the post as insensitive, irrelevant, or inappropriate. Try establishing a detailed posting policy. Here, you need to make sure the tweet or post is reviewed smartly before it can be published.

The Attack Mode

Social media (talk of Twitter) are loaded with trolls. The mere basis of their existence is to bring people down. It is upsetting to watch the trolls disturbing your social media campaigns. Trolling is actually a rare problem. The best way to handle it is to ignore it. It goes away once you ignore it. Trolls simply want your attention. Rage is what energizes them. Strictly avoid responding. Show you aren't reading and bothered!

Not Recognizing your Target Audience

Most business owners believe that creating profiles, developing content and following a some account is all they need to do. However, your job doesn't stop here. If you are serious about enjoying immense success with social media, simply narrow your focus. Make double sure you’re reaching out to the right audience.

A successful social media strategy will start with a detailed understanding of your target audience. This should follow with gaining information on where audience shops, what they do in spare time, their political beliefs, their aspiration and other details. In short, knowing who your audience is will help you engage the audience in meaningful ways.

Paid Likes and Followers

Most people have a tough time getting a social media presence off the ground. Gathering a few hundred followers may take a few months. Most of the time, you will feel as if the progress is moving at a snail’s pace. And this is where a big mistake of paying for followers is made. A lot of business owners consider it as a good deal. They believe that simply spending a few dollars will work.

However, experts in this field strictly warn against taking any such step. This is because likes and follows you purchase aren't real people! These are neither potential leads nor customers. Do not expect them to share or link your content. These social media accounts are robots doing the same thing for everyone around!

One of the biggest dangers of buying likes and followers is that you will spend precious time speaking to the fake or irrelevant audience. None of your advertising or marketing efforts will work here. So it is always better to employ dedicated efforts and exercise patience creating and employing business strategies with social media.

Social Media

It is important to understand that social media can either be an asset or a hindrance. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses tend to launch social strategies without gaining an insight of what precisely successful social media marketing looks like. This often results in costly errors which may damage the reputation of the brand in the long run.

Avoiding the above listed mistakes, you won't fall for traps. Also for a healthy, effective long-term social strategy, it is important that you become familiar with the intricacies of each platform used. Also, never cease learning.

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8 Powerful Ways to Increase Your Reputation Online

Online ratings and reviews possess ample potential to influence decision of your present and future clients. Boosting, protecting, and promoting the online reputation of a company needs to be an integral part of its day to day operations.

Negative reviews for your products, services or website tends to deter buyers. So if you have even one negative review, do something about it. This may affect your potential sales. Listed below are some powerful actions to improve your online reputation:

1. Encourage Happy Customers

Encourage your happy and satisfied clients to post their positive experience. Your customers advocating your services are a plus point. It will influence others to buy from you. In case, your customers don't feel motivated to post their experience about your business, offer an incentive. Remember that a discount or coupon may prove very helpful for your business. These may be awarded to you customers for posting genuine positive reviews.

2. Remove Obstacles

Remove all obstacles that interrupt the process of writing a review. You need to make it really easy for your happy customer to write reviews. Here, you must focus on implementing a proactive, automated process by using online reputation management software. It helps making process of reviewing business easy.

3. Use of Appropriate Tools

Apart from the encouragement of positive posts, you need to make other dedicated efforts to improve your online reputation. One of the effective ways to go about this is the use of professional tools such as Profile Defenders. It is a reputed online reputation management company that removes or deletes defamatory content fully. It also removes bad web pages online. The best part is that they even use themselves as an example of a client they have helped. Use of online tools is quite helpful in improving reputation of your company online as they reach to the route cause of the problem.

4. Associations

Getting positive reviews is easy if your customers like you. So make sure each time you get a positive comment, respond with a "thank you." Take the name of your customer too, if mentioned. Keeping a close track of your customers throughout the sales process is crucial. Continue with these efforts even after they turn into your clients.

5. Handling Negative Reviews

It is important that you properly address a negative review. This should be done in a way that promotes trust amongst consumers. Speak to the customer and try to solve the issue as soon as possible. Also give an answer to the review online apologising for the experience and promising to resolve the issue.

6. Do Not Delay

Timing plays a crucial role in tackling online comments or complaints. So if you see someone has written something about your business, service, product, or employees, respond immediately. Failing to respond will give a 'you don’t care' impression. So if you come across a compliment, acknowledge it by saying thank you and make it as personalized as possible. For a complaint or negative review, apologize. Also offer a solution and if necessary, offer to take the matter seriously by having a conversation offline. You must take care of things before they go out of hand.

7. Stay Positive

The way you respond to a complaint or negative review on your site makes a lot of difference. It can even break how your business is perceived. Most consumers would stop doing business with a brand after a negative interaction. Studies have also revealed that customers increase their spending and regular visits following a positive experience. So make sure you focus on customer satisfaction and keep responses of your customers as positive as possible.

8. Keep a Track of Posts

You should be aware of the posts being made about your organization. This is important as it will let you intercept and even exterminate them way before they emerge as a big issue. Most of the time posts going viral are a result of the initial poster gaining followers from other viewers sharing similar views. The entire thing will lead to a snowball effect. You must focus on getting to the route of the source. This helps with sharing your thoughts in a good way and disperse the issue.

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17 Effective Ways to Use Pinterest for Photography Business

Pinterest is definitely one good way to market your photography business online effectively. It allows simplified client interactions, ensure greater value to clients, and even keep your inspirations and masterpieces organized.

Professional photographers usually share their work on various social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google+. However, many underestimate the importance of using Pinterest. Photographers using this dynamic image-based platform to market photography and build a brand are benefitted.

Pinning photos, infographics, and videos to digital boards helps photographers gain greater exposure. They are also benefited by attracting more website traffic, blog traffic, and potential new clients.

New to Pinterest? Listed below are some tips to market your photography business the best using Pinterest:

1. Create a Business Account

A Pinterest business account will allow you to track your most popular boards and pins. This is important to make your business move ahead and inspire you to take apt steps towards the same.

2. Add Pinterest Browser Button to Your Browser

It is important to add Pinterest browser button to make it easier for you to pin photos to a variety of Pinterest boards. You can add it to your Pinterest browser button to your favorite browser or download the Pinterest app for mobile devices.

3. Create Pinterest Board

Once a business account is created and browser button is added on Pinterest, it is time to create a board that displays your masterpieces. Make sure you sift through your portfolio thoroughly and choose your best images. After selection, simply pin them to the board. It is important to link directly from an individual page or blog post. Avoid doing it from your general website or blog.

4. Additional Boards

If you deal with diverse types of photograph, it is beneficial to create several Pinterest boards. This will you to showcase your work. For example, you can create separate boards for an infant photoshoot, toddler photo shoot, maternity shoot and couple shoot.

5. Give Description

Optimize pins via using the following as per requirement:

- Keywords
- Links
- Categories
- Hashtags
You should also mention your name, location, and type(s) of photography you specialize in. Copyright symbol, date and year of shoot, etc. may also be mentioned.

6. Watermark

You should watermark photographs to ensure apt protection. It also makes it easier for pinner to search your business using the Pinterest search bar in case, your link doesn't work.

7. Storyboard

Pinning a single photograph at a time on Pinterest may not be a good idea. Place, a collection of images which makes for a storyboard. Upload it to your website or blog and pin it to one of Pinterest boards. It helps potential clients have a quick glance at multiple photos and get a nice feel for your work style.

8. Testimonial Board

If you have client testimonials on business websites, share them on Pinterest? This increases your credibility among followers.

9. Board for Present Clients

It is important that you have a separate board for your current clients. They may need your help while looking for something new and unique to wear for their new photo session. So you can create a new “What to Wear”, “The Accessories” and “Make up Guide” boards. Try creating inspiration boards if you deal with different categories of the shoot. For instance, you can create boards for your current clients under engagement shoot ideas, reception decorations, wedding venues, etc.

10. Follow Other Users

Following other Pinterest users will help you build up a substantial following. The best way is to start by following friends on Facebook. You simply need to use the “Find Friends” tab on the left side of Pinterest. You may even invite your Facebook friends to become Pinterest followers or users.

11. Encourage Pinning

Install Pinterest buttons on your website or blog. Also try adding a “Pin It” mouseover button to blog.

12. Appreciate

Take some time and thank those who have pinned your images or followed you on Pinterest. Offering exclusive incentives or promotions for clients who follow you on Pinterest is also a great idea.

13. Join Group Boards

It helps joining different groups or community boards with multiple contributors. You can increase your exposure on Pinterest. Try asking fellow photographers about the group boards they are a part of. Request invitations to those community boards.

14. Get More Exposure

Pinterest makes online photography business marketing quick and absolutely hassle free. Simply download a “Pin It” widget and it fits into all of your social media websites, websites and blogs. It will help display your work on pin boards. Users with a massive following will be highly benefited as they can see the work going viral in minutes!

15. Pin Description

It is crucial to be very selective while choosing pin descriptions. Pleasing Google can be difficult. So make sure the keywords are chosen wisely! Always use a link to your website in description. This will help drive your referral links up which ultimately driving your SEO up. Strictly avoid flooding your description with repeated keywords.

16. Contests and Promotions

Oganize a Pinterest contest where you would put out a call to action to your fans. You may ask them to create a Pinboard and pin your images, ideas, etc. for photo shoot. Let them post a link to their Pinboard on your Facebook wall. You may even develop a promotion plan for special discount or freebie by using a pin on your Pinboard.

17. Maintain Interest Among your Clients

Keep asking your customers and fans to pin your images. Updating Pinterest boards and linking to them on your blog or Facebook page will retain interest of your clients and fans. They will be active on your site.

So using Pinterest to promote photography business is a no brainer. Yes, it is hassle free, free of cost, and super fun! All you need to do is allow your creative mind to come up with some unique, exciting ideas to market using Pinterest! Happy Pinning!

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