Black Hat SEO News

Creating powerful content that grows your business can be a discouraging process. It’s possible to spend countless hours producing something to help your brand reach the next level, only to discover that it does little in the way of improving engagement, traffic, or sales.

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I met a man in line at a fast food restaurant who told me some happy and very sad tales about his life. It got me thinking about the conversations we do and don't have on social media. The memorable ones always contain the pleasures and pains of our lives. This story sheds light some light on what I'm trying to say.

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While news cannot always be anticipated or planned for, holidays come annually and applying the same concept as newsjacking to holidays can aid you in creating great content that your audience will love. Are there any instances where your company used newsjacking to great effect?

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In a new video, Google's Matt Cutts has given us a rare heads up into an algorithmic change that is coming to the search results. Google is going to try to better determine more between a site simply being popular and the site being an authority.

Half of new business startups fail within five years, according to the latest available data from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, as SmallBizTrends.com reports. Finding ways to conserve cash by cutting costs is essential to surviving the startup phase. Fortunately, various entrepreneurial tools can help with this.

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If you are an executive and you don’t see the need for social media, you really should take it upon yourself to learn a little more about it. Executives need to take a bigger step and own the process and learn how it can help them both personally and professionally. It is worth the investment.

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The fear of planning, or what I call planophobia, is fairly common. It’s closely linked with commitmentphobia, or the fear of losing options. In the absence of a content marketing plan, you can expect to run into a few common problems – learn how to avoid those problems with some basic planning.

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In order for employee advocacy to take off in your organization, you need content that employees want to share. So what if I told you how to know exactly what type of content your employees want to share? The answer is simple – listen to them.

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Facebook isn't out to get you. It's a fair fight to get in the newsfeed. The rules are simple: create lots of different types of valuable content, in order to please as many types of your fans as possible. Engage when they engage, and continue to improve your content over time.

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eCommerce; Augmented Reality (AR); Virtual Reality (VR): Three rapidly evolving digital technologies that have long held the theoretical promise of delivering more convenient, enhanced and immersive shopping experiences to consumers. However, speculative theory is fast turning into tangible reality.

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You need to understand the human contract you signed up to when you started using the social web, every time you connect and interact. This isn’t a piece of paper or a PDF file you store in your tablet; it’s a contract of principles, coherence, ethics and ideals.

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For years, marketing, advertising, and public relations folks fought over budgets, scopes of work, ownership, and talent. It was an inefficient, yet accepted dance at organizations of all shapes and sizes. There was paid media, and there was earned media — and for the most part, everyone understood their role. If only things were still this easy.

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The Content Marketing Score is a recommendation engine that quantifies your impact by measuring your audience’s engagement with your content. It also reveals how you stack up against your competitors. You can even see a breakdown of how your content is performing across the LinkedIn platform.

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More than 2,000 people descended on San Diego last week for the second annual Social Media Marketing World. I attended several panels and keynotes on content marketing, and learned a lot from a wide variety of experts. Here are some of the best takeaways from my live-tweeting.

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With new ad features, enhanced campaigns, and the evolution of search behavior, many advertisers are struggling to see performance results like they have experienced in the past. If you fall into that category, don't fret. It's just time to reset.

According to one study, 65% of Australians use social media and 45% use a form of social media at least once a day. The same study revealed that 25% of respondents said they used social media to find out more about a brand, while 20% used it to research products or services before purchase.

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There’s a way to schedule photo tweets on Twitter so that the image will auto-expand like a direct upload. The trick is doing it through the native scheduling client. Here’s how you schedule a photo tweet from the native Twitter client.

"Dear Socially Stephanie: I run a local services business. Think plumbing, cleaning, the type of business that would be featured on Dirty Jobs. I am having a hard time coming to terms with the idea that social media can actually help my business. It's not sexy. It's not exciting. Why would people want to receive posts about what we do?"

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Always look for ways to build your online authority by sharing your knowledge, answering people’s questions and extending the reach of your expertise. Building online authority makes you trustworthy, and that helps pull potential customers and employers toward you. It’s an essential ingredient to a successful personal brand.

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A marketing team that doesn’t invest time in a proper lead nurturing campaign could be missing out on a major sales opportunity. Lead nurturing through marketing automation allows you to deliver the right message at the right time to your prospects in order to accelerate their movement through the sales funnel.

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My title was a little harsh, but I needed to get your attention and it worked because here you are! When I say “avoid being the worst” I mean, avoid being one of those social media types that you roll your eyes at. How do you decide what to RT? If you had a friend who was constantly bragging, would you find that annoying?

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We all love a good case study, don't we? Problem is, despite years of experience and thousands of case studies promoted by agencies, consultants and speakers, most companies are still struggling with their social media strategies. How is this possible when there are so many good case studies to be found?

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It’s the dream of every blogger to write a post that gets picked up by social media and goes around the Internet like a fast-moving fire. We see these viral topics all the time, but trying to break the code and understand what will go viral and what won’t can seem like an insurmountable task.

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"We’re also seeing another revolution. While there is big pent up demand for data scientists, there is also big demand primarily coming from line of business customers, and some of the smaller size customers who don’t have the budgets or capability to buy these exotic tools to do data analysis. "

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What if everything you "know" about social media marketing is wrong? What would this mean to your upcoming and current social marketing programs? Better yet, what might it mean to your job? If you are employed in social media marketing, it is time for a healthy dose of reality followed by some serious soul searching and career planning.

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Storytelling has been our way of communicating and sharing information since our ancestors sat around the firesides hundreds or even thousands of years ago, and now that brands have the ability to share images and videos more widely than ever before, it’s time to tell our stories and connect with our customers – through social media.

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The Indian general elections are almost upon the country and for the first time ever, the political parties are tackling social media to try to win over voters. Politicians are taking part in Google+ Hangouts, interviews organised by Facebook, and also using the Facebook owned messaging service WhatsApp as a way to connect with the masses.

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This week, Eat24 announced its plans to shut down its Facebook page in a very public "break-up" letter. Let’s be clear, Eat24 is abandoning the very community it built rather than sticking around to engage with as many of them as possible. What it views as “taking a stand” will be another company’s opportunity to reach its customers.

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As a brand influencer, one of your most valuable assets is your ability to make meaningful connections between a consumer and a brand. However, this ability is rooted in your neutrality and the second you associate yourself with a brand, your position as neutral can turn hazy in light of your relationship with that brand.

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Don’t be part of the 64 percent that believes their branded content is not effective. Instead, converge the three media channels of owned, paid and earned and stop pouring all of your resources in owned media. It’s true, there’s an audience out there, but they’re already committed to other websites they trust.

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It can be quite distressing when you see a notification of a manual action in your Google webmaster tools account. But by taking prompt action and working hard to resolve the issue you will soon find traffic will return quite quickly.

What is all of this content you're creating supposed to do? Content should be strategic and aimed at a specific use-case. Here are six objectives to push for to help you see value from the content you're creating.

Google+ can be powerful for brands and businesses, but also can be quite confusing. Whether you're stuck with an old Google+ Places page or have the updated Google+ Business page, you can use these tips for Google+ Local listing optimization.

When Google+ launched, I remember waiting with baited breath for my invite to join the platform to hit my inbox. I was hopeful that the search, technology and innovation juggernaut, Google, would be able to create a social media platform that would be a smash success.

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I’ll be focusing on the Latin American market and with the World Cup only two months away, we’ll be taking an extra close look at Brazil. Latin American nations share elements of a common cultural and linguistic heritage, but each nation has its own pre-colonial traditions and history, which have created the countries they are today.

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Have you ever been curious about how Google decides which algorithm is better than another, when they're pushing out one of the many tweaks they do weekly? Google's Matt Cutts spills the beans on how the search team actually does it.

Brand advocates are everywhere, but you wouldn’t know it; they look exactly like regular people. You could be sitting next to one as you read this article. This new Social Media Today column will explore the power of employee advocacy, and why it matters to your organization.

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Every single tweet is an opportunity; an opportunity to build a brand, to start a relationship, to close a deal. So maybe it's time we slow down the content pumping machine and evaluate whether we're really producing the most valuable content on Twitter.

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Have you ever seen a friend’s Facebook post and thought to yourself: “That’s not you at all. Why are you saying that?” People tend to “hide” behind their keyboards, either saying things that they would never say to someone’s face, or representing themselves in a false light.

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Is there anything more nauseating than celebrity PDA? Perhaps celebrity PDA on social media? Famous couples have taken to social media marketing platforms like Twitter and Instagram to share anecdotes, messages of support, and kissy-face selfies with and to the ones they love.

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Facebook is becoming a challenging marketing platform to understand for small businesses. In fact, many business marketers don't understand it at all. They don't know whether their Facebook page is performing well or not, or should we be getting more likes or shares based on their number of the followers.

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A year or so ago, I opened my own Tumblr account, though I lurked the site long before then. I enjoyed the sets of .gif images in certain posts and the site was, overall, an interesting creature of sorts. At first I thought Tumblr would be a fun to engage in on my free time. Now, there’s not a single website that I spend more time on.

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Many companies are choosing to employ virtualization as part of their business strategy in order to work more efficiently and keep needed systems up and running at all times. Virtualization can be a great asset for businesses, but it can also be very complex and difficult to manage and maintain.

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t’s been a few weeks since LinkedIn first opened their publishing platform to the plebs. The blogging soapbox was previously limited to influencers like Richard Branson but now anyone with a LinkedIn account can now be elevated to the same threshold (or is the reverse true?).

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The feedback I’ve read about the platform has been excellent. Well known social media identity Barry Feldman reported that one of his first posts received more than 10,000 views and was shared over 1,000 times. Andy Yeo, a strategic manager at Hootsuite, reported that one of his posts got more than 77,000 views, 800 likes and 200 comments.

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You either get remembered or forgotten. If you aim to get remembered, you need to hone your storytelling skills and make emotional connections with your audience. Let's have a look at 6 key elements of storytelling and how to apply them to achieve influence.

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Google has added some new customization to the Google bar that appears on the top of Google related pages when the users logged in. Users can now add boxes for Google products they use, such as Google Maps, Gmail and Google Docs.

Spredfast announced today that it is merging with its Austin-based neighbor, Mass Relevance, in a move that heats up the already competitive social relationship software space. Essentially, what Spredfast CEO Rod Favaron sees as the highlight of the merger is that the new Spredfast offers “Now Platform Plus a Planned Platform.”

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Google AdWords announced today that by the end of August 2014, regular Product Listing Ads (PLA) campaigns will be going away in favor of "Shopping" campaigns. AdWords is asking all PLA advertisers to upgrade before campaigns are auto-upgraded.

Reputation management expert Andy Beal, CEO of Trackur and author of "Repped: 30 Days to a Better Online Reputation", kicked off Day 2 of ClickZ Live New York by sharing 15 examples of reputation disasters, and what we can learn from these mistakes.

This week I moderated another great webinar from the SocialMediaToday Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Online Community: The New Secret Sauce for Customer Centric Enterprises. Panelists included Vanessa DiMauro,Tamera Rousseau-Vesta, and Nathan Roth.

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Have you made a spelling mistake or grammatical error on an Instagram post? Frustrating, right? Here's an easy way to edit post copy on Instagram without losing engagement. The following how to explains the process on an iPhone.

Enagement is a great goal, but Continuous Customer Engagement is the next turn of the crank. It is about systematically interpreting and evolving a comprehensive understanding of an individual in order to engage that individual in a productive manner in any brand interaction.

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So, April Fool’s Day has rolled around again. You will have undoubtedly fallen for some pranks, or perhaps committed some yourself. Here at Bubble, we fell victim to some of yesterday’s pranks – evidently we’re not as savvy as we thought! I thought I’d round up our top 5 online April Fool’s Day pranks of 2014 for you all.

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The series finale of How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) aired this week after nine successful seasons. You can channel your inner Ted Mosby during the selling process – utilizing LinkedIn to set the stage for yourself and your prospects. Storytelling as a sales strategy can manifest itself with these three practices.

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Why should brands care that my mom gets more engagement than I do? Well, its a telltale sign of Facebook's aging demographic, an important change marketers need to recognize. As technology advances and becomes more integrated into our everyday lives, we can expect the number of older users to rise.

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The time has come for Facebook to behave like the leader they have become. Facebook needs to give this industry a Moses, a figure to explain what has happened, what will happen and how to build for the future. Facebook is better, and smarter than the basics mistakes they have made. And in partnering with businesses, they have everything to gain.

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One potential area that really gets me excited is the potential for in game ads. We already have Re-marketing and Pay Per Click advertising on Facebook but what if whilst playing the latest blockbuster game you see an in game advert on a billboard that relates to a website?

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If you did some digital marketing in 2013, what worked and what didn't? Try to look at both qualitative and quantitative data as much as possible as opposed to relying on your own personal feelings about a strategy; your favorite approach may not have been the one that connected with customers.

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Open up your blog to outside writers and you'll quickly find content marketing’s seedy underbelly, rife with pushy, demanding guest posters. I chatted with a few bloggers about their own experiences with guest blogging, and we found that there were typically five demands that bad guest posters will make.

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Today I came across a new form of protest: one company was encouraging its customers to protest another company.When accessing the dating site OKCupid through Firefox, customers are now greeted with with a message calling out Mozilla (Firefox) CEO Brendan Eich for his support of California’s Proposition 8.

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