Tag Archives: Content strategy

The secret to share-worthy content

People love to share things with their friends, family, and colleagues. Presenting your users with relevant and unique content is the best way to encourage sharing and give you a competitive advantage. Content that is underscored by emotion, in particular, can help you strengthen your brand’s presence.

Here are some tips to help you get into the minds, and hearts, of your audience:

1. Be relatable

Taking the time to research what your visitors are interested in is the first step to creating shareable content. Diversify to cover multiple facets of your audience’s interests by including work, lifestyle and social topics to keep things fresh and engaging. Contextualizing your stories also increases the chances of your audience relating to and wanting to share your site.

2. Know what’s trending

Staying up-to-the-minute can require a lot of time and research. Luckily, online tools such as Google Trends can help you identify what’s important to your audience as well as offer helpful insights about people in specific regions you are trying to target. Being a thought leader means not only sharing up-to-the-minute industry news with your audience, but also offering insightful observations and predictions of what this may mean down the road. A trusted source is a followed source.

3. Increase your content’s shelf life

While timely articles are great for generating instant buzz, having content that maintains its importance over time yields higher traffic rate overall. Evergreen content is information that stays relevant no matter when it is consumed. Make sure to interlace trendier content with evergreen pieces every so often.

To learn more about familiarizing your audience with your brand, check out the AdSense Guide to Audience Engagement.

Posted by Jay Castro
Audience Development Specialist
@jayciro

Source: Inside AdSense

Amplify your content with social

Social media is more than just vacation photos and stories about babies, it’s about sharing experiences and creating interactions with people.

Content on social media can instantly reach millions of users and create thousands of online stories. Do you remember the social media storm that Ellen DeGeneres created with a single photo? Her selfie from the 2014 Oscars started a global conversation and has since been added to Google’s 2014 web culture guide. Her content holds the win for the most retweeted tweet with more than 3M retweets, 6.8M site embeds, and even temporarily led to Twitter going down.

Big events like the Oscars create opportunities for publishers to interact with users through both original content and viral content. This summer, users will be searching, sharing, and consuming content like never before. Be sure to examine your content strategy, and find ways to spark conversations on social channels or, contribute to an existing digital conversation.

How can AdSense Publishers participate in big events? If you're new to AdSense, you can sign up now and turn your passion into profit.

Include editorial coverage around topical events.
Make sure your content is easy to consume and share.
Create a social media strategy around a big event.

Here are four tips to help jumpstart your social media strategy:

Know your audience. Trigger an emotional response from your viewers by humanizing your brand.
Be social to win on social by creating relationships with your users.
Don’t be afraid to follow the leaders and the trends. If there’s social proof behind it, do it.
Use tools to help you create great content.

More on the fourth tip, here are a few tools to help you #drawthecrowds through social channels:

Buffer is a well-known tool used by social media marketers. It helps streamline your social media management.
Pablo is a tool created by Buffer that is “the simplest way to create beautiful images that fit every social network perfectly”.
Canva is another image creating tool that can help you create visual content on a budget.
Feedly can help you organize and read relevant content in your industry to help fuel your content creation.
Google Trends is a widely used tool to help you identify key trends happening around the world.
IFTTT is a popular tool used to streamline many tasks. For example, here’s a pre-built recipe that will automate the process of tweeting each new wordpress blog post.

According to the New York Times, 68% of users share [online content] to give people a better sense of who they are and what they care about. To amplify your content this summer, be sure to create content that resonates with your audience.

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit. Let us know your thoughts on Twitter @AdSense.

Posted by Barbara Sarti and Jay Castro from the AdSense team

Source: Inside AdSense

Measure what kind of content is a hit or miss with the fans

With the summer kicking off, it’s a great time to freshen up your content and try new things to #drawthecrowds. Google Analytics can help you measure what kind of content is a hit or miss with the fans. Here are a few simple and effective places to get started.

1. Find out where to focus
Content Groups let you bundle your offerings to analyze them more clearly. Instead of analyzing all sneakers at once, for instance, a shoe company might divide content into soccer boots, golf shoes, tennis shoes and so on. You can view and compare aggregated metrics by group, or drill down to any individual URL or page title.

Know what topics have the best AdSense CTRs (Click-through-rate)

Group content by topic (such as food, politics and sport).
Use the AdSense Pages report to view metrics.

Once you discover which topics have the best click-through rates, you could then focus on creating more content for those topics.

Know which content groups have slow-loading pages

Use Site Speed reports to look at page load performance.
Group products by type (such as shirts and shoes).

Are some pages very slow to load? You might focus on fixing uncompressed images to improve the user experience (and potentially your AdSense revenue). Check out Google’s PageSpeed tool to test the speed of your mobile site.

Content Groups are easy to set up. Learn how to create them and then follow these best practices from Google Analytics evangelist, Justin Cutroni.

2. Understand where your users enter and leave on your site The Landing Pages report can show you how engaged visitors are with your content. You can analyze individual pages or Content Groups.

Know what pages cause visitors to leave

Look for pages with high bounce rates. This usually surfaces content that isn't appealing to visitors or is irrelevant to their needs.
Try changing the headline of your article or finding different images to see how that affect bounce rates.
Look at Google Trends to see what the world is interested in, then think about how you can incorporate it into your content. Sport is sure to be high on the agenda this summer.
You may also want to analyze the page speed for pages with high bounce rates; visitors may be giving up on a very slow-loading page. Studies have shown that 74% of mobile web users are only willing to wait 5 seconds or less for a single web page to load before leaving the site.

Both Content Groups and Landing Page reports can help you find underperforming pages on your site and take action to fix them.

3. Get to know your users

Demographics and Interests data helps you understand the age and gender of your users, as well as their interests based on their online browsing and buying.

Know who your visitors are:

Click on Demographics Report; Select a demographic category.
Check the bounce rate. If it’s high, consider changing the headline or the visuals to make your pages more relevant and engaging for your target audience.

Know what your users are interested in:

Generate and analyze an Interests report.
Then shape your content based on the user interests you see. If viewers of your bakery blog are interested in a big sports event, see how you can incorporate that theme into your baking content.

To get started with the Demographics and Interests reports, you will need to enable them in your Analytics account.

The key to making your site better this summer is to jump into the data, have fun, and experiment. If you can find out what works and do more of it, you’re sure to draw the crowds. Have any ideas to share about using these reports? Add them in the comments below!

New to AdSense? Sign up now and turn your passion into profit

Posted by Jay Castro, from the AdSense team

Source: Inside AdSense

[eBook] Learn how to increase audience engagement

Did you know that roughly 61% of users abandon a site if they don't find what they’re looking for right away?¹ As hard as you work to get visitors to your site, you have to work even harder to keep them there.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a clever hack to keeping your users engaged. However, if you understand the intent of your users and provide unique content that’s relevant to their interests, you’ll be on your way to increasing engagement on your site.

Download our guide to audience engagement to learn more about best practices and tips to drive better results for both your users and business. Get your free copy today.

We’d love to hear your feedback on how this guide, connect with us on Google+ and Twitter using #AdSenseGuide.

Posted by Jay Castro

from the AdSense team

@jayciro

^{1) Think with Google, What users want from mobile sites}

Source: Inside AdSense

Give your site a content boost

5 tips to grow site visitors

If you're like most publishers, you think a lot about how to grow your site audience. It should be no surprise that for this topic, content is key. Great content attracts and engages new users and keeps your wonderful old users coming back again and again.

But how do you produce content that is high in quality, value, and unique? For the answer, look back to why you became an AdSense publisher in the first place. Do what you love and your content will naturally be at the heart of all you do.

As you build your new content, use these five tips to make what you create as engaging as it can possibly be.

Be targeted, be consistent, be frequent
Take time to figure out who is reading your content and what topics they find most interesting. Does your blog about dogs get 20 comments about Chihuahuas for every one comment about Great Danes? Maybe you should focus on the little guys!

Update your content as often as you can. With regular updates you’ll build trust and engagement with your users, and they’ll be more likely to share your content with their friends and family.

Create engaging videos
People crave video. In fact, the average mobile viewing session on YouTube is now around 40 minutes. You could boost the amount of time your visitors spend on your site by using video and photos.

Create your own videos; it gives your site personality and unique content. Try adding a separate video section, or integrate video within your articles. Use A/B testing to find the best spot for your video: for instance, see how a video performs in the middle of article versus at the end. Remember, if you use videos that aren't yours, make sure that you have the rights to distribute them.

Be mobile-friendly
The number of smartphone users is estimated to grow by 16% to two billion users in 2015. In all, web access from mobile phones will represent 69% of all traffic by 2017, according to emarketer.com. The average user now spends almost three hours per day on mobile devices.*

To win more visitors, optimize your site for all screens. Your site needs to be accessible anywhere and anytime, on smartphones and every other device. (Hungry to learn more? See more tips on going mobile.)

Go social
The way users find and share content has changed. Along with direct and search traffic, social sharing is key for your site visitor strategy. Remember, your article or video could be the perfect fit for someone’s micro-moment, so make sure you have the most important message in the first few moments.

Use social plugins and sharing buttons to help users share your content on the spot. Use large icons to highlight those sharing options. Try to A/B test where those buttons get the best engagement: at the top, at the bottom or embedded right in the article. For the best user experience, keep those buttons separated from your AdSense ads.

Look at what the numbers are telling you
If great content is job #1, great measurement is job #2. Google Analytics can bring you a deeper understanding of your audience and their demographics, time on site, which pages people leave fast, and which they visit most.

Use these insights to provide your users with the right content that works across devices. For instance, try the long-term revenue framework.

Have some top tips of your own? Share them with us in the comments below.

Not yet an AdSense user? Sign up now!

Posted by

Jason Le

Account Strategist

and

Draven Leong

AdSense Onboarding Agent

Source: Inside AdSense

When writing for humans, it helps to think like one

What is human-centered design, and why should you care?

Suppose you want to come up with a new way to engage your site visitors and attract more of them. You could lie on the couch and hope to dream up a genius idea... or you could try human-centered design.

Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving. It's taught by innovative institutions such as IDEO and the Stanford Design School and is often used to design new products.

But it's not just for designers. Publishers like you can use human-centered design to understand what audiences want and create new content to match. Why not give it a try?

The steps go like this:

1. Empathize: Observe, engage, and immerse

To get started, look at your users’ behavior and think about why they behave that way.

Meet some of your users and watch what they do with your content.
Engage with them. Ask them why they read or watch your content. Try to uncover their needs.
Immerse yourself in their experience however you can. Try to discover the emotions that guide their behaviors. Which specific users do you want to create new content for?

Let's say we have a blog focused on the millennial generation and their interests. By meeting and talking with our audience, we learn that a small but growing group of young professional women find our blog really valuable. We decide to focus on this audience.

2. Define: Focus and paraphrase

What is the main user need? Based on what you've heard and learned, create a problem statement. It should look something like this:

"Young professional women need to know more about how to advance their careers, because they aspire to move into management roles."

This is a good problem statement because it:

Targets a clear cohort of users.
Addresses a specific need.
Is something you can take action on.

3. Ideate: Explore

Now it's time to explore as many possible ideas as you can think of. Here are some key ideas for brainstorming:

Be prolific. Go for a high quantity and wide variety of ideas.
Be positive. Use the mantra "Yes, and" to build ideas on top of each other.
Be patient. Don't interrupt yourself or critique ideas as you think of them. You can judge them later.

Use guiding questions. For instance, "How might we…"

Connect relatable role models with our young professional women readers?
Give them useful strategies for managing up?
Address the biases women may face in the workplace?

4. Prototype: Create

Now you're ready to start building. Choose your best idea and build as many prototype solutions as you can. Prototypes can be things like:

Post-it notes
Role playing
Storyboards
Objects

Use any prototype you like, as long as it's something you can show to test users to judge their reactions. For our blog, we might:

Create a video interview with female executives and transcribe it for the blog.

Go to a conference on women in leadership and post notes on conversations we have there.

Present data that shows how progressive companies have tried to address the problem and what can be implemented at smaller companies.

Hold a Google Hangout and invite readers to join in and talk with a guest speaker.

5. Test: Experiment, refine

Now you're ready to take things back to your target users again. Show them your prototypes and once again observe, empathize, and immerse yourself in their experience. Ask for feedback. Listen. Then use what you hear to refine the prototype. Refine and repeat as necessary.

You'll need patience for this creative problem-solving approach. But when you're done, your ideas will be stronger because they grow from the needs of your users. The more you get to know your audience, the better you can anticipate their needs and adjust your content strategy to engage them in the future.

We hope you find this new thinking useful whenever you design something new. Let us know what you think about the human-centered design in the comments below.

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Posted by Michael Le

Strategic Partnership Manager

googblogs.com

All Google blogs and Press in one site

Tag Archives: Content strategy