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Social Media Marketing Do’s and Don’ts

With the rise of social networks, it is no surprise that spending on social media marketing has continued to grow every year. Social media marketing is an aspect of digital marketing that has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years. More business entities are waking up to the benefits of having a strong presence in the circles where more than 70% of the world’s internet users are present most of the time.

As per the statistics, in the period between 2016 and 2020, the spending jumped by nearly 100%. Social media allows brands to create stronger relationships with their target audience, ensure better customer service, and increase brand-consumer engagement. It is also one of the best platforms to use when you need to spread the word about new products and services or promotions and more.

Do you want to get started with your social media marketing? You need to know what is right and what isn’t for achieving the best results as we get them covered in this article.

Do’s in Social Media Marketing

Finding the Relevant Networks

There are many social media platforms in the world today. However, you don’t need to maintain a presence on all of them. Find platforms that are relevant to your business and focus on them. A strong presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is usually a good idea for most businesses. If you are in the B2B model, however, you can skip Instagram for LinkedIn. Additionally, maintaining only two to three social media profiles ensures you won’t overstretch yourself in the course of managing your profiles. If the quality or consistency of your content changes, your target audience will notice.

Use Content that Works on the Platform

Facebook is the one social media platform where most types of content can work. For others, however, you need to use content that works. On Twitter, for example, you can only share short texts. Even when you want to create a Twitter thread, the content has to be broken up into short texts. If you have a LinkedIn profile, deeper storytelling works. Similarly, Instagram users only ever want to see images and short videos.

Plan well in advance before posting

Your business social media profiles should never look like an in-the-making project. Fill out all the necessary details and make sure there is regular activity on your accounts at all times. Your social media names, handles, cover photos, and profile pictures should also reflect your brand. This will help you to attract more engagement while maintaining ingenuity and credibility.

Stay Consistent to Your Brand Message

Your business social media profile is an extension of your brand. You need to ensure consistency in your branding at all levels. From the tone of your content to the type of content you share, there has to be connectivity; otherwise, you will confuse your audience at best, or alienate them in worst-case scenarios or even end up reaching the wrong audience.

And most importantly you need to keep all personal content or opinions away from your business social media page. That’s why you have a personal page. Mixing things up is a problem which is a common case with many beginners.

Create New Relationships

The world of social media is endless. This can be put to good use by actively establishing new relationships while maintaining existing ones. One of the best ways to achieve this is to watch out for mentions of your brand and responding to them.

More than 90% of people that discuss a brand on social media do not follow these brand’s profiles. You need to actively seek out your customers and prospects and engage them. You can use social listening tools to find all relevant mentions of your business.

If your brand is not quite as popular yet, you can use social listening tools to find people with problems that you can solve and offer to help them solve it. Social media is a two-way street, and regular interaction with your audience ensures you are doing your bit and getting noticed at the same time.

Entertain and Inform

If your social media posts are entertaining and informing you stand a better chance of success with your social media marketing campaigns. Social media users are less receptive to overly seller content. This is why only 10% of your posts should be about sales.

Use Visuals as Much as Possible

Even outside Instagram, social media users love to see pictures and videos. On Twitter, known for quick conversations, Tweets with images get 150% more retweets, 89% more likes and earn 18% more clicks.

Even if your business is not visual-heavy, creating as much visual content as possible for your social media platforms is a sure way to ramp up the engagements.

Give Credit to Content Owners

Sharing content from thought-leaders relevant to your niche is one way to generate content for your social media profile. However, it is important to give credit to the owners. Never pass off content as yours or your brand’s reputation will be damaged in the inevitable back and forth that will ensue when you are called out.

Stay Positive

Social media users support the brands which diffuse hairy situations calmly. For example, 45% of people will speak positively about a brand if their complaints are addressed. By not responding to aggression with even more aggression, you will quietly build up a loyal following while increasing the popularity of your brand.

When you don’t have negative issues to defuse, seek out positive comments about your brand and amplify them. If you can’t find any on the social media platform, share reviews from your email or website.

Use Automation

In the early days of your business, you may get away with manually handling your social media process. As your audience grows, however, you’ll need to automate elements like publishing new posts, finding new brand mentions and more. Fortunately, there are lots of social media marketing tools on the web to choose from when you are ready!

 

Don’ts in Social Media Marketing

Poor Language Skills

If you create content with lots of poor grammatical errors and spelling you are harming the credibility of your brand. If you don’t trust your language skills its better to hire an editor to proofread your content before they go public.

Similarly, avoid habits that are generally frowned at on social media such as posting in CAPITAL letters or using profanities.

Begging for Likes, Followers, Retweets, etc.

This is a low-quality strategy that is popular among small business owners. If you project your brand as needy, it calls into question your professionalism. You can organically earn followers or shares by offering value and staying authentic. If you need to generate some traction over a short period, you can consider using techniques such as organizing competitions or giveaways with interesting prizes to be won in the end.

Spamming

If you join social media groups with the sole aim of posting promotional content about your business, this is spamming. It will earn you a block in many cases and will paint your brand in a negative light. In the same vein, targeting followers that are not your ideal audience just for the sake of growing your audience is counter-productive as you will end up with thousands of followers that won’t care about your content.

Oversharing

For a business social media profile, you need to work out the right number of times to post content each day. If you share a lot of content, your followers will gradually begin to mentally tune-off your content. If you share too little, you may be forgotten. Balance is important. You can aim for 5-7 tweets per day and 1-2 posts on Instagram and Facebook. If your business is such that frequent updates are part and parcel of your mode of operation, then this doesn’t apply. Your audience will expect regular content naturally.

Hashtag Wars

This is a behavior that is common on Instagram. Hashtags are useful to make posts discoverable. When you turn every post into a hashtag soup, however, you are ruining the user experience for your audience as they will find it difficult to read your content. This approach also means you are wasting hashtag real estate that could have gone to keywords that will make your brand more discoverable.

A good tip for posting hashtags on Instagram is to put them well away from your captions, or in the first comment position. The post will still come up in relevant searches.

Deceit

More than 60% of cases of customer-brand disputes on social media is a result of dishonesty on the part of the brand. Don’t lie about your products and services. You will be found out sooner or later and you may never recover from the impact of the confrontation. Many people that tried this have had to close down their social media profiles and websites to start all over again.

Sharing Content without Due Diligence

Before sharing that bit of statistics with your followers better find out if it is true. Social media today, is awash with fake news, propaganda and intentional misinformation. You don’t want to be caught as a brand that cannot distinguish between real and fake content. Always verify the authenticity of any claims.

Being overconfident

If you are a genius that knows everything, keep it to your personal social profiles. Arrogance, condescension, and underhanded-compliments do not have any place on your business social media profiles.

In a nutshell

Social media platforms offer marketers the opportunity to connect with existing customers while cultivating new relationships with prospects. However, you need to do things correctly. The social media community is highly perceptive and will not hesitate to block or black-list your brand if you dabble into bad practices. Stay authentic and use social media as another platform that can drive you closer to your objectives.

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Web Design Company Vs Freelancer: Which One is Better?

If we want a website for our business then first we think about how we choose the right option for us. We don’t like to waste lots of time on this. so we hire a web design company or freelance web designers. Which one is better?

Every company needs a website. The website is an asset to a company. It is the hallmark of a business. Companies spend lots of time and money on it. So before taking a decision you have to think twice. Must consider the pros and cons of both of them. Anyway, a freelancer has certain skill sets.

Let us discuss the pros and cons of freelance web designers and web designing companies.

Freelance Web Designer

Who is a freelance web designer? Maybe he is working in Webdesign and development company and doing freelance work when he gets time otherwise he may be a full-time freelance worker. The main advantage of hiring a freelance web designer is they are cheaper than reputed web designing company. Freelancers work for themselves so you can pretty much contact them with questions at any hour of any day and you’ll likely get a response within an hour. You are always getting top-notch customer service. Freelancer is a one-person firm so you don’t need to explain your website ideas again and again. A freelancer usually works whenever required. The flexibility of a schedule is the main advantage if a client and a developer are situated in different time zones.

There are also lots of disadvantages. The main con of a freelancer is risk is high. A freelancer is a single person, if his workload is huge then he might escape at any time. You never know when he decided to quit from your project. Freelancers may have problems with tike management and organization. So handling them is pretty peculiar and risky. Freelancers are only interested in their own profit and success, not yours.

A freelancer is a single person so he has some limitations. website development is not a single process. It’s more complicated than you think. This process consists of several stages of web design, web development, scripting, content creation, search engine optimization and more. After all, when a person is doing all things alone, the quality of the final product may not be as good as you think. Most of them are not provides any future support. If any support you want in the future they did not provide that without paying. Nowadays the market is full of freelancers. Pick from them a professional freelancer is highly difficult.

Webdesign and Development Company

A web development company gives you a whole team of highly skilled professionals in different fields. They provide teamwork. Companies are providing a full cycle of high-quality services over the long term. From the consulting to the technical support of the project you can rely on your partner in everything. Most of the companies give you full time and future support. If anything you needed in the future they provide it without any hesitation.

We can trust them completely. Reputed Pvt Ltd companies as a legal business entity. They are ready to provide you with the list of documents you would want to take a look at to make sure they are reliable partners.

The main disadvantage of them is their cost. But the service they offer is not worth that price.

Conclusion

whatever else we discuss its needs to be concluded. There is a no doubt freelancer is an expert one but they are their own limitations. Web development company would be the best choice when it is about the development of the website.

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Google Bert: Understanding Natural Language

After the Rank Brain, Google’s biggest changes happen now. This Bert algorithm shakes the internet world.

What is Bert? “BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It is Google’s neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training.”

According to Google, they said: “These improvements are oriented around improving language understanding, particularly for more natural language/conversational queries, as BERT is able to help Search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results.

Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.

Bert algorithm understands natural language better than ever. Google Bert rolled out on 24th October 2019. Now it’s rolling out for the English language, in future it will expand to other languages. Like a human, Bert also understands human language. Bert can understand the nuances and context of words so it provides a better search result.

Previously, Google can’t understand the actual meaning of prepositions. The relationship to the other words in query is important for understanding the meaning. Otherwise, they can’t provide an accurate result. This was the main demerit of all Google algorithms but now it overcomes. Bert can understand natural language.

For example: ” can you get medicine for someone pharmacy “

In this query, client intention is to find out whether any family member of a patient can pick up a prescription on their behalf.

Google Bert

Previously Google can’t understand the correct meaning of the query but now they provide better results. Bert helps Google to process each word in the query and then it provides the most accurate result based on the query. After the Bert update, Google is better able to understand natural language.

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Webdesign 2020: New trends for passionate web designers

How to get the user’s attention on our website? What’s the secret behinds it? Did you ever think about it?

Webdesign trends changing rapidly. If we don’t change with new trends we can’t stand in this competitive world. Experienced and passionate web designers keeping on their research for best web design topics, and finding new trends in the tech world. Let us know the updated web design trends and tactics that hit in 2020.

Most incredible web design trends in 2020

Responsive Webdesign

This is one of the evergreen web design trends. Past few years we discussed the same topic, still, now there is no change in this everlasting technique. Responsiveness is the beauty and soul of the website. If the website is not responsive then its credibility will be lost in the first look. This is the most popular web design topic that is widely discussed in the tech world. Responsive Web design is the ability to adjust a website to any device. Webdesign and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform, and orientation.

A responsive website should adjust in any device may it be a desktop or a laptop or an iPod or a tablet or mobile screen. In this 5G era with the increased availability of Wi-Fii even in the rural areas so it has become a common feature.

Minimalism

Another trendy thing is minimalism, less is the art. It is a popular and widely used modern design approach. In simple words, minimalism means designing the interface by removing unnecessary elements. Minimalism is going to stay trendy for a while. Some benefits of a minimalistic website are it easy to make responsive, minimalist websites load faster, they allow users to concentrate all their attention on the product or service you sell, it makes navigation intuitive.

There are a few key practices that can help you create stunning minimalist websites and applications.

-Use whitespace, or negative space it improves the user experience and adds balance to a design

-Implementing bright colors are certainly funny. But too much color and background kill the beauty of a website. So use it well.

-Avoid complex animations, sharp transitions between content blocks and funky fonts.

Parallax Scrolling

The parallax scrolling effect is more popular among the website owners and designers. In this modern web design trend where the background content is moved at a different speed than the foreground content while scrolling. This parallax scrolling method provides a visual treat for users when used minimally and its irritate when used maximum.

Infinite Scrolling

Facebook or Twitter feeds are the main examples of infinite scrolling. Infinite scrolling is a web-design technique that updated content and keeps on loading continuously while the user scrolls down the page. It eliminating the need for pagination. This may be helpful for an e-commerce site but it’s not good for an informative website.

Typography

Font management is a very important topic for the entire success of a website. Typography gives the life of letters. It makes the written language more legible and readable. Some fonts are cool and clean like “Raleway” they inspire people to read.

Ultra-modern black mode

One of the most requested themes over the past few years is the dark theme. Even Apple and Google made a black theme is an essential part of their UI. Still, now many web designers are fear to adapt these black themes they think it’s not good for a website. But actually it is not so. Dark colors give a very creative, elegant, professional and stunning look.

3D elements

Minimal use of 3D elements makes the website more attractive and memorable.3D effect is the inevitable part of web design in modern days. It creates a feeling of depth on the website. This year we will be seeing many 3D web designs static, animated and interactive. Web designers love to use interactive 3D effects also visitors are like to stay more time on the website.

Bytelabz Software Solutions is a web design and development company in Trivandrum, Kerala offering all kinds of web design and web development solutions. We are also an SEO agency based in Trivandrum, Kerala offering all kinds of SEO and digital marketing solutions to our clients. For more details, you can visit our website or contact us.

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Top 10 Blogging Sites For 2020

A lot of people especially writing enthusiasts prefer to write a blog these days instead of keeping a notebook. It’s easy, convenient and is not limited to your study table.

You can easily practice your writing, correct, rewrite or publish them whenever you want, create followers, establish your brand or use blogging as a marketing tool to increase website traffic. It’s also a great way to connect with like-minded people.

But, you need to know how to choose the site for building your blog.

There’s a wide choice of blogging platforms. The more choices we have, the harder it becomes to find the right one.

Before choosing the right blogging platform for yourself, you need to know about what to look for in a blogging platform. Hence, it will then become easier for you to find out which one is best suited for your requirements.

Tips For finding the best blogging platform

For making a decision, it is better to know what you are searching for. Below mentioned are some criteria to judge a blogging platform:

  Starter friendly:– To start you need a blogging solution that is easy to set up, manage and not so highly codified. They should also be able to find support when you run into trouble.   Budget:– It’s important that your blogging platform of choice fits within your budget and worth what you also get for. Almost every blog platform has a free option or a free trial period hence it becomes important that a free offer is worth nothing if it doesn’t do what you need.   Features and Flexibility:– In-built features like social media plug-ins or compatibility with third-party apps can be handy ones which could enhance the popularity of your blog. You might also want to modify or overhaul the design, add features, or make other drastic changes as over time your requirements for your site will change. A good blogging platform should be compatible with that.   Consistency:–It should take care of most of the activities and features for you instead of you having to do everything by hand. If not then it will become an ordeal for you to maintain your blog.   Monetization benefits:– Most people start a blog or website to earn money with it. If that is your objective as well, you better choose a platform that enables you to do that in a way that works for you.   The scoring of the factors above will be different depending on your goals and requirements.  

Here is a comparison of some of the best blogging platforms out in the market.

Best Blog Sites in 2020

1. WordPress.org

The self-hosting version of WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world among all the best blog sites. Its influence and penetration is around 30 percent of the entire market.

 

Pros:-

It consists of thousands of mobile compatible themes that allow you to switch the design of your blog as per your requirements. WordPress gives you full control over every function of your site. The WordPress directory has over 50,000 plugins which can be used to add various functionalities and extensions to the site. The platform is highly responsive, search engine friendly and well-aligned with social media. It provides full ownership of your content. Its large community and customer care gives lots of support options.  

Cons:-

In spite of being beginner-friendly, running your WordPress website does require some technical knowledge. You are responsible for site maintenance including backups, security, and performance. However, you can use outsourcing option to WordPress hosting providers.  

Pricing:-

WordPress is an open-source solution which means it’s free to use although self-hosted variety requires you to find a hosting provider. You also need a domain. This can cost you around 40-50$ per year.

Also, you might end up spending money on many plugins and themes that add more flexibility to your blog.

 

It is suitable for:-

Freelancers Professional bloggers Business blogs E-commerce websites Online businesses

2. Wix.com

Wix allows you to put together your web presence via drag and drop and comes with blogging ability that you can add to your site.

   

Pros:-

Quick and easy setup, includes top-level hosting. Easy to customize the template. You can achieve everything using the graphical interface without knowing any coding skills. Variety of design options. Every design built with HTML5. Has an AI feature to automatically design your blog. Lots of free stock images.   Cons:- Not allowed to change your site template after choosing it. A free account has some limitations. The number of free apps is limited. It doesn’t fully support e-commerce, even on paid plans. The service charges for many things so costs are high. Not allowed to move your site elsewhere and take your content with you.  

Pricing:-

Wix offers different subscription-based packages. Their plans start at $5 monthly for 1GB bandwidth and 500MB storage with the ability to connect to a custom domain which you need to purchase on your own.

Higher plans add more bandwidth and storage, free domains, apps with the ability to create an online store and remove the ads. The highest plan of $25/month also comes with VIP support.

 

Perfect for:-

People who are new to website development Creative artists Businessmen who need a blog with a website

3. Joomla.com

It is another open-source content management system that you can use to build all kinds of websites.

   

Pros:-

Lots of extensions are available. Powerful and flexible blog platform. It is suitable for a website more than a blog. Different kinds of professional website templates are available.  

Cons:-

Basic knowledge of HTML and CSS is necessary. Highly technical processes. The responsibility for security, backups, and performance is on you along with the option to avail Joomla managed hosting.  

Pricing:-

Joomla is free to download and costs only incur for hosting and a domain.

 

Suitable for:-

Business websites Online stores IT professionals Technical personnel  

4. WordPress.com

The most commonly used blog or website platform is wordpress.com. Free version of it is available with basic features. For advanced features, we need to pay.

   

Pros:-

Easy to set up – just create an account and follow the installation wizard Hosting is automated here. Site maintenance is comparatively easy. For paid plans, we can get professional and dedicated support.   Cons:- Free account has less features. The site domain name is a subdomain of WordPress in the free version. It is possible to lose your site if you violate the terms and services of the platform.  

Pricing:-

Paid plans cost between $4 and $25 per month (billed annually). Each tier increases the amount of storage space, features (including monetization options) and support.

With the Business plan, you can install external plugins and themes and connect your site to Google Analytics.

 

Perfect for:-

Hobby bloggers Presentational websites  

5. Medium.com

Medium is a popular blog posting platform. Medium is a favorite publishing platform among writers, bloggers, and journalists.

Medium is not only a blog posting platform but also it has some limited features of social media sites. We can comment and like our competitor’s blogs.

   

Pros:-

For blog posting just need a signup. The user interface and writing experience are awesome. Content is more important than the design structure. content embed from other services is available ( like Twitter, Tumblr, etc).  

Cons:-

All blogs look like the same, we can’t customize designs. Very limited marketing features. No way to transfer your audience from Medium to any other platform. Monetization options are absent. Medium has control over your content.  

Pricing:-

This blogging platform is absolutely free.

 

Perfect for:-

Writers Hobby bloggers Content Markers  

6. Ghost.org

This is a publishing platform focused only on blogging. The idea was to make a more streamlined and modern version of WordPress.

As a consequence, the platform is built on JavaScript. It’s also available for a hosted or self-hosted version.

   

Pros:- Focus on writing and blogging.

Clean, intuitive, streamlined user interface.

Live preview of blog posts.

High speed because it is built on JavaScript.

The hosted version requires no setup.

SEO and social media capabilities are built-in.

Integrated function for Accelerated Mobile Pages

 

Cons:- Not easy to customize.

Limited configuration and customization options.

The number of themes is narrow.

The ghost’s self-hosted version is complicated to set up.

 

Pricing:-

The price for the hosted version depends on the number of websites and the amount of traffic. For $29/month you get one blog and 50,000 monthly page views. This also includes SSL encryption.

The most expensive plan is $249/month ($199/month paid annually). The ghost has prioritized support, uptime guarantee, and other premium features. All plans come with a custom domain.

For the self-hosted version, you need to pay the usual hosting plus the domain registration.

 

Perfect for:-

Bloggers who are happy to experiment with the newest technical solutions

7. Squarespace.com

Squarespace is a drag-and-drop website builder which is aimed at small business owners. It’s a great all-in-one solution for non-technical people and offers hosting, domain registration, and the possibility for e-commerce.

It also has blogging capabilities which are the reason why it’s among the best blog sites out there.

 

 

Pros:-

Simple to use and beginner-friendly.

Professional design templates are available.

SSL encryption is built into the platform.

Ability to build an online store.

Free trial to test-drive the platform.

Includes hosting and a custom domain.

24/7 customer support.

 

Cons:-

Users are limited to the features that Squarespace offers.

Integrates only with a few third-party services and tools.

A personal plan is limited to 20 pages and two contributors.

Slightly overpowered if all you want is a blog.

 

Pricing:-

Squarespace is subscription-based. It comes with only two plans: Personal and Business. One is $16/month and the other $26/month. You get a discount and a free custom domain if you pay annually.

Both plans come with unlimited pages, bandwidth, and storage. The Business plan also has e-commerce, marketing features, and allows you to customize your design through CSS and JavaScript. You can use your domain name, which comes with extra costs. There is a 14-day free trial to test the waters.

 

Perfect for:-

Business owners Portfolio websites E-commerce

 

8. Weebly.com

Weebly is another site builder with a modular approach and a web-based interface. Pick a template and position your content as blocks in different areas.

 

 

Pros:-

Easy to use – everything is operated via drag-and-drop.

Comes with decent mobile apps to run your site on the go.

You can try out the service before committing financially.

Has a good reputation in terms of SEO, even integrates with Google Analytics.

 

Cons:-

Limited integrated features and no possibility to add more.

The free plan only comes with 500MB of storage, Weebly branding, and a subdomain

Integrates with only a few third-party platforms.

Exporting your site is difficult.

 

Pricing:-

You can start with a free account. After that, $5/month gets you a custom domain. For advanced features like site stats, video backgrounds, or membership options, you need to go for one of the higher plans.

Those come in at $12-$25/month. Weebly also has separate plans for online stores that are slightly more pricey. All plans are paid annually.

 

Perfect for:-

Business owners who need blogging capability.

Online portfolios.

Bloggers without technical knowledge.

 

9. Blogger.com

This free blog hosting service has been around for a long time. It was founded in 1999 and acquired by Google in 2003. As a consequence, you can sign up easily with your existing Google account.

 

 

Pros:- Free to use and the set up only takes minutes.

Hosting, maintenance, and other technicalities are taken care of.

Integrates well with other Google apps (e.g., you can store your images on Google Drive).

Has a mobile app version with which you can manage your blog while on the move.

Mobile-optimized templates.

Comes with tracking and anti-comment spam measures.

 

Cons:-

Limited to basic blogging tools and there is no way to add additional features.

Design options are few.

Updates or new features are scarce.

Blogger displays advertisements on your blog.

 

Pricing:-

Blogger is completely free. The only cost you might incur is if you want to use a custom domain. In that case, you have to acquire and pay for it yourself.

 

Perfect for:-

Hobby bloggers and personal blogging

 

10. Tumblr.com

The final entry for the best blog sites is Tumblr. The service is a micro-blogging platform optimized for short-form content.

It also has a community behind it and social network features. Think of it as a middle ground between WordPress and Twitter.

 

Pros:-

Free and very easy to set up and use.

Hosting is included (your blog is located on a tumblr.com subdomain).

Has integrated social features such as following, re-blogging and sharing.

Easy to publish multimedia e.g. videos, GIFs, images, and audio.

Many design opportunities and they are easy to change.

 

Cons:-

Limited features and no way to extend them.

It’s difficult to back up your Tumblr content and use it on other platforms.

 

Pricing:-

The platform is free to use. Optional costs are for a custom domain (which you can map to your Tumblr account) and third-party themes and apps.

 

Perfect for:-

Hobby bloggers Personal blogging Micro-blogs

 

Best Blog Sites – What’s Your Pick?

When looking for the best blogging platform, you have many platforms to consider. Each comes with its pros and cons. There are three varieties: self-hosted blogging platforms, hosted blog sites, and website builders that also have blogging capabilities.

The most suitable for you will depend on your needs, goals, choices, and preferences. Hence, if you are looking for a long term association with your blog or website then you need to study all the factors before choosing a platform or you might end up creating nothing more than a ‘content junk’ on the internet.

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How to choose the right web design company?

Finally, you’ve decided you need a new website. If you’re not already working with a web design agency, how do you choose the right firm to develop a website for your business?

You have to know the dealings of a good agency partner before choosing a web design company because, without that knowledge, you risk choosing the wrong agency and that could be a disastrous waste of time and money.

It’s important to know and understand these important basics in order to protect you and your business against that potential mistake. Without their support, you risk losing a lot of time and money in a mess of complicated contracts, red tape, and failed deadlines.

So before choosing a successful web design partner, you need to go through a basic list of 10 criteria mentioned below:

1.Your website budget

Setting a budget for your web design project is the first thing you should do before you start looking at web design agencies.

A budget can be a shoestring to unlimited funding, but you should have an amount on paper before you start pursuing agencies.

In addition to that, you should set the flexibility of your budget to make sure you can accommodate up-selling.

An agency will recommend that you buy other web design options to achieve more success even though you’ll always be willing to pay less than your budget to get what you need. While the agency has a financial incentive to do that, they’re also the experts in their field which means they know what will work for you.

Also, you should have an amount for your budget that you’ll tell your agency.

This number should be lower than your actual budget to give yourself some additional room when you’re chalking out what you want from an agency. When the percentage amount is slightly lower than average lying anywhere around 75% to 90% of your actual budget is when you can easily accommodate their suggestions without breaking the bank.

That will be a win-win situation for both which is a great way to start a successful relationship with an agency.

2.Web design agency’s pricing

After deciding your budget, you also need to research an agency’s pricing.

That can take a lot of time especially for agencies that offer different pricing plans for their services. Analyzing what you can afford and how it can improve your business is a critical portion of the partnership process, and if you don’t do your research, you could end up spending way more than you want for services that you don’t need.

However, most agencies out there don’t publish their pricing. That’s because the best agencies in the industry usually require you to contact them to get information on packages, and sometimes they won’t give you that information until you tell them you want to work out a web design strategy.

If you are someone who wants all of the information upfront, you will have a much smaller pool of potential partners than someone who can go with the flow.

Generally, agencies that publish their pricing are more dedicated to transparency and working within your set budget than agencies that keep it a secret. However, it’s still uncommon to find pricing listed online, even for the best agencies out there.

3. Hidden fees and charges

Even after you’ve asked an agency about pricing, you have one last piece of financial business on your hands.

Sometimes, an agency has a list of fees and charges that they issue, and they don’t always tell you about them.

They might be in the fine print of your contract, or they might not list fees anywhere at all. But if you partner with an agency without asking about surprise fees, you could quickly find yourself over-budget with a website that you don’t like.

With that in mind, it’s essential that you talk to your agency about their policy on fees. Do they charge for making unscheduled updates to the site? Do they bill you for extra hours that they spend working for your company every month? Can you end up spending more for an unscheduled checkup about your site?

All of those questions are good to ask, especially since there’s no “standard” stance on fees for web design agencies. It’s up to you to get the details you need for success, especially if they’re not presented upfront.

Once you have your finances in order, you can move onto the next important step of agency evaluation.

4. Check their website

The site a web design agency builds for its own company is a good indication of its design style, capabilities, and technological expertise. Do you like the site overall? Is the site responsive? Is that website is user-friendly?

If the design of their website doesn’t exactly reflect your own style then that’s not a big problem. A good web design company never copy-paste their own style. They create a new design for your brand guidelines and style aesthetic, not their own. The important thing is that the site looks up to date and is visually pleasing, highly functional, and user-friendly.

5. Check their portfolio

Every web design company will have their own portfolio section on their website. So you can easily see some examples of their previous work. Check some website they have developed. Is they are looking professional and easy to use? Do the sites seem similar in scope?

That will show you what you can expect from an agency, and it’ll also give you a list of clients to contact to find out more.

While it’s important to see examples of an agency’s work, this step also gives you the information you need to contact an agency’s clients directly and ask about their experience.

If they speak highly of the agency, you can rest assured that you’re in good hands. If they say they can’t wait to get out of their contract, then it’s critical that you look somewhere else.

This is the basic idea is to learn from companies who came before you.

Was partnering with this web design agency the best choice they’ve ever made? Or are they struggling to keep up with payments? Anyway, you’ll have got a clear picture of that web design agency, whether or not you should contact that agency.

Along with looking at an agency’s previous clients, you can also ask them about their client retention rate.

A lot of companies will hover around 60% or so, and anything below that indicates that there’s something sketchy going on with the agency itself.

The agencies that have the best client retention will typically be your best bets for partnerships. After all, a website isn’t just something that you throw together — it takes time, strategizing, and execution to make everything come together.

If that web design agency doesn’t have a good client retention rate, then they’re missing some important things, and that means they won’t give you the results that you expect.

But when you find an agency with a high client retention rate — and when they publish it online for everyone to see — you can be sure you’ve found a quality agency.

6. Accountability

Pay attention to how they handle the call—are they accessible and friendly? Do they ask questions about your company and the details of the project, or do they immediately launch into a hard sell? This is a company you will be working with for months, so chemistry is important. answers the phone might not be the one you end up dealing with the most (or at all) once you have signed on as a client, that person still reflects the overall personality of the company, so be sure it feels like a good fit.

When you work with an agency, you don’t want them to say that they’re responsible as a whole for your success. That mentality reflects an undefined, loose, and undisciplined culture that can let you downtime and time again.

Instead, you want to get the name and contact information of a representative who is personally responsible for seeing that your site gets the attention it needs to succeed. You should have one point of contact that can answer your questions, update you regularly on your progress, and discuss alterations to your current strategy whenever required.

Without that contact, the agency can pass blame among its employees and make excuse after excuse for why you’re not achieving your goals.

But when you have a single person who’s accountable for your satisfaction, there’s no doubt about the responsible person whose name is right there on your phone.

7. Other customer support

Even for agencies that give you a dedicated point of contact, that person may not always be available 100% of the time.

After all, they’re human, and sometimes they get sick, take vacations, or have to take care of their personal lives.

So if your point of contact isn’t available, you need a person or a team who can give you the support you need, especially if your representative is gone for an extended amount of time.

Whether that’s the department head, your contact’s coworker, or someone who looks after clients for people out of the office, you need to know so you can continually keep the agency accountable for your progress.

In addition, you also need information on an agency’s customer support policy.

If something goes wrong with your site, you need to be able to contact them to fix the error. Can you call whenever you want? Or do you have to wait for certain hours? Either way, you need to know.

8. Updating the website

Sometimes, a web design agency will set you up with the tools you need to make direct changes to your website with a content management system (or CMS).

However, sometimes they keep everything in-house so they can better keep an eye on your updates.

Regardless of which policy your agency has, it’s important that you know about it so you can understand how you’ll work together.

If you can make changes to your site directly, that’s great! And if you don’t want to deal with the site at all, you can entrust the agency to do it all for you.

Ultimately, this depends on the kind of project manager you like to be. If you’re hands-on, ask for a way to make changes to the site yourself.

And if you have other things to do, ask the agency to take care of it for you. You win either way!

A full-service web design agency should include a basic training session for your team to explain how things work and show how to make changes and updates. Have a list of things you think you’ll need to update fairly frequently (events, forms, page content, etc.) and ask which of these things will be editable in the content management system. For changes that require programming or design help, the company should provide a quote for the amount of time the change will take, and a rate for the work

9. Relocating your site

In some cases, a web design agency may not work with your existing hosting service.

Instead, they may host it themselves or switch services to another company that they’ve contracted as an exclusive provider.

In the event that they’re going to move your site to another host, you need to know.

You don’t want to try and check out your website one day only to find out that it’s hosted somewhere else under a different username and password. When you’re that out of the loop, an agency can do anything they want to your site without your supervision — and that can be a recipe for disaster.

On top of having free reign over your site, moving your hosting service can also affect your website’s loading speed and accessibility. If you operate in Maine and your web design agency relocates your servers to Guam, that’s almost an 8000-mile difference.

While this is an extreme example, it’s critical that you know where an agency will host your website.

If the servers are on the other side of the world from your primary demographic, then your demographic won’t be able to access your website as quickly as your competitors’ websites.

If your website moves, make sure you know where it’s going.

10. Meeting the deadlines

Last, after you’ve gone through all of the previous steps, you need to set concrete, achievable criteria with deadlines.

This kind of scheduling and outlining gives you a way to track the progress of your web design agency.

If your partner is ahead of schedule, then you know you chose a good partner. And if they’re lagging behind, you might want to consider talking to another agency.

Steps like defining whether or not your website will be accessible on mobile platforms, how many visitors you want to support at any time when your site will launch, a regular maintenance schedule, and more.

As a rule of thumb, you’ll be more successful when you’re more specific about what you want to achieve. Setting general goals gives your agency a wiggle room, which gives them the opportunity to miss the mark.

Final Selection

A lot of effort goes into building a website, but just as much effort goes into optimizing it, promoting it, measuring its performance, and making improvements. Unless you have an in-house digital marketing team ready to take over every aspect of digital marketing once your new website is complete, look for a web design firm that also specializes in digital marketing, so you can be sure that the new website is delivering the results you want. Ideally, the selected agency’s team would be available to you should you wish to deepen your engagement with ongoing digital marketing or periodic enhancements or refreshes.

And if you think of other questions you want to ask, always ask them — a good web design agency will never turn away your questions or give you vague answers.

To find the best fit for your needs, and make sure they’ll work with you through all of the questions and concerns you have.

With all of this information at your disposal, you can now make a good choice for a web design partner for your business.

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Why choose to advertise on Facebook?

The very existence of Social media came into being with the popularity of a website and app which we know as Facebook. Since then social media has forayed deep into our lives with countless apps and websites playing a major role in our daily lives. The time spent on the smartphone by an average human is increasing with their penetration into our lifestyle. Here the role of social media in digital marketing becomes a dominant factor in influencing consumer behavior.

With its growing influence over the years, Facebook is undoubtedly the king of the social media channel. In recent years it is estimated to have more than 1 billion users across the globe with 2.4 million active users just in India! With proper targeting and approach, you can easily reach your target audiences.

To obtain the same crowd, there is little sense paying more on radio advertising, TV advertising, posters or other traditional marketing methods. You have to do business, and you need to reach them in proper hands! The power of marketing through Facebook is high. Facebook ads profit from being one of the cheapest types of ads. One can spend 5 dollars and achieve around a thousand visits on an average to your page or website.

Audience: As explained above one can utilize millions of audiences out there who are active on Facebook. Since it’s a vast market to build the business and that grows the leads and business. So all you have to do is to focus on such people.

Facebook Opportunity: Facebook gives a laser target which means that you can target those people, who are being fit into this field.

You don’t have to be the next multinational or a conglomerate to start an ad on this field. You can begin ads with a very modest amount so you don’t have to pay significant amounts for ads to reach your audience! Facebook is an excellent social media application to achieve targets.

Re-Marketing: Once your ad starts running you can use Facebook search analytics to understand the response and scan your responsive audience. Showing such ads to the people who are already connected with you is re-marketing.

Facebook for business marketing

Social Media Marketing

Focus yourself on generating leads through Facebook. It can be a leader through email, basic information or phone number. Personally, it can be a leader through email. Once connected you can re-market them as explained above. That is how interesting connections are converted into regular customers or users.

Generate sales through Facebook. You have to target the right audience. Find the correct leads and convert them to sales. Use your customer to get some lookalike audience, so that you can increase the sales.

Warm your audience! Some people are in the state of cold that they don’t try to buy any products. You can warm such customers through appealing ads or exclusive offers to make them buy the products.

Re-marketing is very important. You can easily re-market with the activities you have like turning on the website, Facebook, Instagram, etc. By doing the re-marketing, you can quickly get more and more leads.

You can be able to build a custom audience or a lookalike based on it that makes the business to get more reach.

Power of Re-Marketing

The customer needs to watch the advertisement almost seven times to make any placement!

If the customer sees your ads, the chance of branding and reach should be high. After you search a product on a site you can find the same or related ads on your Facebook page also. That is how Facebook gets access to your Google Chrome search and vice versa. Even if you close that page and while you open the facebook you can still see the ads coming up. You get influenced by buying that product while you see them frequently.

Follow with your people, based on their hobbies and areas of interest and brand them properly so that once they close the site it should get visible on their following pages.

The cold audience must be warmed up and polished to buy the product. Take all the audience who visited your site and show them the ad on facebook. You are warming the cold audience based on the parameters when they visited your blog. In their minds, they may be looking for a digital marketing course or digital marketing institute or Digital Marketing Career, etc. and that is why they were searching for it. Hence you need to discuss their needs and warm them accordingly.

Segment list based on people who genuinely get interested in your product and start showing ads on the customized base. Boost the permanent audience to buy the products.

Cost should be less compared to other things for re-marketing. We can put them in the form of a tunnel. 1. Top one: Cold audience were we put more budgets 60-70% 2. Middle funnel: Warm audience were we set budgets of 20-30% 3. Bottom Funnel: Conversion; Business happens

To Whom You Can Market?

The people who are in your mail list, website visitors, any ad liked audience, any person who wanted, shared or subscribed. So tracking such customers accurately to make business leads is possible.

Although marketing on social media platforms is comparatively easier and cost-effective than traditional channels, it should not be considered a child’s play. Most people and enterprises make the mistake of casually executing Facebook ads without the help of a digital marketing professional. You need to do proper in-depth analysis and research your customer base and their buying patterns and behavior in order to get the desired results. You need to follow the steps described above else your campaign will look like just another ad cropping up on the social media pages of your potential customers and soon you will drain out your digital marketing budget without getting any desired results. A final word of advice- Campaign wisely to earn well!

Find here some tips for social media marketing.

Are you searching for a facebook marketing partner for your business?? we will help you with your business growth. Bytelabz Software solution is a prominent web design and web development company in Trivandrum. We also offering all types of online marketing solutions for your business to take the next level. Our services include SEO, SMM, SEM, PPC, Email Marketing, Content Marketing, etc. We are no.1 website design company offering all kinds of web design services at affordable prices to our clients worldwide. For further information, please contact us today.

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Difference Between Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning

Artificial Intelligence is the most talked-about innovation of the 21st century and later, it’s been everywhere, in every talk shows, in the news, in the programs of the top universities, schools or companies. But how many of us really know Artificial Intelligence?

For common people, Artificial Intelligence is “the car that drives itself” like Google cars or Uber cars or the auto-completion in the “smart”-phones or the automatic “real-time” or more commonly real-time translation from one language to another language by the same “smart”-phones.

You can find that most IT professionals and students will associate Artificial Intelligence with Machine Learning which includes Neural Network, Bayesian logic, Support Vector Machines, etc.

Only specialists can rightly define and understand the scale of what is called Artificial Intelligence.

The Non-Human Intelligence

The Non Human Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is also called non-human intelligence. We need to go deep into non-technical and philosophical concepts in order to understand it correctly.

Artificial Intelligence supposes that we can define two notions: Humanity and Intelligence. Actually they can be linked one to each other as we hardly believe there could be other intelligence than ours.

Given the example of nature and how we know animals, plants and insects, we can conclude that there do exist other forms of intelligence that are not human.

The intelligence of animals usually and their capacity to organize themselves and their abilities different from humans give us another insight into the role played by intelligence in various life forms.

Although we regard the intelligence of such groups of animals, plants or insects as inferior and even largely inferior to our human intelligence, this does not change the fact that we have everywhere on our planet numerous proofs of Artificial intelligence.

As for the definition of human intelligence, we are unable to give a precise definition of what it is because we are unable to give a precise definition of “what we are”. Since the beginning of our existence as humans – Homo Sapiens – more than 200,000 years ago, we have searched for answers everywhere, developed arts, build science and technology over the years and the civilizations.

Human intelligence is linked to the nature of our brains and of our evolution of which we know factually but in a certain limitation. Our modern civilization has reached a point of technology where we are able to build intelligent machines and while they still are our creation, the intelligent machines may as well demonstrate Artificial Intelligence.

Evolution of  Artificial Intelligences

Automats

In the past, long before modern civilization, men used to build automats. Many complex automats were built by the genius of the ancient greeks. They were using hydraulic and mechanical mechanisms to move parts to build giant structures and in warfare technology.

While probably sophisticated the mechanism behind these automats could not have called “Artificial Intelligence”, they still were the continuation of the human mind through what was the technology of the time.

The Mechanical Dolls

In later centuries, more sophisticated automats were built. Automated dolls using clock mechanisms were massively built in Europe from the Renaissance to the 19th century.

In spite of being as close to the representation of a human as it was, they were only automats, very rigid, predictable and linear. They were inert and dead pieces of metals without life and without intelligence. It was still the “direct” product of human ability and human intelligence. Yet they could to some ways, give the impression of autonomous behavior.

The uncanny valley

When they started developed human-looking robots in the ’70s, Japanese engineers discovered the uncanny valley principle, the human disorientation and emotional response to a very lookalike automat. In fact, this is probably at the bottom of that mostly unexplored valley that human intelligence stops and that artificial intelligence appear.

Algorithms vs Artificial Intelligence

With the rise of computers and especially digital technology, applications of several mathematical principles were made possible. These mathematical principles gave birth to a class of algorithms known as the Machine Learning algorithms. Yet the automats and robots continued to inspire as the creation of human intelligence.

Anyway, as machines became incredibly more and more powerful, reaching computation speed of incredible scales, the Machine Learning algorithms started slightly to outperform humans in certain domains where it was believed that only the human mind could be the uncontested champion.

In 1997, the supercomputer Deep Blue became the first machine to beat a grand chess master (Gary Kasparov). The algorithms used were mostly brute-force based and not deep learning and as such, they hardly could be classified as Artificial Intelligence.

In fact what beat Kasparov was the superior computation capacity of the machine rather than a superior intelligence to the human mind.

In that case, it is not clear if we can speak of Artificial Intelligence or not. We mostly deal with a machine provided with very important computation capacity and relatively simple algorithms.

So where ends the algorithms, and where starts the Artificial Intelligence? The 1997 Deep Blue Machine, in fact, the combination of its hardware, its chips and algorithmic programmed with some code just proved that a team of programmers and engineers are able to build a machine to help them better play chess than a grand chess master. It is more of a man-machine association.

In fact, we haven’t seen (probably fortunately) any artificial intelligence in machines so far… they stay the sophisticated automats that men have always built, they are no longer made of bronze or steel but silicon. They do not use hydraulics or clocks to move parts but programming languages and the same as the other automats they are finite state machines.

Machines animated with artificial intelligence probably reside in that uncanny valley that we mentioned and we haven’t explored it enough to know what it could look like.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning

Machine Learning is becoming a “buzzword” nowadays while the concept has been invented a long time ago. Decision algorithms using techniques from functional analysis and statistics appeared in the ’50s.

The main ML algorithm is probably the Artificial Neural Network algorithm which can be used for deep learning where the neurons are organized in different layers to reach a better learning quality, extracting progressively information from raw input.

The core principle of machine learning, artificial neural network, vector support machines, classification, and others, is the ability to feed itself from data (information) to learn, that is to say, to become better. Not a better man, but a better machine, ML, therefore, is an “information processor” unit using mathematics and/or probability and eventually inspired by the sour of human intelligence: the neurons.

Yet while impressively they may behave, the ML algorithms are the product of human intelligence, therefore pseudo-Artificial Intelligence. But to the opposite, the combination of big data +processors + network + ML algorithm may create a “primitive” soup from which digital life may emerge – and therefore we may speak of artificial intelligence.

A machine provided with artificial intelligence would be autonomous, make its own decisions, evolve absolutely independently of humans and may eventually show consciousness. The gap between ML algorithms and AI is the same as between life and death, between an inert stone and a living animal! The key factor for this to eventually happen is complexity.

Perils of AI

Before his death, the famous physicist Stephen Hawking made this warning in “Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence: An Open Letter”:

We could one day lose control of AI systems via the rise of super-intelligences that do not act in accordance with human wishes – and that such powerful systems would threaten humanity. Are such dystopian outcomes possible? If so, how might these situations arise? …What kind of investments in research should be made to better understand and address the possibility of the rise of a dangerous super-intelligence or the occurrence of an “intelligence explosion”?”

Artificial Intelligence is non-human intelligence. The sources of such non-human intelligence can be Nature, ants for example.

It could be the possible byproduct of human activity in machines, learning machines co-operating into networks in uncontrolled ways. Actually any form of alien (non-human) civilization would appear to us as “artificial intelligence” … and if we want to enter religious considerations, we may well be the “artificial intelligence” of a god.

It may be a good time to prove, once more, that humans are not so stupid and are able to control their own creations for what they need and direct their own destiny because no matter how far we may have managed through, the odds will always favor the survival of the fittest!

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The Importance of SEO and SEM in Search Marketing

In order to understand Search Marketing and its components SEO and SEM, it is important to know the impact of this kind of marketing in the web business world.

Search Marketing- You need to understand the terminology for this type of marketing before you can create a strategic search optimization strategy.

Search marketing relates to any process that helps a brand get attention by appearing on search engine results pages (SERPs). It includes efforts to get higher rankings and increase search visibility so you can drive more traffic to a website or specific webpages.

There are two categories in search marketing:

SEM or Search Engine Marketing uses PAID strategies to increase search and traffic results for a client’s website. It is generally considered a major part of your overall digital marketing strategy. It is a digital marketing process with the goal of increasing visibility in search engines either by getting organic traffic through SEO or paid traffic through PPC (Pay per click) advertising.

Through paid search advertising you need to purchase advertising space in the search engine results. So, instead of trying to rank in one of the top positions organically through SEO and get free traffic, you pay to appear in front of the search results.

The most well-known advertising platform for paid search is Google Ads also known as Google Adwords. With the help of Google Ads, you can get your ads to appear in the Google search results and you pay only for the clicks on your ads. The whole process is called Pay-per-click or PPC. There are other search engines that have a similar system but they are not as popular and successful as Google.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization uses ORGANIC strategies to appear in search. SEO is the process of optimizing your website for the purpose of getting free traffic from search engines. It is important part of setting up a website because an optimized web site is easily understood by search engine crawlers and this increases the chances of ranking higher in SERPS (search engine results pages). In the case of SEO, website owners don’t pay for placement on SERPs. Instead, they use a variety of methods that prompt search engines to show their content near the top of SERPs because the result is valuable and well-targeted.

The components of SEO

There are 3 components of SEO: technical SEO, on-site SEO, and off-site SEO.

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. With technical SEO you ensure that search engines can crawl and index your website without any problems. The strategies for this SEO relates to site speed, mobile-friendliness, indexing, crawlability, site architecture, structured data, and security.

On-Site SEO is rules and methods you can apply on individual pages and content so that they optimized for specific keywords. The strategies included in this SEO are keyword research, content creation, and keyword optimization.

For example, you need to have optimized titles, good descriptions, well-formatted URLs, optimized headings (H1, H2), alt text for images and many more.

Off-site SEO refers to the process of getting references or backlinks from other websites for the purpose of increasing your web site’s trust in the eyes of search engines.

This may be confusing for first-timers but it could be imagined like a ranking system wherein the website that has the most references, ranks higher.

References, in this case, are links coming from other web sites to your site. That is also the reason why off-site SEO strategies are referred to as link building.

Difference between SEO and SEM

The main difference between SEM vs. SEO is that SEM is a paid strategy and SEO is an organic strategy.

SEO SEM
It does not include any references to Ads as no paid search methods are used. Includes Ad Designation or marking.
Search results are featured as snippets. Search results include Ad extensions like additional links, addresses, and contact details.
Search results are organic and nothing is paid for clicking ads. Search results and ads are paid as PPC method and the brand is charged as per the set budget.
The target audiences cannot be selected. The target audiences can be selected as per age, gender, demographics, interests, etc.
The impact takes time as traffic is generated organically. It can take months to improve search rankings of your page. The impact is immediate as your ads start showing in SERPs and you can manage the visibility using filters or changing the allocated budget.
You cannot make changes or manage results as the updates are time-consuming. It is a flexible method where you can make changes or improvise your campaign as per the performance as the search data becomes available soon as the ads are clicked. Hence its flexibility allows you to strategize your campaign successfully.
It adds value to your website overtime hence it is beneficial in the long run. The ads and campaigns stop right away once the campaign ends or your budget freezes off. Hence it’s not a long term method.
You can get a higher click-through-rate (CTR) if your SEO is strong enough to land on top of the search. In that case, it will work better than SEM. SEM ads work better than SEO if your organic ads do not land on top or on the second page or lower. In that case, SEM achieves better CTR.

So, which is better depends on your overall digital marketing goals. If you want to get traffic fast then you can start with SEM (paid search advertising) and in parallel work on your SEO. If you want to create a long-lasting online business without relying on paid traffic, then SEO is your answer.

Does SEM help SEO?

Despite what many people think, SEM does not help SEO. If you use PPC to target specific keywords and get search engine traffic, that doesn’t positively or negatively affect your SEO efforts.

SEO rankings are decided after taking into account hundreds of factors and SEM or PPC campaigns are not a part of them.

How SEO and SEM are related to each other?

There are some common points and strategies which make them similar to each other.

The goal of both SEO and SEM is that they aim to help a brand appear in prominent positions on SERPs. The goal of each tactic is to help a brand show up in search results when users search for specific terms related to the brand’s industry, business, or offerings.

The goal of both is to gain visibility on SERPs, but more importantly, to drive traffic to a website. Each strategy employs tactics to increase click-through-rates (CTR) and get more users to click on the search results.

In order to succeed in both strategies, you must have a good understanding of your audience and how they act. By using buyer behavior and psychographic analysis, you can get to know your audience, discover what their needs are, and what they are searching for. Then you can create valuable content that shows up when they go looking for solutions related to your brand.

The first step for both SEM and SEO is performing keyword research to identify the best keywords to target. The research includes looking at keyword popularity to determine the top keywords or impact keywords that your ideal audience searches for. It also includes looking at keyword competition to see what other brands are targeting the same keywords and determining what you will need to do to compete with those other companies.

While performing SEM and SEO you will find out that neither is a strategy that you can set and forget. Both require continuous testing, monitoring, and optimization to increase performance.

SEO or SEM? What tactic would you choose out of the two?

To determine what tactic out of SEO and SEM will be better for your business following points would be worth considering:

Competitor Analysis– To decide which is right for your brand, look at what your competitors are doing and how they are performing in their search marketing before you decide how you can best compete with them. Research what search terms they rank organically for. Consider if you can execute a plan to top their SERP placements. Also, look at what paid terms they are using to drive traffic to their own sites. As you perform this research, look for gaps that you can fill and areas where you will be unable to compete in both paid and organic search.

If you have been in business for a while and already know what your customers want and how to best reach them, you may want to start to build a long-term SEO strategy that will provide value over time. If you aren’t sure how customers and competitors will respond to your offerings or content, you may want to consider an SEM campaign that allows you to test your ideas, products, and services.

Customer buying cycle– If your products and services have a short customer buying cycle, meaning your customers know what they want, search for it, and buy it, you may benefit from SEM ads that put your product right where customers will see it. Longer buying cycles, where customers research and compare for weeks or months, may not perform as well with SEM, as there isn’t an immediate buy after seeing one ad.

Cost per click average– Before deciding that SEM is right for your business, research and consider how much you’ll need to spend to show in paid search results. Keywords have varying cost-per-clicks based on competition. If your cost-per-click is low, it might be the right strategy for you. On the flip side, a very high cost-per-click might make you decide you’re better off focusing on SEO.

Timeline of your business– If you just opened your business and launched your website, it’s going to take time to develop your SEO and begin to appear organically in the search. While that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put together an SEO strategy, it does mean that you could benefit from an SEM strategy until you build your SEO. SEM is an effective way to drive traffic while building organic SEO.

Website analytics research– So before you launch a search marketing campaign, research your website to see where you may have the potential to grow an organic SEO strategy that is already working before putting money into an SEM campaign.

Summary

A successful search marketing campaign requires efforts on both SEO and SEM strategies. Some businesses may choose to focus on SEO. Others may choose to focus on SEM. But most of the time, the right approach is to implement a combination of both SEO and SEM strategies. It all depends on your unique business and goals.

But now that you know the similarities and differences between SEM and SEO, you’ll be better equipped to decide how each can help your brand reach its goals.

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How Digital Marketing Budget Plan Can Help You Improve Your Business.

Do you plan to increase your digital marketing budget? Still looking for ideas to make your budget effective? Well, you are at the right place then.

Marketing and promotion are related to each other and they are necessary to make things work for your business. Print, TV, Posters or commercials are some of the traditional ways to promote products or create a market for them. But these days, all marketing and promotions are done online. The smart devices and applications that are available these days, which will help you to market your business and find what is going on around. These days many small, medium and large enterprises are implementing a number of new technologies and research methodologies to grow their businesses using digital efforts. The aim is to target where your audiences without focusing anywhere else.

Almost all marketers are planning to increase their budget every year. Reports state that more than 90% of organizations have increased their digital marketing budget over the years. However, allocating a marketing budget is not an easy task. Every organization needs to make sure that its efforts in digital marketing are maintained specifically across the brand and its goals, and not anything else.

Here are some tips to help you plan a digital marketing budget:

How do you Allocate Your Budget?

It is important to allocate your budget in the right way. Set your goals based on your ideas on which of these strategies would work and eliminate the non-working ones. The focus should be on converting lesser money into more success.

There is a need to cut out on things that do not contribute to your strategies. The decision to allocate your money to a specific strategy should be based on the value generated by it. The best example is of social media which does not cost initially for you to create an account on social media and to post on it. It requires constant analysis and research to find out the audiences of your interest that are active across social media networking sites, such as Instagram and once done then it is important to raise your social media budget.

There are unending possibilities that your social media account can bring to your campaign. A few resources invested in this medium can bring you so much of profit, then with continuous investment, think of how effective it could get. You would have to plan to invest your social media budget on the one platform or account that has a better conversion percentage of advertising cost of sale because sometimes, it happens that a particular social media network begins to underperform while another one becomes strong. Hence, in that case instead of focusing on something that doesn’t get your results plan on something that would bring you results. A lot of research goes into understanding the requirement of your audience.

How do you Define Your Goals?

Thinking about the digital marketing strategies and its implementation is the next step once you have your goals defined and laid out Software and manpower are two of the main resources that can help you accomplish your digital marketing goals. You need to plan out the resources you will need to fulfill these goals.

Think of it in terms of whether you want to allocate dedicated manpower or technology for each process and plan your budget accordingly such that you have placed them in your strategy. If you would like to dedicate staff or technology for social media marketing, plan the number of staff members you will need to handle social media.

If you want your tools to be really efficient – then you would need to spend a lot of money on it. For single-member investment would be less but as a team, it will increase.

In order to allocate a dedicated resource, it would be similar to creating a calendar and then ensuring that someone handles the posts on time. In-Depth analytics needs to be applied to make sure that your team is doing their job right while also finding out what works and what does not.

What Are My Goals?

 

A clear cut idea of your goals is required while you are planning on your digital marketing budget. Do not end up allocating budget for unnecessary things. Experimenting with something that will surely work is required instead of looking for what might work.

You need to be clear of what you want to achieve –

  • Do you want to enhance your brand’s visibility?
  • Do you want to increase the revenue?
  • Do you want to increase the engagement of your clients/customers?
  • Do you want an increase in the number of your clients/customers/followers?

Each of your business goals is important – so how and where you start is important. Make sure you implement ideas that will help you to achieve your digital marketing goals, which are directly related to your business goals. Set your aim in such a way that by the end of it, you are accomplishing and getting what you wanted. This could be either a single outcome or short-term goals, based on your business’ requirements.

Planning Your Content

It is one of the most important aspects of any digital marketing strategies. The content you require depends and varies from business to business.

Hence, based on your business, its needs and goals, it is important to decide the type of content that you create. Create articles and blog posts that are in-depth, and make sure these become an important part of the marketing goals. These should be in-sync with service-related industries and here, you would find that consumers are looking for detailed information before they arrive at a decision. Here, your budget should be allocated for writing experts who will help you to write related content.

Sometimes, rather than just text content, certain businesses might benefit from video content as well. Though content is involved, it is a different side of the content spectrum that would need a variety of skill sets different from that of text content. So you would need to think of budget in terms of recording equipment, editing equipment, writers and even presenters in case you are seeking external agencies, vloggers or professionals’ help to accomplish this.

Where Are You Going to Publish this Content?

You need to know where you would market your business. Website, social media, blogs and various other factors need to be taken into consideration before you finally decide where you would allocate your budget. To have clarity of the platform is as important as any other aspect of your business.

The platform where you will publish your content can be decided based on your business, consumer or target audience and the market you focus on. For a B2B enterprise, your audiences would be from the management level. Your content would be centered more for consumption in office – accessed may be using a desktop or laptop device. This could be content that would appear across articles or even on websites.

If your business is more of retail or B2C focused, then the content that you develop should be something that connects with the people who would be accessing these through devices, such as personal computers, phones or tablets.

Your content would be posted on social media in the form of images or videos. Your budget can be adjusted accordingly.

Paid Advertising

You can think of investing in something like paid advertising where you could allocate your budget for digital marketing strategies. Depending on how much your overall budget is or how much you’d be ready to spend you can start planning your budget. It is important to think of what are the factors that would influence your target audiences and based on these factors you can split your budget between Google Adwords and other social media advertisement campaigns.

Social media ads mainly target social media networking sites, such as Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and anywhere where your audience is active. With Google Adwords ads, you can include search ads that will drive your customers’ attention or remarketing ads that will remind them of your brand’s name.

Email Marketing

email marketing

Email marketing is a major way of influencing consumers’ minds. You can always use email marketing as one of those important methods that would keep moving leads to your sales channel.

A number of email marketing strategies can be implemented but is important to introduce the one that actually works. Email marketing would need you to invest some budget.

Sending accurate follow-up emails are necessary to introduce consistency instead of email pop-ups and copy mails. A number of factors should be taken into account such as the size of your business and its target customers, etc. hence in the process, you should be able to decide how much you can allocate for your email strategy in the digital marketing budget.

Search Engine Optimization budget

seo

Your search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part which should not be ignored in the digital marketing budget. It is important to make sure that your website is able to attract consumers. Your content should be strong enough to attract search engines and people to your website. When you invest certain budget and time on SEO, there are all chances that your words and voice would reach the right customers at some point in time. So it is also important to have an effective SEO strategy for your business.

Every industry has different needs and every strategy needs to be improvised accordingly. So it is important to do your research well before you start allocating budget for your digital marketing plans.

Bytelabz Software Solutions is a renowned web design and web development agency in Trivandrum, Kerala. Our service includes web design, web development, SEO and digital marketing services will help to take your businesses to grow in the online world to the next level. For further information, please contact us today.