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Meet Anne Dorko: Half Artist, Half Developer… Full #DigitalTrotter

Meet Anne Dorko: Half Artist, Half Developer… Full #DigitalTrotter

In July, we started a new column on our blog named #DigitalTrotter. It was the lucky intuition of our friend Alessandro who came up with the title and the focus of this new series of articles.

Who are those Digital Trotters? From Fashion Bloggers to Foodies, from Social Media Managers to Digital Visionaries, there’s not just one kind of trotter that we like to meet.

Today we would like to present a friend from WooRank that came visit us in our office in Rome just few weeks ago while visiting Italy with her mom and girlfriend. Her name is Anne Dorko, and she’s the most perfect example of what Digital Trotting means. She’s young, talented, creative and fun. A long-time digital nomad, Anne now lives in Germany and moves to make things happen. Do you want to know more about her?

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She’s an artist, a web developer, an entertainer. She thinks of something, and then she realizes it. Like when on 2012 the Without Boxes project was launched. It is a series of extraordinary podcasts made of ordinary people’s extraordinary stories. Because everyone matters, and we can all improve so much by learning from each other and sharing our lives. During that same year she also started (and finished!) the project girlsbetrippin and visited 48 states in the USA in just 7 months. Mission accomplished!

Then, in 2013, because she’s a singer/songwriter too, she started First Aid Project, featuring a series of raw, acoustic music session you can find on Twitch. Her music is really good, and from time to time you can find her performing live on the streets in the new city she’s visiting.

Just looking at what she has accomplished in her life so far, I’m – whoa! She must be truly amazing. Traveling, diving, cycling, realizing new original plugins and WordPress themes. Nothing has stopped her so far.

In 2015 she launched DialectPro, a community dedicated to build effective and more useful websites that could improve the life of the users visiting them. Clever, uh? Then, she also published a book, “Catching Up with the Internet”.

On July 2017 she launched SEO Prompts, in partnership with WooRank. The tool helps little website owners attract visitors from search engines in a simple way. They will get a new, short task every day, by email, helping them improve their website ranking and overall performances. With SEO Prompts everyone can learn to create stand-out content, make better design choices, and, above all, optimize their site to reach specific goals.

Here’s how it works:

  • Maybe you’re a young entrepreneur who has spent a lot of time and energy building a very good website, but the SEO side of the project is still a mystery for you.
  • You’ll need to rank better to really increase your exposure and attract better and more qualified visitors.
  • How Woorank SEO Prompts might help you? You will get a simple task every day, a simple reminder with all the essentials of SEO grouped together into manageable daily tasks so you don’t have to think about it anymore.

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If you want to receive Anne’s SEO Prompts, just go to SEOPrompts.com, subscribe with your name and email and… enjoy Anne’s advice.

Explore the Amazing World of SEO Tools for Efficiency & Convenience

Explore the Amazing World of SEO Tools for Efficiency & Convenience

Search Engine Optimization is based on data of all sorts including contextual data, analytical data, and technical data. The effective tools utilized for accessing that data would be fueling your capacity to arrive at SEO decisions to maintain your performance and keep on moving forward in the correct direction.

In this article, some important Search Engine Optimization tools would be explored in different categories. Some of these tools are pretty expensive with additional features while others are for free or quite affordable but all of them are indispensable. Your SEO tools are known for real value for your money.

The SEO tools that are slightly more on the costlier side are really more convenient to use and they would be boasting of several features that would help you in working more efficiently, effectively, and productively.

Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console are supposed to be the keystones of your SEO toolkit. Both these tools come completely free. They would be effectively helping you in accessing performance data which cannot be provided by any other source. These two important SEO tools would be helping the two of the principal search engines to keep sending you messages about problems and concerns on your site impacting your SERP rankings.

Afraid to get lost in your website's SEO? Try out this SEO Audit powered by WooRank and get a map of the next steps you need to take to optimize your website.

Boris Demaria

CEO, WooRank

Enterprise SEO Platforms

The Enterprise SEO Platforms are supposed to be all-in-one SEO tools that would be offering convenience, ramping up monitoring and forecasting natural search performance over numerous pages and keyword targets and against several of your identified competitors, of course, for a price. They would be recommending targeted optimizations for diverse pages. The top contenders in this category are Searchmetrics, Moz, and BrightEdge. These are very much in demand among large companies and top SEO agencies; however, they could cost you thousands of dollars every month.

WordLift partners with WooRank to offer their clients a first-in-class SEO Platform, easy to use for SEO consultants, content marketers, online publishers, and business owners.

Keyword Tools

If you are looking for important keyword data, you should explore Google AdWords Keyword Planner. If your organization is runningAdWords campaigns, you could be accessing that account for using the keyword planner. Moreover, there is certainly no additional cost involved beyond what has already been spent on AdWords. In case, if you do not have official access to any active AdWords account, you may consider trying one of these efficient keyword tools, like SEMrush, Wordstream, and also, Ahrefs. All these tools are actually subscription-based.

AI-powered SEO tools

AI gave a deep contribute to content marketing. Using AI in SEO isn’t totally new, however it is a quickly developing technology today, with tools like WordLift, an AI-powered SEO plugin for WordPress. It translates your content in machine-readable content for search engines and other crawlers, in order to help you get better rankings for the content you publish. Acrolinx, One Spot, Market Brew, Narrative Science are the best example of AI tools you can use in SEO and content marketing.

Let the AI optimize your content for voice search.
Get started for free!

Web Analytics

Google Analytics is supposed to be the most acknowledged and widely popular SEO tool in the world of analytics because of its ease and convenience in extracting data at precisely the URL level. This tool comes free provided you are happy with the basic version. However, if you are interested in an enterprise version you would have to shell out some bucks. Get Google Analytics today, if you do not have it already. Adobe Analytics is supposed to be another package that is often noticed in huge organizations.

Conclusion

If you are a dedicated campaigner and are really serious about Search Engine Optimization, you must necessarily pay up the cash to have an access to the proper tools. You must appreciate that you would fail in achieving success in SEO tasks without utilizing paid subscriptions.

 

Maria Jones is an SEO consultant specializing in digital marketing. She has been keeping up with SEM & SMM trends for a decade or so. She is a dedicated contributor to Tayloright blog where she posts advice, news, and valuable resources.

Maria Jones

SEO consultant and Contributor, Tayloright

What The Best Brand Publishers Are Doing Right Now

What The Best Brand Publishers Are Doing Right Now

Traditional publishers and print media companies have seen their profitability tumble as more and more of our daily media habits have moved online. This change gave rise to the seemingly-unstoppable growth of digital content marketing as a core promotional tool, which subsequently spawned the concept of a brand publisher.

Recognizing that they no longer needed to rely on conventional media platforms to reach people and get attention, businesses have begun to produce and distribute their own content. It allows them to lower their advertising costs and operate with much greater creative freedom.

But the model of a brand acting as a publisher isn’t a magic bullet. There are companies getting it horribly wrong, as well as companies executing it to perfection. In this piece, we’re going to look at the latter, seeing what the successful brand publishers are doing to make this relatively-fresh arrangement function optimally.

Carrying out regular content audits

A content audit is a comprehensive review of all of your live content, looking at numerous elements (such as page titles or subheadings) and collating the data into a single spreadsheet suitable for an overarching assessment — and the brands with the best content know how important it is to schedule a regular content audit.

Newspaper content goes out of date rapidly, and that’s fine given the disposable nature of the medium. You read one edition, discard it, and await the next. But old digital content isn’t worthless, particularly if written to touch upon universal themes, and savvy brands take every opportunity to spruce up their old content and bring it in line with today’s standards.

Following the advent of smarter content tagging and structuring suitable for search algorithms as well as humans, a lot of content (even from recent years) is lacking in some important areas. This is one reason why it’s important to have a solid structural framework in place (either systemwide or provided through an integrated tool) to make the updating process easier.

Investing in cornerstone work

There’s an absurd amount of content available for free through the internet. It barely even matters what the topic is, because even the most niche pursuit will have myriad dedicated blogs featuring similar articles. Brands that aspire to become respected ‘publishers’ but lack any sense often settle for the content barrage method — release as many articles as you can, on as many topics as you can cover, and as quickly as can be achieved.

But just as 100 multiplied by 0 is still just 0, no amount of low-quality content will accomplish anything of note. And when I say ‘low-quality’, I don’t simply mean simply technical quality. I mean general quality — how useful the points are, how good the writing is, etc.

Great brand publishing is about quality, not quantity. That means looking past the hammered-out posts about nothing and focussing on creating content so good that it will get the kind of attention you’re looking for. It doesn’t even have to be that long or complex — it just needs to resonate, like this sponsored Airbnb piece.

Airbnb - Brand Publishers and Influencers

Getting feedback from the people who matter

Let’s imagine for a second that I consider this piece the best thing I’ve ever written, viewing it as an informative masterpiece (untrue, but go with it). If you can barely tolerate my style and reach the conclusion feeling that you’ve entirely wasted your time, what difference does my opinion make? It may be notable, but it isn’t valuable. I’m not the target audience.

Since brand publishing is just another evolution of product or service marketing, its end goal is crystal-clear: make more money. How it gets there might vary, of course, but every path leads in the same direction: you promote a product so the reader might buy it, make your brand look good to make people want to buy from you, or provide a valuable resource to earn goodwill and (yes, you guessed it) make people want to buy from you.

The top brands in the world commit a lot of time and effort to acquiring, interpreting and learning from feedback. They know whose opinions ultimately lead to sales, and whose aren’t worth considering at all, and they use that information to make their published content more practical.

Effectively using user-generated content

As a brand publisher, you’re not simply a humble purveyor of in-house content — you’re in charge of your very own content ecosystem, and you can feature whatever you want. User-generated content (UGC) is perfect for this scenario, because it has so many benefits: it entertains your audience, brings in their feedback (important, as we’ve just seen), provides fresh perspectives, and takes some of the load off your content production team.

Coca Cola innovated with its ‘Share a Coke with’ campaign in a time (2011) when the concept of UGC was very fresh (and only fairly recently made possible through the mainstream acceptance of social media). People really wanted to be involved and produced a lot of visual content that made the Coca Cola brand look great.

Share a Coke - Brand publishers and UGC

Indeed, the practice of using UGC in the form of reviews and/or photos has been a cost-effective revelation, particularly for ecommerce where anyone with a basic webshop host system like Shopify can curate gallery feeds using add-ons like Covet.pics or TagTray. Dominant brands know how to balance content types, mixing expert in-house long-form content with lighter fare driven by user-created work.

Experimenting with different formats

This piece by Samuel Scott really tears into the notion of a brand publisher, describing it as contradictory, but it misses the mark in a lot of places. For example, Scott presumes that brand publishers must present themselves as journalists, when in reality that’s only something bad brands do. The good ones are quite nakedly promotional, and understand that people will accept promotional content if they’re sufficiently entertained.

But Scott’s general point about content feeling generic certainly hits home. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the “X Things You Need To Know About Y” format, but that kind of piece is only ever going to achieve a certain level of traffic. Any brand publishers that want to be exceptional need to try different things.

And while the title is definitely worth considering, the format is a far more interesting and valuable matter. Look at any roundup of hit branded content (such as this one from Forbes) and you’ll see a lot of content rich with imagery and narratives. And see how this Nest-sponsored piece from The Atlantic mixes media types to provide a more engaging experience than a standard article could ever achieve.

Key Take-Aways

Brand publishing isn’t about feigning neutrality and posting countless pieces concluding that your particular software, service or product is superior to any other. It’s about using your keen understanding of the people you’re trying to address to find new and creative ways to entertain, inform and delight them, establishing your personality in the process.

I can guarantee you that the top brand publishers are doing each and every one of these things right now, and that’s the dedication that’s needed to stand out. If you aspire to turn your brand into a respected content source, you know where you need to start!

 

Patrick Foster contributes to Ecommerce Tips — an industry-leading ecommerce blog dedicated to sharing business and entrepreneurial insights from the sector. Check out the latest news on Twitter @myecommercetips.

Patrick Foster

Ecommerce Consultant, EcommerceTips.org