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Is guest blogging becoming risky?

After Penguin hit a lot of sites hard last year, it seems many SEOs have turned to guest blogging for alternative methods of link-building. 

I see this in the volume of requests I get for guest posts on this blog, and Google presumably sees this in the volume of new links it is seeing from guest blogging. 

It seems that Google is now taking a serious interest in guest blogging, so what are the risks for the bloggers and the sites hosting guest articles? 

I’ve been asking some SEO experts for their views on the potential risks and how to avoid them…

Report: Australia’s tech startup ecosystem worth more than $100bn

Google and PricewaterhouseCoopers are predicting that Australian tech businesses will be worth $109 billion by 2023, employing 500,000 people and contributing as much to the Australian economy as the retail and education sectors. 

The new report, Startup Economy, examines the current state of Australia’s technology sector and looks at how this can be nourished to build a strong tech industry for the country, an area that’s increasingly under scrutiny due to the positive effects it can bring. 

Why your engagement rate is low and how you can fix it

First off, there seems to be a lot of confusion over what an engagement rate actually is. In short, it’s a measure of the number of people that are engaging compared to the number of people who could be engaging.

Due to the nature of the different social platforms there are likely to be varying rates for each one. For example, the rates for Facebook will differ to those for Twitter. A good rule of thumb is to divide the number of interactions with your base. It isn’t rocket science.

However, looking across the barren landscape of brand social media pages, achieving and maintaining high engagement levels does seem to be.

So what’s going wrong? Broadly speaking there are seven reasons why your engagement rate is low…

Six alternative ways to assess the value of mobile clicks

Online advertisers are generally seeing more sales coming through from desktops and laptops than mobile phones. But that’s not to say mobile clicks are not valuable.

Instead, advertisers need to use alternative ways to measure the contribution of mobile devices to overall paid search programme goals.

Six examples of B2B companies that shine on Twitter

I recently blogged about consumer brands that had come up with successful Twitter strategies, highlighting ASOS and Nike among others as companies that knew what they were doing with social.

Many commenters mentioned that it would be useful to see a similar post focusing on B2B examples and I was obviously happy to oblige. 

Twitter is a difficult medium for B2B companies as it’s all too easy to simply view the platform as a broadcast medium and churn out dull corporate messages.

But here are six examples of businesses that have managed to buck the trend and create interesting or useful Twitter feeds…

Why the slow days of dial-up could be making a return

As familiar names like HMV and Blockbuster disappear from the High Street, web traffic can be expected to grow as a result.

However, the increasing numbers of data aggregators and tracking tags being placed on websites are leading to slower loading pages, while advances in technology designed to save people time have made us less tolerant of waiting. 

In 2006, the average web user expected pages to load in four seconds or less. By 2010, that expectation had become two seconds or less.

Report: Nearly half of top 100 Australian companies have no social media presence

Only 50% of Australia’s biggest companies use social media to talk to their customers and it seems many would prefer their customers didn’t talk back, according to findings from a new report. 

Econsultancy has often written about how complex social media is in Australia, with many organisations appearing to struggle with the various platforms and strategies found within the landscape. 

How General Electric uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+

B2B companies can often struggle to make social work as people don’t tend to use Facebook and Pinterest for professional reasons.

There’s always Linkedin of course, but that presents an entirely different challenge from the four main consumer networks.

General Electric has managed to buck the trend and achieve a strong social presence, though it’s true that the company blurs the lines between B2B and B2C.

In an interview with Digiday last year, GE’s executive director of global digital marketing Linda Boff said that social platforms have allowed the company to get closer to its customers and tell stories about the human impact of what it does.

Bing is an untapped venue for ecommerce videos

Bing, the search engine created by Microsoft, is gaining traffic, although it’s no Google yet. However, not many e-commerce companies are placing their product videos on this newer search engine.

Now that Bing is powering searches on Facebook’s Graph Search, it’s a good time to get your videos indexed in Bing. Here’s how to do it.

How Evans Cycles uses QR codes in-store to deliver product details and reviews

The high street’s struggles with ecommerce and the digital age have been well publicised in the past 12 months as a number of previously dominant brands have gone to the wall. 

And in general the brands that have thrived are those that were quick to adapt and integrate digital technologies in-store, such as John Lewis and House of Fraser.

In our report How The Internet Can Save The High Street we detailed some of the new tactics and strategies that retailers should be trying to take advantage of, such as click-and-collect, mobile search, apps and QR codes.

QR codes are a much-maligned technology – particularly by us – however they can be used in-store to allow customers to access additional product information and reviews.

11 useful examples of copywriting for product recommendations

All ecommerce sites could benefit from having product recommendations, with research showing that they can potentially increase revenue by up to 300%, improve conversions by 150% and help boost the average order value by 50%.

However, the precise format varies from site to site and should be tested to make sure it’s converting the maximum number of customers.

The copywriting needs to fit with the brand identity and it’s also important to strike an emotive chord and pique the customer’s interest.

This isn’t an easy task considering the fact that you generally only have room for about three or four words, but there is still a great deal you can do with the limited space.

Report: Australians online want to transact, but do they also want to interact?

In the next three to five years almost 75% of Australian organisations expect to have mobile apps available, up from 40% today, in an attempt to better engage and interact with their consumers, according to new research. 

Optus’ Future of Business report surveyed more than 2,000 consumers over the age of 18, as well as 550 marketing and IT executives from mid-large sized organisations, to look at which customer interaction channels are most important to businesses and their consumers. 

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