When it comes to the world of litigation, leadership, and decision-making ability, there are few individuals more influential than John Boyd. Born in Erie, PA, he graduated from Iowa Tech with a degree in economics. He then enlisted into the US Army, where his career as a strategist and theorist began to take off. He developed what was known as the “OODA loop.” In addition to his work with the USAF Weapons School, where he devised tactical manuals, he was renowned as one of the world’s leading military strategists. A common nickname for him was “Forty Second Boyd” because of his remarkable ability to defeat an opposing pilot in air combat maneuvering in less than forty seconds, even when Boyd’s starting position was disadvantaged.

However, despite his military prowess, John Boyd’s work has real implications for people in the business and marketing world today. We can learn from his OODA loop, which is a four-point decision-making process. OODA is an acronym for the four stages of this simple, yet powerful, loop. The four stages are: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. You observe by collecting information from a wide range of sources—as many as possible. Make sure that this information is accurate, unbiased, and representative of all possible angles of the decision you are attempting to make. This step feeds forward into the next.

Orient yourself by carefully and thoroughly evaluating all of the information that has been presented to you during the observation stage. Use it to update and evaluate your present situation. Be aware that your reality is fluid, and be willing to change it if new information and facts contradict a perspective that you currently hold. This orientation prepares you for the third step, which is to decide on a course of action. Determine what you are going to do based on the information presented and analyzed. The course you take should, obviously, reflect the most beneficial outcome for you and your team. After deciding, the fourth stage is to act on your decision. Follow through on what you have decided. This OODA loop is simplistic, yet brilliant in its simplicity. It reduces a complex, overwhelming process into four logical steps. It has been implemented in businesses throughout the world.

Decision-making isn’t the only thing that John Boyd can teach us. In addition to this logical, factual side, the OODA loop can also be implemented in creative thought projects and other endeavors requiring creative thinking and/or problem solving. In this article, we will discuss five ways that John Boyd and his OODA loop can be utilized in your day-to-day creative thought processes. Observation, orientation, decision, and action should become a part of you and your team’s daily mantra.

• OODA can teach us that reality is complex, but not so complex that you should allow it to become muddled or overwhelming.

Your local and global environments interact with one another constantly. The first OODA step, observation, can help you gather all information about every facet of the reality you are experiencing. This information will assist you in making more all-encompassing decisions pertaining to your creative process. Understanding the way the global and local environment interconnect and thread through one another will allow you to broaden the possible audiences you can reach.

To bring this down to the concrete level, here is an example: Let’s say that you are working on creative ways to market your brand. You’ve seen another, direct competitor’s brand’s advertising, and you believe that your product is better than theirs, even though this brand is much larger and better-known than yours. The question is: how do you market in a way that will draw attention away from this monolith and onto you? The first step of the OODA loop would advise you to gather all the information you can about your competitor, including their weaknesses. One such weakness may be their inability to reach niche markets, or certain ethnic, racial, or religious groups. Once you have analyzed who your opposition is leaving out, you can expand your creative process to include ways to appeal to those untapped markets, drawing a larger audience for yourself than if you were to simply go head-to-head with your competition and attempt to take their current core audience away from them.

• John Boyd’s OODA can provide us with the steps to think differently from competition.

The reason Boyd was successful as a military strategist—why he was called “Forty Second Boyd”—was because his tactical maneuvers were unlike anything taught in the military school (until he began writing their manuals for them). John Boyd used the second step, analysis, to determine the rut his opposition had fallen into. There was always a tactic or a pattern that they had tried too often, and signified that they had grown stagnant and predictable in their thinking. Business and marketing involve competition and consumer loyalty. Analyzing information that you gather on your opposition will allow you to see what they are missing or what they have ignored. Your creative thinking process can then be directed at exploiting your competition’s weak spots and taking initiative where they don’t.

• Strong decision-making abilities progress creative thinking by preventing stagnancy.

The best ideas are worth nothing if they are left to gather dust. While careful planning is always imperative, there comes a time when a decision must be made in order to move to the next step in the creative process. If you do not decide to either reject or implement this idea and then act on the decision you have made, you cannot build your business. For example, if you are testing a marketing hypothesis and are ready to expose it to consumers, don’t wait until someone else does it first—or better. Make the decision and act on it; that way, once you have your result, you can go from there and develop an idea that either builds on the previous one or replaces it.

• You may find that there is a disconnection between a creative idea and the conventional way to carry it out.

Creative ideas are “creative” because they are unique and have not been tried before. This novelty can make them harder to implement through traditional channels. Internet marketing is a good example of this. As technology progresses, the way in which businesses communicate with their clientele does as well. Companies looking to expand their advertisements have had to move from print, television, and radio, and attract followings on social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and more. These companies had creative ideas that wouldn’t be as spectacular had they not thought to branch out and diversify the way they broadcasted their ads to the public.

• Finally, the OODA loop’s simplicity can take overwhelming projects and make them more concrete.

The OODA loop has four steps. That’s all it needs to be effective. Sometimes, companies and entrepreneurs will get so caught up in complex blueprints that they have devised, which contain dozens of intricate steps to work their way through the creative process, that they end up getting mired in the details. While this meticulousness is understandable, it can become overwhelming. The simplistic nature of the OODA loop eschews difficult, multi-step plans and theories and broadens your ability to think creatively because you are not constrained by making sure you follow all 200+ steps to the letter. It frees up your thinking to become idea-oriented, not restrictively laborious.

John Boyd was a brilliant military strategist, and although he mainly operated in the mathematical and tactical sectors, that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from his work. The OODA loop consists of four concrete, strong pillars of decision-making that will free up space for creative thinking and allow businesses to explore the market and audience for their product or service.

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In the online marketing world, there are many different ways that you can attract the audience you need to grow your business. There are several schools of thought on how to best achieve company growth through the Internet, and two of the most commonly-used tactics are linkbuilding and content marketing. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and which one you choose to use is dependent upon what you believe can best suit your business’s needs and the market you want to reach. In this article, we will discuss what linkbuilding and content marketing are, their benefits and drawbacks, when to use one instead of the other, and the futures of both practices and the likely direction that they will take as marketing progresses and evolves.

What is linkbuilding?

Linkbuilding is related to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) content. SEO content includes commonly-used words or phrases that people search for while using Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine. The idea is to create content that will appear high in the search results on these sites, directing people to your own page. Linkbuilding is the process of getting external sites to link to your own website. This process can often be laborious, as you want to make sure the links you’re building are from reputable and popular websites. In order to do this, there are several steps you must take. You need to, first and foremost, create compelling and thoughtful content and/or a good product that will entice reputable sites to want to reference your page. You also need to promote your work and submit it to various sites to get noticed by influential bloggers, internet personalities, marketers, and more. Once you gain a reputation as a site with valuable information, your linkbuilding can begin.

What are advantages and disadvantages to linkbuilding?

As with any marketing strategy, linkbuilding is not an exact science. An advantage of linkbuilding is that it helps you get page views, sometimes many of them, if you are able to get reputable websites to link to your own. It also can enhance your reputability. This is seen sometimes in the media, where one publication will link to another (Pew Research linking to Washington Post, for example, in their analysis of political trends). The mutual relationship helps benefit both parties. Linkbuilding does have its disadvantages: it’s arduous, requires a lot of work, and you are dependent upon another party. That dependency can be hard to control, as you never know what someone is going to post or what content they will use your link in.  

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a way of distributing and promoting content that is more information-based than a direct sales pitch. It is a form of marketing that has taken off recently. Content marketing relies on creating useful, valuable, and popular content that isn’t so much product-promotion as it is information dissemination. You are helping your consumer become more knowledgeable about not just the product, but the sector of industry that your business is in. The goal is to build a relationship with the consumer by giving them information they need in hopes that they will then become loyal to your brand. Companies who launch their own magazines are examples of this (John Deere’s “The Furrow” is content marketing, as is businesses that have adjoining blogs or publications). They are providing consumers with information relating to their product without actually selling their product to them in a direct, overt pitch. You want the consumer to take the information they have learned and apply it, while also directing their loyalty towards the company (yours) who provided such valuable insight to them.

What are advantages and disadvantages to content marketing?

Much like linkbuilding, content marketing takes a lot of work. You have to hire bloggers, copywriters, and other people that will assist you in getting your information out there to attract clientele. This is laborious, and the extra effort requires both time and money. However, the benefits that the success of this approach brings are immense. Providing information to consumers means that you will build trusting, longer-lasting relationships with them that aren’t solely reliant on their affinity for your product. Your reputation is enhanced by this provision of vital, valuable content.

When should you choose linkbuilding over content marketing (and vice versa)?

It basically comes down to your website’s needs. If you are just simply selling a product, and you have the manpower and time to promote this product to websites and other publications without needing them to actually buy anything from you, linkbuilding is a good choice. It simply diverts traffic to your site and allows for organic page-views. If your product doesn’t really have adjuvant information that you can share, or you don’t have the time or money to hire writers, linkbuilding is still an excellent way to get noticed.

Content marketing is for businesses that have the capability to introduce their own blog or magazine to people. If you are selling a product that doesn’t already have a multitude of this information readily available to the public, and if you are able to hire writers to produce quality, valuable articles, you should do so. Content marketing can also help you linkbuild as well, as people will want to connect to your site if you are providing valuable insight on a certain topic.

What is the future looking like for linkbuilding and content marketing?

Currently, they appear to be neck-and-neck in terms of which has the best SEO value. However, the projections by publications such as Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Journal show two trends. The first trend is content marketing overtaking linkbuilding because people are getting inundated to more common forms of advertising. Common “click here!” advertising is something people are so used to seeing that it is failing to move them to action. The second prediction bodes better for linkbuilding and content marketing alike, as it makes the case that the two SEO strategies need one another and mutually benefit from each other. Content marketing can increase linkbuilding, and linkbuilding can assist you in building your content’s audience.

In today’s technologically-advanced world, businesses and entrepreneurs want to make sure that they are getting the greatest exposure for their service or product possible. Search Engine Optimization is an excellent way to achieve that goal, with linkbuilding and content marketing as the common strategies to do so. Deciding which to use is dependent upon your business’s capabilities and the goals you have set for it.

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Every company should have a blog for their website. A blog is an informational page that provides a home for content directly related to your business, or engages topics of interest to your market and target demographics. Having a blog as a business allows you to increase traffic to your website while building the all-important relationships with customers who grow to rely on your site and your business. In this article, we’ll discuss “the power of the blog” and make a case as to why all businesses, no matter the size or reason, should implement a blog on their websites.

It drives traffic to your site

Running a blog allows you to tell both search engines and customers what it is that your business does and how it adds value to people who visit it. Content that is related to your services, designed to add value, and generated on a regular basis does a lot to drive your rankings in organic search. With the application of a few SEO techniques, you can make sure through your blog activities that the search engines know where your business belongs in the SERPs. Educating the search engines, and thereby placing higher in search results, will give your business more visibility to your potential clients and customers, and allow your website to be a much more powerful tool for your marketing communications.

It provides an additional platform to communicate with customers

Being able to engage with your customers directly is always beneficial, and a blog allows for comments and communication in a more detailed and focused setting. With a blog, you have the opportunity to convey deeper and more meaningful information, and customers will likely have questions or responses to offer. If your blog is responsive to their needs and replies quickly to any concerns they may have, it shows that you are invested in the conversation your business wants to start within your marketplace. This not only develops and strengthens the relationship between your business and the people it serves, but it also provides an avenue of feedback and concern resolution.

It allows a business to establish its thought leadership

Blogging for your business also allows for more freedom of expression. The business is able to communicate its ideas and thoughts more effectively, not only showcasing to visitors exactly how and where your business can add value to their lives, but also in establishing your business and talent as thought leaders in your industry. Being able to sell your product is one thing but being able to discuss the subject in-depth with your customers is how expertise and trust are established. People will appreciate this added value, and your business will be looked towards as an authority on the topic, reflecting well on your sales.

Your blog can be leveraged towards other marketing channels

If you do any kind of content or influencer marketing, you may have noticed that bloggers and influencers aren’t keen on linking to your homepage. If you’ve found yourself scratching your head as to why, remember that bloggers and influencers are their own brands, with their own audiences. What does linking to your homepage do for them? Most of the time, it just lets their audience know that you’re trying to get them to market for them. While that’s certainly a reality, partnerships between businesses and bloggers or influencers have to be mutually beneficial, or they will be handcuffed to failure. These people have built their audiences based on the value they add — just as your business does. Generating fresh and valuable content in a company blog is one of the best ways of showing that it has something to offer, both in terms of attracting influencers and in terms of ensuring that your marketing campaigns with them are effective. As bloggers and influencers have already overtaken traditional celebrities in terms of popularity, you can think of this as using one powerful tool in your marketing strategy to support another powerful tool — allowing your business to get the most bang for its marketing buck.

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Google AMP has gained a lot of attention from business owners, website builders, and everyday people who have a lot to say about its potential.

Google AMP and its Application

One of the biggest questions that people have is “How can AMP be used?” Currently, it only works for static (non-changing) pages. This makes it ideal for news and company websites. However, it is not compatible with pages that change. For example, if a blog site updates their homepage with new posts, it would not be compatible. This certainly limits its use in some areas, but it will be interesting to see how Google AMP will be used in the future.

Its Use on Mobile Devices

The term “mobile devices” does include smartphones, but is inclusive of devices like tablets. Most of the time when people are looking for a product or service, they are doing so from a mobile platform. In this instance, using Google AMP with your web page allows it to load more quickly than it would with more traditional programs.

Whether or Not AMP Will Reduce App Usage

People are also talking about the impact that Google AMP may or may not have on app usage. When searching for pages on mobile devices, it is not uncommon for people to browse through apps rather than a basic browser. For example, someone might prefer using Google Chrome over the browser that was included on their phone or tablet. It is not believed that AMP is going to reduce app usage, however, because people will most likely still have preferences for a specific app for browsing.

Google AMP and Ecommerce Webpages

With the right programming tweaks, even e-commerce pages could load faster using AMP. E-commerce pages tend to have needs far more complex than AMP would allow. In order for it to run effectively, it is highly like that a business would have to give up some of their features. For smaller businesses, it may be possible to trim e-commerce needs down by that much. Unfortunately, even small e-commerce pages would have to make sacrifices. Basically,  AMP would only work for an e-commerce page if you are willing to give up some features.

How Google AMP Stacks Up Against Facebook News Articles and Apple News

Apple News and Facebook News Articles are among Google’s competition. As for Google, it eliminates the need for JavaScript codes, and every user that uses Google News is able to see AMP’s stories. Facebook Instant Articles is only visible to users that use Facebook’s mobile app, which is a downside, but it is able to provide a faster load time and better page design. Apple News is a preinstalled application that can be found on any iPhone but falls short in terms of appearance and loading speed.

Now that you have an idea of what people are saying, what questions do you have left? Google AMP is definitely something worth looking into if you own a website.

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Content marketing is increasingly becoming more competitive. As a platform, the internet is simply replete with a variety of marketing-related content of various types and quality. Ultimately, with this content-rich environment, comes a greater demand for higher quality. This demand comes not only from the end-user, who is becoming more used to navigating (and, in many cases, ignoring) this deluge of content, but also from entities like Google, Bing, and Facebook, who view the experiences of their users as understandably critical. And as more brands allocate higher budgets towards content creation and marketing, you can expect that the bar will only continue to raise. In this article, we’ll discuss a few of the content amplification strategies that can help keep your content king.

Produce High-Value Content

Let’s be honest, would you promote or be willing to share subpar content? Of course not. Don’t lose sight of this reality — it’s as close to the end-user perspective as you can expect to objectively get in marketing. If it’s not good enough that you, yourself, would share it…chances are it won’t gain any traction with anyone else.

So start by creating top-notch, epic-quality content. Create content that is truly value-added. More importantly, create content that you would be proud to be associated with and that your audiences would consider a resource, or, at least, a source of entertainment.

Extract Nuggets and Share

More often than not, a brand or business can tweet and share snippets of their content with a minimized link to full content on their social media platforms. It’s something that many businesses fail to take advantage of, in spite of the ease of doing so.

This can do wonders for your content’s reach and mileage if you use this strategy effectively, and not just by widening the funnel. Consider any time that snippet gets shared via other social media platforms — you’ve probably set it up with a tracking URL for your analytics (and if you haven’t, you definitely should) and you’ve just gone from being another voice in the wind to being a Source.

This not only amplifies the content itself, it also works towards establishing a sense of thought leadership in connection with your brand.

Leverage Successful Content

There’s a neat strategy you might have heard of called the Skyscraper Technique, and Brian Dean of backlinko.com recently did a fantastic case study about this on his blog. You start with finding the biggest and best piece of content anyone has ever put on the web regarding the topic, industry, or keywords in question. Find out what this piece of content does well, why it sees the rankings and engagement that you’re looking for. Then find its weaknesses. If you’re lucky, something’s been poorly optimized. But it could be that the opportunity you’re looking for is that the content isn’t interesting enough, doesn’t communicate effectively, or maybe it’s trying to convey something to the wrong people in the wrong way.

Regardless, you want to find the biggest and best piece of content on the horizon and build something even bigger and better. Create content that is truly powerful enough that it becomes the point of reference on that topic. Do note that this is an intensive strategy that demands serious investment, but can also provide significant rewards.

Use Influencers to Increase the Reach of Your Content

With the rise and proliferation of social media channels has come the rise of social media celebs — people called influencers. These people have amassed a fan base or following, ranging anywhere thousands to millions, who are ready to consume content from them. Their audiences often like and prefer them to “real celebrities” because many of these people have the appeal of being more relatable to the “average-Joe” and more similar in terms of interests and perspectives.

Look for bloggers and social influencers with large and active audiences and ask them (and yourself) if your content would be a good fit for their reach. You can start with simple Google searches, or you can find a software-as-a-service platform like NeoReach’s influencer marketing platform to help connect you directly with influencers appropriate to your business and manage your campaign. Influencer marketing is quickly becoming an effective means of getting your content in front of the right set of eyes and, in the final analysis, that’s what marketing is all about.

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Below are several characteristics that distinguish a leader from a boss:

Leaders Lead

Bosses tend to rule and demand that the work is done. They will micromanage because they don’t have trust in the team to successfully complete a project. Bosses will also be very quick to analyze and criticize the team’s mistakes.

Leaders, on the other hand, are individuals who will assist their team with words of encouragement, ideas and suggestions, and positive feedback. They are not there to watch their employees fail but to help and lead them to a positive outcome.

Leaders Listen

Bosses will be quick to demand that tasks be done, but won’t be open to discussion or hear out their employees’ ideas. They expect them to just obey and listen and proceed with their job without mistakes.

A leader, however, is open to their team sharing their insights and questions. They are willing to advise and provide feedback to their employees. Leaders want their employees to develop and reach successful outcomes and are conscious that for that to happen, they have to be involved.

Leaders Learn

A leader is open to new ideas and learning from their team. They are not embarrassed to learn from someone in a position lower than them, as they understand there is always room for more growth. Not only are they willing to learn, but they also are pleased to teach. They enjoy sharing their knowledge and experience with their colleagues.

Leaders Love

Leaders have a passion for not only their job but also, to see their employees succeed. They are not afraid to step down and get involved with the project at hand.

Being a boss can be a rewarding job if you take on the characteristics of a leader. Your employees will respect you more if they know that you are not there to scold and criticize every move they make. Yes, as a boss you are in a higher authority, but be sure to do so in a way that is constructive for the company and your employees.

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However, any web developer that wants to remain relevant has to consistently improve on their current knowledge and skill-set. You need to familiarize yourself with new tools and technologies in the industry.

The following are some tips that you can follow to get some great results as well as go on to become a web developer that’s in high demand.

Get More Reading Materials

Web developers are often in the habit of sticking to one programming or coding language and then leaving the others. Here’s what you should know: the more diversified your coding abilities are, the better your opportunities.

For instance, if you’re only familiar with PHP, you should go learn other languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, SQL, Objective-C, C++, C# among others. The point is don’t just stop with one even though it’s in demand.

In fact, all of the above mentioned examples are hot and in demand right now. If you were to master all these, there would be no limit to what you can do in web development; not to mention the fact that you will have more work than you can handle.

Study and Replicate Excellent Web Development Projects

As a web developer, you’ll often see world class web development projects that you can only aspire to. Here’s what you should do whenever you see those projects: try to replicate them.

Yes, we know it sounds crazy, particularly when some of the codes are way beyond your skill level. However, this is the only way to get really better at your web development. Many web developers don’t do this and end up stagnant in one spot. Don’t be like them. Replicating these awesome projects will make your grow and stretch.

Practice More Often and Frequently

The quickest way to becoming better at web development is by consistently doing more practice sessions. This means creating projects, setting web development goals and then working hard towards meeting it on or before the deadline.

For instance, instead of allowing external elements influence your designs, do the experiment in a sandbox. That way, if the code develops an issue and you need to debug it, you will be able to easily locate the source of the problem and create a fix for it.

Work Hard at Advancing Your Skills

This is how most web developers get better at what they do. Repetitive tasks and codes aren’t just enough. All savvy web developers make an effort to commit to progress. You have to continually push the boundaries of what you currently know and try something new.

For instance, instead of just using and depending on the popular GitHub that most developers use, why not try something harder? The GitlLab system is an excellent example of a new tool that you can attempt to master and get better at. The fact that it’s an open source tool means that it is an even more dynamic tool that you can use. If you also want to add it to your servers, it will work just fine too.

Always Ensure that Your Websites are Secure

It is not unusual to get carried away by the design and usability features of the new website you’re developing. That’s perfectly normal. However, of equal importance is the website’s security.
Test all websites for vulnerabilities and secure those loopholes before deploying the website and going live. If you want, test the site with asafaweb.com to ensure that it is truly secure and without any vulnerabilities.

The post 5 Great Tips to Boost Your Web Development Skills appeared first on Rank Executives.

As a consequence, you have to time your content for when it is most likely to be picked up by your audience. The question for any aspiring marketer is when the best time for this is. Post at the wrong time and your audience will likely miss whatever it is you have posted. Thankfully, we’ve put together a handy guide to help with posting on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn!

Facebook

The most popular social media platform today. You already know how everybody expects you to have a Facebook – both a personal page and one for your business. It is also the more casual platform, and the browsing behavior of its users reflect this. Although Facebook users are on the platform every day, engagement is best Thursdays and Fridays, generally after lunch in the 1 pm to 3 pm timeframe. Thus, your best results will come towards the end of the week, around when people are thinking less about work and more about the upcoming weekend.

The worst days for engagement on Facebook are Monday through Wednesday. In fact, engagement for Facebook falls roughly 3.5% for posts that are hosted exclusively on these days. You’ll want to avoid posting on these days and focus your efforts for the end of the week.

Twitter

Everybody loves Twitter. It delivers your message as long as that message is 160 characters or less. Unlike the other two platforms of Facebook and LinkedIn, best days for Twitter engagement will vary according to what type of business you are.

If you are a business to business oriented company, then you are trying to catch people towards the end of the work day. Your best time to post is towards the end of the working day, just before people are going home. However, you have a wide window with which to post. Highest CTR on Twitter for B2B accounts ranges from noon all the way to 6 pm.

If you are a business to consumer oriented company, then you are looking to talk to people at home. Although Wednesdays do report high engagement rates on Twitter for B2C companies, you see higher numbers on the weekends. You can use a tool like Buffer to schedule your weekend tweets. Make sure that you have somebody monitoring the feed at all times, however! The last thing you want is to miss a potential time for engagement because you were at home.

One final note about timing: one tweet per day is not going to build your following or engage your audience regardless of the type of business you have. Multiple tweets throughout the day (in three to four-hour intervals) is ideal.

LinkedIn

Facebook’s more professional cousin is the best place for B2B entrepreneurs to network. While Facebook and Twitter are fantastic to reach out to more casual users, LinkedIn is essential for reaching out to fellow professionals. The best times for posting reflect the nature of the user base, with post times being ideal around when people are going to or leaving work.

Mondays and Fridays are poor days for posting. Schedule your posts for Tuesday through Thursday, from 7 am to 8 am or from 5 pm to 6 pm. The ideal time for posting on LinkedIn, however, is Tuesday sometime between 10 am and 11 am. This time of the day yields the highest number of clicks and shares.

Important Reminders About Social Media!

Although these times are ideal, remember that as with all marketing advice, your mileage may vary. As we see with Twitter, the type of business you run can greatly impact when the best time to post is. These times are most likely when you’ll see the highest rates of engagement, and should serve most individuals.

Finding out when the best times to post for your industry are, and scheduling accordingly, requires the use of social media tools. We went over some of our favorite social media tools in an earlier post, and this should help you to get started.

Regardless of when you post, however, remember that your goal is customer engagement. You want to talk to people, and you want them to talk to you. Customer engagement has no schedule: it will happen when it happens. I say this as a reminder that your social media manager should be monitoring social media feeds daily, and be willing to respond even if they are at home.

The post Timing is Everything: Best Times for Posting Content on Social Media appeared first on Rank Executives.

Content Creation Tools

These tools are used for content creation. While we pride ourselves on never outsourcing, we have a team of writers ready to write content on a regular basis. Furthermore, we had to lean on these tools when we were starting out to locate talent in the first place. For those lacking the resources to write their content, these are fantastic tools for getting the content from elsewhere.

UpWork (formerly oDesk)

Upwork is a network of freelancers connected through a unified platform. Previously known as oDesk, UpWork retains all of the features that made its predecessor useful. Talent ranges from SEO experts to writers and graphic artists. In short, everything you need for content creation can be found on this one platform.

Jobs can be created and posted publicly or handed to a select team of freelancers. This allows you to work with the individuals that you want to work with while creating a reliable team you can turn to on a regular basis. Furthermore, each job can be paid hourly or on a fixed price. The milestones system is fantastic for larger projects and allows you to approve the results each step of the way.

For hourly work, UpWork includes a built-in “work diary” application that takes regular screenshots, allowing you to see what your freelance employee has been up to. This guarantees that every minute billed is a minute worked.

TextBroker

This platform is focused on written content and delivers fast results. When you post up a job, you can be sure that the content will be written and submitted before the day is out. These rapid results do come with a downside – quality control. You will need to pay top-dollar for a high-quality, well-written article. Anything below five stars will suffer from grammar and spelling errors. If you use TextBroker, be prepared to edit unless you are willing to pay for quality.

Content Distribution Tools

Creating high-quality content is only half the battle. You also have to get the content in front of your customers. Publishing content on your website is a good way to place your work somewhere on the internet, but you need to promote it if you hope for success. These tools are incredibly useful for getting your content distributed, and we highly recommend them.

Outbrain

Outbrain is a promotional tool used to get your content and links to your content onto trusted websites across the web. You have likely seen a tab when browsing a news website that proclaimed “featured articles” or “recommended for you.” Sometimes these articles link off-site, but the content is still engaging. These links are provided by services like Outbrain.

In fact, as a fun exercise, go to CNN.com. Click on a random story and scroll down to the bottom, you will most likely see a bunch of stories “recommended by Outbrain”. In fact, when you click these links you may notice your browser includes a “traffic.outbrain.com” URL before you are redirected.

Outbrain is thus a fantastic tool for getting exposure for all of your content!

NeoReach

Influencer marketing has been growing steadily over the past few years, and its compatibility with content marketing is apparent. Social media is inextricably linked with content marketing, but being the only one pushing your content is a poor tactic. Influencer marketing platforms like NeoReach pay social media celebrities (influencers) to promote your content for you.

NeoReach has already gathered a large number of influencers in spite of being relatively new to the space and thus far has proven highly effective in content promotion.

Analytics Tools

All the tools in the world do not change the fact that if you cannot measure it, it may as well not exist. Gathering hard data about traffic, conversions, and revenue are essential for knowing if your marketing efforts work. Here are a couple of the tools we use for measuring data to demonstrate that what we are doing makes a difference.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most popular tool for analyzing a website, and for good reason. It gives you all the information about where your traffic is coming from, where they land, where they go, and where they are when they leave or convert. Using this tool you know if the bulk of yours sales come from organic search, and can even determine what websites are driving customers away.

The one major flaw comes from the one part you’d think Google Analytics would be strongest: keyword traffic. As an internet marketer, you’d want to know what your strongest keywords are. Way back in 2011, Google updated its privacy policy so that now many of the keywords used to find your site come back as “(not provided)”.

In spite of this flaw, Google Analytics is still a very useful tool for providing traffic data and knowing where it all comes from. This way you know where your marketing efforts are succeeding, and where they are falling apart.

SEMrush

For SEO analytics, SEMrush is one of the most popular and useful tools on the market. SEMrush provides traffic estimates on your site and your competitor’s websites based on keyword rankings. It lists out whom your competition is based on keywords, what those keywords are, and where you are ranked. You can even get an overview of where your backlinks are coming from.

SEMrush is an incredibly useful tool that professional internet marketers use on a regular basis and are expected to be familiar with it. Some of the information overlaps with Google Analytics and often comes into conflict. When Google Analytics says one thing and SEMrush says another, we would default to Google Analytics.

No list is going to be exhaustive, but this is a good start and a representative sample of the tools we use on a regular basis. Every tool does have a learning curve attached to it and takes time to learn the intricacies of, but all are well worth the effort.

The post Content Marketing Tools you Cannot Ignore appeared first on Rank Executives.

As professional social media managers, we use a number of tools to give us all of these functions and more. Below we list some of our favorite social media tools, and detail what they have to offer to your campaign.

Social Bro

Social Bro is an excellent social media tool for Twitter and Instagram users. One of our favorite features of Social Bro is the ability to identify when your audience is online. This information is essential as it allows you to optimize your tweet schedule. Social Bro will help ensure all of your carefully crafted tweets make their way in front of your customers.

This particular platform also offers tools for a direct messaging campaign. Direct messaging is fantastic for inviting people to webinars or creating targeted promotions. The features of this application are numerous, and it is for this reason that we use Social Bro in all of our social media campaigns.

CrowdFire

Another tool that works well with Twitter and Instagram is CrowdFire. Formerly known as JustUnfollow, CrowdFire is used to help manage your audience. In the social media world, there is an unspoken expectation. If you follow somebody, they ought to follow you in turn. If somebody does not follow you back, then you will need to locate this person and unfollow them. Using this tool you can quickly locate those guilty of this social media faux pas and take action. The tool also helps you find additional people to follow based on who your competitors are following.

IFTTT

Not strictly a social media tool, but a more general tool that you will find incredibly useful for all of your social media applications. When working in any campaign, one quickly discovers there are certain tasks that are time-consuming, and often annoying. IFTTT (short for: If This Then That) is an automation service that allows you to tie multiple platforms together and coordinate actions.

Some examples of how we use IFTTT in our social media campaign include taking an image we post to Instagram and tweeting it as an embedded image. You can also use this tool to publish content across multiple platforms at the same time. Say you want to publish something to both Facebook and have it post to Google+ automatically? Using IFTTT makes it possible.

Google Alerts

One of the hardest parts of managing a useful social media campaign is in keeping up to date with industry news. Setting up Google Alerts gives you a daily feed of headlines based on your most relevant key terms. This gives you plenty of content to talk about that is relevant to your target audience. Google Alerts is a useful tool not only for your social media campaign but also for your general use.

Buffer

A very well regarded social media tool, Buffer lets you schedule tweets and posts in advance. This tool can work with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and even LinkedIn. Combined with a tool like Social Bro is when Buffer shines. By using the analytics data generated by Social Bro, you can schedule posts through Buffer to take place on the weekend or after work. This ensures that you do not have to change your work schedule to get content in front of your followers. Buffer also provides analytics for your tweets so you know what works and what does not.

These are five of our favorite social media tools, but many more exist. Using the above, however, will get you started on your social media campaign. This will ensure your success online and get your brand in front of a wider audience than would otherwise be possible. If this all seems a little overwhelming, just remember we are always here to help with any of your social media needs.

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