B2B Marketing News: B2B Content Targeting Strategy, Growing Search & Social Ad Spend, YouTube’s Auto-Chapters, & Dark Mode Marketing Insights
Dow Jones Data Identifies B2B Content-Targeting Strategy
73 percent of B2B marketers said they find it reassuring to learn more about a brand even when they’re already in the buying journey, while 68 percent view content about a brand that comes from business news and trade media as more trustworthy than information from the brand’s website — two of several statistics of interest contained in newly-released survey data of interest to digital marketers. MediaPost
LinkedIn Engagement Continues to Grow, Ad Revenue Rising Amid Economic Recovery
Record engagement levels, up some 19 percent from the last quarter, were among the quarterly highlights for Microsoft’s LinkedIn platform (client), accompanied by revenue that grew by 42 percent and advertising demand up some 61 percent, Microsoft recently announced. Social Media Today
With Younger Audiences Going Ad-Free, Brand Integration Is More Important Than Ever
Brand integration is becoming more of a key marketing tactic as more audiences, particularly younger demographics, eschew advertising, leading to new strategic placement options, according to recently-released Nielsen study data. MediaPost
TikTok Shares New Insights into Why People Use the App, and How it Celebrates Authenticity
As more B2B brands test the waters with social platform TikTok, some 53 percent of global TikTok users have said that they trust others to be their authentic selves on the platform, with some 31 percent viewing its content as uplifting, and 53 percent noting a sense of community among its users, according to newly-released TikTok report data . Social Media Today
Facebook tests a new option for cross-posting your Facebook feed posts to Instagram
Marketers utilizing both Facebook and its Instagram platform have been giving new options making it easier to share content among the two services, including the ability to cross-post Reels and Stories elements from Facebook to Instagram, Facebook recently announced. TechCrunch
YouTube Adds Auto-Chapters as a Search Element, the Next Stage of its Chapters Push
Last year YouTube rolled out a smart indexing feature for splitting videos into parts to make finding certain information within a video easier, and recently the Google-owned video platform has given marketers new options for optimizing their video chapter names, along with adding auto-chapter information to provide additional search data insights, YouTube announced recently. Social Media Today
Talent Gap Hinders Marketers’ Use of AI
Some 51 percent of marketing leaders have said that hiring talent with sufficient artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data science skill-sets are among their leading challenges, while tech partnerships, internal cross-training, and selecting the right AI technology were seen as additional top challenges, according to recently-released AI survey data. MarketingCharts
Snapchat Adds 13M More Daily Users in Q3, Now up to 500M Monthly Actives
Snapchat saw 306 million daily active users during the last quarter, with more than 500 million active monthly users, accompanied by the platform’s first ever quarter topping $1 billion in revenue, Snapchat recently announced. Social Media Today
Dark Mode for Email Survey: What Do Marketers Think?
72 percent of marketers said that they have dark mode email creation on their radar, with some 39 percent of B2B brands noting that they incorporate dark mode emails, a practice that nearly half of B2C brands utilize, according to newly-released email advertising report data of interest to online marketers. Mailjet by Pathwire
Which Media Are Recovering to Pre-COVID Ad Spend – or Exceeding It?
Search, social, and other forms of digital advertising are among the media types expected to see the greatest gains during 2021, according to recently-released advertising revenue forecast data. MarketingCharts
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:
A lighthearted look at the “productivity and interruptions” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist
Global IT spending to hit $4.5 trillion in 2022, says Gartner — The Register
TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:
- Nick Nelson — 10 Tips for Finding Your Way as a New Entrepreneur — Small Business Trends
- Lee Odden — 5 SEO Content Writing Tips — InspireFirst
- TopRank Marketing — B2B Influencer Marketing: Your 2021 Guide To Success [+ 3 Examples] — Pop Pays
Have you come across your own leading B2B marketing news from the past week of industry news? Please drop us a line in the comments below.
Thank you for joining us for the week’s TopRank Marketing B2B marketing news, and we hope you’ll return next Friday for more of the week’s most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us on our LinkedIn page, or at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news.
The post B2B Marketing News: B2B Content Targeting Strategy, Growing Search & Social Ad Spend, YouTube’s Auto-Chapters, & Dark Mode Marketing Insights appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.
Opening up COP26 to the world with Google Arts & Culture
For nearly three decades, the UN has been bringing together almost every country on Earth for climate summits called COP, which stands for ‘Conference of the Parties.’ Many believe this year’s summit, COP26, is the world’s best chance to get runaway climate change under control. The UK is asking influential world leaders to bring their plans for real world changes to Glasgow, plans that will help swiftly bring down emissions — from coal to cars to cash — and limit global warming to the 1.5 degree maximum.
But while world leaders gather to discuss their commitments, the people and groups who are fighting for climate action are being showcased. Organized by the UK Government, this is the area where the public, civil society, indigenous peoples, youth groups, charities, academics, artists and businesses can have their voices heard at COP26, through an extensive programme of events, workshops, talks and exhibitions that promote dialogue, awareness, education and commitments.
Visit the COP26 Green Zone on Google Arts & Culture
A new virtual exhibition on the Google Arts & Culture platform will be an exciting part of the Green Zone giving people an insight into what’s happening from wherever they are in the world. It will provide a window into climate action, and the Green Zone, with over 60 multimedia stories showcasing some of the organizations and communities that will be present at COP26.
Inspiring stories
By visiting the Green Zone on Google Arts & Culture, people can discover a wide range of exhibitors and stories. This includes Conservation Volunteers in the UK, who connect people to the green spaces that form a vital part of any happy healthy community. Their teams of dedicated, passionate staff and volunteers work with communities across the UK helping preserve nature, build gardens and grow inclusive and diverse communities. By 2025 they pledge to have planted five million trees.
The “India One” Solar Thermal Power Plant illustrates how the Brahma Kumari community came together to build a solar thermal power plant in Rajasthan. People can learn about this and hear how the project was born by a commitment to living in harmony with nature.
And from all sectors, people are considering what climate action means for them. In the arts, Reimagining Museums for Climate Action is an initiative to explore how a fundamental questioning of what a museum is can make them tools to empower the climate vulnerable.
COP26 has four goals, one of which is adaptation, helping communities to adjust to actual or expected future climates. We know that the most vulnerable are at the greatest risk from climate change, and that they have done the least to cause it. Action to address this and build resilience is needed now, before more people lose their lives or livelihoods. The international community must unite and support people who are most vulnerable to the impacts of the changing climate.
In October 2013, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the province of Bohol, Philippines, causing land subsidence in some of its small island communities. Now, the islands of Batasan, Pangapasan, Ubay and Bilangbilangan in the municipality of Tubigon experience partial or complete flooding even during normal spring tides.
Coming face-to-face with a hundred years’ worth of sea level rise, the island communities have demonstrated great resilience. In 2017, the Racing the King Tide research team filmed a series of micro documentaries which were played to the Local Government Unit in Tubigon in 2018.
These and dozens more stories are available in the COP26 Green Zone on Google Arts & Culture and we are delighted to be sharing them with the world. Climate change affects us all. By opening up the Green Zone to the world with Google, we can all learn more about it, be inspired and moved by stories from around the globe, and gain a greater understanding of the challenges and opportunities for our planet.
Escono Windows e Mac OS nuovi: non c’è fretta di installarli
Sono disponibili al pubblico le nuove versioni dei principali sistemi operativi per computer, ossia Windows 11 e Mac OS 12 Monterey.
Una volta tanto non è urgente installarli: non introducono miglioramenti importanti della sicurezza, perlomeno per l’utente comune, per cui aggiornatevi se volete, ma non sentitevi particolarmente in obbligo. Non c‘è fretta: Windows 10 continuerà a essere supportato fino a ottobre del 2025.
Come sempre, prima di aggiornare un sistema operativo, fate un backup completo dei vostri dati e delle vostre applicazioni (meglio ancora, dell’intero sistema), controllate che le applicazioni che usate e il vostro hardware siano compatibili con la nuova versione di Windows/MacOS e ritagliatevi un paio d’ore di tempo per l’aggiornamento.
Ho provato a installare sia Windows 11 sia MacOS Monterey, e anche sui miei computer non particolarmente potenti o recenti non sembrano causare rallentamenti. In entrambi i casi, il computer stesso vi avvisa se è compatibile o meno con l’aggiornamento non appena tentate di avviarlo.
Windows 11
La nuova versione del sistema operativo di Microsoft offre un nuovo design molto pulito, che però ha una scelta probabilmente controversa: il pulsante Start, che per decenni è stato nell’angolo in basso a sinistra, ora sta in basso al centro della Taskbar, sovvertendo abitudini e automatismi ben radicati nella memoria muscolare degli utenti. Si può riportare a sinistra andando nelle impostazioni di Windows 11.
A parte questo, una novità interessante di Windows 11 è che vi girano o gireranno anche le applicazioni Android, grazie al Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA), anche se con alcune limitazioni hardware e geografiche. C’è una gestione più potente dei monitor multipli e delle finestre multiple, arriva un nuovo Store delle app Microsoft e ci sono alcune migliorie per i gamer. Ma non ho visto nulla che mi faccia correre ad installarlo.
MacOS 12 (Monterey)
Il nuovo MacOS è installabile anche su computer piuttosto vecchiotti (ho appena finito di installarlo su un Mini del 2014). Anche qui non ci sono miglioramenti che fanno venire fretta di installarlo: sono arrivati gli shortcut, ossia dei “programmi” o script che permettono di automatizzare le operazioni ripetitive (tipo creare una GIF partendo da un video). I Mac possono ora essere usati come monitor e altoparlanti per altri dispositivi, tramite AirPlay: si può mostrare sullo schermo del Mac lo schermo di un iPhone, per esempio. I MacBook recenti hanno una funzione di consumo energetico ridotto (è nelle impostazioni della batteria). C’è un’opzione che consente di limitare notifiche e distrazioni.
La novità forse più interessante è lo Universal Control, che però non è ancora disponibile ma dovrebbe consentire prossimamente di usare una sola tastiera e un solo trackpad o mouse di un Mac per comandare altri Mac e iPad nelle sue vicinanze (che siano sulla stessa rete Wi-Fi e usino lo stesso Apple ID e soprattutto permetterà di trascinare e mollare un file da un dispositivo all’altro.
I nuovi MacBook Pro, per contro, rivelano una magagna piuttosto comica: il loro schermo ha una tacca, il notch, per ospitare la webcam, ma la barra menu situata in alto non ne tiene conto e alcune sue voci finiscono per essere nascoste dalla tacca. Piuttosto imbarazzante, per un’azienda che ha il culto del design e dell’estetica.
Questo tweet https://twitter.com/thelazza/status/1453307197115490317 mostra un problema serio dei nuovi Mac con la tacca per la webcam:
WTF HAHAHAHA HOW IS THIS SHIPPABLE? WHAT IS THIS?! pic.twitter.com/epse3Cv3xF
— Quinn Nelson (@SnazzyQ) October 26, 2021
Il problema è parzialmente risolvibile cambiando le impostazioni dello schermo in modo da sacrificarne una fettina.
Fonti aggiuntive: Howtogeek, Gizmodo.
Expanding pathways into higher education and the workforce
Google believes that to have sustainable economic growth, we must have inclusive growth. It is why we developed the Grow with Google digital skills training program, which provides free training to help individuals grow their careers and businesses. Through our digital skilling programs and Google.org grantees, we have helped put nearly 170,000 Americans into new jobs, and of these, 67% are from underrepresented groups, including 44% women. Our Google Career Certificates, available on Coursera, have helped people enter high-growth career fields including Data Analytics, IT Support, Project Management and User Experience Design. Because we believe that collective action is key to success, we created a network of more than 150 companies who accept the Grow with Google Certificates as credentials for roles, including Walmart, Infosys, Verizon and of course, Google (and we are hiring, by the way!).
Today, we’re announcing an expansion of our Google Career Certificates program, including furthering our partnerships with community colleges, translating our Google Career Certificates into college credit and partnering with four-year universities to prepare students for in-demand jobs.
1. Providing community colleges with free access to Google Career Certificates
Community colleges are critical to workforce development and economic mobility, providing accessible education options for millions of Americans and opening doors to opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach. With 44% of American undergraduates attending community colleges, and as the primary institutions serving students from underrepresented groups, there is no doubt they play an invaluable role across the U.S.
Beginning today, the Google Career Certificate program is free for all community colleges and career and technical education (CTE) high schools to add to their curriculum. We will also be partnering with the American Association of Community Colleges, the primary advocacy group for U.S. community colleges and their 12 million students. All of these schools will now be able to onboard this curriculum for free.
2. Translating our Google Career Certificates into college credit
All our Google Career Certificates are now recommended by the American Council on Education for up to 12 college credits (the equivalent to four college courses). For the more than 36 million Americans who have some post-secondary education but no college degree, Google Career Certificates can help provide an affordable on-ramp back to earning their diploma.
3. Partnering with four-year universities to prepare students for in-demand jobs
We are also partnering with four-year universities that are accepting credit for the Google Career Certificates, including Northeastern, Purdue Global, Arizona State University and SUNY, to help increase earning potential and provide students with direct pathways to jobs. For example, a psychology major who acquires data analysis skills can unlock more than 100,000 additional entry-level jobs paying on average $60,000, versus $39,000 for psychology majors overall.
What inspires us to do this work are the real-life stories we hear every day. Like Chelsea Rucker, who was struggling to make ends meet before she took the Google IT Support Certificate through our grantee Goodwill and got a job at Google. Or Natalie Burns, who, while attending community college in Texas, earned her IT certificate and got a job in cybersecurity with a salary three times higher than her previous retail role. These are the stories that drive us, and we will continue to help people develop the digital skills they need to participate in this economy, and gain confidence that they have valuable options for their future.
Squid Game, virus e truffe abusano della popolarità della serie
Tutti parlano di Squid Game, la serie coreana distribuita da Netflix, e questa popolarità ha attirato l’interesse dei truffatori.
Circolano finte app Android che fingono di essere sfondi a tema Squid Game ma in realtà installano malware, come nota Lukas Stefanko di ESET. Oltre 200 app in Google Play usano il nome della serie senza però esservi associate ufficialmente e fanno soldi attraverso le pubblicità in-app. Va ricordato che non esiste nessuna app ufficiale della serie.
Secondo Kaspersky (a 29 minuti dall’inizio del podcast), una di queste app fraudolente è stata scaricata oltre un milione di volte e attiva di nascosto abbonamenti a servizi SMS premium a pagamento, i cui incassi vanno ai gestori dell’app, oppure rubano dati o password.
Altre segnalazioni riguardano app che dicono di consentire di vedere una puntata della serie, ma non sono ospitate da Google Play, oppure sono app che fingono di essere giochi legati alla serie ma in realtà mostrano solo un’animazione intanto che si fanno dare i dati degli utenti (o li rubano). Ci sono anche finti negozi ufficiali che rifilano fregature a chi abbocca. Non cascateci.
Fonti aggiuntive: PC Mag, Punto Informatico, Itechpost, TechRepublic, Tomsguide.
Netflix, 5 anime da non perdere a novembre 2021
Call of Duty: Vanguard: scopriamo i cinque eroi principali
Supporting journalism in Africa
Citizen journalism is playing a crucial role in helping South African communities unite. Food for Manzi is one organization which tells the untold stories of rural communities and agriculture in South Africa to challenge stereotypes and spread positivity. With support from the Google News Initiative, they set up the Sinelizwi citizen journalism project which trained 62 citizens from all nine Provinces to tell local stories to empower and unite local communities.
Projects like this are why Google invests in the Google News Initiative (GNI), and this week we held the first GNI for Africa event.
The event is an opportunity for journalists, publishers and content creators in Africa to find out more about Google’s training programmes for journalists and news business professionals. From understanding how small and medium size news organizations can grow their digital business to how to use consumer insights and data to better understand reader preferences and increase profitability and engagement, the event brings together experts from Google and the industry to share tools, training and best practices.
The news landscape in Africa is changing fast. In five years, the number of people accessing digital platforms for news content has almost doubled, opening up access to news and supporting a new generation of independent and digital media. Yet not everyone has the opportunity to access digital media, and many more people and communities are not represented in the news. Organizations working to change this, like Pulse in Nigeria, were also part of the event. They spoke about how they have used new digital formats to engage a mass youth audience and developed formats like Explainers to provide additional — and very much needed — context to the flow of information.
At the event, we also announced a partnership with UNESCO to further invest in training for journalists in Africa. Using its networks of established journalism schools, UNESCO will launch a collaborative programme to update journalism education and training programmes run by over 100 expert institutions in Africa, enabling them to better respond to the major changes in journalism and publishing in recent times. This new training initiative will roll out over the next 18 months.
Google is increasing its investment in and support of journalism in Africa, including hiring a News Lab Teaching Fellow who provides locally relevant training for journalists in Southern Africa and programmes such as the Digital Growth Programme andInnovation Challenges which support publishers in their digital transformation. To be part of this training send an email to newslabsupport@google.com.
Daylight Saving Time tips from Google’s sleep scientist
As the days get shorter and colder, it’s getting much harder for us to step out from under our bed covers and into the dark morning. When Daylight Saving Time ends this weekend in Europe and the weekend after in North America, we’ll need to adjust ourselves even more. So, what’s the best way to deal with the new sleeping schedule?
The Nest team spoke to Dr. Logan Schneider who gave us five tips to get your winter sleep schedule ready. Originally a sleep scientist at Stanford Medicine, Logan is now the sleep expert at Google Health. He’s also the brain behind Sleep Sensing on the new Google Nest Hub, the smart screen that helps you get a better night’s sleep.
Start adjusting on time… or don’t adjust at all
That extra hour of sleep this weekend can feel like jet lag for some. Soon, your sleep rhythm might make you want to go to bed earlier than usual. Logan’s advice is to start preparing a few days in advance to make the transition easier for your body. Dr. Logan says: “Rather than shifting your bedtime and wake time by an hour at once, you could try shifting them over four days, so that’s by 15 minutes a day. Start two days before the clocks change, and wrap up two days after.”
The time change can be even more dreadful for kids and their parents. Dr. Logan applies the same principles to kids as above, but makes the night of the time change extra fun: “I allow my kids to wake up 15 minutes later on the Friday before the time change, and again on Saturday morning. On Saturday night, the kids get to stay up an hour later than usual. I make sure we’re watching a movie in a bright light environment, because that helps push the clock a bit later. They wake up at the usual time on Sunday.”
For adults, there might be an even better way: why adjust to the new schedule at all? “You could simply take advantage of being an early bird and just stay on the earlier schedule”, Logan says. Nest Hub with Sleep Sensing can help you monitor your sleep schedule and provide a new bedtime and wake time recommendation after the transition.
I nuovi prodotti ufficiali dell’Inter in offerta lancio su Amazon
OPPO A54s arriva anche in Italia: specifiche e prezzo
Imprenditoria al femminile e gender gap: le iniziative per l’inclusività di Huawei
Kaspersky: il 40% dei piccoli italiani condivide dati personali online
Introducing Pathways: A next-generation AI architecture
When I reflect on the past two decades of computer science research, few things inspire me more than the remarkable progress we’ve seen in the field of artificial intelligence.
In 2001, some colleagues sitting just a few feet away from me at Google realized they could use an obscure technique called machine learning to help correct misspelled Search queries. (I remember I was amazed to see it work on everything from “ayambic pitnamiter” to “unnblevaiabel”). Today, AI augments many of the things that we do, whether that’s helping you capture a nice selfie, or providing more useful search results, or warning hundreds of millions of people when and where flooding will occur. Twenty years of advances in research have helped elevate AI from a promising idea to an indispensable aid in billions of people’s daily lives. And for all that progress, I’m still excited about its as-yet-untapped potential – AI is poised to help humanity confront some of the toughest challenges we’ve ever faced, from persistent problems like illness and inequality to emerging threats like climate change.
But matching the depth and complexity of those urgent challenges will require new, more capable AI systems – systems that can combine AI’s proven approaches with nascent research directions to be able to solve problems we are unable to solve today. To that end, teams across Google Research are working on elements of a next-generation AI architecture we think will help realize such systems.
We call this new AI architecture Pathways.
Pathways is a new way of thinking about AI that addresses many of the weaknesses of existing systems and synthesizes their strengths. To show you what I mean, let’s walk through some of AI’s current shortcomings and how Pathways can improve upon them.
Today’s AI models are typically trained to do only one thing. Pathways will enable us to train a single model to do thousands or millions of things.
Today’s AI systems are often trained from scratch for each new problem – the mathematical model’s parameters are initiated literally with random numbers. Imagine if, every time you learned a new skill (jumping rope, for example), you forgot everything you’d learned – how to balance, how to leap, how to coordinate the movement of your hands – and started learning each new skill from nothing.
That’s more or less how we train most machine learning models today. Rather than extending existing models to learn new tasks, we train each new model from nothing to do one thing and one thing only (or we sometimes specialize a general model to a specific task). The result is that we end up developing thousands of models for thousands of individual tasks. Not only does learning each new task take longer this way, but it also requires much more data to learn each new task, since we’re trying to learn everything about the world and the specifics of that task from nothing (completely unlike how people approach new tasks).
Instead, we’d like to train one model that can not only handle many separate tasks, but also draw upon and combine its existing skills to learn new tasks faster and more effectively. That way what a model learns by training on one task – say, learning how aerial images can predict the elevation of a landscape – could help it learn another task — say, predicting how flood waters will flow through that terrain.
We want a model to have different capabilities that can be called upon as needed, and stitched together to perform new, more complex tasks – a bit closer to the way the mammalian brain generalizes across tasks.
Today’s models mostly focus on one sense. Pathways will enable multiple senses.
People rely on multiple senses to perceive the world. That’s very different from how contemporary AI systems digest information. Most of today’s models process just one modality of information at a time. They can take in text, or images or speech — but typically not all three at once.
Pathways could enable multimodal models that encompass vision, auditory, and language understanding simultaneously. So whether the model is processing the word “leopard,” the sound of someone saying “leopard,” or a video of a leopard running, the same response is activated internally: the concept of a leopard. The result is a model that’s more insightful and less prone to mistakes and biases.
And of course an AI model needn’t be restricted to these familiar senses; Pathways could handle more abstract forms of data, helping find useful patterns that have eluded human scientists in complex systems such as climate dynamics.
Today’s models are dense and inefficient. Pathways will make them sparse and efficient.
A third problem is that most of today’s models are “dense,” which means the whole neural network activates to accomplish a task, regardless of whether it’s very simple or really complicated.
This, too, is very unlike the way people approach problems. We have many different parts of our brain that are specialized for different tasks, yet we only call upon the relevant pieces for a given situation. There are close to a hundred billion neurons in your brain, but you rely on a small fraction of them to interpret this sentence.
AI can work the same way. We can build a single model that is “sparsely” activated, which means only small pathways through the network are called into action as needed. In fact, the model dynamically learns which parts of the network are good at which tasks — it learns how to route tasks through the most relevant parts of the model. A big benefit to this kind of architecture is that it not only has a larger capacity to learn a variety of tasks, but it’s also faster and much more energy efficient, because we don’t activate the entire network for every task.
For example, GShard and Switch Transformer are two of the largest machine learning models we’ve ever created, but because both use sparse activation, they consume less than 1/10th the energy that you’d expect of similarly sized dense models — while being as accurate as dense models.
So to recap: today’s machine learning models tend to overspecialize at individual tasks when they could excel at many. They rely on one form of input when they could synthesize several. And too often they resort to brute force when deftness and specialization of expertise would do.
That’s why we’re building Pathways. Pathways will enable a single AI system to generalize across thousands or millions of tasks, to understand different types of data, and to do so with remarkable efficiency – advancing us from the era of single-purpose models that merely recognize patterns to one in which more general-purpose intelligent systems reflect a deeper understanding of our world and can adapt to new needs.
That last point is crucial. We’re familiar with many of today’s biggest global challenges, and working on technologies to help address them. But we’re also sure there are major future challenges we haven’t yet anticipated, and many will demand urgent solutions. So, with great care, and always in line with our AI Principles, we’re crafting the kind of next-generation AI system that can quickly adapt to new needs and solve new problems all around the world as they arise, helping humanity make the most of the future ahead of us.
5 lessons from a blogger with 500,000 readers
Editor’s note: Today’s guest post is from Ryan Robinson, blogger and podcaster from ryrob.com.
Interested in growing your blog’s audience? Over the past few years, I’ve built an audience of over 500,000 readers — and today, I wanted to share some of the best strategies I’ve learned.
With some repetition and a healthy dose of creativity, putting just one of these tips into practice could help you double (or even triple!) your readership.
Lesson 1: Use video to show your human side
Video is a great way to build an instant connection with new visitors — whether it’s an introduction video on your homepage, or tutorial videos within your blog posts. This humanizes you and helps you connect more deeply with your audience. Readers can actually hear your voice, see your body language, and get to know you better.
You don’t need a lot of fancy equipment to get started. You can use your smartphone to record a quick introduction of yourself and your blog. Host it on YouTube, then embed it on your blog’s homepage or “About” page to welcome new readers.
Lesson 2: Get featured in top publications
Getting featured in a top publication is a great way to bring in readers. It also shows that you’re a credible source of information. Take a look at the “Featured on” section on my blog’s homepage.
You might not be able to go straight to the top, so start by guest posting for larger blogs in your niche. Aim for websites that are just a few steps ahead of where you are today.
For example, rather than reaching straight for your dream publications when your blog is still relatively new, focus your guest posting efforts on sites that have somewhere in the tens of thousands of monthly readers. For more guidance and steps for getting published on larger sites in time, check out my guide to guest blogging.
Lesson 3: Create valuable content
To attract an audience, you need content that is valuable to your readers. And it’s important for your content to not only be educational, but engaging too.
I focus on building content that is…
- Comprehensive: Going more in-depth than your competitors can help you win loyal readers and encourage people to share your content.
- Easy to read: Aim for short paragraphs, subheadings and lists so your readers are more likely to stay engaged on the page.
- Well-structured: A clear post structure carries readers along without them ever feeling lost or confused. Plus, structuring your posts first helps you create content consistently.
Lesson 4: Craft a great intro (hook)
You don’t have long to make an impression online — just seconds, at most. Sure, headlines are important, but the introduction is also crucial.
A great way to begin your post is with a question or a promise. This immediately shows the reader that you understand their problem, and you’re going to help them solve it.
Take, for example, my guide about how to name a blog. It begins with the headline, “How to Name a Blog (the Smart Way): 40 Genius Blog Name Ideas (and Examples) to Get Inspired.” Here’s where the introduction takes over:
“There’s both an art and science to learning how to name a blog that tells readers about who you are, the topics you’re blogging about and more. So, what are you going to name your blog? Let’s dive into this ultimate guide, then look at some blog name ideas and examples to inspire your decision.”
In this introduction, I start with the promise that readers will learn how to choose a blog name that explains who they are and gives their audience useful context. Then, I restate the question, before sharing how we’ll work through that challenge together.
Lesson 5: Write in-depth answers in online forums
I’ve also built a presence in online forums to grow my readership. I’ll write answers on Quora, engage in discussions on GrowthHackers, and participate in Q&As on Producthunt.
I spend time finding questions that are relevant to my niche and writing in-depth responses. If the opportunity presents itself, I’ll include a link to one of my articles in my answer. This doesn’t draw tons of traffic overnight, but it adds up over time.
Ultimately, it takes time to build your audience. You may only have 100 monthly readers right now, but you can dramatically grow your audience with these tips. In fact, by this time next year, you might be well on your way to having hundreds of thousands of readers.