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best digital marketing strategies for 2016

Looking for ways to enhance your digital marketing strategy?

This article highlights 5 useful and effective tips from all facets of digital marketing. Use these tips to get ahead of your competition in 2016.

1) Use the Silo Structure for Your Blog

What’s the silo structure?

To explain that, we need to take a look at an average website. A typical website has its blog pages static and independent of each other. Blog posts are part of an “blogroll”, meaning every blog post falls under a section called blogs.

This method has two problems. The first problem is this structure makes it tough for your visitors to navigate your blog (especially if you have a lot of blog posts). If your website is difficult to navigate, your bounce rate will skyrocket. This will push your website down Google’s SERP (search engine results pages).

The second problem is if you don’t use the silo method, you are discarding the ability to further to interconnect your website.

Let me explain. With the silo structure, your articles and blog posts are subsections of major pages on your website (the silos). You are giving all the minor pages more of a SEO boost than if you only used a blogroll. That allows those pages to be more visible on Google, which will give you major pages more visibility. It’s a positive self-feeding cycle.

What Does a Silo Look like?

Here’s what a silo structure would like if you ran a digital marketing blog.

First, you choose your silos. These are general categories that your blog posts would fall into. For example, if you run a digital marketing blog, you might choose SEO, affiliate marketing, and PPC marketing. Put user- friendliness at the forefront when creating your catergories. You don’t want too many categories or too few.

Each silo will house an article when you decide to make a blog post. For instance, let’s say you wrote an article about the different places where you could buy a PPC ad. With a typical website structure, you would post that article under your “blogroll”. With a silo structure, you don’t have a tab on your website that says blogs. You would post that very same article under your PPC tab.

Harness the power of silos. The benefits are tremendous. This page gives more details about installing silos for WordPress sites.

2) Don’t Over-Optimize Extension Words

An extension word is the text you find at the end of your URL.

There are a lot of webmasters out there that don’t bother to change their extension words. They don’t change the gibberish that appears after their URL into something readable.

For instance, let’s say your website is:

onlinemarketing1234.com

If you post an article about PPC, it will organically show up as something like:

onlinemarketing1234.com/75fhg6

But if you take the time to change the extension URL, it will show up as something less nonsensical such as:

onlinemarketing.com/ppctip1

But, webmasters with industry-related domain names are at risk of getting penalties. This is a process I call doubling up.

If your website’s name is bestseotips.com, then don’t make a URL extension called bestseotips.com. The website hyperlink in question would look like this: bestseotips.com/bestseotips. You chose that URL because you want to rank for the phrase “best seo tips”. That’s great. But don’t put your domain name as a URL extension for any blog posts or pages. If you do that, Google might think you are trying to rank high for a sought after keyword, and they will penalize you.

It’s not bad to have an industry-related phrase as your domain name. It’s not bad to have an industry-related phrase as a URL extension. Just don’t double up, especially if you have a new website and it’s a popular keyword.

3) Focus on Mobile-Friendliness

Cellphones have exploded in popularity in the last five years. It’s crucial to take note of the depth of this shift. For instance, in China, many consumers are foregoing desktops entirely.

Huge groups of people are connecting to the internet for the first time, and they are using a cellphone to do it. There is a shift toward mobile here in America too. That means mobile- friendliness is more essential than ever. If your website doesn’t look good on a cell phone, you are alienating a massive group of potential customers.

What’s the First Step?

First, check how your site looks on your phone.

If you do most of your work on a desktop, you may have never checked your website on a phone. Some WordPress themes aren’t optimized for mobile, meaning parts of your website could look terrible on a cell phone.

The first step toward mobile-friendliness is changing your WordPress theme. Responsive themes are themes that look great on a desktop and on all the mobile platforms.

4) Look Into Display Remarketing

What is the major problem with advertisements?

You know the answer. Many times you are showing an ad to someone who has no interest in your product. But what if they had visited your website before? If that was the case, they would be much more likely to buy your product.

Before it was difficult to market exclusively to those people. Display remarketing makes it easy to market to people who have already visited your website.

What’s awesome about display remarketing is that it only takes about 7 minutes to get started. Also, it’s not as expensive as you think it would be. Go here to learn more.

5) Use Sidekick

If you are emailing someone, then it is useful to know if they opened your email. Sidekick tells you if people open your email and how many links they clicked on.

What is its downside?

Let’s be honest, it’s kind of intrusive. It’s old hat for many, but everyone won’t feel comfortable using it.

It is effective though. If people are opening your emails (and clicking on your links), your brand interests them. Maybe they aren’t buying because your price is too high. Maybe they are looking for a special bonus.

You can use this information to sweeten the pot. Offer a special deal for these borderline customers and watch your sales bloom.

Sidekick has free and paid packages. Start small and grow. Click here to learn more.

Conclusion

We know that this list is not all inclusive and we are working on the next set of 5 digital marketing strategies for 2016 that you should see posted next week. This should help you and your business get started with creating the right strategy for your digital marketing campaign in 2016.

About the Author

Zachary is a freelance copywriter and will help you grow your profits. Just send him an email, and he will personally analyze your newsletters, product descriptions, or landing page copy for free. No risk, no obligation. Get in touch at Zachary Writes today!

 

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Obviously, there are no guarantees of success; however, if you do the above, your chances for success are improved.

If you are considering launching a business or growing your ongoing company, check out Dear Mr. A for creating strategy around your passions. The Next Level Navigator strategy process is a great crowdfunding tool! Click here to look inside Dear Mr. A.

Why not tell us about your own digital marketing strategies and how they have affected your business? Please do so, either in the comments below, or by submitting a guest post to us. We review these posts carefully, and as long as your contribution adds something to the entrepreneurial community we’d be happy to feature it on our site with a link back to yours!

 

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