5 Proven List Building Strategies to Employ in 2017

Email marketing will be the most effective marketing tactic of 2017.

Email is so powerful that the Direct Marketing Association says that you can expect a ROI of $38 for every $1 you invest in email marketing. Similarly, Monetate research that analyzed over 500 million shopping experiences found email to be the single most powerful marketing tactic when it comes to conversions — email traffic converted more than both search and social traffic combined. That’s not all, but research shows email to be just as powerful during holidays: 25.1 percent of all sales during Black Friday 2015 was attributed to email, compared to just 1.6 percent of sales attributed to social media.

That said, email marketing isn’t often as easy as it is purported to be. For many, the single biggest struggle with email marketing is that of gaining subscribers. Here are five proven list building strategies that you can employ in 2017 — each backed up with case studies and research:

Offer an Incentive to Subscribers:

This could be in form of a coupon, a discount, or the popular option: an ebook or ecourse. As basic as it seems, a lot of email marketers still don’t offer an incentive to encourage people to subscribe to their email list. The result is a significant loss in subscribers they could have otherwise had.

Exactly how powerful is offering an incentive to subscribers? Very powerful. Offering an incentive is so powerful that Flyte was able to increase monthly subscriptions by a whopping 5,000 percent simply by going from offering nothing to offering people an incentive for joining their newsletter.

When offering an incentive, it is important to:

• Ensure that your incentive is very relevant to your site and the subscribers you are trying to attract.
• Ensure you carefully communicate that people will be getting regular emails from you when they sign up for your incentive.
• Deliver the incentive as soon as people sign up, and again remind them that they will be hearing from you frequently.

Run a Viral List Building Giveaway:

Meet Josh Earl. In an attempt to rapidly build his email list, Earl decided to run a viral giveaway. He offered people a popular paid software in his niche, and the condition for winning was to share his giveaway and subscribe to his newsletter. I mean, how seriously will people participate in a giveaway for free software? Apparently, overwhelmingly! Earl got 482,044 visitors to his blog and 187,991 subscribers to his email list within 11 days, all thanks to the giveaway.

If done right, a giveaway can be very massive for your list building. There’s a right and wrong way to do it, though. Here are some tips:

• First make sure the incentive you offer to your audience is relevant and in high demand. Many people offer gadgets, but if you run a health website how likely are people to be interested in your emails after they sign up for the gadget giveaway? The more relevant your giveaway is to your target audience, the better.
• Make it a requirement that people join your newsletter to participate in your giveaway — that’s the point of all this in the first place.
• Incentivize people to share your giveaway; give them bonus points for sharing your giveaway and inviting their friends.

Run a Challenge:

A challenge is very powerful for list building for two reasons:

• It can massively boost the size of your email list
• Due to the nature of the challenge, it creates a bond between you and subscribers — making them much more valuable than if you had gotten them from other means.

Running a challenge was exactly what Natalie Sisson did to give her email list a boost and help her book launch. The challenge was so successful that Sisson reported it to be the most successful initiative she has done on her blog. It resulted in over 1,000 new subscribers to her email list, her book becoming a #1 bestseller and a 100 percent increase in traffic.

Survey your audience to see what their major struggle is, and run a challenge around this — make it a requirement to join your email list to participate in the challenge. You will be surprised to see how successful this will be.

Content Upgrades:

The content upgrade became really popular a while back, but you can be rest assured that it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, content upgrades will be even more effective in 2017 for two reasons:

• It allows users to get relevant offers — someone interested in getting traffic won’t get an ebook on making money. This makes the second benefit much more powerful…
• It allows you to segment people. In fact, this is so powerful that many email service providers now actively include automation in their package. Research from MarketingSherpa shows that you can get up to a 208 percent boost in conversion rates by segmenting your email list and sending targeted emails to subscribers.

When you consider the above two factors, you can clearly see that content upgrades are the future of email list building and they will become more prominent in 2017. Brian Dean famously reported a conversion boost of 785 percent in one day simply by implementing content upgrades.

Expanded Guest Posts:

Similar to the content upgrade is the expanded guest post: it is basically you offering a content upgrade inside your guest post on another blog. The only difference with an expanded guest post is that your content upgrade is offered inside a guest post, instead of directly on your blog.

Expanded guest posts have been so successful for a lot of influencers: Bryan Harris reports getting 500 subscribers from every expanded guest post.

There are a few things you should keep in mind to make expanded guest posts work for you:

• Put great work into your guest post; the more comprehensive and practical it is, the better. Not only will this increase the number of subscribers you can get, but it also reduces the chances of the host blog removing your content upgrade.
• Make your content upgrade a resource if possible — a lot more people will want to download a resource that complements your post.
• Hint at your content upgrade early in the guest post; this will create desire and massively boost conversions.
• When you finally introduce your content upgrade, make sure you direct people to a landing page specifically customized for the blog your guest post will be published on.

Conclusion

Just as it has always been in the past, email will still be very important in 2017. Hopefully you’re able to record a massive increase in the size of your email list by implementing the above techniques.

John Stevens is a marketing consultant and the founder of Hosting Facts.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/12/05/5-proven-list-building-strategies-to-employ-in-2017/

How to find the best security solution for WordPress

As WordPress market share grows, so does its attractiveness as a potential hacking target. That simple, stark truth is reflected in the results of Sucuri’s 2016 security report, which demonstrated that WordPress was far and away the most often targeted CMS, outpacing Joomla and Magento by a wide margin, as you can see in the screenshot from the graph in Sucuri’s report below. Image Source: Screenshot – Sucuri.net
WordPress vulnerabilities aren’t a sign that the CMS is weak or somehow natively insecure. It simply reflects the obvious: The more popular a platform is, the more likely it is to be a target of bad actors. Those security vulnerabilities can be found in all three code pillars of the CMS – the core files themselves, WordPress plugins, and also WordPress themes.
Image Source: Screenshot – Sucuri.net
As of this writing, the WPScan Vulnerability Database has cataloged over 5,200 vulnerabilities in all three categories. WordPress security is a huge topic. And so security goes well beyond changing the default admin username and picking a strong keyword, though you should of course do both, as they’ll help make brute force attacks more difficult
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13952/how-to-find-the-best-security-solution-for-wordpress

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/how-to-find-the-best-security-solution-for-wordpress/

The Rise of Emoji and Google’s Mobile-First Movement

We’re constantly tuned in to the Internet as well as the new technologies and amenities that spawn from it.

Emoji — those little smiley faces and symbols used in your mobile device’s messaging keyboard — used to be used exclusively for text messaging. Their meanings are simple. Unlike shorthand acronyms like LOL, emoji have the ability to convey universal messages, like laughter and joy.

Emoji are now integral in the digital vocabularies of people of all ages and backgrounds and are used not only between individuals, but by companies, too.

A Brief History

Before emoji were introduced in the U.S., they originated in Japan. Created by Shigetaka Kurita, who worked for the mobile communication company DoCoMo, Emoji were intended to be a means of communication through pictures that didn’t use much data. Meanwhile in the U.S., emoticons, pictorial representations created using punctuation marks, were more widely used, as few devices could recognize emoji.

The success of the emoji did not go unnoticed, and Apple launched an emoji keyboard in 2010. Soon after, emoji were standardized by Unicode, which allowed the images to be recognized on all devices.

Unlike emoticons, emoji faces are far more detailed and represent a wider range of emotions. Additionally, emoji keyboards include objects, like food, plants, flags, buildings, etc.. They are able to modify sentences and answer questions without text. In fact, in 2015, “emoji” was named the fastest growing language as well as named the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year.

It wasn’t long before corporations began hopping on the emoji bandwagon. With social media and email marketing, companies could use emoji to convey messages to their customers. Coca-Cola, one of the world’s most valuable and recognized brands, was one of the first companies to use emoji as an effective marketing tool when they launched the #ShareaCoke campaign on Twitter. To set a world record for “World’s Largest Cheers,” Coca-Cola used a branded emoji, exclusive to Twitter. When users would use #ShareaCoke, two clinking coke bottles would appear in the tweet automatically. This campaign actively engaged audiences worldwide, garnering the media’s attention. It is considered one of the best uses of emoji marketing to date.

Other forms of emoji marketing tactics include branded emoji, like Kim Kardashian’s “Kimoji” keyboard, Ikea’s keyboard, which includes a plate of Swedish meatballs speared with a Swedish flag, and even Domino’s emoji-order text service, which allows hungry customers to simply text the pizza emoji to open an order.

Emoji Domain Registration

Domain registration continues to be a hot market. It’s clear that some domain names are more effective than others, causing a lot of competition over certain domains.

Since the introduction of the emoji in the U.S., emoji are able to be registered in domain names, but the process is difficult. Through a method called punycoding, emoji are translated to text, allowing search engines to recognize the images as standard text and route a user to a web page.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Coca-Cola was one of the first corporate giants to launch an emoji domain name.  

“One has to have a reasonably sophisticated knowledge of punycode and whatnot to even look to see whether domains are available,” according to GoDaddy, a domain registrar and web hosting company. “From there, the setup is a bit of a pain.”

That’s why GoDaddy has launched an emoji domain registration page on its own. https://❤❤❤.ws/ is the company’s official, chosen domain, which is translated to ASCII in the browser, because computers are only able to recognize numerical text.

“Driven by the rise of mobile Internet usage, which now accounts for over 60% of traffic, consumers are integrating emojis into their conversations on social media, messaging and beyond,” said Theresa McGinness Geraghty, the GoDaddy senior director of product marketing.

The Future of Digital Marketing

Years ago, the marketing departments in many companies made the shift to digital-first. We’ve seen the disintegration of a number of newspapers in lieu of online news sites, as well as the shift from mail coupons and deals to email-first. Now, as digital media consumption patterns among Internet users continues to evolve, more companies have put emphasis on mobile marketing tactics.

According to Nielson, 92% of consumers are more influenced by peer recommendations and word of mouth marketing — otherwise known as earned media — than all other forms of advertising. Consumers like conversational patterns, the study finds. Many potential buyers look for consumer reviews instead of checking out the most recent ad, or are more apt to search in-store to find out if a product is worth it. Emoji, which is primarily used in messaging format between friends, family, and colleagues, is highly conversational, which leads many to believe why it is so effective for marketers.

Google has even taken action to keep up with the shift. On Nov. 4, 2016, Google announced its plan to move forward with mobile-first indexing. Previously, the search engine giant would index desktop content. As users continue to search using a smartphone or tablet, they continuously run into sites ranked highly in the SERPs, but do not have nearly as much content as their desktop counterparts.

For some companies, this isn’t worrisome. Responsive websites allow the same robust content to be published across all media and will not count against the site’s Google rankings. Responsive sites are extremely important for SEO. For mobile sites that are more empty, this is a wake-up call to make the shift to mobile-first marketing, or else the rankings will plummet.

As mobile Internet usage continues to rise and an optimized mobile site is of much higher stakes than before, it’s a curious question to ask, how will emoji come into play?

Emoji are recognizable on desktop computers, but much harder to access. With the exception of Apple’s newest MacBook Pro, which has a touch pad in place of a function bar, keyboard shortcuts or click-in keyboards are needed to access emoji on a desktop or laptop computer.

Among a number of other uses, the new MacBook Pro touchpad is able to access an emoji keyboard which can be swiped and searched, much like it is on an iPhone. This method is highly user-friendly, especially for those familiar with emoji via mobile devices.

Though GoDaddy’s emoji domain registration is expected to be successful — many have already registered a number of emoji combinations, if only for the resale value — we still haven’t seen a huge amount of these domain names in the mainstream. Since most desktop keyboards do not support emoji typing, it’s far more difficult to search an emoji domain organically.

Emoji domains are fully Google-compatible, and have been for some time now. In May 2015, Google’s John Mueller said that they would be removed and hopefully filtered out of the titles of search results, as they started to look spammy.

“I thought that looked really cool when I saw the first pages that were using [emoji],” said Mueller, “But I think it’s really easy to over do that, so I think it’s something we’ll take action on it at some point.”

Eventually, Google did filter out the emoji titles. These sites were not penalized in their rankings, but it is interesting now, considering the probable hike in emoji domains, how the SERPs will look going forward. With a mobile-first index, it is likely that emoji URLs will appear higher in the SERPs than they would on desktop, but it’s too soon to tell whether Google will adjust the appearance of these results based on how they look.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/12/05/the-rise-of-emoji-and-googles-mobile-first-movement/

How to Add Google Slides Presentations to WordPress

Do you want to embed Google Slides presentation on your WordPress site? Google Slides allows you to create beautiful presentations and share them anywhere. In this article, we will show you how to easily add Google Slides presentations in WordPress.

Method 1: Add Google Slides in WordPress Using Plugin

This method is easier and recommended for beginners.

First, you need to install and activate the Google Docs oEmbed plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

The plugin works out of the box, and there are no settings for you to configure.

Before you can embed your presentation, you will need the shareable URL of your Google Slides presentation.

You can get that by opening your presentation in Google Slides and then clicking on File » Publish to the web.

This will bring up a popup where you can configure slideshow settings like delay between slides and autoplay.

You will need to click on the publish button to continue.

This will bring up a popup asking you to confirm that you want to publish the slide. Click on the OK button to give permission.

You should be able to see a URL that you can use to share your Google Slides presentation.

Go ahead and copy this URL and return back to the admin area of your WordPress site.

Now you just need to add this URL in your WordPress. Simply edit the post or page where you want to display the slide.

In the post editor, you need to paste the URL you just copied from Google Slides. It’s important to make sure that the URL is on its own line.

If you are using the Visual editor, then as soon as you enter the URL it will display your presentation in the editor.

You can now click on the publish or update button to save your changes.

If you need to adjust the height and width of the Google Slides container, then you need to wrap the URL around an embed shortcode.

[embed height=”900″ width=”400″]Slides URL[/embed]

Don’t forget to replace Slides URL with the shareable URL of your Google Slides presentation.

That’s all, you can now preview your post or page to see your Google Slide embedded into your WordPress site.

Method 2: Adding Google Slides Embed Code in WordPress

This method does not require you to install any plugin. We only recommend using this method if you will not be frequently adding Google Slides to your WordPress site.

First you need to open the presentation you want to share and then click on File » Publish to the web.

You will see a popup where you can configure the slideshow settings. You need to click on the publish button to make your presentation public.

Next, you will see a popup asking you to confirm that you want to publish the slide. Click on OK button to give permission.

Now you need to switch to the Embed tab and copy the embed code.

Head over to the WordPress admin area and edit the post or page where you want to add your Google Slides presentation.

On the post editor screen, you will need to switch from Visual to Text editor and then paste your code in the editor.

You can now save or update your post/page. Visit your website to see your Google Slides presentation in action.

Note: It is important that you don’t switch to the visual editor after adding your embed code. Switching to visual editor will mess up the embed code, and you will then see it as plain text instead of your slides.

We hope this article helped you learn how to add Google Slides presentations to WordPress. You may also want to see our list of 19+ free Google tools every WordPress blogger should try.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Add Google Slides Presentations to WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

source http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-add-google-slides-presentations-to-wordpress/

State of the Word 2016: The Significant One

Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of the Word speech at WordCamp US in Philadelphia. At about 54 minutes in, he started a section that I found quite fascinating and means that WordPress 4.7 (to be released on Tuesday) might be the last release as we know it. If this sounds too strong, let me explain why I believe we’ve just witnessed a true milestone in WordPress’ history. “What got us here, won’t get us there”
You generally don’t make big changes when things go well. It’s easy to get the perception that things have been going very well for WordPress recently. 4.7 is a great release, the market share is growing, community maturing and businesses thriving. Overall, everything seems to be going in the right direction and that’s what the first 50 minutes of SOTW were about.
But then you can go deeper. I have recently had a chance to watch a friend trying to build a site on WordPress without any previous exposure, and it was painful. Even I don’t build WP sites that often and when I do, I am amazed how “2000” some things still feel, from basic UX to plugin / theme quality to development workflows. In a
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13951/state-of-the-word-2016-the-significant-one

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/state-of-the-word-2016-the-significant-one/

WordCamp US Recap by the ManageWP team

It has been a very emotional and exciting few days for all of us at ManageWP at #WCUS. I think I can speak for everyone when I say thank you to all of the WordCamp US organizers, speakers, sponsors and attendees for making this an incredible WordCamp. We are already counting down the days till next year! I want to leave you all with a few of our impressions and key takeaways. This photograph is a great snapshot of the WCUS feeling – smiles all around. Thank you Sheri for capturing this moment.
I am very grateful I was able to share this moment with my GoDaddy colleagues, Isaac and Noah.
GoDaddy & ManageWP Booth Action
Thank you all for stopping by, saying hello to us and supporting the GoDaddy Pro launch (more on that on Monday!). Overall we’ve had very positive feedback, and that’s not just about the swag, or as Lilly calls it schwwaaag. It was helpful for us to see you and hear all of your thoughts, so for those of you who came over and shared their knowledge with us, another big thank you. This kind of contribution from our users is what makes our product grow in the right direction. After all, we always focus on making our dashboard user friendly.
Vladeta,
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13950/wordcamp-us-recap-by-the-managewp-team

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/wordcamp-us-recap-by-the-managewp-team/

Automattic to transform WordCamp into a public-benefit corporation supporting non

|| Automattic is seeing a steady growth in the number of sites using its WordPress content management system — 27 percent of the internet uses it today — and there’s no shortage of die-hard fans and users who gather in towns and cities around the world to support one another. The money gleaned from these conferences numbers in the millions and Automattic wants to put it to good use — supporting those who need it.
At the annual WordCamp US gathering, company chief executive Matt Mullenweg presented his “State of the Word” address in which he announced that next year, Automattic’s WordCamp Central will be transformed into a public-benefit corporation (PBC) which will be an evolution of the existing WordPress Foundation.
Mullenweg also revealed that the company plans on expanding its HackerOne-powered bug bounty program soon, and that there will be a “Growth Council” designed to accelerate adoption of open source technology around the world.
Above: Map highlighting the places where WordCamp events were held in 2016.
In 2016, 115 WordCamp conferences across 41 countries, an increase from 89 last year. More than 30,000 tickets were
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13949/automattic-to-transform-wordcamp-into-a-public-benefit-corporation-supporting-non

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/automattic-to-transform-wordcamp-into-a-public-benefit-corporation-supporting-non/