Content Marketing

Our favorite channel, by far, is content marketing.

We don’t have to push people to become our customers, all we have to do is release amazing content and great prospects will come to us.

For many us, getting into sales or paid marketing just as appealing as being able to help people while marketing our business. We get the best of both worlds. Not only do we grow our business, we provide a ton of value and solve problems for people along the way.

It’s not all roses though, content marketing does have some downsides. The main one being how long it takes. To build an audience that loves our content, we have to invest a ton of time.

To help you get results sooner rather than later, we’ve put together a huge collection of guides below that detail every step of content marketing.

Content Creation

Creating content is no joke.

The first few pieces are always fun and exciting, then it turns into a grind.

One of the most intelligent decisions you can make is how you approach content creation. Setting the right frequency, not getting burned out, using reliable templates, and getting the most from every piece of content makes it much more manageable over the long term.

Before jumping in and getting burned out, go through these guides and put some thought into your long term content plan.

How to Write 5 or More Articles a Week and Not Burn Out

How to Create a Popular Infographic

Does Infographic Marketing Still Work? A Data Driven Answer

8 Tactics to Increase Sales with Video Content

Engagement

We all want engaging content.

That’s the difference between a successful content marketing program and one that’s dragging along without getting results.

If you spend the time to get really good at making each piece of content highly engaging, your entire program will light on fire. You’ll get endless shares, tons of word-of-mouth, and more links than you know what to do with. Engaging content is the cornerstone of any great content marketing strategy.

The Ultimate Guide to Creating Visually Appealing Content

9 Tips to Create Highly Engaging Content

How to Engage and Persuade People Through Storytelling

4 Ways to Make Your Content Gripping to Readers

30 Tips For Creating Content that Gets Shared and Discussed

Metrics in Google Analytics To Help You Make Better Content

How to Cut Your Bounce Rate in Half with Interactive Content

The 8 Underused Components of Compelling Content

How to Get 247% More People to Read Your Content

Content Creation Tactics That Will Amp Your Content’s Reach

Suck Your Readers In: 4 Types of Openings for Sticky Content

Formatting Tactics That Will Double Average Time on Page

Ideation / Topic Development

Another major sticking point for content marketing is the blank page. What happens when you completely run out of ideas?

And how do we ensure that our ideas will resonate with our audience?

Over the years, we’ve learned that it’s too expensive to simply produce a ton of content and hope for the best. These days, we use a number of processes and step-by-step formulas to quickly generate a ton of ideas that our audience loves.

Feel free to use all of them yourself:

10 Tips To Help You Find Interesting Topics in Minutes

7 Ways to Find Better Content Ideas

The Top 15 Ways to Come up with New Content Ideas

Generate Clickable Ideas For Content Marketing

Infographics

Infographics got really hot around the 2012-2015 period. It seemed like every infographic went crazy viral as soon as it was released.

Granted, they don’t pop quite like they used to but a great infographic can still cut through all the other marketing clutter. Especially since most folks aren’t producing them anymore.

5 Ways to Get Your Infographic to Go Viral

How to Enhance Your Content by Building Infographics

Productivity

Also take the time to dial in your personal productivity. With the volume of content that needs to get produced, any small productivity win pays huge dividends over time.

The Best Time to Think and Write Creatively

18 Tools for Better Content Creation To Improve Writing

Produce More Content in Less Time With These 6 Tactics

Templates for Quick and Easy Content Creation

6 Unconventional Tips to Create Content Faster

How to Double Your Writing Speed Without Lowering Quality

Quality

One strategy has never failed me: when in doubt, improve quality.

If you ever find yourself stuck with a struggling content marketing program, push on quality. Find a way to make it better than anything else that your competitors are doing. If you improve quality enough and maintain it for a long enough period, you will win.

Discover Whether Your Audience Is Bored with Your Content

6 Teaching Techniques You Should Know

7 Tips to Take Your Content From “Meh” to Amazing

Is Your Content Good Enough? 6 Questions to Find the Answer

A Method for Finding Out Whether Your Content Sucks

How to Take and Edit Photos Without Hiring a Professional

Examples of Truly “Epic” Content: How Does Yours Stack Up?

Scaling Content

Once you’ve gotten a content marketing program to work, the next major hurdle is scaling it.

Don’t take this step lightly, lots of folks stumble here.

At this point, you’ve spent countless hours honing your content skills. You’ve gotten pretty darn good.

But when you start getting contractors or employees to help, they’re not nearly as good. They’re also not as motivated as you were in the early days. And the folks that are really good? They’re either working on their own business or are too expensive.

When you first start scaling your content team, go slow and perfect every part of your process. These guides will get you up to speed:

6 Skills All Great Writers Have (and How to Learn Them)

The 15 Best Tools for Creating Content as a Team

How to Do Curated Content RIGHT: A Step-by-Step Guide

How to Create Content More Efficiently with Curation

11 Advanced Techniques for Repurposing Old Content

How to Run Contests That Encourage User-Generated Content

How to Leverage Crowdsourced Content to Grow Your Audience

How to Grow Your Business by Doing Less Work with UGC

Video

With every year, video gets bigger and bigger.

The best part is that it’s not nearly as competitive as other types of content for one simple reason: it takes a lot more effort to produce.

Yes, video costs have come down tremendously over the years. All you need is an iPhone for great quality video. But the editing
and production of video still take a ton of time. Since it’s going to be a much larger investment than other content types, make your video is as good as possible:

If a Picture Says 1000 Words, Then Video Is… Priceless

How Text Drives More Traffic Than Video Content

Written Word

Blog posts, articles, PDFs, and emails all form the core of any content marketing strategy.

Get good at these and you’ll always have a way to grow your business.

A Guide to Writing a Compelling Article Introduction

A Guide to Producing a 3,000-Word Article on Any Topic

The Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Scannable Content

12 Content-Writing Secrets of Professional Writers

Learn To Write Content like a Pro

Content Marketing

Creating the content is one thing, spreading it is another.

Yes, if your content is unbelievably good, it will spread on its own. But I wouldn’t recommend depending on this. I’d much rather plan for the worst and hope for the best. I do that by marketing my content and helping it spread.

If I can kick start the content sharing process, then the quality of the content can carry it the rest of the way. Here’s all of our tips, ticks, and hacks to give content that little extra push.

8 Content Marketing Tricks Helped Dollar Shave Club Go Viral

How to Use Content Marketing For a “Boring” Industry

Create Content That Will Increase Your Traffic by Tomorrow

10 Tips to Make Content Marketing Work for Small Budgets

A Guide on How To Create a Guide That’ll Drive 360k Visitors

How to Create Content That Drives Sales

35 Content Marketing Lessons Learned

93 Content Marketing Tools You Need to Check Out in 2019

34 Content Marketing Tips Every Marketer Needs To Know

Build Audience Connections with Content Marketing

Distribution

What about the nitty gritty of where to publish and feature your content? Should you repost content? Reshare it? What about sponsored promotions?

We’ve broken down our recommendations on everything:

Should You Repost Your Blog Content on Other Websites?

Distribute Content Effectively Across Multiple Channels

How to Combine Native Advertising with Content Marketing

Leverage Basic Concepts of Sponsored Content to Boost Reach

Amplify the Reach of Your Content Without Spending a Dime

Create a Waterfall of Downloads for Your Ebook

How to Repurpose Your Content Across Multiple Platforms

Which Content Marketing Strategies Have the Biggest Impact

Strategy

The best way to ensure results from your content marketing is by picking the right content strategy to begin with.

There are quite a few strategies for content marketing, many of them work in different situations too. So take the time to research all the options and then pick the best one depending on your exact situation.

How to Easily Add Gamification Techniques to Your Content

7 Ways to Ensure You Maximize Your ROI From Content

Give Away Your Best Content, Your Business Will Grow by 290%

How B2B Audiences Engage with Business Content Online

How to Use Humor to Power up Your Content Marketing

6 Steps to Your First Content Marketing Plan

The Future of Content: What It Will Look Like

Create a Content Marketing System That Runs on Autopilot

7 Required Content Marketing Principles To Master

10 Quick Low Hanging Fruit of Content Marketing

One Insanely Actionable Content Marketing Strategy

How to Make Your Content Marketing Impossible to Copy

How to Use Social Listening to Create Viral Content

A Useful Framework To Produce Great Content, Every Time

Should You Outsource Content Marketing?

Is Your Content Marketing Profitable? Here Are 22 Metrics

3 Content Creation Strategies That Will Help You Prosper

How to Influence Purchasing Decisions

Get Your Boss to Invest More Money in Content Marketing

This is Your Brain on Visualization

5 Simple Strategies For Monetizing Your Content

How to Plan Your Content for Maximum Productivity

Source Quick Sprout http://bit.ly/2IWu7qb

Business

Fundamentally, you need to make money, or you don’t have a business.

That’s actually the only true failure in business. No matter what happens, don’t run out of money.

Every other mistake can be fixed.

As simple as that sounds, there’s a reason why you can find over 90,000 business books on Amazon.

Most of what we focus on here at Quick Sprout, is helping you grow your business and make money with digital marketing. This section covers more of the general business advice and expertise that we’ve compiled over the years. Everything from how to start a business to how to control your emotions.

Regardless of your experience or role in business, there’s something here for you.

BUSINESS FOUNDATIONS

Looking back on previous businesses and jobs that we’ve had, the biggest failures all stem from the same lesson.

Get the fundamentals right and you can mess up just about everything else. Get the fundamentals wrong and it doesn’t really matter what you do.

Have you heard the business saying “a rising tide floats all boats”? That saying refers to this exact lesson. Pick the right tide and everything works out. Pick the wrong one and you won’t get very far.

Sounds obvious in theory but it takes a lot of experience and hard-won lessons to spot the subtle differences between a business with healthy fundamentals and a business that’s rotten to the core.

Instead of learning these lessons the hard way yourself, learn from our mistakes. The following guides will show you everything you need to build a healthy foundation for your business:

How to manipulate the law of supply and demand

101 Motivational Business Quotes

7 Lessons Learned From Running a Consulting Company

11 Business Philosophies to Live and Die By

What I Learned from Fighting a 12-Month-Long Lawsuit

16 Tips for Naming Your Startup

How a 23 year old turned $1500 into $128,000 in 1 year

Why Most Business Partnerships Don’t Work

Beginner’s Guide to Corporate Entities

Do Business Like A Drug Dealer

Why Entrepreneurs Shouldn’t Write Business Plans

How to Create a Company That Can Run without You

How a Ferrari Made Me a Million Bucks

7 Business Principles That You Have to Follow

How to Analyze Your Competition in Less Than 60 Seconds

7 Lessons Learned From Losing $739,135 In Bad Investments

Effective Marketing Strategy for Your Startup Company

Exercises That Will Help You Become a Better Entrepreneur

Charge More for Your Products by Enhancing Perceived Value

How to Monitor Your Competitors With These 10 Helpful Tools

How a 21 Year-Old Created a 38.5 Million Dollar Business

8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs

5 Ways Metrics Can Cause Bad Decisions

How Spending $138,491.42 on Meals Made Me $992,000

53 Ways to Become a Better Entrepreneur

59 Resources For First Time Entrepreneurs

10 Timeless Business Tips From 10 Millionaires

Provide Better Customer Service by Implementing Live Chat

How Spending $162,301.42 on Clothes Made Me $692,500

How to Increase Profits by Analyzing Your Competition

How to Increase Revenue Without Acquiring New Customers

9 Ways to Get Your Startup Funded

How to Identify the Target Market of Your Startup

Generate More Profits by Focusing on Your Pricing Strategy

How to Write a Business Plan for Your Startup

Keep Your Employees Happy While Pushing Them to Their Limits

How to Turn a Failed Startup Launch into a Success Story

How to Write a Great Value Proposition

Business Card Ideas To Help You Stand Out

Brand

A great brand is like having a business super power. Everything gets easier.

Every step of your funnel has a higher conversion rate, you get more traffic, customers stick with you longer, and it’s easier to recruit people to your team. A brand is one of the few aspects of business that impacts everything at once.

Brands don’t just happen though, they need to be built deliberately. Then once you have a brand, you need to protect it.

These guides will show you exactly how to build a brand for your business:

How to Get Your Customers to Recommend Your Brand to Others

6 Branding Approaches You Won’t Learn in Business School

How to Increase Your Brand Exposure with Public Relations

How to Connect With Your Customers

How to Build Brand Awareness for Your Business

The A to Z Guide on Creating a Memorable Brand

Manage Customer Testimonials For Brand Credibility

How to Improve Your Customer Service By Getting Feedback

A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Authenticity and Transparency

Personal Brand

Personal brands, like business brands, have an enormous impact on your success.

But the execution is a bit different for a personal brand. Some things matter much less (like logos) while other things matter a LOT more (like your wardrobe). We break down all the unique aspects of building a personal brand here:

How To Create Your Personal Brand Vision

How To Connect With Mentors To Build Your Personal Brand

Be Yourself Because Everyone Else Is Taken

How To Build Your Brand Through Outreach

How To Define Your Target Audience

How To Build Up Your Online And Offline Assets

How To Get Free Press Coverage For Your Personal Brand

How To Monitor Your Personal Brand

The Complete Guide to Building Your Personal Brand

What Effect Does Swearing Have on Your Brand?

How to Improve Your Online Reputation

Why You Should Dress to Impress – The ROI of Fashion

How to Become the World’s #1 Expert in Your Niche

Personal Brand Building Hacks That Will Earn More Customers

How to Launch Your Personal Brand if You Have No Credibility

7 Ways to Use Your Personal Brand to Find More Clients

The Marketer’s Checklist for Establishing a Personal Brand

Build a Million Dollar Business From Your Personal Brand

15 Things You Need in Place for Creating Your Personal Brand

How to Become the Person Everyone Wants to Interview

A Process to Become an Influencer in Your Industry

Daily Activities To Double the Size of Your Personal Brand

A Guide to Using Live Video to Build Your Personal Brand

Mindset

We’ve worked with a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs and hired hundreds of people in our careers.

Do you want to know what separates those that succeed versus those that flounder for years on end?

It’s mindset.

Even if there’s an unlucky setback in the beginning, the folks with the right mindset always make it eventually. Sooner or later, they achieve their goals.

But no amount of luck can overcome a poor mindset. Year after year goes by and these folks are still struggling with the same problems, never growing into their true potential.

Any improvement that you put into your own mindset will have an immense impact on your goals.

Why Being the Loudest Makes You the Weakest

Why I’ll Never Live in a Rich Neighborhood…

How Much Money Do You Really Need?

Play the man, not the odds

Why Immigrants Are More Successful than You!

What Should You Do if Someone Attacks You Online?

6 Reasons You Won’t Succeed

Why Successful People Are Douchebags

The 10 People Who Led Me to Success

A day in the life of Neil Patel

How to Be a Workaholic And Not Get Burned Out

Tony Soprano’s Top 11 Tips for Success

How to Control Your Emotions

Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover

15 Little Life Experiments That Will Change Your Life

11 Rules to Work By

The Two Reasons Why You Aren’t Making Over $100K a Year

10 Efficient Ways to Save Time So You Can Follow Your Dreams

The Less You Know, The More Money You’ll Make

Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful

Career

Whether we’re entrepreneurs or working for someone else, it’s up to us to take control of our careers.

There are reliable steps that anyone can take in order to have an amazing career. Focusing on the right areas, building a network, and attending conferences without wasting time will push you way ahead of your peers.

These guides walk you through all of it:

You’re the Reason Why You Don’t Have a Job

Focus on what you’re good at, and nothing else!

Why Consulting Is A Job Everyone Needs To Experience

Got Screwed? Think twice before burning the bridge!

Conferences can be a waste of time, they can also instantly uplevel your career. If you’re going to do them, do them right:

Beginner’s Guide to Attending Conferences

Is It Worth Speaking at Conferences?

How to Speak in Public… Even If You Hate Public Speaking

Also focus on building your network, it’ll increase the quality and quantity of opportunities that come your way:

How I Got to Know Over 100 Millionaires and How You Can Too

The 10 Secrets That Make Networking Easy, Fun and Effective

How to Build Influential Relationships

The Real Secret to Successful Networking

Sales

The old saying that everything depends on sales may be a cliche but it’s true. Everything we do in our business is fundamentally a sales activity.

Sell your co-founder on a strategy that you want to pursue, sell your team to get behind it, sell a potential partner on co-promoting a marketing campaign, sell someone on joining your team, sell you boss on how you want to accomplish a goal, sell a teammate on helping you with your project, sell a customer.

Some of the selling is a monetary sale, a lot of it isn’t.

No matter what role you have, sharpening your sales skills will accelerate your business and career.

7 Common Sales Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them

10 Tips for a Killer Presentation

Implement a Customer Referral Program That Drives Sales

How to Upsell to Your Customers

The Startup Guide to Building a Killer Sales Team

7 Ways to Gain Lifelong Customers after Making a Sale

Sales 101: Change their mood, not their mind

How to Leverage Your Brand’s Story to Drive Sales

A Guide to Winning (Almost) Every Single Negotiation

How to Generate Sales for a New Product Release

6 Effective Ways to Become a Better Sales Person

Case Study: How I Used a Case Study to Grow My Sales by 185%

8 Psychological Principles That’ll Double Your Sales

What Interviewing 31 Sales People Taught Me About “Sales”

How to Guide People’s Emotions to Drive Sales

Want to be successful? Learn how to sell!

Generate Recurring Sales by Implementing Subscriptions

Boost Your Revenue Through Upselling and Cross Selling

Increase Sales by Implementing a Customer Loyalty Program

Increase Profits by Focusing on Customer Retention Strategies

How to Increase Sales by Mastering the Art of Storytelling

How to Boost Sales by Accommodating the Needs of Mobile Users

Increase Sales by Personalizing the Customer Experience

Source Quick Sprout http://bit.ly/2ZwAWon

SEO

Google is still the place to find answers to questions.

Search engines have changed over the years, and the barrier to entry has gotten a lot higher. When we started, all it took was a ton of content in order to get search traffic.

The game has changed.

Not only do you need a ton of content, it needs to be incredibly high quality, your on-site SEO and architecture needs to be polished, and you need enough backlinks to compete. You really do need all of it.

But the rewards are still well-worth the effort.

Across all the sites that we’ve built and managed, no traffic source compares to SEO in quality, consistency, and volume. Once you have it, it’s a persistent flood of traffic for your business.

Our playbook is below.

AUDIT

We always start with an audit on every site we touch. Whenever we skip this step, we always regret it later. The last thing you want is to spin up an entire SEO program, poor a ton of time and money into it, and then lose a bunch of rankings later because of core site problems.

Complete your site audit first so there aren’t any problems lurking just out of sight.

How to Score Your Website’s SEO in 10 Minutes or Less

How To Perform an SEO Audit – FREE $5000 Template Included

FOUNDATIONS

Next, go through the foundational elements of SEO.

You’ll find a lot of SEO “experts” claiming quick hacks or tricks to get higher rankings. Be careful with that stuff. It might work today but it seldom works for long.

Whenever starting an SEO program, we spend the bulk of our time focusing on the foundations.

The Proven Method to Ranking on the First Page of Google For Any Long-tail Keyword

The Secret to Learning SEO

SEO vs. PPC: Which Should You Focus on First?

A Step-by-Step Guide to Dominating Any Keyword You Choose

Augmented Reality SEO: What to Expect in the Future

The Psychology of Search Engine Optimization: 10 Things You Need to Know

How to Get Search Traffic from Google’s Knowledge Graph

How Google Works

What SEO Used to Be Versus What SEO Is Now

How to Get Extra Organic Search Traffic with Google’s “Related Questions”

How to Create Content That Drives Lots of Organic Traffic

Quantify Your Results: The 14 Most Important SEO Metrics

10 Ways to Get More Traffic, Attention and Higher Rankings Through Social Sharing

5 Practical Steps To Improving Your Website’s Domain Authority

28 Browser Extensions That Make an SEO’s Life Easier

The Best SEO Tools the Pros Really Use in 2019

How to Gain More Branded Search Volume to Your Website

A Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Audit

The Ultimate Guide to Using Google Search Console as a Powerful SEO Tool

The Step-by-Step Guide to Fixing Any Google Penalty

Don’t Get Fooled: 17 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company

How Content Marketing Affects Search Engine Rankings

The Complete Guide to Keyword Research For SEO

How To Structure The Perfect Search Engine Optimized Page

How to Avoid a Google Penalty in 2019

What Matters To Google: Ranking Factors in 2019

A Guide For SEO’s In The Agency World

SEO Mistakes To Avoid in 2019

How to Build An SEO Plan From Scratch

Ways To Improve SEO Rankings in 2019

WordPress SEO – Everything You Need To Know

LINK BUILDING

No matter how good your content is, sooner or later, you’re going to need to build links.

Links turn an “okay” SEO strategy into an “industry dominating” SEO strategy. All the most hardcore SEO teams have a very deliberate and focused effort on link building.

Once you’ve mastered the basics and have a healthy site, it’s time to start link building.

A Step by Step Guide to Modern Broken Link Building

The Beginner’s Guide to Optimizing for Bing Search

A Thirty-Day Plan for Gaining 100 Authoritative and Relevant Backlinks to Your New Website

7 Reasons Your Outreach Emails Aren’t Getting Responses and How to Fix That

How to Combine PR with SEO for the Biggest Success

Why Link Building Is NOT the Future of SEO

4 Ways to Boost the Conversion Rates of Your Link Building

7 Ways to Make Your Brand and Content More Likable

How I Built 826 Backlinks to a Single Article in 8 Weeks

How to Create a Link-Building Strategy from Scratch

How to Leverage Link Blending and Stage 2 Link Building to Maximize Your Rankings

Here’s the Process to Help You Consistently Build 7 Backlinks a Week

7 Link Building Mistakes You Ought to Avoid

What Is a “Good Link Profile” and How Do You Get One?

The Link Builder’s Guide to Email Outreach

How Many Links Should You Build to Your Website?

The Ultimate Guide to Content Link Building

7 Lessons Learned from Publishing 300 Guest Posts

Why And How To Build an Online Brand Through Guest Blogging

.Edu and .Gov Link Building Guide

Submission Backlinks Guide

Advanced ScrapeBox Link Building Guide

Grey Hat Link Building Guide

The Guide to Link Building Techniques

A Guide to Turning Images Into Links

The Quest For The Perfect Link

Relationship-Based Link Building Guide

A New Era of Link Building

The Ultimate Guide to Guest Posting in 2019

How to Get Backlinks: The Complete Guide

Types of Content That Attract The Most Backlinks

ONSITE / TECHNICAL

Lastly, you’ll want to get your onsite and technical SEO in tip-top shape. Most of these items are smaller details but they can make the difference when pursuing those last few rankings.

After you’re on top of all the other parts of SEO, work through all the technical details. That’ll keep you ahead of your competitors and give you that extra edge.

You Can Use 404s to Boost Your SEO. Here’s How.

Here’s How to Perfectly Optimize Your Infographic for SEO

How to Create an SEO Friendly Infinite Scrolling Page

Does URL Structure Even Matter? A Data Driven Answer

How to Optimize Images for Better Search Engine Rankings

How to Retain at Least 95% of Your Organic Traffic After a Site Redesign

Demystifying SEO: How to Skyrocket Your Traffic Through Schema Markup

How to Decrease Your Bounce Rate

4 Steps to Making Your Search Listings Stand Out on Google

The Ultimate SEO Checklist: 25 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Your Next Post

The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO

Source Quick Sprout http://bit.ly/2GFzTLr

Starbucks to install needle-disposal boxes in locations across U.S.

Starbucks has installed needle-disposal boxes in its bathrooms in at least 25 U.S. markets over the past few months, reports Business Insider. The international coffee chain has further plans to install the boxes in more franchises across the country this summer, though exact locations were not specified.The change is in response to employee complaints that used needles [...]

Source Business - poconorecord.com http://bit.ly/2GCUsYS

These Companies Will Help You Find the Best Life Insurance of 2019

Paid Marketing

There is possible nothing else in marketing more magical than getting a paid marketing funnel to work.

Think about it.

You put $1 in and you get $2 out.

At that point, you’re printing money for your business, getting bigger with every cycle of your paid marketing.

Now the bad news, paid marketing is really difficult to make work. There’s a lot of serious players that are all trying to convert the same prospects. So ads get bid up quickly. It’s still possible to win but you want to take paid marketing seriously.

First, go through our guide on PPC. That’ll give you a really strong foundation so you can compete with the paid marketing pros.

Once you’re ready to go through some of the core tactics for paid marketing, read through our post 7 Ways to Get High Quality Paid Traffic with Rock-Bottom CPCs.

For B2B marketers, definite go through our post on How to Generate Leads with PPC Campaigns for Your B2B Company. I’ve run B2B and B2C paid marketing campaigns and while there is a lot of overlap, there’s also some key differences that B2B companies need to watch out for.

These guides will also be helpful when learning the basics:

• What Spending $66,372.09 On Paid Advertising Taught Me
• How to Improve Your Revenue Using Video Ads

Google Ads

Google Ads (formally Google AdWords) should be part of every ad budget. The best part of AdWords is that as long as there’s a few keywords that people use to find your product or service, it’s really easy to get in front of your ideal prospects. Since they’re searching for those keywords, they’re already aware of the problem and have decided to take some action to solve it by looking for solutions. Those are the prospects that you want to be in front of.

For a small business, hopefully your niche isn’t too competitive. That means you’ll probably be able to run ads on Google Ads that aren’t too expensive. If you’re going after a really large market, keep in mind that other businesses have most likely bid up the ad placements really high. It could take some time before you’re able to compete with them directly on Google Ads.

We have a number of guides on different parts of Google Ads to help get you up to speed:

• How Much Should You Spend on Paid Ads? Here’s My Data-Driven Formula
• How to Use the Google Ads Keyword Planner
• How to Optimize Your Google AdWords Quality Score
• How to Manage Your Campaigns Using the Google Ads Editor
• How To A/B Test Ads In Google Ads
• How to Use Google Ads Extensions
• How To Set Up a Google Ads Display Network Campaign
• How To Setup Product Listing Ads In Google Ads

Source Quick Sprout http://bit.ly/2UQZrOp

FICO Score vs. Credit Score: What’s the Difference?

What’s your credit score?

It’s important financial information to have. But did you know there are actually multiple answers and no single way of calculating a credit score?

A credit score is just a way of distilling your entire credit history into a number that, at a glance, allows lenders to determine the risk they’re taking on by granting you a loan.

The two most common ways of estimating it are the FICO Score and the VantageScore. In this article, we’ll detail the differences between the two, and how those variables could impact your pursuit of good credit.

What is a Credit Score?

The general term ‘credit score’ encompasses the many different models for calculating the three-digit number, ranging from 300 to 850, that defines your creditworthiness. If you have a good credit score, not only are you more likely to be approved for new credit accounts with higher credit limits, you can qualify for better interest rates.

Details of your debt — like your payment history, total debt load, unused credit and the different kinds of credit you’ve opened — are reported to the three major credit bureaus, TransUnion, Experian and Equifax.

When you apply for a new loan or credit card, the lender can query one of the bureaus to get a report on that data. Finally, that data is run through an algorithm to determine your score.

You should know, however, that the three bureaus gather and store your data differently, so your credit report from each bureau could be different, resulting in a different overall score.

The Credit Scoring Models

The FICO Score and VantageScore models are the most common provided to lenders and consumers, and it’s important to note that which one is checked depends on the financial institution making the query.

FICO Score

Typically ranging from 300 (very poor credit) to 850 (exceptional credit), the FICO model is the most well-known credit score and is used by over 90% of the top lenders in the country.

The FICO model was devised by the Fair Isaac Corporation, and in 1995 the two biggest secondary mortgage companies in the U.S., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, began to use the model to determine if loan applicants were a credit risk.

There are more than a dozen versions of the FICO score. FICO8, which was introduced in 2009, is the broadest and most widely used by lenders. The other versions differ slightly based on what they’re used for.

FICO Auto Score is specifically for auto loans, a FICO Bankcard Score is used on credit card applications, and there’s an updated version of the general purpose FICO score released in 2019, called FICO9, though most creditors are still using FICO8.

The FICO8 Score Ranges

• 350-579: Very Poor Credit
• 580-669: Fair Credit
• 670-739: Good Credit
• 740-799: Very Good Credit
• 800-850: Exceptional Credit

FICO closely guards how it calculates scores, but knowing the weight given to each component can help consumers improve their scores.

The Components of a FICO8 Score

• Payment history (35%)
• Amounts owed (30%)
• Length of credit history (15%)
• New credit (10%)
• Credit mix (10%)

How to Get Your FICO Score

You have several options here. The first is to check your credit card statement, as some issuers (Bank of America, Discover and Citibank, for example) offer their customers their FICO Scores every month for free. You can also get a free FICO Score from Experian at freecreditscore.com.

Remember, though, that just because your Experian FICO Score says one thing doesn’t mean it will be the same at the other two bureaus.

VantageScore

This is the other major credit scoring model, created by the credit bureaus themselves in 2006 as an alternative to FICO. Like FICO, Vantage ranges from 300 (poor credit) to 850 (excellent credit) and (like FICO!) there are multiple versions. Right now, the standard is VantageScore 3.0, and it’s used by several lenders, including credit card issuers, across the country.

The biggest difference between the two is that with VantageScore, even if you have a very short credit history (as short as one month), you can get a score and have better access to credit. With FICO, you need six months of data to be visible to their algorithm.

There are also slight differences in the ranges of scores.

The VantageScore 3.0 Ranges

• 350-630: Poor Credit
• 630-690: Fair Credit
• 690-720: Good Credit
• 720-850: Excellent Credit

And, just like FICO8, weighted estimates signal how important certain factors are to calculating the VantageScore 3.0

The Components of VantageScore 3.0

• Payment history (40%)
• Depth of credit (21%)
• Utilization (20%)
• Balances (11%)
• Recent credit (5%)
• Available credit (3%)

As you can see, payment history is the most important factor in both models, so if there’s one thing you should prioritize it’s to be sure you make payments on time.

How to Get Your VantageScore

Just like FICO (are you beginning to see a trend?) there are several ways of going about this.

The first is through your financial institution. Many offer your score for free each month, including Chase Bank, Capital One or OneMain Financial (provided by TransUnion), and U.S. Bank (provided by Experian).

If you’d rather go the no-strings-attached route, a good option is Credit Sesame, a monitoring and financial management tool that offers your VantageScore 3.0 for free as provided by TransUnion.

While many people’s VantageScore and FICO scores are similar, that’s not always the case. In fact, they can vary by nearly a hundred points all because of the differences in the models.

But long as you keep up with at least one of the major scoring models, you should know roughly where you stand across the board.

Curtis Westman is a freelance writer whose strategy is to have multiple screens in his home reporting dozens of different versions of his credit score at all times…but who definitely doesn’t recommend it.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.

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Handling the Financial Irresponsibility of Family Members

When you’ve devoted a lot of effort to fixing your own finances and putting yourself on a great financial track and you’ve spent a lot of time absorbing and thinking about good financial practices, the financial conversations you hear can sometimes be really frustrating.

You’ll hear people talking about their huge financial missteps as though they’re no big deal or even as though they’re a good thing. For example, maybe you’ll hear from a relative who is proud of the fact that they replace their new vehicle every three years with another new one when they barely make $40,000 a year.

That alone isn’t a big deal, but it’s often coupled with conversation about how they’re struggling financially and how the entire financial system is unfair. That same cousin who showed up in the brand new pickup truck that looks virtually identical to the brand new pickup truck they bought three years ago complains about how the whole system is rigged and that they’ll never retire, and then they’ll turn to you and expect agreement and reinforcement.

Even worse is the relative who takes you aside to give you a long sob story of financial misfortune, one that would have been mostly solved with an emergency fund, and then asks for a “loan” that you both know they’ll never pay back.

Those situations happen to me on occasion, and I used to find them incredibly frustrating and almost anger-inducing. Their financial mistakes were incredibly obvious and I wanted to simply say, “Can’t you see that you’re doing this financial damage to yourself?”

Over time, as I matured a little and heard many, many stories like this from readers, I came to realize something very important: most people do realize their own financial mistakes. That cousin knows how much those trucks are costing him. That other cousin knows that they’ve made some bad moves to wind up in a position where they’re swallowing their pride and basically begging for money. People are not unaware of their own financial missteps.

If people aren’t unaware of their missteps, what’s going on, then?

For starters, while understanding (at least some of) your mistakes can be pretty easy, actually correcting those mistakes is pretty hard. It requires a lot of behavioral changes. It requires a lot of self-denial. Most people won’t commit to those kinds of changes in their life unless it’s desperate.

At the same time, if you’re not making a ton of money, it’s very hard to get ahead financially because you just don’t have a lot to work with and there isn’t much room for error. You can make lots of good financial moves, but if you don’t have a lot of money to begin with, one or two missteps or one big unfortunate event can undo a lot of effort, and that contributes strongly to a sense of hopelessness.

Another factor to consider is that while many people might not like aspects of their life – like their retirement situation – they like other aspects of their life a lot and thus, on the balance, they prefer things as they are rather than making changes. I know a lot of people in this camp. While they might long to have more money or have a healthy retirement savings, when they look at their life on the whole and the changes they perceive that they would have to make to get on a different path, they don’t want to make those changes. Their life, as it is now, is better for them on the whole.

I’m sure that, in some aspects of your life, there’s something you’re unhappy with, that you’d like to correct, but you don’t do so because the balance that you have in your life right now is better than what it would take to correct that thing, so you table it. Many, many people do that with their finances.

Furthermore, people often want to blame forces outside of their control for the things that go wrong in their life. Undoubtedly, forces outside of our control can smash into our life like a meteor, but we made a lot of decisions leading up to those events and after those events. Did we prepare our life to be future-proof, or did we live in the moment? It takes some introspection to see this, but it’s a flavor of introspection that many people don’t want to take on. It doesn’t mean they’re bad, it just means that they want an easy explanation for their financial difficulties and unexpected events are an easy thing to point at.

When you consider those factors, it becomes clear that when you see someone else being financially irresponsible, it shouldn’t frustrate you; rather, it’s simply a different choice of priorities. It does not mean that your priorities are right and theirs are wrong, nor does it mean that their priorities are right and yours are wrong. Very likely, your priorities are right for the condition of your life and your own personal characteristics, and their priorities are right for the condition of their life and their characteristics.

So, let’s roll things back to that family event where your cousin who has that brand new vehicle is complaining about never being able to retire because the system is stacked against them. It might feel frustrating, particularly if you’ve worked hard to put yourself in a position where you can retire and you know from personal experience that it can be done with hard work, but what should you actually do?

Nothing. That’s what you should do.

Just sit there and listen to their story. It’s not your story. It’s their story. Just listen.

If you feel frustrated, just try to envision the world through their shoes for a while. That person probably has a lot of personal pride in that truck of theirs, which is why they’re always buying a new one. That other person probably feels overwhelmed by a series of unfortunate events in their life.

There is almost no case in which your interjections about financial responsibility are going to be welcome.

Instead, try to find a rapport or common ground with that person. Ask questions about their story. Compliment their truck and look it over with positive reactions to it.

There will come a time when you are telling your story (but probably not today), and that’s the point where you can slip in some financial wisdom. Today, listen to their story and use that opportunity to build a stronger relationship.

What if you’re being asked for money in some way? If the person is asking you for money, then you should absolutely feel free to say “no.” There should never be an obligation to just fork over money upon request, no matter what the relationship and no matter what the situation. Just say “no.”

Being in a situation where you’ve loaned money to a relative or a close friend creates a lender-borrower relationship, and no one on earth has warm and fuzzy feelings for their lender. They might be appreciative of the loan, but they’ll never feel joyous about repaying it, and that means some degree of negative feeling from them is going to be levied toward you.

Rather, look for other ways to help. Offer to help them find work or to polish their resume. Offer to look over their business plan. Offer to give them a ride to work for the next few weeks until their car is fixed.

If you absolutely feel as though you should help them directly, then make it a fully no-strings-attached gift. Just put the money in their hand and tell them that it’s theirs.

If you absolutely feel you must give someone some advice, get them into a one-on-one situation and tell them that you have some experience with getting one’s financial house in better shape and you’d love to give them some suggestions, if they want. Leave the ball in their court – don’t thrust unsolicited financial advice at them as it will often be resented.

Aside from those things, the best thing you can do is stand back and try to gain an appreciation of their story as a distinct journey through life, not just an extension of your own story. Many, many family conflicts occur when you try to substitute what you value into someone else’s story that’s centered around what they value. You don’t know what’s best for them, so don’t fall into that trap. There’s very little benefit and a whole lot of pain down that path.

Good luck!

The post Handling the Financial Irresponsibility of Family Members appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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Maths, the only subject that counts

Just because I write about money, and turn up on TV and radio talking about the stuff, people assume that I’m a maths genius. But I’m not a natural mathematician by any means.

I have an English degree (so useful!) and used to take so little interest in maths classes at school that I would hum absent-mindedly while working out figures, to the annoyance of my classmates. They were busy trying to hide the blackboard wiper from Miss Smith our bespectacled and absent-minded maths teacher. My school didn’t turn out many maths geniuses.

But I’ve developed an interest and ability in maths and, yes, a respect for it as I’ve seen and experienced the practical effect that it has on my day-to-day and long-term finances.

I can’t say that I love maths. I like angles… but only to a degree (sorry, couldn’t help myself). And numbers that can’t be divided by two just seem odd to me (ker-ching).

Personally, I blame society because it’s so much easier than facing my own faults. But look at how innumerate we all are.  For a start, we believe any old number splashed across the side of a bus. It’s a national disease this ‘antimathsitis’. In the UK, it’s quite all right to say: “I’m hopeless at maths; numbers make me dizzy”, but we would never say: “I’m useless at words – I can’t read at all”.

We are so afraid of numbers that we turn them into shapes or stories. When I was growing up things were routinely priced in Mars Bars: “That bike’s worth about 100 Mars bars”. Geographical areas are still measured in football grounds: “The Sheik’s house is as big as 20 football pitches.” Don’t even get me started on Wales which, to most commentators, only exists as a measuring stick for natural disasters. If it’s bad and big, it’s “the size of Wales”.

Like the Americans, we cling unaccountably to unhelpful measurements in 12s and 16s, rather than the easier and more logical 10s, 100s and 1,000s. Mind you, at least we’ve had the sense to accept centigrade for our temperature, rather than farenheit where the freezing point of water is a handy 32 degrees. In what universe would water want to freeze at anything other than a good old zero?

Britain may be a nation of shopkeepers but we prefer the romance of life rather than counting figures.

Perhaps that’s why we came up with romantic terminology in the 1824 Weights and Measures Act, which established imperial measurements, imposing not only feet, yards and inches across the British Empire but also fabulous furlongs, luscious leagues and fantastic fathoms. I have to admit I would rather fathom leagues and gallop furlongs than crawl over pedestrian kilometres. But ask me how long any of those are and I couldn’t tell you.

Then there is a dozen, another 12-based unit. Who came up with that idea? We’re not good at times-tables, so why make us work things out in multiples of 12? Even then, we couldn’t quite handle a proper number and added a ‘Baker’s dozen’ for 13. Who was the baker, why did he keep adding an extra bun in the bag and why can’t Greggs revive this great tradition?

Romantic, old story-tellers we may be, but our collective innumeracy is adding up to a big problem. We’re losing actual pounds and pence (maybe shillings and farthings) on a grand scale, thanks to our inability and unwillingness to grasp hold of day-to-day maths. To us, maths is an acronym for Mental Abuse To Human Species and we won’t stand for it.

We hold on to expensive credit card debts at 19% while still putting money into savings accounts at 0.5%, not ‘doing the maths’ and seeing how much we’re losing month by month.

We eschew stock market funds with upwards of 4% annual returns and instead hold on to Cash Isas paying barely 1%. In fact, the whole area of investing remains a mystery to most of us because it involves percentage signs and a bit of compound interest and who bothered with that at school? Humming was more fun.

It’s hardly a surprise that Asian economies, where maths reigns supreme, lead the world. China and its neighbours are at the top of the OECD maths capability chart every year. And it shows at the top too. Singapore’s President Lee Hsien Loong has a first-class maths degree from Cambridge, while the UK’s recent prime ministers studied politics or law, apart from Margaret Thatcher, the chemist (and geographer Theresa May.)

But then, as the politicians will tell you, maths is just 50% numbers, 50% functions and 50% imagination.

JASMINE BIRTLES is a financial journalist and founder of MoneyMagpie.com. Email her at columnists@moneywise.co.uk.

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What’s going on at Barclays?

A Moneywise reader has a scare with their current account

I recently had more than £2,000 in my Barclays current account and it was taken by the bank without notice or reason. After numerous phone calls, I got it back and was phoned to be told it was OK. I withdrew £50 from a cash machine, then the next morning Barclays had again taken the £2,000 and closed my account without warning or reason. What is going on?

JG/Dartford

You wrote to us in an understandable panic and referenced a Fight For Your Rights letter from a few issues ago, when we helped a reader with problems with Barclays, to suggest that there was something really dodgy going on. But by the time we responded, you had calmed down. You told me: “It’s all sorted now and I have got my money back.”

I’m featuring your letter for one simple reason: ever since the TSB computer chaos last year, there seems to be a tendency for victims of bank cock-ups to presume some kind of conspiracy by the banks to keep people from their cash.

That’s not the case. The truth is that banks make many mistakes but with millions of customers, that’s inevitable. If you do become a victim, a little patience is likely to be needed while the bank sorts things out.

The fact is that British banks are being hit by major IT or security failures every day. Barclays leads the table of computer chaos with 41 operational and security incidents in the last nine months of 2018. But the other big banks are also victims. It’s a shaming statistic but mainly a product of antiquated IT systems rather than a deliberate attempt to rip-off customers.

OUTCOME: Barclays resolves reader’s problem right away

Simon Read is a money writer and broadcaster. He was personal finance editor at The Independent and is an expert on BBC1’s Right on the Money

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Help! The last bank in town has shut

There has been a raft of bank closures across the UK in recent years, leaving many people without ready access to cash. We look at why banks are closing and how it is affecting local communities

Located just outside Eastbourne, Polegate has always been a popular place to live among pensioners. 

New housing developments are also helping to attract young professionals and families to the area and there are plans to build more.

However, despite having a population of more than 8,000 and growing, Polegate no longer has any banks after Lloyds closed its branch there three years ago.

This leaves residents wanting to visit a bank with no other option than to travel to Eastbourne or Hailsham – both more than three miles away.

Lesley Stracey, who runs the local newsagent, says the closure of the banks has had a devastating impact on the town.

She says: “It has killed the whole high street, and everyone is struggling. People just go to bigger towns now, where there is a bank, and do all their shopping there. We have to travel to Hailsham with the takings, which is quite dangerous. If the banks close there, we’ll have to go to Eastbourne, which would be crazy.”

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show nearly 6,000 local bank branches have closed since 2010 – a fall of nearly a third.

Until recently, Polegate had three banks but now they are all gone. HSBC closed in 2012, Barclays in 2015, while Lloyds shut its doors for the last time in 2016.

These bank closures mean the town is left with just two cash machines. Those who don’t want to travel outside Polegate have to use the Post Office or go online. Public transport and petrol are a further cost if people have to go to banks at Hailsham or Eastbourne, while traffic and parking can also be a problem.

For many pensioners in the town, the closure of the banks has left them with an uphill battle to access the services and cash they rely on.

Angela Turner, 73, has lived in Polegate for more than 40 years. She says that she has no other option but to make the journey to Eastbourne or Hailsham as she does not feel online banking is secure enough.

Angela says: “I don’t trust online banking, not when you hear about all the [scam] stories.

“When I used to visit the bank in Polegate, I would do my shopping. Now there isn’t one, I go into town for my papers but that’s about all I do here.

“I still use cash, but the machines run out sometimes – especially at the weekend.”

It seems as if hardly a week goes by without one of the big banks announcing further branch closures.

Santander, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and RBS are all shutting branches, blaming rising costs as well as the shift to online.

A spokesperson for Lloyds Bank says: “We made the difficult decision to close our branch in Polegate due to the changing ways customers choose to bank with us, which resulted in the branch being used less often. Customers can access their banking locally by visiting the nearby Post Office.”

Like millions of other people, Polegate resident Emma Mintrim banks online. The 35-year-old secretary says she can’t remember the last time she went into a branch.

She says: “If I can avoid going into a branch, I will – especially as you can now pay a cheque in on your phone.

“I do everything online now. You can move money that way and pay bills. For my generation, it is great but it can be more difficult for older people.”

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Why are branches closing?

One of the main criticisms of bank closures is that they can lead to customers being financially excluded.

When banks close, elderly and disabled customers often struggle to access vital financial services, with those in rural areas the worst affected.

Already this year Santander has announced it is closing 140 branches – nearly a fifth of its network.

Last year, Royal Bank of Scotland said it was axing 216 branches, leaving just 54 branches in England and Wales.

In 2014, Lloyds Banking Group announced it was shutting 400 branches and added a further 49 to the list of closures last year. Barclays Bank closed 54 banks in 2017, while HSBC shut 222 branches the previous year.

The official line from banks to justify these closures is that with the increase in online banking fewer customers are now using services in branches.

A spokesperson for Barclays says: “With customers visiting our branches less and less each year, we must constantly assess how and why our branches are used and make decisions based on that insight.”

However, critics argue that the true motive for banks is to cut costs. Branches are expensive to run, so removing the costs of employing staff and running the premises can save a substantial amount of money.

David Clarke, head of policy at campaign group Positive Money, says that, despite what the banks say, there is still a strong demand for branches across all age groups.

He says: “The banks want to close branches as they see them as an unnecessary expense.

“Branch closures are disastrous for local communities and economies, and risk harming financial inclusion as they undermine access to customer services. This is happening not because of lack of demand from consumers but because banks are acting in their own interest.”

He thinks it is time the government stepped in to stop the rapid rate of branch closures.

Mr Clarke says: “There is no regulatory intervention that prevents a bank from closing a branch, even when it is the last one in town.

“As the majority owner, the government could use its power to ensure that RBS continues to provide branches to its customers. By selling RBS back to the private sector, it has missed a huge opportunity to reform our broken banking system.”

William Millis, who runs an antique shop in Polegate, agrees that it is time the government intervened. 

He says: “The government needs to bring in legislation to stop all bank branches closing in a town so there is at least one bank left. Banks are the lifeblood of a town. If an independent bank opened up in Polegate, it would be hugely popular.”

What can I do if my bank shuts?

Banks often justify branch closures by pointing toward partnerships with the 11,000 Post Offices across the UK.

While this provides people with the opportunity to do their day-to-day banking, post offices only offer basic banking services, such as cash withdrawals, business deposits and balance enquiries.

For people who lack mobility or access to transport services, their only option is to go online.

According to research and statistics company Statista, the percentage of people who use online banking in the UK has doubled to 69% over the past 10 years.

However, many people do not have the option of going online or are worried by security issues.

Lucy Malenczuk, Age UK’s senior policy manager, says: “We think the branch network is being run down prematurely, and people are being effectively forced to go online or to rely on other people to do their banking for them.

“We want banks to realise it is just not realistic to expect everyone to suddenly go online. It can be expensive and the interfaces can be difficult to use, especially with some age-related conditions. Banking online is also not an option for many people who are worried about security.”

Mobile banks provide another solution, but these make infrequent visits and are of limited use for businesses which need them on a daily basis.

When banks close, people become more reliant on cash machines. However, they are often unreliable and can run out of money, and some older customers can find them difficult to use.

If your bank branch closes, you can switch your account although this might depend on whether there is another bank in your area.

“Cash machines close at an alarming rate”

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The limited provision of cash machines is becoming a serious problem too, especially in rural communities.

Free-to-use cash machines are closing at a rate of 250 a month because operators are removing unprofitable ones.

This has left towns and villages without access to banking services, hitting elderly and disabled people particularly hard.

There is some hope, though, as from the end of April companies operating free-to-use ATMs will receive up to £2.75 per cash withdrawal for cash machines in remote areas to stop further closures.

The extra financial support will be paid for by Britain’s banks and is being introduced by Link, the UK’s largest cash machine network. Around 1,000 cash machines will initially be eligible for the support, with the number likely to increase, says Link.

Currently, Link pays the operators of free-to-to-use cash machines a 30p subsidy for each withdrawal.There are around 50,000 ATMs in the UK. However, as only 2% of cash machines will be eligible for this premium, thousands more could still be under threat.

Cash machine closures also hit small businesses as the subsequent rise in contactless payments forces them to absorb the cost of card charges or pass them on to customers.

Positive Money’s David Clarke warns that when bank branches shut, they are taking their cash machines with them, hitting customers with a double whammy.

He says: “The rate of cash machines closing is alarming and risks leaving whole communities without access to money.

“It is happening because banks have lobbied for a reduction in the amount they pay to maintain in the ATM network. This trend is likely to continue unless the government steps in to protect the public’s access to cash.”

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