Author: Brad Johnson

Brad Johnson is an author and blogger who helps writers discover their niche, build successful habits, and quit their 9-5. His books include Ignite Your Beacon, Writing Clout and Tomes Of A Healing Heart. For strategic content and practical tips on how to become a full-time writer, visit: BradleyJohnsonProductions.com.

How will you implement the strategy from this post?

Published by Brad Johnson on 01/21/2020

https://www.rohitbhargava.com/2020/01/ten-stories-about-non-obvious-megatrends-you-should-read.html

Earlier this week I sent the 200th edition of my weekly Non-Obvious Insights email and my book Non-Obvious Megatrends just launched on Tuesday so there is lots happening this week!

Thank you to everyone who has already bought the book and shared their review. Last night I found out with hit #1 in about fifteen categories on Amazon, #2 overall in the Business category (behind the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) and the Top 25 of ALL books on Amazon.

In honor of launch this week, I thought I would share some fascinating stories from the week organized in terms of each of the ten megatrends from my latest book. I hope you enjoy the stories this week and if you happen to live in one of the cities where we are having launch events coming up (DC, NY, Boston, Orange County, Seattle, SF or Cincinnati) – then perhaps we might meet up in person!

Non-Obvious Megatrend #1 – Amplified Identity

There were two elements of this megatrend that came out in the news this week. The first was an interesting exploration from Psychology Today on whether the extreme social withdrawal of the Hikkomori in Japan (which I also wrote about in the chapter) may be leading to a global epidemic of isolation. Another side of this megatrend is the importance of our online selves to our overall identity, and there was a story about new survey results from Kaplan suggesting that universities are once again using social media profiles to help evaluate college applicants.

Non-Obvious Megatrend #2 – Instant Knowledge

People expect to learn everything faster and are frustrated when they can’t. This story about Captain America actor Chris Evans was a perfect example of Instant Knowledge. Evans was frustrated by the length of Wikipedia entries on political topics and so he decided to create his own site to more simply explain complex issues. While this article snarkily called it “a vanity project to save democracy,” we’ll likely see more efforts like this in the coming months.

Non-Obvious Megatrend #3 – Ungendering

Every week there seem to be several stories about gender issues and how our culture seems to be evolving. This week was no different with a story about a new single from rapper Saucy Santana suggesting that anyone of any gender could be a “material girl.” This week Gucci also unveiled their Winter 2020 menswear fashion line – featuring a rebuke of toxic masculinity and including plenty of ungendered options.

Non-Obvious Megatrend #4 – Revivalism

It’s a good week for remakes and we’re just a week away from the new Star Trek show bringing back Patrick Stewart as Picard (which I’m insanely excited about) and the network already renewed for a second season. NBC is even talking about doing a remake of Quantum Leap.

Non-Obvious Megatrend #5 – Human Mode

There are continually stories of the power of human connection and authenticity and this week I loved this story about Brazilian photographer Angélica Dass who is “on a mission to capture examples of every skin color in the world, to prove that diversity goes beyond the standard confines of white, black, red, and yellow.” You can check out her collection of images here. (HT to my friend Gautam Gulati for sharing this story.)

Non-Obvious Megatrend #6 – Attention Wealth

Trust is hard and skepticism is high. This megatrend talks about both and so there were plenty of related stories this week that brought it to life. In one example, Instagram announced they would start hiding Photoshopped images. Another story focused on Nordstrom’s renewed efforts to create a more experiential retail experience to stand out. And my friends over the Future of Storytelling spotlighted a very cool new augmented reality experience called the Museum of the Hidden City which is worth checking out.

Non-Obvious Megatrend #7 – Purposeful Profit

The importance of brand purpose in an era of empowered consumers is the focus of this megatrend, and this week marketing publication The Drum explored this idea of the rise of the conscious consumer. In other news, Amazon was widely criticized for Jeff Bezos’ relatively small contribution to Australian bushfires and an excellent Vox article pointed to a key factor being Bezos’ reputation as one of the world’s stingiest billionaires.

Non-Obvious Megatrend #8 – Data Abundance

Data stories tend to be quite black and white – there are big breaches of data or smart uses of it. This week there was a positive story of how India’s top banks are launching a system that gives consumers access to their own financial data along with the ability to share it instantly. At the same time, a new story broke about how Grindr and Tinder are selling user’s personal data.

Non-Obvious Megatrend #9 – Protective Tech

Technology is getting smarter and more proactive about protecting us in every situation. That’s a key idea from this megatrend and it was perfectly demonstrated in the story this week of how Microsoft is trying to improve child abuse detection by opening it’s Xbox chat tool to other companies.

Non-Obvious Megatrend #10 – Flux Commerce

The central idea behind this megatrend is that the lines between what used to be different industries are starting to blur. In yet another example of this, Warner Brothers film studio announced this week that they signed a deal with Cinelytic, a machine learning startup that uses AI to predict a film’s commercial success.

How will you use the advice from this post?

Published by Brad Johnson on 01/21/2020

https://conversionsciences.com/a-behavioral-design-framework-for-you-and-your-website/

Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: A Behavioral Design Framework for You and Your Website

Maybe the best behavioral design framework for your website is the same one that you can use to change your personal habits. The man walked onto the stage in a colorful robe. He was holding a small oar. He claimed he was wearing a magician’s robe and that the oar was his magic wand and […]

The post A Behavioral Design Framework for You and Your Website appeared first on Conversion Sciences.

What’s the most interesting marketing tip you’ve uncovered from this post?

What’s the most interesting marketing tip you’ve uncovered from this post?

Published by Brad Johnson on 01/20/2020

https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/614982578/0/convinceandconvertconsulting/

Building consistent organic search traffic is every digital publisher’s dream. But what does it really take to make your content SEO friendly?

The good news is it is not a rocket science.

On top of that, despite what many people think, it has nothing to do with “tricking” Google into thinking your content is high-quality or SEO friendly.

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, which basically means making sure a search algorithm can easily access and understand your content. There’s no dark art involved.

Here are the steps you should take to make your content SEO friendly:

1. Match Your Content Idea to a Searchable Phrase (Search Query)

So you have an idea in mind which you feel like writing about. This is where any content creation starts: “I have something to say on this topic, and I feel like it will be interesting and/or useful”.

Is anyone searching for this topic?

Chances are, if you have come up with the topic, there should be other people who may feel intrigued enough to research it in Google.

But how exactly are people searching for it?

This is the key question you should ask if you want to generate organic search engine traffic to your future content.

You need to know what people type in a search box when trying to find answers to questions you are covering in your content.

So your first step is to find those actual search queries.

This exercise is also useful because it helps research. Knowing what people are typing in Google’s search box will likely help you discover interesting angles, narrow your initial idea down to make it more specific and even structure your future article to make it more useful.

So even if you don’t really care about organic search positions, keyword research is useful to do.

But how?

The keyword research process — at its core — hasn’t changed much over the years. We do have much more data to work with, but the actual process is the same.

These days, we have a variety of tools that help you identify a keyword to focus on. Here are a few tools and approaches you can try:

1.1. Type Your Terms into Ahrefs

Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer is a great tool for that because it offers “All keyword ideas” tab that broadens your initial idea to related and synonymous terms.

So if you were to type [grow tomatoes] and click through to that section, you’d find both phrases containing the term (e.g. “how to grow tomatoes”) and related concepts (e.g. “when to plant tomatoes“):

This broadens your outlook and helps you come up with more words to include in your copy.

1.2. Discover What Your Future Competitor is Ranking For

If you’ve done at least some research on your content idea, you may have found some resources that are on the same or similar topic. So use those URLs to discover what they are ranking for.

Serpstats’ URL Analysis section is great for that:

Notice that Serpstat is also showing all “extra” search elements that show up for each query in Google, so you get a good idea of what your future target SERPs (search engine result pages) may look like.

Note that both of these platforms offer “keyword difficulty” metric signaling of the level of your future organic competition. Obviously, the lower the keyword difficulty is, the better.

On the other hand, the higher the search volume, the more clicks each SERP may drive. So you want to try and pick a keyword that has high search volume and low keyword difficulty.

Here’s a more detailed guide on keyword research for you to become better at it. And here are even more keyword research questions answered.

2. Put Those Keywords in Prominent Places

While the process of researching keywords hasn’t changed much, the way we use keywords within content has.

These days, we don’t sacrifice the quality or flow of our copy for the sake of keyword density. In fact, we don’t pay attention to how many times we have used those keywords on-page.

We do use those keywords in prominent places on the page to make both Google and our human visitors more comfortable and confident there.

To put it simply, upon landing on your page, your users should clearly see terms they initially typed in the search box. That will put them more at ease and prompt them to linger a bit longer.

Keyword prominence means making your keywords visible on the page. It helps both search engine optimization and user-retention. Both of these help rankings.

Basically, you want those keywords to appear in:

Page title
Page URL slug (which in WordPress will be transferred from your title anyway)
First paragraph
Page subheading(s)
Image alt text (Do make those alt text descriptive as it helps accessibility)

Many SEO plugins (like Yoast and SEO Editor) can handle a lot of these SEO elements, so it is a good idea to pick one.

3. Use Semantic Analysis to Match Google’s Expectations and Make Your Content More Indepth

As I have already stated before, Google has moved away from matching the exact query to the pages in its index. Ever since its Hummingbird update, Google has slowly but surely become better and better at understanding each query context and searcher’s intent behind it.

To match that context better and optimize for the intent, use semantic analysis, which is basically about clustering each query into underlying and related concepts and covering you in your content.

Text Optimizer is a tool that takes Google’s search snippets for any query and applies semantic analysis to identify areas of improvement. Text Optimizer can be used for writing new content from scratch:

You can also use the tool to analyze your existing content to identify areas of improvements:

As you can see, Text Optimizer also helps analyze whether your content meets the query intent.

To increase your score at Text Optimizer:

Choose the most suitable words for your content and include them naturally into your article. Avoid keyword stuffing. Only choose terms that you find fitting your current context.
You may modify sentences or write new ones until you reach at least 80%

4. Diversify Your Content Formats

Google loves textual content, but the Internet in general and Google in particular has moved beyond text-only. Web users expect to see more formats, including videos and images. And Google recognizes that demand for content diversity, so it will feature all of those content formats.

In my previous article for Convince and Convert I described how videos improve SEO on many levels, including more exposure in search engine result pages and better on-page engagement.

With that in mind, any time you work on your article, think which other content assets can be created to enhance its value and improve SEO.

Luckily, creating videos doesn’t require any budget or skills. With tools like InVideo you can turn your articles into videos in a matter of seconds:

Select “I want to convert article into video” option
Paste in a maximum of 50 sentences (I usually use the tool to turn my article takeaways or subheadings into a video)
Pick the template and let the tool do the job
You can upload your own images (screenshots), tweak the subtitles and select the music

You are done! Now, upload the video to Youtube, add a keyword-rich title and description and embed it to your article.

For images, you can use Venngage or Visme to create nice visual takeaways or flowcharts (in case you have instructions to follow).

5. Set up an On-Page SEO Monitoring Routine

Finally, there’s always room for improvement, so monitoring your organic traffic is an important step here.

The must-have tool for that is Google’s own Search Console, which will show you which queries are sending you traffic. Just check your “Performance” tab regularly:

Another useful tool to have is Finteza, which shows your organic traffic performance allowing you to dig deeper to see whether your organic traffic clicks engage with your ads.

… or whether each search query sends traffic that brings conversions.

6. Don’t Forget External (Off-Site) Signals

Obviously, it is more to Google position than on-page optimization. You still need those backlinks that would help Google assign some authority to your content. But that’s a topic outside of the scope of this article. Besides, there’s a lot of content already written on that. And here’s another collection of tips on how to build links.

Finally, the above steps apply to any kind of optimization, whether it’s a blog, product pages or lead-generating landing pages.

I hope this guide will help you optimize your content to make it easier for Google to understand and hence help the search giant’s algorithm assign search positions it truly deserves.

The post How to Make Content SEO Friendly appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

What’s the most useful content marketing tip you’ve discovered from this post?

Published by Brad Johnson on 01/20/2020

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OnlineMarketingSEOBlog/~3/vzwzeC9scXc/

The post Top 10 B2B Digital Marketing Trends in 2020 appeared first on Online Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

10 Healthy Snacks That Are Also Excellent Writing Fuel | Writer’s Relief

Published by Brad Johnson on 01/20/2020

It’s the time of year when many writers make resolutions: eat healthier, write more, get published, maybe run a marathon. While we can’t help you with that marathon thing, the folks here at Writer’s Relief can offer some smart ideas for eating right (and we know a thing or two about finding more time to write and getting published)! Sugary snacks might give you a burst of energy, but it will quickly fade and you’ll soon be slumped atop a big writer’s block. Make a fresh start now by choosing from these healthy, tasty snacks that are also great writing fuel.

Smart, Healthy Snacks That Power Your Writing Muscles

Fruit

Fresh fruit is both healthy and delicious! And there are so many options: Slice up some strawberries, have an apple with peanut butter, bring a whole bag of grapes to your desk and pop them one after another into your mouth, peel a few clementines—any fruit will satisfy your hunger and give you an energy boost. Maybe try something you haven’t had before: kiwi or dragon fruit, anyone?

Popcorn

Yes, we said POPCORN, and we mean it! But instead of using the microwavable bags, go old-school and pop plain kernels in a popcorn popper. Add salt or other seasonings, and popcorn becomes a healthy snack that’s full of fiber and lower in calories than you probably thought! Just go easy on the butter.

Eggs

If you’re in the zone and busy writing, you don’t want to stop and cook an entire meal when hunger strikes. A soft- or hard-boiled egg with a dash of salt can be a quick, tasty, protein-filled snack to help you power through to your next break. Keep a dozen or so (a writer’s dozen?) hard-boiled eggs in the fridge, and your go-to snack will be ready and waiting!

Hummus

Hummus is a miracle snack food. This chickpea-based dip is versatile, filling, and low calorie! There are countless flavor choices, and even more healthy options for what to dip into it! Pretzels, pita chips, pita bread, carrots, celery—any veggie, honestly—they’re all delicious with hummus. (And we should mention that it’s also available in chocolate. Yum!)

Cheese

Surprise! Cheese can be a healthy snack! But a little mouse told us moderation is key. Eating an entire block of cheese is not a good idea, but a few slices can certainly help ward off hunger. Choose one of the healthier cheeses, like feta, mozzarella, ricotta, or goat cheese.

Nuts

Nuts are a fantastic healthy snack: They are packed with protein and require no preparation. Keep a bag on your desk and start munching away when your stomach starts growling! Almonds, cashews, peanuts, pecans, macadamias…the list goes on.

Edamame

Though it won’t match the experience of ordering this tasty treat at the sushi restaurant, those bags of frozen edamame you buy at the grocery store and steam at home are still a really good snack choice. The best part? Squeezing the beans out of the pods relieves tension—it’s almost as good as popping bubble wrap!

Pickle rolls

These strange-but-delicious snacks can be made a few different ways, but the basic recipe is this: your favorite kind of sliced meat, spread with a layer of cream cheese and wrapped around a pickle. It might sound odd, but don’t knock it until you try it!

Salsa

Salsa is much more versatile than a simple party dip. Sure, you can eat it with tortilla chips, but why not try dipping your favorite veggies in it! Sliced peppers are a good option, as are carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, and celery.

Yogurt

There are so many different types of yogurt and flavors to choose from that almost everyone can find a yummy option to tempt their taste buds. There are even vegan yogurts available in most stores. So when you need to fuel your writing muscles, grab a cup of nutritious probiotics—aka yogurt—and toss in your favorite toppings. (You can even add chocolate chips, crushed cookies, or caramel syrup, but you didn’t hear that from us.)

Question: What other healthy snacks do you like to eat while you write?

What’s the most intriguing writing tip you’ve discovered from this post?

Published by Brad Johnson on 01/19/2020

https://www.rohitbhargava.com/2020/01/ten-stories-about-non-obvious-megatrends-you-should-read.html

Earlier this week I sent the 200th edition of my weekly Non-Obvious Insights email and my book Non-Obvious Megatrends just launched on Tuesday so there is lots happening this week!

Author: Brad Johnson

How will you implement the strategy from this post?

Non-Obvious Megatrend #1 – Amplified Identity