The benefits of guest blogging are two-fold: firstly, by guest blogging you can build links to your blog, which will organically increase your organic search rankings; secondly, guest blogging leads to exposure for you and your blog, which will naturally brand you as a thought leader in your field and help you discover more business opportunities through a solid digital Content Marketing strategy.

Building backlinks

By having a post on a reputable website you will get a link back to your website. You want to receive back links from more established websites than your own.

You can check this using PageRank – PageRank is an algorithm that factors in all the links to a site and the weight of those links. Each website, when ranked by Google, is assigned a number between 0 and 10. You should aim to guest blog on a website that has a higher PageRank than you.

When people are impressed with your content, they will want to share your links in as many locations as they can. These back links reflect positively on your search results and mean you rank higher in Google.

Gain more publicity

Publicity and exposure are two things that can come with guest blogging. By providing high-quality content and posting it on a high authority site, you’re creating a positive image of yourself and your blog. People will start to think of you as an influencer in your own right and your content becomes infinitely more sharable.

It’s free advertising. What could be better?

How to find a blog to guest post

Research: choose a blog that specialises in similar topics to you.

Outreach: connect with bloggers or websites on Twitter, retweet content.

Write well: make sure content is your absolutely best work.

Follow up: share guest posts all over your social networks. Track comments and reply to every reader who comments or asks for more info. It’s all about engagement.

Give as you receive: have guest bloggers on your own site. http://unbounce.com/content-marketing/how-and-why-you-should-be-guest-blogging-with-case-study-kinda/

If you’re looking for a London based digital Content Marketing agency to help boost your brand, why not get in touch with DVO!

This week we’re looking at how you can bring some UGC into your brands life, curating user generated content alongside creating content.

It’s time to start curating user generated content (UGC), you need it on your site. You know why? Because it gets people interested in, engaging with and sharing your brands story. Above all it builds trust, people trust other people more than your brand, get over it it’s a fact. Content marketing and integrated campaigns feel lacking without the addition of UGC, such is it’s power.

But, not all UGC is the same and every company requires a different variety. UGC can fall into various categories, including product reviews, blog posts, forum entries and social media sharing. Most importantly, not always is it beneficial. The mindset shift in a UGC world is moving from simply creating content to curating user generated content.

Content created by your users does a lot to influence your brand. It stands as a representation of your company and has a lot of sway in recruiting potential customers to your site.

So, before you start plastering your UGC all over the web, consider which type of audience you want to attract.

Once you know this, you can start seeding your site or social media stream with comments and content that is going to get your desired audience communicating with your brand.

Here are a few ways to inspire people to generate content for your brand:

Run a competition

This year, Tourism Australia has re-launched their ‘Best Job in the World’ competition, which gives people the chance to win one of six amazing jobs in Australia, while also subsequently promotes tourism in the country.

After huge success last year, YouTube, Canon and Ron Howard have teamed up again for Project Imagin8ion. The competition asks photographers to submit their most imaginative photographs under categories including setting, character and time, with a winner being selected in each. This will form the fodder for a 30-minute movie to be directed by Howard. While the entrants get the opportunity to contribute to a movie directed by a Hollywood star, the brands also get their names shared and publicised.

Make a platform for people to contribute to

Websites like TripAdvisor and Allrecipes do this very well. In fact, much of their business plan depends on UGC. For these brands, having their users providing the content for their site creates a website for people who want advise from a community of likeminded and knowledgeable people. It’s the relatable factor that makes this approach work. On these sites, users contribute travel advice and recipes respectively. Millions of users log on daily for advice from people like them, not a travel writer being paid to review a hotel, or a top chef expecting every household to have a pasta maker and a bamboo sushi rolling mat.

The Guardian has also just implemented this approach. Their new platform – GuardianWitness – invites anybody who’s in the right place at the right time to contribute live news content to the site, whether video, photographs or audio material.

Make UGC your product

Chicago-based printing company Threadless sells designer t-shirts. But, it’s not what you might expect. The company invites artists to submit their creative designs to their site for ranking. Over a week, the Threadless community rates the designs from 1 to 5 and leaves feedback that helps the company decide which piece to print on a t-shirt. The chosen artists receive upfront cash and royalties from the sales. Effectively, the users are doing all of the work; all Threadless has to do is print the t-shirts.

Trust your users

After all, they’re the ones who will buy your product. Burberry launched the site, Art of the Trench, in 2009 and in true high-end designer fashion, paved the way for many other brands to follow. The website shows photographs of real, fashionable people wearing the iconic Burberry trench coat. Utilising your users photographs is a great way to get people sharing your brand on social streams.

Yogawear brand Lululemon has also done this effectively by incorporating Instagram into their marketing plan. Using a specific hashtag, users were asked to tweet or Instagram photos of themselves living #TheSweatLife and wearing Lululemon clothing.

If you’re looking for a London based digital agency to help boost your brand, why not get in touch with DVO!

In today’s digital age, creating content has never been easier, but getting it seen, read and paid for is a whole different ball game. As a full service digital agency it’s in our DNA so this week we’re sharing some of our insights to help you do things better.

Pre-internet era content creation used to be simple. It was created and distributed by select publishers and newspapers, and they would fund the creation process through advertisements and paid subscriptions. These publications would have a relatively stable readership base that would gobble up their content like daily bread. However, a variety of players have entered the content creation market since then.

Brands now give away free content in an effort to engage with their target market as a way to maintain and grow their consumer base. Bloggers write on their own platforms to make their opinions freely accessible to the public. And normal people share their own titbits of content via social networks as an efficient way to ‘socialise’ and ‘share’. A good piece of content nowadays needs only a topic, opinion and an angle, written with no grammatical errors and posted in a timely manner.

As the quality of these free branded and blogger content continues to improve, readers are left feeling reluctant to pay for content since a plethora of free options exist, forcing traditional publishers to rethink their monetisation strategy.

Furthermore, the abundance of free content also makes gaining readership harder than ever for brands and bloggers, as readers can now pick and choose free content as they please, resulting in a huge SEO and social media investment by both brands and bloggers.

The biggest issue that content providers face is no longer the content creation process, but a distribution and readership issue. This is why modern day content creation involves SEO, social media, guest blogging, free access and web versions of print articles.

The problem lies in the fact that there is so much content on the web, meaning a single piece of content will inevitably struggle to be seen. Creating content is dead easy, but gaining readers requires a whole lot more work.

If you’re looking for a London based digital agency to help with your marketing needs, then why not get in touch with DVO!

This week we look at negative brand content and steps to make things better.

Negative brand content can be hard to swallow. But at some point every brand and business will have a negative brand content experience, you just need to know how to deal with it. With the rise of brands using social media as a platform to engage with their customers, it has become easier for people to spread negative comments about brands online. But do not fear, there are ways that you can manage this negativity and even use it to your advantage.

Social media is a very easy platform for complaints. If a negative comment is made by the wrong person it can spread like wild fire. This could result in serious damage to your reputation and a consequent effect on sales. Here’s a few tips on how to tackle negative brand content:

• Don’t panic! This might lead you to tweet or comment defensively without thinking about the effect on the reputation of your brand.
• Who are they? The type of person who is sending out negativity regarding your brand is important to how you form your response. There are trolls on twitter that are just trying to get your attention, but industry experts or genuine customers making a negative comment or writing a bad review need to be addressed.
• Timely Engagement Nip it in the bud with a strategic response. Use the negativity as feedback and opportunity to engage with your customer. It’s not a good idea to ignore a genuine complaint as it will be perceived that you simply don’t care about your customers. Use this opportunity to show that you do value your customer’s feedback and that you are willing to provide a solution to the complaint.
• Don’t be a robot When you respond to a complaint or review, make sure you sound like a human being. It won’t work in your favour if your customer feels that they are communicating with an automated service, so give everyone a unique and genuine response. Be honest and apologetic and make sure you’re using real words and not corporate jargon.
• Be Honest Don’t try to avoid or hide negative comments. If you respond professionally and appropriately it can actually to your brand a favour.
• Get Ahead It is safe to expect that you will experience some kind of negativity online somewhere along the line, so be proactive. Establish an online presence for your company or brand via Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In, blogs and shareable creative content. This way search engines will always be populated with content you’ve created when you are searched for and not negative press. 

If you’re looking for a London based creative agency to help with your marketing needs, then why not get in touch with DVO!

With the fragmentation of media channels and audiences on the internet, it’s become harder than ever for companies and political parties to identify demographic groups united by a creed or culture. But over the past several years, one such collective has emerged and become a major force of influence over consumer and other preferences. These are the Mummy Bloggers.

What you think about Mummy Bloggers probably depends on the angle your relationship to them points from. If you’re a mother of young children, you appreciate the shared wisdom and insight into the sometimes baffling experience of trying to raise a child. If you’re a marketer, you see Mummy Bloggers as a potential gold-mine, a way to disseminate your brand name and products to a consumption-hungry audience. If you’re slightly jaded about the whole people setting up blogs and websites to get free products from companies thing, you probably won’t care much either way.

Mummy Bloggers didn’t start out as a freebie-seeking, swag-bag grabbing group. They were women with something to say talking to other women who wanted to listen. They are undeniably a phenomenon and probably mark the first time in history where women have been able to communicate with each other on a mass scale via a direct channel about their personal experiences of motherhood. Some commentators have gone as far as to label Mummy Bloggers the third wave of feminism.

Somewhere along the way, the movement became commercialised – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Who better to decide which company sells the best baby bottles than a Mummy Blogger? If a mother discovers a company selling, say, a type of lunch box which solves a space in the school-bag problem for her, why shouldn’t she share that information with her followers and fans online? And if she is writing about it, and effectively doing PR for the company, why shouldn’t she get paid for it?

The point about Mummy Bloggers that is often overlooked is that, generally speaking, the most successful ones aren’t just ‘Mummies’ with sick-strewn jumpers and ratty hair. The top bloggers are socially elite and well-educated and usually start blogging while on a having-a-baby break from prestigious corporate careers. In the US there are almost 5 million blogs which qualify as Mummy Blogs, but of that number only about 500 breakthrough and are read by a mass audience.

The other 99% of Mummy Bloggers will never break through into the mainstream, but can nevertheless acquire writing, marketing, PR and social media skills which they can parlay later on into paid careers. Perhaps that’s the real value of the genre to its practitioners. And despite being a digital collective, Mummy Blogging is intensely social. Dedicated conferences like Blogher, CyberMummy and BritMums attach thousands of women who have or hope to start online blogs.

For brands, blogger outreach to Mummy Blogs is increasingly a place where top names battle for attention, hoping for reviews from “real mums” and access to the valuable power of word of mouth. Being a player in the Mummy Blogger world can mean access to free products, getting big media buys and even trips to the red carpet in Hollywood and Caribbean cruises. In the future, this area will become more tightly regulated: in the US the Federal Trade Commission has already issued guidelines requiring bloggers to disclose their connections to advertisers. Expect something similar on these shores soon. Although not until after the next General Election.

It’s unlikely that Mummy Blogs will ever return to their origins, when it was just about the writing and connecting, but expect to see more authenticity in product reviews in the future, as the best Mummy Bloggers seek to protect their reputations and retain their audiences.

In our modern connected world online content rules. This week we discuss the fundamental difference between an advert and editorial.

The best online content produced by brands often blurs the line between two worlds, old and new.

When most people think of advertising they picture a billboard, a double page spread in a magazine or a TV commercial. This is an easily understandable business model. A brand pays an advertising agency to promote their product: a beautifully shot picture of a car with a witty strapline or a model who we aspire to be like can make a designer brand desirable. An advert is clearly selling us a product.

Online content can differ immensely from this model. This is not always easy for people to understand. The best content marketing does not appear to be advertising at all, as there is often no mention of a product.

A car company might commission a blogger to write about ‘Road trips in the UK’ or ‘Breathtaking highways in Scotland’ with no mention of the brand at all.

This can be hard for both consumers and companies to get their heads around. So hard that the industry body that governs us has taken steps to clarify, read more.

Some brands do still have the urge to publish content online about their products. When this is the case, there is little difference between content and paid advertising. Not that there is anything wrong with this. Giving a customer access to as much information about a product or service can be useful. The trouble is there is only so much that can be said. Put yourself in the consumer’s shoes: would you read an article that was little more than a sales pitch?

For example, would you rather read an article that told you about the benefits of taking out insurance on a bike or see an interactive map of hotspots in your area that bikes have been stolen from?

The fact the internet allows anything to be published virtually for free means brands have the opportunity to create an abundance of media that their audience can choose to consume rather than adverts they are forced to look at.

When a brand creates content to entertain rather than to sell, it builds a relationship with the customer and becomes viewed as an interesting friend.

How a brand benefits from publishing content

If online content doesn’t advertise the product or brand, how does the company profit from it?

Well, there are numerous ways this can work. Take the Innocent Drinks example. This simple piece of content was shared over 1,000 times as it was clearly a statement that resonated with its audience. This resonance builds a relationship with the audience as they interact with the brand and develop positive associations through engagement.

If the content is published by the brand on their own site, it should make the website more discoverable through additional search terms.

Google runs on links, so offsite articles that link back to the brand’s main site will boost the search ranking. As with most advertising, it is about visibility. The beauty of digital is that this can be measured and sales conversions can be identified.

If you’re looking for a London based agency to help boost your brand then why not get in touch with DVO!