Think You Got Hit by the Google Fred Update? Here Is What to Do

By Neil Patel

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Arguably, the biggest Google algorithm shakeup of 2017 occurred on March 8.

Of all things, it was called…Fred.

The sheer randomness of the name and the massive drop in traffic that many sites experienced have left a lot of marketers scratching their heads.

What happened, who was affected and why?

More importantly, what steps do you need to take if your traffic took a plunge?

In this post, I’m going to cover all the details of the update, explain how to recover from its negative consequences, and talk about what you need to do to avoid future penalties.

Why was it called Fred?

Let’s start from the …read more      

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2017 Content Excellence Challenge: The August Prompts

By Sonia Simone

Content Excellence Challenge: August Prompts

Happy August! It’s time for our pair of prompts to make you more creative and more productive.

For those of you who haven’t joined us yet, each month in 2017 we’re providing a pair of prompts: one to make you more productive and one to improve your creativity or writing skill.

Feel free to try one prompt or both. You can join the fun anytime you like. And let us know about your experiences in the comments!

The August Productivity Prompt

This month’s prompt is inspired by Jessica Abel’s excellent book for creative souls, Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus …read more      

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The Non-Perfectionist’s Guide to Noteworthy Blogging for Your Business

By Stefanie Flaxman

"You can care about quality and produce meaningful work without driving yourself crazy." – Stefanie Flaxman

The fear of criticism …

It can certainly discourage you from writing in the first place, and it also can disguise itself as perfectionism when you do attempt to create content for your business.

If you delay publishing your writing — while you try to improve your content before anyone else reads it — you are likely trying to avoid criticism.

The false belief associated with perfectionism is that if everything is “just right,” you’ll protect yourself from someone pointing out something you did wrong or something they don’t like (which is impossible to control).

The pivotal word in the sentence above …read more      

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How to Combine Native Advertising with Content Marketing to Maximize Your Traffic

By Neil Patel

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Despite the proven effectiveness of native advertising, it’s a concept that remains a little murky for many marketers.

Copyblogger performed a study on native advertising, asking people whether they knew what it was and how knowledgeable they were about it.

Here are the results:

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Clearly, it’s still an ambiguous concept to many.

Simply, native advertising is a tactic that blends promotional content with the rest of the content—native content—of a page.

Here’s a good example:

NativeEntrepreneur

When compared to more traditional advertisements such as banner ads, native ads tend to be more effective:

consumers interact …read more      

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Boost the Relevance of Your Content with Benefits and Features

By Sonia Simone

Quick Copy Tip

One cool thing about being a content marketer is that you tend to become an expert in your topic. You probably know an awful lot about your business, your project, or your subject matter.

In fact, you might actually know too much about it.

It’s called the curse of knowledge. Because we research our topics deeply and spend so much time writing about them, we tend to understand the technical specs inside and out. We have a great grasp of the under-the-hood details that make the thing work. And we think customers want to know all about those …read more      

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