Nebo Agency, iProspect Score Multiple Wins At 2015 Landy Awards

Inaugural Search Engine Land event honors the best in search marketing, raises $25,000 for two charities. The post Nebo Agency, iProspect Score Multiple Wins At 2015 Landy Awards appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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Egypt's lost Queen Nefertiti may lie concealed in King Tut's tomb

CAIRO(Reuters) - High-resolution scans suggest the tomb of Ancient Egypt's boy-king Tutankhamun contains passages to two hidden chambers, including what one British archaeologist believes is the last resting place of Queen Nefertiti.

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Berlin candy store offers 3D printed sweet treats

A German candy maker is hoping to tempt the taste-buds of Berliners with customized fruit gum sweets made with a 3D printer.

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Salton Sea backers still waiting for state to keep its word to save the lake

Community activists, politicians and water officials from the Imperial and Coachella valleys went to the state water board in Sacramento six months ago with a plea: Avoid a "looming catastrophe" at the Salton Sea.

The message was stark: after 2017, the lake "falls off a cliff environmentally."...

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Next conservation strategy: zeroing in on biggest energy users

Wealthier neighborhoods use far more energy per capita than their low-income counterparts, but the biggest energy users overall in Los Angeles County are commercial and industrial businesses.

Those are among the findings of a new analysis of energy consumption that provides the most detailed map...

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21 Posts That’ll Help You Decide What Type of Writer to Be

You passionately want to be a “real” writer.

A writer whose work is an authentic expression of your true self.

The problem is, you feel disconnected from everything you write. It’s like you’re the ghostwriter on a project nobody commissioned.

And sometimes you wonder if you should just give up.

After all, if you were destined to be a writer, it wouldn’t be this hard, would it?

But in truth, it just means you haven’t found your groove.

More specifically, you haven’t decided what kind of writer you want to be.

The firebrand? The storyteller? The visionary? The guru?

Successful templates abound, but you’re unsure which (if any) is authentically you.

And you’re making a mistake if you believe that question can be answered by careful thought alone.

In fact, if you’re serious about finding your stride as a writer, the answer is a little unexpected.

You must immerse yourself in the writing of others.

The “Serious Bloggers Only” Autumn Contest 2015

If you’ve followed Boost Blog Traffic over the past year, you’ll know that we periodically celebrate the best work of the members of our Serious Bloggers Only community.

For past winners, being recognized on BBT has not only been a validation of their skills as writers and bloggers, but it also drove valuable traffic to their blogs.

And in previous contests, even those entrants who didn’t make the final list reported that entering inspired them to push their writing further than ever before.

If you’re not a Serious Bloggers Only member, you’d be forgiven at this point for wondering:

What’s in it for me?

Why should I care about the results of a contest I didn’t enter?

In response, let me ask you:

How often do you read posts outside your niche? How often do you read the work of unfamiliar writers?

If your answer is “rarely” or “never,” you’re missing the opportunity to discover a post that just might put you on the path to becoming an authentic, confident writer.

As you read the winning posts that follow, try them on for size and consciously look for a post that feels like the work of the writer you were meant to be.

So here they are, the winners of our latest contest, organized by category.

Most Epic Post

Epicness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What’s epic to you may be commonplace to someone else, and vice versa. Even so, some posts possess certain qualities that naturally attract this description. This first category recognizes posts that – through their scope, detail or sheer ambition – set themselves apart from the pack.

Winner – Camilla Hallstrom – 99 Smart Ideas

Top 101 Self-Improvement Blogs That Help You Thrive

What I love about this category-winning post is that the impressive size of the list is just the starting point. This post quickly suggests a writer determined to push every aspect of the post to the maximum. The descriptions that accompany each entry are thoughtful and interesting. The formatting of the entries and section headers is slick and visually appealing. And each featured blog is augmented by three example posts as suggested entry points into that blogger’s work.

Runner-Up – Kim Owens – Wise Bread (Guest Post)

30+ Cash Back Sites to Earn You Thousands Per Year

What makes this post feel epic is its comprehensiveness – we can only imagine the research that lies behind it. A reader could start the post knowing little about cashback sites and finish it feeling like a topic expert. Kim gives a helpful overview of the sites but also uses a consistent set of attributes to make it easier to compare different options. This kind of post attracts links because it feels like the definitive take on its topic.

Visit Kim’s blog here: Money Under The Cushions

Highly Commended – Ben Levesque – Webrunner

How to Grow Your Business Through Guest Blogging (a Step-By-Step Guide)

This post feels epic not by virtue of having a large number of individual points, but through its patient and thorough treatment of a large and complex subject. Ben takes the time to set the stage for his discussion of guest blogging and then walks readers through each stage of the process, providing practical tips at each point. It’s a great way to get a solid overview of an important topic in a single sitting.

Most Original Idea

Sometimes a post rests on a single bold idea. Posts like this are often the easiest to write, but the hardest to devise – such “tent pole” ideas rarely arise. But when they do, our job as a writer is to get out of the way and let the idea shine through. That’s what these writers have done.

Winner – Thijs Harteveld – Critical Cactus

This One Simple Trick Will Save You 29% Space At Home

At the heart of this short post is a single striking idea about living spaces. (I won’t spoil it – read the post to find out!) What seems like a crazy notion at first becomes more seductive the more you think about it. Thijs grounds his idea with strong reasoning, and soon we wonder why more people don’t do it. In a niche where creative ideas abound, this still manages to feel fresh and interesting.

Runner-Up – Barry Gold – DivorcedOver50

Considering a Gray Divorce? Here Are Some Pros and Cons

Almost a pick for the “fearless” category, this post tackles a difficult topic – divorcing after a long marriage – with reason and wisdom. But it’s Barry’s coining of the term “di-curious” (to mean a person considering a divorce but unsure whether it’s the right path) that provides the post with its original hook.

Highly Commended – Vanessa Anderson – Diverging Roads

How Travel Can Redesign Your Brain

The web seems littered with posts about the self-improvement benefits of travel. But this post recommends travel not as a horizon-broadening tonic for the young, but as a way to maintain a healthy brain into old age. Providing a refreshing alternative to the more typical “complete a jigsaw” or “take a long walk” advice on keeping dementia at bay, this post is backed up by the author’s experiences moving to mainland China.

Most Practical

Great posts can inform, persuade or entertain, but a truly practical post inspires readers to take action and gives them everything they need to succeed. This category rewards posts that give their readers real-world results.

Winner – Jeffrey Romano – Scheduit

11 Networking Myths That are Costing You Time and Opportunities

This post has a wonderful, empathetic opening that speaks to the frustration of failing to wring full value from a networking event. Jeffrey successfully demystifies an activity that many people find opaque and intimidating, and his down-to-earth tips give even nervous networkers a clear sense of purpose for their next events. Better results will surely follow.

Runner-Up – Victor Tan – Spirit On Stage

Your Presentation Won’t Be Perfect, and That’s Great

I loved this post’s central premise – that something will almost certainly go wrong with your next presentation but that’s okay. In fact, the idea that perfection is not only highly unlikely but actually undesirable should comfort anyone facing a public performance. And that’s why this post has real, practical value. Reading it will actually increase the chances of a calm, polished performance.

Highly Commended – Ellen Bard – Tiny Buddha (Guest Post)

5 Ways to Create a Life You Love Without Making a Major Change

Self-improvement posts often set their sights on huge changes. But many of us are not looking to reinvent ourselves, just to make incremental improvements. Ellen’s practical post shows us how to create a life we love – even if life is basically okay right now. It gives us permission to want a little more, and by making realistic promises it’s far more likely to deliver on them.

Visit Ellen’s blog here: Ellen Bard

Most Valuable

The success measurement for this category is simple. To what extent is the world a better place (even in a small way) because of the existence of the entrant’s post? To what extent will it improve the lives of those who read it?

Winner – Ashley Trexler – A Fine Parent (Guest Post)

How to Make Sure Your Kids Don’t Grow Up to Be Judgemental People

Valuable posts usually start with big ambition – and Ashley’s post has this in spades. She has a long-term goal – that the next generation will grow up a little less closed-minded and judgmental than the last. And even if she only reaches a few people, imagine the ripple effect over many years and lives.

Visit Ashley’s blog here: Lies about Parenting

Runner-Up – Tom Schueneman – TriplePundit (Guest Post)

Electronics Recycling: Breaking Down Barriers to Employment

This post brings together two important issues of our times – the mountains of waste caused by consumer electronics that quickly become obsolete and the struggle that ex-offenders go through in finding work after incarceration. Tom doesn’t allow the seriousness of either issue to affect the post’s readability, and by promoting practical solutions to these problems he’s making a genuine difference in the world with his writing.

Visit Tom’s blog here: Global Warming is Real

Highly Commended – Quinn Eurich – The Change Blog (Guest Post)

How I Finally Loosened Anxiety’s Grip on Me

For those suffering from anxiety, the feeling of powerlessness as emotions take over can be overwhelming. Here Quinn uses her experiences with anxiety to contextualize the practices she finds most effective in dealing with this “sneaky tyrant.” The result is a valuable case study of dealing with anxiety that greatly benefits from the author’s willingness to share the details of her journey.

Visit Quinn’s blog here: Quinn Eurich

Most Fearless

Any decision to put your ideas in the public domain is an act of courage. But some posts, by virtue of their topic or the author’s willingness to be vulnerable, are more fearless than most. This category celebrates brave bloggers.

Winner – Shelley Sandiford – Next Scientist (Guest Post)

How To Know If You Should Leave Academia … Before Wasting Years In Postdocs

If you’ve spent most of your adult years engaged in study, it will be difficult to hear that you’re most likely unsuited to a life in academia. But that’s the central message of this brave post. Shelley doesn’t shy away from hard truths that might sting at first but could save her readers a great deal of heartache in the longer term. And she isn’t afraid to subject her academic life to those same tough measures.

Visit Shelley’s blog here: Sciconic

Runner-Up – K.J. Hutchings – K.J. Hutchings

What to do when your partner is still close to their ex, without seeming crazy or jealous

Admitting that you feel uncomfortable with the relationship your partner has with his or her ex is not easy. This post reassures readers that such feelings are not just acceptable, but normal, and shares grounded, emotionally intelligent tips for dealing with them. But it doesn’t assume that the answers lie solely with the reader and is brave enough to suggest issuing an ultimatum if all else fails.

Highly Commended – Emma Carmichael – The Marvellous Mind

5 Commando Life Hacks To Get You Motivated

Inspired by the brave story of an elite soldier who sustained horrific injuries during a tour of Afghanistan, this post shares the positive lessons he drew from his long journey to recovery. But the author’s decision to reach out to the soldier directly also required a very real type of courage. Most bloggers would have kept the story at arm’s length and stayed within the confines of the soldier’s book.

Best Use of Detail and Examples

Often what separates an interesting post from a genuinely useful one is the level of detail and the examples the author chooses to include. Providing detail takes work, and choosing good examples demands more creativity than you might imagine. But the authors of the posts in this category understand the value of both.

Winner – Jacqueline Stone – Wise Stress Mastery

Quit a Bad Habit, or Build a Healthy One! 10 Ideas that Really Work

Habit change is a wildly popular topic in the self-improvement space. And unsurprisingly so. After all, adopting the right habits (and eliminating the wrong ones) can have a huge impact on your quality of life and the results you achieve. But what sets these battle-tested tips apart from the ones in other posts are the concrete examples that bring each point vividly to life, adding credibility to the claim that they “really work.”

Runner-Up – Cylon George – Marc and Angel Hack Life (Guest Post)

7 Surprising Reasons You’re Attracting Toxic People

Most of us accept that some people are toxic to our mental wellbeing. But this post takes the idea further – stating that we might unwittingly be attracting them. What Cylon does brilliantly is to tell us specifically why this happens, how to recognize the early signs and what to do to fix it. In other words, he’s created a toolkit for identifying and dismantling toxic encounters.

You can visit Cylon’s blog here: Spiritual Living for Busy People

Highly Commended – John Anderson – Bible Money Matters (Guest Post)

The Important Investment Every Married Couple Should Make

Money issues, this post reveals, are the number-one cause of divorce. The post details the true cost of divorce and builds a persuasive case for tackling corrosive money topics head-on. And since he wrote it for a faith-infused personal finance blog, John also provides specific biblical verses to help maintain a healthy balance and respect around money issues in a marriage. The result – a thorough and valuable post.

You can visit John’s blog here: Simple Financial Fitness

Bonus Awards

Best Storytelling – Gail Gates – Aging Schmaging

I Cried Today: Maybe You Really Can’t Go Home

There’s something beautiful and heartbreaking about this post, which would be equally at home in a short story collection as among the pages of the blog. It tells of a simple quest to find a relic of childhood, and although it’s a simple tale told in a minor key, it manages to evoke time and place wonderfully and tug at the emotions with great effectiveness. This is a simple story well told that lingers long after the first reading.

Most Virtuoso Performance – John Yeoman – Write to Done (Guest Post)

How to Bond With Your Readers: The Pain and Glory of Writing

John’s writing is rich with the kind of detail that quickly establishes him as an authority in his field, which happens to be . . . writing! No surprise, then, that he’s been featured in the winners’ list of every SBO contest to date. He packs his post on bonding with practical advice, colorful examples and crisp, playful prose. Bravo!

You can visit John’s blog here: Writers’ Village

Best Visuals – Perpetua Neo – Perpetua Neo

Your most common therapy questions answered: The technicalities, simplified

This post explains the differences between three disciplines – psychology, psychotherapy and psychiatry – with the help of a series of simple images. The consistent visual style ties the post together and makes a potentially dry and academic subject highly accessible. And cleverly, by refining the readers’ understanding of these concepts, the author also moves them further along a path that could lead them to hire her.

What Kind of Writer Will You Choose to Be?

Still struggling to find your place as a writer?

Don’t worry, it’s a common problem. But introspection is rarely the answer.

Instead, look for answers outside yourself.

So dive into the posts above. Study our previous contest winners here, here and here.

Because somewhere, a writer is already producing work that will signpost your own path to confident and authentic writing.

And the key could be the smallest thing – a certain attitude, a particular rhythm, a distinctive way of expressing ideas.

But when you find it, everything about being a writer will become easier.

So immerse yourself in the best writing of others.

And don’t emerge until you know what sort of writer you should be.

About the Author: Glen Long is the Managing Editor of Boost Blog Traffic. If you’re feeling social, pop over and say hi on Facebook or Twitter.

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5 Ways Content Underpins Outbrain’s Customer Retention Strategy

Content marketing isn’t just for generating leads – it can also help you support and retain customers. Image source.

It takes more than coupon clippings and reward points to win over today’s consumers — they’re looking for value that goes beyond monetary incentive. Businesses that know how to engage their customers and provide unconditional value will be the ones that foster a long-term relationship with their community.

This makes the pairing of content marketing and customer retention a powerful match that can’t be ignored.

The growth team I lead at Outbrain, the world’s largest content discovery platform, provides a real-life case study for content and retention coming together to produce results.

I’d like to share five specific content-based customer retention tactics we’re employing to grow our customer base and revenue at Outbrain – tactics you can steal for your own customer retention strategy.

1. Get new customers trained up fast with educational emails

The sooner you educate customers about using your product, the faster they can derive value from you and become sticky.

According to a survey conducted by SaaS metrics company Preact, 23% of customers churn due to poor onboarding. Especially when you have a fairly complex service, frontloading the delivery of educational content and learning from how new signups interact with this content is critical.

We’ve certainly seen a direct correlation between reducing our churn and improving our onboarding process. To help our customers get acquainted with our platform and understand how our system works, we created a bootcamp training series.

As soon as a customer’s first campaign is launched, an automated email campaign (which we call our Brainiac Bootcamp) is triggered for them. It sends four daily emails that walk the customer through campaign optimization tips, our dashboard and other resources. Here’s a screenshot of the first of four emails:

The first of four emails in our automated email training series.

When we first launched our Bootcamp series, we did a test and control experiment by sending 90% of first-time customers the email program and keeping a 10% control group. For customers who received the bootcamp emails, we saw a direct correlation between content and retention.

Pro tip: If you’re launching a new email campaign, exclude 10% of recipients as a control group so you can say with confidence that the customer’s actions were a result of the campaign, and they wouldn’t have taken the same actions even if they hadn’t received the emails.

We dug even deeper by being strategic about which features required more education than others.

For example, we knew from analyzing the overall behavior of our customers that the more headlines they are testing per individual piece of content, the better chance they have of receiving a higher click-through rate (CTR) when their content is recommended in our publisher network.

This graph shows the drastic increase in CTR when a campaign has greater than 5, 10 and 15 headlines on rotation.

Knowing this, we made sure our bootcamp content helped customers understand the importance of testing more headlines. As a result, those customers received higher click-through rates – and stayed active 1.5x longer than people who did not receive the bootcamp emails.

Takeaway for your campaigns:

Make sure your onboarding process is laser-focused on educating users on the importance of certain product behaviors you know will result in their success.

Through testing, determine which features lead to a higher retention rate – and then be sure to frontload that education. If customers do well, they’re more likely to stick around longer. It’s mutually beneficial.

2. Use live webinars to step up customer training

Webinars are often discussed as an acquisition tactic, but they’re also a great way of engaging more personally with customers at scale. Nothing beats real face-time when explaining a complex product.

We run bi-monthly webinars conducted by our Account Strategists. The content has evolved over time, and it’s always driven by feedback from our customers, as well as questions fielded by our Customer Support team.

A landing page for one of our bi-weekly live webinars.

We put a lot of time into adapting the content we present in these webinars, but also closely measure the webinars’ impact on our bottom line.

Our Business Intelligence team built a report to compare customers’ campaign performance a week before and a week after they attend the webinar. We also look at their metrics two weeks and a month later to see if they’re continuing to optimize their performance based on webinar learnings.

On average, we’ve seen a 50% increase in average spend and 38% increase in cost-per-click (CPC) as a result of these webinars.

You may be thinking that increase in spend and CPC does not necessarily equal success for our customers, who are optimizing for leads and pages per visit. But due to the competitive nature of our content marketplace, a campaign that starts with a higher CPC has a much better chance of receiving any traffic at all.

It’s another win-win scenario – if we can effectively explain this to customers on a webinar, they’re more likely to see results from their campaigns and they’re more likely to stick around.

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Use webinars to demystify your product. If you help customers succeed, they’ll help you succeed too.
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3. Always be adding content to your help center

Not nearly enough content marketers are focused on making their help center and FAQs as useful as possible – but help centers should be a vital part of the customer journey.

At Outbrain, we’ve structured our Help Center to reflect our customers’ needs from the pre-signup stage to first-time campaign creation to more advanced optimizations and reporting.

Just like webinars and bootcamp emails, help centers should be works in progress that you’re constantly striving to improve. You can use a combination of sources to help determine what content needs to be developed, refined or updated. These could include:

• New product developments that require more training and FAQs: Product releases are exciting, but the platform and its features are only as good as your ability to communicate them to your customers. It’s important to educate customers on how to get the most out of new features — create new training content and FAQs to guide them!
• Commonly asked questions sent to your Customer Support team: If your customer support team notices a trend in a particular topic of enquiry, that’s great fodder for new Help Center content.
• Google Analytics reports for the top Help Center search terms, search refinements made by customers and most commonly visited FAQs: For example, have a look at the chart below which shows our most commonly searched terms from 2014 and the percentage of search refinements users were making when trying to find relevant content.
  

  Customers searching for FAQs on cancelling accounts or languages were having to further refine their terms to find the content they were after, whereas customers looking for FAQs on UTMs, mobile, tracking or adding content were finding what they needed right away.

  We used this report to create more relevant and obvious FAQs to address these trickier searches and saw an improvement in search refinements and a reduction in questions on these topics sent to Customer Support.

All of these measures help customers feel supported the entire way through their journey, and allow them to better understand your product and derive more value. And that keeps customers coming back for more.

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Use your search box data to understand what content your customers want but can’t find.
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4. Communicate product improvements and new features with great content

Collaboration between content and product marketing is essential to bringing new features to customers in the most efficient way. The more educational content created around each release, the more customers will continue to engage with and provide feedback on the new feature.

For us, email and our blog are our two most effective channels for sharing product updates with our customers. Our email updates are designed to alert customers to the latest developments, and then we drive them to the blog to learn more.

When we created the ability for customers to upload content in bulk and test multiple headlines and images per URL, we sent out an email announcing the feature:

The goal of adding this feature was to make it easier to add more headlines; a process that had been manual and very time consuming.

By tracking the feature as an event in Kissmetrics, we were able to see that the average number of headlines and images per content increased significantly after our blog post and email explaining the new feature.

The peak in this Kissmetrics graph shows how usage increased after we informed our audience of the new feature.

The concept here is pretty straightforward: the more customers are aware of new tools and features, the more likely they are to use them.

5. Use lifecycle email marketing to segment customers

Email campaigns are still the bread and butter of many a retention marketer’s efforts. With today’s overloaded inbox, personalization of the content based on individual product usage data is now more important than ever.

This is where lifecycle email marketing comes in: reaching your customers at each stage of their journey with you and tailoring relevant content to their needs and experience at each stage.

For lifecycle email marketing to our customers, we use a customer retention automation platform called Optimove to measure the impact of every campaign on revenue and customer lifetime value across five major customer segments:

• New customers
• Non-spending customers
• Engaged customers
• Churned customers
• Reactivated customers

Our seasonal performance email campaign is a great example of this. Historically, we’ve seen that the end of each quarter is a competitive time on the Outbrain network; more buyers and higher cost-per-click. It’s especially important to communicate that to customers so they understand how to optimize their campaigns accordingly.

When we ran an educational email campaign for our most active customer segment about the importance of adding more headlines to increase your click-through rate (CTR), we saw a 10% increase in the average number of headlines per content campaign among those who received the email – along with an increased CTR in the most active customer segment.

Put your content to work

If you plan to prioritize customer retention as a major driver of growth and revenue for your business, investing in content will be critical to your success.

Here’s a quick recap of the five ways content underpins our entire customer retention strategy:

1. Get new customers trained up fast with educational emails
2. Use live webinars to step up customer training
3. Always be adding content to your help center based on customer feedback and user behavior
4. Communicate product improvements and new features with great content
5. Use lifecycle email marketing to segment customers

Over to you — how are you using content marketing to drive your customer retention strategy?

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