Google Penguin update was released on April 24 and since then I have been approached by few people saying their site traffic has been hit badly.

I always wondered, what could they have done and the first thing I go about asking is – were they spamming. Quite obviously no one said yes, but a quick glance at their activities and a look at their site will convince you, they may actually be doing it, maybe not intentionally.

Nothing in my opinion beats building organic traffic – writing original content, avoid link stuffing, getting better on social media, etc because sooner or later, Google will catchup with your techniques and always remember, they have better mind than yours. So NEVER CHEAT Google!

Hence, this week, I decided to give you a quick intro to what the Penguin Update is, what you should do to if you’re hit and what to take care.

Top 5 Posts on Google Penguin Update

1. First up, it’s Matt Cutts telling us about Google Penguin in this video

The point to note is, if you’re doing paid reviews, make sure that is disclosed and than there is few other tidbits on link spamming. So avoid doing it!

2. Coming second, this post by Saurabh Sharma talks about few points to avoid being hit by Penguin 2.0 update. Quite notably, he talks about the importance of Social Media. Undoubtedly, it is one of the most important medium to spread content and engaging.

3. Also, Shira Gal has some great tips on avoiding the Google Penguin penalty in this post. I agree with her on usage of multiple content types – Image and Multimedia to build your traffic. It does help in reducing the bounce rate of your site and getting users glued for a while. Great tips!!

4. This post by Pamela Vaughan gives us the lowdown on what to do if your site has been hit with the Penguin Update. And like each update, the stress on keyword stuffing is quite obvious. Add to that hidden links and cloaking. Her message, avoid doing those and you’re back to being the best online. Also, get the Authorship of your content.

5. Finally, here’s an humorous take on the entire Penguin Update by Barry Gibson. But then there are subtle messages on why the sites got penalized.

So that is it for this week!

Your Turn

1. Is your site hit with Google Penguin Update?

2. What steps do you recommend to recover, if anyone has been hit?

Share your views through the comments below!

Photo Credit: Arthur Chapman via photopin cc

The post Top 5 Posts on Google Penguin Update – Week #23 appeared first on Malhar Barai.

Did you hear about Facebook Ad creation process getting a makeover and only few ad options would be available?

But before you or businesses jump on me and shun Facebook for fewer options, there are still some questions out there. So you can breathe for a while.

No, this post is not about what changes they have announced, but is of a little experiment that I did and am still studying the answers.

With an intention to increase the brand value and recall, I recently ran a Facebook Ad campaign for Cake-O-Mania. Since, this was the first Facebook Ad that the brand was doing, it was kind of an experiment for me.

The result follows…

Facebook Ads…

While the usage of Facebook is FREE, no wonder that their key monetization strategy is using Facebook ads. They also leverage the screen real estate very well and hence you see ads and sponsored stories in your timeline.

What we did?

With the aim of this Facebook Ad was to increase the reach, I chose the option to ‘Get More Likes’, which looked pretty logical. The next step was to define the reach, since we only wanted folks from Bangalore having an interest in cakes and narrowed down the reach to very specific audience.

Voila, we were set to launch the ad!!

The results

1. Increase on ‘Likes’ on the first day were miniscule

2. The number of ‘Likes’ shot up on the second day, with an increase of nearly 400% than the previous day

The stats about ‘Reach’ of the Facebook Ad gave us very interesting insights.

1. The reach increased nearly 3 fold by the second day

2. By the end of the campaign, the reach had moved from 2700 to more than 17,000

3. Similarly, the number of ‘unique people who saw the post’ which is viral-ity increased by more than 700%

Net Result

Increased PTAT, leading to more inquiries and increased brand value.

Verdict

As I found, a wisely done Facebook Ad campaign can boost brands recognition. Be careful about selecting your audience, done correctly, the ad can be targeted at the right set of users increased the chances of it being ‘clicked’ and ‘viewed’.

Your Turn

1. What kind of ad do you recommend for smaller brands or new business?

2. What strategies should such brand adopt?

The post The Facebook Ad Experiment appeared first on Malhar Barai.

WordPress Plugins are at the core of WordPress being one of the best blogging platforms. These plugins offer users some niche out-of-the box functionalities which otherwise would be difficult to achieve.

As we know, the right WordPress Plugin will help you achieve mundane tasks as image loading, Twitter integration or even much difficult task as SEO.

In this post, I share few plugins that I use and are kind of ‘must have’ in my opinion.

5 WordPress Plugins

1. Yoast SEO

http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important aspect of any Content Strategy. Using proper SEO techniques, the ability of your content to be discovered increases manifold.

A simple looking ‘Yoast SEO’ WordPress plugin is by the way one of the most powerful SEO plugins. It has the ability to give information of your HTML tags, setting up permalink structure and eve setting up XML sitemaps, which are very important from SEO perspective.

2. SEO Friendly Images

http://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-image/

Again an innocuous looking plugin but helps very much in assigning the title and alt attributes for your images. So even if you miss giving information on those attributes, the SEO Friendly Images WordPress plugin with handle it.

3. Social Network Auto-poster

http://wordpress.org/plugins/social-networks-auto-poster-facebook-twitter-g/

Apart from your content being discovered by search engines is important, it is also very much necessary now that the content is shared across multiple social media platforms. With more than 50% of the world using social media and disseminating information, this WordPress plugin helps in posting on multiple platforms.

4. Triberr

http://wordpress.org/plugins/triberr-wordpress-plugin/

Triberr is one of the best place for bloggers to share content.  It is much helpful for new bloggers to drive traffic to their website. Their WordPress plugin makes it easier to share content directly from the WordPress dashboard. It also enables to share comments directly via the plugin.

5. Tweet Old Post

http://wordpress.org/plugins/tweet-old-post/

Often your post becomes stale after a while and there is very little of social sharing. This plugin allows your old posts to be tweeted at certain intervals, thereby ensuring that your content is shared often, use specific tags and also exclude some categories.

One More…

6. Lazy Load

http://wordpress.org/plugins/lazy-load/

If your site had tons of images that load while the page is being accessed, this is one WordPress plugin you should have. The plugin improves the site loading time by loading the image only when user is viewing the page.

These were my top 5 or to say 6 must have WordPress Plugins, now it’s your turn…

1.What tasks you generally leave out for plugins?

2. Which plugins would you suggest for a WordPress blog?

Share your views in the comment section below!!

The post 5 Must Have WordPress Plugins appeared first on Malhar Barai.

Probably you are not living in a ghost town and know that the new Google+ was unveiled last week. And with more than 300 million active users, it’s a platform to reckon with.

The new Google+ announced at the I/O 2013 Conference has since evoked lot of interest in the social media community. Be it the new 2 column interface, auto-hashtagging (a feature I love), photos and Hangout replacing Chats, the changes have stirred up some interesting debates.

So here we go with the weekly round up…

Also Read: 5 Ways to Leverage Google+ Communities

Top 5 Posts on New Google+

Post #1

First up, what are the changes that Google+ announced at the I/O 2013. This post by Francis Bea rounds up 41 key changes that were shared during the conference day. With information on the new layout and auto-hashtagging, we might see more people adopting new Google+.

Post #2

On the second place, we have Sherry Nouraini walk us through the new Google+ features in her own weekly hangout ‘OpenSM’. Here’s the slide pack she had used during the hangout. I agree with her on the ‘Related Topics’ feature, it’s a great way to discover information which otherwise would have missed from our radar.

Post #3

On this third post, Om Malik along with Fred Gilbert share the behind the scenes effort on the new Google+. It’s interesting to hear the take on ‘flat design’ because the guys at Google wanted the content to shine through. And hence you see a gentle stream of updates and no menus on either sides. Amazing!!

Post #4

So this post by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols gives a love, hate view of new Google+. Until I read the article, had not looked at the font issue though. While the point about no updates for Hangout is quite valid. Even I would have liked to hear about some Hangout Tweaks

Post #5

Finally, if you’re looking forward to build some audience around Google+, this video of Amy Walgenbach tips should help you a lot

Your Turn Now

1. What did you make out of the New Google+?

2. Which feature(s) did you like the most?

3. Will it increase adoption of Google+?

Share your views and it would be great to exchange thoughts.

Circle me on Google+ here –> https://plus.google.com/117622256636395350069/about

The post Top 5 Post on New Google+ – Week #21 appeared first on Malhar Barai.

Free Images!! Ha…I see your eyes light up.

You have written some great content, but we know that it is incomplete without an image. Images have the ability tell a story and they form an integral part of the many articles we write.

The web is a treasure trove of some beautiful images, but not all of these images are available for FREE. Though the challenge lies in finding the right images at the right price.At the highest level, they are classified as premium, freemium or free images.

Before we dig into the resources for free images, here is the classification you should know about from Google:

Labeled for reuse

Your results will only include images labeled with a license that allows you to copy and/or modify the image in ways specified in the license.

Labeled for commercial reuse

Your results will only include images labeled with a license that allows you to copy the image for commercial purposes, in ways specified in the license.

Labeled for reuse with modification

Your results will only include images labeled with a license that allows you to copy and modify the image in ways specified in the license.

Labeled for commercial reuse with modification

Your results will only include images labeled with a license that allows you to copy the image for commercial purposes and modify it in ways specified in the license.

Here is another great resource on copyright guidelines.

Back to our main topic…

4 Resources For Free Images

1. Google Images

Google Images is one of the best place to search for some beautiful images. For free images, look for the small ‘gear’ on the right side of the screen and select ‘Advanced Search’. Select the correct image usage type from the blue sign that says ‘Usage Rights’ and you’re set.

Warning: Don’t just pick up any image from the search result, they are protected by strict copyrights

2. Flickr Creative Commons

To pick up free images from Flickr, put the image subject in the search string and click the ‘Advanced Search’ on the right corner of the screen. On the Advanced search page, select ‘Creative Commons’  at the bottom.

3. PhotoPin

One of the easier ways to find free images from Creative Commons is to search through Photopin. It find images with all the attribution license details, making it easier for you to plugin the image to your content.

4. FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This site has one of the best stock of images. Free images are lower in size, apt for blogs, but if you want a bigger size, they offer it at a premium. With some best images, it is often my go-to site.

5. Create Your Own

Yes, this could one of your best ways to get free images. I often end up making my own images when I am unable to find a suitable image on the web. With cameras on most phones now, it is pretty much easy to click a snap and utilize it on your content. You can even add some beautiful text over it using image editing tools like PicMonkey.

Your Turn

1. How do you find images for your websites?

2. Do you use free images or premium?

The post 5 Amazing Resources For Free Images appeared first on Malhar Barai.

Pinterest has been gaining much importance lately.With nearly 50 million users and growing, you are looking at a great marketing platform and so you need an ‘Effective’ Pinterest Strategy.

The beauty of Pinterest lies in its simple yet a very pleasing visual interface and so your Pinterest Strategy should involve a lot of visual element. Since Pinterest also supports videos, it’s a great way to showcase your video streaming prowess too!

So this week was dedicated to finding some amazing articles that can help YOU build an effective Pinterest Strategy and get additional traffic through your visual content.

Also Read: 5 SEO Tricks for Pinterest

Top 5 Posts on Pinterest Strategy

Post #1

The first post is from Beth Hayden on 56 Ways to Market your Business on Pinterest. Though #8 which says about commenting on Pins is still less prevalent, but am sure those tips are pretty much useful in creating an amazing Pinterest Strategy for your brand.

Post #2

If you are looking at more resources to master your Pinterest Strategy, this post by Zach Bulygo is a treasure trove. You ought to bookmark this post since it has links to 103 great articles on Pinterest. Starting from the basics to some rare gems, it’s one article you should not miss reading!

Post #3

And if you’re a writer, the post ‘How Writers can Use Pinterest’ by Peg Fitzpartrick is worth a read. She shares some basic tips for writers to build an effective Pinterest strategy. #3 is a pretty good tip, since every reader would like to know something more about the writer, so create boards that can help identify you.

Post #4

If you’re a community manager, it is impertinent that you share the importance of Pinterest within your community. This post ‘How community managers use Pinterest’ gives good insights on Pinterest Strategy for community managers. The point on leveraging ‘contests’ to generate interest and traffic is pretty spot on.

Point #5

One of the biggest virtue of Pinterest is that it helps boost SEO. This post ‘6 Quick and Easy Ways to Boost SEO With Pinterest‘ by Rebekah Radice explores 6 quick and easy ways to do so. The one point that I also advocate is about “pinning you own content’ and it definitely adds life to your content.

So that’s it for this week.

Let’s hear from you now

1. How important has Pinterest been in your branding strategy?

2. Do you follow a particular Pinterest Strategy?

3. Share your interesting Pinterest board

You can follow me on Pinterest here…

The post Top 5 Posts on Effective Pinterest Strategy – Week #20 appeared first on Malhar Barai.

This is a Guest Post by Anny Solway

One of the best ways to enhance a company’s reputation, develop traffic, and improve search engine performance is to be sure that their website is social media friendly. This is because websites like Facebook and Twitter have really exploded due to one simple fact: people prefer old-fashioned word of mouth more than anything else.

Here’s what we mean: You can see an advertisement on TV for a toothpaste and you might make a mental note to look for it the next time you go shopping. The reality, however, is that you are probably not going to make that big of an effort to do so. If you hear from a friend, however, that the toothpaste really did make their teeth much whiter or that it is a great product, you will definitely seek it out.

Also Read: The Three C’s of Social Media

Because the online world does not work in the same way as a person to person conversation, social media has become the next best thing. People from all over the world now use these sites to recommend things, “talk” about things, and more. This is often done by clicking “Like” buttons or “Share” buttons, re-tweeting, and more on the website. And this is tremendously valuable.

How to Get Social Media Friendly Website

So, is your website social media friendly? In other words, do you make it easier than ever for someone to like or share the content you have available on the website? This is a true key to success, and yet a lot of people and companies are missing the boat, or they just are not using the right tools to ensure that sharing and liking can easily occur.

Search engine optimization can be an extremely difficult endeavor. If you’re using the WordPress platform, you’ll find that many of the free themes out there don’t really have the search engine optimization features built into them that you’ll need. Premium WordPress themes usually include enhancements that are designed for users who need to make certain that the content on their website is as search engine friendly as possible. Here are some of the things they generally include and why you should consider utilizing one of them for any sort of a business site.

When the theme is then partnered with the many social media plugins and widgets, such as the many graphic tags that feature social network icons or functions, it converts a nice blog or website into one that is social media friendly, and optimally functional.

Photo Credit: Rosaura Ochoa via photopin cc

The post Is Your Website Social Media Friendly? appeared first on Malhar Barai.

Are you here because of the headline? Look at the images on the side. Newspapers headlines are the best way to learn the art of grabbing attention

If you are here because of the headline of this article, I consider my job as half done, because it as caught you attention and that is what good headlines should do other than having great content.

And in the other half, I am going to share few links that I feel are some very good articles on writing great headlines. I do see crafting headlines is an art, those articles have covered each bases very all.

Here you go…

Top 5 Posts on Writing Stunning Headlines

Post #1

One of the site I admire a lot is 12Most. It has got some powerful contributors and this post – ‘12 Most Snappy Headline Writing Tips For Your Blog‘ by Jayme Soulati gives some great tips. #8 is spot on as sometimes blogger tend to over do SEO and start writing for search engines rather than readers.

Post #2

How do you guage the importance of headlines??

Well, Brian Clark from Copyblogger has 11 posts dedicated to writing some great headlines. Head over to this amazing series of post starting here – How to Write Magnetic Headlines

And I am sure, at the end of that series, you are going to be a rock star in writing those amazing headlines.

Post #3

Barry Feldman echoes that exactly about being a media star by writing good headlines in this post. And I liked the way this article has been written. The first part about we being in the 1986 era, just blew me away!!

Post #4

On this post - How To: Create an Amazing Headline For Your Blog Post by Taylor Davies are six amazing techniques that will help you write better headlines. The point about using ‘adjectives’ and also using ‘pun’ caught my eyes. They are pretty powerful ways to grab the readers attention.

Post #5

And finally, let me share some easier but an exciting way to write peppier headlines. In this post – 45 Exciting Words to Spice up Your Blog Headlines by Alex you get some great key words. Guess what? I have bookmarked this post and plan to use much of those words going forward

I hope you find all of these links exciting and will help you craft some great headlines for your next post.

Do not miss to bookmark this post and visit all those links, am sure they are pretty helpful.

Your Turn

It’s over to you now. Please let me know your feedback about this post. The comment section is all yours! Let’s engage over -

• Does this post really help you?
• Were you able to write an amazing headline?
• Share your next post?

Also read: 5 Blogging Mistakes to avoid

Photo Credit: DanBrady via photopin cc

The post Top 5 Posts on Writing Stunning Headlines – Week #19 appeared first on Malhar Barai.

I have always been asked about the social media tools that help me manage my activities online. With new tools coming up everyday, it’s not easy to know about all of them. But I stick to few basic tools to help me manage most of my activities on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ et al.

Read: 5 Twitter Tools to Increase Productivity

What I have learnt though is, not one tool will do everything you want. So, I usually end up picking different tools to manage different functions of my activity.

Those repeated inquiries do lead me to reading about the various social media tools getting recommended by some leading personalities and here’s the list of Top 5 Posts that I came across this week.

Top 5 Post on Social Media Tools

1. Google+ remains an enigma for most of the tools makers since they have limited API calls that the tools can make. This post by Aleh Barysevich gives us few social media tools that support Google+. Personally, I use ‘Do Share’ on multiple occasions to manage my activity on Google+

2. Ian Cleary shares a list of 21 social media tools and technology in this post. I would say this list is overwhelming and would cover most of your activities in the social space. And I frequently use Google Analytics, it’s such an amazing tool.

3. If Twitter Hashtags is what you dread of, this post by Saul Fleischman give 6 hash tag tools that can make your life better. I have always found TagDef to be a wonderful tool.

4. Love infographics?? Then you should read this post by Lilach Bullock where she share 15 awesome tools to help you create wow-some infographics. Visual.ly is a personal favorite too.

5. Finally, as marketer, we love managing content and this post by Genia Stevens gives us 4 Social Media tools for content management. My favorite here is the Buffer tool followed by Social Bro.

Your Turn

If you would like to share, this is the place to let me know which social media tools do you use to manage your online activities.

Click here to read – Top 5 Social Media Automation Tools to Streamline Your Web Presence

 Photo Credit: UGArdener via photopin cc

The post Top 5 Post on Social Media Tools – Week #18 appeared first on Malhar Barai.

Time Management plays a key role in success of any blogger. Every minute, enormous amount of content is created but then there are few ideas which do not see the light as well, reason, the blogger had different priorities.

I know you that these bloggers want to write, but for the lack of plan or priorities, the enthusiasm to write a post dies down very fast. So, if you’re someone who is not able to write regularly, inspite of making plans to do it, this time management article is for you.

Here are the set of rules I try to adhere to and ensure that you get a post every single week. It’s more than a 100 post on this blog now and this could not have been possible if I did not stick to a plan. And just to say, this plan has evolved from my own experience over the last one year of writing regularly.

5 Time Management Tips

Time Management Tip #1. Set Aside Time to Write

Well, I am a morning person and prefer to write my posts early. This helps to plan the rest of my day promoting the post and even responding to comments. In this post, I have said, you got to write EVERY SINGLE DAY. Not everything you write will be published. But setting aside time to write everyday will help you set a pattern and the tame the beast called “mind”

Time Management Tip #2. Switch Off all Social Platforms

Earlier, when I used to sit for writing, I had all sort of social platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google+ open. So everytime someone updated a status or a new tweet came up, I was inclined to look at it. And that led to cascading effect of me either engaging on that update and loosing out my valuable writing time. Somewhere down the lane, I saw that nearly 70% of my time was unproductive and that’s where I decided to switch off all the social platforms when I sit down to write.

Time Management Tip #3. Create Topic Buckets

If you look at the pattern of my articles earlier, may be a year back, they were everywhere. I just used to write whatever came to mind. That is where I was introduced to Creating Topic Buckets in one of the #BlogChat. And ever since, I have tried to set a pattern and created buckets of post ideas on my Editorial Calendar. This helped in ensuring my research follows a proper direction. I also managed to keep my ‘Top 5′ weekly post aggregated under certain buckets.

Time Management Tip #4. Use Tools

Least to say, I am a tools junkie and like to try every single tool out there. But I found it easy to stick myself to Evernote and Instapaper. Evernote has been a big companion and many of my post ideas are logged there. I also like to store the URLs of some of the interesting posts that I read and they qualify to be stored in Instapaper. A small ‘Read Later’ on the brower has been of enormous help.

Time Management Tip #5. Guest Blogging

Not all days are alike, so sometimes even I get bored of seeing or writing my content. That is where I rely on guest posts. I have few bloggers who send me their articles and while I am spending some quality time with family or other work related stuff, the guest blogger come into picture. It always helps to have few articles in your repository from guest bloggers. This ensures that your regular visitors still get their share of information while you’re not at it.

There you go, I shared few tips that have worked for me. As a person with a day-job, every minute of my time is accountable and those time management tips have helped so far to keep me away from boredom and lethargy.

Your Turn

1. How do you handle your Blog Schedules?

2. Do you follow a certain routine? How does it help you?

It would be great to hear back from you. Share your feedback and comments below.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons

The post 5 Time Management Tips for Bloggers appeared first on Malhar Barai.