Internet marketing

Let’s say you’re a company working with influencers. You hire people to post on their social media about your products.

One way to handle this is not to use the content the influencers create in any way.

But there’s another way – you could include information from them on your own social media accounts and your product pages.

So, if they create a photo of them using your product, you can share that photo on your social media accounts and also add it to the image gallery of your product.

Of course, you’ll need to agree about this right from the beginning and give credit.

There’s a study that says that:

With five experimental studies, we determine that women exhibit greater purchase intentions for products displayed in a rich contextual setting rather than a plain white background, but men are not positively affected by this display strategy.  (What women want? How contextual product displays influence women’s online shopping behavior – ScienceDirect)

So, seeing your products in a realistic environment might increase their likelihood of being bought.

I got this idea from Mihai Bocai – CEO @ Flaminjoy at Marketing Waves (2023.04.06, Mamaia, Constanța).

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What does LinkedIn generally offer in its Premium plan? And my take on them.

• InMail – They allow you to send emails to people outside your direct connections. If you are looking for a job, it might be worthwhile to be able to send anyone a message.
• See the list of people who viewed your profile. Useful if you’re job hunting.
• Access to a library of courses. It’s a nice bonus; I watched some courses and considered them OK. Still, there are alternatives to this (YouTube clips, Udemy, Coursera, and many others).
• If you’re a company seeking to attract talent, the Premium plan allows you to search for candidates easily.

Bottom line: if you’re job hunting or looking for candidates for your own jobs, it might be worthwhile to use LinkedIn Premium.

In the long run, though, if I wanted a good career, I would use my time to build an online portfolio (for example, a personal blog or social network) – this might be a better tool than paying to LinkedIn. A popular blog/social network could bring me more value.

PS: I haven’t used Premium (I’m waiting to get a trial for when I’ll really need it), but I think I’m quite familiar with the platform.

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I don’t think that Magazine-Type WordPress themes are fit-for-all.

What’s a magazine-type website?

See, for example:

• The New York Times – Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos.
• News, sport and opinion from the Guardian’s global edition | The Guardian.
• BBC – Homepage.

For them, it’s great. They add a lot of news, and when you enter the website, there is a logical structure – the most important pieces of news get the most attention.

For a website that publishes just a few times a month, there’s actually no need for a magazine-type theme.

A „regular” blog theme will do.

Sure, a magazine-style theme looks nice.

But if doesn’t fit the style of the website, I suggest you avoid it.

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It might seem obvious, but a lot of time in Usability and User Design and User eXperience Design, people tend to make the suggested buttons big.

So, if you’re on a website and wonder what button to click, look for the big button.

If there is more than one, consider the most important one as the most intensely colored.

As a thumb rule – pick the big, red button.

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I don’t like to use a smartphone that much – a tiny screen, a hard-to-use keyboard, no mouse & precision.

So, a lot of things I share and use come from the desktop PC.

A small comparison between the two:

• If you don’t have an app for a specific link (YouTube link, Instagram link, 9Gag link), you’ll likely open a link in a browser, perhaps an in-app browser and the navigation might not be good on mobile.
• If, on the other hand, instead of providing the person with a link, I just give them a photo/video to view directly on mobile, there will be no context. The image has no source; the video has no comments; I am to blindly believe what I see.

In conclusion, I prefer desktop devices, but I do understand why some people prefer to use photos/videos directly in apps rather than giving links (they’re easier to consume, even if they provide no context).

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Let’s say you want to know when people mention your brand in the press.

For this, there are specialized entities (ZeList Monitor in Romania).

But let’s say you want to monitor newsletter appearances.

One simple solution is to create a new email account (GMail is a good start), subscribe in that account to a lot of newsletters (for a good start see the blog of Cristina Chipurici or open any newsletter from Autocritica.ro and browse to the bottom of the newsletter).

Then create a GMail filter (or other options – 1, 2) to automatically forward the emails that mention your brand to a more important email address of yours.

Et – voilà! – that’s how you have basic brand monitoring for newsletters.

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I don’t think that social media links are like any other link.

If Google can’t see your links on Instagram/Facebook/LinkedIn and others, you might as well not create them for SEO purposes. And the value of the nofollowed links on YouTube/whatever other platforms allow indexing is so small that you can safely assume it to be zero.

My tip – create social media channels for UX, not for SEO purposes.

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For SEO practitioners, it’s always a good idea to look at what the competition is doing. Analyze the competition, and see what they do.

For a client, knowing what the competitors are doing is a good idea – you know where you are in the world.

But to analyze a competitor from an SEO perspective, trying to get to his success by replicating what they do is generally not worth the trouble.

Sure, you’ll find some things by analyzing the competition, but not that many new things, though.

You’re much better off working on your own properties (website, Google Business Profile, social networks, other media presence) than trying to mimic the competition.

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