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TOOLS
Some tools that can make life as a marketer easier
First, let’s look at the easy one, which is called IG Captions… It’s a free tool developed by Albert Renshaw that allows you to add multi-linebreaks to IG without having to use all those awkward extra characters.
All you have to do is write the caption in the tool and then copy it to Instragam.
The second tool is slightly more complex and some of you might already be familiar with it. It’s part of Google’s marketing platform, and it’s called Google Optimize.
This is a great split testing tool. You can do A/B tests or multivariate tests under the same URL, or you can use it to test 2 completely different pages. Not only that, but you can also add personalization for your targeted users.
And you do all this by simply adding a line of code to your page, with everything else being conducted from the Optimize dashboard.
Setting up split tests is super easy, too! You have a visual editor where you can adjust your landing page as you wish. We’ve only recently started using it, and we can’t help but think “why didn’t we get involved sooner?”
Our first use was to split-test landers for our referral system, and we’ll definitely be using it to split-test many more opt-in pages in the future.
WORDPRESS
WordPress websites under attack… again!
Oh boy, some more warnings for people using WordPress websites. It’s nothing to panic about, but definitely something you shouldn’t ignore either.
Some plugins with unpatched vulnerabilities have been targeted in order to gain admin access to sites. This is an older vulnerability, so the main targets have been websites that haven’t updated their plugins yet.
Still, even if you keep everything up to date, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Here’s a list of the most common plugins with known vulnerabilities:
- Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode
- Yellow Pencil Visual CSS Style Editor
- Blog Designer
- Bold Page Builder
- Live Chat with Facebook Messenger
- Yuzo Related Posts
- WP Live Chat Support
- Form Lightbox
- Hybrid Composer
- All former NicDark plugins
If you use any of these plugins, make sure to double-check the users on your website. If you see that an extra, unidentified admin account exists… well… Bad news, huh?
More often than not, simply keeping all your plugins up to date will be enough to keep you safe.
How to exclude unwanted customers. Facebook makes Pages’ Stories more clickable
Stop all those low-quality clients getting in touch with your biz! Will this update increase FB Stories’ usage and help FB Pages’ reach?
Stop attracting low-quality customers
Not all customers are created equal. There are those who come back to buy more, leave positive reviews, and generally help your biz grow.
Then there are those you wish never got in touch in the first place. Bad reviews, asking for refunds, chargebacks etc.
So, if you wish you never met these customers, why don’t you exclude them?
Yes, literally!
Jason Portnoy shared a tip to exclude these kinds of customers. How?
- Create Custom Audiences of the people who asked for refunds, chargebacks, unqualified leads, etc… All those low-quality leads and customers you don’t want.
- Make a LAL of each of those audiences.
- Exclude these LALs from your ads. Additionally, exclude the Custom Audiences just in case you run some retargeting campaign to your customers to get them to buy again, leave you a review, etc.
- Sleep sweeter dreams!
Still, be careful when applying this tip. Sometimes, a person asking for a refund is well within their rights. They might actually like your business, but just had problems with a specific transaction. Pick the exclusions wisely.
FB giving more exposure to Page Stories
Stories on Instagram really took off, right? We can’t say the same for Facebook though, where initial growth has been much slower.
However, FB is betting on this format, so in a bid to increase usage they’re trying to give FB Pages’ Stories more exposure.
How?
Basically, they’re putting Pages Stories in a new in-Feed panel. In this way, users will see them again while scrolling.
The top of feed placement of Facebook Stories makes it a high-potential option for getting in front of users, but with this new update the exposure is amplified!
SPONSORED
🔊 PI LIVE is one of the world’s biggest performance marketing conferences and The WTAFF Crew is going!
On 22-23 October 2019, the PI LIVE conference is taking place. With over 3k attendees from 60+ countries, including brands with huge budgets like Amazon, Apple, AWIN, Google, AMEX, Uber, Rakuten and more, this is going to be one of the biggest performance marketing focused conferences…
What’s on the agenda? Here are some highlights:
- Scaling Emerging Channels: Delivering Effective ROI with Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin and Snapchat with Julian Arias and Pieter Verstuyf
- Push Notifications: Deep Dive into Strategies, Optimisation and the Future by Emerson Smith, CEO of Pushnami
- Unlocking The Growth Potential Of Affiliate Marketing with Blockchain
- … and 30+ more sessions!
Want more? OK, here are some other reasons PI LIVE is a must-attend event right now:
- Big brands (Uber, Amazon, Rakuten) that are doubling-down on performance/affiliate marketing. This means big, sustainable and profitable long-term partnerships that you can create.
- Get a pulse for the latest international trends whether that’s Facebook, lead-gen, influencer marketing, programmatic or content.
- Witness “The Grammys of Performance Marketing” with The International Performance Marketing Awards taking place on 21st October, the day before PI LIVE.
- Countless chances to network, like The Mix & Mingle, the Beer Garden, the Meet & Eat zone, the Impact Prosecco Lounge and more!
Whether you’re an affiliate, a media buyer, an ad network, an affiliate network, ad tech solution, etc., PI LIVE is an awesome place to build exciting new partnerships with global brands. And you can meet some of The WTAFF Crew that’s heading there!
We have one last bit of good news for you! We have a special price for WTAFF readers! The first 50 people to use code “WTAFF” at checkout to get earlybird pricing of £250 per ticket, saving £250 from the full ticket price!
Book your PI LIVE ticket at a special price using code “WTAFF” right here. Only 50 available! We’ll see you there!
PS: Want to exhibit at PI LIVE? Head over here.
E-COMMERCE
Simple and elegant e-com P&L template for everyone to use
Do you dread spreadsheets? Find it hard to keep track of revenue and expenses for your store?
Branden Yamada from the Ecom Empires group shared a cool P&L template that everyone can use. Simple and efficient.
If you’re not in the group, you can find the template here. As Branden said, there’s no opt-in or upsell, but he did ask everyone for one small favor: Don’t pass it as your own and give him credit if you share it with others.
SEO
Ecomm SEO case study: Double your revenues
For those of our readers running ecomm stores, the likelihood is that a lot of you are more focused on paid traffic. However, if you’re interested in getting organic traffic from Google (aka, free clicks), this case study might be interesting.
Let’s start with the results.
This ecomm grew the revenues from $43k per month to $91k per month, along with a 418% growth in traffic. All this in just 8 months.
The store is a B2B furniture and equipment business mainly focused on the UK market.
Here’s the strategy.
Increase the users’ experience. What they did was:
- Visual changes: adjust colour contrast, adjust placement and selection of images, and add zooming and scaling images to product pages.
- Mobile optimization: Making phone numbers clickable, making emails addresses clickable, increasing the font-size to a minimum of 16px for mobile users.
Technical auditing:
- Google Index Management: This includes removing all traces of the old website from the Google index, removing duplication in their category pages, managing index bloat, adding the XML sitemap to the robots.txt, and removing now-defunct meta keywords from their site.
- Cleaning up legacy strategies: They cleaned up any technical issues caused by legacy strategies.
Internal link building:
- Adding internal links to existing content: Before working on this website, there was very little content and most of what was there was out of date. Thus high-quality blog content was created, allowing the building of more internal links to relevant product and category pages.
Content Strategy:
- Evergreen, algorithmically optimised content: Focus on evergreen content, preferably creating linkable assets such as infographics, slideshows and documents containing industry insights.
- E-A-T and E-commerce content: Create content that references your products and services so that you can funnel users to your core landing pages. However, ensure that the content matches the user-intent across the entire conversion funnel.
On-page optimization:
- Page by page product and category page analysis: Each page was analyzed individually, comparing how many exact match and partial match keywords were on the page in comparison to the top 10 ranking pages for that keyword in Google.
E-commerce link building:
- Spammy backlink disavow: The site had a fairly underdeveloped existing backlink profile. These were removed.
- A natural backlink profile: Here it was necessary to grow the domain’s backlink profile in a natural-looking way. So, they built backlinks with safe branded anchor texts from medium quality domains.
Finito! Well, kind of. The case study contains many more steps and tips. It’s an incredibly thorough one, so if you want to know more head to the post here and make those clicks rain!
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Working at FB vs Google – A TechLead’s comparison
We’ve compared Facebook and Google when it comes to their ad business quite a few times already. Today, we’re doing something different.
We’re going to quickly compare the 2 giants based on how it is to work there as a software engineer.
No, we don’t have first hand experience. That’s why we’re just giving you the main points from this video.
TechLead is a relatively popular YouTube channel for those interested in the life of a software engineer, and it also contains some nice insights when it comes to big Silicon Valley companies.
So, what’s the difference between Google and Facebook?
- Google has a better work/life balance, mostly because of the tools used. Unsurprisingly, at Google you work across G Suite. Facebook, however, forces you to use Workplace. This contributes to work-related stress because of the difficulty in finding relevant information. In other words, all the mechanics they use to get users addicted to FB are also used in Workplace. Can you say infinite scroll? Not cool!
- Facebook is more bottom-up driven. Sounds pretty good at first, but in practice it makes people “trample on each other all the time.”
- The performance axis for Google is based on “complexity, impact and leadership”, however at Facebook it’s “impact, better engineering, people and direction”. As TechLead explains, FB’s values are kind of opposing… Impact usually comes at the cost of better engineering. In order to create an impactful tool, you often have to ship more features and write more code. This comes at the cost of better engineering, because “the code just becomes mush”.
- Google is “engineering driven” while Facebook is “product driven”,which means that Google’s managers usually have an engineering background, while FB’s don’t. In practice, this can result in FB managers not understanding the code and resorting to the “slave drive”.
Check out TechLead’s video to see the full explanation. Based on his breakdown, we’re pretty sure Google is the more mature and organized company. Can you tell from their ad business too?
PS: Facebook has better food at least…