Here’s how to be successful on LinkedIn
No, this isn’t advice on how to write self-indulgent broetry that makes the LinkedIn algorithm happy (and the LinkedIn algorithm alone).
But, we don’t think any of y’all would be interested in that anyway. What we do think you’ll be interested in, though, are three new guides that LinkedIn released to help your brand succeed on the platform.
There are three guides: advertising, brand building, and driving leads. We’ll quickly break down each:
- Advertising: LinkedIn recommends you first decide between brand and demand-based marketing. Their guide provides a handy chart to figure out which one is best for you. LinkedIn also suggests complementing your advertising with a strong organic strategy to bolster both!
- Brand building: Don’t get too hasty with proving ROI. The guide on brand building cautions that looking for results too quickly can take a toll on your campaigns.
- Driving leads: LinkedIn offers some fine-tuning targeting options, but don’t go overboard. Monitor what’s working and go from there, as you don’t want to miss out on valuable leads!
We’ll always take advertising information from platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook when we can get it. Happy advertising!
CONTENT MARKETING
Take it easy
Scrambling to finalize your editorial calendar for the holidays and beyond?
It’s planning season, and if you’re in the business of creating content, Ryan Law’s got some tips. He’s the director of marketing over at Animalz – so we’ll definitely be taking his advice.
Here are a couple of his biggest tips as you’re planning content this season:
- Remember the three Cs. According to Ryan, the three Cs are curation and cross-cutting. One of the ways you can practice the three Cs is by looking at the content you currently have, then figuring out ways to mesh that content together for something entirely new.
- Refresh your existing content. It’s fine to take it easy this holiday season with your content, as long as the things you’re doing are driving growth. An easy way to do this is by refreshing older blog posts – both for relevancy and a potential traffic boost.
- Write some spin-offs. TV shows and movies can have spinoffs, so why not your content? If you’ve got a big piece of content, break it down into some smaller pieces to make the content more relevant for your audience.
It’s already been a long year, and there’s no reason your content planning needs to be excruciating. Follow the tips Ryan outlines and you’ll be well on your way to a successful content strategy in the coming months!
His full Twitter thread is here, if you’re interested in checking out all of his tips (there are a few we didn’t get to cover here).
SPONSORED BY CAROUSEL
How media buyers can crush BFCM with 200%+ ROI running sitewide CPA deals for the hottest D2C brands in the world.
Media buyers, are you tired of running white label beauty products and gadgets plucked straight from Alibaba? Tired of losing accounts? Tired of working with advertisers that don’t know how to run and scale their businesses?
Instead, imagine you could run campaigns with some of the biggest venture-backed direct-to-consumer brands in the world.
Better yet, imagine running them during the biggest shopping season of the year at discounts up to 40, 50, even 60% off sitewide.
Introducing 12 Days of Deals, created by Carousel.
Carousel has developed 12 BFCM sitewide CPA deals with brands like Gli, Glamnetic, Keeps, Tushy, Thryve, and many more!
With CPAs as high as $90 per sale and the Carousel team providing you with all the resources and deal structures that guarantee the campaigns convert, you can cash in big during the holidays.
All of these campaigns include:
- CPA’s in the $30-$90 range with CTCs as low as $10-$15.
- Free gifts, Free shipping, BOGO deals.
- 500-3000 UGC, influencer & celebrity images and videos.
- Legit celebs like Cameron Diaz, Ellen DeGeneres, Tim Tebow, Tony Hawk, Venus Williams, Iggy Azalea, Dave Asprey, the Kardashians, and even Oprah!
- Hashed email lists, LLAs & pair and shares to run off the brand’s FB and YouTube channels.
- Redirectless tracking – link directly to the brand’s URL.
- 500-25,000 sales/day caps.
- Worldwide shipping and translated pages.
Get more details here and act quickly as spots are limited per channel.
GET A MACBOOK AIR
One day left to enter our MacBook Air giveaway!
OK, it’s kind of a day and a half but you get the point…
Share our newsletter and you’ll have the chance to win a shiny new MacBook Air – a machine that’s the perfect balance of power, portability and instagramability (we might have just made up that word).
Each time you refer a person to Stacked Marketer, you receive a ticket for this raffle. In short, 1 referral = 1 ticket. (other rules that apply can be found here)
Giveaway ends on 11th November at 23:59 Central European Time.
Grab your referral link here. Then tell your marketer friends how they can stay ahead of the curve by reading Stacked Marketer (and how they can help you win a MacBook Air).
Or just copy your referral link:
Does your internal linking strategy work?
Internal linking is one of those muddy areas of SEO where your friend who likes marketing, the SEO person you hired last week, and John Mueller might all be telling you different things.
Today, though, you don’t need any of those people – because Cyrus Shepard just did a Whiteboard Talk at Moz explaining some of the best practices for internal linking. Let’s take a look at what he said:
- Focus on engagement. Cyrus tells a (true) story about a Domain Authority post on Moz that was getting solid traffic. Then, a link to a Domain Authority tool was posted in that article. Guess what? The Domain Authority post saw a 33% drop in bounce rate and lift in traffic. Above all else, put internal links where it makes sense for your users – more engagement means happier users and better signals for Google!
- You want laser-focused topical relevance. Generally speaking, the less topical relevance two pages have to each other, the less value is being passed between those links. When you’re setting up an internal link structure, try to link extremely similar topics together.
- Add context. Don’t just throw a link in willy-nilly. Instead, draw some attention to the link and explain why it’s there, which is what we’re doing right now by telling you that you can go check out the full explanation from Cyrus here.
- Make every link unique. Don’t try to over-optimize by matching anchor text to keywords or any of the questionable tactics you might see parroted on the internet. Don’t overthink it!
- You don’t actually need a thousand links. Ever seen a blog post with so many links the entire thing is outlined in blue? Yeah. Don’t do that. Cut out low-value links to give users what matters.
The full post is here, if you’re interested in checking it out – there’s a video from Cyrus as well as some detailed explanation we didn’t get to cover here.
Bottom line? Just follow a couple of simple rules with your internal linking, and don’t overthink it. As with most things SEO: Do what’s best for the user.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
SEO: Tyler Hakes has just put together a curated list of SEO tactics for SaaS companies. It’s a must-read if you’re in SaaS – some of the best resources out there are featured!
SOCIAL MEDIA: There’s a thoughtful piece out from Marta Martinez about the state of social media marketing in 2020, and how marketers are feeling with such a wild news cycle.
YOUTUBE: Connected TV viewership is on the rise for YouTube. This article from Digiday explains how advertisers are adapting.
MARKETING: Here’s an inspiring take on the future of food writing (hint: it might be newsletters). If you’re into food – or into newsletters – it’s worth a read.
BRAIN TEASER
I surround you but I’m not air. I am almost everywhere, but I don’t take up space. I can go through glass without breaking it. What am I?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Back to the drawing board?
Autonomous driving is the future, or so we’re told.
But, at a self-driving motorsports event (so fitting for 2020) called Roborace, we collectively lost a little bit of confidence in the power of self-driving vehicles.
In a video that surfaced of the race, a car from Swiss group Acronis SIT Autonomous didn’t quite make it around the track. More accurately, the car immediately turned and gunned headfirst for a wall.
It might be back to the drawing board for those engineers, but they’re still here to offer us some details. If you’re interested in learning just why the car failed, you can check out this explanation on Reddit for more!