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This is not the Facebook we’ve grown to know
How many of you are waiting for Facebook to start monetizing WhatsApp? It would be fun to launch and scale some WhatsApp camps, yeah?
Well, probably that moment is not happening anytime soon…
As it seems from a WSJ exclusive release, Facebook is backing off its plan to monetize the messaging app. The plan, announced in 2018, was to place ads in the WhatsApp Status, Instagram Stories equivalent.
This was also the reason the founders had to exit the company. However, as per the WSJ find, Facebook actually stopped its effort and their focus currently is to add new features for the app(s).
Well, that’s the first time we see Facebook not taking the chance to monetize attention… Mark, are you sick bro?
E-comm email trends you should bank on this year
Joshua Chin is one of those guys that shared a lot of knaaawledge about this medium. And here’s a post about some trends for ecomm we should have a look at. Let’s dive into them:
+“Going organic”: User-generated content (UGC) has been pretty hot this year when it comes to FB Ads. Why not include it in email as well? 82 percent of customers consider user-generated reviews extremely valuable, and 70 percent will look for reviews or ratings before making a purchasing decision.
You’re probably one of them. And if you don’t have enough UGC, reach out to your clients and give them something back in exchange for some love for your biz.
+ Responsive interactivity: This is about keeping your leads engaged and engrossed. Here are some best practices:
- Use animated CTAs, such as GIFs.
- Make use of rollover or mouseover images. These allow readers to see an alternate view of your products when their cursor hovers over something and keep them highly engaged. Yes, you can embed this into emails using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Surveys: Another way to keep your customers stay spend more time on your emails.
- Make long emails more compact using accordion-style. Joshua shared an image as an example if you check the post.
+Accessibility: How can you work this out?
- Mobile friendly messages.
- Since many people are resorting to voice assistants, make your messages short as it’s better both for readers as well as listeners.
- Avoid big blocks of text.
Finito!
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Everyone can take advantage of these very useful features:
- Source Sampling: Test the quality of traffic received from different sources in a small amount, evaluate, create whitelists of the best-performing sources and scale up your campaigns.
- Microbidding: Drive clicks from the better sources and limit traffic from the bad ones without creating separate campaigns, blacklists or whitelists.
- Automated Rules: Set rules to increase or decrease your bid, create blacklists and whitelists, or stop ineffective campaigns automatically.
Check out what these early adopters have to say about it:
Luke, owner of affLIFT said: “RichPops also has the same automated rules you can set to create whitelists/blacklists as RichPush, which is awesome and works well. Obviously, I recommend RichPops”.
Jimmyvanilla, member of affLIFT: “It looks like I’ve got a nice amount of traffic even with a random bid of $0.50, plus lots of conversions so it looks nice and responsive!!”
So yeah, we’re also excited to see what this platform can do! The cool thing is that everyone can check it out in this webinar dedicated to pop traffic on RichPops. It’s free to sign up and you will get a full run through how to create, optimize and scale pop traffic.
When? January 22nd at 10:00 Eastern Time or, for those of you in Europe, that means 16:00 Central European Time. Register here.
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Sign up to RichPops right here.
SEO
Ecomm SEO case study: From €351k to €914k to…€Rollercoaster
Yes, it’s a case study. It’s about an SEO journey. About an e-commerce site. Talking about the value of informational content but it’s not a regular how-to or a strategy post. It’s something very interesting. Read on…
It’s a story about the life of a website. You’ll be able to feel the emotions of the website here.
So, this content-rich e-commerce website (picture a poor guy with huge potential) with hardly any SEO efforts involved.
It was launched in 2011 but this new SEO strategy didn’t start anytime before 2017.
What strategy was used? No magic or secrets. Just the 2 things:
- Technical SEO: Making the 60k product pages and 80 category pages crawlable and indexable.
- Content: Reorganizing existing and adding new pages and contextual internal linking from informational to category pages.
Result: The overall organic sales bumped from €351k in 2016 to €914k in 2019.
Tragedy: Despite this huge performance improvement, this site was just a small time thing for a much larger organization which also owned a big direct competitor.
So, in late 2019, it was decided to hand over the entire operations of this site to the big boys.
Big boys always have big ideas and deeper pockets. So, in order to restructure everything and move this site within their systems, they only kept the domain name and the logo of this site.
Around 60k product pages, 80 category pages and 25 informational content pages were removed and all informational content pages and redirected the URLs to the home page.
The big boys didn’t implement the redirects to help the rankings transfer to the home page.
Rather hopelessly, plain simple home page redirects instead of 404 or 410 status codes was done as a spontaneous decision without any specific reason.
After content removal, the site lost about one-third of its overall visibility because the home page and category pages lost most of their top rankings for commercial intent search queries.
Now, 3 weeks later, to identify whether the ranking drops were really related to this exercise of content removal, the informational content was added back.
3 more weeks and the site had fully recovered and the home page and category pages got their rankings back for commercial intent search queries.
This data suggests that the informational content pages do help the home page and category pages rank better for search queries with commercial intent.
The most likely explanation lies in the relevance of backlinks from other domains pointing to the informational content pages, which is then passed on to commercial pages via contextual internal links.
Key takeaways from this case study:
- Informational content pages do help the home page and category pages rank better for queries with commercial intent.
- Relevant backlinks pointing to the informational content pages, along with internal links pointing from the informational content pages to commercial pages play a major role in the improved SEO performance of the commercial pages.
Want to get into the nitty-gritties of things and read a more detailed version of the story, check out the post here.
ROUNING UP THE STACK
- SHOPIFY: The platform launched Shopify Capital, a program to help merchants that are shorts on liquid cheese.
- GOOGLE: Alphabet, Google’s parent company, hit the $1T mark for the first time. Company number 4 in US history to reach this milestone.
- FACEBOOK: A video from Dim Niko that explains how you can block Facebook from delivering your ads on certain publisher’s audience network placements.
- SEO: Google is including favicons in search results, plus it’s blending organic results with ads. And also more prominent domain listings.
- FACEBOOK: Why does the Learning Limited status happen to your camps? Small budgets, small audiences and others might be the causes. A discussion from Andew Foxwell.
BRAIN TEASER
Which month has 28 days?
You can find the solution by clicking here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Top tech trends of 2020 by Ex-Google, Ex-FB techie
We found this “2020 Tech trends” style of video by TechLead that looks pretty interesting.
He starts by saying: “As someone who is moving back in with his parents, unemployed, I thought you might be interested to hear my opinion on this critical topic” – So, we really don’t know what to expect or what he meant by that, but anyway…
Okay, waiting for him to finish talking about his first sponsor.
Waiting…
Okay, he’s finally revealing it. The biggest trend of 2020: Videos and the entire ecosystem driven by influencers, ecomm marketing.
But yeah, in between his shoutouts, he’s got a point here. Have a look at your app store and almost all of the top apps are into videos – YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Snap, IG, FB.
He says that you don’t need to rely on Google or SEO anymore, influencers are disrupting entire industries. They are equipped enough to craft lifestyles for young people who want to imitate and copy them.
He goes on to talk about a lot of meaningful ways videos and influencers are changing and further going to change the way businesses market their products and consumers consume them.
If you can manage to go through his video with tonnes of affiliate links, check him out here and we are sure you’ll gain some cool insights to come up with a few marketing ideas and activities for your business in 2020.