YOUTUBE
Here’s what your Shorts should look like
If you’re reading this and you haven’t started working on launching your own TikTok clone yet, you’re probably behind the times.
Shorts, which we’ve talked about before, is slowly starting to roll out. Here are a couple of recent updates about the app:
- There’s an icon for Shorts in the YouTube Android app.
- We learned about best practices. YouTube recently released a video with Q&As and best practices about Shorts. The main points: All your Shorts should be less than 60 seconds, and shot in a vertical format. Also, keep your videos visual, accessible, and add the #Shorts hashtag to keep them relevant.
We’re still not sure when Shorts will be fully launched, functional – and more importantly, relevant – everywhere in the world, but we’ll be keeping our ear to the ground as more news about this feature comes out!
MARKETING
Are you missing out on the top acquisition channels?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could analyze hundreds of founder interviews to figure out the acquisition channels that consistently work?
Yeah, it would. Problem is, that process could take 240 hours that you probably don’t have.
Problem solved: Darko Gjorgjievski just did all the heavy lifting for you. In a new blog post, he spent 240 hours analyzing 479 founder interviews – and which acquisition channels were mentioned the most. Here’s the breakdown:
- SEO tops the list. Predictably, SEO was the king – but it’s important to note that SEO was most successful for founders after they’d already had success with another acquisition channel. It’s a great channel, but shouldn’t necessarily be your launch strategy.
- Product Hunt and HackerNews are reliable go-tos. At #3 and #6, respectively, these two popular channels consistently produce for marketers. Don’t overlook them!
- Facebook Groups and mainstream press mentions were the losers. It’s not that these channels don’t work, but founders mentioned them less often as a key acquisition strategy. For example, with Facebook Groups, the focus might not be on acquisition as much as it is about customer loyalty and retention.
These are just the biggest points from the blog post, but Darko’s full analysis takes a deep dive into why these channels work, and how to use them. Check it out here!
SPONSORED BY AHREFS
This new Ahrefs tool is much better than Google Search Console – and it’s free
Google Search Console is a must-have tool for every SEO. However, its functionality is lacking in some areas.
It doesn’t show you all the issues your website might have. It doesn’t provide many instructions on how to fix these. And what about a SERP snapshot showing how your website stacks up against your competitors?
Nada!
And that’s where Ahrefs Webmasters Tools comes into play.
If you own a website and can verify the ownership of it (it takes a few clicks), you can get thousands of insights (for free) about your SEO performances such as:
- You can scan up to 5k pages per month, and search for over 100 pre-identified issues that can potentially harm your website performances. And detailed instructions on how to fix these issues.
- Learn what keywords your website ranks for and compare how you stack up against competitors in the SERPs.
- Discover the real SEO potential of your website using actionable SEO metrics like Search Volume, Keyword Difficulty, and Traffic Value.
- Know your backlinks: Browse your website’s backlink data and get actionable insights from your inbound and outbound link profiles with a variety of user-friendly reports and filters.
We just scraped the surface of what Ahrefs Webmaster Tools can do. And you can watch a demo of this tool here.
CONTENT MARKETING
An analysis of 150M pageviews reveals how strong your content marketing game is
Dear content marketer,
You’re probably out there churning out content like an erupting Hawaiian volcano.
However, do you ever ask yourself how you’re doing compared to your competitors?
Are you growing alongside everyone else, outpacing them, or falling behind?
Andrew Tate and Ryan Law from Animalz just analyzed 150,000,000 pageviews from dozens of SaaS companies. If you’re wondering how you’re stacking up against the other players in your industry, you’ll find this benchmark report pretty useful.
They grouped the blogs into five groups based on the traffic they received in September 2019:
- <10k pageviews.
- 10k-50k pageviews.
- 50k-100k pageviews.
- 100k-1M pageviews.
- 1M+ pageviews.
Are you curious about what they found?
These are some of the stats:
- Almost 60% of all traffic to the blogs analyzed came from organic search.
- Organic search is also the highest growth channel, with a growth rate increasing by 9% every month. (Email and social are the slowest growth channel).
- 80% of all blog traffic is generated by just 16% of blogs.
- Different sized blogs grew at a different rate: the bigger the blog (in terms of total yearly page views), the greater the traffic in the following year.
- It takes a median of 9 years to reach 1M monthly page views.
- The median time on page for a blog is 3 minutes and 15 seconds.
- The median bounce rate for a blog is 80.33%.
All this data (and the tons of other stats you’ll find in the blog post) are useful, however, the Animalz team also went further by turning these benchmarks into practical pieces of advice:
- Use the BLUF (bottom line up front) principle to deliver value within the first 400 words of every article.
- If traffic is your #1 priority, focus on organic search.
- If you own a small blog, use social, email, and community distribution to seed your organic growth.
- Tutorial content is the best source of organic traffic and engagement.
- Backlinks don’t happen by accident, so you should dedicate resources directly to creating “linkable” content.
This looks like a lot of stuff, but it’s just a tidbit of what you’ll find in this long and detailed benchmark report.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
MEDIA: Remember the news last week that someone had hacked Donald Trump’s account with the password ‘maga2020’? Yeah, we can pretty certainly say that didn’t happen – but this blog post does explain how easy it can be, sometimes, to fool journalists.
INSTAGRAM: Has your Insta feed looked weird lately? It’s being reported that Instagram might be split testing feeds, with some users having the option to toggle between Suggested Posts and Older Posts.
FACEBOOK: Ads Alchemist on Twitter is frequently passing around valuable knowledge. Over the weekend, they mentioned an important reminder: Don’t mess around with tons of ads and ad sets if you’ve got a small budget!
SEO: GIFs have had a tumultuous history – from internet meme meta to outdated format to, now again, a popular way to (carefully) be funny on your website. But, how do they affect SEO? Check out this article from Search Engine Journal for best practices.
BRAIN TEASER
You know what time it is! What do you think was our most opened newsletter last week?
Pick on Twitter here! We’ll be back on Wednesday with the answer.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
This guy is on fyre
You’re probably familiar with the Fyre Festival at this point. And if you aren’t, your day should look like this:
- Finish reading this newsletter.
- Put off all work for the rest of the day.
- Watch the documentary on Netflix about the Fyre Festival.
Short story? Billy McFarland, put together a fake festival that never happened even though people paid to attend.
He’s in jail for six years now (due to the aforementioned defrauding), but apparently he’s been attempting to record a podcast series – always gotta capitalize, right?
News of his podcast got to the prison he’s currently in, and it didn’t go over well: He’s been in solitary confinement since last week, and could be there for another three months.