Interview with Michael Georgiou Co-founder & CMO at Imaginovation

Steve Wetmore – Hello Michael Giorgiou and welcome to the InstaVIP Podcast. Michael Giorgio is co-founder and CMO of Imagineovation.net So Michael could you please introduce yourself and talk a little bit about who you are, what you do, and some of your accomplishments over the recent years.

Michael Giorgiou – Yeah, absolutely. Steve, thanks for having me on the show and learning more about me and my story. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Michael Giorgiou – I’m the co founder and chief marketing officer at imagineovation is a turnkey technology company located here in Raleigh, North Carolina. And we build custom mobile and web applications for startups to enterprise level companies, and in pretty much any industry. We start with an idea from the customer, we collaborate and we guide them to create a creative and technical solution application for their business that will help their productivity and help their customers help them internally. We provide value on a digital perspective. And we also do a little bit of IoT,

The Internet of Things is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. Wikipedia

As well as some artificial intelligence and blockchain development.

Michael Giorgiou – My brother in law and I started Imagineovation about eight years ago as a family business. We made a deal with some developers to work for us for free for a few months.

Michael Giorgiou – Let’s take step back and provide some background; I earned my master’s degree in Australia at Bond University and graduated in 2011. When I got back home I was unemployed for about seven months. My brother in law was working at SAS, at that time in tech support. So he called me one evening and he asked me if I would join him to create a technology company. So I was like, okay, I have nothing to lose, you know, I was unemployed already for seven months with a master’s degree.

Michael Giorgiou – The third week after we started we closed a fairly large deal with a client in Charlotte, North Carolina, developing a music application that was similar to Spotify. And it was really our first project. The developers, that were willing to work for us for free until we can close some business, were definitely dedicated to our team. As we as we grew, we paid them and we just reinvested everything back into the business.

Michael Giorgiou – Then we expanded into the “mobile” arena. We were creating websites, web applications, mobile applications. And then we got involved in digital marketing. At this point we were doing marketing and app development simultaneously. So we were a full turnkey digital marketing and technology company. And then about three and a half years ago, almost four years ago, we decided to skip our company, and just focus on our core strength, which is is you know, a bit building building custom applications for companies.

Michael Giorgiou – So that’s what we do. And I’ve been blessed to have a lot of success throughout the years. Although there’s been a lot of struggles; owning any business being an entrepreneur is incredibly difficult. There’s a lot of ups and downs. It’s definitely a roller coaster, and it requires tons of perseverance. It requires lots of sacrifice and grit and hard work, and just dedication and belief in what you’re doing and having a macro mindset, not thinking short term, but thinking long term, that’s really the key to to building any business that you want to build and that you love is thinking long term because if you think long term, then you’re you’re going to overcome a lot of obstacles that come away, right. So it’s part of journey, it’s part of the story.

Michael Giorgiou – But in regards to some of the recognition I received, I was closing $100,000 deals. I closed my first six figure deal when I was 27 years old. And we grew to a million dollar company before I was 30. And we’ve been a seven figure business since then. We’re growing and have over 30 full time employees at our company. We’ve won multiple awards. We’ve won a VA digital award at the show and we were a Shorty Award finalist.

Michael Giorgiou – We were ranked in the top six in North Carolina for the best technology companies. And in our group there is Pendo and they just received 200 million in funding. So that was that was definitely, you know, an amazing recognition. I’ve been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Foundr, Business.com, VentureBeat and Search Engine Journal. So, yeah, been been all around the internet. And it’s definitely been a journey thus far and I love what I do.

Steve Wetmore – So I’m great. You’re a lucky man Michael. It’s important to love what you do. So what what I’m really looking forward to Michael is your perspective, given the fact that you not an SEO, even though you could put that on your resume, your primary function is not as an SEO agency. You have a deep understanding of the value of organic traffic. You audience is really looking forward to your perspective on what you see as being the future of SEO, particularly in 2020.

Michael Giorgiou – Absolutely. So I’ll first give you a background of the some of the strategies and tactics that have worked for our company to get ranked for competitive keywords on Google, you know, which is search engine optimization.

Michael Giorgiou – So for our company here is more background on why SEO was so important to us as a start-up, but we are 100% organically bootstrapped. We grew to seven figure business from nothing – absolutely nothing. Our first ad was on Craigslist. So you can imagine that, I had to learn the hard way and didn’t I didn’t have a mentor. So it was a lot of trial and error. It was a lot of research and development. It was learning that our marketing was trial and error. We didn’t really know the the key to what works and what doesn’t work because every business every industry is different. Right?

Michael Giorgiou – We researched what keywords we believed we could realistically rank for. I’ll give you some examples; “Raleigh Web Design” because we’re in North Carolina – we focus locally first. Then “Raleigh Web App Development” and “Web App Development Company”, “North Carolina Mobile Development Raleigh”, and IoT Development Company, Raleigh

Michael Giorgiou – We used short tail keywords and long tail keywords. And what we did with that is we basically added those keywords to our website strategically. This is our method we use to optimize our website over the years. I believe we’ve redone our website about six or seven times in the last eight years to stay relevant in the market. It’s incredibly competitive in the app development market. There’s a lot of saturation, there’s a lot of companies that develop applications and websites, mobile apps, all of that. So we had to differentiate ourselves, we had to get a lot of reach and, you know, get in front of the eyes of of a lot of people, especially locally here in North Carolina, which is a totally market for technology. So we did heavy on site optimization. We dedicated a lot of time creating high quality content on our website.

Michael Giorgiou – We rarely talked about what we did, or what we offered. We talked more about how others can learn from the content that we write. So that’s really what it’s about. Google wants to see that you’re providing value to your audience. It’s called the giveback approach. So over the years, we optimized our website for over 2,000 blog articles. We have a domain authority of over 40. Now, I believe it is or I think it is 40 domain authority. Top Sites like the New York Times, they’re like a probably a 95 or 96. So basically, we wrote a lot of high quality content. We created hundreds of videos as we acquired to video company a few years ago. We create video animation as well and onsite video production to be published on YouTube ,Facebook and LinkedIn.

Michael Giorgiou – On the on site optimization side we added a lot of relevant keywords to our website copy and strategic internal linking. We knew you’ve got to make sure that that when you are writing content on your website, you’re not spamming the content with keywords. That method is often referred to as black hat SEO. We would add maybe a few of those keywords per page, nothing too crazy, just so Google’s algorithm can recognize that we’re trying to rank for those words while providing value to our audience as well. We have several people that work on “On Page” SEO, making sure that our website is easily crawled by Google. It’s important to make it easy for the Google crawler algorithm to see your website and to view the content and to see what you’re about, who you’re targeting, and what keywords you’re trying to get ranked for.

Michael Giorgiou – Now there’s another side to SEO it’s called “Off Page” optimization. So, off page optimization is anything that’s off of your website. So a good example is writing content for other publications. Blog posts that linked back to our site was the main factor of how we ranked. As one of the top development companies in North Carolina and even even in the USA for some keywords. If you search “mobile development Raleigh”, or “Raleigh web design” or “web application Raleigh” or “web application, North Carolina” all of those keywords. We’re gaining almost 5000 unique visitors on our website per month. And for an agency like ours, that’s actually pretty good. We’re not like a blogging company, and we’re not a publication so we’re not going to receive hundreds of thousands of visitors, but we’ve been getting pretty decent, consistent traffic over the years, and it’s been increasing. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been writing for a lot of respected publications earning valuable backlinks.

Steve Wetmore – Thank you for that. Our next next step is we’d like insights on what are the three top SEO tools you use today?

Michael Giorgiou – The top SEO tools we use our Moz.com, SemRush.com and we use Google Analytics, Google Console, Google My Business GMB. We use these tools on a daily basis.

Steve Wetmore – Ok Michael now please share your views on the future of SEO taking us into 2020.

Michael Giorgiou – In regards to the future of SEO and where it’s going and some strategies that we believe are going to work. Right now the trend is voice search. Like Amazon’s Alexa, right now, it’s vital for agencies and companies to optimize their websites and their marketing strategies to voice marketing. So for an example, a podcast. Podcast are a huge trend now and they’re growing every single day. It’s about the user experience or UX, right? It’s important to start thinking about strategies that are going to differentiate yourself from your competitors and just from others in general, and start thinking about voice marketing, voice optimization on to rank on Google. Maybe you want to be an Amazon partner, an Alexa partner is a good example. So that’s what we’re working on. Our companies were kind of being Alexa partner so people using Alexa could ask “I’m looking for a Raleigh web development company”. “I’m looking for a web design company, North Carolina”. Or Alexa will give you the top five because you’re a partner of theirs. And you’re on Google. So that’s one example there.

Michael Giorgiou – Another example of kind of the future SEO is, getting heavily into storytelling. Storytelling is very important. From experts in the world like Neil Patel, storytelling is really important because your audience on the internet in general want to hear your story, and they want to be able to resonate with that you’re not just selling your services, but you’re also your brand yourself as an authority figure. We all know about personal branding, right? You want to be perceived as a Thought Leader in the world
and as for your company, you can write articles to relate yourself and your story, your background, your journey to other people. That’s also a huge strategy and tactic that I believe is going to be constantly increasing. So I would say voice search, storytelling and video is continuously increasing.

Steve Wetmore – Michael thank you for your perspectives and insights into SEO Trends going into 2020.

The post Interview with Michael Georgiou Co-founder & CMO at Imaginovation appeared first on BuySellShoutouts.

source https://www.buysellshoutouts.com/blog/interview-with-michael-georgiou-co-founder-cmo-at-imaginovation

Instagram Basics

I am text block. Click edit button to change this text. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

Originally posted 2014-09-06 17:13:18.

The post Instagram Basics appeared first on BuySellShoutouts.

source https://www.buysellshoutouts.com/instavip/instagram-basics

Interview with Antonin Pasquereau of Black Cat SEO

Steve Wetmore – Today on InstaVIP Podcast we are interviewing Antonin Pasquereau of Black Cat SEO in Montreal, Quebec. specifically we’re going to be discussing the future of SEO in 2020.

First Antonia will outline who he is and what he does at Black Cat SEO.

Antonin Pasquereau – I’m originally from France and immigrated to Canada 15 years ago with a business school diploma. I worked in Quebec, the first five years in the marketing department for large companies. It took it took me five years to realize I didn’t want to work in central departments. So I switched to technical SEO, and I took one year off to learn everything everything I could about SEO from the roots. I then basically started with a company that was selling advertising placements and I was in contact with some SEO guys over there. The company was in the “adult” market.

Antonin Pasquereau – I started doing technical SEO for some websites in the adult industry. And after one year, I decided to leave everything behind in terms of that particular market, and switch to the BtoB model and apply all the techniques learned. So it was around 10 years ago and working with Mediagrisik, which is a big stock company in Quebec.

Antonin Pasquereau – I started my own company right at this moment and I started to have lots of requests from colleagues and friends and also from different clients. So I created my website and it’s been nine years since we incorporated doing some SEO for companies in Quebec, and now in France . It’s a great pleasure to to keep working with my home country.

Steve Wetmore – Fantastic, that’s an interesting background. Could you talk about your customers and the specific niche that you found success in?

Antonin Pasquereau – And there was obviously a progression and evolution in my clients profile, I guess. We start working with small entrepreneurs or small companies. We call that in the French PNE for small and medium sized companies. So that’s typically the profile of clients I started working with. We usually divided clients profile this way, in terms of size. So if you have between zero and 10 people on per user, typically this kind of company, and when you fall into, you know, dozens of employees and you have more than $500,000 per year revenues, then we created another profile.

Antonin Pasquereau – So the first five years I worked for small companies in Quebec, basically. What’s funny is that having good results with these people, we developed a lot of referrals? Yes, lots of referrals.

Antonin Pasquereau – Quebec is as small and friendly place in Canada. So it’s easy to be mentioned. So in the last two years where we have more requests from bigger companies, actually global and multinational companies and we found our Black Hat SEO to be really, really relevant for international SEO.

Steve Wetmore – So basically, selling your products in other countries through the web. Interesting. The fact that you’re fluent in English and French? Do you often recommend that your clients duplicate pages in English and French?

Antonin Pasquereau – Well, it’s an interesting questions because it’s a big concern for all clients. They often ask, can we literally translate a piece of content? For example for English Canadian? What do we do for American English people? Is it the same piece of content is indicated? It’s very good questions. But the first thing to understand is that every piece of content on the same domain belongs to you. So it cannot be really duplicated.

Antonin Pasquereau – Plus, search engines understand that one version of the page can be translated in another language and correspond to another territory. So there is no such thing as duplicated contents when we talk about international SEO, because we have regional equivalencies from one page to another. So the challenge is basically to indicate to search engines that this page is the translation of an other page in a different language. And it’s done with the local tag or read internet tag, depending on the CMS you use.

Steve Wetmore – So how many different languages Will you work with?

Antonin Pasquereau – We really focus on the language we master. I’m originally from France. So we obviously work in French Canada and France. That’s the two main territories in terms of revenues and then our secondary market is with English speaking people in Canada and English speaking people in the United States.

Steve Wetmore – Very, very interesting. Okay, well, let’s let’s get into the meat of this interview. I’d really like to get your perspective, your views on what you see happening in the future of SEO, and especially in 2020.

Antonin Pasquereau – There is many things happening nowadays with deep learning and how we apply, let’s say aid to search engine indexing. It’s a very interesting topic, because most of the experts in this field are trying to understand the relevancy of criteria for Google rankings. But we learn that there is real ranking factors. So the real ranking factors, the criteria that are basically used in a sec second ranking process from Google are really important. And we’re talking about engagement data. We’re talking about traffic statistics from Google SERPS to your websites. So everything that we knew before in terms of link building, in terms of how we create mentions, how we create an audience, from recipes, from vacation to your website, is being How can I say, is being balanced or is being specified with this kind of engagement data?

Antonin Pasquereau – Click through rates is an important metric. If you create a link or an article in a publication you want to have some traffic going from the article to your website. And the funny thing is that Google won’t admit that the click through rates or any kind of traffic data will be used as a first ranking hint.

Antonin Pasquereau – But we know this is true because of Patents and some SEO case studies, that’s the engagement that are used and reused to rank a website. So it’s definitely this multi process of Google you just changing the game to entry for SEO.

Steve Wetmore – Interesting. So I’m looking for one juicy snippet piece of advice, something that makes Black Cat SEO unique in the marketplace.

Antonin Pasquereau – OK, someone in Jamaica or anywhere in the World, it’s pretty much the same principle each time or for any country. So we hear lots of things depending on which agencies you’re working with.

Antonin Pasquereau – First of all, it’s been 10 years we have for three key metrics, specifically for clients or leads to understand that we can give away secrets, there is no secrets. In my opinion there is just transparency and expertise. Yeah. I think what defines our strengths is honesty. I mean, it’s always about signal alignments. We need to have content accessibility, we need to have a crawler going through our website the good way. And of course, we need authority, which is more enough the story, right.

Antonin Pasquereau – So our strength is to explain this alignment of very wide specialties, I mean, publishing an article as a press release is completely different from the canonicalization process on the website, right. But we need a holistic approach if we want to get results. So our strength is definitely to put all the SEO testing perspective for a defined campaign duration and make everything clear and transparent from the technical aspects to the price we pay to put an article online and get some traffic from this article to the website. We have over 12,000 partnerships with blogs in the US, including USA today or Forbes or even the big media editorial sites like Reuters, CNN, the Sun etc.

Antonin Pasquereau – We give price we pay to our clients. There is no secrets over there. So definitely what make what makes black so different is this transparency from technical aspects, the way we work with them, the way we explained everything and we even give codes to the price they have to pay for the vacation.
Our plans are for a duration of two months, three months, four months, it depends. But everything is managed and synced up perfectly so that the clients understand the whole Plan.
That’s really our differentiator.

Steve Wetmore – Excellent. Okay, let’s, let’s talk about what three SEO tools you use most often and find most useful.

Antonin Pasquereau – Yeah. Very interesting one.
Let’s talk about Onsite SEO first because the tools to use for onsite SEO and off site are different. There are tools specialized for certain objectives.

Antonin Pasquereau – So for on site SEO, we use good coders and believe ScreamingFrog.com
and Screaming Frog is not the only crawler. And sometimes we rely on other crawlers SharkSEO.com
Screaming Frog does not allow you to export nice and user friendly PDF reports easily. You have to work on cleaning up the presentation. What I find is sometimes SharkSEO works better on smaller websites and gives us a finished report for clients. So big ecommerce websites definitely work best on ScreamingFrog.com

Antonin Pasquereau – For Offsite our sites we rely on AHREFs.COM and MOZ.COM that are the two main Tools for of site metrics and giving an overview of what the equivalent of the “dead” PageRank could be. So most is a great indicator to see the stable backlinks over time. The refresh delays nuts is not great. So when you want to uncover fresh backlinks, you want to try a dress a dress is a great software it for for having this freshness of links.

Antonin Pasquereau – And ranking ranking positions depending on the situation we use SEMrush.com is fine. It really depends on the quantity of keywords.

Steve Wetmore – Antonin, could you could you give us just one piece of wisdom, one piece of advice to anyone that is interested in SEO or is an SEO?

Antonin Pasquereau – In my opinion the most useful piece of advice I can give away for any webmaster or any entrepreneur that wants to start his business online, is to explain that you need to focus equally on Onsite content and Offsite content. It’s not possible to grow organic traffic websites with just on site deployment and today’s principle of authority assignments. So someone that wants to start SEO should really focus on content in to do a nickel systematically on other websites to this content, not only other websites but engage websites, run the rigors of trick. There is another tweak we can use. Its we used to say, the more backlinks you build, you gain the better ranking. Yeah. And we don’t do that anymore. We don’t automate. We don’t do directories anymore because We understand Google has changed. But still every backlink you paid for every backlink you build, you should backlink it yourself.

Steve Wetmore – So give me an example.

Antonin Pasquereau – Well, you get a wonderful article in Forbes or Entrepreneur and you know it has great potential because the content is fresh and relevant. You’re sure it will transfer some authority to your website. If you want to have even better results, you can backlink, you can mark it, you can quote it in the comments. You can use it as a profile link. You can do this kind of thing we used to do for the first layer websites 10 years earlier. Today we can we can do backlinks to the first layer.

Steve Wetmore – Very good. Well, that’s, well, Antonin, thank you so much for sharing this valuable information.

The post Interview with Antonin Pasquereau of Black Cat SEO appeared first on BuySellShoutouts.

source https://www.buysellshoutouts.com/blog/interview-with-antonin-pasquereau-of-black-cat-seo

Quote3

Sales were slowly dropping for my iPhone app so I was seeking new leads. I thought about advertising with Instagram but there was nothing out there, I then came across BuySellShoutouts and bought a shoutout on a car niche page. Within a day, my sales had tripled and I was back in the top 100 on the AppStore! People swarmed to the app from the shoutout. I would highly recommend this service to anyone.

– Richard, WhizURL Link Shortener and Tracker App

Originally posted 2014-05-09 05:23:52.

The post Quote3 appeared first on BuySellShoutouts.

source https://www.buysellshoutouts.com/quote/quote3

Interview with Malcolm Graham of Aceify.me

Steve Wetmore – Today we are meeting with Malcolm Graham. He is founder and CEO of a Aceify.me and he’s going to give us his perspective and insights on SEO moving into 2020.

Graham Malcolm

Hello Graham welcome!

Graham Malcolm – Thanks, Steve. Great to be here.

Steve Wetmore – can you just give us some background and introduction on who you are and what you do?

 

Graham Malcolm – Absolutely. So my name is Malcolm Graham, and I am co-founder and CEO of Aceify.me a certified Sports Lesson booking App.

My background is in digital marketing. So I have been working in digital marketing, nearly my entire career – right back to the late 90s. I started very early in the field of digital marketing. And amongst other things, I started an SEO Agency LimeTree which grew to 20 staff and had some clients such as McKinsey consulting, Financial Times, British Army, Mars drinks and many other top organizations. And we ran some major campaigns for some of those organizations.

The Aceify sports lesson booking app, which launched in 2015, continues to grow. We initially started in the tennis industry. To give some background, when I was younger, I was a pretty good Junior tennis player and tried to go pro so I wanted to do something for the tennis industry.

We’re now expanding to other sports and now offering other services such as Yoga coaching, Personal Training, Swimming coaching and some other activities. And we are trying to make it easier to book fitness session than to order a pizza.

Steve Wetmore – Awesome, for the layperson, can you describe the functionality of your app? Like how are people using the app for scheduling?

Graham Malcolm – The App works like an “Uber” style, which allows you to locate and book, fitness training.

As a service for the trainers we’re providing them high quality clients at flexible times and prices for the customers. We are providing high quality training, flexible locations and good prices.

Steve Wetmore – And what is the Aceify.me app service area?

Malcolm Graham – We’re currently UK wide with a bit of a focus on Southeast UK, particularly London, which is where we’re based. We are looking to go global in 2021. Right now, we are mainly Southeast UK, although we do have some other activity going on in the rest of the UK.

Steve Wetmore – Okay. So let’s just jump back to earlier in the conversation when you were describing that you still operate SEO Agency LimeTree. Can you elaborate?

Malcolm Graham – We are web design and build and provide SEO Services. What we realized is, there’s no point building the most amazing website in the world if you don’t have traffic, so lots of really great designers don’t know that much about search engines. And a lot of search engine specialists don’t know much about design. So by combining expertise in those two services, we’ve got a very powerful offering whereby we have a team of over 100 years combined experience in that industry. So basically our objective is driving traffic through to websites, and then giving people a great experience on the landing page and helping them to convert the traffic into sales.

Steve Wetmore – Very interesting. Can you share with us, your customer base for your custom web design and SEO Agency?

Malcolm Graham – Yeah, absolutely. So you know, we’ve got quite a few clients in health foods and fitness. We gravitate to things that we’re interested in. And those are the sort of clients that I’ve largely been picking up but we do cover many other industries. We have top law firms that we’re working with in London and several other professional organizations. So yeah, it’s quite a wide range of clients. And what we’re doing with most of them is for web design and build followed by SEO contracts. And we do also have some clients which are on long term SEO retainers as well. We’re helping them to build rank and we’re helping to build up their sales through web marketing.

Steve Wetmore – Very interesting. Can you can you share your vision on marketing trends or the future of SEO into 2020?

Graham Malcolm – I think what we’re starting to see is that, mobile’s really important, as opposed to when I started it was 99.9% desktop. And a little bit of mobile. We know mobile is actually now dominant. Now designing firstly for the mobile experience, and then secondly, a desktop.

And we’re also starting to see the advent of new technologies such as AI, voice, and machine learning. And these types of algorithms are coming into play with a search engine. So it’s not just as simple as it used to be where, you know, you could get to the top of Google by having lots of links and the right keywords on the pages, you really must be a lot smarter than that. The whole industry is evolving alongside the search engine technology. Increasingly, the search engine technology is based around the user so it’s more and more personalized, and You are actually, in some senses, the search term. What I mean is, before you even type a question or phrase, the search engine has a good idea of what you might be going to search for which is something that is really new.

Steve Wetmore – Very interesting. Can you share with us the three most important SEO tools that you use today?

Graham Malcolm – You mean software? Yes I’m constantly trying new software tools. And I’ve used literally hundreds over the years. Right now, most of our services are based around Ahrefs.com and SEMrush.com, and we’re also using some other tools like a Majestic.com as well.

Those are real top top performing tools these days. And they both bring some really strong different features to the table, similar but different.

SEMrush.com is very good for the optimization. And we’re mostly using a
Ahrefs.com for the off page. And the data, some of the data that Majestic.com has around customization is really, really good. So we’re also also using that for the backlink analysis.

Steve Wetmore – Have you used SEOPowerSuite.com? I like this software while it does not rank as high as the software you use I like it and am not ready to abandon it.

Malcolm Graham – We also use AdvancedWebRankings.com for tracking rankings. And, you know, several other tools actually, but I would say those three that I mentioned first, are the tools I rely on mostly.

Steve Wetmore – In closing what number one single piece of advice would you offer someone reading this article relative to SEO?

Malcolm Graham – I think keyword research is absolutely critical. You can do great SEO for the wrong keyword and it doesn’t help you. So make sure that you have the right strategy. Invest some time in the keyword strategy piece before you start optimizing.

Also, just consider if SEO is the right marketing strategy for you. Remember there’s multiple marketing strategies. SEO is a very, very cost effective way of getting traffic to your website. But it’s a long term thing. So if you needed to sell something next week, and you didn’t have any SEO right now then just forget it.

So yeah, I would say keyword research is #1, and then make sure there’s enough value in those keywords and then execute the strategy. But don’t just assume that you have the right keyword, a lot of people make the mistake of “I know the keywords my industry”, and they quite often get that completely wrong, and then they just waste a lot of money.

Steve Wetmore – I agree 100% with your analysis on performing detailed keyword research. It’s critical today.

Malcolm, thank you very much, I think this very interesting what you’re doing and you’ve wisely diversified your business, with the app and your agency. And I wish you all the success in the future.

Malcolm Graham – Thank you. Absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.

The post Interview with Malcolm Graham of Aceify.me appeared first on BuySellShoutouts.

source https://www.buysellshoutouts.com/blog/interview-with-malcolm-graham-of-aceify-me

10 Myths of Instagram for Entrepreneurs

Instagram is a powerful marketing tool but over the years many Myths of Instagram for Entrepreneurs has limited effectiveness.
Perhaps it sounds like a cliché, but it’s not. Buy followers Instagram from BuySellShoutouts and see the impact on your Instagram account.
The platform gathers over 1 billion accounts, which is enough to convince more than 70% of the US companies to use it as part of their business strategies.
At the same time, as much as 200 million Instagram users actively visit business profiles every single day.
Some serious business-related activity is obviously taking place on Instagram, so it’s not the question of whether you should join the game or not but rather how to do it effectively.
But before you make the first move, you need to be aware of common misconceptions that make a lot of people confused.
This post will show you 10 myths of Instagram for entrepreneurs.
Keep them in mind and you’ll avoid making beginner-level marketing mistakes.

1.     Instagram Marketing Doesn’t Require a Strategy

The first myth on our list is so obvious that it actually hurts.
Can you begin any kind of task or project before making a plan?
You can, but the outcome won’t be nearly as satisfying as you may have imagined.
The same goes for Instagram marketing.
Rachel Miles, a social media specialist at Careers Booster, recently noted: “If you want to generate results, you have to create a sustainable strategy and decide what to do when, how, and why.
There is nothing random about content creation, so don’t fall for this trick and engage in Instagram marketing without a proper plan”.

2.     It Takes Too Much Time to Grow

All good things in life and business require patience and so does Instagram promotion.
However, it’s not true that you need too much time to grow the number of followers.
Depending on your objectives, you can reach the desired level within months or even weeks.
However, you do need to invest a lot of time in content creation.
This is the tricky part because your posts need to be appealing and interesting enough to grab the attention of the target audience.

3.     Instagram Works for Product-Based Companies Only

This social media network generates by far the best results in case of product-based companies.
The reason is simple – such businesses sell physical stuff and they can present it easily via Instagram.
Contrary to popular belief, service-focused organizations can also leave a good impression by posting analytics, testimonials, client-related photos, freebies, or behind the scene details.
This kind of promotion proved to be highly productive for some service-based companies, so why would you run away from it?

4.     The Platform Can’t Get You Leads

This is the common statement among entrepreneurs who don’t know how to handle Instagram marketing.
Okay, the platform doesn’t allow you to add URLs everywhere, but you can still do miracles using the website link.
You can play with it and change it a few times a month.
You can leave the new landing page link.
This is a great way to generate leads through Instagram, you just need to be persistent and clever about the URLs you share.

5.     You Need Professional Images

Brightness and colors really do play a major role here, but it doesn’t mean that your images have to be strictly professional.
Even amateurs can now take great photos using smartphones.
Mobile devices have become so good that they easily adapt to background light, adjust focus and exposure, and do all sorts of other tricks.
Of course, we don’t recommend you publish amateur photos on all occasions.
Instagram marketing is an investment, which means you should accumulate a certain budget to hire professional photographers from time to time.
This way, your account will look even more impressive and compelling.

6.     Post Once a Week

You can often hear business people saying it’s enough to post one photo a week.
Before you accept it as the ultimate truth, let’s see what statistical findings tell us.
According to the reports, users publish 95 million photos and videos on a daily basis!
If you really think anyone will notice your sole weekly post among thousands of other photos published simultaneously, you are making a huge mistake.

7.     Lots of Images Guarantee Engagement

On the other side of the spectrum, we have entrepreneurs who strongly believe that posting dozens of images a day will bring them user engagement.
Needless to say, this is also an awkward misconception. Instagram users prefer quality over quantity.
Therefore, you need to make a balance between the two elements to make your followers truly interested in your work.

8.     Once You Post, You Are Done

Speaking of user engagement, let us remind you that your own engagement makes the other side of the coin.
A common myth suggests that once you post on Instagram, you are done with it.
But this is often where the real job begins as you need to monitor user feedback and respond accordingly.
Business accounts on Instagram need to show the human side of the story and strengthen the bonds with their followers.
In such circumstances, interaction becomes crucial and you cannot afford to leave user comments unanswered.

9.     Follow To Get Followed

Gone are the days when you could simply follow someone and expect to get followed back immediately.
Today, Instagram users are picky and they don’t want to bother seeing too many business accounts.
For this reason, your strategy should not be “follow to get followed”.
You need to publish quality content instead and wait for the target users to follow you.
Rest assured followers will come to you in case you can provide them with informative and entertaining content.

10.    You Can’t Measure Results

Businesses would never invest money in Instagram marketing if there wasn’t a way to measure results.
As the matter of fact, there are dozens of useful metrics to check out here: follower growth rate, link clicks, engagement per follower, etc.
Your only job is to determine metrics that really matter to your business and analyze them regularly.

CONCLUSION
Although a lot of businesses use Instagram to promote products or services, some still can’t figure out how social media really functions.
It creates terrible misconceptions and Myths of Instagram for Entrepreneurs that can easily confuse and chase them away from this platform.
In this post, we revealed 10 myths of Instagram for entrepreneurs.
Did you already know about these misconceptions?
Do you have other myths to share with our readers?
Feel free to let us know about it in comments – we will be glad to see more Instagram myths debunked!

This blog was first published at https://www.buysellshoutouts.com/blog/10-myths-of-instagram-for-entrepreneurs

Interview with Qamar Zaman of KissPR.com

This is an interview on the InstaVIP Podcast with Qamar Zaman of KissPR.com

Steve Wetmore 0:02
Today on the InstaVIP podcast we are interviewing Kumar’s Zaman with Kiss PR in Dallas, Texas. Specifically, we’re going to be discussing the future of SEO in 2020. Kumar’s credentials are very impressive. He has been published on Forbes, CNN several times on USA Today. While using “White Hat”, SEO methods, Kumar has helped hundreds of companies gain visibility and grow their business. How are you this morning?

Qamar Zaman 0:41
I’m good, Steve. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Steve Wetmore 0:44
Awesome. Could you give us some background on who you are and what you do?

Qamar Zaman 0:51
Steve, I’ve been in the SEO field for almost 20 years started the business in 2002, unofficially incorporated in 2014 or 2004. After a major hurricane, I used to live in the Cayman Islands. And after the hurricane, everything got devastated. couldn’t do much web design. Seo was really at infancy couldn’t do much web design. So I moved to Dallas where my second home was, and that’s where I started selling websites. And fast forward now. I’m mostly doing SEO. I do some website work, but mostly SEO and digital marketing. That’s where I am.

Steve Wetmore 1:40
Interesting Qamar. So can you can you share some highlights of your career over the last 20 years?

Qamar Zaman 1:48
Sure. Started kiss PR which was not called kiss PR It was called One Visibility and people had trouble Kind of understanding and misspelling. So I went and got a domain name called kiss VR. But before that happened, I had invented I would say a product. And I had in my pricing page, three columns and there was the price called $10 and $20 and $30 and the middle price which was 1999 or $20 was called kiss and that product was very successful everybody bought it and because it was called keep it super simple for search engines. So I decided that you know, everybody likes it, so I should call myself kiss, which stands for Keep it Super Simple and keep you know, it’s super.

And I started getting into marketing and SEO. It was a rough journey, because the SEO competition is intense. There’s a lot of people that claim to do SEO. And in the intro, you said, You know, I do white hat SEO? Actually, there is no white, gray or black hat. SEO is Seo because, you know, a lot of people, most people will say, this guy does white hat SEO, the moment you hear that, you’d run away from them because they actually don’t.

So it’s funny that you said that because Google doesn’t want you to do any SEO. You know, that’s what Google says. They don’t manipulate search results, just make it organic. And Google says it for whatever reasons they say it for, but to do search engine optimization. You have to do certain things. So The best way I put it is, I use Google’s best practices to get the websites found. And that’s really been the secret to my success. And I’ve kept it simple. And as a result, and as the name implies, Keep it Super Simple (KISS). As a name applies, you know, my clients haven’t gotten excessive and very successful results.

I have worked with over 30,000 small businesses in the last 20 years. Wow. And they are still using my services, which have a very affordable point.

And to segue into the need of doing affordable SEO, I use a lot of press releases in my SEO which Google will tell you that back links are dead, etc.

But I don’t use it for link building. I don’t use it for any other reason. It’s just that when you have a product and you talk about your product consistently, somebody out there will find you and your press releases. People do read it, you know, they are found in the search results. People do go to Google News. They go to Yahoo News, they read all the big journals that are trusted, like the USA today and the Wall Street Journal etc. And that’s how people have found me and interviewed me.

And as a result of that, I’ve been lucky enough to be found by Forbes and ultimately became a Forbes content writer. I write for Forbes, I was also mentioned couple of times in their expert panel on the tips that are provided, which are also there. So you just need to keep things very simple and ethical. And imagine me explaining what is SEO to my friends and I say “if the CEO of Google was looking over your shoulder, what would you do that he would say, “Well, this is not right or honest.” Okay? So just be cognizant of that and build good digital assets. And ultimately, the more you chase Google, the harder it becomes. So just be natural, and this approach become successful.

Steve Wetmore 6:19
Interesting. That’s a great perspective. Thank you for that.

So, let’s pull out our crystal ball and give us your insights on what you feel is going to be the future of SEO, particularly in 2020.

Qamar Zaman 6:42
Sure, I’ve been doing SEO for 20 years and there’s one thing that I have seen that consistently has been there is link building. You are still going to be able to do link building. The real question is what types of links are these. So the best are natural links; create content that people are searching for, and are able to share your content. So if you create a good content and people see your content on social media, and then they become your fans, they know, like and trust you and they are going to share that content with their friends.

That link may not be placed on the very authoritative site, but because that link is getting viral and it’s getting shared. It’s a great signal. So that to me, will continue to be important.

Google dedicated one of their products Google Plus, you may recall it was not very successful and it went away. So they have put all of their effort into Google My Business which is technically the map page. And if you claim your map and you really work hard as using the best practices, Google My Business will become a very important factor.

In fact, MOZ.com, which is a great tool and they are very authoritative. In 2018 MOZ had made prediction that Google My Business signals are counting towards the 100% Factor.

25% was Google My Business. And link signals were 27%. So I think they will continue to dominate Google My Business.

The next trend I see is that reviews will continue to dominate your search because people are researching for who they want to do business with. They need to know who they can trust and reviews are the best signals.

Companies that have bad reviews, obviously, don’t get as much business compared to, you know, people that have good reviews or continue to get good reviews.

Now there is some some people say that you need to have 40 reviews and four plus ratings. I don’t know about that. But as long as it’s all organic, you get what you get. And sites are getting a five star review from every customer. So as long as it’s not a gamed approach, I think Google will continue to see that.

Citations, which means getting links from sites remain very important. So if your links are found on ways and other sites, they are going to be a big factor in ranking.

But at the end of the day, it’s all behavior, how people will behave from where they find the content, and then they come to you. You know, I have an Instagram page and I have like, 20,000 followers. And I’m getting a lot of traffic from my Instagram to KissPR.com. So I think Instagram, even though Instagram does not pass any link value to my page from an SEO perspective, is a good signal. I think that channel will continue to drive more traffic for me, as long as I keep posting good content and gaining better engagement.

And I think Google does look at it, they have said they don’t. But you know,  it’s organic, so anything organic will benefit.

Mobile voice search is going to be the next big thing, artificial intelligence, Voice Search. Those are the next big things.

Google just released a new algorithm called bird, which basically tells me that voice search is going to be big. And because everybody’s searching on their mobile – we know mobile and voice search is going to be the next dominating factor of personalization in Google.

Steve Wetmore 11:00
Interesting. Well, thank you for that.

Working with your day to day SEO methods, you know, as you’re working for your customers, what are your three top tools that you use to get your work done?

Unknown Speaker 11:22
#1 I believe in a cloud system because I’m always there, so I’m not carrying the computer all the time. I want to be able to access my data on the phone. So the tools that I really love, and I literally work around are Google Docs, because it’s relatively inexpensive and it’s secure.

I mean, if Google is not secure, then who could be. So that’s one of the tools that I use excessively.

#2 I use Canva for my graphics that I design for posting images on Instagram – is a very easy to use.

#3 Then I use a tool called Evernote. So I keep everything in Evernote.

#4 In fact, the fourth would be zoom. So I use zoom a lot too.

And those, those are my four. You can call it a “Swiss Army Knife”.

Steve Wetmore 12:16
Very, very interesting. So if if someone wants to reach you, where do you want them to find you on LinkedIn or at your website?

Qamar Zaman 12:31
The best place is obviously my website, because it’ll be hard for them to search me on LinkedIn unless they know my exact name.

So the website that I can share with the people that are listening to this podcast and they want to try some unique methods is kisspr.com

Kisspr.com is the main website for digital marketing and Story.KissPR. This is where all small businesses come in and use press releases and content marketing for their business. So those are the two places.

Steve Wetmore 13:07
Awesome, fantastic. Well Kumar This is very insightful and I’m sure our audience will get a lot of great information from article once they, they digest it. So thank you again, and look forward to talking to you in the near future.

Qamar Zaman 13:27
Thank you.

The post Interview with Qamar Zaman of KissPR.com appeared first on BuySellShoutouts.

source https://www.buysellshoutouts.com/podcast-interview/interview-with-qamar-zaman-of-kisspr-com