With millions of monthly active users using the social media network, Twitter is a great place for bloggers to obtain as much audience as possible for their blogs.

Here are 8 great Twitter tools every blogger must know:

1) Audiense:
As the name sounds this tool will help you This tool will help you optimize your content. You can also analyze how your content is making plus suggestions on the best time to post your tweets. Besides all that you will also figure out new followers and those who are un-following. Check out audiense.com

2) SocialRank:
As a blogger, you will need influence. This tool will tell you the most influential users you have and help you engage them to increase your visibility. Check out social rank.

3) Twubs:
This will help you register your hashtag to help you create a community discussing an issue. It will also help view tweets from one spot. Check out twubs

4) Twitshot:
Your images can be shared on any platform for your Twitter audience. Have a look at twitshot

5) Tweriod:
Tweriod lets you examine the behavior of your followers, and see when you are most active. This is your time to schedule and post your best tweets. This will also ensure you have a complete view of your twitter followers tweriod

6) Triberr:
The greater your following, the higher will be the traffic numbers. Triberr involves ‘tribes’ concentrated on different topics. You can search and join a tribe and send out a tweet to the Tribe members. They shall approve, retweet or share it on Facebook, thus letting your content receive more traffic. Check out triberr

7) Paper.Li
A consistent flow of good quality content is important to keep your users interested. Paper.Li will let you identify influencers and experts in your niche, obtain tweets from people who mention you or your blog, and publish content every day to grab the right audience for your blog. Check out paper.li

8) UberSocial:
For bloggers to stay connected with their readers, UberSocial can help

This mobile marketing platform has the necessary tools and functionalities that lets you read and reply tweets, check profile, preview timeline and more.

For increasing user engagement, these 8 Twitter tools will help. Have any other suggestions? Let us know in the comments.

An online presence has become paramount in the prevailing global economic conditions. Unless you have been living under a rock, you have watched Facebook evolve from just an online ‘meet me’ spot to a staple in business. This phenomenal online platform has instituted steady improvements over the years and one of the latest ones being, Facebook messenger bots.

Facebook messenger bots are autonomous messages that can interact with clients on your behalf using automated responses. How are they beneficial to my bottom line? – you may ask. These bots provide a number of benefits such as:

1. Saves You Some Face Time
You no longer have to be glued to your monitor, Facebook messenger bots can interact with customers on your behalf through words, videos and pictures depending on customer queries.

2. Help Gather Customer Information
Facebook messenger bots can read and interpret customer queries through artificial intelligence after which, they will deliver relevant answer templates or furnish you with the information needed to respond to the customer query yourself.

3. Easy Customization
These bots amplify various Facebook resources such as chat extensions, sharing capabilities and visual components to help extend your reach. These bots can also be customized to accept customer payments in the messenger window.

4. Broadens Your Reach
Customers are seeking to patronize businesses with bots, which exposes your businesses to a larger audience. Ensure you retain your patrons by giving them a memorable experience.

5. Helps in Delivery
Bots also come in handy in dropping your product offerings and ads right into customer inboxes.

Statistics show that more than 100,000 businesses are using bots with that number set to rise. Customers have also expressed an affinity and preference for businesses they can message effectively. These two facts alone highlight the importance of incorporating Facebook messenger bots into your online business.

Most content marketers would agree that email marketing is unavoidable for businesses. If you have got quality content, marketing emails can be more engaging and successful. Adopt these 5 easy ways to create engaging emails in your marketing strategy:

Create a meaningful Subject Line:
The subject line will often be the reason for the user to read your email. A good subject line should be short, simple and on point. Ask questions, give statement, or highlight unexpected facts, and your email will likely be opened.

Produce Great Content:
When you add great content, your email will obviously be improved. You can draw the attention of your customers by creating content that is intriguing and useful. More importantly, your content should satisfy their requirements.

Make Emails Responsive:
Making your emails responsive will enhance user experience . Design your emails and optimize them to display better on tablets and smartphones. When you create emails that are easy-to-read and navigate, you will notice more click-through.

Add More Imagery:
Good emails should be precise and attractive to keep the readers engaged. Even if you have a great subject line, no one would prefer reading a massive paragraph of text. Alongside concise content, the email should incorporate necessary images, graphics, and other components that would attract a reader.

Don’t Forget Automated Emails:
What if the customer makes a purchase? You would need to create an automated follow-up email as it is important to create a good impression for your business. An automated email that is poorly designed wouldn’t do well. Use professional templates and take some time to design such automated emails.

Make it Short:
During proofreads let every long and unnecessary sentence be eliminated so that you can remain with content that is direct and addressing what you intend. To succeed in this, you can focus on cutting your original writing into a half.

Sound Friendly:
When writing your email to many people, you do not need to sound like a big corporation that is passing information to their clients. Make sure you address a single person by name, not as general subscribers.

Your Greetings Should not be Repetitive:
Do not stick to a single greeting every time you send an email. Use various greetings being conscious of seasons. You can use greetings like “happy holidays ” or “warm wishes” or “Hello from…” Do not think about a strict formula when writing. Express yourself in the best way you can.

Your Voice Should be Natural:
Let your audience realize that you are genuinely interested in the value they will receive from what you are trying to sell them. Just the way you would address a customer at a store. You can use ‘you’ to address them directly.

Reward People for Checking Your Emails:
Who doesn’t like rewards? You need to ensure your subscribers can benefit from checking your emails regularly. You can reward them in the form of e-books with exclusive tips related to your industry or inspire them with free e-courses.

Creating engaging content along with user friendly emails will help you go a long way in content marketing.

Happiness does not come from what you have, but from who you are and what you think.

You can be the richest person in your locality or in your office but that has no relation to you being happy. You can have the biggest house in the neighborhood but that does not mean you are happy – Well, it might make you happy but only for a very brief moment.

So, what is Happiness and what makes you feel Happy? Science says do these 11 things to be happy, and these are very simple things that each one of us can do to be happy. As we move from 2017 into 2018 , lets focus on doing things that make us feel happy in 2018.

Below are my Top 10 Quotes on Happiness

1) If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion – Dalai Lama

2) “Tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you are.” – Chinese Proverb

3) “Happiness is not having what you want. It is appreciating what you have.” – Unknown

4) “In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.” – Deepak Chopra

5) “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” – Aristotle

6) “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” – Abraham Lincoln

7) “Once you do something you love, you never have to work again.” – Willie Hill

8) “Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.” – John C. Maxwell

9) “A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?” – Albert Einstein

10) “If you want to be happy, be.” -Leo Tolstoy

Have a Happy 2018 and Stay Blessed

As we all gear into the new year, its important to reflect on the new possibilities and technologies that can impact your website in 2018. My friends at Digital Vidya have blogged about key social media marketing trends in 2018 that will make a difference to your marketing ROI, these trends are a Social Media Marketing Trends in 2018 part of the interview series done by three experts from the digital and social media marketing functions.

I am honored and privileged to be a part of the expert panel on the interview series on social media alongwith my two other expert panelists.

While the questions are only three, the depth of the answers will give you an overall perspective on what’s going to work in 2018.

And Yes …in the interview I’ve spilled the beans on where your marketing dollar and efforts should be focused

Check out my interview on Social Media Marketing Trends in 2018

Jack Ma, the mavrick entrepreneur who founded the Chinese eCommerce company Alibaba has a great rags to riches story to tell.

Alibaba has been labelled to be more successful than Walmart and other off line retail giants. Jack Ma is the richest Chinese by networth – USD 40.5 billion as per 2017 data.

Below are 15 Quotes from Jack Ma

1) “The opportunities that everyone cannot see are the real opportunities.”

2) “Opportunity lies in the place where the complaints are.”

3) “When you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.”

4) “Today is cruel. Tomorrow is crueller. And the day after tomorrow is beautiful.”

5) “Never ever compete on prices, instead compete on services and innovation.”

6) “The very important thing you should have is patience.”

7) There’s an examination for young people to go to university. I failed it three times. I failed a lot. So I applied to 30 different jobs and got rejected. I went for a job with the police; they said, ‘You’re no good.’ I even went to KFC when it came to my city. Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted.

8) “Intelligent people need a fool to lead them. When the team’s all a bunch of scientists, it is best to have a peasant lead the way. His way of thinking is different. It’s easier to win if you have people seeing things from different perspectives.”

9) “Hire the person best suited to the job, not the most talented. This can be a very painful lesson. There’s no point putting in a Boeing jet engine when you need to run a tractor.”

10) “Spending money is much more difficult than making money.”

11) “I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.”

12) “I got my story, my dream, from America. The hero I had is Forrest Gump… I like that guy. I’ve been watching that movie about 10 times. Every time I get frustrated, I watch the movie. I watched the movie before I came here again to New York. I watched the movie again telling me that no matter whatever changed, you are you.”

13) Chinese people, young people, they don’t go shopping a lot in department stores. All department store guys hate me. They say business is bad because of Jack.

14) I like to play cards. I’m not very good, because I don’t want to calculate, I just play by instinct. But I’ve learned a lot of business philosophy by playing poker.

15) You American people worry too much about the China economy. Every time you think China is a problem, we get better, but when you have a high expectation for China, China is always a problem.

An ecommerce site has many features. But which of these are the most essential? Is your site missing any important one? It is often hard to answer these questions even for an expert designer. Though the standard features of an ecommerce site are pretty well known, it is not uncommon to see that even big sites are missing one or two important points.

My friends at WebAlive, have created an infographic that presents 72 essential features of any ecommerce website in a very convenient way. Each ecommerce site is different. But the presentation of the infographic shows that general features that any site owner will find applicable.

The focus of the infographic is to give you the fine points that define a good user experience for your online store. It is more or less a visual presentation of an ideal ecommerce site with the basic structures all the pages, such as – Home, Product page, Category page, Checkout page and Blog. Though the final details of your site don’t need to be as same as this infographic, by taking a look at it you can easily get an idea of what goes where.

Whether you are building a new ecommerce site or redesigning your existing one, you will certainly find this infographic to be a great reference.

How efficient is your website? If you were to access your site from any mobile device, would you be satisfied with the experience?

For some years, there has been a lot of talk about mobile-responsiveness, yet a good number of website are yet to adapt. The mobile craze is not without good reason. In 2015, Google’s search chief Amit Singal announced that for the first time, more searches were conducted on mobile than on desktops.

It’s no secret that while the search giant dominates the search industry on desktop, it still competes fiercely with companies like Facebook and Apple for mobile search browsers. It’s not surprising to note that it has since taken measure to correct that situation.

In 2015, Google decided to wage war on websites that were not mobile friendly by giving site owners an ultimatum to become responsive or drop in search rankings. The decision paid off because many website owners soon switched to a responsive interface.

At the time, Google started putting labels on sites for “mobile friendly” and giving them a better ranking position on its search engine result pages (SERPs).

According to Brendan, digital marketing analyst at Domain 4 Less “Mobile compatibility does not only improve your SEO, it creates an enhanced user experience for visitors. It helps you get more visitors and then convert a larger proportion of them. It is one of the most practical steps you can take to increase the ROI you make in your business.”

However, despite the fact that the push for mobile responsiveness is in full swing, there are websites that are suffering the effects of the latest Panda update. We have not heard the last of Mobilegeddon, nor is it going away.

It is a requirement that is here to stay.

Here are a few things to consider in the coming months.

1) Google is coming for websites with intrusive interstitials
Mobile compatibility is still a priority for Google. Although it announced last year that it was dropping the “mobile friendly” tag because 85% of searches for website on its mobile SERP were mobile friendly, it is still coming for websites in other ways.

As part of a mop-up activity following Mobilegeddon, Google has asked websites with intrusive interstitials (pop-up ads) to remove them or face de-ranking. These giant boxes which appear immediately a visitor lands on a mobile site is a major reason for poor user experience. There are however, some exceptions like age restriction boxes or cookie policy information and paywall dialogue boxes.

2) Businesses will still lose search traffic if they are not mobile friendly
On February 7, webmasters experienced an update that seemed to affect many websites. While they were not sure about the details of the update, sites most hit where those yet to convert to mobile-responsive status. It is possible for a website with a high search listing on desktop to drop in mobile search listing, simply because it is not optimised.

It is important to consider that if you run an ecommerce website, you are better off ranking higher on mobile search than on desktop. This is because shoppers are more likely to search on mobile, even though they complete the purchase on the seller’s desktop site.

3) Mobile search rankings differ a lot from desktop search rankings today
If you still think desktop search is the same as mobile search, you are wrong. In 2011, SEO expert Rand Fishkin didn’t think much about mobile SEO. In fact, he predicted that at some point, both search rankings would converge and become one, thus making mobile site redundant.

Today, the reverse is the case with mobile sites being even more relevant. Considering the unique nature of smartphones, search engines have optimised the ways desktop and smartphones receive search results. There is evidence that this started even long before Google effected the mobile-friendly update. As far back as June 2014, it was reported that mobile search results differed from desktop by 62% and variance continues to increase till today.

4) Websites not optimised for multiple screens will have it tough
It’s not just enough to be mobile-friendly, but is your site compatible with the different kinds of mobile browsers available? Mobilegeddon isn’t going to end anytime soon. As long as your site is found wanting in one mobile feature or the other, you could be exposed to a search demotion.

As long as the number of smartphone users continues to grow, and use their phones to search, Google isn’t going to relinquish its efforts to promote mobile-friendly websites. There are multiple devices with different operating systems. From Android to iPhone and Blackberry, Google wants you to ensure your site is optimised for mobile search on these systems.

Keep improving your site to suit the latest mobile search trends so you don’t suffer a hit at Google’s next core update. If you are not yet mobile-friendly, do something about it immediately. In the world of SEO you can’t afford to be lax about your search status (on both desktop and mobile) because you could be left behind in a second.

5) Google Tools: How do you know your mobile-friendly status?
In a bid to make it easy for site owners to migrate their platforms, Google has launched a mobile-friendly test tool. This API (application programming interface) helps site managers determine the mobile-friendly status of their websites.

Although it was first released in 2014, at the time its core function was to help bloggers and business owners know if their website could support certain functions. For example, whether a site could show flash software, display texts that were easily visible on small screen or screen-size compatible for scrolling.

The API has been developed for more sophisticated functions. The earlier tool was a simple way to manually test whether a particular URL is compatible with mobile phones.By introducing an API, Google is helping developers and webmasters incorporate the tool with automated software.

For instance, it could be used as a track specific pages automatically on a website and prevent accidental modifications that reduce a website’s responsiveness to mobile screens.

According to John Mueller, Google’s webmaster trends analyst, the API performs all tests and returns the same information, including the blocked URLs list, just like the manual test.

If you are not sure of your website’s mobile-friendliness, check out the page in the link above. You never know, a simple test can improve your mobile-credibility.

This is a guest post by James who is a business psychologist and serial entrepreneur, with over a decade working in finance, IT, marketing and recruitment sectors. He has authored numerous books in the management space and is Founder and CEO of the Daily Posts Content Writing Agency.

Did you know that online bloggers and webmasters who make a living by making money online, made a very small amount at first – but they never gave you their quest to continue their online dreams.

My friends at AmplifyBlog just released a super post on how 112 online experts made their first income online.

They interviewed the Top 112 Online experts over a two month period by asking a simple question

“How did you make your first income online” – The post has very interesting mix of bloggers, webmasters, social media experts and online czars.

I am humbled to be a part of this elite list. You’ll find my answer to the above question when you read the post here.

I hope you get inspired by what the experts have to share. Remember every Expert was once a novice.

Google Chrome is up against the new Firefox browser that officially launches on November 14, 2017. The browser from Mozilla promised to be fast and fierce with cutting edge technology that makes it 2x faster than the present Firefox browser and claims to use 30 % less memory than Chrome. Rightly named Quantum, which gives it more speed and power to challenge Chrome and Safari.

Firefox in the early 2000 was leading the browser race with a high market share, however in the last decade it has lost out to Google Chrome and Safari. Currently Google Chrome rules the internet browser space in US with more than 45% market share, followed by Safari at 24%, Firefox however lags at less than 7% market share.

The new Firefox Quantum not only promises better speed and less RAM usage, but is also loaded with intuitive features like sleeker UI, in browser screen shots (Now why didn’t chrome think of this ), extensive library for you to bookmark your favorite sites, plugin extension, mobile browsing capabilities and a very powerful private browsing experience that promises upto 44% faster page loads.

Excited

The New Firefox Quantum launches Nov. 14, 2017 – you can however try the beta version in the meanwhile.