Enter social proof. By utilising the audience of a go-to WordPress knowledge site, your plugin is not only increasing its trust-factor but getting a load of new eyes on it too.

The following are 4 WordPress specific sites that will review your plugin and host that review on their website. Most of these reviews are paid for, but the expanded reach you get in return is likely worth it (scroll to the bottom of this article for added benefits of external reviews).

Note: All of the facts and figures below were collected as of the time of writing, they may have changed depending on when you read this. If so, let me know in the comments below so I can update them.

4 sites that will externally review your WordPress plugin

Site name: WP Mayor

Domain authority: 47

Cost: $449

WP Mayor is one of the most transparent sites when it comes to disclosing their review prices and content. Like many of the sites listed in this article, WP Mayor doesn’t hold back on their opinions so your review will be fair and transparent because they put their readers first.

Don’t let this deter you, WP Mayor’s style of review not only keeps them honest but provides you with great feedback for improvement and some great SEO juice to boot.

Most external review sites will do surface-level research and trialling of your plugin, however, WP Mayor seem to go the extra mile and stay in touch with you while they review.

Site name: WPLift

Domain authority: 48

Cost: $399

WPLift has an extensive and active readership including a great social media following ( 17,600+ Twitter followers and 4,125+ Facebook fans) and large email list (17,000+ subscribers). So for the cost of a review with WPLift, you’re getting a lot more exposure for a good price. 

Not only this, WPLift have their SEO hats on. Each title for their reviews contains keywords and content that will help your review rank higher on Google and make them more clickable than a standard review. 

Site name: WPBeginner

Domain authority: 71

Cost: Unknown

WPBeginner doesn’t specifically offer reviews on their website, nor do they specify what they offer at all. However, they do state ‘inquiries related to advertising’ on their contact page.

WPBeginner are known for not writing reviews, but instead doing tutorial style posts on solving problems with specific WordPress plugins. So when contacting them, it’s advisable to include what specific problem your plugin solves and how it can help their readership and take it from there.

This style of promotion does wonders for your plugin’s reputation, while not a review, it works as a direct endorsement by WPBeginner of your plugin’s ability to solve the problems you say it does.

Site name: IndexWP

Domain authority: 30

Cost: $150

IndexWP is a fast-growing WordPress specific news and resource site. It claims to get over 40,000 pageviews per month and has multiple different advertising options for you to choose from.

For a relatively low price, your plugin will be reviewed by someone at IndexWP and much like WP Mayor, will remain unbiased. They don’t go into a lot of details on their contact page, but if their current reviews are anything to go by, you get something pretty basic. 

Rather than an in-depth analysis of your plugin, IndexWP focus on listing plugin features and a general overview with minimal opinions added in. If you’re just looking for an SEO boost, then a review from IndexWP might be worthwhile.

Some things to note

When it comes to paying for external reviews, you may believe that you’ll get thousands of people visiting your site and some fantastic sales to offset the cost of the review. 

This is unlikely to happen. 

It’s important to lower expectations when it comes to plugin reviews. You may have a few people visiting your site but the numbers will be lower than you expect.

However, there are a few benefits that will serve you long-term:

1. If the reviewer allows do-follow links, your site domain authority will get a boost (although watch for this because Google is starting to crack down on link building in this way).
2. If the reviewer has implemented good SEO, the post will ideally rank high for certain keywords and you’ll be able to see long-term steady visits from that.
3. Once published, all of these reviews can be used as featured testimonials on your site – further increasing your social proof. Simply take snippets from the review, credit when credit’s due and display them on the relevant shop pages of your site.

Are external reviews something you’ve invested in for your plugin? Let me know in the comments below what ROI you’ve had. Also, if you have any other sites to add to this list, post their links below.

You might also like:

• The Importance of Content Marketing for Your WordPress Business
• 2 Simple Content Measurement Tools You Can Use to Track Your Content’s Impact
• Why Ultimate Guides Work So Well to Market Your Business

The post 4 Sites That Will Review Your WordPress Plugin and Expand Your Audience appeared first on Gina Lucia.

When it comes to putting together a good content marketing strategy, put simply, you need to do three things:

• Research and target the right keywords
• Create excellent content to hit those keywords
• Share your content with as many people as possible

The keywords you find can range from 30 searches a month to 20k a month and beyond. So, if you’re looking to target the higher end keywords (and that’s actually possible for you), you’ll need to create some seriously exceptional content to help you rank. 

Enter ultimate guides.

What are ultimate guides?

Ultimate guides are essentially the best possible guide you can find on any given topic. They should contain all the information you need to know on your selected topic. In fact, they’re so detailed and helpful the reader shouldn’t need to go anywhere else to get the information they need.

Why ultimate guides work

Creating an ultimate guide for your business’ blog takes time and research to get right. So, you probably want to know why you should even bother. Below are 4 reasons why ultimate guides work and why you should be adding them to your content strategy today.

1. They’re attractive to readers

Do any search on the internet and what you’ll find are thousands of articles claiming to answer your burning question. But take a look at all the titles, and they only seem to answer part of that question. 

Up pops an ultimate guide, just one article you have to read to get all the information you need – you can bet you’re going to click on that!

If you’ve ever wanted a way to look more appealing in a search engine, this is it. Couple that with a truly valuable article and you’re onto a winner. What’s more, you don’t have to use the title ‘Ultimate Guide’, you could use:

• Essential Guide
• Unrivalled Guide
• Complete Guide
• And more

2. They demonstrate your authority

The simplest way to demonstrate your knowledge and authority in your field is by showcasing it. Your ability to create an ultimate guide in your niche shows your potential clients or customers that you seriously know what you’re talking about before they even get in touch with you.

3. Ultimate guides build trust

Picture this, your potential client/customer is searching for some much-needed information to help them solve a problem with their website. They type their issue into Google and up pops your ultimate guide. 

They click and scroll through to find not only the solution to their problem but some other information they didn’t know they needed. 

Not only have you just saved them time and probably money but a lot of stress too. As the saviour of this potential client/customer you’ve built trust within just a few minutes (skip to the ‘what’s usually missing’ section to see how you can capitalise on this).

4. They’re great for SEO

I’ve moved this point to last, not because it’s the least important, but because your audience and readers should come first. Good SEO gets you to the top of Google, but your readers keep you there.

Ultimate guides rank for more than just one keyword

Ultimate guides usually cover a slightly more broad topic, so the detailed nature of the guide lends itself to containing lots of sub-keywords. 

For example, if you’re creating ‘The Ultimate Guide to SEO’, then your sub-keywords could be ‘SEO in 2020’, ‘domain authority’ and more.

By creating one piece of unforgettable content, you could be ranking for multiple similar keywords – making your content stretch further.

They attract links and shares

Ultimate guides by nature attract backlinks and sharing. 

Your guide is so filled with information and value that by sharing it, the sharer gets some kudos by association. After all, it’s much easier to link to an ultimate guide, than 5 articles all covering a similar topic. 

To make your guide even more shareable, you could:

• Make sure to include social sharing buttons
• Add a shareable infographic
• Create a video version of the guide
• Add tweetable links
• And more

What’s usually missing from ultimate guides

Ultimate guides work well to hit those targeted and lucrative keywords, but unless there’s some thought and strategy behind them, they can bring in a lot of visitors, but not much else.

Before writing your guide, think about what the purpose is:

• To inform readers about a topic?
• Build brand trust?
• Generate email subscribers?
• Create new leads?
• Sell products

This purpose will then fuel your guide. There’s no use in creating the best content possible if your intention isn’t right. Make sure to include a call to action and gear your content up to achieve your goals. 

You’ve solved your readers’ problems, capitalise on that by requesting something simple in return.

Roundup

Ultimate guides are not going anywhere anytime soon, and while they’re just starting to gain traction, now’s the time to get creating them for your business.

Want a skilled content marketer to create yours? Get in touch and let’s chat.

Featured image by Smart

The post Why Ultimate Guides Work So Well to Market Your Business appeared first on Gina Lucia.

This needs to change. After all, what’s the point in investing in good content marketing if you’re not making sure it’s working?

So in this article, I’m going to outline why you should track your content marketing, what metrics you should look out for and talk about 2 content measurement tools to help you get it done.

Why track your content’s impact?

Here’s a scenario: You’re paying someone to create content for your business’ blog, or you’re doing it yourself. You’ve invested time, money and energy into content marketing because you know about its benefits and high return on investment. However, you have no real way of knowing if all this effort is paying off.

When you include content measurement into your content marketing strategy, you’ll be able to fully track its impact on your business. After all, you wouldn’t invest in an advertisement unless you had a solid way of knowing it’s impact, right?

So with all that, let’s get a little bit more specific and look at the content marketing metrics you should be tracking.

What metrics should you be tracking?

The metrics you track should be entirely based on the goals you initially set for your content marketing. Do you want to get more email sign-ups, free trial sign-ups, purchases or simply increase the number of people visiting your site?

The success of your content is up to you, but here are a few metrics you could be tracking:

• Exposure – how many views did your content get?
• Search engine optimisation (SEO) – what position did your content land on Google? How long did you have to wait for it to happen?
• Engagement – How many comments or shares did you get? How long did they stay on the page?
• Conversion – Did your content convert into email sign-ups, purchases etc?

It’s essential to determine your metric before you start creating content (and keep it to 1 or 2). It will determine the structure, focus and goal of each piece created. Then, after the content has been published, you can start tracking it for this focused metric.

2 simple content measurement tools

With your metric in mind, it’s now time to start tracking your content’s impact with some content measurement tools. In this article, I’m going to talk about free and accessible tools. Any advanced techniques should be implemented by a content marketing professional.

Content measurement tool 1: Google Analytics

The likelihood is that you’ve already got Google Analytics set up on your site. If not, follow this link to get yourself up and ready. 

Google Analytics offers a lot of tools to measure your businesses’ performance and growth online, but it can get pretty overwhelming when it comes to tracking very specific metrics. 

What we want to measure are things like:

• Which type of content is most popular?
• Which content format performs best in search?
• Whether your content results in conversions

If you’re particularly Analytics savvy, then you’ll want to set up Goals to do this. Goals allow you to take things one step further from the basic Google Analytics tracking and get some detailed information on how your content marketing is doing.

However, on this occasion, let’s keep things simple. Google Analytics is pretty advanced, so when it comes to finding answers, you can simply type your question in the search bar.

Questions to ask Google Analytics

Analytics Intelligence gives you quick answers to specific questions, so you don’t have to waste time digging around in your data to find them. It’s not a long-term solution unless you like inputting this data into a table each month, but it works if you’re a beginner. 

So, with this in mind, what are some of the most important questions you can ask for each of the metrics we talked about earlier?

Metric: Exposure

• What are my top pages in terms of pageviews?
• Which URL got the most pageviews this month?

Metric: Search engine optimisation (SEO)

• What percentage of my users came from organic search in the last 30 days?
• What Medium had the most growth in Users
• Show me a trend of Users for organic over the last 90 days

Metric: Engagement

• Show me a trend of my bounce rate over the last month
• What pages do people spend the most time on?
• Highest landing page average load times

Metric: Conversion

• What are my top landing pages by revenue?
• Percent of Revenue by Landing Page

In most cases, you can view full reports for all of these and delve deeper from there. Use these as a basis for finding the right information you need to track your content marketing. 

Content measurement tool 2: Google Search Console

If you’ve got Google Analytics set up, then you’ve likely got Google Search Console too. If not, follow this guide to get it up and running.

Search Console can show you a more in-depth look at the position and performance of your site’s content. To determine how individual pieces of content are doing in Google search results, do the following:

• Log into Google Search Console and click Performance in the left-hand menu
• Scroll down and click the Pages tab
• Select the piece of content you want to measure

Here you’ll be able to see the total times someone saw your listing in a Google search result (impressions), how many clickthroughs you got and your average position on Google.

Now that you’ve selected a piece of content to view, you can then delve a little deeper to see what keywords people are searching for. Just click the Queries tab below.

These insights should give you a good idea of how your content is performing and if you’re hitting the right keywords.

Roundup

Tracking your content marketing’s performance is an integral part of making sure your investment is worth it. The content measurement tools I’ve suggested may not go into the same level of detail and reporting as other paid-for tools, but they certainly do the job. 

If you’ve read this article and have decided that your content marketing should be done by a professional, get in touch. Along with the above tools, I use Ahrefs and others to do monthly reporting for my clients.

The post 2 Simple Content Measurement Tools You Can Use to Track Your Content’s Impact appeared first on Gina Lucia.

But when it comes to marketing your business, the importance of content marketing is stark. 

Not only does content marketing get three times more leads than paid search advertising, but marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI.

You’re here for a reason, so in this article, I’ll outline what content marketing is and the importance of content marketing for your business. We’ll take a look at how it helps your ranking in search engines and your relationship with potential clients and customers. 

If you’d like to skip the article and jump straight into having someone do your content marketing for you, click here: www.ginalucia.co.uk

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the creation and sharing of online material. This can include articles, e-books, videos, webinars and more. Generally speaking, it’s ‘content’ that provides answers to questions or provides some kind of value to the reader/viewer.

In this article, we’ll be focusing on the benefits of blog/article content marketing for your WordPress business. 

The importance of content marketing

We’ve outlined what content marketing is, so let’s dive deeper into its benefits. Content marketing has two huge benefits, its impact on your search engine ranking and its impact on your relationship with your clients/customers.

Content marketing for SEO

Firstly let’s talk about content marketing’s impact on your SEO(search engine optimisation), or Google ranking. 

Content marketing targets your ideal client/customer

When done right, good content marketing should find the specific keywords your ideal client/customer is searching for in Google and create blog posts/articles around them. These keywords should be directly related to your business and you should be able to rank for them. 

Benefit: When achieved, you’ll be first on the list in Google to answer your ideal client/customer’s questions or queries directly – there’s no better way to gain business than that!

It builds links 

Great content is created when you answer every single one of your potential client/customer’s questions. In other words, the answers you provide in your article are so good, they don’t need to look anywhere else. 

Benefit: When done, your content will be shared for its value. Great content encourages this sharing naturally. The result of which is more links back to your website which build over time and increase your standing with Google.

Content marketing gives you Google cred

Google rewards sites that produce good content. It’s as simple as that.

Benefit: If the content you produce keeps people on the page, encourages them to visit other pages on your site and gets linked to a lot, then the likelihood is, you’ll be rewarded with a higher rank on Google.

So when it comes to creating blog posts for your website, only the most informative and valuable will do.

Content marketing for your potential clients/customers

We’ve gone through the benefits of content marketing on your Google ranking, now it’s time to delve into how it benefits your relationship with potential clients/customers.

Content marketing isn’t just about ranking highly on Google. It also has to take into consideration how you convert those visitors into leads or sales.

It solidifies your expertise

When you create content which answers questions within your niche, you’re essentially demonstrating your knowledge and expertise to any potential clients/customers that visit your website.

Benefit: This on its own builds trust from the get-go and enables you to do less convincing down the line and more selling.

Content marketing builds brand awareness

A good brand is one that knows its customers’ problems, wants and needs and works to find solutions to those. The best way you can demonstrate this knowledge is to create content that advertises it.

Benefit: When done right, your content will showcase that you care about your clients/customers, want to help and are willing to give away some of your knowledge for free. There’s nothing that builds trust quicker than that.

It generates leads for your business

When you answer a visitor’s question in full through a blog post or article, you’re helping them solve a problem that they wouldn’t have been able to sell without your help.

Benefit: So, when done strategically, you can use these valuable pieces of content to generate leads. Depending on your goals, you can insert a call to action to sign up to an email list, start a free trial or get in touch.

Round up

Content marketing shouldn’t be an afterthought in your WordPress business, it should be the bread and butter. When invested in, its benefits are extremely rewarding and if evergreen, the content has the ability to keep working for you, long after it has been published.

Unlike social media, content marketing is completely within your control, direct and has a much greater return on investment.

If you’re looking to invest in content marketing for your WordPress or online business but don’t have the time to put a strategy in place and implement it, take a look at my services here: www.ginalucia.co.uk

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