No matter what
you want to achieve, you need some kind of content in order to attract and
engage your audience – be in a newsletter that will inform them about your
latest features, or a how-to video that solves a particular issue, or an
educational blog post. Even a product description on an e-commerce web page
also qualifies as a piece of content.
In other
words, content is a building block of your overall marketing strategy.
But the
problem is you need a lot of it. And what’s even more important, it has to be
superb. Long story short, it takes a great deal of time, effort, and resources
to come up with all the content you need.
Technology has
been tackling this challenge for quite some time, and natural language
generation (NLG) seems to be a solution for scaling your content marketing.
Natural
language generation is a branch of artificial intelligence whose primary
purpose is to produce verbal or written content consisting of meaningful words
and phrases in a human-like manner. In other words, this advanced technology
uses vast amounts of data and translates them into stories with the help of
powerful algorithms.
It’s worth
mentioning that NLG can write, but it can’t read – that’s the role of another
similar branch of AI called natural language processing (NLP). Its role is to
analyze unstructured data and turn it into numbers that will be fed to NLG and
out of which human-readable text will be produced.
In a nutshell,
what we have here is artificial intelligence, which is an umbrella technology
encompassing a wide variety of different subset technologies such as NLP, NLG,
neural networks, and others.
The main use case of AI is processing and analyzing massive sets of both structured and unstructured data, and interpreting their meaning at an immense speed. So, it’s clear that such data-driven machines can analyze and produce content for different purposes in no time.
Note
Before you go crazy with natural language generation, you need to focus on creating great content first. That means researching about and finding influencers who are knowledgeable about the topic. ContentStudio not only makes these processes much easier for you, but you can also schedule them for social media promotions.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION?
This brings us
to our first question – how to produce a lot of relevant, personalized, and engaging
content relatively quickly?
Natural
language generation has been commercially implemented, meaning that there are
tools capable of generating content for various digital marketing purposes.
Some of them
include:
A predictive typing feature that offers smart suggestions and corrects typos and grammatical errors is an example of partial automation. It eliminates repetitive writing and helps users draft their copy faster. This AI-powered functionality has been available in Gmail through its Smart Compose, and it learns from your preferences when picking from one of its available suggestions. The synergy of NLP and NLG technology is capable of reading your emails while you’re writing and predicting what you want to say next, based on the context in real-time.
Some major publications, including The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg, have been using NLG for some of their reports and short articles. For example, Bloomberg News leverages Cyborg, an AI-powered system, to produce thousands of company earnings reports. Similarly, the Washington Post has its own proprietary robot writer, Heliograf, to churn out high school football league reports. Such intelligent machines allow writers to focus on more important stories that require critical thinking, creativity, and literary craftsmanship.
Conversational AI or chatbots automate customer interactions and provide 24/7 customer support by answering questions and helping website visitors find what they’re looking for. These smart algorithms are capable of mimicking human communication, thus engaging customers. In other words, conversational chatbots can be configured more intelligently so that they don’t only generate already predefined and canned phrases, but converse on an almost human level. However, for an effective enterprise chatbot implementation, a detailed strategy has to be put in place.
E-commerce stores need well-optimized product pages in order to attract the right audience. This means coming up with unique product descriptions, which can be a repetitive, tiring, and time-consuming task. NLG can harvest all the relevant product information and generate different description versions for products that are almost identical. Besides, big stores can have catalogs containing tens of thousands of items that need descriptions – and NLP can produce this gargantuan amount of content very quickly.
HOW TO GET STARTED?
While this
technology is revolutionary and game-changing, it still has some limitations.
This means that it’s essential to do your research and consider whether NLG is
the right thing for scaling your content marketing.
Here are some
factors to take into account before you embrace this sophisticated tech:
Do you have
a use case? As helpful as this technology is, at the moment, it can be used
only for data-driven content. You can’t expect it to produce a regular blog
post, which is the result of a creative process based
on critical reasoning. NLG works only if you provide
it with cold, hard data that it can make use of and transform into a narrative.
So, if you’re publishing reports, summaries, or fact-sheets, then this
technology can be beneficial for your business. If your content doesn’t heavily
rely on facts, figures, numbers, and repetitive structures, then NLG isn’t the
right fit.
Is your
data structured? NLG needs structured data in order to be able to produce
content. This means having well-organized CSV files, with impeccably structured
columns and rows. For this technology to deliver value, you should clean up
your data before feeding it to the NLG system.
Calculate
your ROI. NLG is a sophisticated technology that takes time to set up and
configure. If we bear in mind that you have to pay for it, it’s logical that
you should assess the value you’ll get by implementing it. Analyze how long it
takes you to produce your reports and articles at the moment, and establish how
much time an NLG system would trim and whether you would benefit from this acceleration.
Natural language generation has immense potential to disrupt content marketing, although it’s still in its infancy. If you identified one of the use cases discussed in this text as being important in your business, it’s a good idea to give this technology a thought as its benefits can be immense.
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Michael has been working in marketing for almost a decade and has worked with a huge range of clients, which has made him knowledgeable on many different subjects. He has recently rediscovered a passion for writing and hopes to make it a daily habit. You can read more of Michael’s work at Qeedle.
Successful blogging takes more than just writing great content. Even if you have a top-quality blog, you can’t expect everyone to come unless you promote your content and build a following.
The trick is knowing is finding the right channels that will help you reach the most people.
But before we begin, let me explain the concept behind how each of the sites featured below works.
Digital marketing has evolved throughout the years.
The tactics of yesteryears no longer work today because marketers nowadays focus on providing value to their audience.
By giving their audience what they want, marketing will capture their interests and get viewers to visit their websites and commit to their calls to action.
The keyword here is reciprocity.
Putting this concept into content marketing:
Some of the sites mentioned below also work under the principle of reciprocity.
To promote your content on these sites, you have to help others promote their content as well!
By promoting the content of others, you can generate points that you can use to create your campaign for content you want to promote!
Ultimately, these sites will teach you how you should put your interests aside and prioritize the needs of your audience.
According to the premier SEO Company in Chandigarh, you must share relevant content from other sites that your readers will find valuable. Doing so on a consistent basis, they will view you as an authority within your niche. Also, they will figure out that you are not here to merely promote content from your site, but from other authoritative sources as well.
All these factors help build trustbetween yourself and your readers. As a result, you will be able to command the attention of your readers and get them to read your content.
Now that we have established that:
Below are the best places to share your blog post so you can drive more traffic to it!
Vocal is a platform where creators can publish stories on topic-specific communities and earn money based on the engagement their stories get. Users earn each time their posts are read, and can also collect one-off tips from their readers. It’s free for anyone to join and start earning, but there are also paid membership options to help you earn even more.
Sharing your blog on Vocal is a great way to expand your current audience and develop your blog.
First, Vocal has a simple-to-use editor that helps make your stories look polished and professional, and you can embed all types of rich media with just a URL—so unlike a personal blog or domain, there’s no coding necessary at all.
Vocal’s community sites are also SEO-friendly, and they have 9 million monthly readers who come to the site and visit the communities they’re interested in.
This means it’s easier to get a story to rank on Google, and it’s easier to get your post seen by people who will be interested in it instead of getting lost or bogged down amidst less relevant content.
Overall, it takes a lot of the guess work out of designing, monetizing, and audience-building that comes along with traditional blogs.
Viral Content Bee
Keep in mind that social media is the primary channel for attracting a crowd with your content promotions. It also offers an opportunity for your content to go “viral” and reach a ton of people in a short amount of time. This is the ultimate goal of Viral Content Bee, a free platform where you can tap into the social reach of real influencers.
Just like CoPromote, Viral Content Buzz will work if you’re also willing to share the content of other bloggers. However, remember content quality is a deciding factor when it comes to the ultimate shareability of your content. Though your blog post will be shown to a vast network of influencers, it is their discretion that determines whether they will share your post or not.
Empire.Kred
One of the things that make Empire.Kred unique is that the platform “gamifies” cross-promotion. It is a living, breathing market of influencers that help each other to reach a large following. Once you activate and personalize your profile, you can buy social stocks and set social missions, which involves the discovery of other content and influencers.
Another advantage of Empire.Kred is that it encourages you to learn more about brands and influencers that matter to you. Be it a musician, charity, sport, or industry—you are capable of discovering great content you can enjoy.
BizSugar
BizSugar is another business portal where bloggers and online marketers can share and spread content. Just like Kingged, this platform has a unique “Sugar” system to improve the credibility of a particular post. After posting your article, other users can add “Sugars” to your content and leave comments to start a discussion.
Aside from written content, BizSugar allows you to post videos, which is a distinct advantage for creative bloggers who want to explore other content options. And just like other blogging communities, it is somewhat limited to specific industries—namely finance, marketing, management, technology, and running startups.
Blokube
Blokube is another portal wherein you can submit and promote your content. However, one of the features that make it unique is the emphasis on ranking content according to relevance. It works via a voting system that propels the top-rated content on the front page while pushing “thin content” to the bottom.
This feature poses a challenge for new bloggers who want to make a name for themselves in the blogging community. But once you win the audience’s trust, it’s difficult for you to be knocked off the top spot. That said, being recognized in Blokube is a substantial accomplishment and deserves to be on any blogger’s to-do list.
Blog Engage
Blog Engage is a sister site of Blokube. However, it focuses more on giving bloggers feedback for their written works rather than ranking them and solidifying their authority. Once you submit your content, other users may choose whether to like or dislike your content. They can also leave a comment, save, and share your content for added exposure.
To have a good start with Blog Engage, make sure you join the right groups that will expose you to the primary influencers in other bloggers in your niche. Another advantage of using Blog Engage is the number of syndication options that help you manage which posts are visible on your page. You could also benefit from features such as live chat, groups, private messaging, and the occasional contests that let you win freebies.
AmplifyBlog
AmplifyBlog is a great place to contribute to the blogging community and be shared with a larger audience. Of course, your reach is directly proportional to your activity and the quality of your submissions. Once you set up your professional profile, you can start publishing posts from your blog for instant visibility. You can also link to your social media accounts to attract new followers from the platform.
Aside from being a place to share your articles, AmplifyBlog will also provide you with the latest information in the ever-evolving world of blogging. From blogging tools to new marketing trends—if it is relevant, then someone in the community is bound to write about it. All you have to do is bookmark the site and frequently check the “Home” and “New” sections to learn something new.
Scoop.it
Scoop.it a content curation tool that allows influencers and bloggers alike. It’s all about “scooping” new articles, adding your perspective, and spreading it to build your authority in your niche. You can easily use the platform to showcase your curated content in different channels such as email, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
With Scoop.it, you can showcase your collection of curated content and build a readership from there. If you continue to provide useful insights to the topic at hand, then you’re well on your way to thought leadership.
Shared Pinterest Boards
Pinterest is one of the most populous social media networks, making it a great avenue for bloggers when it comes to building a social presence. It is an image-sharing site that allows users to create “boards” and build a following. Today, you can find big name brands, and a myriad of influencers share content such as infographics, recipes, quotes, and product images.
While you have the option to start from the ground up and create your board, you can also join an existing board. Doing so allows you to get in touch with the social community around your niche. To look for specific boards you can join, you can use a tool like PinGroupie.
Type the keyword of your topic or niche, and PinGroupie will show you to most relevant boards that you can join.
Once you find a suitable board to join, make sure you learn the rules set by the board administrator and promptly ask for an invite.
You can receive this invitation via email or through a built-in notification, depending on the system implemented by the board owner.
Facebook Groups
As the biggest social media network in the world, of course, there should be room for Facebook in everyone’s social media marketing strategy. As a blogger, using Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with a broad audience and build a loyal following along the way.
In addition to optimizing a page for your blog or brand, you also need to learn how to use “groups” and expand your reach through active participation.
For bloggers, it pays well to be in touch with a social network of professional bloggers. Doing so will enable you to find people who are open to guest blogging or co-blogging opportunities. All you need is to find the right groups that encourage this kind of collaboration.
LinkedIn Groups
Promoting your content on LinkedIn is somewhat similar to other networks such as Facebook and Google+. The main difference, however, is that you’re now catering to the professional crowd. If you usually produce informative blogs that can aid said professionals, you should be able to spread your content with ease through LinkedIn Groups.
Once you find an appropriate group that relates to your niche, you can start sharing content that can help these professionals grow in their careers. Just remember to diversify your content strategy and use tactics that improve the communication and retention of information such as using infographics, slideshows, and podcasts.
Reddit
Promoting your content on Reddit is like throwing yourself into a den of wolves. They either hate you and tear your brand apartwith love you and drink from every word in your blog posts. Keep in mind that the Reddit community or “Redditors” hate self-promotion. You have to be very careful in letting your brand into the mix.
A rule of thumb is to stay relevant and focus on what’s useful for your audience. Look for the right subreddits to find people who will be genuinely interested in what your blog has to offer. Also, remember that there’s no room for subpar content, so be sure you only share your best-written pieces.
Quora
Linking to your blog in Q&A websites is one of the oldest strategies for bringing traffic to your content. Unfortunately, sites like Yahoo! Answers are no longer viable since outbound links are actively deleted. That said, it’s best to turn to Quora, which is currently receiving a ton of traffic from people who need answers to their questions.
An advantage of using Quora—or any other Q&A site for that matter—is the intent of users to find solutions. Just stick to being helpful and focus on the solution rather than your brand to avoid sounding “sales-y.” A good strategy is to simply use your blog post as a reference while providing a concise, yet helpful answer to the original question.
QuuuPromote
Quuu Promote is a paid platform where you can share your blog posts straight to your audience. It allows you to create customized messages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn to compel users to visit your blog post.
However, what makes Quuu Promote different from any content promotion channels is the ability to choose a specific group of influencers who you want to share your blog post. For example, if your post is about SEO, it will only be shared by the top SEO influencers in social media. The influencers who share your posts will likely come from Quuu users.
While Quuu Promote is a paid promotion platform starting at $40/month with one (1) promoted article, you can only track the number of shares and clicks of your promoted post. Therefore, you need to ensure that your post is high-quality and the social media copy is impeccable to increase its ROI. Also, Quuu Promote reviews each content you want to promote before it is approved. If it doesn’t meet their standards or if it too promotional, they won’t enable the post for sharing on their platform.
Growth Hackers
Like Inbound.org is to marketers, Growth Hackers is an online community that caters to growth marketers. Aside from being able to share posts, you can also answer questions, spark discussions, collect growth ideas, and more!
When sharing posts, however, you need to make sure that it is relevant to growth hacking. Anything that is not about the topic will be removed and could risk suspending your account there.
Mix
Formerly known as Stumbleupon, Mix is a platform you can leverage to increase your blog traffic. For users, it is used to “stumble” on high-quality pages related to your interests. For publishers, you can submit your posts to the platform so people interested in your blog’s topic could stumble upon your post. Sometimes, all it takes is just one view from a user before your post spreads like wildfire.
However, for your efforts on Mix to work, you need to be active in discovering content and sharing the works of others. You need to be active on the platform by commenting on pages you stumble upon, like pages, and others. Doing so allows you to generate a substantial following so you can get more people to view the posts you submit.
Flipboard lets you create and organize magazines according to specific topics under your account. It is similar to Scoop.it in which you can curate great content about a particular topic. However, for Flipboard to be an effective promotion channel, you need to build a following so more people can view the latest added posts in your magazines. If done correctly, you can enjoy lots of blog traffic coming from this channel.
DoSplash is another place to promote your blog posts about almost anything. However, unlike other sites, registering for an account is done manually. It might take time for your account to be approved as well. This is a good thing to prevent riff-raffs from spamming the site with low-quality content.
I have extensively written about Zest.is in this post. In a nutshell, Zest.is delivers digital marketing news straight to your Google Chrome upon opening it. You no longer have to visit to get your fix on the latest marketing news. Submitted content from Zest.is immediately shows on your open Chrome window. You can filter the news according to clicks and comments. The platform allows you to filter news from a specific category so you get targeted content based on your interests.
You can submit your posts here, but the process of approval so far is manual. It might take time for your posts to get approved.
Conclusion
Finding readers for your blog is never easy. The tricky part is getting the online community to trust you and being connected to the right people—a problem that the sites above can help you solve. If you know how to unlock the channels that will expose your brand to the right audience, then it’s only a matter of time before you become a thought leader yourself.
Depending on whom you ask, artificial intelligence (otherwise known as AI) is one of many things: a silver-bullet solution for the troubles and trials of the digital age, a portent of eventual human extinction, or nothing more than a trumped-up parade of smoke and mirrors. In reality, it’s probably none of these things, with an answer far more mundane (even disappointingly so).
AI as we refer to it now is a tool with significant applications for some tasks but minimal use for others. And rather than involving any actual intelligence (or even trying to approximate it), it merely involves the use of computer systems capable of adapting to the data provided to them. This process is obviously less hypeworthy, but in practice it can be tremendously valuable.
One field in which this variety of AI is having an impact is content creation. In this piece, we’re going to look at five ways in which content AI is changing how online content is made. Let’s begin:
The world of online content is both broad and deep, containing work of so many different types: everything from thin 200-word blog posts to painstakingly-researched 4000-word guides to key topics. And while pieces like the former don’t generally require research, that can’t be said of high-value tentpole content, as the target keywords must be carefully selected to maximize ROI.
Keyword tools abound, offering functionality such as saving time manually going through autocomplete suggestions or even analyzing the highest-ranking content for particular terms to see which commonalities can be found. You can then use such analysis tools to review your drafted content and determine how well it meets its goals.
Think about how Yoast’s SEO plugin and SEOPressor have become an industry standard for the writing and release of WordPress blog posts. It takes a topic that can be awkward to address practically and makes it as simple as following the guidelines: do that, and you’ll avoid many of the most common SEO mistakes.
Technical SEO audit is also made much easier, thanks to AI-assisted insights generated by tools like Ahrefs Webmaster Tool or Screaming Frog. Use this information to guide your upcoming SEO efforts.
It’s helping with personalization
Personalizing content is an integral part of making it more appealing and engaging, particularly in a time when brands have access to so much valuable customer data. It isn’t just about names and locations now: it’s also about which products someone has bought before when they prefer to place orders, and what topics they’ve expressed interest in.
AI tools are ramping up the use of personalized elements and making the implementation hugely simpler. If you’re engaging in email marketing, you can have personal details automatically inserted. If you’re offering live chat, you can use an automated system to point people towards the content most useful for their needs. If you’re trying to refine your product pages, you can throw in an auto-populating box of dynamic recommendations.
It’s automating very basic copy
I mentioned thin blog posts earlier, the kind that people with no imagination or enthusiasm use to update their websites (usually just acknowledging industry updates but providing no insight or even commentary). They’re often essentially worthless, but not always. In some situations (client reports, for instance), dry pieces of content are entirely necessary.
Suppose you were running an SEO company and working with a client that required weekly progress updates concerning everything from the number of backlinks earned to the average session duration. While some SEO tools provide report templates, you could use AI-driven tools like Quill to automatically generate statistic-heavy summaries that read like natural language.
This frees up time to spend on the kind of content that actually demands human intervention: the kind with spirit and invention and creative freedom. It’s more valuable than any other form of content (whether short or long), and it also happens to be much more fun to write (bonus points).
It’s improving targeting options
Creating content for everyone is still viable, but being able to engage in highly-specific targeting is showing just how much value there can be in creating content for niches. If you’re trying to sell to people between 40 and 50 with jobs in the tech field and interest in the movie industry, for instance, you can do it using platforms like Facebook Ads.
There’s also the growth of programmatic advertising which sees ads automatically selected for placement through AI-driven buying and selling of ad space. This is great for marketers because it lets them spend less money to get their ads seen, giving them more resources for working on making those ads as effective as possible.
It’s damaging and protecting authenticity
Granted, the ability of AI tools to generate convincing copy is currently quite limited, but basic blog posts are entirely doable (and those limitations won’t be in place forever, as improvements are being made all the time). This has notable implications when it comes to content authorship and brand authenticity, with the latter being particularly meaningful today.
Now that people know content can be procedurally generated, it’s diluting the value of a basic blog post, as people may well assume that it wasn’t written by a person. Indeed, this doubt can shape the perception of every brand. How will people know when they’re reading work written by robots? That said, the overall effect is actually one of protection.
Here’s why: just as NLP tech can generate real-sounding language, it can detect fake language very effectively. This means that AI is the key to curbing its own threat. Soon enough there will be tools capable of gauging (with a fair amount of accuracy) whether a given writer wrote something or whether it was done artificially. This is sure to be great for legitimate businesses (and copywriters) all across the globe.
Are you ready to embrace content AI?
Content creation is a core part of a flourishing digital marketing strategy, and it needs to be handled with as much ingenuity and craft as possible to get the most value from it. In all the ways we’ve looked at here, AI is vital for that process. I strongly recommend considering how you can use it for your content marketing, and looking out for industry updates to see what comes over the horizon.
Respona is an outreach platform build by Visme, a visual content creation tool, in the vein of Ninja Outreach.
Due to the stiff competition from Canva and Prezi in 2013, Visme needed an ace up its sleeve to get more than a slice from the pie.
The brand turned to blogger outreach to generate buzz about their tool. After trying out different tools to develop and launch outreach campaigns, Visme decided to create a tool of their own. Hence, Respona was born.
The key to this marketing tactic is personalization. Blogger outreach entails you to send bulk emails to site owners. As a result, some of the emails lose their personal touch because they try to cater to all recipients.
With Respona, Visme was able to maintain a personal approach in their emails despite reaching out to hundreds and thousands of site owners.
Using its in-house tool, Visme cut 80% of its outreach costs and multiplied its team’s productivity tenfold!
The brand’s success using Respona encouraged it to launch the tool as a stand-alone product.
As with most blogger outreach tools, Respona helps you reach out to journalists and bloggers about your business in a personalized way while cutting down on costs.
Instead of manually finding prospects and sending out emails to each, you can do all that with a few clicks of a button using Respona.
First, sign up for an account to to create a campaign. For example, I want to generate backlinks to my review about Serpstat, an SEO tool.
Next, you must choose how you want to find prospects for your campaign.
There are two choices: Content Based or Import.
The former allows you to use its built-in search feature to find the right people who will receive your outreach email. It will also take care of finding the emails, setting up the drip sequence, and personalizing the emails for you.
If you want to use your list of prospects you exported using a different tool, you can do that as well.
For this campaign, I will be using Respona’s Content Based prospect search.
Then, you need to enter a keyword or topic that you want Respona to search online.
You can use search operators to narrow down your search.
Entering the right topics and keywords to search for is crucial in the success of your outreach campaign. It depends on what the purpose of your campaign is.
Going back to my example, what I can do is search for a topic that best describes Serpstat. In this case, I will enter “best seo tool.”
Once you see the result, you can also filter them accordingly.
You can see different factors for each result to help you determine which ones to reach out to first.
Click the box of pages that you want to reach out for your outreach campaign.
Choose content that features similar or identical information. This way, you can send them personalized emails using the same template. For the other articles, you can create a brand new campaign to send out a different email
Moving on to the next step, you need to choose which template to send your contacts.
You can check out the template by hovering over it and clicking on the eye icon.
I chose the Content Promotions template because I want to get a link for the Serpstat review I wrote.
Here’s what the template looks like:
Once you’ve chosen the template, you need to edit it before sending them out.
The great thing about Respona is it gives you an idea on how users will respond to your email.
It helps you improve your email to increase deliverability and conversion rate when editing.
Also, make sure to edit out the text in brackets and fill out your info there.
You can also insert variables that you want to include in the email.
Here’s the template I came up for the campaign:
Also, don’t forget to edit the follow-up email and their subject lines.
If you plan on creating your drip campaign from scratch, you can save the emails as a template and use them again on a different campaign.
Next, Respona will help you find the contact details of the page’s author.
What it does is search social media for the author’s profile. You then need to choose which among the profiles with the same name is the real author.
For this, you need to cross-reference the author image in the article to verify which ones in the results is the writer.
Then, click on “Get Contact.” The tool will find the email and verify to ensure deliverability.
If the color of the dot is green, it means that the email is accurate. If in red, the email is not accurate.
Be wary of this when assigning the recipients of your email campaign. You don’t want to send the email to incorrect emails because it will lower your deliverability rate. If all your emails keep bouncing back, your campaign will eventually go to the recipient’s spam folder.
Also, depending on your plan, each email you assign will take away a point from your total credits.
Before moving to the next step, you need to find emails on all the pages you listed as prospects. If you can’t find the contacts of the person, you can delete the page from your list.
The final step before sending the email is further personalizing your emails.
Respona lets you do this by listing down excerpts of the author’s article.
Set the cursor in the email and click “Copy Excerpt” to insert the text there.
Use this feature if you want clarification about a particular line they wrote in the article or maybe discuss a point in relation to the excerpt.
The point is you want you use the Excerpts to customize the emails further. This way, it shows to recipients that you read the article and didn’t just send the email because you want a backlink.
Once you finish, click “Launch Campaign” to send the emails.
Over time, you can check out the performance of your campaign in the Reports section.
Another cool feature of Respona is the ability to automatically rake in opportunities for your campaign.
Using this feature allows you to add prospects in your campaign automatically so you don’t have to.
However, the key here is tracking the right keywords to include in your campaign. There may be times that the opportunities don’t match because you used the wrong topic or keyword.
Pricing
Respona costs $95/month (paid annually). Or you can pay monthly for $145/month.
The plan gives you 50 content searches, 10 backlink checks per result, and 100 email sent in a day.
If that’s not enough, you can choose the Custom plan instead starting at $245/month (paid annually). This gives you more than enough juice to supercharge your outreach campaign.
Respona review: Verdict
Respona joins the blogger outreach market by providing users an easy way to manage their outreach campaign.
To be honest, the tool isn’t much different than the others out there. It lets you find contacts from within and send emails automatically using the available templates that you can edit and tweak.
However, I do appreciate the Opportunities feature that allow you to passively gather contacts of people whom you can reach with your campaigns. That’s a very convenient way to run Respona in the background while you focus on growing your business.
Also, Respona seems to be geared towards being a link building tool bevause it shows SEO metrics of prospects. No longer do you have to do extra research as to which one has more traffic and higher Domain Authority.
Regardless, I’d recommend Respona even to people who want to expand their business’ reach by forming relationships with influencers. Try Respona for free by clicking here or on the button below.
By now, you should know that you can rank for more than one keyword for your blog post or web page.
The problem is, most of the time, people optimize their content using a focus keyword.
This is not wrong by any means. However, you don’t get to maximize the organic traffic potential of your page if you don’t optimize it for related terms.
This is where keyword grouping, or keyword clustering, comes to the rescue.
In this post, I will discuss keyword grouping and its benefits. Also, I will show you how you can group your search queries in different ways.
In the end, you should be able to do keyword grouping to help your blog post rank for multiple keywords on SERPs.
The keyword grouper method is the process of researching a list of keywords and grouping search terms closely related to one another. They help you build a silo that covers different user intent for each search term in the cluster.
Most conduct keyword research by finding a search term with a high search volume that they will use to optimize the content. There are different tools you can use for this.
With keyword grouping, you can unearth thousands of keywords and organize them into keyword groups.
Benefits of a keyword group
So, what’s the big deal with coming up with keyword clusters?
Below are its advantages:
Increase organic traffic
By coming up with clusters of keywords, you can optimize for them in your content.
Since they are related to your target keyword, you shouldn’t have any problem mentioning them in the post. Simply use them as synonyms to your main keyword to mix things up.
By doing so, you increase your chances of ranking for your target keyword on search results and closely related keywords on search results.
And by ranking on top of search engine results for all those keywords in a single page, you can increase traffic coming from search engines!
Organize your content structure
Aside from using a keyword group for a single page, you can use the keywords to create a silo in your website.
A silo is a structure where a category or a folder in a website contains pages related to the topic of the category.
For example, if the category is “running shoes,” then the pages in it can optimize for the following keywords:
Running shoes for men
Best running shoes in 2020
Nike running shoes
Basically, keyword groups can help you come up with relevant content ideas for categories in your site.
By doing so, you create semantically relevant content about a topic, which plays a big role in your content marketing strategy.
Focus on topics, not keywords
In relation to the benefit above, keyword grouping allows you to approach your site as a source of information about a topic.
Again, if your website is about running shoes, creating content about woodworking for it doesn’t make sense.
Even if the search terms for woodworking have generally higher quality scores (high search volume and low difficulty), it adds nothing to the topic of your website.
So, if your visitors see content optimized for irrelevant keywords, expect them to leave right away.
It’s about time webmasters create topically relevant content instead of chasing profitable keywords left and right.
This way, they create authority and credibility for your website about their topic.
Start keyword grouping with SE Ranking!
If you want to make the most out of keyword grouping, use SE Ranking. It’s an all-in-one SEO platform that lets you conduct keyword research, competitor analysis, monitor website changes, and more. Below, you will see how you can effectively use SE Ranking to cluster keywords. But if you want to learn more about the tool, check out the SE Ranking review I wrote to shows how powerful the tool is.
How to use Keyword Planner for creating keyword groups
You can use tools like Long Tail Pro if you want a paid tool to help you find keyword ideas. But Google Keyword Planner is a free keyword tool mainly used for Google Ads and PPC.
For SEO, however, you can use it to find keyword suggestions for building your keyword strategy.
But for the purpose of this post, you can use Keyword Planner as a keyword grouping tool to help you cluster related keywords together.
If you have a Google account, login from Google Adwords to access the tool.
Once in, type in your topic on the text bar.
The tool will then generate keyword ideas that you can include in your campaign.
From the Keyword ideas page, click on Grouped ideas on the sidebar.
It will show you the keywords organized into groups.
To view the keywords for each group, click on the arrow button to show them.
From here, you can download the keywords ideas and organize them further manually onto a spreadsheet.
Now, using the Keyword Planner is the easiest and simplest way to group your keywords. It also doesn’t provide you with the most value.
For one, the tool doesn’t tell you how it grouped the keywords together (more on this later).
It also lacks features to help you analyze the clusters properly.
So while Keyword Planner is good enough to help you group keywords together, it’s not useful enough.
But its keyword grouper feature lets you come up with keyword lists for optimizing your websites with topically relevant keywords.
SE Ranking is a paid search marketing tool but you can sign up for a 14-day free trial to test its features.
But before you can use its keyword grouper feature, you must upload a number of keywords manually to the tool.
You can use the keywords you downloaded from the Google Adwords tool.
While they are already clustered together, it doesn’t hurt to run them again using SE Ranking. You could get different and possibly better results in the process.
Or you can also use SE Ranking’s keyword tool to find ideas and suggestions for your topic. I personally feel it’s one of the better keyword research tools in the market.
To begin, go to Tools > Keyword Suggestions from the menu.
Then enter your topic on the text bar. Change the source and country database if necessary before hitting “Start search.”
On the overview page, scroll down until you reach the Similar keywords section. Click on View detailed results to see the entire list of keywords.
From here, click on the Export button and choose .csv or .xlsx format to download the list.
Once you have downloaded the file, go back to the dashboard and go to Tools > Keyword Grouper.
Next, enter the title of the keyword group and change the settings as you see fit.
Next, and perhaps its best feature, is the ability to organize the keywords according to accuracy and method.
If you want to create accurate keyword groups, you need to set it at a higher setting.
What happens is the tool will be stricter regarding clustering keywords.
Therefore, the higher the accuracy is, the fewer search queries there will be in each group.
Regarding the method of grouping, choose between soft and hard.
In a nutshell, the soft method groups together a much larger set of keywords. However, there’s a chance that each group will have irrelevant keywords in there.
The hard method clusters fewer keywords compared to the soft method. But there’s a low chance you will see unrelated search queries in each group.
After choosing the settings, confirm if you want to include the search volume of each keyword. Then upload the file where your keywords are.
Also, you must understand that keyword grouping is an on-demand SE Ranking service. This means it’s not part of your subscription of the tool.
Each keyword query check costs $0.004, while the search volume check is at $0.005.
Once you start grouping the keywords, wait for a couple of minutes. The length of time clustering your keywords depends on how many you uploaded.
The keyword group on SE Ranking should look like this:
If you expand the group, you will see the keywords included, their search volume, the Top 10 matching URLs, and the highlighted keywords on the top 10 results.
You can export the groups and explore each of them more in detail from a spreadsheet.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is keyword grouping in SEO?
Keyword grouping is an effective method for optimizing content. The process involves making clusters of related keywords and using those groups to create posts or pages optimized with several terms from a particular keyword group.
What is keyword with example?
In SEO, a keyword is the term that people use to search for products and services online. For example, if I want to search for Nike basketball shoes, I type in “adidas basketball shoes” or “best Nike basketball shoes for guards.” Keywords are part of an optimization strategy called on-page SEO.
How do you organize keywords?
You can organize content according to their intent. Some people use keywords to learn more about a specific topic (informational), while others type in keywords with the intent of purchasing something (commercial and transactional). Organizing keywords according to these categories allows you to create topically relevant content for each group.
How do you do keyword clustering?
It would be best if you researched for keywords that are closely related to your niche or topic. From here, you can group them together according to their respective variants, subtopics, and others.
Conclusion
Grouping keywords is not really reinventing the wheel. However, the best SEO strategies happen to be the simplest.
In this case, clustering your keywords is one of the easiest ways to organize your content according to topic.
This way, you can rank your pages for multiple keywords at the same time. You also create semantically relevant content based on keywords.
Google Keyword Planner is a great place to start keyword grouping. But if you want a leg up on the competition, try out SE Ranking.
It’s always better to get help from others. They not only make your life much fuller, but they also help you achieve your goals faster and live happier.
“Reaching out to people is a time-suck and robs my time for doing other important things for my blog!”
You know what? You’re probably right.
Promoting your blog is an arduous task that sucks out the creativity from your blogging bones. It’s something that you’d rather assign to a VA but can’t because you don’t have enough money.
Therefore, to succeed, you must find a way around this problem, like a stealthy ninja unleashing an attack when their opponents least expect it.
You need to promote your blog content effectively, if not reach out to Instagram influencers in your niche, to fast-track your blog’s success without giving away much of your time and money.
In a nutshell, it is an influencer marketing software and a great one at that. To call it otherwise is a disservice to what the tool can help you with as a blogger.
In layman’s terms, NinjaOutreach is a prospecting tool that easily helps you find influencers to reach out in your industry. The core feature of the tool is the ability to make the prospecting process much more convenient for bloggers. What you do with the prospects is what makes it truly useful.
Once you have generated the contact details using this tool, you can perform any of the tasks from the screenshot above. You can then schedule sending emails to your target influencers so you can connect with them and open doors for you to build relationships with them.
As a blogger, you will find a lot of uses for the tactics above to help grow your blog’s traffic and conversion rate!
Note
To objectively review Ninja Outreach, we need to establish factors that we will use to measure the tool’s performance. Below are the ones that I will be using for this review: Features – How helpful are they for growing your blog? Usability – Is the tool easy to use and intuitive enough for first-time users to understand? Customer support – Does the tool’s customer support go above and beyond to provide an exceptional experience to users? Price – Is the tool useful enough to justify its costs?
How to Use Ninja Outreach
As an influencer tool, Ninja Outreach is primarily used for blogger outreach campaigns. The tool is perfect for the job if you want to drive blog traffic and reach out to bloggers and influencers in your niche. If you’re unfamiliar with how blogger outreach works, click here to visit the page I wrote about the basics of this tactic.
If you’re well-versed with blogger outreach, then the software will help make it much easier and more convenient for you. Below are the main functions of the tool and how you can use them to launch your entire outreach campaign from the platform.
Blogging prospecting
Once you’ve created an account (you can start here by signing up for a 14-day trial), you can start searching for prospects by typing on the search bar.
Normally, you’d start searching for your topic in the bar since you want to find people related to your niche. For example, typing “content marketing” in the field will yield these results:
The results bring you to the Content Prospecting feature of the tool. It returns websites that are most relevant to the keyword phrase you entered. A website, while not an influencer, can be considered a prospect if you want to write guest posts on different blogs, for instance.
When you search for influencers, type in your seed keyword and not your long tail keyword like the ones you find on digital marketing tools like Long Tail Pro. Seed keywords are broader in scope, which provides you with more results of influencers to choose from.
This feature is similar to what Social Animal has. But what’s cool about the software is it easily shows you the different factors to help you determine a website’s authority. If you want to write guest posts, then you should refer to the site’s SEO Metrics. While guest posting is not primarily an SEO tactic, writing for sites that search engines love can help funnel some of that love to your site. Therefore, choosing sites with high DA (domain authority) and lots of backlinks can go a long way in your guest blogging strategy.
If you find sites with similar SEO metrics scores, you can use other factors to break the tie. For example, referring to a site’s Traffic and Engagement will help you find sites that will drive the most comments and eyeballs to your post.
Another factor you must consider when looking for sites to submit your guest post is the Features column. It says here if the site or blog is currently looking for guest posts or sponsored content. However, some of the results have no entries under Features. It may be better to visit the site and see if they are accepting manually.
If the results returned hundreds and thousands of sites, you could filter them to show only specific figures for each factor. Filtering the results that help you find sites that meet your criteria so you don’t have to sift through each page manually.
Twitter and Instagram influencer research
The Social Prospecting feature helps you find influencers on Twitter and Instagram. The idea is to piggyback on the popularity of influencers in your related niches. Once you’ve acquired their social media information, you can follow and engage with them on social media. Ultimately, you want to build relationships with them and get help with promoting your blog.
Click on the Social Prospecting tab and enter your keyword on the search bar. For the best results, enter the topic of your niche to get the most relevant bloggers and influencers to target.
Once you’ve entered the keyword, you will see the different influencers. You can filter the results based on location, followers, and website.
Like the Content Prospector, you can filter the tags to show specific influencers. You can focus on looking for bloggers, influencers, executives, companies, and journalists. You can also set the minimum number of followers to target influencers with lots of followers.
Contact management
The List Management will show you the different lists you have created using the tool’s prospecting feature.
Once you have chosen the sites and bloggers, and influencers you want to target with your outreach campaign, click on Save List.
You can add the chosen sites/influencers to an existing list or create a new one. Once you have finalized the selection, you can review each entry by clicking on the Your Prospects tabs and opening the list.
On this part, you can change the relationship of each entry once you’ve reached out to them by following them on social media or emailing them for a sponsored post. There are lots of stages to choose from in the relationship drop-down menu. As a result, the software works as a CRM tool to help you define which relationship stage you are with your contact details.
If you want to update your contacts’ profile, click on the edit button and update as you see fit.
You can also follow them on Twitter by clicking on the Twitter button if you haven’t yet. If you want to reach out to them via email address, click the paper plane button to send them one.
This influencer outreach software can manage your leads and sales process. Assign your sales team to qualify prospects and send them emails from your collection of email templates. Doing so lets you automate your sales process and frees up your time to focus on more important matters.
Outreach campaign launch
As mentioned earlier, the core feature of the software is to send emails to your contacts and build relationships with them. The Manage Templates open the door to different possibilities for reaching out to your leads and contacts.
After clicking on the Manage Templates tab, click on the Create Template button.
The email templates help beginners to get acquainted with blogger outreach. Clicking on the Load a Pre-Written Template from the drop-down menu gives you access to many email templates, from blog post promotions to conversation invites.
However, you need to edit the templates to make them more personalized before sending them out. After choosing a template, it’s best to edit the email to communicate your messages more efficiently.
Once you have edited the template, save it as a brand new template. You can use the edited template to send it to the appropriate list.
Now, this is where Ninja Outreach shines.
The Outreach Mode easily automates the process by scheduling the email outreach program to be sent to your contacts. You can send hundreds and thousands of emails to your target list with just a few clicks. Once you’ve set up the options, you can only wait for their replies and continue the conversation.
Once you’ve clicked on the Outreach Mode tab, click on the Schedule Autosending button if you’ve finalized your list and the email template.
On the settings, you can limit the emails sent in a day to decrease your chances of getting penalized. Although the maximum of 200 emails is safe enough, you can reduce the volume to control your email frequency.
As mentioned, you can schedule when the emails will be sent. Spread them out as you wish to manage the emails sent to your contacts properly.
Lastly, you can add follow-ups using this email outreach program if the recipients haven’t replied yet. This option is a great way to touch base with your contacts and remind them about your message. There’s a chance that they forgot your initial email.
Customer service
It should no longer be a surprise if customer support happens to be one of the best factors of a tool or software. What differentiates most companies nowadays is how they treat customers and how customers feel about them. A positive experience can go a long way – it could even turn fair-weather users into loyal and returning customers.
Throughout the years as a freelance writer and marketer, the software has had one of the best customer support teams I’ve come across with. My introduction to Ninja Outreach started with me receiving a free account to play around with from their support team two years ago. I was able to extend my account throughout the years
Another positive encounter I had with Ninja Outreach’s support team was when I was asking for help to improve my affiliate partnership with them. I asked for ideas on improving my affiliate links’ performance, and they were quick to reply with suggestions.
While none of the emails is related to how the tool works, the team answered my emails promptly and provided the information I was looking for.
NinjaOutreach Pricing
Ninja Outreach’s price point increased through the years.
Their most affordable package was around $389/month ($649/month for the Pro plan). While the software wasn’t the cheapest back then, it even got more expensive now.
You gain access to Instagram influencers (that wasn’t available before), Twitter users, bloggers, and business emails for your outreach campaigns.
To cut costs using this software, you can pay annually and drop the price to $155/month ($259/month for Pro).
NinjaOutreach Reviews
Pros and cons
Pros
An all-inclusive marketing tool for bloggers
Excellent customer support
Cons
Loads too slow for my tastes
Some of the features feel half-baked
Pros: An all-inclusive marketing tool for bloggers
Ninja Outreach can do everything you can expect from a blogging tool.
Aside from blogger outreach and CRM, you can use the software to create better content by filtering content with the most shares about a specific topic.
In many ways, it is similar to Buzzsumo regarding purpose and use. That’s why you see many “Buzzsumo vs. Ninja Outreach” comparisons.
However, the ability to conduct email outreach makes Ninja Outreach arguably better than Buzzsumo. The wealth of options also separates the tool from similar tools like Buzzstream.
Con: Loads too slow for my tastes
Compared to other outreach tools, its chock of choices makes it bulky, probably due to the slow loading time.
I tried loading hundreds of emails from a CSV file to Ninja Outreach, and it took too long to get the list on the platform, so I had to stop it.
I’m not sure if it’s an isolated case, but it hampers the overall experience of using the tool if it doesn’t provide a seamless UX experience.
Pro: Excellent customer support
It has a very accommodating and friendly support team that sincerely wants the best for you as a customer. My encounters with them have been nothing but positive, and I can’t help but feel valued by the software in general.
Con: Some of the features feel half-baked
Social Prospecting doesn’t offer many insights about an influencer – the data can easily be seen with a simple Twitter search.
The Content Prospecting could have been helpful as a tool. However, most of the results are Web 2.0 sites. If you want to write guest posts, most results will not be much help.
Also, influencers don’t use Web 2.0 sites to publish their content.
Despite its shortcomings, I’m not ready to write off this feature yet.
The SEO Metrics and Traffic and Engagement indicate a site’s authority and make it very easy for bloggers to filter the good sites from the bad.
If the tool improves this feature, I could see it as a game-changer.
To recap the entire review, check out this video created using InVideo:
That said, I sincerely feel that it is strong enough as a tool alone to be considered for purchase. If you’re not convinced, you can sign up for its 14-day free trial* and get your hands dirty with the tool.
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