Timothy Carter

Here’s a perfect example of an overly-superfluous clickbait title: This Cute Puppy Shows This Homeless Veteran One Weird Trick for Weight Loss—and You Won’t Believe What Happens Next! While some have heralded clickbait headlines as a useful engagement style, most have harshly and vocally criticized it as tabloid-style sensationalism. Criticisms range from calling it gimmicky to insinuating that it’s responsible for the death of journalism, but no matter where you stand on the clickbait issue, clickbait still works. Clickbait continues to drive many of the eyeballs for Buzzfeed, Upworthy, and many other online media outlets (including many legitimate media sites). If it works for them, should you use clickbait as part of your SEO strategy? Does it harm your brand? The answers depend on your understanding of what clickbait is and how you use it. What is Clickbait & How it Evolved Rob Steffens from Bluleadz.com defines clickbait as content calculated to maximize reader clicks, attention, and shares By this definition, clickbait isn’t inherently misleading. It’s simply the art of enticing users to click. Unfortunately, clickbait is synonymous with unethical marketing thanks to the intentional disconnect between headline and article. sensationalized headline have always been around in some form—most notably on the cover of supermarket tabloid magazines—but it’s only within the past few years that they truly rose to prominence on the Internet. To understand how the phenomenon came to be, we must look at the two signature qualities that allow it to exist: the motivation to earn clicks by any means necessary, and the social element of viral ideas. The key motivation in most Internet-based schemes and gimmicks is to make money. So if clickbait is a way of making money, why has it only risen to prominence recently? Money-making schemes used to be all about getting money directly from web users, such as the infamous Nigerian prince scheme or weight loss pills. When the web was fairly new, these spam emails and flashing advertisements were everywhere—and they worked—but users and web authorities quickly became aware of the schemes. Spam filters and ad flags quickly got rid of the majority of these attempts, and user savvy avoided the rest of them. Today, it’s almost impossible to get direct money with these schemes. In order to make money, you have to get people to your site, and get them clicking as much as possible. “Clicks” are the new cash, so instead of doing whatever it takes to get your money, companies are doing whatever it takes to get your clicks. Clickbait evolved naturally. Consider the case of Upworthy, which has become one of the most notorious propagators of clickbait on the web. Their editors didn’t intentionally create gimmicky articles—instead, they used a straightforward mathematically testing process to figure out which type of headlines worked best for their shared material. It probably won’t shock you to learn that clickbait-style headlines just happened to perform the best, so they stuck. The second key environmental quality of clickbait is its propensity to be shared socially. The rise of social media encouraged the growth of this industry. Rather than having these articles naturally found by searchers or web browsers, companies could use similar tactics to get them shared thousands of times across the web, drastically increasing their reach. Facebook and Google United Recognizing clickbait as a new form of spam, both Google and Facebook (two of the web’s biggest authorities) have begun taking measures against it. Starting in 2011 with the Panda update, Google has gradually refined its ability to detect “high quality” content, eliminating any duplicate or unoriginal content (which is common in clickbait) and learning to recognize gimmicky headlines designed only to attract clicks. Now in the era of Panda 4.1, Google has all but eliminated the worst clickbait offenders from its search results. Stories published to Facebook (that include relevant links to your content) are ranked based on a multitude of factors, including how much time people spend reading the content after they click. When users click away and come right back to Facebook, the algorithm presumes the person isn’t interested in the content. Despite the slap-down from social media sites, clickbait continues to generate hordes of traffic for sites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy. In 2014 Facebook began cleaning up its newsfeeds, eliminating both organic posts and advertisements that were deemed to be “spammy” and allowing users more control over the types of posts they see. While the exact specifications of its quality analyses are not made public, there has been a significant decline in clickbait-style articles in most users’ newsfeeds. The combination of these efforts has led to a decline in the social shareability and overall visibility of these articles, throttling their potential impact. However, the association that clicks = money still remains. The Shift From Upworthy Marking a major shift in the clickbait trend, Upworthy hired a new editorial director to take over the company’s content operations. In a startling move, she immediately laid off several content “curators” responsible for generating this type of material, and hired replacements who serve as quality, talented writers. As one of the biggest clickbait authorities on the web, this could be a major sign that the combination of Google’s and Facebook’s efforts have finally convinced clickbait artists that it’s time to step up the quality of their work. How Long Does Clickbait Have Left? As with any major change in trend, it won’t happen all at once. You can expect to see clickbait articles (or “soft” clickbait) in your news feeds for several years to come. However, as Google and Facebook become even more adept at filtering out “bad” content and users become wise to clickbait schemes the same way they did Nigerian prince schemes, it’s only a matter of time before they’re gone for good. If I had to guess, I would suppose 2020 to be the last year of clickbait relevance (though a new form of “baiting” may emerge by that time). How to Take Advantage of the Shift Not

As difficult as it is to master the technical aspects of SEO, there’s arguably no more challenging piece to the puzzle than link building. There are no substitutes for the time and creative energy it takes to create content, building links, and drive authority and traffic back to your site. And for eCommerce business that want to experience steady and sustainable growth around their website, it’s important to understand the ins and outs of quality links building – the dos and don’ts, if you will. Link Building Tips and Best Practices If link building were all about purchasing power and ad spend, only large ecommerce websites like Amazon and Etsy would have success. But the fact that smaller ecommerce companies can find success in a crowded online world indicates that Quality links building has more to do with consistency, creativity, discipline, and intentionality. 1. Be Consistent With Content There can be no Quality links building without a commitment to content creation. If you want to funnel SEO “juice” back to your eCommerce website, there has to be regular content creation – both onsite and offsite. There’s no hard and fast rule that says you need to publish “X” number of blog posts per week, but there should be some weekly content creation. A handful of posts per week will eventually lead to a library of content that Google and other search engines will take seriously. Even just two pieces of new content per week will give you more than 100 linkable resources per year. 2. Create Sticky, Linkable Content Resources There’s a difference between consistency and quality – and you need both to excel in your link building efforts. It’s easy to say, “We’re going to publish a blog post every Monday and Friday.” But if the content is thin and irrelevant to your underlying marketing objectives, it’s essentially worthless. In order for content to be effective within the context of eCommerce link building, it needs to be sticky and linkable. When developing content, you need to put yourself in the shoes of bloggers, customers, social media users, and anyone else who will run across it. What are you doing to make people want to links back to your content, reference it, or encourage others to click? Examples of sticky content include: This roundup post by Neil Patel, which provides readers with 44 Must Read Resources on Content Marketing. People love resourceful, evergreen articles and are more likely to link back when there’s lots of value packed into a single URL. This Dollar Shave Club video is sort of the gold standard for sticky, viral content. And while not every ecommerce brands will be able to pull off the same brash, humorous approach, it does speak volumes of how well video can work in today’s social media environment. People love data and visuals. Bloggers, social media users, and website owners also love to share data and visuals. This makes infographics – such as this one from WebFX– highly effective for eCommerce link building. You’ll ultimately have to decide what sort of sticky content works for your ecommerce site, but these are a few good examples. In today’s world, boring doesn’t cut it. You need something to magnetize your audience. 3. Work With Influencers Not all backlinks are created equal. Running some sort of influencer program where authoritative bloggers and influential social media users are incentivized to link back to your website will take your strategy to the next level. Make a list of websites and individuals that (a) have sizeable audiences, and (b) have clout with your target market. Craft outreach emails or messages to engage the names on your list and build mutually beneficial relationships. 4. Guest Blog It can be challenging to convince bloggers and other digital media influencers to link back to your ecommerce website or content. They don’t always see much reciprocal value in it. Having said that, your best option may be to develop guest blogging relationships. With guest blogging, you write the content, plug in the building links, and give it to another blogger to publish on their platform. This gives them free content, while simultaneously providing you with valuable backlinks. Link Building Mistakes to Avoid As is the case with any element of SEO, myths, misnomers, and falsities abound. The internet is filled with self-proclaimed gurus who have the “secret sauce” to unlocking unlimited potential and growth. But in case you’re new to the world of SEO, here’s the only secret you need to know: There are no magic wands or five-minute tricks. True SEO success takes time and commitment. In addition to following the tips and best practices outlined above, it would be in your best interest to avoid making the following eCommerce link-building blunders. 1. Not Building Deep Links Naturally, everyone wants to build links to the homepage. And while it’s great to get these links, it’s also necessary to build links to the internal pages of your site. In link buildings lingo, these are referred to as “deep links.” For eCommerce website, category and sub-category pages are especially valuable real estate that you should be deep linking to. While it can be harder to pick up backlinks to these pages, it is possible. Any extra investment you make in this area will yield significant results. 2. Not Targeting High Authority Publishers Depending on the connections you currently have – and what sort of brand recognition you have in the industry – you may have to start small with your link building strategy. But understand that there’s a significant difference between the value that a high authority publisher and low authority publisher provide. DA is the search ranking score that those in the SEO industry use to grade or qualify websites and publishers. The scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater authority. As you develop your strategy, look to source backlinks from high DA partners. This will accelerate your efforts and enhance your eCommerce site’s SEO health. 3.

Site navigation seems like something you shouldn’t have to think about, but its importance to search engine optimization (SEO) is often underestimated. Your main goal is to present certain information to your customers, so it’s easy to get lost in thinking that it doesn’t matter how you structure that information. However, your site navigation plays a number of different roles in providing data to search engine crawlers and ensuring usability, therefore making it a crucial element for development in your SEO strategy. The term “site navigation” can actually refer to multiple components of a site. First, it usually refers to the main navigation bar on a given website, often found running across the top of the screen. It can also refer to the overall sitemap of the domain, including links not found in that header bar. Confusing things even further, “site navigation” can even refer to how easily a user can travel throughout your site and find the information s/he is seeking. To simplify things, in this article we’ll refer to site navigation as the overall structure and navigability of your website. The Importance of Sitemaps and Crawlers To understand the mechanics that dictate why site navigation links are important, we first have to understand crawlers. Google Search Console (GSC) can provide crawl stats on your site, letting you know areas that could use improvement. If you’ve been working in SEO for more than a month, you’re probably at least fleetingly aware that crawlers are automated indexing units that scour the web for structured data. Web crawlers, also called spiders, are bots that systematically scour the internet for content and download copies of web pages to add to a search engine’s index. How do search engine crawlers know where to find web pages? They start with a list of seed URLs, which can come from a variety of sources, including sitemaps. As each web page is crawled, the bot identifies all the hyperlinks on that page and adds them to the queue. Google, in particular, has several invisible crawlers constantly discovering new information on the Internet. Since crawlers consume resources on the systems they visit, some people block or limit their access. For example, people who don’t want their site crawled add special code to their robots.txt file to tell bots what they can and can’t index. Sometimes they block entire directories. However, blocking crawlers can prevent portions of your site from being indexed in Google. In order to generate the most relevant search results, search engines need to have a vast store of accurate, up-to-date information about the pages on the web. Crawlers ensure the legitimacy of this data, so if you stop crawlers from being able to do their job, you run the risk of having your pages left out of this massive store of information. On the other hand, if you can help crawlers do their job, you’ll maximize the number of pages they’re able to see on your site, and will thus maximize your presence in search engine indexes. To maximize crawler efficiency, first you need to make sure your website is free from Flash and JavaScript. These are old-style web formats that were once popular due to their flashy appearances, but their structure makes it almost impossible for crawlers to digest. It’s better to use more modern, crawlable schemes using XHTML and CSS. Building an XML sitemap is a must if you want crawlers to read your site in full. There are many free tools available that can help you build an XML sitemap, such as XML-Sitemaps.com, but it’s better if you put it in the hands of an experienced web developer. Once complete, you can upload your sitemap to Google Search Console (GSC) and place the file on your site, directly off the root. Having a properly formatted XML sitemap, in addition to maintaining a crawlable site, will ensure your pages are fully indexed. Site Depth The depth of your site is also an important factor for navigation. If you’re engaging in a content marketing strategy, “depth” might seem like a good thing. After all, the deeper your content goes, the more likely it is that you will be seen as an expert and that you’ll attract a wider audience as a result. However, “depth,” as it applies to websites, is actually a bad thing. The depth of a website is related to the complexity of links that lead to a certain point. For example, let’s say your website has 50 pages. The home page and nine other pages are immediately available on the top header. However, in order to access the remaining 40 pages, you need to click into one of those initial 10. The name of the game is K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid). Stick to “meat and potatoes” content. That’s why we only have two sitemaps, giving the crawlers less steps to get to the entirety of our site’s content. Some of those pages actually require a specific clicking order (such as Home > Products > Tables > Wooden Tables) in order to be reached. This is considered a “deep” site. Shallow sites, on the other hand, offer multiple pathways to each page. Instead of mandating a directional flow like the example above, a shallow site would have many pages pointing to each page in the hierarchy (Products, Wooden Tables, etc.). Shallow sites and a simple sitemap make it easier for users to find what they are looking for, and as a result, shallow sites get a small boost in domain authority. Restructuring your site to avoid unnecessary depth can give you more authority and more ranking power. You might be wondering if you should just link more pages in your main menu. Although this would certainly make your content easily accessible to crawlers, it will create a frustrating user experience. Your main menu should only give visitors the most important links. Having too many choices and multiple sub menus can make people bounce. Create a text sitemap for your visitors

If you work long enough in marketing or related fields, such as web development, you will run into demanding clients. These clients can subject your company to unreasonable demands, low pay, overwork, and even verbal abuse. A few might not pay on time, as well. The good news is these types of other clients are relatively rare, and there are strategies you can implement to avoid them that we outline below. Charge A Higher Rate For Difficult Clients Many digital firms fire the most challenging and toxic clients. But another same way to handle it is to upcharge clients that make unreasonable demand. Check that your contracts and billing policies have contingencies in place for the extra workload that some clients can cause. You may want to consider charging rush fees if they want you to drop your entire client load and work only on their project. Or, itemize how much time you spent doing rework that was done according to spec. You also can write in the contract that you will charge more when you have to handle an excessive amount of phone calls or emails. Also, when you have a demanding client, you can insert provisions in the contract that will get you paid more quickly. Meet On Your Home Turf If you physically meet with clients, it can help to meet in your office, not theirs. If that won’t work, you can schedule meetings with your software. This way, discussions happen with your culture in the background, not theirs. It also means they are your guest, which can make them behave better. Check The Client’s Background Don’t sign a contract just because the content marketing client offers excellent pay. This is an easily avoidable rookie mistake. Check their references and see how they have worked with other contractors in the past. Send Difficult Client’s To Your Competitors Sometimes a client is so challenging that the company will tell them that they can no long run with them. If a client is too demanding, rude, even condescending, it may be time to send them to your competition. However, it’s a good fit idea to give the SEO companies you send the client to that they may have trouble heading their way. After all, what comes around, goes around; someone could send toxic clients to you someday without warning! Write Clear Contracts It can be more challenging for companies to bully you and demand too much if you make everything clear in the contract. A well-written contract can cover you by giving you an advantage if you ever need to file a suit to get paid. Sometimes, just referring the first client to the contract can get them to cool down and back off. On the other hand, a contract template you pull off the Internet might not give you the protection you need. In the worst case, it could even cause you problems. ‘Free’ isn’t always the best idea when it comes to writing contracts for your company. Before you sign up with a client, it’s a good idea to check the business’s credit to see if they have a strong payment history. A low score may alert you to a company with cash flow problems. Say No When you have a paying client, even a difficult one, it can be all the hard work to say no. But some people will take advantage of that and drive you harder and harder until you have to do something. There are clients out there that can insist that you work on a marketing campaign over Christmas and New Year’s. If you have a large staff, that could mean ruining everyone’s holidays. In a situation like that, you have to learn just to say no. If All Else Fails, Fire Them The idea of firing a client sounds straightforward, but things are delicate when you’re working in the corporate world. Firing a client can have consequences, especially if you make the wrong decisions or a company with influence. Some of the factors to review when considering to fire a toxic clients are: Regularly shows a negative attitude towards your work no matter how hard you try. Making unreasonable demands beyond your company’s ability regularly. Shows signs of endorsing mental or physical abuse. This might include making threats, displaying rude etiquette to you or your employees, and even sexual harassment. The client isn’t honest and unprofessional when working with you, leading to a lack of trust and uncertainty. The client shows you a lack of respect. How To Fire A Toxic Client In most cases, you can’t just yell at the client, ‘you’re fired!’ as much as you might prefer! It would feel great, but it may come back to haunt you. Here are some steps to follow to let a toxic client go the right way: Come up with good, concrete reasons for your actions: You might simply loathe their pessimistic attitude, but that’s not enough. Make a list of unprofessional and unreasonable things about the client and present them professionally. Be adamant: The key to firing a toxic client properly comes down to tone. You know you can’t continue the business owner relationship further, so maintain an adamant and confident approach. A toxic client will makes sense weakness if you are uncertain and may take advantage. Don’t blame them: The idea is to end the business relationship professionally. To do this, you may need to divert some of the blame to yourself to avoid riling them with accusations. This lets the client approach the matter more practically. No means no: Some clients will try to develop a counteroffer to keep you on board. If you’ve made up your mind, make clear that the matter is settled, and you want to move on. While most clients are reasonable and easy to work with, human nature being what it is, sometimes you’ll run into a toxic situation. It’s ok; it happens to most businesses eventually. If you follow the guidelines

Ranking for competitive, high-volume keywords is the holy grail of SEO. Wikipedia has nailed the strategy perfectly: Create timeless, evergreen content worthy of attention Regularly update and improve your old content Recalibrate and reformat your content for specific niches and industries Promote your content It is not as easy as we make it sound, however. Here’s our internal process for targeting and ranking for competitive, high-volume keywords in Google search: 1. Identify the competitive keywords This should be the foundation of your content marketing strategy. One simple way to do it is to do deep keyword research yourself. The keywords must be relevant, have a high potential to funnel traffic, and must be intent-driven. But the search volume should also be substantial. The purpose is to maximize your returns not just on the money but also on the effort you put into your campaign. So, how many do you think is the ideal number of keyword variations? Five? 20? Nope. Try 1,000. But do not forget your competitor as well since you will benchmark your SEO strategy with theirs. For example, which of their keywords are most successful? Apps like SpyFu are valuable tools to spy on your competitors. Then you can reverse engineer the process to develop your own. In the same vein, you can also spot gaps in their campaign where you can take advantage, understanding that sometimes the advantage to you may be targeting no or low-volume searches. 2. Map the landscape Now that you have an idea of the competitive keywords in your field, the next step is to look at the big picture. Conduct a more exhaustive audit of the competitive keywords in your specific industry. You need to identify the reasons why some websites rank for high volume keywords and find some common grounds that you can build on. You can ask yourself the following questions: What are the competitive keywords they are using? What are they using for their title tags? Why are these effective? How did they produce their content? Which content is getting the most engagement? How can you implement best practices to your SEO campaign? 3. Internally link to your blog posts But not just any blog post. Remember the three elements of a good content post stated above? Using analytics, audit your content and determine which ones resonate with your audience better. However, make it relevant to your new content thematically and not just link for the sake of rankings. In this way, you can ramp up the activity on your website. You can also get some of that juju from your most successful blog and into your new post. If you’re in need of someone to help, our link building services should be a good match. 4. Optimize for voice Voice is going to be the future of online search. More than three billion people today own a device equipped with a voice smart assistant. About 5 in 10 people are using online voice searches. You can expect the figure to rise since voice search is faster and more convenient. Unlike with text, voice search is characterized by several elements: The long-tailed keywords are longer, perhaps five or more words The tone is more conversational, like you would talk to someone in front of you More geared toward local listings The keywords are simple and direct to the point Designed for question-type keywords They tend to include filler words It is not to say that you should focus your resources on targeting voice search. For now, text search is still the standard. But it is nice to have this strategy in your back pocket that you can pull out during emergencies. 5. Focus on Industry terms Your homepage should generally target a broad spectrum within your specific industry. However, you have to hone in on your target market with surgical precision. To do this, you need to create sub-categories containing products, articles, infographics, videos, or images. The main goal is to address the pain points of your audience. In this way, you can create contextual links to each post–both internal and external links–whenever necessary. Once they rank for the keywords they want, your life becomes easier since they will naturally attract organic links like bees to honey or raccoons to trash. 6. Content as a blank canvass Think of your blog post as a blank canvass and you, the crazy and struggling artist. Once you have finished the template–a well-researched article that addresses the pain point, it is now time to do the analytics. You have to audit your work to gauge its success. Auditing your work will also enable you to tweak the content to make it better. You can scale up and scale down, depending on the need. But you must be deliberate with your actions. You continue to open your ears to listen for content demand so that you can immediately deliver the desired content. Using your brush, you can then add more colors, wash away some of the tints, perhaps add some more birds if that is what your audience wants? Updating your content is necessary because some new information might have surfaced that makes your assumptions obsolete. The goal is to make your post the best available resource on the topic to force Google to sit up and take notice. Believe us; there is a method to this madness. 7. Proper Keyword Placement In the early days of SEO, marketers found a hack to outrank in the SERPs. They simply flooded their content with keywords, and the result was a heap of nonsense. Thankfully, we have come a long way since then. Google constantly updates its algorithms to make sure that the results would be most relevant to the search. Google constantly moves the goalpost, so marketers are always playing catchup.  It is the primary reason why it is difficult to rank these days. Now, Google does not want you to pepper your blogs with relevant keywords. In fact, that is the

Customer communication is one of the most important aspects of your business. Your customers will dictate the success of your enterprise—keep them happy and informed, and they’ll keep coming back to you for all their needs, telling their friends about the pleasant experience. Make a misstep, however, and you could permanently lose a potentially lifelong follower. Communication is the key to retaining this level of satisfaction. No matter how perfectly constructed your business is, something is eventually going to go wrong—you’ll miss a shipment, you’ll send out a defective product, or your service won’t go as anticipated. When those things inevitably do go wrong, communicating quickly, politely, and accurately is the only way to remedy the issue. We’re entering a new era of customer communication, and adequately preparing for the transition can position your company for success. The Old Model of Customer Communication For decades, most businesses have worked to turn their customer communication strategy into gigantic funnels, one for inbound communications and one for outbound communications. At the mouth of the inbound funnel, the entirety of the customer base would be ushered into one channel for further service. For example, a company would have a single “customer service” phone number that would accept all requests, no matter their intentions. This number would be listed on product packaging, promotional materials, emails, catalogs, ads, and would be given out to anybody who inquired using a different channel. Similarly, the majority of outbound communications would occur in a concentrated medium. For example, a company would work to ensure that every customer was signed up to receive email blasts, and then rely on the power of those emails to reach the entirety (or majority) of its customer base. The advantages of this model are clear; by concentrating all your effort into one channel, you save time and money and produce a much more efficient system. You can invest exclusively in your inbound customer hotline, making new hires and establishing new processes, and eventually, your team will become masters at handling inquires. But there are also disadvantages to this system. Because there is no redundancy, a failure in this line of communication is an instant and non-rectifiable failure across the board. Because you can never be sure that you’ve made this channel available to the entirety of your customer base, you’ll have a few stragglers that never realize its benefits. Why the Funnel No Longer Works Today, the disadvantages to the funnel-based marketing system have outnumbered the advantages. Too much has changed, both from a communications technology and from a customer needs perspective, to allow this approach to continue. Take, for example, the sheer number of communication channels available. In a world once exclusively dominated by in-person visits, direct mail, and phone calls, a funneled approach could be feasible. However, once you consider the following channels, that once-narrow path becomes much wider: emails online directories instant messages phone chats live chat chatbots video chats and about a thousand different social media platforms, Ostensibly, these channels are so diverse in function, advantages, and disadvantages, that it would be inefficient to forward each one to a singular final destination. Along with this, consider the fact that each individual customer has different communication preferences. A high school student might only use apps like Snapchat and Instagram to communicate with his/her peers. A young adult might rely mostly on emails, but jump on Facebook from time to time. A senior might prefer more traditional means of communication, or direct human contact. Each demographic and each individual will have unique preferences, so funneling them all to one communication channel will instantly alienate the majority of them. The sheer availability of technology has also created more problems for the funnel approach. The majority of modern users have a smartphone in their pocket at all times, capable of using multiple forms of communication instantly and reliably. This has created a generation of users that demands instant answers to common inquiries. If they are forced to go through multiple steps, or are forwarded to different communications channels, they may become impatient and abandon the process altogether. The Multi-Channel Approach The best approach for the modern era is to capitalize on the number of channels that are available. It’ll take some extra work up front, and in some cases, more managerial expenses, but the flip side is that you’ll be able to please a larger percentage of your audience a larger percentage of the time. At the end of the day, your customers’ happiness is all that matters. If you’re looking for a checklist of channels to make available, this one can get you started—but be sure to add your own preferred mediums to the mix: Printed how-to guides and troubleshooting documents Online troubleshooting and searchable FAQ sections Customer forums (with official moderation) Blogs and video tutorials Email (both inbound and outbound) Customer ticket logging Phone lines Instant messaging onsite or through Skype (or a similar program) Video chatting Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) Begin your strategy by offering as many mediums as possible, but DO monitor their progress over time. You’ll likely find that some of your channels perform better than others, and some are flat-out duds. Feel free to eliminate the duds in favor of routing those expenses to your more popular channels. Having a multi-channel approach doesn’t mean you have to invest in all those channels equally—it just means you have to make those channels available. Typically in online communication, we provide our expert link building services to both SEO agencies–typically by white labeling link building–and direct clients who want to increase their brand’s exposure online. Contact us for more information!