FREE DESIGN TOOLS FOR CREATING GREAT VISUAL CONTENT

If resources are limited for your team, there are always online tools available to do some of the heavy lifting. This is also true for visual content. If you are short a designer, tryout these tools to see which one meets your needs.

CANVA

Free Design Software for Simple and Clean Graphics

Canva is a design platform that allows you to create simple and clean designs for print and online materials. Also included in the platform is an extensive list of free icons, shapes, filters, fonts, and thousands of photos that can be used for commercial use. You also have the option of uploading your own images or using built-in templates for the following types of content:

• Flyers

• Banners

• Posters

• Resumes

• Presentations

• Collages

• Magazine covers

• Social graphics

• And many more…

• Online support with video tutorials

• Easy-to-use with customizable templates

• Free memberships with access to thousands of icons, fonts, colors, shapes, and images

A premium feature, called Canva for Work, allows your team to setup branding guidelines, from color schemes to font types and sizes. This is a great way to maintain brand consistency across your channels. Cost to use: Free, Canva for Work – Monthly Subscription.

KEYNOTE

Free-Form Tool for Simple Graphics and Layouts

This one requires a little bit of design talent. Although most consider it as the alternative to PowerPoint, Keynote is a much more flexible tool for creating different types of designs, from icons (as shown above) to website banners and simple infographics. A bonus is that you can customize the slide size to meet your desired dimensions. Cost to use: Pre-installed on Apple computers.

PIXLR

Free Photo Editing Tool

While it doesn’t have all the features of Adobe Suite, Pixlr has a powerful set of editing tools to transform your photos with the desired effects. It’s also browser-based, which removes the hassle of downloading another application on your computer. Cost to use: Free.

PIKTOCHART

Free Infographic Tool for Bright and Inviting Content

When you are in a pinch for an infographic, Piktochart is a great tool. With drag-and-drop functionality and extended access to pre-made graphics and templates, you can create a shareable and beautiful graphic faster than ever before. Plus, making your infographic public on the site allows for more content visibility.

Other benefits:

Cost to use: Free / Lite / Pro.

Got any other suggestions for free design platforms? Let us know! We are always looking to test out new tools.

Tips to Improve Your Link Building Strategy

For many, link building seems to be one of the more laborious SEO tactics, but it is still a valuable factor for impacting your rankings. Before you can start to reap the benefits of link building, you need to lay the groundwork first. Here are a few ways to get started with building a portfolio of links with quality content from authoritative sites.

• Take Inventory of Your Onsite & Social Media Content

• Press releases: Offsite

• Social posts: Offsite

• Guest blogs: Offsite

• Blogs: Onsite

• Landing pages: Onsite

• Microsite: Onsite (because it is a part of your root domain)

• Analyze Your Onsite Metrics and Most Popular Backlinks

• Headlines and headers

• Text

• Images

• Layout

• Run a Competitive Backlink Audit

• Create a Backlink Audit and Outreach Sheet

Before you can brainstorm new content, you should take inventory of what you currently have. Create an excel sheet and label content by where it is housed, offsite and onsite. Here are a few examples:

After you list the types of content you distribute, pick out the themes that each of your pieces of content can be bucketed in. This is how you outline your inventory.

Content planning can feel like a guessing game, but it doesn’t have to be. Pull metrics from live content to analyze and highlight which topics receive the most engagement from your users. If you want to take your analysis a step further, use Google Analytics’ content experiments to set up testing for:

For your backlinks, record the most popular link referrals as well as the hyperlinked text. Any links you earn without manual outreach are great examples of the topics users find resourceful and are willing to refer to others.

Just like you do with your audit, run one for your competitors as well. This will give you better insight into their content marketing strategies, as well as what conversations their company is being invited into. Also, highlight authoritative sites that are linking back to your competitors. If you can figure out the topics that interest them, you can brainstorm and propose content ideas to them.

Make sure you are pitching topics that align with your overall content strategy.

To track your efforts and keep an updated list of collaborative sites, create an excel sheet to list other partner sites, the content they typically publish (including your own), and analyze these posts to see how much traffic is referred each month from them.

The more active you are with your backlink effort, the better you will  be at understanding what resonates with your users and benefits your business case. Want to learn more about our SEO strategies? Our specialists are waiting to hear from you.

5 Ways to Optimize Your Content & Maximize Sales for Holiday Shopping in 2016

Retailers and brands are scrambling to get their product content ready for the holidays, and for good reason. In 2015, non-store holiday sales grew 9 percent to $105 billion, according to National Retail Foundation. Holiday shopping for 2016 will be expected to produce just as much online activity, maybe even more.

For years store aisles and mall parking lots were flooded with holiday shoppers, but in the past couple years we have seen many consumers move to the virtual aisles. There are quite a few benefits to online holiday shopping: no lines, better deals (sometimes), and faster product comparison. Online retailers realize that improving a consumer’s online shopping experience can improve purchase behavior, decreasing the chance of shopping cart abandonment for big retail days, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

To improve this experience, you need great holiday content. And we have some tips that can lead you to that.

    Show images of customers wearing or using your product

Especially for the fashion industry, customers’ posting products photos is essential for buyers. Seeing your product in action is the best vote of confidence for indecisive shoppers. From social media competitions to in-store perks, set up a strategy that invites users to engage with your product and showcase it.

    Reach out for reviews months before holiday shopping

“But which one has better reviews?” Comparison shopping is second nature to most of us, and brand trust always comes second to consumer-to-consumer referrals.

It can be scary to request customer reviews because you never know if it’s going to result in positive or negative feedback, but that shouldn’t stop you. Bad feedback can be good, as long as your proactive. It shows your users that you care about customer satisfaction.

READ MORE https://www.gotitdigital.com/five-ways-optimize-content-maximize-sales-holiday-shopping-2016.