Author: Dylan Kissane
Getting a visitor to land on your webpage is one thing. Convincing them that it is worth signing on for your product or service is another. But guiding them through the process of getting started? That’s often the difference between a looky-lou and a confirmed client. It’s known as onboarding. What is Onboarding? According to Samuel Hulick of UserOnboard.com, onboarding is “the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product.” Simply put, it is everything that you do with a new user to ensure that they understand, use, and progress with your product. The…
Getting started on a new social network doesn’t only mean learning a new workflow, it usually means learning a new vocabulary, too. While most social networks are relatively intuitive, there are always a couple of things that seem to invented only to confuse the novice user, especially one only coming onboard some years after the network launched. Sure, some things can be the same – a like button here, a hashtag there – but usually there are a bundle of different terms you need to get a handle on quickly just to know what is going on. Today we aim…
IFTTT stands for If This Then That, a simple API-driven automation platform that makes keeping all of your web services working together a cinch. Here at DOZ we are big fans of IFTTT and we’ve previously mentioned how useful it is when blogging with Evernote or when using a ‘read later’ applet like Pocket. But IFTTT is more than just a tool for bloggers or for your own individual reading pleasure. IFTTT takes advantage of the APIs of your web services to take care of the things that would otherwise cost you extra clicks and extra minutes every day. For…
Some brands struggle to understand social media and to break through to fans, followers, and potential customers through this relatively new communications channel. Even those companies that have developed a reasonable funnel through major networks like Facebook and Twitter can face trouble when it comes to smaller or niche social networks, and Instagram certainly falls into this category. While the image sharing network has hundreds of millions of active users, brands have found the image-centered social network difficult to master. The audience is there, but reaching that audience, driving engagement, and ensuring click throughs has proved difficult for many. On…
No marketing campaign can be judged a success without the analysis of key metrics. In other words, you need to be able to prove your marketing campaign was responsible for achieving the sales, engagement, and community building goals you reached. There are a number of tools available for measuring engagement and click through rates on Facebook, Twitter – including the fantastic and native Twitter Analytics tool – and for social networks like Google+, too. When it comes to Instagram, though, tools are a little less developed as the market is obviously smaller and the advertising engagement by brands is, to…
Instagram is a social network just like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. But it’s also a little different, and getting started on Instagram requires at least one thing that those other social networks do not. A smartphone. Unlike most other large social networks, Instagram is built almost exclusively for mobile use. It’s not impossible to review your own or someone else’s Instagram feed on a desktop or laptop but you cannot upload from your computer, only from your phone. Assuming that you have yourself a smartphone, getting up and running with Instagram is a simple process. Let’s move through the 8…
It’s May 1st – May Day, as it is know in much of the world – but this post isn’t about welcoming spring, dancing around poles, or taking to the street to demand worker’s rights. It’s also not about that famed distress call, mayday mayday mayday, or any of the books, songs, films, or TV specials that bear the name. It’s about another Mayday – Amazon’s Mayday – and how it just might be the best marketing move the company ever made. Amazon on Fire The launch of the Amazon Kindle, the company’s market leading e-ink tablet, in 2007 was…
Sometimes the most simple things can have a significant effect on your SEO. Things like anchor text. Anchor text is a basic element in your onsite and offsite SEO. In a world where the web is connected by hyperlinks (usually just referred to as ‘links’) the words that sit highlighted by those links is known as anchor text. But what different types of anchor text exist? And which sorts of anchor text should you use regularly? What counts as best practice when it comes to linking within your own site and to the sites of others? This post sets out…
As long as there has been information there have been ways of organizing that information. Making things easier to find, to follow, to recall, and to pass on to others has always been the goal, and most people have a few different ways of doing exactly this for the different parts of their life. Take me, for example. I’m a little bit anal about organizing my books on the shelf at home. The spines face out, the books are arranged in categories, and I like them to run from tallest (on the left) to shortest (on the right). I organize…
Politicians want your vote and, to get it, they’re increasingly looking to be one thing above all else: authentic. According to Pace University Associate Professor Christopher Malone, authenticity is increasingly what voters are looking and listening for when politicians and their parties come looking for support. “The need for authenticity comes from the voters, because we want to know that they know what we go through, that they tweet like us, and email like us” Malone told WNYC. Even presidential candidates “go out of their way to appear genuine, like a good friend we trust.” But it’s hard to be…