Contents

1. Introduction
2. What is a White Label Agency?
3. How is it Different from Hiring Freelancers?
4. Can My Agency Be Profitable with White Label Services?
5. Why Should You Use White Label Services for Digital Marketing?
6. Allows You to Run Business at Optimal Size
7. Facilitates Expansion
8. Reduces Workforce Management Hassles
9. Bridges the Information Gap and Delivers Data-Driven Solutions
10. Ensures Profitability
11. Boosts Client Retention
12. Helps Get More Business
13. Offers Cost-Efficiency
14. Allows You to Leverage Cross-Functional Expertise
15. Conclusion
16. About DashClicks

Digital marketing companies face several challenges. Sometimes, you have an influx of clients and want to scale. Meanwhile, at other times, you experience periods of slow business. Recruiting in-house staff or hiring freelancers may not always be a feasible solution to manage such volatile fluctuations.

With white label services, you don't have to worry about any of this. When you hire a white label agency, you outsource your business services to a third party, resell those services under your brand, meet your business goals, and keep your clients happy.

Your ability to succeed as a digital marketing agency depends primarily on your ability to scale business and reduce overall costs. It is essentially why most companies prefer to remain lean, thin, and agile so they can focus on their core strengths in the face of fluctuating demand and other market uncertainties.

What is a White Label Agency?

A white label agency works as an extension of your team. It provides you with its dedicated team of digital marketing strategists, software professionals, designers, developers, writers, SEO professionals, and people trained in other disciplines such as email marketing, social media marketing, web designing, paid advertising, and analytics.

By giving you quality services, a white label agency allows you to quickly expand your current offerings and fulfill other marketing services under your brand. Contrary to global outsourcing, where you might end up hiring generic and cheap talent, a white label agency makes sure that you get all kinds of quality services under one roof.Ā  When you hire a white label agency, you don't need to buy expensive tools. They use the best tools available in the market to offer you the best in class services.

How is it Different from Hiring Freelancers?

According to a study by Upwork, 57 million people in the United States are engaged in freelancing, which makes up a whopping 36% of the country's entire workforce. It is contrary to the trends prevalent in the early industrial age when most people went to a factory or an office to earn a living. The information age has changed the way we earn our livelihood.

According to WITI (Women in Technology International), freelancers will be 50% of the total workforce by 2025. Currently, their annual contribution to the US economy is approximately $1.4 trillion.

Some confuse white label services with hiring freelancers and subcontractors, but it's different. When you hire a freelancer or a subcontractor, you make them work as an in-house team member on your clients' accounts. Freelancers either charge hourly rates or on a project basis.

But when you hire a white label organization, you outsource work outside of your business and use your logo to rebrand the services provided by a third party. From a client's perspective, it doesn't matter what your business model is. They are chiefly concerned with achieving the results you have agreed on. White label services maintain quality and branding guidelines shared by your agency. Though you can inform your clients that you use a white-label service, most agencies prefer not to.

Related reading: Complete Guide to White Label Reselling

Can My Agency Be Profitable with White Label Services?

In the digital marketing industry, everything boils down to the return on investment your marketing agency can achieve for you. So, whether it's a quick fix or a long-term solution, white label services allow you to achieve marketing objectives and focus on other business aspects. No wonder digital marketing agencies and software companies are increasingly using white label services and have satisfied customers without investing in extensive office infrastructure or hiring expensive resources and tools required to succeed in a highly competitive environment.

Why Should You Use White Label Services for Digital Marketing?

There are numerous benefits of white labeling. Every small business or digital marketing agency should consider using a white-label service because it:

1. Allows You to Run Business at Optimal Size

Hiring is a time-consuming and expensive process for most businesses; working with a white label agency allows you to skip it entirely. White label services enable you to scale up or downsize as per your business requirements without worrying about resource crunch, recruitment hassles, or overtasked workforce. It can be a boon for fast-growing digital agencies with a highly low-risk factor.

2. Facilitates Expansion

Most marketing agencies excel at one type of service; it's usually because most solopreneurs sell something they are confident they can deliver value for. As the company expands and gets more clients, the focus shifts to a bundle of services the marketing agency wants to provide under one roof. For example, if you are an agency for SEO services, working with a white label provider will allow you to add additional services such as PPC, social media marketing, and email marketing.

3. Reduces Workforce Management Hassles

When you buy white label services, you don’t have to worry about hiring, training, attrition, retention, paying employee benefits, leaves, and bad-hiring costs. With a white label agency, you don’t have to face the following HR challenges common among small businesses:

• Legal and regulatory compliance
• Finding the right employees
• Retaining talent
• Training employees
• Resistance to organizational change
• Workplace diversity (cultural, ethnic, and demographic)
• Employee compensation (the cost of benefits, taxes, and training together may add up to as much as three times the employee’s salary)
• Low employee motivation
• Resistance to technology adoption
• Developing a competitive benefits package

4. Bridges the Information Gap, Delivers Data-Driven Solutions

With markets getting saturated worldwide, it is challenging to forecast demand and identify newer markets. More and more businesses are now using big data sets and artificial intelligence for data mining and analytics. In such an environment, only data-driven campaigns drive results. If your business strategy is based on intuition alone instead of statistical analysis and data patterns, you can't expect actual results.

A white label agency has a skilled workforce that includes data-driven marketers who are well-versed in web analytics and AI. So, they can deliver lasting solutions for their client's marketing campaigns using sophisticated tools.

5. Ensures Profitability

The market offers you a flood of opportunities once you start delivering quality services aimed at client satisfaction. Businesses prefer B2B partners that can provide all related services under one roof as it saves them the time and the hassle of dealing with multiple service providers.

When marketing agencies focus on expansion and outsource services to white label companies, they get fantastic bundle deals. Furthermore, it also helps them cut the exorbitant costs associated with recruitment, training, offering employee benefits, and adding infrastructure, ensuring profitability.

6. Boosts Client Retention

Hiring a white label agency also helps you retain clients, especially when your competitors want to lure them with additional services. The more aggressive agencies generally push a bundle deal, and most often, businesses buy them as it saves them time. A white label company allows you to expand your service portfolio by helping you keep clients without increasing your current headcount and related training cost.

7. Helps Get More Business

As you add more services to your portfolio using a white label arrangement, you start getting more business at a rapid rate. Some niches have a longer sales cycle; others are more competitive. But when you offer a bundle of services, you can white-label the ones that have a shorter sales cycle and sell them quicker than your primary service. It will help you maintain your cash flow throughout the year, seize fresh opportunities, generate leads, and expand your client base.

8. Offers Cost-Efficiency

According to Deloitte's 2020 global outsourcing survey, 70% of respondents cited cost reduction as the primary reason for outsourcing. Hiring white label service is akin to business process outsourcing, where cost reduction becomes a significant competitive advantage. That's essentially why more and more startups and small digital marketing companies are switching to white label services.

9. Allows You to Leverage Cross-Functional Expertise

White label services work on a B2B model; they hire the best professionals in various domains to serve diverse businesses. So, they use economies of scale to their advantage. For example, they have many trained SEO professionals, developers, writers, and designers working under one roof. When you work with a white label agency, you get to leverage their cross-functional expertise.

Conclusion

In today's competitive business environment, cash-strapped startups and small marketing agencies can't afford the expensive tools, skilled resources, and continual testing needed to implement data-driven strategies. It limits their ability to make relevant decisions and restricts them to a handful of clients. A white label agency can be the lifeboat for such startups, keeping them afloat and allowing them to expand and forge new business deals.

About DashClicks

As a white-label service, we take your worries away, so you have more time to expand your business. You can use our platform to resell white label Facebook Ads, SEO, website design, funnel building, social media posting, content marketing, PPC, and directory listings. You can check out our website to see the full range of white-label services we offer. If you want to get in touch, fill in our contact form, and we will get back.

To attract traffic and to become a successful brand, you need to rank high up on search engines. But there is no standard benchmark to tell you how well your site is doing. Sometimes, you may try your best to rank on top of search engine results but not succeed. Domain authority can be of immense help in such situations.

What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is a popular metric used worldwide to assess a website's performance. It is a search engine ranking score developed by software giant Moz. DA predicts a website's likelihood of ranking high on search engine results. It assigns a score between one and 100; the higher the score, the higher a website's probability of ranking on top. Finding out your ranking score helps you build a website that your customers love.

Multiple factors, such as the total number of links and linking root domains, are considered while evaluating Domain Authority. You can use this score to measure a website's ranking strength and its performance against competitors. However, it's important to note that Google doesn't use Domain Authority as a metric to rank a website. Google uses its algorithms to determine search rankings.

How to Check Domain Authority?

You can check your website's Domain Authority on:

1. Moz's backlink checking tool Link Explorer

2. MozBarāMoz's free SEO toolbar used in the browser

3. Moz keyword tool Keyword Explorer's SERP analysis section

How is Domain Authority Scored?

A 100-point logarithmic scale is used to score Domain Authority. At lower stages, when the score ranges from 10 to 30, it is easier to increase your website's Domain Authority. It starts getting more complicated at the later stages, i.e., from 75 to 90.

What is a Good Domain Authority?

A website with a lot of quality backlinks gets a high score on the Domain Authority scale. Meanwhile, since small business websites have fewer inbound links, they have a low DA score. For new websites that need to be built from scratch, the Domain Authority is 1.

However, you shouldn't aim for a high DA score alone. You also need to focus on improving your website's overall SEO. DA score helps when it is used as a comparative metric when assessing the backlink strength of different websites rather than an absolute number. Since it's primarily used for comparison, no DA score is "good" or bad.ā

How to Use DA Correctly?

To use this metric correctly, you need to understand the concept of Page Authority (PA). Let's discuss the difference between the two metrics:

Domain Authority vs. Page Authority

Domain Authority assesses a website's predictive ranking strength. Meanwhile, Page Authority measures an individual web page's ranking strength.

How Does Domain Authority Work?

Link Explorer provides the data that's used to calculate the DA score through machine learning. It compares thousands of actual search results with link data to set standards to scale the website. Since it is based on machine learning, most of the DA score calculation is subject to fluctuation.

As websites acquire fresh, high-quality backlinks, other websites' DA and page authority may fall in comparison. SEO experts consider DA as a relative metric to compare against the link profiles of other websites. DA doesn't give you the absolute value scores against your SEO efforts.

How Can I Influence Domain Authority?

It is not easy to influence DA using direct methods. Since its developers use various metrics and linked data to impact the DA score, collectively, these metrics decide an individual website's competitiveness to rank on SERPs. As Google also uses hundreds of ranking factors, a metric designed to clone Google algorithms must also work in the same way.

The ideal way to positively influence the DA score is to improve the website's overall SEO, including its link profile. You should try to earn or engineer as many high-quality backlinks as you can.

Why Did My Domain Authority Change?

Since your DA score is constructed using a complex set of metrics and calculations, figuring out the exact reason for its rise or fall can be difficult. Many potential factors can cause sudden fluctuations in your DA score. Some of them are:

1. Your freshly built links haven’t been updated on Moz’s web index.
2. Possible link growth in high authority sites that you are targeting may negatively impact the scaling outcomes.
3. You have earned links from various websites that Google doesn’t approve for ranking.
4. Sometimes Moz crawls through your backlinks when scanning your link profile, resulting in a sudden fluctuation.
5. Your DA is susceptible to fluctuations if it ranks low on the scoring system, i.e., between 10 and 35.

Conclusion

The metrics that cause fluctuations in DA can be highly complex and depend on many positive and negative factors. Sometimes your score may not reflect any of the changes you made to your website's SEO.

After regular updates in Moz's metrics to decide DA score, re-calculations may affect a website's score, regardless of whether it has improved SEO and link profile. It is a relative scaled system, with DA scores more comparative than the absolute values.

Google defines duplicate content as the content that appears in more than one place on the internet. Identifying duplicate content is way more complex than it sounds. The content doesn't always need to be identical; similar content can be considered duplicate too.

Search engine crawlers identify duplicate content by tracking a webpage's source code. Substantive blocks of duplicate content can exist both within and across domains. Though duplicate content is often considered malicious, it is mostly not. A few examples of non-malicious duplicate content are:

1. Products on an eCommerce portal shown on different web pages or interlinked with multiple distinct URLs
2. Pages generated by discussion forums intended for regular desktop use and a more simplified version for mobile devices
3. Web page versions created only for printers

If you need to maintain identical content across different web pages for a better user experience, you should mention your preferred URL to Google. It is known as canonicalization.

However, sometimes marketers deliberately copy the content that's ranking on top and publish it as their own. They also often add some of their own content to it to manipulate search engines. It's malpractice; it may lead to poor user experience and a Google penalty.

Google seeks distinct, fresh information and has zero tolerance for deceptive practices. According to a Google Search Central document, the search engine filters and chooses one of the pages if your site has a "printer" and a "regular" version of a webpage, which you haven't blocked using a noindex tag.

Google penalizes websites that deliberately use duplicate content to manipulate search engines by downgrading their ranking. In more severe cases, it may remove the site entirely from the Google index. In that case, the site will no longer show on search results.

How to Fix Duplicate Content?

To fix instances of duplicate content, you can take the following steps:

1. Use 301s: You can use 301 redirects in the *.htaccess file on all the pages with duplicate content to divert the traffic to the desired pages. It will also redirect Google crawlers to ensure that the search engine doesn't index that page.

2. Manage internal linking: Sometimes, website builders and developers erroneously or deliberately create several versions of the same page to build internal links. However, Google recommends that your internal links should point to a web page's main version. Therefore, you need to streamline internal linking and keep it consistent.

Internal links help users to navigate between relevant pages. Internal links that point to irrelevant or duplicate pages confuse search engines and may affect rankings and traffic on the main page. Efficiently managing them becomes even more critical when you have a big website with hundreds of pages.

3. Use top-level domains: To make Google use a web page or a document's most appropriate version, you should use top-level domains, especially if you manage websites with country-specific content.

The domain Amazon.de is the German version of Amazon's eCommerce portal. It uses *.de as a "top-level domain" to reflect a website that is region and language-focused.

On the flip side, domains like http://de.xyz.com are the subdomains of the main site xyz.com and don't reflect whether it is the website's country-specific version. Similarly, http://www.xyz.com/de is a subdirectory, it doesn't clearly indicate that it's a country-specific website.

Using a Hreflang tag in the website code (i.e., rel=" alternate" hreflang=" x") is the best way to tell Google that you're using a specific language on that page, so it can show the page on SERPs when users perform a search in that particular region or use that language.

4. Be cautious while syndicating content: Google shows the most appropriate web page version as per the search query during content syndication. But it may or may not be the page you want.

You can add a canonical tag to the syndicated page to suggest Google the right page to index. Here is an example of how a canonical tag looks like. You can insert the target URL inside the quotes:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://xyz.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/" />

Google wants you to provide the original article's link on each site that you're using for content syndication. Should anyone seek your permission to syndicate your content, you can add instructions using the noindex tag. It will help prevent Google from indexing the version used by third parties. So, even if other sites syndicate your content, Google SERPs will show your original version.

5. Avoid content repetition: When you need to include lengthy copyright text, terms and conditions, product features, and benefits on every page, add a summary and then link it to the page where the user can find detailed information.

‍6. Manage URL parameters: Developers use URL parameters for a better user experience, but multiple parameter combinations can create numerous URL variations with the same content. It can be an SEO nightmare. To manage URL parameters efficiently, use the Parameter Handling Tool. It will suggest Google bots the right way to treat URL parameters.

7. Understand your content management system: It's crucial to know how your website content is displayed. Different website templates for blogs, forums, and related networks often show the same content in various places. For example, a newly published blog may appear on your home page, in the archive, or some other page. But Google won't consider it as duplicate content.

‍8. Avoid similar content: If you have many pages with similar content, you can:

A. Expand each page, so it appears unique

B. Consolidate all the pages into one page

For instance, if you have a fitness website with separate pages for similar workouts, you can either merge them or add fresh content to each page to create several unique pages.

Should You Block Crawler Access to Certain Web Pages?

Google doesn't like it when website owners use robots.txt files or some other code to block crawler access to web pages with duplicate content. It can lead to indexing issues.

Instead of blocking the bots, Google recommends using the rel="canonical" code to mark duplicate pages. You can also use the URL parameter handling tool or 301 redirects.

If there are numerous pages on your website with duplicate content, you can adjust it by changing the Googlebot crawl rate.

When Does Duplicate Content Not Hurt Your Website?

Duplicate content hurts a website's ranking if search engines perceive that it's used to manipulate search results. However, if you have created several versions of the same page unintentionally when structuring your website, you need not worry about it. Google usually does an excellent job of filtering the best version of a web page to display on their SERPs (search engine results pages).

What if Someone Else Copies Your Content?

Though it's rare, however, if you find a site copying your content without your permission, you can:

1. Contact the webmaster and request its removal.
2. File a report under the Copyright Act. Google removes all content that infringes copyright laws from its search results.

Conclusion

Duplicate content can be a major issue for your website if used to manipulate search engine results. In most other cases, it won't harm your site's rankings or indexing. However, it can significantly diminish the user experience. Therefore, you must work proactively to ensure that your website is free of duplicate content.

If you're a manager or a business owner handling your social accounts, you must have often wondered about the best times to post on social media.

Recency is a significant ranking factor used by both Facebook and Instagram algorithms. So, the best time to post your content is when most of your followers are online.

But it is easier said than done. There's no unique or universal "best time to post" as it changes drastically across different platforms and demographics. So, it's better to use analytics and the right tools to figure out.

Here we share a few tips to help you find your own best time to post on various social media platforms for maximum reach and visibility.

Facebook

You should use your posts' past performance and follower activity to find the best time to post on FB.

Source: Hootsuite's Social Team

According to the heatmaps of Hootsuite Analytics tools, most of HootSuite's Facebook followers are available around 3 PM EST every weekday. However, according to another metric past post-performance the best time to post on Facebook is 6:20 AM and 12:20 PM PST during weekdays. These posting times can be considered the best as they highlight the widest gaps in the routine of HootSuite's social media followers when they spend time scrolling through their social media feeds.

For better decision-making, you can refer to Facebook statistics.

Instagram

According to the Hootsuite social media team, the best time slots for publishing content on Instagram are:

1. 11:00 AM-3:00 PM EST
2. 7:00-8:00 PM EST

The first slot is during mid-morning when people go to offices in New York or evening when they log off from their workstations and check social feeds on their smartphones. For more in-depth insights, you can check out Instagram statistics.

Since Instagram's algorithm works a lot like Facebook's, recency is a primary ranking factor here too. So, to increase your click-throughs, ensure that the content you publish in these slots is fresh and engaging.

Understanding user behavior is essential in social media marketing. Let's have a look at an Instagram-generated heatmap.

Source: Hootsuite's Social Team

When formulating a posting strategy, you can't just rely on a single factor, which is online behavior in this case. You should also consider the past performance of your posts and experiment with different time slots.

Twitter

According to the Hootsuite social media team, the best time to tweet is between 9 AM and 12 PM EST on weekdays. Click-through rate is the most crucial metric on Twitter for engagement. The 9 AM to 12 PM slot receives the highest click-throughs since it coincides with the office hours in the UK and the East Coast.

Though the morning hours on weekends are the busiest, marketers prefer to schedule posts a bit later to avoid the social media rush hour.

However, using the best time to post metric is not suitable when your audience is spread across the globe in different time zones. According to Nick Martin, Global Social Engagement Specialist at HootSuite, you should tweet content round the clock in small intervals for most traction.

Tip: There is no best time to post on Twitter because of its global audience. Schedule tweets round the clock, preferably every hour. You should do the same when running ad campaigns. Target people according to their time zone. For comprehensive Twitter stats for 2021, you should refer to Twitter statistics.

Linkedin

According to the Hootsuite social media team, the best time to post on LinkedIn is between 11 AM and 2 PM EST during weekdays.

According to Iain Beable, Hootsuite's Social Marketing Strategist, people are usually more active on LinkedIn during mornings, lunch hours, and evenings, but the pandemic has changed this. Now, the pattern is more scattered and spread over irregular intervals.

During the pandemic, users have been active even on weekends, especially Sunday evenings. Therefore, your LinkedIn strategy must be more data-driven and based on past performance. Also, keep experimenting to know what works.

Unlike Facebook and Instagram, recency is not as crucial on LinkedIn. Factors such as relevance, quality, and trending content matter a lot more.

To know more LinkedIn facts and stats, visit LinkedIn statistics in 2021 and LinkedIn demographics.

How to Find the Best Time to Post on Social Media?

1. Research When Your Audience is Most Active Online

Though most social media algorithms consider recency when determining organic ranking, you must know when your audience is online on Facebook and Instagram for better reach.

Twitter and LinkedIn are less transparent; they don't reveal too much information about their user activity. Therefore, you should use third-party tools to research audience behavior on these platforms.

Tip: Popular social media tool Hootsuite offers a built-in feature, The Best Time to Publish, which provides hour-by-hour user activity through heatmaps. It will fetch your posting history and help you figure out the optimal times to post that you haven't experimented with in the past few weeks.

2. Study Your Best Performing Posts

You need to use a data-driven approach to meet your social media performance goals. Learn how to use various social media analytics tools to maximize your engagement and reach on different platforms. You should focus on your most successful posts and study all the critical metrics. You can create a social media report to find the top-performing posts.

Use the following metrics to assess your best performing social posts:

• Awareness (consider the number of impressions)
• Engagement (posts with high engagement rates)
• Sales and traffic (posts with highest click-throughs)

Analytics for Social Platforms

A. Facebook Analytics

Facebook provides three analytics tools:

• Facebook Page Insights: It contains information about page and post engagement, post and story reach, video views, and recommendations. It also provides data about follower growth, orders and revenue, and when your audience is online.
• Facebook Audience Insights: It tracks your audience’s demographics such as gender, age, job title, and relationship status.
• Facebook Ad Center: It covers information about ad spend, post engagement, audience reached, and click-throughs.

B. Twitter Analytics

Twitter analytics is also divided into three parts:

• Account home overview: Gives information on monthly highlights and the best performing content
• The tweet activity dashboard: Tracks your tweet’s engagement and impressions for a selected period
• The campaign dashboard: Tracks your Twitter ads so you can measure important metrics such as impressions, reach, engagement rate, and cost per action

C. Instagram Analytics

Instagram insights can also be divided into three significant sections:

• Content: Helps you track the performance of your posts and Stories.
• Activity: This allows you to track the audience’s response to your posts and Stories.
• Audience: Gives information about your audience’s demographics and user-behavior by assessing when they are most likely to be online.
  

3. Get Competitor Insights

To get competitor insights:

1. Scroll through the feed of your major competitors
2. Find out their best-performing posts; assess the number of likes and shares
3. Do a competitive analysis to study the patterns
4. Reverse-engineer the strategies that led them to succeed; apply them to suit your specific needs

You can also try social listening to decide what kind of content you should post and when you should post it.

4. Post According to Your Audience's Time Zone

When you target a global audience, make sure to schedule your posts according to their time zone. Or else, publish round the clock. Use a social media scheduler to do it efficiently.

How to use a social media scheduler like HeroPost?

HeroPost helps schedule posts for all social platforms from a single dashboard. It allows you to publish posts directly or schedule them for posting at a later date. It has many valuable built-in features such as ‘Geolocation’ and ‘First Comment to Post.’ HeroPost facilitates unlimited scheduling for months ahead.

5. Test and Optimize

Even after due diligence, you would need routine A/B tests to achieve the desired results. Post the same content at different time slots to see when you get the best response.

According to Nick Martin, testing should be a continuous process. You should test for multiple variables such as the images used, the post's copy, and the posting time.

6. Keep Monitoring and Experimenting

Social media is constantly evolving, and so is the user behavior on these platforms. For instance, businesses resorted to remote work in 2020 following the coronavirus outbreak. It led to increased social media use. Earlier, people checked their feeds during lunch hours, but when they started working from home, they checked it even during their zoom meetings. When user habits shift so drastically, your social media strategy should also follow.

Conclusion

There's no standard or global best hour to post on social channels, especially when time is a variable factor. The ideal time to post may vary according to your audience's social behavior and the platforms you choose. However, a data-driven approach with continuous A/B testing and experimentation will help you get the best results possible and improve your ROI. You need to assess your past post-performance across all social channels. But for Instagram and Facebook, also consider when your audience is online.

An email's subject line plays a vital role in determining whether the recipient will open it. Most people scroll through their inboxes looking for relevant emails based on the subject lines.

As a marketer, you must ensure that your subscribers read your emails. To write attention-grabbing subject lines, you can draw inspiration from some of the best email subject lines used by businesses and organizations.

You must have seen the typical promotional headlines in your inbox, such as "how she got a $700 writing client in one week (!!!)" and "these are some great BONUSES!" Readers ignore such hyperbolic emails and move to the next without wasting time.

So, what kind of email subject line should you write? Here are 15 examples that will inspire you to craft attention-grabbing subject lines:

1: "unmotivated? these 2 steps fix it"

Marie Forleo, who Oprah named a thought leader for the next generation, is a motivational speaker and business coach. She creates quality content on her blog and inspires her audiences through the weekly YouTube show MARIETV.

2020 was full of challenges and difficulties, with most people staying inside homes during the lockdown. We also saw a dramatic upsurge in the work-from-home culture. It was a tough time, and millions worldwide struggled financially, physically, and psychologically.

Forleo uses intelligently-crafted subject lines to draw her audience's attention without sounding overly promotional. A relevant case study is: "unmotivated? these 2 steps fix it." Written in lowercase, the message has a casual tone, yet it addresses a much bigger problem ā how to bring your life back on track after a global pandemic? The subject line was researched carefully to echo the global public sentiment.

2: "What Did You Think? Write a Review."

People receive these kinds of messages from eCommerce sites, usually within a fortnight of buying a product. It is the perfect way to ask your customers how they feel about the purchase. Reviews from satisfied customers help website visitors make a buying decision. However, it's important to note that they are not forced into writing a good review. Honest feedback is of paramount importance. It encourages strong relationships and transparency with customers. Consumers feel empowered and valued when they are offered an opportunity to express their opinion.

3: "Your prescription is expiring"

It works as an email alert when your prescription for medication or eyeglasses is nearing its expiry date. A subject line's power lies in its timing. It prompts the user to engage with an email because it is highly personalized and suggests urgency.

4: "Best of Groupon: The Deals That Make Us Proud (Unlike Our Nephew, Steve)"

Groupon uses humor expertly in its marketing messages. For example, "unlike our nephew Steve.ā  It makes us laugh. Because it imbues an element of fun in an otherwise serious-sounding message, the sheer contrast compels the user to open the email.

5: "Free (Cool!) Clothes Alert" (Gift emojis)

Clover used emojis in its subject line to evoke specific and vivid responses. The content's visual nature arouses curiosity and invites the reader to see the information.

6: "The timer is going off on your shopping cart"

King Arthur Flour used this subject line as a reminder, signaling urgency. Warning customers that they would likely miss out on the products if they don't act immediately almost always works. It also effectively conveys the implied message that the stock may soon run out.

FOMO, or fear of missing out, is a proven sales technique. If a customer has had a particular product on their wishlist for some time, such messages can push them into making the purchase.

7: "Important Weather Advisory"

People take weather advisory seriously as it impacts their daily routine. It influences their ability to leave the house, travel, and go to work. Businesses with products or services susceptible to the weather are more likely to send such messages to their customers. For example, before an impending hail storm or power outage, the businesses selling internet services might email a weather advisory to their customers.

8: "3750 reward points for you. A lovely gift for your partner."

Specific numbers compel you to open an email, especially when personalized. Usually, banks, airlines, financial services, and superstores send such messages to their loyal customers to show that the company cares. It helps businesses nurture their brand value and build long-term relationships with customers.

9: "Rock the color of the year"

It uses intrigue and mystery to stimulate you into opening an email. Etsy, an eCommerce marketplace, once promoted a product highlighting a single feature: color. They generated curiosity by using the phrase "color of the year." A message like this builds interest enough to make users click on the email.

10: "Black Friday shoppers are the worst customers"

LinkedIn used this subject line to promote an article published on Pulse, its publishing platform. Although the subject line is facetious, bold, and judgemental, it is a cultural observation. And since LinkedIn doesn't sell anything on Black Friday, it does not cause any direct harm.

11: "Don't open this email"

A subject line like this exploits human psychology. We experience a strong desire to do something when asked to refrain from it. Brands leverage this human tendency, known as reactance, and use it to boost the open rate.

12: "I got Botoxā& THIS is what it looked like"

Used by Refinery29, this subject line uses a personal story to create intrigue. People are naturally curious about personal anecdotes. When you include a strong human story in your email, it is more likely to be well-received.

13: "What can you afford?"

Affordability is a significant factor when consumers explore the market for a product or service. When an email tells you that something is within your means, you feel compelled to check out the prices.

14: "As you wish"

It is a popular dialogue from the movie "The Princess Bride." The brand UncommonGoods used it effectively to target the film's fans. It was a simple strategy, but it worked because the brand sent it to a predisposed user base.

15: "Not cool guys"

BuzzFeed's excellent copywriting also reflects in its emails. They engage the reader with catchy and engaging subject lines. It delights their customers and improves the open rate for their emails.

Conclusion

We have discussed just a few examples and ideas you can use when working on the subject line for your emails. The objective is to craft a message that evokes an immediate response. Prior research about your target user goes a long way in creating exciting subject lines. However. there is no magic formula to succeed. Users may click on an email today and be completely turned off by it at another time. The best strategy is to be receptive to innovative ideas. The most effective subject lines entertain, educate, and offer value.

The traffic that a website attracts is crucial; it can be both the cause and the effect of a thriving business. Impressive website traffic helps entrepreneurs achieve their ultimate objectiveābusiness expansion and an ever-increasing customer base.

Optimizing SEO is an effective way to boost website traffic and rankings. However, it is not the only way. As a business owner, you should know how to diversify the incoming traffic. Relying on SEO alone is akin to putting all your eggs in one basket. So, if something goes wrong or Google rolls out an unpredicted algorithm update, your primary source of traffic, which is a search engine, in this case, may ditch you. It could also spell doom for your business.

Therefore, in this blog, we discuss various ways and practices that you can use to improve your website traffic without relying too heavily on SEO. Here we share 15 useful and mostly free tactics to boost your website traffic.

1. Use Schema Markup to Highlight Information on SERPs

Schema Markup is a code that you insert into your website to help the search engines return explanatory results for searchers. Adding it doesn't directly increase traffic to your website, but it makes search engine crawlers find and index your web pages. As a result, you get better search engine visibility and traffic. It also creates rich site snippets to bolster your click-through rate.

Here's an example of a website, Cute Calendar, that used Schema Markup on its events calendar page. The search result on Google looks like this:

Here is how you can use Schema Markup for SEO:

Go to Google's Structured Data Markup Helper to mark up elements on your page so Google can understand the data on the page.

1. Select the type of data: Choose one of the content formats such as articles, book reviews, and events from the several listed options.

 
• Select Content Format
• Paste the URL to markup
• Select the elements
   

2. Continue adding markup items: Highlight the other things on your page to populate your markup list.  ‍

3. Create the HTML: Click on Create HTMLā once you're done.  ‍

4. Add Schema Markup to your site: Open your CMS or the source code and add the highlighted snippets at the right places.    ‍

5. Test your schema: Use the Structured Data Testing Tool to see how the result will look on the SERPs.  

2. Add Internal Links

Adding internal links is a healthy SEO practice; they are as important as backlinks or external links. You must interlink your website's pillar content for the best user experience. It will make navigation easier and improve metrics such as "time spent on page" and "time spent on the website."

Image courtesy:  Media Search Group

3. Interview Experts, Industry Influencers, and Thought Leaders

The objective of content marketing is to bring fresh content that offers value. You should invite people who can offer useful and fascinating inputs. Interesting interviews work across all major content formatsāblogs, YouTube channels, and podcasts.

It's even better if you can call over experts, industry influencers, and thought leaders for interviews. Popular names establish an instant connection, add to your credibility, and increase traffic. Celebs also share such interviews on their social handles, further enhancing your content's reach. It is an excellent exercise in giving a boost to personal branding and mutual promotion.

4. Use Email Marketing

Most businesses overly rely on content marketing and SEO these days. However, many other streams, such as paid social and email marketing, are equally effective, and you should not ignore them.

When done right, they can have a great reach and impact. Even a moderately successful email campaign can result in an instant spike in traffic. But make sure that you don't bombard your audience with frequent and unimportant messages. Instead, use emails to give them gentle reminders about your latest products and services.

5. Make Sure Your Site is Responsive

80% of netizens used a mobile device to search the internet in 2019. Therefore, it's crucial that you optimize your website for mobile devices and tablets for a smooth user experience. An unresponsive website can result in a massive spike in the bounce rate. You don't want visitors to leave your website in no time; it will nullify all your marketing efforts.

6. Work on Your Site's Loading Speed

Poor site loading speed hurts user experience and may lead to many other severe consequences such as:

A. Google can penalize your website

B. Your rankings may drop overnight

C. Bounce rate may increase

D. Disappointed visitors may never return and even share their bad experience on social media  

To resolve these issues, you should:

A. Technically optimize all your website pages

B. Optimize image file size

C. Improve your page structure

D. Control the functionality of third-party plugins for optimal user experience

7. Be Active on Social Media

No user can spam any group or account for self-promotion on social media. However, even if your end goal is self-promotion, you need to participate with the online community and use relevant hashtags to provide context to your posts and conversations.

If your followers leave comments on your Facebook or Instagram business page, you should respond proactively and answer their queries. Don't use social media as your broadcast channel. It is meant for interaction, so engage with your audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms.

Tip: It will do well to remember Megan O'Neill's wise words when using social media for business: Before you sell on social media, interact, inspire, educate, entertain, and engage.

8. Use Videos

Videos are much more effective and entertaining than text-based content. Also, it is far easier to retain the information you consume via video. If you want to make your website engaging and attract new visitors, you should create high-quality videos that inform, educate, and entertain.

9. Host Webinars

A webinar is an effective way to share your experience and knowledge with an interested audience. Webinars should be an integral part of your digital marketing and social promotion campaigns. They will generate traffic and lucrative leads that you can nurture carefully through content marketing and personal interaction.

To make your webinar successful, send out a reminder email before the scheduled time to your subscribers and website visitors and use paid advertising to promote it. You should also send reminders and alerts with messages such as "last chance to register" 24 hours before the webinar.

It's a good practice to make your webinar content available after it's over through downloadable audio files and promote it on social media. To learn more on how to conduct a webinar, click here.

10. Advertise

Paid advertising is a great way to promote your website among untapped audiences. You can tweak paid strategies according to your business objectives. But study an advertising platform's pros and cons carefully before selecting it.

If you want your website traffic to translate into more sales, you should target keywords with "high purchase intent" when creating paid campaigns. These keywords and search terms may be costly, but the rewards will outweigh your spending.

11. Experiment with Your Content

To succeed at content marketing, you should experiment with different content formats and sizes. Content repurposing is a great option if you have a team working on your blogs. You can break your content into small chunks and convert it into picture messages, infographics, and videos for maximum impact.

Famous entrepreneur and internet personality GaryVee, for example, experiments with different content formats, especially "micro-content," which he creates from his event videos and long-form posts. He says he constantly creates and posts as much content as possible. However, he makes sure that each piece is specific to the platform he's posting it on.

GaryVee publishes a new episode of his popular GaryVee Video Experience every day and distributes it on his YouTube channel, Facebook Watch Page, and IGTV. Apart from that, he continually creates "micro-content" and shares it on his Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Quora, and other social handles.

To know how Gary Vaynerchuk makes 30+ pieces of content from a single keynote or event, visit the GaryVee Content Model.

12. Write Compelling Headlines

The writers at Buzzfeed experiment with more than 20 different headlines before arriving at the one they publish. Headlines are crucial to attracting traffic. If you have a dull headline, most readers will bounce off and go elsewhere. Writing a compelling headline is an art that you need to master for successful marketing. You can try the blog topic headline generator to see what works. You can also read this post to learn how to write attractive headlines. Here's more about how Buzzfeed headlines work.

13. Make Use of On-Page SEO

Search engines rank optimized content on top, and SEO is still as relevant as ever. Make sure to add alt text to your images and create internal links in every post you publish. Don't ignore meta descriptions and meta tags. Optimizing your website for on-page SEO is a proven method to increase organic traffic and website visibility and rank on various keywords.

14. Target Long-Tail Keywords

Once you are done researching high-intent keywords and popular keywords in your niche, you need to experiment with long-tail keywords. It is the secret formula to attract enormous traffic to a website.

Once a website starts ranking on long-tail keywords, it becomes visible on search engines and starts ranking on other keywords too. Long-tail keywords are used the most in web searches; if you are not targeting them, you're missing out on traffic and opportunities to rank on top of SERPs.

15. Start Guest Blogging

Guest blogging for a high-domain authority site is a surefire way to increase traffic to your site. It also helps build your brand.

Google doesn't like users manipulating its results by overusing/misusing guest posting. Therefore, you need to stay away from spammy tactics and approach guest posting with caution.

Conclusion

This is an exhaustive list of the tactics you can try to ensure a consistent increase in your website traffic. Most of these strategies don't require any investment and can be implemented easily. If you've also got a list of proven tips that helped increase traffic to your website, please feel free to share them in the comments.