Best of the Web August 2019

bow-aug-2019

Best of the Web August 2019

Some great posts from around the web during August 2019…

56 Inspirational Motivational Quotes About Success and Life

50-quotesInspirational quotes and motivational sayings have an amazing ability to change the way we feel about life. This is why I find them so interesting and crucial on our paths to success.

So what’s their secret?

You see, the way you think and feel about yourself, including your beliefs and expectations about what is possible for you, determines everything that happens to you.

When you change the quality of your thinking, you change the quality of your life, sometimes instantly. Just as positive words can make someone smile or a well-timed humorous quote can make someone laugh, our thoughts react to the world in real-time.

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Effective Networking Requires Mastering These 5 Skills

effective-networkIf you struggle with approaching other business professionals and finding the right things to say, it may be because you don’t yet know how to network. Effective networking requires particular skills, and most people aren’t born knowing the best ways to build meaningful connections with other entrepreneurs. If you master these skills, you’ll be able to leverage networking for what it is – a powerful tool that can open up future opportunities and help to build your business.

Networking isn’t intuitive. After all, how many times have you received blanket LinkedIn connection requests with generic messages or no messages at all? Or maybe you’ve been approached by people at events who pitched their services right away? Networking done poorly is ineffective and off-putting, and you’ve probably encountered many people who don’t know how to do it right.

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How to Boost Content Linkability Without Wasting Your Marketing Budget

boost-linkabilityI’m always fascinated with the marketing budgets of enterprise-level companies that are ready to pay astronomical sums to contractors. A recent shmooze in the community was thanks to Hertz that paid 32M to Accentura agency, which (so far) hasn’t resulted in any substantial changes to their site.

Though I personally don’t work with client’s who throw around millions of dollars, that doesn’t affect the quality of services that I provide. My average client wants to get the maximum by spending as little as possible. It might sound like a tough job for me and indeed it is, but I love the challenges that a small budget brings, as it helps me stay creative and reach new professional heights.

So while the budget isn’t a challenge, changing my client’s mindset is, and that’s because all of my clients are victims of one of the biggest misconceptions about content marketing: They think that once they start publishing content pieces regularly, inbound traffic will hit their site like a meteorite.

And it’s not just the traffic — links are a subject to a similar misconception. Each time I share studies like the one by Brian Dean that clearly shows that links don’t come on its own, there’s always someone that’s going to say: “That’s because their content’s just not good enough.” When I have a call with clients that ask for quality content with zero focus on links.

The bottom line is, traffic and links don’t just show up out of thin air. Regardless of how good your content is, how well structured and valuable it may seem, it has nearly zero chances of getting attention in today’s overcrowded digital space.

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Paul Barrs