How Zeen is Changing the Digital Media World | Bosmol - Social Media & Web 2.0 Internet Marketing News

This year saw the introduction of Zeen, a website that serves as an online publishing platform. Created by the founders of YouTube, Zeen allows users to create rich content collections that redefine the common definition of the term “web magazine”. Whereas traditional mediums such as blogs and web magazines publishers limit the types of content you can use, Zeen makes it possible to pull items from numerous sources on the internet.

For individuals and businesses alike, Zeen presents itself as a promising new content creator. People can develop collections of the things they are interested in while businesses can publish multifaceted promotional content. Below is a summary of Zeen itself and its relevance for casual users and professionals.

About Zeen

Zeen opens the door for integrating video content, photos, written content and links into individual collections, or “Zeens”. By utilizing preexisting content, Zeen makes it possible to develop multi-media stories and articles. This means that you can weave videos, music, social media posts and other content types in with your own written words.

Basic Use

Upon visiting the Zeen homepage you have the option to view Zeens created by other users or to begin creating your own Zeen. When you choose the “create” option you are prompted to choose a title for your new content piece. Based on this title Zeen produces a template with a theme related to your topic.

For instance if you choose the title “soccer”, Zeen generates a theme with images and a style relevant to the sport. From there you can begin adding your own written text and various types of content from the internet. You also have the option to change this generic theme if you have another background image or color scheme you’d prefer. Once you’re satisfied with the appearance of your Zeen and its content you can publish it for the world to see.

Issues

While Zeen certainly expands upon the previous limits of other blogs, it still has limitations. The inability to upload content is a strange, yet disappointing shortcoming that was noted by Digital Trends. This means that users can’t utilize word documents, photos or other media files currently stored on their computers (however, Zeen is still labeled as Beta and has implemented some of these features since the late 2012 article).

Although posting content to sites such as Flickr and YouTube and then pulling it into Zeen is a way around this issue, it still represents an obstacle to user’s content creation. Zeen is still stuck on the content curating model that sites such as Pinterest currently utilize. There’s no question that Zeen has elaborated upon current blogging platforms, but allowing for content uploading would certainly take user control and creativity a step further.

Relevance for Bloggers

Despite being limited to content that is already present on the web, Zeen can be leveraged as a valuable tool for bloggers and businesses alike. From the perspective of a blogger, Zeen gives you more freedom than other sites as you tell your story and share your interests.

For instance, a music blogger could share their experiences at various concerts. Each week, their concert-focused Zeen could incorporate videos and photos from the event, a written summary, interviews with fellow attendees and links to the band’s other music. A common strategy seems to be making videos and artsy forms of media. Also, reviews tend to perform well. For example; turning a hashtag tools review into a video can increase your reach; YouTube, Vimeo, and now, Zeen.

On the other hand, photographers may create Zeens to help categorize their Instagram and Flickr content. A user interested in employing Zeen in this matter might create collections of their travel photos, family photos and nature photos from these sites. These collections could then be complimented with written explanations, creating a coherent, multimedia story of the user’s online image collection. Regardless of your focus or interests, Zeen makes it possible to share the things you love in one place with a variety of media.

Professional Value

As for business professionals, Zeen presents itself as an excellent vehicle for delivering content to potential customers. Considering that Zeens can be posted to social media sites and blogs, they make an excellent addition to any content marketing campaign. Examples of business implementation include Zeens highlighting product lines, upcoming events and other company news.

A product related Zeen could feature videos of the product in action, examples of customer reviews from social media and product images pulled directly from you’re your company’s website. On the other end of the spectrum, an event-focused Zeen can compile links to news articles featuring the event, a link to the event’s page on your site and promotional media.

Whether you wish to utilize them as daily, weekly or monthly content pieces, Zeens can serve as multimedia newsletters for your business. It’s essentially the manifestation of turning banner stands into digital forms, as an additional advertising/marketing channel. Rather than simply presenting your business materials in words, Zeen allows you to create sharable content featuring a variety of mediums.

The arrival of Zeen represents another step forward in terms of web content creation and blogging. No longer do people have to keep their content separated across a multitude of social media channels, websites and blogs. Individuals can now share content collections via one cumulative, concise medium and businesses can present their brand in a similar fashion. While it may have its shortcomings, Zeen takes content curating a step further and puts more control in the hands of the user

Written by Jesse Aaron. Jesse is a professional blogger with a passion for homebrewing. He writes on a variety of topics on his blog Mashbout. Follow Jesse on Google Plus

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How Zeen is Changing the Digital Media World

What Makes a Great Backlink? | Bosmol - Social Media & Web 2.0 Internet Marketing News

What makes a great backlink?

Is it Page Rank?

Domain Authority?

How about niche relevancy?

While all those are important SEO metrics, they ignore one of the most important factors to consider when evaluating a potential link opportunity: referral traffic.

In fact, when you put these 5 link building strategies into practice, you’ll find that — due to the increase in traffic you get from a diverse set of sources — that you actually become less reliant on Big G. And with Google rolling out update after update, you definitely want traffic coming from as many different non-search sources as you can.

#1: Infographics

The link building potential of infographics are well known in the SEO community.

But you may not know that — when done right — you can get thousands of targeted visitors from a single infographic. To do that, you’ll need to approach your infographic marketing a bit differently than most SEOs.

Instead of submitting your infographic to hundreds of infographic directories, put that time and energy towards targeted blogger outreach. That means you’ll have to email top bloggers in your industry (and authority sites like LifeHacker and Mashable) to give them a heads up about your infographic.

Sure, most will say “no”. But even one infographic placement on a popular authority site is enough to send you server-melting traffic.

#2: PR and Press Releases

Google may not value backlinks from press releases as they once did (even though there’s evidence they still pass on some value to your site).

But that doesn’t mean press releases are completely dead. In fact, when you write an SEO and press friendly press release, you can often get your release picked up by bloggers and major news sites. This is where more of the SEO — and referral traffic — benefits come into play.

The key here, again, is what you do after the press release is published. If you submit it to 25 free press release distribution sites, you’re probably going to find yourself with a trickle of traffic (if any at all). But if you let industry-leading bloggers know about your legit news piece, you’re likely to get mentions on high-traffic sites in your niche.

#3: Guest Posting

You may have seen that Google recently updated their guidelines to discourage “large-scale” guest posting. If you’ve ever published a guest post on a site with zero comments, social shares or engagement, you’ve probably seen that the post brings in a grand total of zero visitors.

The fact is, there are hundreds of blogs out there that exist for the sole purpose of accepting guest posts. They’re not what you (or Google) would consider a “real site”.

On the other hand, guest posting on a top site in your industry will land you a much more powerful backlink…and will send you a boatload of targeted visitors.

It’s also important to note that — because visitors that come through guest post links have just read your content — they’re much more likely to convert than the average visitor. However, getting your content placed on massively popular authority sites isn’t easy. This guide has some handy email outreach and guest posting tips that you can use to increase the odds of getting your content published on authority sites.

#4: Broken Link Building

Broken link building is a link building strategy that’s growing in popularity in the SEO community.

And why not?

It’s one of the few scalable, white hat link building strategies out there.

However, most people approach broken link building as a pure link building exercise. And while there’s nothing wrong with getting backlinks from broken link building, it can also be leveraged for serious traffic.

Here are two strategies that work well:

Find resource pages on popular sites in your niche (resource pages are usually some of the most heavily-trafficked pages on any site). Then check for broken links using a program like Check My Links. Finally, reach out to the site owner to let them know about their broken links…and offer yours as a replacement. This way, when people visit the page, they’ll see your site listed as a helpful resource and click through.

Use a program like Screaming Frog SEO Spider to analyze an entire site for broken links. Instead of offering your link as a replacement, use your outreach as a way to build a relationship with the site owner.

#5: Create a Linkable Asset

A linkable asset is essentially an amazing piece of content — like a tool, ultimate guide or great resource — on your site that naturally acquire backlinks.

They’re not easy to make. But when you invest the resources necessary to put out an amazing linkable asset on your site, the long-term SEO benefit is very real.

Linkable assets should also be called “traffic assets”, because they tend to generate repeat visitors and referral traffic via blog links, email newsletters and forum mentions. If you need some inspiration, here are 9 examples of linkable assets published from a post published at Moz.

Image via Flikr

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What Makes a Great Backlink?

Constructing Compelling Content: Top 5 Marketing Tips | Bosmol - Social Media & Web 2.0 Internet Marketing News

In an industry where competition is constantly growing, it’s getting increasingly difficult to shine through the rest of the crowd and build an audience that boots your business. Creating and sharing valuable, fresh, engaging and free content is crucial in attracting people to your brand and driving results.

Every second over 5,700 tweets are tweeted, every minute 100 hours of video uploaded and according to Google, there are 527 million ways to make ice cream.

With such an extreme overflow of content being produced and pouring in at such a rapid rate, the question stands – how on earth do you make your content and online marketing stand out? Grab an ice cream (or make one) and think back to your inner child-like mentality.

1. Be Curious and Open Minded

If you are ever around children, you would know they ask a great deal of questions. Children are curious, their brains are constantly developing and by always asking questions like “how” or “why”, they learn. Curious people create useful and fascinating content because they are constantly seeking answers, researching and working out why something is the way it is and how exactly it works.

In your content and online marketing research, make sure you take into account what information your audience wants or needs. Social media monitoring tools and Google trends can help with this.

2. Be Witty

Children love to make people laugh, there is a certain rush you feel when you can put a smile on someone’s face. When constructing great marketing content, learn to engage your audience with the occasional smile whilst still providing clear and informative information.

3. Be Bold, Be Fearless

Some of the best and most unique content stems from addressing a question or topic that your competitors may be too afraid discuss. The greatest thing about children is they are fearless and not afraid to speak their minds. As we move into adulthood, we spend so much time contemplating and analysing the details, what ever happened to just saying it how it is? Whilst our brains are better trained these days than to be too bold, sometimes the best content and marketing ideas come from taking a little more control and stepping in a different direction.

4. Be In It All The Way

It’s all very well though to create great content, but really it has no use if you don’t do the second part of the job right either. It’s one thing to write winning content, but to get it published in the right spots is a whole new game ball.

After you have found an effective outreach placement for your content, make sure you promote it. Use social media to share it around and ask friends and employees to do the same.

5. See through Google’s Eyes

Whilst great content is written for people to read it also needs to be search engine friendly. Optimising content for Google is essential for good rankings. Make sure you are identifying and using relevant keywords and external and internal links. It’s also important to give an appropriate heading, title and description.

As adults we strive to lose our childish behaviours in order to fit into a grown up world. There are, however, characteristics that help us in our professions and enable us to have a certain edge not everyone is brave enough to go for.

This article is written by Jayde Ferguson, who writes for White Chalk Road, a leading SEO and Online Marketing Perth Company.

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Constructing Compelling Content: Top 5 Marketing Tips

Apple iOS 7 App Development Market Changes | Bosmol - Social Media & Web 2.0 Internet Marketing News

Apple has been redefining the dynamics of the smartphone market since its inception. Almost every Apple product has brought a revolution along with its release. Every new iPhone has set new records for the sale of iPhones across the globe. The reason for this success is not too difficult to decipher. With the excellence that Apple offers, this success is only obvious. Nevertheless, along with the users’ experience of smartphones, there is something else too that is greatly impacted by every new release of the Apple industry- it is the application development industry.

With the popularization of smartphones in the last five years, a new industry emerged- the industry for application development for different mobile operating systems. These applications have changes the way the people think, work, act, and entertain themselves. You can today find an application for practically everything.

With the change in the operating system, the application development industry also sees a massive change. In September 2013, Apple came out with its latest developments- the iOS 7, the iPhone 5c, and the iPhone 5S. The two new iPhones- iPhone 5c and iPhone 5S both carry the new iOS 7. Therefore, it is the iOS 7 that will change the game now. With some additions and other changes, the iTunes would see a hustle of new applications and many apps being upgraded for the new operating system. Since 2007, Apple always made a few minor changes to the operating systems, which did not greatly disturb the app development world. This time however, the iOS 7 includes a number of features that can make hundreds of applications outright redundant. Just a facelift for the apps won’t be sufficient.

Let’s have a look as to how the iOS 7 will impact the app development world-

Camera features- The iOS 7 gives you the option to sort your photos on the basis of time or location. There were hundreds of applications that were just doing the same. Now that the feature is there in the phone itself, we do not need to download applications to do the same.

Siri- One of the most interesting features of the iPhone, Siri has also been upgraded with the iOS 7. With the integration of Siri with websites like Wikipedia, Twitter, and Bing and the photos in the phone, the applications relating to Siri also have a lot to look forward to.

Call block- Blocking unwanted people from calling or messaging you was a major app development avenue. Thousands of applications allowed you to block people from calling you. From blocking few specific numbers to blocking unknown numbers to blocking your entire contact list- you could do everything. Now, the iOS 7 gives you this easy option.

Security- the iOS 7 has significantly improved on the features relating to the security of the phone. With inclusion of a number of anti-theft features, iOS 7 has made useless the plethora of applications providing similar features.

Flashlight- The iOS 7 has an integrated flashlight. Earlier you needed to download an application for this.

New apps- However, the iOS 7 is not only bad news for the app developers. A number of features have opened grand new avenues for application development. One such area to look forward to is the AirDrop API. Be it an online internet advertising company in Melbourne or a social networking site in the Middle East or a fashion house in Europe, every business has a lot to gain from the latest operating system from Apple for their applications.

Ella rich is an advertising expert with specific knowledge in business development, online internet advertising company in Melbourne.It is important to get business the right exposure and that is why Ella has been exploring a lot about potentials of online business directories like My Business Central. She believes that business directories have great possibilities for businesses to grow.

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Apple iOS 7 App Development Market Changes