Saturday, July 2, 2016

Free Web Clipping and Note Sharing

Evernote has made news this week with its 8th Anniversary Celebration and the announcement that it is raising subscription fees for the paid plan of its note-taking app.

The good news is that Evernote Basic, which supports web clipping and note sharing is still free. On Basic, you can access notes on up to two devices, such as a computer and phone, two computers, or a phone and a tablet, as well as on the web, so you can continue to take your notes with you throughout your day. Passcode lock on the mobile app, formerly a paid feature, is now available on Basic as well.

Those who do not want to pay the increased fees for Evernote's paid plans do have other choices such as OneNote, a free service that has many features including clipping content from Web pages, attaching PDFs to notes, drawing (if you have a touch screen laptop)and table tools.



Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Easily Embed Web Content Into Your Presentations With New Liveslides Technology


Presenters are now able to embed any web content directly into their presentations thanks to a new PowerPoint and Keynote add-in called LiveSlides. Poll Everywhere, the company that pioneered the mobile audience response system, created the technology which is now available on both Windows and Mac platforms.

Liveslides enables seamless presentations without flipping back and forth between the presentation and a web browser to show a video, ask a poll question, or view a reporting dashboard. The add-in makes it possible to embed directly within the slide deck for a smooth presentation.

With the rise of social media, presenters and venues are increasingly using services such as Twitter and Facebook to interact with attendees during live events. LiveSlides makes it possible to display media streams directly within a slide deck and bring the backchannel to the foreground to increase audience interaction.

LiveSlides allows users to put real-time data into presentations. In the business world it's not uncommon for someone to take a screenshot of a live data dashboard, paste the picture in a slide, and present it. The tool also allows corporate trainers to demonstrate eLearning portals right within their presentations, and show participants how to use them.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Dot Biz Buzz: The Future of Web Content Management

Web content management (WCM) software has outgrown being only a tool for creating web content,according to Gartner, Inc., In addition to serving content, WCM vendors have set their sights on helping companies manage their customers experiences. This shift is due to the fact that consumers are harder to reach and more discerning, according to Mark Floisand, VP of product marketing for Sitecore, one of many companies in the rapidly growing WCM market.

According to a report by the market research and consulting firm Markets and Markets, the web content management market will almost double to $6.85 billion by 2020, a compound annual growth rate of 14.5%. as companies' needs mature and they outgrow homegrown solutions.

As consumers increasingly interacting with brands via smartphones and tablets, helping businesses respond to their mobile market is a top priority for WCM vendors.

But as big as the mobile trend has become it is not the sole trend impacting the web content management industry. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are as important as ever and may become the reason that WCM and CRM join forces at some point.

Although many companies continue to rely on their DIY solutions, when they decide to acquire WCM software, they find that is has become somewhat of a commodity. So the growing demand is for WCM solutions that help them manage their customers' experiences as well. Companies such as Sitecore are focused on allowing companies to know each customer as an individual and being able to automate managing customer experiences among the many different channels that exist today.

For more information see gartner.com and sitecore.net.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

Content Boards Can Help You Stay In Touch with Your Readers and Customers

Click a button, curate content, post it to the web and email it to subscribers, and do it all automatically. Marketers can increase reach while decreasing time and resources spent. According to Dan Forootan, president of StreamSend Email Marketing, here are seven ways to make that happen.

1. Make News with Social
Convert social posts into an e-newsletter by creating a content board for social posts, and setting it to pull posts automatically from Facebook. Then set the content board to email new posts on a predetermined schedule.

2. Create a Dynamic Newsletter
Automatically deliver curated web content as an e-newsletter. Any time users see something interesting on the web, they can click on a bookmarklet in their browser to post it, share it and have it emailed automatically to subscribers as an e-newsletter.

3. Keep it Front and Center
Marketers can centralize content strategy with content boards, which act as a repository for content and can be embedded in web sites, shared to social and automatically emailed to subscribers.

4. Touch on Targeted Topics
Businesses can create multiple content boards and easily segment content by topic or target audience. Each board can be associated with its own list for automatic e-newsletter delivery.

5. Boost SEO
Content boards will provide powerful backlinks to businesses’ websites, boosting their website's SEO power.

6. Keep it Fresh
Embed content boards in your website. Every time you post new content to your board, your website will be updated too.

7. Keep it Friendly
Increase engagement with mobile-friendly e-newsletter templates. Take advantage of professionally designed e-newsletter templates optimized to render well across all screens, from the computer desktop to mobile devices.


Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Content Marketing's Role In Attracting and Retaining Readers and Customers

In 2016 content marketing will become even more important for a number of reasons. First and foremost is its ability to amp up Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your site. Positioning your business or blog to come up on the front page of Google and other search engines is essential to people finding you online.

Online SEO is particularly essential if your products or services or only offered online. Your site or blog competes with a mind-boggling amount of other sites and the more buried down they are on the Web, the more difficult it will become to be found and the more expensive if you are relying only on digital ads.

Advertising your way to your potential customers' eyes is a diminishing factor, because not only do people as a rule dislike intrusive online advertising, there is an increasing use of ad-blockers to actually prevent unwanted advertisements, like banners and pop-ups, from appearing on a web page. With new Apple technology digital ads can also be blocked on cell phones.

What do you do? Provide your readers or potential customers with SEO enhanced content about yourself, your products and/or services. Determine what words or search terms that your readers are likely to use when looking for your type of business. Once these are determined,be careful not to "spam" the search engines with over use of your key words and phrases which will be counter-productive and not liked by many search engine algorithms. Describe your products or services in an easy to understand manner.

Write additional copy on them segmented by questions or search terms that your readers or potential customers are likely to want information about. This is not the typical FAQ list, but helpful informative articles, White Papers or even e-brochure and e-book downloads that can help your business provide a value added service. You can also benefit from key word press releases that link back to your site and can be an additional path to attract site traffic from the Web.






Wednesday, February 10, 2016

DotBiz Word Up: RankBrain Helps the Long Tail Searcher Find Your Specialized Content

In the last quarter of 2015 Google announced that it would begin using RankBrain, a machine learning artificial intelligence (AI) system that helps it process search results to provide more relevant results for users. RankBrain uses AI to embed a huge amount of language into mathematical vectors. If it sees an unfamiliar word or phrase, RankBrain can make a guess as to the words or phrases that have a similar meaning and filter search results accordingly.

RankBrain is not just about never-before seen queries, although they are a growing part of Google's 67% chunk of the global search market and Google's approximately 3.5 billion Google searches per day. With RankBrain Google can deliver better results for rarer search terms which sophisticated searchers increasingly use.

Google has said that never-before-seen queries account for some 15 percent of all searches. These and other phrases make up something called the ‘long tail’ search which is not a simple key word or even a couple of key words, but rather a specialized search term entered to return a more focused search result. RankBrain handles the increasing number of long tail searches that more specifically describe what a searcher hopes to find.

What this means for bloggers and other content providers is that frequency of particular keywords in your content is less important. Your copy need not and should not sound as though it is knocking a reader over the head with a particular word, even if that word is as favorable a word as chocolate.

The result will be that RankBrain can hopefully deliver searchers to your content who are in a way pre-qualified for the information you are dispensing or products and services that you are selling. For more information search RankBrain.

Friday, January 22, 2016

Dot Biz Blog Says Intelligent Content Convenes March 2016 in Vegas

Okay, we can all see the first month of 2016 drawing to a close. The new year hype is old, the resolutions are same old, same old and we're all eager to see what's ahead, really ahead. For content marketers and bloggers what you may need is an infusion of new ideas via the Intelligent Content Conference coming up March 7-9 in Las Vegas.

ICC is all about schooling you on the need to scale your content, leverage the right technology, easily repurpose and reuse content, and deliver content to the right person, at the right time, regardless of device. Who attends these gatherings, will you feel out of place and is the trip something you can write off as a biz expense?

Well, the answer to the first part of that question is answered by the organization as the following: Marketing practitioners passionate about leveraging content as an organizational asset, including communications roles, content strategists, managers and creators, and internal content change agents. Sessions will lean toward larger enterprises and those companies that want to bring structure to their content marketing with process and technology.

So, the answer to the second part is only something you can answer, but if you're an indie content provider looking to hook up with a larger enterprise, networking may make that possible. If you want to continue to do you own thing with better insight into the larger scheme of things, chances are you will benefit as well. If you're already involved as a major player you will already know about this conference and have it on your calendar.

Can you write it off? You, bet. And if you're feeling lucky, who knows maybe your stay at The M Resort Spa & Casino, at the special attendee room rate of $150 per night (plus applicable taxes and fees)will bring in enough winnings to pay attending the conference. Check out the details now at Intelligent Content Conference.