Let's face it, our collective attention spans are either at zero or hovering right around it. Whether you're in marketing, advertising or any industry for that matter, the world we live in does not exactly allow for much patience.
We are all looking for shortcuts to get what we need to get done in a given day.
From Instagram to email signatures to increasing site traffic inexpensively, this list is going to help you save time, resources, and lots of headaches.
Coffee may have the same effect, but I digress.
Without further ado, here are 10 online marketing shortcuts to increase productivity.
1. Photo Map Labeling
When you upload any picture to Instagram, you have the option to “Add to Photo Map” in which you can either select one or create your own. Brands like Puma who don’t have a single physical location use the location to label its photos with the product name.
2. Maximize Your Email Signature
If you’re just using the standard block of text you’re missing a valuable opportunity. It takes less than a minute to add a line to promote your latest product, service, offer, or resource, which means you are marketing to everyone who gets an email from you. To make this technique even more effective and stop people from ignoring the signature, periodically change up what you link to, the font, or the font color.
3. Reading Emails On Your Phone
Phone it in: Most email today is read on a mobile device, limiting the amount of text that is visible on screen… and the attention span. You have just 20-35 characters for the subject line, depending upon the device, and even less for the content preview (and you thought
4. Editorial Calendar
Create an editorial calendar for social media activities and schedule your posts. One single research for a week worth of posts is much more effective than doing research each day. Extra tip: schedule tweets with images directly in your Twitter Ads account. If you don't have a Twitter Ads account, it's easy and free to set up and the benefits are worthwhile, as it provides more engagement with your users.
5. Post on Several Social Sites
If you maintain accounts on several social media networks, automatically publish posts on several accounts, by using IFTTT (If This Then That.) If you focus only on Facebook and Twitter, an alternative would be to connect your Facebook account to your Twitter account. In any case (whether you use IFTTT or not), take into consideration that Twitter posts should be a maximum of 140 characters long.
6. Make Sure You Get Credit
Limit yourself to 120 characters on Twitter. According to Scott Cohen, CEO of 180Fusion, “In order to make it easy for people to retweet your material, make tweets that are 20 characters fewer than the 140 you are given. Twitter's unwritten ethos is that credit is always given to the original tweeter. That means a retweet or your original tweet will look like this: RT @yourname."
7. Micro-content
Instead of crafting a catchy paragraph for a social media post, opt for a custom graphic instead with a headline that solves a pain point or eludes to a little controversy. If you don’t have a designer or creative team, here’s a valuable shortcut: use Canva.
Canva is an online image creator that provides colors, backgrounds, fonts and layouts for a multitude of platforms. There’s a plethora of free options, and even more paid options that are just $1.00 per image. Posts with images get 2x more engagement than those without, so use this trick to garner attention from prospects.
8. Infographics
Hiring infographic designers can be a pain. There are sites like Fiverr, 99Designs, Odesk, and Freelancer.com to name a few. But how do you choose? According to, you guessed it, an infographic about hiring infogrophic freelancers, co-founder & VP Product at Zintro, Inc. Enrique Levin notes, “In helping thousands of companies hire consultants for a wide array of projects, we’ve found that businesses often have trouble identifying the exact right expert for their specific job (particularly when they have multiple projects they’re managing at scale). Hiring the wrong consultant for your project can cost you significant time, money, and energy.”
9. Keep Up-To-Date On What’s Hot
Tap into current trends. Consistently creating compelling content is a challenge for a lot of bloggers. One way to pump out fresh posts is to use Google Trends. It is a valuable tool that lets you know on an hour-by-hour basis what the most popular searches are. If you write a timely post centered on one of these trends, you may get a quick traffic boost to your blog.
10. Increase Client’s Traffic Volume Inexpensively
Chris Madden, co-founder of Matchnode had this to say on how to generate quality traffic quickly and inexpensively. “For a client that had low search volume (and expensive clicks) because of the product category (consumer electronics), we used data,
