Author: Franz Malten Buemann

You already know how important social media is to increase brand awareness, generate more leads, and ultimately score more conversions.
The world is on social media — 50% of it, at least — so if you want your product, service, and mission to reach the maximum amount of people, your business needs to be on social media, too.
However, social media can be extremely time-consuming. It also spans so many diverse tasks, ranging from data-based activities like tracking analytics, to creative jobs such as designing graphics.

It can be difficult to find the skills and manpower needed to execute a good social media strategy — which is why you need social media tools to help you out.
Below, we’ll cover the top social media tools you should be using in 2021 to help you save time and increase conversions.

What makes for a good social media tool?
Although the term “social media tool” is very general and can apply to a wide range of services, there are a few key features that your top social media tools should have.
It saves you time.
The goal of a social media tool is to save you time while getting similar — or better — results than you could without it. Look for social media tools that automate a process, but make sure the process still happens correctly, since some shortcuts might be too fast and therefore won’t focus on quality.
It helps you increase brand awareness.
One of the biggest benefits of social media is its ability to increase your brand awareness, which is why each social media tool you select should perform its services with brand awareness in mind.
Maybe your tool of choice is an editing platform such as Lightroom, which can help you create images to match the rest of your feed. Or, maybe it’s an Instagram scheduler like Later so you can preview your profile before you post images. Whatever the case may be, social media tools should focus largely on brand awareness.
It’s easy to use.
Social media tools are only a time-saver if they’re easy and intuitive. Each tool you select should be super user-friendly so that, if needed, your accounting team could edit photos and your creative, right-brained writers could still use the analytics function to track daily social metrics.
Many social media tools provide tutorials on their websites. Others, such as Kicksta, have top-notch customer service so you can get immediate expert advice if you need help getting off the ground.
It’s affordable.
Social media tools should be affordable (and most of them are). Many high-quality social media tools are even free, such as the Unfold app, which is perfect for creating Instagram stories.
With social media tools, there’s no need for you to go back and forth with the accounting department trying to get your budget approved. Most social media tools are already budget-friendly so all you need to do is sign up.
It keeps you organized.
One of the ways social media tools save you time is by keeping you organized, so make sure the social media tools you decide to use are efficient and tidy.
For example, HubSpot’s Social Inbox tool helps you prioritize your social media interactions, and graphic design website Canva saves your designs so you can go back and edit them later.

1. HubSpot’s Social Inbox Tool
Price: Starts at $800/month, included in the Marketing Hub Professional tier
HubSpot’s Social Inbox tool saves you valuable time while still optimizing your social efforts. Schedule your posts, integrate your social networks with your blog, and monitor messages and mentions so you can nurture new leads.
HubSpot also integrates all of your marketing with your CRM, so it’s easy to figure out how many leads and customers you’re receiving directly from social media. “HubSpot Marketing Hub … puts the potential of corporate marketing within everyone’s reach,” one customer says.

2. Kicksta
Price: Starts at $49/month for individual creatives
Kicksta is an Instagram growth service that helps you get more organic followers on your Instagram business account. Using your company account, the growth service “likes” around 30,000 photos a month on carefully-targeted accounts. Those users — real people, not spam bots or fake accounts — will begin to follow your account, increasing your brand awareness.
Kicksta is a good fit for any industry and provides a friendly, responsive, and helpful customer success team. “Kicksta helps introduce new audiences to our brand while providing consistent organic Instagram growth,” says Ryan Beltran, CEO of watch company Original Grain. “It’s great for social proof too!”

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3. Lightroom
Price: Starts at $9.99/month
Adobe’s Lightroom product is a tool that lets you organize and edit photos. Since social media is all about visuals, it’s critical your business’s social media accounts showcase vibrant, on-brand photos.
Sliders, filters, and many other features make Lightroom a user-friendly tool to create beautiful photos even if you don’t have much editing experience. Lightroom is available for both mobile and desktop, and best of all, changes made on one device immediately apply to all devices.

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4. Canva
Price: Free, or starts at $9.95/month
Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design website where you can create custom, on-brand graphics for your company’s social media accounts. The website has dozens of templates — everything from Facebook banners to Instagram stories to Twitter posts — so if starting from scratch to create social graphics seems intimidating, use a template instead.
One user said, “Canva has been a lifesaver to me and my business. No more hours sitting in front of the computer coming up with graphics for social media post[s] or Pinterest post[s].”

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5. Unfold
Price: Free
Described as “a toolkit for storytellers”, Unfold is an iOS and Android app that helps you create beautiful templates for Instagram stories. Bringing your creative visions to life is the driving idea behind Unfold.
It’s an ideal app for lifestyle brands who want to create stylish collages to keep their social media accounts on-brand and receive the maximum amount of engagement from followers.

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6. HypeAuditor
Price: Starts at $200/month for 50 reports
You’ll never earn money from fake followers — they just make your engagement look bad (think millions of followers, but only a few hundred likes per photo) and ruin your reputation. That’s why HypeAuditor weeds out fake followers on your Instagram account to help you determine your organic reach.
Additionally, HypeAuditor analyzes your audience to figure out where they live, their age and gender, and which of your followers are ghosts.

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7. Retouchup
Price: Starts at $0.25 per image
The website Retouchup provides an easy way to edit photos for social media, from basic color correction to more advanced Photoshop-like features such as adding or removing people from a photo. With Retouchup, you don’t do the work yourself — instead, just submit a photo and the website’s experts will edit the photo for you within 24 hours.
“You’re making me look like an awesome photographer!” one user gushed. Retouchup can save you time during the editing stage, and make your images appear higher-quality and more compelling.

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8. Marketing Video Builder
Price: Free, or starts at $33/month.
Marketing Video Builder by Animoto helps you make professional-tier videos to engage with audiences. Videos can be created in minutes using the online video editor. The best part about the tool is that you don’t even need editing experience to get started.
You can increase brand awareness by making videos for your company, and share them across social channels to grow your audience. Additionally, if you’re a HubSpot customer, you can integrate that account with your Animoto account.

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When you create videos, you can use a pre-built storyboard template curated by either Animoto or HubSpot. Alternatively, you can make a video from scratch. When you’re done, you can export the video to your HubSpot file manager with one click and manage it from there.
Animoto also integrates with Getty Images, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn, so you can have video tools for a good portion of social media platforms all in one place.

In addition to the HubSpot Social Inbox Tool, which is helpful while planning and executing campaigns, these social media campaign tools are also helpful to add to your tool belt.
1. Falcon
Price: $129/mo.
Falcon is a social media management platform that allows you to create posts for social networks on a collaborative content calendar.
It integrates with HubSpot, Microsoft, and Salesforce to help users streamline marketing tasks among teams. For a visual to see how Falcon integrates with other software, refer to the photo below:

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HubSpot customers can use this integration to create audience segments. These segmentations will help you target your customers with social media posts, making sure your content is being seen by the right people. Any changes you make within HubSpot will automatically transfer to Falcon, so you don’t have to worry about manually updating content.
2. Quuu
Price: Free, or starts at $19/month.
Quuu is a platform that helps its users execute visually stunning social media content. It automates the time-consuming process of properly creating professional, engaging multimedia assets for campaigns.
When using Quuu, you can choose from over 500 interest categories, like marketing or real estate, and receive content suggestions based on those choices. You’ll receive a certain amount of content suggestions per day per profile based on your settings, ensuring you’ll always have relevant posts for your audience.

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If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can integrate the two platforms. Quuu finds the best content for your social profiles, and HubSpot lets you control those suggestions. You can go to your draft folder via HubSpot and pick which content you want to upload if your Quuu account isn’t automated, which you can change.
Quuu looks for content so you don’t have to. The tool also integrates with Buffer, Hootsuite, and Socialbee.
3. Later
Price: Free, or starts at $7.50/month
Social media marketing platform Later lets you plan and schedule your Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest posts. The drag-and-drop calendar makes it easy for you to map out your upcoming posts and see at a glance how your feed will look.
You can also track your analytics, which will help you figure out the best time of day to post, and the best hashtags to use. Additionally, the Linkin.Bio feature for Instagram helps your posts become instantly shoppable.
“I love that you can either use it via the website or app on-the-go,” one user remarks. “It is one of those apps that I could not live without … Later is [a] super easy tool to set up.”

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There are numerous choices out there for high-quality social media tools. Ultimately, it’s your job to decide which tool is the best fit for your needs, your budget, your campaigns, and your marketing goals.
4. Design Wizard
Price: Free, or starts at $9.99/month
This tool lets you create different types of content, like photos and videos, with no professional editing experience required. If you have a limited budget and time on your hands, this free visual content tool is ideal for you.
Design Wizard has a library of over a million multimedia graphics for inspiration and use. Plus, all images are licensed for commercial use, so if you use one from the site, you won’t run into copyright infringements.

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Over to You
Your beautiful, on-brand images will be able to integrate with HubSpot. You can manage all of the files you create with Design Wizard from your HubSpot account, which you can use for campaign posts.
Need a painless way to track your social interactions? Try HubSpot’s social inbox tool today.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Companies are still struggling to improve the reach and reliability of personalized data about potential clients and customers.
Part of the problem is supply — bigger data volumes offer greater insight around B2B and B2C buying preferences both immediately and over time.
But variety also plays a role. While information about individuals at a company (demographics) and the technology they use (technographics) can help enhance marketing and sales outcomes, there’s also a place for firmographics, which are datasets that help businesses effectively segment organizations into meaningful categories.
The challenge? Although this is a great high-level definition, it doesn’t offer much in the way of specifics or actionable strategies.
In this complete guide to firmographics, we’ll define firmographic data with a look at key forms and functions, explore how it’s used for segmentation, and dig into the types of questions that can help your company locate — and leverage — firmographic data.

What is firmographic data?
Demographic data focuses on information tied to individuals. Data such as contact names and customer purchase preferences are examples of demographic assets that can be used to drive targeted marketing campaigns.
Firmographic data shifts the focus to organizations — or firms — to collect and analyze key information about the operation of enterprises themselves. Common firmographic data examples include:

Industry type — From manufacturing or logistics organizations to financial, professional or legal service firms, industry type is a key vector for segmentation. Worth noting? Many companies occupy more than one industry vertical and can also occupy multiple firmographic segments.

Organizational size — How big is the organization, both in terms of physical location and staff size?

Total sales and revenue — Both quarterly and annual information is relevant here. While annual sales and revenue data can drive long-term sales strategies, quarterly results can help pinpoint more immediate needs.

Current location — Where is the company headquarters located? How many satellite offices do they have, and where?

Ownership framework — Is the company a public organization? A private enterprise? An NGO, charity or non-profit? Each comes with their own unique market approach.

Growth trends — Is the company growing, downsizing or maintaining its current market position? All three movement metrics offer opportunity, but must be approached in different ways.

There’s also a crossover segment of firmographic and demographic data as it relates to specific job roles, titles, departments, and potential buying power.
By understanding more about the people responsible for decision-making within an organization along with the operational framework that surrounds them, businesses can better target marketing efforts to receptive audiences with the power to take immediate action.
Benefits of Firmographic Segmentation
The primary goal of firmographic data is to help organizations segment potential B2B customers into meaningful segments, which in turn can reduce the distance between observation and action.
If marketers, sales teams, and C-suites have access to segmented information that classifies prospective clients by size, location, revenue, or current growth trajectory, they don’t need to spend time and effort separating this data before making decisions. Instead, potential purchasing partners are pre-sorted into relevant categories.
Segmentation offers specific benefits for organizations, such as:
1. Improved market targeting.
Understanding the physical and market size of potential B2B buyers can significantly improve sales targeting. Here’s why: Smaller, “mom and pop” businesses don’t have the same needs as larger enterprises — while both are potentially valuable clients, their paths from initial contact to sales conversion are significantly different. For example, while many SMBs want one-size-fits all solutions to help reduce total complexity, many enterprises are after custom-built tools and technologies to help address specific issues.
2. Enhanced customer service.
Leveraging key firmographic data about where companies are located and how their employees are geographically distributed can help improve customer service offerings. Consider a manufacturing firm located entirely within a single state — chances are they’ll prioritize partners that can deliver local service. Multinational firms, meanwhile, often prefer on-demand, distributed digital services.
3. Long-term buying potential.
Companies moving up the market offer the potential for B2B businesses to get in on the ground floor and enjoy increased conversion volume over time. Enterprises that are currently downsizing, meanwhile, also come with sales potential but require a different approach with services that are both cost-effective in the short term and can scale over time as revenue targets evolve.
Key Firmographic Questions
So how do you gather firmographic data that’s relevant to your brand and can help drive corporate success? It all starts with asking the right questions. Commonly-used queries include:

When was the company founded?
How many employees in total does the company have?
How many staff at each office or satellite location?
What is the company’s revenue per year?
What percentage of their target market share does the company currently have?
Are they currently in a growth phase, downsizing or remaining relatively consistent?
What does their organizational structure look like (flat leadership, standard hierarchy, etc.)

When it comes to collecting firmographic data, you’ve got three broad options: Survey companies directly, conduct online reconnaissance or purchase firmographic information from a data clearinghouse or similar service.
All three come with potential benefits and drawbacks. For example, while surveys offer the most accurate firmographic information, many companies prefer not to share this data — especially if you’re taking a “cold call” approach.
Online searches, meanwhile, can turn up a host of useful firmographic data but there’s no guarantee about its accuracy or relevance; the actionable value of data gathered this way depends heavily on the source and the date the information was obtained.
Purchasing data from a reputable seller provides the most accurate and up-to-date option, but prices vary significantly and it’s worth cross-referencing this information with publicly available sources to ensure sellers are consistently accurate.
Finding a Firm(ographic) Foundation
Timely, accurate and actionable “graphic” data — demographic, technographic, and firmographic — can help B2B organizations create custom-built sales and marketing strategies and improve overall conversion rates.
To ensure firmographic frameworks deliver intended outcomes, it’s critical for companies to focus on both segmentation forms and decision-making functions.
By asking the right questions, accurately segmenting potential customers and using this data to inform sales and marketing efforts, companies can reduce the time between information and action while simultaneously increasing sales success.

A Facebook ad is nothing without a Facebook landing page. You need to attract people to click on your message, but at the same time, you’ll need to keep them interested once they do it. How? In this article, you’ll learn how to create that landing page for a successful Facebook ad campaign.

For more than a decade, email has been the marketing channel that delivers the highest ROI. A study from McKinsey & Company reports that email marketing can be as much as 40 times more effective at reaching target customers than social media.
At the same time, we’ve seen the emergence of Chatbots, which can be effective when people engage with your website. Forty-five percent (45%) of consumers report they prefer to use chatbots to communicate with brands when it comes to getting a quick response, while a survey by Campaign Monitor revealed email was among their most important channels to customer communications.
 

Perhaps it’s time for marketers to start bridging the gap. It’s not a matter of one strategy versus the other; combining both email marketing strategies and the use of Chatbots can boost engagement and accelerate results.
Integrating email marketing and chatbots
Email marketing and Chatbots create an inbound marketing strategy and outbound marketing strategy that complement each other. Here are some of the strategies you need to use to make email and Chatbots work together to boost your marketing efforts.
Securing email addresses and permissions
At the heart of many of your marketing efforts, especially email marketing, is procuring the email addresses of your customers and potential customers. A qualified list of people who have opted in to receive email from you provides a multitude of opportunities for marketing. Getting that email address and getting people to agree to receive offers and content from you is crucial.
Here’s where Chatbots can help. When visitors are browsing your website, a Chatbot can interact at key moments to request email addresses. For example, if someone is reading your blog, a Chatbot might ask them if they would be interested in subscribing to your email newsletter. If someone is reading about one of your products, a Chatbot can pop up and ask if they’re interested in receiving discount coupons.
An effective strategy is to offer content that provides real value, such as eBooks, guides, demos, and how-to videos. Someone looking at a website for sauces might be willing to exchange their email address for recipes, for example.
The more customized you can make the “ask,” the more success you’re likely to have.
Gathering the data you need for effective segmentation
One of the most effective strategies for email marketing is segmenting. Rather than blanket customers with a generic email, you need to make sure your marketing efforts are relevant and customized. Segmenting your list narrows the target and gives you a much greater likelihood of hitting the target with the right message.

Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to get opened. Personalization requires segmenting. When done right, marketers using email segmenting strategies report an incredible 760% increase in revenue generated from email.
Segmentation takes many forms. Based on your product or service, and your industry, you might segment your audience by:

Demographics (Age, Gender, Income, Marital Status, Education, etc.)
Geo-location
Past purchases
Purchase Intent
Buying Frequency
Stage in the Customer Journey
Page Views
and more.

Chatbots are one of the most effective ways to gather the data you need to efficiently segment your list. This is because you can ask your customers specific questions to get the data point you need to craft effective marketing messages.
Some of the data you want to collect may not be supported by the chatbot software or email platform you’re using. For example, you may not be able to directly pass images or larger files from a chatbot to your email engine.
You may need developers to create customer software for these functions. Once you have the data, you’ll be able to better qualify potential customers to tailor Chatbot conversations, sales leads, and develop a segmented email marketing list.
Improve your conversion rates
Someone who has shown an interest in your product or services by visiting your website and then engaging further with you will have a much higher potential for conversion than a casual visitor and sending mass emails.
Chatbots can personalize the conversation by providing relevant information based on page content and visitor queries. This helps move potential customers through the sales funnel. Your email can follow-up on specific topics or questions, or send them back to the website for more information.
Another advantage of Chatbots is that they don’t take breaks or vacations. When someone is ready to engage with your company, Chatbots are there to keep the conversation moving forward. Nearly two-thirds of internet users say the best part about Chatbots is 24-hour service. When they read that marketing email at 2 am, Chatbots will still be there to answer their questions.
Provide diversity in your communication channels
90% of customers say they want a seamless interaction with brands using omnichannel communications. The more ways you can interact with consumers, the better chance you have to convert them. Research shows that companies deploying an omnichannel communication strategy for customer engagement retain nearly 3 times the number of customers versus companies without multiple channels for customer interaction.
Having a website, being available by phone, email, social channels, and Chatbots present multiple ways for people to engage with your brand. It makes sure customers don’t fall through the cracks and provides them a way to get the answers to their questions quickly and in their preferred method of communicating.
Chatbots can personalize the experience, provide on-the-spot answers, and help gather the data you need to personalize your email marketing campaigns.
Wrapping up
Creating effective email campaigns, taking advantage of marketing automation, and integrating Chatbots into your marketing mix can create synergies that build on top of each other for more effective marketing. 
It takes special skills and experience to do it well. If you don’t have the right experience in-house already, you may want to consider turning to a top staffing agency to help with recruiting. It takes the right team with the experience to build and manage the tech, create the marketing, and make it all work together seamlessly.
The post How Chatbot and Email Integration Can Boost Engagement appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

Keywords are king when it comes to engaging users and increasing your search engine ranking.
As a result, search engine optimization (SEO) has become a multi-million dollar business with a host of experts offering advice on how best to move up the search engine results page (SERP) and claim the coveted number one spot.
Most actionable SEO advice boils down to a few solid suggestions: Do your market research so you know which keywords are relevant to your target audience, and create content that’s timely and relevant.
Something that doesn’t make the SEO rounds quite so often is keyword cannibalization. While this unpleasant-sounding issue won’t sink your website, it can cause your pages and posts to rank lower than they should and — if left unchecked — could harm the overall reputation of your site.
Here’s what you need to know about finding, evaluating, and eliminating keyword cannibalization.

What is Keyword Cannibalization in SEO?
Keyword cannibalization occurs when two or more pages on your website end up competing for the same keyword.
Let’s say your company sells roof shingles. Your blog content will likely include posts about how to extend shingle life through proper care and maintenance — with the right combination of authority and actionable insight, this kind of content can attract the attention of your target audience and lead them to purchase shingles from your site when their home requires repair or replacement.
To ensure you’re capturing the right audience, you do a keyword search and find that “roof shingle prices” ranks extremely high. You then create multiple pages that all leverage this keyword — one piece might deal with the most costly shingle types, another with less-expensive options, and a third with the costs of potential repairs if shingles are damaged.
The problem? By using the same keyword for each page, you’re essentially stealing search engine rankings from yourself.
Here’s why: From the perspective of search engines each of these pages is its own separate entity with its own authority and page ranking, meaning your pages are fighting for SEO attention.
What’s more, these similar-but-different pages will split your click-through rate (CTR) across multiple links, in turn decreasing the value of each page. As a result, these three pages might rank sixth, seventh, and eighth in SERPs while a single page could rank second or even first.
How to Detect Keyword Cannibalization
The simplest way to detect keyword cannibalization is to create a spreadsheet containing the keyword(s) for any content you create.
Before making a new post, check your spreadsheet and see if you’ve already used the same keyword. If so, consider tweaking your content to focus on another keyword or ensure that the content you’re creating is substantially different than that of previous posts.
You can also check for keyword cannibalization with a quick online search of your most relevant keywords. If you see multiple pages from your site listed close to one another in SERPs for the same keyword, you have a cannibalization problem.
In addition, keyword cannibalization checker tools can help ensure you’re not missing potential overlap — better to know ASAP and modify your content before it gets pushed down the search rankings by more targeted posts from your competitors.
How to Eliminate Keyword Cannibalization
So what happens if you discover keyword cannibalization on your site?
First, take a look at the content on each page. Wherever possible, combine the information from both pages into a single post to boost search rankings and increase authority.
In the case of our shingle company, for example, it’s worth combining the “most costly” and “least expensive” shingle pages into a single post that targets the “roof shingle prices” keyword. If there are particular aspects of low-cost or high-priced shingles that could help customers make their decision, create new posts with new keywords, and link to them in the original post.
In other cases, you may find that older posts on your site are still ranking highly thanks to targeted keyword use but are no longer relevant to your company’s product line or service offering. Here, it’s a good idea to integrate any useful data from older posts into newer content and then delete the original, in turn allowing search engines to rank up your most relevant post.
Worth noting? As with anything in SEO, there are exceptions to the keyword cannibalization rule.
For example, if you have two posts with the same keyword that are both highly ranked and their ranking position isn’t fluctuating, there’s no need to combine them.
If competitors’ pages start to rank higher, however, or if your top-ranked page stops delivering sustained click-through rates, this could indicate the need for action.
Keyword Cannibalization Checker Tools
While keeping a spreadsheet of page URLs, metadata, and keyword use can help reduce the risk of unintentional cannibalization, this becomes prohibitively complex as sites scale up.
Consider an ecommerce site that sells multiple types of winter jackets — with a product page for each jacket, category pages for each jacket type, and blog posts around jacket care, storage, and repair, it’s easy for keywords to overlap and SERP to suffer.
Keyword cannibalization checker tools can help streamline this process and reduce the risk of missing a potential keyword problem. Some popular options include:
1. Keylogs Keyword Cannibalization Checker

The Keylogs Cannibalization Checker offers a free trial — simply log in with a Google account that’s connected to your website(s) and the Checker does the rest.
You’ll get results about any pages on your site that are competing for the same ranked keyword along with strategies to resolve the issue. Worth noting? The free tier of this tool only tracks three keywords across one site. Paid plans are required for multiple sites and unlimited keyword tracking.
2. SEMrush Position Tracking Tool

SEMrush is a popular SEO tracking and monitoring toolset. With a paid plan, site owners have access to a Cannibalization report within the SEMrush Position Tracking Tool, which provides a cannibalization score for the keywords entered.
A 100% score means no cannibalization has been detected — lower scores indicate potential problems and will specify both affected keywords and cannibal pages.
3. Google Search Console

Using the performance report section of Google Search Console lets you view the queries that have earned your site impressions and clicks from Google searches.
Drill down into these queries with the “pages” tab to see a list of URLs that rank for specific keywords and queries — if you see more than one URL from your site listed for the same keyword, you may have a cannibalization issue.
4. SEOScout Cannibalization Checker

SEOScout’s Cannibalization Checker offers an alternative to managing keyword spreadsheets. Simply create an account for a 7-day free trial, enter your site’s domain and the tool will create a report detailing any duplicate keyword rankings, allowing you to quickly track down and eliminate cannibal content.
5. Moz Keyword Explorer

The Moz Keyword Explorer lets you find ranking keywords, determine page ranking positions, and make decisions about which pages to keep and which ones need to be reworked or eliminated. Moz also makes it easy to download CSV spreadsheet files which can then be analyzed offline for duplicate keyword listings.
Staying Aware of Keyword Cannibalization
For site owners and admins, cannibal keyword content is problematic — multiple URLs ranking for the same keyword can negatively impact page authority, frustrate potential customers, and reduce SERPs.
Solve for keyword cannibalization by finding duplicate keyword use, then combining or deleting content as needed to ensure your most relevant content earns the highest SERP placement with popular search engines.

Did you know that there are more than 600 million blogs on the internet, and that 77% of web-surfers read blogs regularly?
Blogging has exploded since its humble beginnings in the 1990s, and many people today interact with blogs frequently if not daily.
By setting up a blog, you have the opportunity to make meaningful connections with other people, whether you want to share your recipes, talk about your lifestyle, or sell products and services. Whatever the topic, blogging serves as an outlet that can even become profitable.
But before you see dollar signs, you’ll need to set up a blog, which involves choosing a content management system (CMS), deciding on themes and color schemes, and reaching your target audience.
This guide will help you navigate the process of setting up a blog successfully across various platforms.
But before you set up a blog, you’ll need to choose a CMS. Let’s dive into that, first.

How to Choose a CMS
You can’t have a blog without a CMS, or a content management system. As the name suggests, this is a system that manages your content. While you could certainly build a blog from scratch with savvy coding skills, a CMS does the hard work for you.
This software makes it nearly effortless to switch up your blog’s font styles, colors, and overall theme. It also means you can generate content much easier, simply clicking a few buttons to add photos and videos.
All of these seemingly simple actions can be difficult to implement through HTML and CSS coding, which is why many bloggers opt to use a CMS. This way, you can dive right into making great content.
When you’re looking at different CMS platforms, there are a few things to consider.

User-Friendly Interface
Price
Customization
Support
Extensions
Security
Marketing Capabilities

Let’s dive into each element to help you decide what you need in a CMS.
1. User-Friendly Interface
The point of choosing a CMS is to make creating your blog easier for you. If you find it difficult to navigate the dashboard or the text editor, blogging will just like a chore.
Look for a CMS with drag-and-drop capabilities, and unless you have top-notch developer skills, steer clear of anything that requires heavy coding.
2. Price
As we’ll cover below, it is completely possible to start a blog for free. But if you are looking for more robust features, you’ll need to consider your budget.
If you are looking at paid platforms, consider what you get with each CMS for the price, and double-check for hidden fees.
3. Customization
You want your blog to look and perform how you’ve envisioned it, so make sure your CMS allows for customization through different themes and templates that can also be adjusted as you see fit.
For example, with Ceros, you can completely customize every element of the content you publish without adding a single line of code.
4. Support
If your blog glitches while you’re writing an important post, you’ll want to be able to get help right when you need it.
CMS support ranges widely — you might only find a digital handbook or FAQ page full of common issues and fixes with no number or live chat to reach for urgent matters.
Or the platform could only have an email or number available during standard office hours, Monday through Friday. Meanwhile, some CMS platforms have extensive support options, including agents available 24/7.
If you don’t have experience working with CMS systems and want access to hands-on support, take this into consideration when comparing platforms.
5. Extensions
One of the most helpful features for CMS platforms is the ability to work with third-party extensions or plugins, which add even more functionality to your blog.
There are extensions for nearly everything you could think of, so whether you want help with search engine optimization (SEO) or the ability to create galleries or social media feeds on your blog, extensions and plugins can help you do so. If your CMS isn’t compatible with most of these applications, your blog could suffer.
6. Security
Protecting your information and your content is important. You could also lose your audience’s and customers’ trust if your blog is compromised. As such, you’ll want to make sure the CMS you choose has plenty of security features.
Check if SSL, Firewall and content delivery network (CDN) are included, and be sure updates and vulnerability scans are done frequently. This also relates to support — is someone available to help you should your site be compromised? If not, run — don’t walk — to another platform.
7. Marketing Capabilities
Once your blog is established and you are producing content, make sure you can get this content to your target audience. Check to see if your CMS offers options for social and email marketing, or if it offers compatibility with extensions such as UpContent to make sharing your content simple.
How to Set Up a Blog for Free
If you are working with a limited budget, you can certainly start blogging for free. There will be some limitations, but you can always choose to upgrade or move your content to a paid CMS. To get started, you’ll need to find a free blogging platform. Common free blogging platforms include

WordPress.com (not to be confused with WordPress.org)
Blogger
Wix
Weebly

Tumblr. Keep in mind that some free blogging platforms will restrict your freedom with domain name and may be limited in services like support, security, and customization. After choosing a free platform, you’ll sign up and head for the dashboard to choose a free theme or design template, then use the platform’s CMS to add content.
How to Set Up a Blog
Whether you decide to invest in a blog or go the free route, there are a few different ways to get started depending on the platform you choose. Here are some of the most-popular blogging platforms and how to set up your blog on each one.
1. WordPress
If you want to blog on WordPress, you’ll need to choose a domain name and a hosting service. The hosting service is the server space that stores your website’s files and information, making it accessible to others on the internet.
Hosting is typically a paid service; there are free options, but be wary of the security, support, and functionality if you do choose a free host.
Once you’ve selected the domain name, such as yourblog.com, and a host, you’ll be able to create your WordPress account. From there, you can access the dashboard, where you can decide on themes, add plugins, and, of course, write and publish content.
2. Blogger
If you are looking for a popular and free CMS, Blogger, formerly BlogSpot, is a free blogging platform by Google.
To get started, visit Blogger and create an account with your Gmail address and password. From there, you’ll choose a profile. If you don’t wish to have the name associated with your Gmail address on your blog, you can choose a limited profile.
After this, you’ll be taken to the dashboard, where you can choose your blog name and theme. Then it’s as easy as using the straightforward CMS to write your blog.
3. Wix
Wix is another free and simple CMS to consider when setting up a blog. Simply sign up for an account, then you can choose from templates.
Note that while Wix offers many templates, only certain ones offer Wix Blog. If you choose one without this application, you can still add it on later through Wix’s App Market.
Customize the template to fit your vision, then go to the Wix Editor>Menus & Pages>Show More>Rename to name your blog. Wix offers free hosting, but if you want your own domain name, you’ll need to establish that and then connect it to your blog via the Wix Editor. Once these logistics are set, you’re ready to start a new post and get to blogging.
Now that you know the ins and outs of starting a blog, you’re ready to get started! Evaluate CMS platforms based on support, security, and design and functionality features.
Once you’ve decided on a CMS, the platform will make the rest of your work a breeze. And once that blog is up and running, you can start considering even more options, like marketing and advertising, to make your brand known and even turn a profit.