Blockchain Tracker:
Blockchain’s Role In Digital Advertising

  

Although it’s still in its infancy stage of being used

outside of the financial arena, blockchain technology is slowly showing signs of impacting other industries. On the tip of everyone’s tongue in the digital advertising arena is blockchain technology. Just as recent as this January, ethereum-based blockchain technology company adChain partnered up with decentralized application studio ConsenSys with the goal of specifically developing a blockchain solution for the online advertising industry.

ConsenSys’ Founder, Joseph Lubin, commented in the joint press release about how blockchain technology adds value to digital advertising: “There is tremendous value and disruption potential of this technology beyond FinTech. The development of smart contract-based applications in digital advertising is an ideal use case for blockchain. Supply chains and value chains are ideal use cases for Ethereum, as it enables many cooperating and competing participants to work fluidly together on a shared platform that they can all trust to realize an efficient and fraud-resistant n-sided marketplace. We’ve been iterating on the adChain blockchain implementation for a year and believe adChain will significantly change the way advertisers and publishers operate their supply chains to exchange ad impressions.” Developed through the Swiss non-profit organization, The Ethereum Foundation, ethereum is a blockchain platform that’s defined as “a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.”

As such, it should come as no surprise that the digital advertising realm is beginning to use blockchain to help prevent fraudulent advertising. The first example of the technology’s use in digital advertising comes from Los Angeles-based startup company MetaX. It seeks to fight ad fraud via its new adChain protocol, which enables its own supply chain to adapt in a scalable, trustworthy and secure manner via blockchain. MetaX’s Co-Founder and CEO, Ken Brook, understands how quickly the digital advertising arena is growing and thus believes standard industry procedures just won’t cut it. “Blockchain has a number of exciting implications for digital advertising. Fraud prevention is a natural first application given the transparency and security blockchain brings, and because fraud is such a major issue for the advertising sector,” he said.

Another avenue blockchain technology is being used for in digital advertising is ad-delivery verification. While trust in advertising isn’t at its highest point, some are touting that blockchain has the ability to be used to see if advertisements are being delivered and whether or not they’re going to the correct place. Blockchain also allows advertisers to track who opened the ad, where it was opened and what possible conversion rates are from the promotional push. Through all of this, blockchain ultimately helps out two parties, which include the digital advertising industry, with its budgeting, and streamlining its services and consumers with transparency into ad practices. By removing any third-party interference, access to information on how advertising works internally and the paths it takes to reach consumers will allow the public to likely have more control over incoming targeted messages.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

The “City of the Future” is One Step Closer to a Blockchain Based Economy

Dubai’s Blockchain Goals

Dubai has quickly grown into a global hub for trade. Now, it’s planning to use blockchain as the basis for its economy, further enhancing this status. Blockchain has the potential to simplify record-keeping and the transport of goods all over the world. In concert with Dubai’s advanced transportation infrastructure and near-zero taxes, businesses will experience Dubai as a secure, reliable business-friendly environment.

Although Blockchain is primarily known as the technological basis of the digital currency Bitcoin, the technology itself can function in many roles. Blockchain allows users to share and track information from transactions and contracts using a digital ledger, and the records are secure, verifiable, and permanent. With blockchain serving as the basis for both private business and government services in Dubai, service provision will be more efficient. In short, doing business in Dubai will become far simpler for any kind of business.

“We want to make Dubai the first blockchain-powered government in the world by 2020,” Aisha Bin Bishr, director general of Smart Dubai, a government office charged with facilitating innovation, told The Wall Street Journal. “It is disruptive for existing systems, but will help us prepare for the future,” she says. This commitment to using blockchain at the government level makes Dubai the first city in the world to promote the technology in this way.

In March, a citywide implementation effort began, led by Smart Dubai. The office will educate both the private and public sectors about the potential of blockchain, and conduct workshops with key stakeholders, public and private, to identify which services can best be enhanced by blockchain and prioritize them for implementation. It also will educate the public and private sectors about the technology’s potential. Once these efforts are finished, Smart Dubai predicts that the blockchain rollout will begin later this year as the public and private sectors collaborate on pilot projects. The office will also build a shared Blockchain as a Service platform for implementing government projects.

City Of The Future

Dubai’s vision for becoming the city of the future goes far beyond a blockchain economy. By 2030, 25% of Dubai’s road transport system will be using AI and will, therefore, be driverless. The use of rooftop solar power will be mandatory by 2030 — the same year the country plans to reach 25% of its goal to generate 75% of the city’s energy via solar power by 2050. With what will be the world’s largest 1000 MW concentrated solar power plant scheduled to open in Dubai in 2020, the city should be on track to reach that goal.

Dubai is also home to “Smart Palm Trees,” 3D-printed trees with Fiber Reinforced Plastic (FRP) that act as community tech hubs throughout the city. The trees provide free wifi, city information, and device charging powered by solar. Dubai is also going to be home to the world’s first 3D-printed skyscraper; the first 3D-printed office is already in use. The city is also planning for a hyperloop, and inviting entrepreneurs and innovators with working ideas for technical solutions to pressing problems to join the Dubai Future Accelerators program to foster more great work.

A blockchain economy will be the next step in this process, and it will fit right in. “We have a very clear objective to make Dubai the capital of the blockchain industry,” Ms. Bishr tells WSJ. “By 2020 we’ll have 100% of applicable government services and transactions happen on blockchain.”

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Reasons Social Media Marketing
Is Still Underrated

  

The numbers on social media marketing are impressive.

More than half of small businesses in the United States are planning to increase their social media marketing budgets in 2017, and the number of businesses using social media marketing has increased, year over year, for more than a decade.Still, social media marketing remains underrated. Business owners and marketers frequently treat it as a second thought—something for an intern to handle, rather than a strategically deep mode of building your reputation and attracting new traffic. Some have even abandoned the idea altogether, refusing to spend any time or money on a strategy that nets a positive ROI for up to 92 percent of businesses that use it. So what’s the deal? Why isn’t everyone on board with the strategy?

The "fad" angle.

Believe it or not, some people still believe that social media—or its use as a marketing strategy—is still a fad just waiting to fizzle out. This is an argument I could have understood back in 2007 when social media platforms were only in use by a small percentage of the population. But now that Facebook has reached more than 1.2 billion users and is still growing, with a corporate foundation that rivals those of Apple or Google, it’s a hard argument to defend. Users have gotten used to the idea of socially interacting online, and platforms keep evolving in new ways to maintain their interest.

You get what you pay for.

Psychologically, people tend to place more value on things that cost more money. For example, in a blind taste test of identical wines whose only difference is price, people claim that the more expensive (yet compositionally identical) wine tastes better. Take this principle to social media marketing; it’s free to claim and build a business profile and to post regularly (as long as you aren’t leveraging paid advertising). Because of that, people don’t value it as much as they do paid advertising. They’re also less likely to pay a professional to work on a social media campaign, knowing that—technically—anyone could do it for free (even if they never actually do it).

Unmeasurable effects.

The return on investment (ROI) of social media is hard to measure, and I’ll be the first to admit it. One of your biggest goals is attracting a large following of people who are enthusiastic about your brand, and improving both your brand’s reputation and brand awareness. These aren’t as objectively measurable as on-site conversions, but they can and do lead to greater consumer interest, which manifests as sales eventually. Trying to pin down an exact value for all these benefits is next to impossible, even for the pros, so the value of a social media campaign is almost always underreported.

Anecdotes.

People also use anecdotal evidence as a basis for their opinions about the strategy. For example, they may know of another business who used social media and didn’t see any results, so they stay away from it in the present. However, these anecdotal examples often don’t examine the types of tactics these businesses used, and they certainly don’t represent the average across multiple businesses.

Apples and oranges.

Ironically, these same business owners often cite the fact that anecdotal evidence can’t prove a strategy’s effectiveness for everybody. They point to major influencers or big businesses in the social media world and explain that social media works for them because it fits naturally with their industry, or because they have the resources to invest in a heavy campaign. It’s true that some industries may be naturally inclined to perform better on social media than others; tech companies and consumer-facing businesses are two good examples. However, social media marketing can be used by practically any company—it may just require an adjustment to your approach.

Poor targeting.

Some businesses look at their own results and use those results as a gauge of the long-term potential of their campaign. But they may not realise that their strategic targeting is interfering with their results. For example, if you buy 1,000 followers using some super cheap follower-adding service, but only 4 or 5 of them ever interact with your posts or visit your site, it could be that the remaining 995 don’t belong to demographics relevant for your business, or that you haven’t been using the right engagement strategies to cultivate interest. Don’t underestimate the potential of a well-researched, strategically focused campaign.

 Lack of investment.

Effective social media marketing can’t be done on a whim. It needs to be planned, researched, and strategically executed. That means you’ll need to spend a significant amount of time or a significant amount of money to see results; and since many business owners aren’t willing to make that investment, they never see a fraction of their potential results. By that point, they’ve seen what a small investment does, and they’re unwilling to make the jump to a larger investment.

Social media marketing isn’t an “underground” strategy; it’s talked about heavily (and I should know), and there’s no shortage of content covering its feasibility and best tactics. But the perceptions of marketers and business owners are still lagging behind the evidence, and they’re only hurting themselves in the process. The more you learn about the effective implementation of social media marketing, the more plainly beneficial it seems—but you have to treat it as a legitimate marketing strategy if you want to research it appropriately.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Ways to monetize your
social media followings

Turn your social media presence into a way to generate revenue — even if you don't have a massive following on Facebook or Twitter.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Does Your Company Really Need to Focus on SEO?

  

Q: Is search engine optimioptimisation important to your digital marketing strategy?
A: Yes and no.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference.

I’ve helped hundreds of local business owners bolster their SEO. In many instances, entrepreneurs have solicited my business after unsuccessfully trying to boost their own SEO for years. The issue isn’t that they are lacking effort, it is that they don’t know the best place to focus their effort.

I’m going to teach all local business owners how to crush it on their own local SEO, taking just five hours to do it. What entrepreneurs don’t realize is that if you have a physical location, you have a huge benefit in your local market. You need to make sure that you use that to your advantage.

What is local SEO? 

I’m sure you have done a Google search and seen the results populate at the top of the page with the map, star ratings, address and phone number. This is what I’m referring to when I say local SEO. This is Google’s Local Snack Pack. Depending on the industry, it has the potential to be the very first result on Google and can make a big difference when it comes to bringing new leads into your business.

Create a Google My Business page.

It is free to create a Google My Business page and shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes to cross this step off your checklist. This will get your business hours, phone number and directions onto Google Search and Maps. Make sure you add pictures of your business and add a great description so people can familiarize themselves with your local brand directly from your Google My Business page. To verify this process, Google will manually send you a postcard with a pin so make sure to check your mail!

Submit your business to local directories. 

After you enter your PIN and verify your Google My Business page, you still have a lot of work left! There are hundreds of local directories across the internet where your business needs to be submitted to. Since you are a busy entrepreneur and we only have five hours to bolster your local SEO, we are going to automate this process. Fortunately, there are services that will take care of this for you. Through Moz Local, Aabaco or Yext, you can get your business submitted to hundreds of directories. The cost associated with this is approximately $89.00 per quarter. This will be one of the most worthwhile investments you can make from a marketing standpoint. After submitting your business to one of the aforementioned services, you will appear on sites like MapQuest, FourSquare and Yahoo Local (to name a few). This process will take you 30 minutes and it will help align your local presence.

Tip: If you have moved businesses or are not confident that all of your local listings are consistent, run this test on Moz to check your listings. It is vital that you have consistency with your brand name, address, phone number and other local indicators.

Get reviews.

I’m frequently asked if reviews on a Google My Business page will help increase rank. The answer, unfortunately, is somewhat wishy-washy. Just because you have more reviews than someone else doesn’t necessarily mean that this will help you surpass them in rank. What reviews will help you do is increase your click-through rate, an important indicator to Google.

If you Google “Columbus SEO Company,” you should see my company populate towards the top of the page, in maps and organically. What I started to notice was that once I focused on getting reviews from customers, I started to get more high quality leads. It makes perfect sense. Reviews help establish credibility for your brand. When people are deciding between SEO firms, they are likely going to read reviews. If they like what they read from The Media Captain, they are going to click on to my site. Google likes it when you have a high click-through on the search results because it means you are clearly providing value to the user (otherwise, they wouldn’t click on your site).

Business owners should spend at least one hour coming up with a list of 50 customers or clients. Create a customized email for each brand advocate and tell them how important a review would be to your business. It is also important to train your staff to ask customers for reviews. Starting with reviews on your Google My Business page is a good start. But, don’t forget about Yelp, Facebook and the Better Business Bureau. Every Friday afternoon, before closing up shop at your office, make sure you’ve gotten some new reviews!

Tip: Don’t send a massive email out at once to all of your customers seeking reviews. This could raise a red flag to Google if you suddenly go from 0 reviews to 30. Be sure to stagger this out in an organic fashion so the reviews are naturally coming in. I always tell my clients, if you aren’t proactively getting reviews, you 5 Get’ll only get bad reviews! If you have a massive list of customers, signing up for a service like Stars or ReviewBuzz.

Acquire local backlinks.

How exactly is Google determining which local business to populate in the “snack pack” results? There is a lot of correlation between the domain authority of your website and the local SEO results.

If you are unfamiliar with domain authority, it is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. I wrote an article about this if you want to learn more about domain authority. To make a long story short, to increase domain authority, you need quality backlinks pointing back to your site from external websites.

For a local company, it is imperative that you have local links pointing back to your site. If you are an extermination company, for example, make sure all of your vendors link back to your site on the “partners” section of their sites. If you have a lot of corporate clients, see if they’ll link back to you. Get involved in the local community and sponsor a youth baseball team and they should link back to you on their “sponsor” page. All of these backlinks are indicators to Google that you are a local business.

If you are having a hard time coming up with local clients to link back to your site, revert back to my playbook on knocking on local business owners’ doors! (watch this video on how to acquire local links). Within 60 minutes, you can get at least five local businesses to link back to your site, regardless of whether or not the relationship is already forged. 

Step 5: Improve your on-site SEO.

Google is not going to know you are a lawyer in Little Rock unless you make this clear on your website. Make sure to include your business name, address and phone number on your website. In the title tag of your site, reference your local market. On your contact page, make sure to list out directions to your office and include local landmarks so people can easily find your location.

Your local search results tie back to your website. Your website needs to be a true local indicator. Don’t go overboard though; there is no need to mention Little Rock on your homepage 48 times. Google will get the point if it is naturally worked into the verbiage throughout the site. For a local business, you can optimize your site in 45 minutes to improve its on-site SEO.

Tip: You can sign-up for a 30-day free trial of Moz and use its on-page grader to determine how well your site is optimized for local keywords. For example, if you are curious how your homepage is doing for “Little Rock Divorce Lawyer,” this page will tell you your score and give you tips to improve it.

Open for business

If you haven’t taken the steps above to improve your local SEO, it is the equivalent of having a sign on your front door that says, “We’re Closed.” You want to make it known to Google that you are open for business. A common question I receive is what entrepreneurs should do if they don’t have a local business and work out of their home. This is more of a complex issue that I would have to analyze a case-by-case basis. What I will say is don’t try and game the system. Many businesses in the past have signed up for a Regus Virtual Office Space to improve their local SEO. Google is smart. It was able to pick up on the fact that 15 businesses shared the same suite number. It rolled out an algorithm called Possum and penalized those businesses.

If you have a local office and spend five hours in a smart and efficient manner on your local SEO, you will reap the benefits for years to come. Don't be discouraged if your business isn't ranking in the top three results within a week, though. Like anything in life, it can take time and continued work for Google to recognise your efforts. 

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

  

Even for experienced SEO professionals,

search optimisation can be confusing. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different factors that can enter into how your site ranks and those factors change frequently (oftentimes, without warning). If you’re adhering to best practices — to the best of your ability — and there’s a sudden disruption in your progress, it’s common to feel disheartened. But take comfort knowing that it’s happened to all of us, and that those pesky SEO mysteries aren’t always as mysterious as they may first seem.Draw insight from these seven common SEO “mysteries” that often plague new campaigns:

Why did my traffic suddenly drop?

You’ve been seeing steady results for a while now, but all of a sudden, your organic traffic has declined. What could be the reason? The answer depends on how severe the decline is. If you notice a decline of 10 percent or less, it’s probably nothing to worry about; you should expect some natural fluctuations due to index refreshes, new competitors and new factors.

At the other extreme, if your traffic drops to almost nothing (which is extremely rare), you have a serious problem. It could mean your site is down or you’re facing a manual Google penalty (you can check to see if either of these are affecting your site in Google Search Console). If you’re somewhere in the middle, check for any recent “bad” inbound links that could be considered spam by Google, any recent content changes to your site that may have changed your page URLs or a new Google update that may have significantly changed your rankings.

Why aren't my pages showing up in search results?

If your pages aren’t showing up in Google search at all, it means they haven’t been indexed. If you’ve created a new site, don’t worry — it typically takes between four and 28 days for Google to index new web content. If you want to speed up the process, you can submit an XML sitemap through your Search Console (which is a good measure to take in general).

If you’re still having trouble with certain pages showing up, check your robots.txt file to make sure you haven’t accidently blocked search bots from seeing your pages. As a last resort, check for crawl errors in Google Search Console to pinpoint the root cause of the problem.

What happened to my link?

If you built a link pointing to your site, but it’s suddenly disappeared, the solution is usually simple: The site that hosted it removed it. The site may have found the link irrelevant, it may have removed your content entirely or it may have replaced it with a “nofollow” link. Double-check with the publisher, and attempt to build a replacement link elsewhere.

Why do my rankings keep changing?

It’s natural to expect some kind of volatility in your rankings. It would be strange, in fact, if your rankings weren’t changing at all. Don’t drive yourself crazy by checking your rankings every day; instead, shoot for bi-weekly or monthly check-ins. Like the stock market, rankings will go up and down over time; what you’re looking for is an overall uptrend. However, if you’re facing extreme volatility (drastic ups and downs on a regular basis), the problem is that something in your strategy is inconsistent (such as alternating between black hat and white hat techniques or producing both low-quality and high-quality content).

Why aren't I seeing better SEO results?

This is a more open-ended problem than the others on this list. If you just started a campaign, remember that SEO is a long-term strategy, and depending on your niche, budget and competition, you might have to wait months before you start to see results. If you’ve been at it for a few months and aren’t satisfied with the results, consider upping your budget — more money means higher quality (in many cases), and higher volume. Don’t be afraid to consult with an expert if you can’t seem to build momentum.

Why is my traffic so volatile?

See my answer to “rankings” in point four. Volatility isn’t specific to rankings; it will affect your traffic, as well. However, traffic bears an additional consideration: the ebb and flow of your business. Does your industry have a “peak” season that could be responsible for driving more traffic, or does your traffic seem to be correlated with specific events (such as more “air conditioning” searches on especially hot days)?

Why is my site running slow?

This isn’t an analytics issue like the other mysteries on this list, but your site speed does have an impact on your rankings and performance. If you know your site loading is a problem, but you can’t get it to load faster, consider downsizing the image files on your site and stripping any plugins you don’t use regularly. Then, delete any meta information or drafts you don’t need and optimize your caching plugins so you can load more quickly on previous visitors’ devices. If speed continues to be a problem, consider upgrading your hosting provider.

These aren’t the only issues you could run into while managing an SEO campaign, but they are some of the most common. Your solution may not be obvious, but as long as you keep digging, eventually you’ll find the root cause — or at least, some way to reverse the situation. There’s usually more than one culprit and more than one way to fix the problem — a gracious side effect of SEO’s complexity — so the next time you face an optimization enigma, remain calm and start troubleshooting. For more help on ways to improve your site’s SEO.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member