What We Read This Week (WWRTW) – January 6, 2018

About What We Read This Week (WWRTW): Each week, we share bits and bobs from around the web that 270netters have been reading this week. We also create a Pinterest board each week with many more valuable articles than we can fit into one blog post! Follow us to get notified as we release a new board each week.

Here we are in a new year, with new goals and a whole month to spend writing “2017” instead of “2018” on everything. We at 270net enjoyed our holiday, and we’re back to work ready to help our clients grow even more in 2018.

Here’s What We Read This Week:

“How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?” – Moz

Here’s Moz’s take on something we posted about a couple weeks ago. Their conclusion is pretty much on-par with ours: As long as your site is optimized for mobile, you don’t need to worry about Google’s push toward mobile-first indexing. If your site isn’t mobile-optimized, you’ve got some work to do.

“18 Apps and Tools for Social Media Marketers” – Social Media Examiner

We’ve posted before about apps for creating great graphics, and tools to help with content marketing. The tools listed in this post go beyond all that to some real basics, but things that are helpful to any marketer. Have you ever tried, in vain, to calculate a percentage change, or do you need help finding complementary fonts for your graphics? This post has just the tools you need!

“3 Aha Moments to Improve Your Content Marketing in 2018” – Content Marketing Institute

Though all three of the the “aha” moments referenced here are things to ruminate on and learn from, the second point on “aeration” of ideas resonated with me. Sometimes, the enemy of the good truly is the perfect, and we can all fall victim to trying to make all our work product perfect. Instead of going back and re-evaluating, we spend too much time staring and waiting for something to be absolutely, 100 percent ready. Content marketing is an evolutionary process, and we should never just put a piece of content out into the world and forget about it.

“Three Killer Skills Professional Writers Need to Succeed in 2018” – Copyblogger

We all know those writers: The ones who can really write a beautiful sentence, but whose prose becomes so bogged down in all the metaphor that the persuasive point becomes lost. Persuasive marketing copywriting is an art and a skill, something that takes time and practice, not just pure talent, to hone. The three skills referenced in this post – strategy, analytics, and technology – are skills that can improve our overall skills as marketers as well as our content.

“Optimizing for Voice Search and Voice Assistants: Four Search Tactics for 2018” – MarketingProfs

With Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and the rest of the voice-assisted search gang, it’s becoming increasingly more important for marketers to work with voice-assisted search in mind. This post from MarketingProfs gives some practical advice. My favorite is to think more in questions than in terms. After all, when was the last time you called on Siri and didn’t ask her a question?