5 Ways Brands Utilize Instagram to Increase Engagement - A Guest Post

Since we’re focusing on increasing your traffic using effective photos, this guest post by Steve would be a great addition to the series. Take a look at how you could use Pictures to increase visitor engagement on your website.

If you are a regular internet user, you must have come across or at least heard about the popular photo tool known as Instagram. It is a smartphone app that makes it possible for users to incorporate visual effects to their photographs, before sharing them with their friends and followers on the various social media websites.

In recent times, Instagram has proven to be an effective tool for engaging and conducting business.

This is because it has an incredible digital PR potential, which helps in giving your business the much needed exposure. The following are five of the most significant ways brands and other businesses in general can utilize the Instagram app to boost their engagements:

Photo Contests

One of the most excellent ways brands can make use of Instagram is by setting up photo contests, and encouraging users to participate in them. Since the app is very simple to use and millions of people across the globe have access to it, there is always a great chance that a good number of people will show interest in participating in your photo contest. 

To heighten their interest further, promise to offer attractive rewards for the winning contestants. Such competitions greatly assist in giving your brand better coverage, especially if you are able to attract a huge number of participants to the competition and they share their photos on various social media pages.

Brand Marketing

Business enterprises can also make use of Instagram photographs for the purposes of marketing their brands. For instance, apart from seeking the services of a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to make certain that your brand can be seen and ranks as high as possible in search engine results such as Google, a business enterprise could also spice up their marketing campaigns by posting and sharing attractive Instagram photographs of the products they are trying to promote. 

How to Design an Effective Website without Coding Skills - A Guest Post

Today, small and medium businesses are keeping up with Fortune 500 companies as they delve into the world of e-commerce and setting up their very own professional websites. Micro enterprises, homeowners and even teenagers are able to run their online businesses through websites. 

What’s amazing is that such small-scale businesses are able to have professional looking websites without the huge budget for a web designer. How do they do it?

CMS Platforms:

CMS stands for content management system. It allows you to design and edit your websites in an ongoing basis. You only have to login and edit your website in a browser window without even knowing PHP, XHTML, CSS, HTML and other coding languages. 

There are so many CMS platforms available today, which you can use to design beautiful websites no matter your coding background. Wordpress is by far the leading CMS Platform today. 

Blogging Tips - Use Pictures to boost your traffic

If you're a blogger, one of the first questions that you'd want an answer to is - 'How do I increase traffic to my blog?'. If you want the usual answers of back linking and social networking you've come to the wrong place. One thing I can tell you - I'm relatively new to blogging; but, the technique I use for HubPages does seem to work there and I'm sure it would work here as well.

If you're ready to learn - Check out this Post (It's the first in its series)

Made for Pinterest Image

One of the best ways to give your traffic a boost is by creating unique pictures for each post. It's definitely going to be time consuming at the very beginning. But, once you get the hang of it, it would be  a smooth journey. However, considering the amount of long term traffic that you could get by doing this, I'd say it's definitely worth the extra effort.

Before going further into this discussion, I'd like to thank Wrylilt for bringing this up through the humongous Pinterest shares that she'd received and continues to receive. That surely made me think about it and I went back to check on some of my Hubs and viola - they had 30+ Pinterest shares! That's without me even making my own pics (They had some crazy illustrations). So, that's when I began creating special images which are popularly known as - 'Made for Pinterest Images'.