I've been doing some work on influencer marketing recently and specifically on why use it, best practices, examples etc.

I'm not going to go in the discussion around whether influencer marketing is the same thing as PR or not, whether it should be PR doing it or the marketing department. 

I'll just say that when I was working in a PR agency back 6-7 years ago, I was engaging a group of young beauty bloggers in a very similar fashion as influencer marketing preaches. 

Anyway, back to my research.  I've published a list of influencer marketing statistics before but I figured it's time to update that and share a new list that's more recent. 

So when I came across an infographic from smallbizgenius I knew I had found what I needed. 

It's a long and detailed infographic with more than 80 influencer marketing statistics. 

You can check out the infographic below but first, here are the stats that got my attention:

10 Top Influencer Marketing Stats:

Continuing the SEO series, this is a guest post by SEO consultant Paul Teitelman. 

Blogging has evolved from a niche option to the standard of content marketing across just about every web niche you can think of, but this serves as a bit of a double-edged sword.

The popularity of blogging means that it’s very subject to diminishing returns, and perhaps nothing illustrates this better than SEO. With every single new blog that pops up, that’s a new piece of competition when it comes to getting eyes on your content through Google.

The key way to stand apart here is through making sure that you take the time not just to follow trends, but to make sure you have a fundamentally sound strategy for your SEO content.

So, whether you are putting together an editorial calendar for your own content or preparing some guidelines before hiring an outside content marketing service, here are some of the things you can do to help the SEO structure of your blog develop.

9 Tips to Improve Your Blog's SEO Structure

This is a guest post written by Binh An Nguyen from Market Ease.

What do you do when your website’s performance becomes abysmal and your ranking on Google starts sinking?

Whenever my client comes to me saying his or her website is suddenly performing poorly, or dipping in recent months, I’ll tell them that it’s time for a comprehensive audit.

An audit is a diagnostic analysis of your website’s health, specifically in the content and SEO aspects.

There are many steps involved in a website audit, but all it takes is a bit an analytical mind, and a bit of time on your hands.

I’m going to show you a simple way to do your audit, including some free online tools that can help you get the job done.  Let’s dive in!

Why you need an audit

If you wish to have any hope of putting your website on the first page of Google, then you’ll need to make sure your website’s content is as optimised as it can be.

Because the internet is an ever-changing landscape, a routine audit can help in:

Mary Meeker's 2019 Internet Trends report is out. 

333 pages full of insights around internet users and usage, e-commerce, advertising, work, education, freemium business models and more.

It's pretty detailed and there's so much to learn.

I've gone through the whole report and wanted to share some of the things that stood out to me. 

Before I go into the facts and learnings, I want to share this quote which I believe is very relevant to today's business and consumer reality, and specifically, businesses need to pay serious attention to this because few are living and breathing this: 

Now onto the learnings.

This is a guest post by Liuda Nebozhak from Crello.

Every start-up undergoes some trial and error in its first 1-2 years. Those are probably some of the most difficult and crucial learnings of any new business. 

There's a ton start-ups need to figure out, including their own PR and marketing. PR especially plays a key role because as a start-up nobody knows you and you need to get the word out about your existence, your products and the new value that you add in the market. 

Our company Crello - which offers a design tool specifically for marketers and bloggers - has gone through multiple trials and errors but we've learned a lot.

We recently announced and celebrated reaching the major milestone of 1 million users over the course of just 20 months.  However, it took us some time to find our product-market fit and we are continuing to tweak it to this day. Along the way, we are leveraging our product development with the help of PR, brand ambassadors, and market research, amongst others.

Below are my 5 key takeaways for getting your start-up off the ground.