It is hard to believe it is Friday already, isn’t it? Where did the week go? Before you head into the long holiday weekend, take a look at this week’s Five on Friday articles with SEO tips from Search Engine Land, marketing time savers from Constant Contact, security best practices from Recurly and social sharing advice from Strong Social Media. We’ve also scouted out some top subscription jobs from LinkedIn.

5 Quick and Easy Ways to Improve SEO

We all know that good SEO is critical to getting noticed online. Search Engine Land offers these five quick and easy ways to improve SEO:

• Consolidate digital assets. Do you have more than one website? If so, combine them into one website.
• Reclaim unlinked brand mentions. Search online for mentions of your brand that aren’t linked to your site. Reach out to those sites and ask them to link back to you, or to fix a broken link.
• Use long-form content. According to Maher Abiad of 3Seven7 Studios, Google loves long pages, so add sales pages and blog posts with content ranging from 2,200 to 2,500 words in length.
• Find your optimal keywords, or low-hanging fruit. Do you have keywords where you have a high keyword ranking, but that you haven’t targeted? If so, optimize those keywords, assuming those keywords make sense for your subscription business.
• Internationalize your site by setting specific geographic targets within Google Search Console.

For additional details and tips, see the original post by Christian Sculthorp on Search Engine Land.

3 Marketing Time Savers

Marketers have many tasks and responsibilities, and there never seems to be enough time in the day to get to all of them. In a recent email campaign, Constant Contact offered these suggestions for marketers to save time:

1. Develop an automated email series that starts when someone signs up for your email list.
2. Save content ideas in a folder (real or virtual), so when you have time to sit down to write or market, you have a starting point. No more writer’s block!
3. Schedule your posts in advance. Whether they are blog posts or social media posts, write and schedule posts in advance for “fix it and forget it” marketing. You can always supplement with “live posts” later.

5 Tactics to Increase Social Sharing of Your Subscription Company’s Content

Social shares are a great way to grow your prospects and to get your message in front of more people, particularly if your own customers are sharing your content. Strong Social Media offers these tactics to help you increase your social media shares:

1. Share content multiple times with different headlines and images at different times of the day.
2. Create “snackable” content. This is our favorite suggestion – readers want brief nuggets of information which could include images, quotes, an infographic or statistics.
3. Provide social media sharing buttons, and make them easy to find. If you’ve got great content that you want shared, please make sure your social sharing buttons are easily accessible. If a reader has to hunt to find the share button, they’ll lose interest and bounce off your site before hitting “share.”
4. Images are key. Posts with images are more likely to be viewed and clicked on than social media posts that are simply text. Use good quality images to increase the likelihood your post will be shared.
5. Don’t be shy – ask readers to share your content if they found it interesting or helpful.

For more social media sharing tactics, read the original article online at Strong Social Media.

LinkedIn: Subscription Jobs

Microsoft: Director of Business Planning, Xbox Live
Redmond, Washington
As the Director of Business Planning for Xbox Live, you will play a leadership role in growing one of the largest subscription services in the world, as well as helping drive the strategy to make Xbox Live the best and highest value social network for gamers on consoles, PCs & phones.

Petco: Senior Analyst, Subscriptions Strategy and Insight
San Diego, California
Petco is seeking detail-oriented, enthusiastic and determined senior analyst to join the subscription business (function) at Petco. Petco’s subscription business is one of the fastest growing segments for the company. If you are seeking an iterative, fast-paced environment where you can drive innovation through analytics, apply robust data driven approaches and solve/scale real world delivery challenges while providing visible benefit to end-users, this is your opportunity.

AC Lion: Director of Subscription Marketing
Dallas, Texas
As a result of launching a new platform, they are seeking a Director of Subscription Marketing who will be focused on acquiring new paying subscribers. Subscriber growth is the new lifeblood of their business and this key executive will be responsible for strategically driving awareness and interest though compelling content targeted at key audiences. The ultimate KPI is driving conversion via multiple channels.

The New York Times: Senior Software Engineer, Digital Subscriptions Backend
New York, New York
We develop the core backend services for digital subscriptions – including the (in)famous paywall and the billing and subscription management system that has enabled The New York Times to grow to almost 2 million digital-only subscribers. On our team, you’ll get to jump right into our quick development cycle and work on microservices running in the cloud (Amazon and Google Cloud platform) and secure, fault-tolerant backend processing and RESTful APIs in a mature Java codebase with ~500,000 lines of code.

Staffmark: Senior Oracle Consultant – Subscriptions and Pricing
East Windsor, New Jersey
Senior Oracle Apps R12 Consultant (O2C-SME)

• Technical/functional role which Oracle Apps – Business Analyst with extensive experience in Supply Chain and Financials modules of Oracle Apps 11i and 12.2.5 (12 years)
• Module Experiences OM, PO, INV, AR, AP and FA
• Key Process Reengineering experience in Order to Cash, Subscriptions, and Pricing.
• Work with Analysts and Functional consultants to prepare Technical specifications for designing RICE components.
• Order to Cash (O2C) implementation experience for at least Four projects.
• Up to 25% Travel
• W2 Only, NO C2C******

Recurly: Security Best Practices

The internet and digital world are rich with opportunity for subscription companies to be successful in sharing their products and services across the globe. Unfortunately, that world is also a scary place where hackers lurk and fraud breeds, even in the most secure environments. In this blog post, Recurly shares best practices for keeping your subscription company safe online:

1. Your payment processor should provide top notch security, meeting or exceeding all compliance rules and regulations.
2. Two-factor authentication provides enhanced security. Recurly, for example, requires a password and a verification code that’s sent via text or email.
3. Payment processing systems should allow users to set up different levels of access (full access, editing access, read-only, etc.)
4. Periodically, double-check user emails and access to be sure the right people in your organization receives appropriate notifications about key changes to your account.
5. Set up best practices for API keys (e.g., a policy for reviewing and updating your API keys regularly).

For more on best practices, read the full post here.

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend!

P.S. – Want to learn how to reduce subscriber churn in 14 days? Sign up for our free online seminar on April 19. We’ll pull back the curtain to reveal what growing subscription companies do to increase member engagement, build an emotional connection with their members, and grow a vibrant tribe. Claim your spot now!