Social Media and Internet Marketing

This guest post is by Belinda of The Copy Detective.

Your blog is a good read. Everyone says so.

Although “everyone” is really just people you already know. Like your Mum.

So why isn’t your blog being found by other people? The millions and millions of people hungrily consuming blog content out there in the global online space we call the Internet?

The cold, hard truth is that Google hates your blog. And it’s nothing personal. You just don’t have anything that Google wants.

Creating high-quality, relevant content is a must if you want your blog to be noticed by search engines but it’s only part of the picture. If you’re not sure if Google really hates your blog, or whether it’s just ambivalent, then step through these warning signs.

1. You don’t know which keywords your readers are using

The very heart of search engine optimization is understanding what people are searching for online and aligning your own content to those searches. When you use the same words and phrases that your audience members use, your blog posts can be matched to online searches. If you don’t? Well, you may as well be blogging in another language.

2. You don’t know how to find the right keywords

Google has a free keyword tool that will show you different phrases being searched on, the amount of traffic they get, and how many other sites are also trying to rank for those phrases. Spend a few moments before writing each blog post to find the most popular phrases for your blog topic, or use keyword analysis to think of new topics!

3. You don’t use your keywords frequently enough

Using your keywords as frequently as is natural will help Google understand what your blog post is about. Use an online tool such as wordle.net to produce a word cloud from your blog post. Your most frequently used words will be the largest ones you see and you can quickly see if you’re using the right phrases often enough. But beware of over-using your keywords and being labelled a spammer.

4. You are trying to rank for too many keywords in every post

Keeping it simple is definitely the best approach when you are optimizing your blog posts. Focus on a single theme and choose one main keyword to avoid diluting your SEO efforts.

5. Your blog headlines don’t even mention your main keyword

Strategic marketing aims your message like a laser rather than spraying it into the wind, and the same applies to SEO. Your headlines (h1 text) and subheadings (h2 text) are given more weight than regular text, so they’re prime candidates for your keywords and phrases.

6. You don’t bother putting descriptions on your images

You might include images to catch your readers’ eyes, or to help balance your text, but Google can’t see your images and unless you attach a description of some sort, your image will be ignored. Attach an image description using the ALT tag or caption, and don’t forget to use those keywords.

7. You never link to your old blog posts

Creating links between your blog posts makes it easy for your readers to discover other content, which naturally keeps them hanging around for longer. From an SEO point of view, Google pays particular attention to links, making them the ideal location for your keywords.

8. You never link to other bloggers

Although it sounds contrary, you will also get some SEO benefit from sending your readers away from your blog by linking to other blogs. You might do this with a “best-of” list post or with a blogroll—however you do it, but Google sees you sharing high-quality content with your audience, and rewards you for it.

9. You don’t fill out your page title and description fields

Meta data is the code name for the information you can use to advertise your blog post to Google. When you search on Google, the results are displayed as a post headline in bold and a brief description underneath. Search engines can work this information out but you are better off writing these yourself and popping those keywords in.

10. You don’t make your URLs search engine friendly

Using recognizable words, especially your keywords, in your blog post URL will help Google to make sense of your blog posts. The bonus, of course, is that your blog posts will be easier to remember for everyone else. So take a minute to edit your blog URL before you publish.

11. Your blog has broken links all over the place

Broken links occur when a URL points to a page that no longer exists. It might be that you changed the URL slightly or you deleted the blog post, but broken links give the impression that you aren’t maintaining your blog. Broken links also stop Google from crawling your blog posts and when you put the two together you get a big SEO cross against your name.

12. Your blog doesn’t have a sitemap

A sitemap is a website page that has all the links and pages of your blog mapped out. Sitemaps make it easy for Google to index every page on your blog, which can affect how quickly you appear in search engine results. Most content management systems will have a plugin that will create and submit your sitemap to Google, taking all the hard work out of the process.

13. You copy your content from other bloggers

Smart people don’t try to reinvent the wheel. They draw inspiration from the world around them. Google rewards original content but “original” refers to the wording rather than the concept. If you lift large amounts of content from external sources, and Google will mark it down as duplicate content and give you no SEO points. Adapt or attribute. Always.

14. You don’t publish blog posts often enough

Google loves fresh content and new posts on your blog are a great incentive for Google to come back and visit. Some bloggers publish when they are inspired. Some bloggers write every day. The question you need to answer is how often can you publish valuable and relevant posts to your readers.

15. You never use bullet lists in your blog posts

Google loves bullet lists. Not quite as much as headlines, subheadings and links, but a lot more than regular text. That, of course, means you should use lists to break up long passages of text and pop your keywords in, especially in the first couple of words of each list item.

16. You don’t have a presence on any social media platforms

Google is always looking for ways to return search results that are valuable and relevant. Social recommendations are becoming a huge influence on how search engines view your content and that’s exactly what active social media pages are. So go and get social, and build a community around your blog.

17. You don’t share your blog posts on your social media pages

Social media pages are fantastic for building a community—see above. They are also the perfect vehicles to share and promote your blog posts! Don’t be afraid to share your new blog posts across social media and ask your community to share the love. You are building social currency that Google loves to see.

18. You don’t invite blog readers to leave comments

Comments give your blog the kind of freshness that search engines just love. Comments also show that your blog posts are still relevant to readers. Invite readers to leave their thoughts and continue the conversation or blog about something a bit controversial to get the discussion started!

19.You don’t know where your biggest referrers live

Google Analytics will show you where you have the greatest numbers of people sending traffic to your blog. It’s worth knowing who they are so you can give them the attention they deserve. Your analytics will also show you the keywords that led people to your blog, how many times they visited, and which other pages they clicked on.

20. Your blog content will age like a b-grade actress: badly

Blogging about topical subjects is a great way to start a conversation but it might also date your blog posts into irrelevancy. Creating helpful, educational content, instead of editorial content, is just one way you can create a library of blog posts that will be relevant again at a later date. Mixing different types of blog posts will also keep your readers interested.

21. You don’t write about topics people are interested in

If you ever ask yourself if your blog posts are interesting enough, you’re asking the wrong person. If your blog isn’t getting much attention from readers then Google isn’t going to give it a second look. You can discover a wealth of potential topics from comments on other people’s blog, surveys, keyword analysis, trending Twitter topics, and simply asking your current readers. Don’t be shy!

22. You have advertising that is irrelevant to your blog topic

Paid advertising is more than ok but if you have a lot of advertising that is irrelevant to your blog topic then it kind of makes you look bad. Google is getting really good at picking out poor poor-quality websites and lots of irrelevant advertising can give off all the wrong signals.

23. You don’t have share buttons so people can’t spread the word

Social share buttons let your readers promote your words of wisdom without ever having to leave your blog. Apart from the extended reach, the more often your blog posts are tweeted, liked and commented on, the more value they have … and the more Google will notice you.

24.Your guest posts are replicated on other sites, word for word

Opening your blog up to guest bloggers is a fantastic way to add depth and variety to your own blog topics—not to mention giving yourself a break from writing! But if your guest bloggers publish the same content, word for word, on their own blog, then you don’t get the kudos from Google for original information. Ask your guest bloggers to give you exclusivity or at least a few weeks’ head start.

25. You write about too many topics and Google is just plain confused

If you have a lot of different passions, that’s wonderful, but blogging about them all on the same blog will get you nowhere. In fact, from an SEO point of view, your blog will look like a big pile of books on the floor: too hard to categorize. Keep it simple and Google won’t get so baffled.

Remember that Google’s ultimate mission is to match online searches with the most relevant and reputable content. You will be rewarded when you create content that focuses on your readers’ needs and you build a strong network around your blog. It won’t happen overnight nor is it a one-off process but if you keep at it, people will find you (and it will be Google that shows them).

Belinda is a professional marketing copywriter confidently walking the line between writing effective copy and creating an engaging brand personality. You don’t have to choose between them! Read her copywriting blog, The Copy Detective, and improve the way you write about your business.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

25 Reasons Why Google Hates Your Blog

Creating a Company of Owners

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I believe that one of the greatest opportunities we have as business owners is to create wealth.

By that I don’t necessarily mean get wealthy. I mean create an asset, a business, which is worth more today than it was yesterday. All too often this view gets buried in the push to create a paycheck.

In my view there are much easier ways to draw a salary than owning a business.

The real magic in the wealth creation opportunity comes when you also see it as a way to create wealth for all of the people the work to increase the market value of the business.

Image Doug Brown 37 via Flickr CC

The key to this notion is shared ownership.

Sharing ownership with employees has become much more popular in the world of Internet startups and IPOs. The idea is that if people have stock they’ll be more productive.

The problem with this mentality however is that if employees don’t have psychic ownership first and foremost, real ownership probably won’t benefit anyone.

Psychic ownership suggests a culture where employees feel like owners, act like owners and think like owners, even though they may not actually have any formal equity in the company.

The fact is many companies try to explore this idea of ownership but approach it in name only.

If employees don’t feel like they have a stake it what happens, don’t have access to the financial data or can’t make decisions that impact the value of their ownership, then all the stock options in the world won’t help. In fact, organizations that simply adopt an ownership or equity type of environment based on paper only find that it can be a disincentive and create entitlement without accountability.

Until you can create a culture that fosters psychic ownership first – a place where people feel empowered as owners, even if they’re not – you’ll never realize the benefits of providing real ownership.

The combination of a psychic ownership environment and real ownership structure, however, is perhaps the most potent tool for the creation of commitment that can be employed.

Creating a culture of shared ownership

When Sky Factory founder Bill Witherspoon determined, approaching sixty, that he would start yet another company he sat back and analyzed his past failures and successes and concluded that he had never been very good at managing people or the organization once it had grown to a certain level.

So, he decided to throw everything he had ever done or learned about traditional management out and start with a totally new view of how to build, in his words, a “beautiful corporation,” also something of an oxymoron in his view.

Having a background in bioscience he determined that every organization’s DNA lies in the company culture and he knew he had to direct that element over all else. The company’s core beliefs sprung from that thinking, but became much more than words on sign.

Transparency – Now, there’s a word that’s been abused in business writing over the last few years, but taken at face value, and in this context, it simply means sharing everything with everyone in the company.

Every Friday afternoon the entire staff gathers to go over the metrics one by one – even things like how much cash is in the bank is reported. (The only metric that is not public is individual salaries.) Every department talks about goals and challenges and the entire team of 40 can discuss any element that’s shared.

When issues arise that need to be shared quickly, they call impromptu “stand up” meetings and shut down so that everyone can be involved.

Autonomy –There are no vice presidents, no managers, and no shop supervisors at The Sky Factory. If they had an organization chart it would be very flat.

The company is organized into functional teams based on related work and each team uses a rotating facilitation model to keep things moving in place of the traditional manager.

Every week two members of a team take on the role of management (one from last week and one new one.) Everyone on the team takes a turn and Witherspoon feels that this concept allow people to learn, grow and earn greater respect from other members of the staff.

This no hierarchy approach removes politics and frees people to stretch far beyond the confines of the normal job description. The Sky Factory has numerous job descriptions that are tied to functional work that must be done, but the goal is to create a workplace where everyone can essentially do everything.

There certainly are instance where this isn’t practical or possible, but no one gets tethered to one kind of work, no one gets bored and everyone is asked to grow and given the opportunity to do work that continually stretches them.

The Sky Factory also finds that experience built in continuous improvement by letting new people provide a fresh approach in processes and systems.

Consensus – Every important decision made at The Sky Factory is made through a system of consensus. Some decisions are departmental, others are company wide, but if there’s even one no, the decision must be evaluated.

Decenters are asked to explain and own their no votes and more often than not the no simply leads to more research or looking at a decision in a new light, but everyone has a real voice in the process.

Sky Factory also uses consensus to impact operations – The Company was experiencing a high percentage of late deliveries on promised projects. They had tried a number of process improvements to no avail. During one of their weekly meeting an employee suggested that they should tie profit sharing bonuses to delivery. The group agreed and the rule became that if even one delivery missed its promised date during a month, no one in the organization would receive that month’s profit sharing bonus.

Since installing this rule several years ago they virtually eliminated the problem. Everyone in the organization is now concerned about late deliveries and everyone is focused on pitching in and solving any potential snags in any part of the production process. And you can bet that if someone is having an issue with an order they ask for help.

Of course consensus won’t work if there’s no transparency and truly no hierarchy. Consensus as a stand-alone tool is a recipe for disaster, but teamed with complete sharing of information and rotational management, it is the tool that turns everyone into an owner.

Now, Sky Factory also has an incredibly innovative profit sharing and real ownership structure, but the key to making it work in their incredible shared ownership culture.

When an entrepreneur starts a business and it’s just them, they have all the information, have no hierarchy and get consensus on every decision – shared ownership thinking simply takes this to another level.

If a major storm is headed you way, Google wants to be your information guide. The Google Crisis Response team is looking to be your go to information source on when a storm will strike, how bad will it be, and what resources are available to help.

Online Marketing is all about information. And people. Making connections that solve marketing problems in today’s environment of social and technological innovation can be challenging. Like many readers of this blog, a big part of what I do as an Internet Marketer centers around being able to consume large amounts of information or better, the right information, synthesizing it and using insights to help others make sense of the challenges and opportunities they face with marketing on the web.

As an author, frequent speaker at industry conferences, advisor to clients and the people who serve our clients, there’s a sense of urgency for me to stay current and to understand what current events in the digital marketing world mean in the context of individual situations. It’s not enough to observe that news events and trends are happening, but to understand what those observations mean as it relates to impact on business, on customers and how to continue the pursuit of successful online marketing.

Simply finding and sharing news ala basic ”curation” is a cheap commodity. Value comes from identifying bigger picture patterns and synthesizing that information into practical business advice.  I like what Christian Adams said in a G+ thread, “When you have information overload across multiple channels you start to pick up on common threads and trending topics”. This is the essence of curation that creates value and there’s no substitute for human filtering.

In Avinash Kaushik’s recent post, “The 2015 Digital Marketing Rule Book. Change or Perish” one of his 7 Rules for Digital Marketing Revolutionaries concerns the need for marketing practitioners (which is applicable to professionals in any industry) to extend their expertise beyond core skills. “You can no longer be good at just one thing, or two. It is a 10-thing world now (and maybe a 20-thing world soon).”

As a professional, it’s essential for you to filter signal from a mass of noise to grow expertise in your core discipline as well as others. The question is, where do you get the information to stay current? How do you filter out the noise?

After writing most of this post I tried the new quick video post feature on my Google+ account to ping the smart connections I have there for their ideas on how to stay current. While some people still use RSS via Google Reader, usage of the traditional RSS feed has been displaced by Twitter lists, Google+ circles and more so what Shel Holtz called “curated collections” like what you can find at SmartBrief and PR Daily newsletters. Other curated news services mentioned include paper.li, Percolate, news.me, Pulse, FlipBoard and the recently acquired Summify. Trunk.ly is another useful service that works with Twitter but is being shut down.

Below is a screenshot and here’s a link to see everyone’s full comments. Thanks to Shel Holtz, Scott Duehlmeier, Christopher Drinkut, Ash Buckles, Christian Adams and Corey McNeil for chiming in.

While I’ve been able to gain a lot of knowledge and insight over the past 14 years of being in this business, I know that I’m only getting a fraction of what I’d like to know. Every day is a learning experience. Every day is massive piece of humble pie working with a great team at our agency. Transparency, competition and information availability means earning your stripes every day. I think that perspective works pretty well as evidenced by the growth and quality of our team and client roster.

There are many people who have asked me how I stay current and on top of what’s important in the online marketing and PR world. Some of what I do is scheduled and methodical. Some is more intuitive and opportunistic. Both types of activities are guided by a pursuit of wisdom and an interest in being able to provide high value insight to others that will help our business grow. I have a feeling some of our readers are in the same boat: wanting to find ways to stay informed and several steps ahead.

Here are a few of the things that I do to stay current and on top of not only what’s  happening in the Search, Social Media, PR and Content Marketing world, but what it means for developing relationships, solving problems and growing the business.

1. Read social feeds & email. I typically do this between 4:30 and 6am. I’ll bookmark articles & media for later use and reading, taking notes on each item. I’ll also queue sharing with social networks and share insights internally. Evernote ROCKS for managing this.

2. Meet with my right hand marketer.  You may have noticed Ashley posting here frequently. She’s our Marketing Manager here at TopRank Online Marketing and we regularly discuss all sorts of content, social media, email, event, website, blog and book related topics – every day.

3. Meet with our group of Account Managers on tactical case studies, observations/insights into successes with client Content, Social, Email, PPC, SEO programs. We also discuss situations that need resolving. It’s great to see the AMs working together to identify solutions. Our AMs are project managers and consultants that directly interact with both clients and internal subject matter experts. They are on the front-lines of what it means to develop online marketing strategy, make recommendations, oversee implementation, measure results and work to identify new opportunities. Their insights into daily marketing problems and solutions is priceless.

4. Review our own Analytics & Reports: I’ve been watching key metrics related to our blog and website for a very long time. Traffic, links, search data, time on site, inquiries and other goal page activity paint an interesting picture when overlaid with external KPIs like social shares, comments, links and media mentions.

5. Marketing TopRank – Several of these tasks are related to marketing for our agency but I am involved with some of our marketing initiatives but developing approach and having things tested out to see what we might scale or adjust for better performance. Being able to test online marketing, SEO and Social Media Marketing tactics out on our own sites has been incredibly valuable over the years when it comes to developing first-hand knowledge that can be shared with staff and clients.

6. Talk with Customers – Every time I get to talk to one of our clients, I learn invaluable lessons about how they see search, social and content marketing contributing to the success of their business.

7. Research & Write – Between blogging over 2,500 times and writing numerous contributed articles, I have found that developing writing skills has been one of the most profitable things I’ve ever done.  I’ve been writing a book over the past few months, which has taken considerable time in addition to daily work. The process of writing a book is not for the faint of heart, but it has made me smarter and more strategic in how I view modern online marketing strategy.

8. Research & Presentations – Another profitable investment (in terms of knowledge and for our business) has been speaking at events. The research and preparation for presentations requires an understanding of the subject matter that extends far beyond day to day familiarity.  Packaging content to be relevant to specific audiences as well as educational and entertaining means thinking that content through. The process helps create mental models for explaining key concepts and can serve as a basis for many other forms of content creation.

9. Research and Training – One of the big initiatives I have this year is to develop internal training beyond the things we’ve established so far. Identifying external sources of training such as industry conferences and workshops for our team to attend as well as building our own workshops for internal use and for our clients is another situation that calls for thoughtful consideration, planning and packaging. Related to presentations, I’m also involved with providing SEO or Social SEO to other agencies (especially PR agencies) and marketing communications departments within companies. Collecting case studies, examples and keeping tactics current keeps me on my mental toes.

10. Connect with Industry Peers - In the time I’ve been publicly active in the internet marketing and PR world, I’ve been able to make some incredible connections with amazingly smart people. Outside of working with our internal team of consultants, there is no substitute when it comes to gaining high value information than connecting with other professionals that are as passionate and fanatical about marketing and online business as you are.

11. Revisit Social Streams - This is a later in the evening activity but it’s a good way to end the work part of the day and get ideas for the next. Using Google Reader, Hootsuite, Disqus and other tools, identify any new articles worth reading, cluster them together according to theme and take notes. I’ll take time to focus on mainstream media publications, not just industry blogs and news websites.

Another approach to staying current is to form a mastermind group. I first head of this from reading Napoleon Hill many years ago and it’s even more powerful now. Find likeminded professionals and agree to connect on collective and individual areas of focus. A mastermind is not only about sharing information but working with each other to achieve goals.

I don’t do all these things every day of course, but it represents a number of the things that have been instrumental in keeping me close to tactics as well as in line with more strategic perspectives on new events and industry changes.  Would reading my email and social feeds for 10 min a day be a better alternative to free up time for other business tasks? Maybe, but then I wouldn’t be able to output as much as I do or bring as much value that results in better service to customers, a healthier social network and a growing business.

If staying current and informed is essential for your job, how do you keep up to date? How do you make each day a positive learning experience?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
11 Ways to Get Smarter & Stay Current in a World of Social Information Overload | http://www.toprankblog.com

Posted by randfish

Having content that goes viral can seem like the luck of the draw, but there are a number of steps you can take to improve your odds. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will show you a few things you can do to increase your chances of having that well crafted content spread through the internet like a wildfire. Thanks for watching and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about how to give your content a better chance of going viral, and from virality, what I really mean here is not just getting links, which are obviously very helpful from an SEO perspective, but getting social shares, getting mentions on other blogs, getting talked about, getting emailed around. The virality of content determines how successful that content is going to be in the broader Web, in the scheme of all things that are inbound, not just SEO, not just social, not just community stuff, but overall. There are a few things that you can do that will significantly help your efforts to earn that content virality. So let's talk about a few of them.

Number one, the right format or the right UI or UX, user experience. What I'm talking about here is a lot of people think that they can take the same way that they produce content normally, keep on doing that, and sometimes that works, especially if you have a very, very clean site, maybe it's in a blog format and it's got nice width. It's not too hampered by advertising and surrounded by that kind of stuff. But oftentimes you will see that content can perform better when it's in a separate type of format. So let's say you've got a traditional page layout that has content section here but a big header up here and a top ad and a bottom ad and a bunch of sidebar stuff. And maybe you think, "You know what? I'm actually going to clean that up to something that has branding but minimal branding, got a great headline, got the content right in there, and that's the focus of the page." So the users who come to it can easily, above the fold, find the content that they're looking for, that there's compelling visuals.

These visuals are particularly important because both Google+ and Facebook, if you do any sharing on either of those platforms, remember that they'll automatically insert an image from the post, and oftentimes the user can select which image. If you've got a couple compelling images that look great when scaled down, that look great when you're going to share them on Facebook or on Google+ or that somebody else who is going to copy those images and put them on their site, oh man, much, much more successful.

Even if you have literally just a piece of writing, if you can have some sort of a visual element that is compelling, that's interesting, that draws in the reader, that's relevant, you're going to do much, much better. Flickr Creative Commons is great for this. Drawing your own stuff is great for this. Charts and graphs are great for this. Even licensing out someone to do a tiny amount of work for a few hundred dollars around building a visual for you, taking some of the data or some of the insight that you've learned that you're putting into that content can be really helpful to help it go more viral.

Then doing things like, you know, you've got to have the design look and feel professional. It has to be modern and updated. Clean is very, very good for getting that sharing principle. You can see this happen all the time with content that's shared on major media websites, where it's the print friendly version that gets emailed around, that makes its way around Twitter and around Google+ and Facebook and goes on LinkedIn. It's almost always the one that people will link to in a Reddit or a Hacker News or on Stumble Upon. Print friendly versions, just make that the default for content that you want to have virality.

Then finally I'd also be looking at the title friendliness itself, and the URL actually matters a lot now too. So if you've got a pre-existing CMS, when you go to bit.ly or you to goo.gl or whatever your URL shortener is, you might want to try something like this, getting the customized one. So for example, you'll see that when I have content that I like to share a lot, I might say for example, "Oh, let's make this content say inbound startups, and that'll be my slide share presentation." So now you don't have to remember some long URL. It's just bit.ly/inboundstartups, and that will take you right to my presentation here, that URL functions. Customizing this portion of the shared URL can be very helpful if you can't control it. If you can though, go with something easy, simple, short, not too many parameters in there. This will also help you. I might even, for some things, recommend dropping the slash articles or the slash blog and going just with /catchy-subject, whatever that subject line is. You 're going to shrink down the title so that it's easily understandable so if somebody ever sees that URL or hovers on it, they think, "Oh, that sounds interesting. I should click that link. That might be cool."

Number two, great, fantastic way to make sure that your content is going to at least perform decently on the Web is to get buy-in from your influencers, the influencers in a community, before, not after, not during, but before you ever publish it. So I'll give you a great example. I got an email last Friday from a guy in the search world and he said, "Hey Rand, my company, we produce this big report. We've got this cool infographic, lots of interesting data about stuff that's happening in the world. Would you take a look at this? Tell me what you think. Do you think your community would like it?" And I wrote back and said, "Yeah, I really love this. I think it's excellent. I don't even have any changes. I think this is going to do great, and I'd be happy to share it." This person didn't specifically ask me for a share and I think that's why. What they asked me for was feedback.

That feedback, coming from people who have a powerful forum, 6,000 RSS readers, 500 people following them on Google+, you can find these people. You probably already know about them in your niche or your sphere, who they are, the key bloggers, the key Twitter accounts, the key Google+ accounts, the key people on LinkedIn, the people who run popular websites, the influencers. Then you can essentially draw them back to whatever it is that's your content in here, and they will be much more likely to share if you ping them about it beforehand. They'll also give you feedback like, "I don't really think this is going to play well," or "If you did this, it'd be very interesting, but I don't see what you've done as particularly unique or valuable. I probably wouldn't share it." Or no response at all. If you get lots of those, you know that you're not hitting it out of the park with this content. You're going to have to do something else, try something else. That's great to know before you hit that publish button.

There's a bunch of things you can get from them. So if you're thinking, boy, I just can't get these people to share what I'm producing. I don't know what I can do, get them involved in the actual content itself. So rather than you writing an opinion blog post saying I like this particular thing and that particular thing, you can instead go and gather. Hey, can I solicit your review and opinion on a subject, and then I'm going to gather that from several experts and publish that. I'm going to run a survey of you and 20 other people who are influencers in the field about particular things, about some data from your sites, your projects, your experiences, your businesses, whatever it is, or your opinions on this matter. I'm going to interview you or do some lessons learned stuff. I shared a great link last week that was a bunch of video interviews of entrepreneurs, and this type of stuff performs tremendously well because all of those people who are involved in the project, from an interviewee perspective, they are all going to share it after it's produced because you write back to them and you say, "Hey, the interview is now live. The data is now live. The review is now live."

You can request input from their communities. For example, when SEOmoz does the SEO Industry Survey every two years, we always ask, hey, would you share this with your community so that we can get the input of people who read Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch or SEO Book or Search Engine Journal, a variety of these places. HubSpot, etc.

If you can't directly reach out, you can always mention these people. So if you, for example, gather things that they've tweeted, said on their own blogs, you're getting quotes from them, you're getting data they've shared, you're using numbers from them, anything like that, you can say, "Oh, by the way, we mentioned you or we're going to be mentioning you in an upcoming piece, would you like to take a look at it and review and let us know if it's appropriate or okay, if this is accurate?" That process of interacting in an authentic way, both to confirm that you do have accurate data and that you're doing the right thing with them, gives them a buy-in to, "Oh, I'm going to go check out this article. Huh, this is interesting. Yeah, this looks great, thanks very much." Or, "Oh I have this little bit of feedback for you." Then when you publish, you can say, "Hey, we hit publish. It's now live. Thanks again for reviewing. If you would share with your community, that'd be great. Here's the shortened link or here's a tweet you could retweet." This kind of stuff works phenomenally well. This process of getting that early buy-in ahead of time is so powerful, and it just makes sure that the content does much better than it normally would.

The third and final thing that I'm going to mention here - topic, timing, and seeding. So this is essentially the process of figuring out what works best in your community, and that's from a topical perspective. Copyblogger has a lot of good posts about how to write a compelling headline and what's going to be popular right now. But I would think about it this way. If it's being mentioned in the news, so for example if I go to, let's say this is Google Insights or Google Trends or the news timeline, and I see mentions it is at the steady state point but has a spike here, this is where I want to be writing about that topic. Or maybe right after, when there's usually that second bump of people having a discussion about it. If you can, you might even want to catch it here, before it goes hot, and then you'll have a chance to appear in things like Google News and you'll have a chance to be mentioned in all the articles that talk about that subject thereafter. This is great for anytime you have a timely or trending type of topic.

You also want to, in addition to all these influencers you talk to, there are likely a few people, these are your buddies, your friends, people you connect with on a regular basis, you're emailing with them, you follow each other on Twitter. Do them a favor. Start sharing some of their content. When they tweet things, retweet them. Build up those relationships. Almost all of you probably have a few of those already. Leverage those. Email them in person and say, "Kenny, I know you've got a small Twitter account. It'd be awesome if you could share this. If you ever need the same favor from me, just ask." Almost always, especially if those are close relationships, personal relationships, you've hung out in a bar before, you've bought each other dinner, you know each other well, you're going to get that. I think that's a great way to leverage the real world social network for online social networks. Obviously, you have to be careful not to abuse this. You want to be sharing stuff that these people would ordinarily want to share and be interested in.

Then finally timing stuff. I can tell you for B2B content, Saturday and Sunday are just straight out. However, the reverse is true for Facebook, where the most sharing and the most time spent on Facebook happens on the weekends. Now, not surprisingly, that's not B2B Facebooking. That's personal Facebooking. So it better be the kind of stuff that's going to play well with your mom and your grandma and your brother and that kind of stuff. B2B, Tuesday through Thursday. Don't do Monday. Don't do Friday. With the exception of, it appears that some of the best content or most successful tweeting happens on Friday morning, sort of Thursday night going into Friday morning. That's when people seem to be tweeting and retweeting a lot of stuff. This is from some research from Dan Zarrella over at HubSpot. You can look into that. The timing of social media, I believe, is his presentation.

So don't necessarily take my word for it. Test, test, test. If you're sharing content and producing content on a regular basis, you will figure out the right times to share, who you can start seeding things with, who's reliable and helps you get that content out there, what topics work well, what sorts of headlines work well for your audience. It's going to be different for everyone. So don't just trust these. But do test and observe and watch your click through rates, using something like a bit.ly, watching your analytics, seeing what works when you share things and how long it takes for them to go and what sources indicate. Sometimes you're going to share with this one guy and he's going to populate it to tons of places. One of my favorite features for this is Google+'s ripples, where you can actually see, it's almost like this. It'll actually show you a timeline of this person shared and then these 13 other people shared and 1 of them produced 10 more shares. That stuff is very powerful, and you can observe it on the regular Web, on the rest of the Web, across platforms if you're carefully watching analytics or your bit.ly click throughs.

So hopefully, using this methodology, you can produce some content that has higher chances, better odds of going viral. I wish you luck. I hope to see lots of great stuff out there on the Web. Take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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The 2012 Community Manager Report

Community Manager is an essential, yet still uncharted territory for many companies that are expanding their presence on the social web.  What should you know about the current state of this position?

• 67% of Community Managers work for a brand
• The most popular city for Community Managers is New York
• 65% of Community Managers are Female

Be sure to check out the rest of this report presented by Social Fresh.

Google & FBI: All Your Social Data Are Belong to Us

For non-geeks, here’s the reference (Zero Wing video)

“Google Privacy Changes: What Do They Mean To You?” Google announced this week that it is rolling out a new, main privacy policy that covers the majority of its products. The company is consolidating over 60 privacy notices into the main privacy policy. User activities across Google web properties from Gmail to YouTube will be used to deliver customized ads. Via WebProNews.

“The FBI Wants to Monitor Social Media” The FBI is looking to develop a web application that can monitor social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, in order to gain better real-time intelligence about current or potential future security threats or situations. As with the Google combined service data collection, many people are thinking, “Weren’t they already doing this?” Via Mashable.

“McDonald’s Twitter Campaign Goes Horribly Wrong #McDStories” From McDonald’s PR: While #meetthefarmers was used for the majority of the day and successful in raising awareness of the Supplier Stories campaign, #mcdstories did not go as planned. We quickly pulled #mcdstories and it was promoted for less than two hours. Via Business Insider.

“Twitter Now Able To Censor Tweets, If Required By Law, On A Country-By-Country Basis” From Twitter: Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it up in the rest of the world. Danny Sullivan compares Twitter’s approach towards censorship to Google, which you might find interesting. Via Marketing Land.

The Online Marketplace is Competitive: Tips to Help You Meet the Challenge:

“The Top 51 stats for Generation Y marketers” How can marketers tap into this gadget-savvy, brand-aware demographic? The following statistics, taken from four recent reports listed below, provide an insight into the complex world of 13-24 year-olds. Via The Next Web.

“5 marketing Tips for Putting Customers First” The digital world of today offers many choices to customers, which means that marketing professionals have a tough job ahead of them.  We must not only ensure that our messaging is on target, but also work with our internal team to make sure that our promises can be delivered.  Via i Media Connection.

“10 Essential YouTube Tips and Tricks”  YouTube is currently getting over 3 billion views each day.  This article provides some great tips for getting more out of your YouTube experience including, improved search and better viewing options.  Via Mashable.

“10 Ways to Impress Your Industry’s Influencers” Often times your press releases are in the hands of influencers within the industry.  This article provides some great tips on identifying who these people are, buttering them up, and following their lead.  Via Ragan.

The TopRank Team Knows News

Brian Larson – “MarketingSherpa Research Shows the Avg B2B Deal on the Decline”
We know that B2B sales cycles are longer. The rebuttal from B2B’s has always been ‘the size of our sales are far greater’.  What if that changed? With B2B deal sizes diminishing, do B2B’s need to focus on increasing sales volume or developing new ways to demonstrate value and win back larger sales? Or both? The answers to these questions are sure to influence online marketing strategies.  Via Marketing Sherpa.

Ken Horst – “Social media for the complex sale: Where should you start?”
While most B2B companies are heavily invested in their social channels today; many are finding that for at least Facebook and Twitter, these may not be the best channels for companies with a longer sales cycle.  The good news is that in this post, the author lists 10 other social media outlets that B2B marketers could use to help prime the pump for those longer sales cycle products and services. Via SmartBlog.

Emily Conley – “Google Announces Privacy Changes Across Products; Users Can’t Opt Out”
Google released an announcement on Jan. 24th stating that the company plans to follow users’ activities across the majority of its sites, including YouTube, Gmail and Google search. With no opt-out option, as of March 1st all logged in Google users will be sharing data that will enable Google to create more complete user portraits.  The change opens new debate around privacy and competitive practices.  Via Washington Post.

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Online Marketing News: Women Dominate Community Management, Google Privacy, FBI Social, Twitter Censorship, McD Hashtag Gone Wrong | http://www.toprankblog.com

How to Drive Sales Offline With Local Online Calls to Action

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

One of the real underutilized opportunities these days is to use your online presence to drive local offline sales.

In order to do this you must think beyond the content aspects of your website and start to think about ways to tap local buying behavior and enable local buying tools.

The heart and soul of this kind of thinking is the tried and true call to action. Marketers have been using the simple act now, buy now, call now language to get prospects to take all manner of action since the dawn of advertising.

As Internet use has become the primary way that even local shoppers find information and make buying decisions, it’s become essential for local businesses to integrate local calls to action into their websites.

It’s easy to think this is something that only restaurants and salons can take advantage of, but with mobile and search use so high almost any type of business, even professional services, can benefit from this idea.

Example calls to action

Free pass

Let’s say you have a membership type of offer like a gym. Put a “get a free pass” button and form on your site so that you can put a free trial offer in their hands before they come to your door.

A financial planner could use this same approach for a upcoming seminar on investment advice. Or you could allow customers to grab a “bring a friend” pass for an early bird sale.

The easiest way to handle this would be a button that linked to a print friendly web page, but you could also use a form so you could capture a little info and send the pass to their mobile device.

Coupons

People love coupons and coupons certainly drive sales. This is an approach you can update and rotate with all kinds of new products, sales and sample offers.

A restaurant could place a coupon for a free appetizer on Tuesday night, but an insurance sales person could also place a coupon for a free iTunes card with every rate quote.

You can create your own trackable coupons through services such as Coupontank and don’t forget to use the coupon feature on your Google Places page as well as locally focused networks such as Local.com and Craigslist.

Click to call or chat

Many times people that come to your website either don’t immediately find what they are looking for or wonder whether you have that cute little dress on your homepage in their size.

By adding services like LivePerson, BoldChat or Olark you can make it very easy for people to call or chat with your business and get that one piece of information they needed so that they jump in the car and come into your business.

Schedule now

Businesses that run primarily by appointment must start making it easier for today’s mobile enabled customers to book a time on the fly. This means adding appointment booking functionality to your website so that prospects can schedule when it’s convenient for them and see that you have that perfect spot open in two hours when they are free.

There are a number of click to schedule tools like ClickBook, GenBook  and Schedulicity.  Or use the tool set from a service like Agendize that allows you to add call, chat and schedule options all from one tool.

Driving call to action

In addition to you creating compelling offers and tools you’ll want to promote the fact that you have openings, coupons and special.

Pay per click – Using locally focused Google AdWords in conjunction with your call to action is a tremendous way to get terrific offline bang for your online spend.

Social – Facebook has a very robust local targeting mechanism that offline businesses have been using along with strong offers to act. You can also use tools like the Wildfire app to create calls to action right on your Facebook page.

Don’t forget to Tweet your Tuesday offer and drive customers to your site to get their coupon.

Yahoo’s 2011 Q4 search revenue was $465 million, down 27 percent compared to the same quarter for the previous year. Yahoo attributed the decline to the search agreement it signed with Microsoft. Overall fourth quarter revenue was $1.3 billion.

Posted by Tim Grice

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

The title of this post may come across a little contentious, however I hope by the end of it you understand where I am coming from.

Over the years, I have been privileged enough to work with some large businesses that can afford to throw big budgets at online marketing. One of the first tasks I undertake is a meeting to discuss previous strategies. As my main focus is natural search, one of the things I always find interesting is discussing link building strategies carried out by previous agencies and internal SEOs. This can be quite enlightening, but really worrying at the same time, you begin to realise fairly quickly why SEO gets such bad press.

One of the things that always makes my head spin is companies who invest in pumping out online press releases through well-known services for the sheer purpose of building links!

"So, what's your link building strategy?", "Well, we send out press releases every week and get thousands of links!” fantastic. You realise at this point the road ahead is a long one.

This is my opinion and you can disagree with me in the comments, sending out press releases through services such as PRnewswire or Marketwire is not a link building strategy, in fact paying for these services alone is nothing but a waste of time and money.

So, I did a little research as I wanted to confirm my long held belief, asking 20 different SEOs to give a rough figure as to how much each of their clients spend on Online press release distribution. I have to say even I was shocked by the figures (a quick thank you to all those who responded, cheers guys).

As you can see 40% of clients were spending £2000 – £3000 a month on press release distribution alone, even at the most expensive rates that’s 6 – 10 per month. Do you really have that much to talk about? On top of that, 2.5% were spending over £5000 per month on press release distribution, that figure is staggering!

I work with some very big brands and they would struggle to fulfill that quota. When I asked why this amount was being spent each month, the same answers came back, "The MD/CEO/Marketing Director believes it to be a solid link building strategy". I know this isn't large enough to be a meaningful sample, but it gives you a slight insight into the minds of some fairly big organisations.

Why is it a Terrible Strategy

I'm sure you're all aware that a good link building strategy should:

1. Follow natural linking patterns
2. Be aimed at acquiring links from unique domains
3. Incorporate social signals

So let's go through this step by step:

Is it natural?

You're sending the same content out to multiple hubs, with the same links in the same anchor text which automatically updates within seconds. Natural? Nah, at least not on its own.

Links from unique domains?

Sure, the first time you send a press release out all your links will be from unique domains. Maybe if you use multiple distribution services you will get plenty of links from unique domains. However if you use these services month after month, all you're doing is acquiring low quality links from the same domains over and over again.

Incorporating social signals?

Erm… nope. The only way this could develop social signals is if someone actually read these releases and referred back to your site through twitter or Facebook etc…

So alone press releases are not a good link building strategy. To emphasise the point a little more I monitored a recent press release that I distributed:

Out of just over 300 hubs precisely 299 were in my report from the distribution service. A month later I checked OSE where I found 36 unique linking domains, out of these only 11 were indexed in Google and my Google alerts account only picked up on four of them. Personally I think this is some indication as to how Google value these types of links.

It's not All Doom and Gloom

I guess I better get a little more positive before I start receiving nasty emails from some of these distribution services and press release fan boys . I honestly believe that press releases can be used to benefit rankings!

I am sure some of you won't agree, but I am a firm believer in creating 'noise' links, but we'll go into that in a little while. Press releases can be used effectively as part of an integrated link building strategy.

Now I know there are other elements but I just want to cover a few of the basics:

1) Creating the Bait

So many people think link bait has to be absolutely amazing, never before seen, wonderfully awesome content. Slight exaggeration but let’s continue… Link bait in my opinion has more to do with the site publishing the content than the actual content itself. Sometimes really average content can garner tons of links simply because the site publishing it has some authority. I have seen terrible content flying around Twitter or Facebook for the simple reason that it was published on the Telegraph or New York Times etc…

So as budding SEOs, the first step to creating link bait isn't thinking up the idea, instead it is making relationships and reaching out to the right people. Getting great content on the right publication just about guarantees some decent links, of course the article published will have to refer/link back to the site you are targeting.

2) Creating noise links

What's the first thing that happens when you get an article published on a well read and well respected publication? It gets scraped hundreds of times.

A very quick example:

I had a link from the White Board Friday on 'Links in Old Content' (Thanks Cyrus). My site went on that same day to receive over 50 pingbacks! Up to date it is over 100! Thanks SEOmoz

In my opinion all these type of links (scraped links) help to raise the link profile and authority of my site. So what is the harm in giving them a push once in a while?

Google knows these popular websites get scraped and creating more of them if you have a link from a strong site, is not going to harm you and in my opinion it helps.

So provide some unique commentary of your own on the article and publish to your favourite newswire, article directories and content hubs. My personal advice would be to use plenty of variation with your anchor text as not to upset any of the algorithms.

3) Guest posting

Yes it's old news, but a really important aspect of link strategy; you should be constantly building a list of blogs you can write for whenever you want to push a new peice of content/link bait. Be proactive in reaching out to relevant bloggers. Feed them genuine content, not just a rewritten article you copied from ezinearticles. You want to make sure that when your story goes live on Fox News you have plenty of friends who will cover it and link back to your site as well as the publication. Guaranteed link bait

4) Social signals

Last but certainly not least is creating the right social signals and utilise all your resources.

As well as regularly reaching out to bloggers you should also be reaching out on Twitter and Facebook. When the time comes your new friends will be more than happy to tweet, stumble and share your ultra link worthy content.

You will also notice that content on highly authoritative resources is almost always more likely to get shared, and more sharing = more links.

So back to press releases…

Using them as a one dimensional strategy = waste of time, money and energy.

Incorporating them into an overall link building strategy, utilising them only when the content is worth sharing = winning formula.

Heading a team that builds thousands of links every month through viral and social promotions gives me some tremendous insights and I have seen the above strategy work time and time again in boosting rankings and overall organic traffic to a website.

One caveat I'll add – If you're the super industry authority and have a large readership, keep your best content for yourself.

There are lots of tools, tips and techniques out there that will help enhance a link building campaign. However we need to figure out how they fit into our overall strategy and not just throw budget mindlessly at well sold services.

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“What was ‘the tipping point’ for your blog?”

This question is one that I’m regularly asked in interviews, and it is one that is challenging to answer. The assumption behind the question is that there is often some kind of event that pushes a blog into the limelight. The reality is that it’s not always this way.

Let me illustrate this by telling the stories of my two main blogs—ProBlogger and Digital Photography School.

ProBlogger’s tipping point: dramatic growth

Here on ProBlogger, the only real tipping point-type event that I can identify is when I mentioned in an interview I did on another blog that I was earning six figures a year from my blogging. Back then (it was 2005), nobody was making money from blogs (or if they were, they weren’t talking about it) so it was news that quickly got passed around.

It was picked up by quite a few other bloggers but also went viral on Slashdot, which was the closest thing that there was to social bookmarking back then.

While I didn’t really consider that there would be much effect from saying I was a six figure blogger in that interview, the impact was pretty significant (in terms of traffic but, more importantly, in terms of profile/brand) for a few reasons:

• The statement was somewhat controversial (the idea of monetizing the “pure” medium of blogging was something that some were dead against) and that caused some buzz. But being the first to announce I was a full-time blogger also created a desire for others to do likewise.
• The idea of blogging for money was sown in the minds of many. As I was not only making a living from blogging, but also writing about that journey here on ProBlogger, I guess there was some credibility built from that statement.
• Coining of the term “ProBlogger”—again being first and having a site called ProBlogger meant that people started to talk about making money from blogs as being a pro blogger, which just grew the site even more.

While all this was fantastic for the growth of ProBlogger and for building my profile, it was all fairly lucky. I didn’t make the statement with any intentions of leveraging it, but once the groundswell of reactions started, I did act fast to make the most of it.

Digital Photography School tipping points: slow but steady growth

Digital Photography School (dPS) on the other hand was a different story. I can’t really think of a single tipping point moment that really stands out as being one that boosted the site to becoming popular (and today is is six or seven times the size of ProBlogger despite being a couple of years younger).

Instead, dPS had a much more steady growth, mainly through a variety of smaller events:

• I did have ProBlogger and a previous camera review site linked to dPS, but after the initial launch, traffic from these sources wasn’t significant.
• We were featured in some mainstream media publications in the early days (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc.) but none of these caused any significant jump in traffic.
• We had days of significant traffic from sites like Lifehacker and social bookmarking sites like Digg, but in general this type of traffic didn’t hang around.

These events certainly didn’t hurt us, but none of them stands out as a tipping point that we never looked back from. Rather, traffic and the brand slowly grew over those first few years from launch.

More significant for dPS than any of the above in mind mind is that I put real emphasis upon a few activities for the first couple of years (warning: none of these are rocket science or spectacular … but they worked):

• Regular useful content: Daily “how to” posts that solved problems, showed people how to achieve their goals and improve their photography was 90% of the content that I produced.
• Shareable content: Content that I knew was more likely to be shared (inspirational posts, breaking news, humor, controversy (I didn’t really focus on this), grand list posts, and so on. This type of content was around 5% of what I produced.
• Community: The other 5% of posts was more focused upon community activities like reader discussions, giving readers a chance to show off their photos, debates, polls, etc. We started a forum in time, too, to build this community further.
• Email newsletter: If there’s one thing that grew the site more than any other, it was that we started collecting people’s email addresses early and began sending them weekly updates/newsletters.
• Promotion: I defined who I wanted to read my blog and did the exercise of asking where they gathered. This lead me to sites like Flickr, other blogs, and some social networking sites where I developed presence, was useful and in time shared our content.

These tasks took almost 100% of my focus in the early days. I didn’t spend a heap of time on social media, did limited networking with other sites (although did develop friendships with a few in time), and focused little upon SEO. The promotion I did was focused to those sites where I knew potential readers were gathering, but the main effort was upon content creation and looking after the readers I already had.

Note: I share quite a bit of the story of how I grew dPS in the 2nd edition of the ProBlogger Book (and have updated and expanded it a little in the soon to be released 3rd edition).

The resulting growth on dPS was far from dramatic or explosive, but in the long term, it was on a far greater scale than here on ProBlogger.

Did your blog have a tipping point for growth?

There is no one way to grow a blog. They come in all shapes and sizes, and their growth cycles vary considerably. I’d love to hear your own story. Did your blog have a tipping point, or was it a slow and steady process? Or do you have another experience all together?

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

2 Different Tales of Blog Growth