Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Content Isn't King. Trust Is
King.'
Posted by becole
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.
As you likely already know, the goal of content marketing is to build up
familiarity and trust with your prospective customers. In this case, the content
isn't designed to sell a specific product or service, but rather to sell you,
and to interested potential customers.
People buy from people that they know, like, and trust. And if you haven't
heard it yet, let me be the first to tell you that "familiarity" breeds trust.
Content marketing certainly isn't new, but it's been getting a lot of new
attention online lately (and for good reason). Small business owners across the
globe are re-discovering these tried and true marketing practices, and using
them to get a big leg up on the competition.
One of the really big advantages small business owners have over the titans of
industry is thatyou can get much more personal with your target audience than
they can. You have a face and a voice. You can be human with your audience. And,
as it turns out, one of the best ways to do that is by talking to your
customers. One of the best ways to get a feel for some of the best-practices
around the industry is to follow and watch how others are succeeding. As such,
I've cherry-picked some of my favorite content marketing tips from experts
around the web.
1. Don't build on rented land
Publish your best content on web properties that you personally own (i.e., your
own self-hosted website). Social media has hit the business world like a freight
train, and there is great value in spreading your message far and wide via these
cheap media channels. The point of all that chatter, though, is to get all those
eyeballs back to your own site. Once they're there, it's time to convert them,
either into customers or, at the very least, into email list subscribers. Social
media is for mingling and chatting (and, obviously, marketing). Your own site is
where the magic should happen. That's where you answer your potential clients'
questions in depth. That's where you create loyalty.
Social media is great. Use it aggressively, but never forget what you're using
it for: to get all those eyeballs back to your own site for conversion.
"Before you create a single piece of content, think about where that content
will live and how audiences willget to it. Effective content marketing takes
work. You'll need energy, thought, and time to create goodcontent. This means
that nearly all of the content you create needs to live on a domain you control,
using a platform you can do as you please with. That means you're not producing
the bulk of your creative content for Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, and you're
not publishing on a "website in 20 minutes" solution that forces you to use
someone else's domain. If your domain isn'twww.YourWebsiteName.com, you don't
own your platform. If you can't publish what you please, with the wording, sales
messages, and images you please, you don't own your platform."
-Sonia Simonevia copyblogger.com
2. Help, not hype, your customer
The goal of content marketing is to allow the potential customer to develop a
trusting relationship with you. One of the best ways to develop that trust is by
answering customer questions and offering information in a clear, honest, and
transparent way.
If the product or service that you offer is part of that message, then feel
free to reference it. But if your content comes across more like an
advertisement or a sales letter, then you're not doing content marketing; you're
doing sales and advertising.
Trust is not built by pushing sales. Trust is built by selflessly helping
people looking for help. In fact, anything but hard selling will probably do
just fine. Some people tell personal stories. Some people seek to entertain.
Some people seek to inform. It all depends on your target audience. What are
they interested in? What do they care about? As long as you're not selling, the
possibilities are pretty much endless.
"Content marketing is not just about amplifying your message to your customer,
it is about helping them find what they are looking for. Discover your customer
needs by searching what they are looking for online and what they are saying
about your category/sector. Provide them with a program to meet these needs,
whether it directly impacts your business or not. Your audience will find the
help useful and you will become top of mind when they are looking for someone in
your sector.And don't forget the power of the face to face contact or 'just
asking' the question."
-Kaitlin Walshvia bluechipcommunication.com.au
3. Write what people want to read, not what you want to write
If you're planning to succeed in your content marketing efforts, there is one
big thing that you have to understand right from the start: it's not about you.
It's never about you. It's not about your company. It's not about your product.
It's not about your service. It's not about how great your company/product is.
It's not about the amazing charity work your president does. It's not about how
fun it is to work at your company. It's NEVER about you. And the minute you try
to make it about you, that's when you lose their trust, and that's when you lose
another potential customer.
Repeat after me: It's ALWAYS about them, never about you. This is content
marketing. It's not sales, and it's not advertising. If you want to do sales and
advertising, that's perfectly fine, but just don't do it in your content
marketing. Write for the reader, always.
"Your content should always have an audience in mind. That means you should
have their needs in mind, too, not your own. Remember, content marketing should
provide something valuable to people. So although you may want to write about
how terrible your day was or how someone should do something about the lines at
delis in grocery stores, that's not the kind of thing people will want to read.
They want to read something that's written about the things they're thinking
about. So ask yourself what concerns and delights your audience, then go from
there."
-Blaise Luceyvia constantcontact.com
4. Reference industry influencers
Even if you are the undisputed thought leader in your specific niche or areas
of expertise, it doesn't mean that you are the only person with something
valuable to add to the conversation. In fact, you make yourself seem more
trustworthy and confident when you reference other players in the marketplace.
I'm not saying that you have to specifically cite your direct competition
(although sometimes that's a great idea) but people are way better informed
these days than you might think they are. Customers are savvy. They know that
you're not the only expert, so if you try to pretend that you, are guess what?
Say it with me this time: they start trusting you less.
Referencing other experts is also a great way to show that there are others
that agree with what you're saying. This is huge. Guess what else? Search
engines love it, too. And just in case you're not fully convinced yet, try this
one. The people that you reference will be thrilled that you mentioned them, and
will likely help promote your content for you for free! Ahhh, viral marketing,
sharing...everybody wins!
"When discussing a specific topic within your content marketing piece, it can
be helpful to reference and cite individuals who are known to the audience and
have authority on the topic. People love to see their own names published and
will likely promote the content on their own for free, thus further spreading
the exposure and influence of your brand and its expertise."
-Marc Purtellvia searchenginejournal.com
5. Create content for all types of readers
Branch out from your normal niche and target readers in a wider variety of
related niche. This doesn't mean that you go way off on a huge tangent from your
core demographics, but people do have other interests. For example, accountants
aren't just interested in accounting.
Let's say you're a real estate broker. What things, other than buying a house,
are people moving to a new city interested in? People with houses often have
pets. Where are the best dog parks in your area? People with houses often have
kids. Where are the best schools in your area? Best restaurants in the area?
Best home improvement contractors in the area? Best landscapers in the area?
Best doctors in the area?
Let's also revisit #4 here for a minute. How thrilled do you think the local
contractor/doctor/restaurateur will be with you and your company if you
reference and link to them in a piece of your marketing content? Especially if
it's a 'best of' type post, you'll come out ahead.
That may have been an easy example, but use your imagination for your specific
industry/niche. What other things are your target customers interested in? You
know your customers better than I do (right?).
Another point is that people have friends, and you never know who will see your
content and pass it on to a friend that they think it will be more useful for. I
do this all the time, and I'll bet you do, too. I may not care about buying a
house, but if I happen to see a post entitled 'Best Pizza Shops in Yourtown,
USA' written by a local real estate agent, I may just tell my friends that are
looking for a new house how cool I think your real estate agency is for writing
such a post.
These actions go a long way toward showing your customers that you care about
them and that you're trying to help them, not just trying to sell them on your
company. That, more than anything else (arguably), builds massive trust.
"The cardinal rule of content marketing says that you need to create content
for your ideal reader in order toattract the right leads and customers. Most
companies follow this to the T, no matter how niche theirindustry is. So even
though their content is excellent, it does not get seen by too many people.
Contentmarketing success takes time and I suggest that you create content for
readers other than your ideal reader sothat it attract more traffic to your
website and social media pages. Instead of focusing on creating just one type of
content for your target audience, create some popular content to service other
readers."
-Jessica Davisvia socialmediatoday.com
6. There is more to content than links
Content marketing is so far above and beyond the classic SEO link building
tactics of the past. These days, it is likely better to think of links in terms
of the direct traffic you'll get from them, rather than any SEO benefits they
may or may not contribute. I'm not suggesting that backlinks are no longer
important for SEO. What I'm suggesting is a change in mindset. Links that will
actually get clicked through to your site are the better ones for SEO, anyway.
That being said, if you think of content marketing as a way to get link juice,
you're doing it wrong. Content creation is all about engagement building and
trust building. Let the SEO benefits work themselves out. What's good for
engagement and trust is also good for search engine optimization.
A link from a reputable site is valuable because of the number of people that
will click on it and come learn more about you and your company. And it just so
happens that the search engines will love it for that exact reason too; win-win.
"Content Marketing is so much more than getting links. It's the glue that holds
your funnel together. It's the reason a prospect visits your site, it's the
reason they choose to move further down the purchase path, buy a product and
return to your site time and again."
-Kieran Flanagan via seomoz.org
7. Don't forget the "marketing" in content marketing
Until now, I've talked mostly about content creation, but there is one other
huge piece to this content marketing puzzle: content promotion.
It's incredibly shocking, but one of the biggest problems I see is that small
business owners seem to be embarrassed about promoting their content. None of
them seem to have any trouble trying to promote their products and services
within their content, but once the content has been created, they're timid about
telling people it exists.
My best guess is that they're not proud of their content. Maybe that they don't
think their writing is very good, or that their content is boring, or something
along that vein. If that's the case, let me try to help you a bit with that.
In general, if you're being helpful, people don't really care if your writing
is a little rough around the edges. If you're getting people the information and
answers that they're looking for, they will very easily forgive non-perfect
writing. In fact, very often it can make you seem even more human to them.
Furthermore, the more you do it, the better you'll get at it. Nobody starts out
being a great writer, a great blogger, or a great content marketer, but the
sooner you start 'practicing,' the sooner you'll get better at it. I promise, it
gets a lot easier very, very quickly. As a matter of fact, read my I Hate
Bloggingpost here and you will see I am in the same shoes as many people who
struggle with writing.
You don't ever have to be perfect; you just have to help and/or entertain your
readers. If you do that and keep working at it, you'll be fine. But you must
promote your content. If you don't promote it, then no one will ever read it, in
which case, it's useless. The days are long gone where you could just post a new
piece of content and hope that people would find it via search (or because you
had built boatloads of spam links to it).
As discussed in point #1 above, this is where social media and your social
media connections come in. Use your social channels to guide traffic back to
your freshly minted content. If people like you on social media, they'll want to
learn more about you. Give them a way to do that.
If you're just starting out on sharing your content through social media,
here's an example of what you can say:
"Hey there folks, I just wrote up a quick post about some cool local resources
I've been working on recently. If you have a moment, take a quick peek and let
me know what you think. I'm just getting started with this whole content
marketing thing, so any feedback you can give me will be greatly appreciated.
Here's the link, thanks!"
This may be the one piece of advice I can give you that will determine your
fate in content marketing more than any other. If you are too embarrassed to
promote your content, then you may as well give up on the whole idea of content
marketing right now. Go do PPC instead.
"Do you know why your content marketing campaign is going to fail? It's not
because you can't write great content it's actually because you don't know how
to promote it. You can learn how to write great content, but if no one reads
your content and links to it, there's no point in putting it out there."
-Neil Patelvia quicksprout.com
8. It's all about relationships
If people can see you actively participating and being a team-player, then they
will treat you accordingly; as a member of the team. [ Insider Tip:That's the
goal!] The bottom line with social is this: you have to be an active member of
the team. It's not enough to just stop in and share a few things here and there,
a day or two before you're going to need those same people to share your stuff
for you. You have to be active. You have to be part of the team; a member of the
community. It's not a wishy-washy kind of thing. It's a commitment; a commitment
to your community. Your network depends on you to be there for them, just like
they are there for you.
This doesn't mean that you have to be on social sites all day long. This also
doesn't mean that you have to promote every piece of content that every member
of your social network produces. It does mean however, that you stay involved
and engaged consistently.
If people see you actively sharing and promoting other people, they will be
that much more likely to share and promote your stuff when the time comes.The
time to make friends on social media channels is way before you need them.
"I've heard this mantra a lot, but it wasn't until my first crack at this that
I really understood how crucial relationships were. The people who were
ultimately the ones to contribute something to the post were the ones I built
the best relationships with. They were the ones that (for whatever reasons)
responded to comments I left on their blog posts or replied to my tweets in the
initial weeks. They were the ones who I was able to engage with in a personal
way over email. And now they're the ones who are appreciative of the opportunity
and exposure and are interested in working with me again in the future."
-Mike Arnesenvia mikearnesen.com
9. Think like a publisher
Whatever business you're in, your website and/or blog is now a venue for that
industry/niche. That's just pure fact; no way around it. The trick, though, is
learning to re-train your brain to treat it as such. Go down to your local book
store and grab a few magazines that catch your eye, and then study them. Study
their format, study their layout, study their focus. Whether you like it or not,
you are in the "online magazine" publishing business now. The fun part is that
you get to talk about stuff you're already an expert in.
Use your site to engage, entertain, and inform. That's all you really have to
do. The hardest part is remembering to do that every time you sit down to write
another piece of content. One of the quickest/easiest ways to do that is to
write content that answers common customer questions. That sounds simplistic,
but it's incredibly useful and engaging for people seeking answers. And if you
can do that in a fun interesting way; all the better.
"You are not an advertiser[emphasis added]. An advertiser disrupts but a
publisher educates and connects in a two way communication. Don't put too much
emphasis on your brand. The goal is to engage your visitors and in due time,
your brand will get the proper recognition. Always put value in your content. To
be accurate, content is not king but value is. It's not enough to have content
that is readable and no grammar mistakes. What matters is the substance of the
content. What's in it for your visitors? What value will they get?"
-Mark Acsay IIIvia webbythoughts.com
10. Use other sites to find out what kind of content people want
I saved this one for last because it always seems to be a major sticking point
with small business owners, and I wanted it to be fresh in your mind as you
finish up this post. Small business owners oftentimes think that they have
nothing to say, and nothing to write about.
We started this conversation in #2 above, and then again in #9 talking about
answering customer questions in a fun, interesting way (and that should get you
started in a big way), but eventually, you'll probably want to start branching
out a bit with your topic ideas. The best way to do that is to watch what your
competition is writing about, and also what other industries closely related to
yours are writing about.
Read other good blogs on your topic and then just write similar articles with
your own opinions and insights on the same topic, and try to make it better. I'm
not suggesting that you copy anything from them obviously; just that you get
inspired from them. This is also a great way to incorporate #4 and #8 above.
Everyone does this. Everyone gets inspiration from things that they see (and
read) elsewhere; it's how the world works. Inspiration comes from building on
top of what has come before.
This very post is a perfect example. I was inspired by the people that I quoted
here. I read their posts, I picked my favorite tips from each of them, and then
I added my own thoughts on the topics. I didn't have to quote and cite them,
this post would have been perfectly fine on its own, but I did quote and cite
them because it makes for a more interesting and engaging article. Plus it helps
with a bunch of the other tips mentioned above.
"Sometimes it's hard to know what people want to read about. One way to find
this out is to visit sites within your industry. Check their blogs and see what
posts get the most tweets and shares. In the internet marketing niche, social
media is all the rage. If you write a post about Facebook or Twitter, it's
guaranteed to get more shares. Do some research to find out what kind of post
are popular in your industry and write that type of content. You don't want to
write these types of posts every time, but it's a great way to boost traffic
when it fits into your publishing schedule."
-Joseph Putnam via kissmetrics.com
Conclusion
Its a wonderful time to be a small business owner. The Internet and content
marketing has made it possible for us to stop chasing the media, and instead,
become the media. You are now a magazine publisher for your own industry (and/or
a local niche). Your voice can be as big or as small as you want it to be. It
can start small and then grow. Or it can just stay small and that's okay too.
You are in total control here. There's no reason to ever feel intimidated by the
process because you control the process.
Just remember, the goal of content marketing and its sidekick social media
marketing is to inform and entertain prospective customers in a way that
inspires them to trust you for the right reasons; authentic, legitimate,
deserving and well-earned trust. When the time comes for them to buy something,
they buy from people they trust: you. Which, as I may have mentioned once or
twice already, is the whole point of all this stuff. Trust, trust, trust; burn
that into your brain. Content isn't king. Trust is king. Content is just how you
get there.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/VHxawNm6O_k/content-isnt-king-trust-is-king
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Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Thursday, 9 May 2013
Tuesday, 7 May 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'How Guest Bloggers are
Sleepwalking Their Way into Penalties'
Posted by James Finlayson
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.
How do you get links in a post-penguin world? For far too many the answer seems
to be, exclusively, guest posting. Today Im going to give you four reasons why I
think this tactic is as dangerous as those it replaced.
Note: Im not about to say that all guest posting is bad in the same way not
all directories are automatically spammy. Im also not about to say all guest
bloggers will be penalised. What I will do is point out the dangers of guest
posting as Google becomes increasingly intelligent; and what you can do to avoid
them.
Link Quality
Penguin really hurt sites that relied on low-quality links. Many have responded
by setting a minimum domain authority threshold when prospecting. To keep the
process efficient they then remove sites with a DA over a certain level seeing
these as less likely to accept content.
No new site owner ever sat down and thought hmm, well I best not link to
buybluewidgets.com today, my domain authoritys only 28 Ill wait a few months.
Equally, the reason Mashable's not linking to you isn't because your DA has yet
to hit a magical level. If you offer something of value links naturally come
from a huge variety of high, medium and low quality sites. High quality links
are rare naturally, thats part of what makes them so valuable, but they do
occur. As a result, a completely natural link portfolio looks something like
this:
Ive now started to see new sites, fresh out of a successful outreach campaign
whose link portfolio looks like this:
Theres little way that this could have occurred un-engineered and, if its
obvious to us then itll be obvious to Google too.
"Mass guest posting is dangerous because it creates an unnatural looking link
quality graph." [tweet]
Link Type
Conventional wisdom tells us that directories are bad, blogs are good and
academic links are amazing. Tools like Link Research Tools and Linkdex allow you
to break up your competitors links by type - if SEO tools can do this then so
can Google. I took a vertical at random and wasnt surprised to see this:
Its not unusual to find sites with a huge percentage of their links coming from
directories and these are sites we currently think of as having engaged in
low-quality link building. So your site proudly strides in to the market and
builds this profile:
Im not saying that you need to replicate the industry standard thats not going
to put you ahead of your competitors. I am saying A link profile made up of only
one type of link looks unnatural whatever those links are. [tweet]
Link Location
Google devalued footer links because theyre too easy to game. Google devalued
sidebar links because they were being purchased en masse. Are links in author
boxes next? When youre consistently relying on links in guest-post author boxes
youre building a very obvious footprint. Due to the author boxs proximity to the
author markup, relatively standard layout and positioning on the page it would
be incredibly easy for Google to algorithmically target them in the same way it
did sidebars and footers.
When a links in the middle of a post theres an assumption that its there
because its relevant. When a links in the author box its rarely there for the
benefit of the user its the writers payment for the post. Its a box in which
the author advertises themselves. So it could be argued the author box is a form
of paid advertisement. How long until Matt Cutts does a video saying those links
should be no-followed?
Thats all before you consider that the links in a box that gets skipped over by
readers. That means you can expect virtually no traffic from it. Wouldn't it be
better to be building links that drive traffic as well as rankings?
Anchor-text-heavy links in author boxes look fishy, even to non-marketers; lets
stop building them. [tweet]
Authorship
Googles really started to push authorship as an important signal. So, many
guest bloggers have used their own name (or repeatedly the same name) in each of
their guest posts to build up their authority. This has led to a great new form
of competitor link-building. If youre an agency, this creates a competitive
issue:
Whoever you are, this creates two other problems:
Your competitors can Google your name and easily find your link-building
efforts no SEO tool necessary.
Whichever domain youre building links to has a large number of their links
coming from a single author.
Every SEO knows how important domain diversity is; having a large number of
your links coming from a single author is the authorship version of putting them
all on the same domain. Assuming all other factors are equal (including average
link quality), which of these do you think Google would be likely to rank more
highly:
In real life its natural to assume a company that has lots of people talking
about it is more important than one nobody's heard of - that has very few people
mentioning it; shouldnt Google follow the same principal with linking authors?
Lets assume Google gets smarter still. On your Google profile theres a nice box
for you to enter your employment history. What if Google used that data to make
a graph similar to this?
Search engines see links as an indicator of quality because theyre essentially
recommendations. If most of a companys recommendations are coming from its own
employees would you trust them? Youd probably just ignore those recommendations.
What if Google decided to discount all links created by a companys own
employees? Simpler still, what if Google decided to ignore all links created by
SEOs where those links are in articles that arent talking about SEO? Googles
collecting all this data now, why wouldnt it use it?
One person authoring the majority of your links looks like link building
because it is. [tweet]
Fundamentally, this all comes back to Dr Petes Top 1 SEO Tips For 2013
diversify. Each of the issues is a problem of oversimplifying the link building
process. Im convinced that taking a holistic view to inbound marketing not only
provides the highest ROI, but will increasingly become the only safe way to
aggressively grow a companys reach online.
Takeaways:
Dont rely on any one type of site for a majority of your links; build links of
all types into your plans.
Be aware of the quality of links you're building, but make sure to keep the
overall portfolio looking natural.
Don't use a single author for all your content - vary it between different,
real, people. When using external writers, use their authorship to help further
vary the mix.
Split up different parts of a clients campaign between different team members;
that way there should naturally be a slightly different approach applied across
the clients links.
Oversimplifying a link building process may make it faster, but the footprint
it generates also makes it riskier.
Have you begun to scale back, or even phase-out, guest posting? Let me know in
the comments below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/BvjoljTJm2s/how-guest-bloggers-are-sleepwalking-their-way-into-penalties
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Sleepwalking Their Way into Penalties'
Posted by James Finlayson
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.
How do you get links in a post-penguin world? For far too many the answer seems
to be, exclusively, guest posting. Today Im going to give you four reasons why I
think this tactic is as dangerous as those it replaced.
Note: Im not about to say that all guest posting is bad in the same way not
all directories are automatically spammy. Im also not about to say all guest
bloggers will be penalised. What I will do is point out the dangers of guest
posting as Google becomes increasingly intelligent; and what you can do to avoid
them.
Link Quality
Penguin really hurt sites that relied on low-quality links. Many have responded
by setting a minimum domain authority threshold when prospecting. To keep the
process efficient they then remove sites with a DA over a certain level seeing
these as less likely to accept content.
No new site owner ever sat down and thought hmm, well I best not link to
buybluewidgets.com today, my domain authoritys only 28 Ill wait a few months.
Equally, the reason Mashable's not linking to you isn't because your DA has yet
to hit a magical level. If you offer something of value links naturally come
from a huge variety of high, medium and low quality sites. High quality links
are rare naturally, thats part of what makes them so valuable, but they do
occur. As a result, a completely natural link portfolio looks something like
this:
Ive now started to see new sites, fresh out of a successful outreach campaign
whose link portfolio looks like this:
Theres little way that this could have occurred un-engineered and, if its
obvious to us then itll be obvious to Google too.
"Mass guest posting is dangerous because it creates an unnatural looking link
quality graph." [tweet]
Link Type
Conventional wisdom tells us that directories are bad, blogs are good and
academic links are amazing. Tools like Link Research Tools and Linkdex allow you
to break up your competitors links by type - if SEO tools can do this then so
can Google. I took a vertical at random and wasnt surprised to see this:
Its not unusual to find sites with a huge percentage of their links coming from
directories and these are sites we currently think of as having engaged in
low-quality link building. So your site proudly strides in to the market and
builds this profile:
Im not saying that you need to replicate the industry standard thats not going
to put you ahead of your competitors. I am saying A link profile made up of only
one type of link looks unnatural whatever those links are. [tweet]
Link Location
Google devalued footer links because theyre too easy to game. Google devalued
sidebar links because they were being purchased en masse. Are links in author
boxes next? When youre consistently relying on links in guest-post author boxes
youre building a very obvious footprint. Due to the author boxs proximity to the
author markup, relatively standard layout and positioning on the page it would
be incredibly easy for Google to algorithmically target them in the same way it
did sidebars and footers.
When a links in the middle of a post theres an assumption that its there
because its relevant. When a links in the author box its rarely there for the
benefit of the user its the writers payment for the post. Its a box in which
the author advertises themselves. So it could be argued the author box is a form
of paid advertisement. How long until Matt Cutts does a video saying those links
should be no-followed?
Thats all before you consider that the links in a box that gets skipped over by
readers. That means you can expect virtually no traffic from it. Wouldn't it be
better to be building links that drive traffic as well as rankings?
Anchor-text-heavy links in author boxes look fishy, even to non-marketers; lets
stop building them. [tweet]
Authorship
Googles really started to push authorship as an important signal. So, many
guest bloggers have used their own name (or repeatedly the same name) in each of
their guest posts to build up their authority. This has led to a great new form
of competitor link-building. If youre an agency, this creates a competitive
issue:
Whoever you are, this creates two other problems:
Your competitors can Google your name and easily find your link-building
efforts no SEO tool necessary.
Whichever domain youre building links to has a large number of their links
coming from a single author.
Every SEO knows how important domain diversity is; having a large number of
your links coming from a single author is the authorship version of putting them
all on the same domain. Assuming all other factors are equal (including average
link quality), which of these do you think Google would be likely to rank more
highly:
In real life its natural to assume a company that has lots of people talking
about it is more important than one nobody's heard of - that has very few people
mentioning it; shouldnt Google follow the same principal with linking authors?
Lets assume Google gets smarter still. On your Google profile theres a nice box
for you to enter your employment history. What if Google used that data to make
a graph similar to this?
Search engines see links as an indicator of quality because theyre essentially
recommendations. If most of a companys recommendations are coming from its own
employees would you trust them? Youd probably just ignore those recommendations.
What if Google decided to discount all links created by a companys own
employees? Simpler still, what if Google decided to ignore all links created by
SEOs where those links are in articles that arent talking about SEO? Googles
collecting all this data now, why wouldnt it use it?
One person authoring the majority of your links looks like link building
because it is. [tweet]
Fundamentally, this all comes back to Dr Petes Top 1 SEO Tips For 2013
diversify. Each of the issues is a problem of oversimplifying the link building
process. Im convinced that taking a holistic view to inbound marketing not only
provides the highest ROI, but will increasingly become the only safe way to
aggressively grow a companys reach online.
Takeaways:
Dont rely on any one type of site for a majority of your links; build links of
all types into your plans.
Be aware of the quality of links you're building, but make sure to keep the
overall portfolio looking natural.
Don't use a single author for all your content - vary it between different,
real, people. When using external writers, use their authorship to help further
vary the mix.
Split up different parts of a clients campaign between different team members;
that way there should naturally be a slightly different approach applied across
the clients links.
Oversimplifying a link building process may make it faster, but the footprint
it generates also makes it riskier.
Have you begun to scale back, or even phase-out, guest posting? Let me know in
the comments below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
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Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Secret Recipe for Viral
Content Marketing Success'
Posted by KelseyLibert
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.
Let's assume you know the basics: content marketing is one of the best ways to
engage with audiences and potential customers online. It is useful for improving
search rankings, increasing brand engagement and loyalty, increasing brand
visibility, and encouraging social sharing and interaction. If you are a
consumer-facing company in this day and age, you simply cannot keep up with the
competition if you are not actively building your content marketing skill set.
Easier said than done though, right? Youve probably dabbled in content
marketing before, or maybe even hired a top agency. Maybe you have even seen
some results; a few links here, a few hundred shares there, but then what?
Certainly no fireworks, no massive ranking improvements, and no lead or sale
increases. Maybe it wasnt the panacea youd hoped it might be. Short on time and
money, you probably gave up and reinvested your money into tried and true
marketing practices that could at least drive a few conversions. You chalked
content marketing up to something too expensive or too difficult to find any
real success with.
If any of this resonates with you, you are most definitely not alone. Doing
content marketing properly is no easy task, and to beginners it can seem to be
next to impossible to create anything that will stand out and get noticed. Add
to that the explosion of agencies who claim to be gurus and deliver tragically
poor results, and the whole content marketing arena can start to feel like a
convoluted mess that cant deliver on its promises.
So, what do you do? Other tactics are losing efficacy, your site is losing
rankings, you cant get social engagement for the life of you, and your
frustration level is at an all-time high.
You go back to the beginning, and you relearn the truth about what it takes to
come up with content that works: content that shows what content marketing can
really do for your business. Content marketing that can transform a company
overnight.
When content goes viral: The example above shows a near 10 fold increase in our
client's organic search traffic (from Google alone) after a single successful
viral campaign. The big spike in the beginning of December marks the launch of
the campaign.
Step 1: Understanding the truth about your competition
You may assume when you first begin that your only competition are your
business competitors, the companies online that fight for the same search
phrases, or sell the same products or services. When it comes to content
marketing, these businesses are only the beginning. What you must remember is
that when creating content, you are fighting for attention against EVERYONE; all
content creators, not just businesses. Your content must stand its ground
against those who are creating content for entirely non-commercial reasons. This
means that when coming up with your campaigns, you must not only do better than
your competitors, but you must do better than almost everyone talking about your
subject area.
Step 2: Engagement is good, but viral is better
In content marketing, going the incremental route can be an effective way to
go. Loyal audiences can be built by creating a great deal of relevant, useful,
but not particularly viral content. Through persistence and often grueling
content creation schedule it is possible to find a positive ROI over the long
term. If you have the capacity to pump out 5-7 thoughtful and moderately useful
pieces of content weekly, eventually you will likely see good results. However,
as Rand Fishkin said, you have to "be willing to fail for a long time.
In fact, for companies that can afford it, this can be an essential piece of
the content marketing pie, and it is often something we recommend to our clients
who have longer timelines. But this style of content marketing will not change
your business in the short term. It can take years of consistent effort to see
substantial improvements in rankings and in audience growth.
What if you dont have years; dont have the time, energy, or budgets to create
compelling content on a regular basis; or simply need to build an audience fast?
The answer is this: you must create something viral; content that can spread in
a way that creates massive attention. Content that will boost you above the
writhing masses, and make others take notice.
Below, you can see our viral content marketing campaign results, which impacted
our clients 271% organic traffic increase. It's important to note that these
results were generated by a single outreach placement on Buzzfeed.com, with a
nofollow link.
Step 3: Understanding what it means to go viral"
If you have done any reading on viral marketing, you have probably come across
attempts at formulas for describing virality, but none that have made it very
concrete beyond the understanding that to go viral means to have a high level of
visibility. The truth is that virality and the act of going viral isnt really
all that complex. Having something go viral relies on having specific values for
three important variables. These variables include:
Viral coefficient: the total number of new viewers generated by one existing
viewer. As content creators this is the number you should be most concerned
with, it is basically a score of how shareable your content truly is.
Viral cycle time: the amount of time it takes before all these new users have
been generated by a single initial viewer. In content marketing, the viral cycle
Time can be thought of as the amount of time it would take for a viewer who had
a piece of content shared with them to view the content and then decide whether
or not to share it themselves. The viral cycle time for sharing content is
usually no longer than 1-2 days, though in some special circumstances, it can be
longer. For the purposes of our discussion here, we will define the viral cycle
time as one day.
Total available market: the number of people online who might be interested in
sharing your content. For broad-appeal type pieces, this number could be in the
hundreds of millions. For niche content, this could be as low as several hundred
or several thousand people.
Ive adapted a spreadsheet that looks at how these factors actually influence
the anatomy and eventual success or failure of a piece of content. The bones of
this spreadsheet were originally created by Mark Devisser. Feel free to make a
copy of this document and play around with the three variables mentioned above.
As a note, you will likely notice some key aspects of virality just from playing
with this including:
True virality along with the telltale hockey stick graph can not be created
without a viral coefficient of greater than "1." The higher the coefficient, the
faster the spread of the content and also the sooner and more abrupt the hockey
stick you will see on the graph.
The size of the initial seed is important for the length of time from the
initial publishing it takes for virality (hockey stick) to happen. The larger
the initial seed, the sooner you will see a potential viral effect, assuming the
coefficient is still greater than 1.
Extending the cycle time will extend the length of time it takes to see a
viral effect (hockey stick) Fortunately, with web based content, the cycle time
happens extremely quickly thanks to social channels and the nature of digital
content. If you were measuring the virality of say a snail mail chain letter,
the cycle time would be on the order of weeks, and creating virality would take
much longer assuming a viral coefficient greater than 1.
The size of the Total Available Market has an enormous bearing on the total
number of cumulative views. This makes it extremely important to think about
your target audience during idea development. If you want a viral smash, you
must have content that appeals to the masses (more on this later).
Step 4: Creating content with a viral coefficient above 1
So, understanding what virality is great, and understanding the levers for
virality is even better, but how does this translate specifically to content?
How do you take the ideas we just learned and make them work for you in your
content marketing efforts?
To begin, the first, most important, and most difficult step is to create a
piece of content that you think will likely have a viral coefficient greater
than 1. When it ultimately comes down to it, there is no perfect way to gauge
whether or not a particular piece of content will have a viral coefficient above
1. Ultimately, you wont know until your content gets out onto the Internet.
However, by exploring the top-level qualities that exist within most viral
content with a coefficient above 1, it is possible to give yourself a much
higher probability of viral success.
Strong emotional drivers
Put simply, emotions drive almost all behavior. When an emotion is triggered in
your brain, your nervous system responds by creating a subjective experience
(feelings). A great deal of your decisions are informed by your emotional
responses because that is what emotions are designed to do: to appraise and
summarize an experience and inform your actions. The stronger the feeling, the
more likely to spur a responsive action.
When it comes to sharing online, the potential actions related to emotional
activation are relatively simple. Essentially there are four options for your
typical content consumer when approaching a new piece of content.
Engage or disengage
Share or dont share
In order for a content consumer to share, they must engage first with the
content, and then make the decision to share that content. These actions are
mediated entirely by emotions. Many brain researchers and scientists agree that
emotion of interest is continually present in the normal mind under normal
conditions, and it is the central motivation for engagement in creative and
constructive endeavors and for the sense of well-being. Interest and its
interaction with other emotions account for selective attention, which in turn
influences all other mental processes. Thus, in order to get someone to engage
with your content, it must first and foremost pique interest. It is for this
reason that titles are so massively important. Without a title that piques
interest beyond an undefined threshold, there will be no engagement.
Assuming youve piqued your readers interest with an interesting title and have
passed the first stage, your content must now convince the reader to share. The
decision making process for this, as defined by prominent psychologist Richard
Lazarus is as follows:
Cognitive appraisal: The individual assesses the event cognitively, which cues
the emotion.
Physiological changes: The cognitive reaction starts biological changes such
as increased heart rate or pituitary adrenal response.
Action:The individual feels the emotion and chooses how to react (or not).
If the cognitive appraisal spurs a strong enough emotion, and resultantly large
physiological change, the probability of action is increased. In the case of
sharing content, if the cognitive appraisal cues a strong enough emotion and
resultant physiological response to overcome factors that antagonize sharing the
reader will share the content.
So, how do we create strong emotional drivers in our content?
In the fast paced online environment, you will only ever have a short amount of
time to get the attention of a viewer. Your goal should be to capture the
attention of a viewer, and then engage them emotionally as quickly as possible.
The faster and more deeply you are able to engage their emotions, the more
likely the viewer is to invest themselves enough in the content to share it.
Lets by addressing speed:
The speed of emotional activation
If you are not able to convey the emotionally impactful aspects of your content
quickly, you are probably dead in the water. Highly viral content will
communicate its strong emotional impact within the first few seconds of viewing.
It is for this reason that visual, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-consume
content is generally the most viral. Take one look at viral kingmakers like
Reddit.com and you will notice that 90% of the frontpage content are static
images. This is also the reason behind the success of infographics (as well as
image macros/memes, animated gifs and several other mediums). Visual,
simplistic, easy-to-consume, infographics can make excellent viral content, but
only if they can extend the benefit of their medium and illicit a strong
emotional reaction as well.
Which emotions should we engage?
Conceivably, almost any emotion, given that it is strong enough is possible as
behaving as the primary driver of sharing. In practice, though, not all emotions
are as effective in driving sharing behavior as others. Unfortunately, there
have been very few studies on the types of emotions lead to sharing. Jonah
Berger, a professor at Wharton, has done some preliminary research in this area
by looking at the email sharing rates of New York Times articles. His findings
are summarized as follows:
The results indicate that positive content is more viral than negative content,
but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex
than valence alone. Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal.
Content that evokes high-arousal positive ( such as awe) or negative (anger or
anxiety) emotions is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or
deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral. these results hold even
when the authors control for how surprising, interesting, or practically useful
content is (all of which are positively linked to virality), as well as external
drivers of attention (e.g., how prominently content was featured). Experimental
results further demonstrate the causal impact of specific emotion on
transmission and illustrate that it is driven by the level of activation
induced. taken together, these findings shed light on why people share content
and how to design more effective viral marketing campaigns.
While this is a great start in understanding the emotional drivers of sharing,
it is a very incomplete understanding. In an effort to further detail the real
emotional drivers, I sought to understand the emotional impact of content that
better fit the criteria of most viral content (i.e. visual, easy-to-understand,
and easy-to-consume content).
Exclusive Fractl research project: viral emotions
*It is important to begin by noting here that the following experiment is not
scientific or widely comprehensive. Despite this, there is a good deal of
preliminary information that speaks to some of the most apparent aspects of the
emotional drivers of viral content, and the takeaways found are likely quite
valuable. Research of greater depth will likely bear out additional information
and more granular insights.* (Raw Data)
I began by selecting a group of content that fit what I believed would be
representative of the best of the best in viral content. To make sure I was
comparing apples to apples, I decided only to use static images instead of
written or multimedia content. Memes and inside jokes were also excluded as the
factors that lead to them becoming viral can be non-emotional and more difficult
to analyze or ascertain.
The source of the content I used came from the top 50 image posts of all time
on reddit.com/r/pics, a community of 3.4 million plus content voters. I selected
25 images that I felt could stand alone, ones that required no previous
knowledge to understand (Reddit tends to boost inside joke type content on
occasion, so post that fit that profile were excluded).
I then had each image coded by 50 volunteers for the emotions that were
elicited by each image as well as the strength of each emotion. The possible
choices for the emotions included:
Possible emotion choices
What we learned
The results from this informal survey on some of the webs most viral visual
content was actually quite amazing. Much of what we found mirrored the results
found by Jonah Berger, but we also found some interesting additional takeaways.
What we found was as follows:
Positive emotions were much more common than negative emotions (14 negative
and 184 positive).
Certain specific emotions were extremely common, while others were extremely
uncommon.
The strength of the emotional impact was a great indicator for the popularity
of the content on Reddit. The top four most popular posts on Reddit also had the
top four highest aggregate emotionality scores (sum of emotional strength score
totals).
Interest, surprise, and amusement seemed to behave as emotional multipliers
for positive emotions, and empathy seemed to act as an emotional multiplier for
negative emotions. 12 of the 25 images had Amusement, Interest, and Surprise as
3 of their top emotions and all images had at least 1 of the 3 emotions (either
Amusement, Interest, or Surprise).
Contrasting emotions seemed to be helpful in increasing emotional impact. In
the cases where negative emotions were present, they seemed to directly contrast
positive emotions, likely enhancing the emotionality of the image through this
contrast. Additionally, empathy seems to be a common emotion found alongside
popular content that evokes strong negative emotions.
Enhancing emotionality for higher virality
Its clear that emotionally evocative content is essential in creating
wide-reaching viral content, and that there are even some emotions that seem to
work better than others toward this goal, but are there other ways to expand on
emotionality for virality? In other words, how can emotionality be enhanced?
Increasing emotional identification with the content
Make your content visual
On a whole, visual content is better at conveying emotionality and being
understood quickly and easily. Therefore, images and video have a leg up against
written form content. It is for this reason that image and video sharing
dominates online. It is the reason the images and video dominate Reddits front
page each day and the reason 40 of the top 50 posts of all time on Reddit are
either images or videos. It is the reason we have all seen infographics,
animated gifs, and image macros have become ubiquitous. As a general rule,
visual content is simply more engaging.
Make your content interactive
Interactive content engages the viewers senses and attention in a more active
way than simple static content. By creating an experience that your viewers must
participate in, you necessarily enhance the impact. If there is an emotional
angle to your interactive campaign, it can increase the emotional impact
substantially. One excellent way we are seeing this happen recently is through
the use of parallax treatments like these.
Make your content personalized
Customized or personalized content is, by its very nature, better at engaging
viewers emotionally than non-personalized content. Emotions are more easily
evoked when the user can actually SEE themselves in the content, instead of
relying on empathy to put themselves in someone elses shoes. Some standout
emotionally compelling, personalized, content like this, illustrates just how
incredibly viral emotionally driven, personalized, visual content can be. Have
you ever created something with 12 million + Facebook likes? Try
emotionally-driven, visual, personalized, interactive content, and you might
just be able to.
Emotional stacking with lists
If you havent been paying attention to Buzzfeed.com lately, you should probably
start. They have mastered the art of what I like to call Emotional Stacking.
Definition: Lists of disparate visual content, linked thematically, into a list
that is purposefully structured to build up a specific emotional response.
This example, for instance illustrates the technique perfectly. A list based
image post of the 45 Most Powerful Images of 2011. With each image adding to the
emotional reaction of the user, by the time you get to the end, you have been
worked up into such an emotional state that the desire to share feels almost
visceral.
Growing the viral coefficient - Beyond the emotions
While emotions generally play the largest role in determining the viral
coefficient of a piece of content, there are other aspects that can contribute
significantly to whether or not a that content is ultimately shared. Additional
motivating factors can play a key role, specifically factors that convey some
kind of social benefit or ego benefit.
The social benefits of sharing:
Social incentive/reward to share
"Ingroup vs. Outgroup"
Content that makes the viewer feel exclusive, or in-the-know, or otherwise
included can often work very well as a motivator for sharing. This ingroup vs.
outgroup effect is one of the driving forces for the popularity of memes, by
sharing the inside joke the sharer demonstrates that they are part of the
ingroup.
"Altruistic"
Content that allows the sharer to feel that they are doing tangible good can
often incentivize sharing and substantially increase the viral coefficient. This
is especially true for content that has a strong emotional hook that creates
strong feelings of empathy. This is just one excellent example of an altruism
enhanced, emotionally-driven viral effect.
"Self-identity/image bolstering"
When users share content on peer-facing communities like Facebook, they often
make sharing decisions based on how the content will represent them to their
peers. What is it that sharing that specific piece of content will convey about
the sharer to their peers? Content that, when shared, would affirm the identity
of the sharer will be more likely to be shared than content that wont. This is
one of the reasons why emotionally driven content that relates to hot-button
social issues can often be extremely viral.
We saw this exploited (in the best sense of the word) extensively by companies
like OREO, with their pro LGBT rights campaigns over the last year. Sharing was
incentivized because so many people felt compelled to position themselves on one
side of the issue or the other, bolstering their own identity to themselves and
their peers using the emotionally evocative image as a vehicle.
Step 5: Decreasing viral cycle time
As I mentioned earlier, viral cycle time can be thought of as the period of
time it takes for a viewer to share from the time they view the content. While a
viral coefficient above 1 is needed for exponential viral growth, the timeline
of this growth can be fast or it can be exceedingly slow. It is the viral cycle
time that determines how quickly exponential growth will occur in content that
has a viral coefficient above 1. It is in the best interest of the content
creator to do everything they can to decrease the viral cycle time, to help
achieve exponential viral growth in the shortest amount of time possible. So,
what can be done to manipulate viral cycle time? To be precise, pretty much
anything that can spur the sharer to consume the content faster and share the
content faster. This includes, but is not limited to the following:
1. Decreasing consumption time
Conciseness of content is extremely important. The faster content can make its
impact, the faster the potential cycle time. This is another reason why images
tend to be so viral. They can be understood and shared at lightning speed. For
instance a viral image may take only seconds to consume, whereas a long-form
article, or long video may take many minutes or more to consume. The slower the
consumption of the content, the slower the viral cycle time, and potentially the
longer it would take for the content to go viral (assuming it has a viral
coefficient above 1). The takeaway here is to do everything you can to make your
content as concise as possible, so long as you are not sacrificing the impact of
the content. Dont make the mistake of sacrificing a 1+ viral coefficient for a
faster cycle time, because without it, you wont have any virality at all.
2. Increasing ease and speed of sharing
Making your content simple and fast to share is absolutely essential for
helping to increase viral cycle time. You should do everything you can to
include sharing tools for the most popular social sharing sites (Facebook,
Tumblr, Pinterest, Email, and Reddit) at the very least. You should also make
sure that sharing is set up properly to share a compelling default title and
text.
Step 6: The limitations of virality and the importance of audience.
Ive discussed generalities about the importance of emotional activation in
viral content, but creating successful viral content can often be a bit more
nuanced than simply creating something that will strongly engage viewers
emotions. It is also incredibly important to do your best to make sure that your
content is well suited for the audience you hope to target.
Now, if you are simply trying to create something massively viral, and you dont
really care about any connection or tie-in to your company or brand, your
opportunities for topic ideas are nearly limitless. In practice, though, this
isn't often the case. The goal is usually to create viral content that in some
way ties in with the offering of the company creating the content. In this case,
it is essential to carefully define a target audience for your prospective
content, even before coming up with ideas. The reception of the content you
create within this segmented target audience is what will determine whether or
not your content will become viral.
The considerations that you may want to make are multiple, and a future blog
post will cover this topic in more depth, but in general, it is important to
consider the following aspects of your audience in order to determine the
potential reception of any viral concept you are considering creating.
What types of content does your target audience like to consume?
What specific topics tend to be discussed within this community, and
specifically, what topics are held as important by this community?
What topics are controversial? What gets this community riled up?
What is the general Zeitgeist of the community you are targeting? What are
their commonly held opinions on social and political topics?
Who are their heroes and villains?
Who are their niche celebrities?
What is their unique history? Their legends and fables?
What sorts of emotions typically are expressed by your target audience?
Failing to understand your audience can spell failure. If you are unable to
understand them enough to know how to push their emotional buttons, and which
ones to push, you will have a high likelihood of turning them off from sharing.
Step 7: Considerations for fractal virality
A fractal is the mathematical term use for a system of self-similar repeating
patterns at different scales. In the context of viral marketing, it can be
thought of as an apt descriptor for so called viral expansion loops which are
created when content has functionality built into it that provides for users or
viewers to extend or create new viral content based on or as a part of the
original content. Generally, fractal content is user generated, either actively
(the user actually does something) or passively (the users data is used, but
they do nothing). Some examples of fractal content include:
Elfyourself.com
Fatbooth, Oldbooth, and other mobile apps
UGC photo or video contests like: crashthesuperbowl.com
Altruistic DIY concepts like Dan Savages It Gets Better campaign
By giving users an opportunity to utilize their own creativity through
personalization and user generated content, it is possible to create fractal
sharing and massive exposure. Keep in mind that all of the emotional drivers
discussed with viral content apply here as well, weve simply added an additional
layer or step to expand virality. Some important aspects to consider when
attempting to create fractal content include considering:
How can this idea be adapted, personalized, or altered while retaining the
primary message?
How have you enabled creativity? Is the functionality conducive to ease of
creation and creativity?
How have you encouraged users to create compelling emotional content?
How do you plan on curating or controlling the content? Is there a potential
for a negative reaction?
Conclusions
Viral and fractal content has the potential to reach and influence massive
audiences, but in practice can be exceedingly difficult to create. By
understanding your audience and the emotional drivers that motivate them, it is
possible to increase your odds of success substantially. Through careful
investigation of the elements of virality, in the future it will be possible to
continue to improve the odds of success substantially. Here at Fractl, we aim to
do just that. Keep an eye out for several new case studies that will help
illustrate the points made here through real-life examples of emotionally driven
viral and fractal content.
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Content Marketing Success'
Posted by KelseyLibert
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.
Let's assume you know the basics: content marketing is one of the best ways to
engage with audiences and potential customers online. It is useful for improving
search rankings, increasing brand engagement and loyalty, increasing brand
visibility, and encouraging social sharing and interaction. If you are a
consumer-facing company in this day and age, you simply cannot keep up with the
competition if you are not actively building your content marketing skill set.
Easier said than done though, right? Youve probably dabbled in content
marketing before, or maybe even hired a top agency. Maybe you have even seen
some results; a few links here, a few hundred shares there, but then what?
Certainly no fireworks, no massive ranking improvements, and no lead or sale
increases. Maybe it wasnt the panacea youd hoped it might be. Short on time and
money, you probably gave up and reinvested your money into tried and true
marketing practices that could at least drive a few conversions. You chalked
content marketing up to something too expensive or too difficult to find any
real success with.
If any of this resonates with you, you are most definitely not alone. Doing
content marketing properly is no easy task, and to beginners it can seem to be
next to impossible to create anything that will stand out and get noticed. Add
to that the explosion of agencies who claim to be gurus and deliver tragically
poor results, and the whole content marketing arena can start to feel like a
convoluted mess that cant deliver on its promises.
So, what do you do? Other tactics are losing efficacy, your site is losing
rankings, you cant get social engagement for the life of you, and your
frustration level is at an all-time high.
You go back to the beginning, and you relearn the truth about what it takes to
come up with content that works: content that shows what content marketing can
really do for your business. Content marketing that can transform a company
overnight.
When content goes viral: The example above shows a near 10 fold increase in our
client's organic search traffic (from Google alone) after a single successful
viral campaign. The big spike in the beginning of December marks the launch of
the campaign.
Step 1: Understanding the truth about your competition
You may assume when you first begin that your only competition are your
business competitors, the companies online that fight for the same search
phrases, or sell the same products or services. When it comes to content
marketing, these businesses are only the beginning. What you must remember is
that when creating content, you are fighting for attention against EVERYONE; all
content creators, not just businesses. Your content must stand its ground
against those who are creating content for entirely non-commercial reasons. This
means that when coming up with your campaigns, you must not only do better than
your competitors, but you must do better than almost everyone talking about your
subject area.
Step 2: Engagement is good, but viral is better
In content marketing, going the incremental route can be an effective way to
go. Loyal audiences can be built by creating a great deal of relevant, useful,
but not particularly viral content. Through persistence and often grueling
content creation schedule it is possible to find a positive ROI over the long
term. If you have the capacity to pump out 5-7 thoughtful and moderately useful
pieces of content weekly, eventually you will likely see good results. However,
as Rand Fishkin said, you have to "be willing to fail for a long time.
In fact, for companies that can afford it, this can be an essential piece of
the content marketing pie, and it is often something we recommend to our clients
who have longer timelines. But this style of content marketing will not change
your business in the short term. It can take years of consistent effort to see
substantial improvements in rankings and in audience growth.
What if you dont have years; dont have the time, energy, or budgets to create
compelling content on a regular basis; or simply need to build an audience fast?
The answer is this: you must create something viral; content that can spread in
a way that creates massive attention. Content that will boost you above the
writhing masses, and make others take notice.
Below, you can see our viral content marketing campaign results, which impacted
our clients 271% organic traffic increase. It's important to note that these
results were generated by a single outreach placement on Buzzfeed.com, with a
nofollow link.
Step 3: Understanding what it means to go viral"
If you have done any reading on viral marketing, you have probably come across
attempts at formulas for describing virality, but none that have made it very
concrete beyond the understanding that to go viral means to have a high level of
visibility. The truth is that virality and the act of going viral isnt really
all that complex. Having something go viral relies on having specific values for
three important variables. These variables include:
Viral coefficient: the total number of new viewers generated by one existing
viewer. As content creators this is the number you should be most concerned
with, it is basically a score of how shareable your content truly is.
Viral cycle time: the amount of time it takes before all these new users have
been generated by a single initial viewer. In content marketing, the viral cycle
Time can be thought of as the amount of time it would take for a viewer who had
a piece of content shared with them to view the content and then decide whether
or not to share it themselves. The viral cycle time for sharing content is
usually no longer than 1-2 days, though in some special circumstances, it can be
longer. For the purposes of our discussion here, we will define the viral cycle
time as one day.
Total available market: the number of people online who might be interested in
sharing your content. For broad-appeal type pieces, this number could be in the
hundreds of millions. For niche content, this could be as low as several hundred
or several thousand people.
Ive adapted a spreadsheet that looks at how these factors actually influence
the anatomy and eventual success or failure of a piece of content. The bones of
this spreadsheet were originally created by Mark Devisser. Feel free to make a
copy of this document and play around with the three variables mentioned above.
As a note, you will likely notice some key aspects of virality just from playing
with this including:
True virality along with the telltale hockey stick graph can not be created
without a viral coefficient of greater than "1." The higher the coefficient, the
faster the spread of the content and also the sooner and more abrupt the hockey
stick you will see on the graph.
The size of the initial seed is important for the length of time from the
initial publishing it takes for virality (hockey stick) to happen. The larger
the initial seed, the sooner you will see a potential viral effect, assuming the
coefficient is still greater than 1.
Extending the cycle time will extend the length of time it takes to see a
viral effect (hockey stick) Fortunately, with web based content, the cycle time
happens extremely quickly thanks to social channels and the nature of digital
content. If you were measuring the virality of say a snail mail chain letter,
the cycle time would be on the order of weeks, and creating virality would take
much longer assuming a viral coefficient greater than 1.
The size of the Total Available Market has an enormous bearing on the total
number of cumulative views. This makes it extremely important to think about
your target audience during idea development. If you want a viral smash, you
must have content that appeals to the masses (more on this later).
Step 4: Creating content with a viral coefficient above 1
So, understanding what virality is great, and understanding the levers for
virality is even better, but how does this translate specifically to content?
How do you take the ideas we just learned and make them work for you in your
content marketing efforts?
To begin, the first, most important, and most difficult step is to create a
piece of content that you think will likely have a viral coefficient greater
than 1. When it ultimately comes down to it, there is no perfect way to gauge
whether or not a particular piece of content will have a viral coefficient above
1. Ultimately, you wont know until your content gets out onto the Internet.
However, by exploring the top-level qualities that exist within most viral
content with a coefficient above 1, it is possible to give yourself a much
higher probability of viral success.
Strong emotional drivers
Put simply, emotions drive almost all behavior. When an emotion is triggered in
your brain, your nervous system responds by creating a subjective experience
(feelings). A great deal of your decisions are informed by your emotional
responses because that is what emotions are designed to do: to appraise and
summarize an experience and inform your actions. The stronger the feeling, the
more likely to spur a responsive action.
When it comes to sharing online, the potential actions related to emotional
activation are relatively simple. Essentially there are four options for your
typical content consumer when approaching a new piece of content.
Engage or disengage
Share or dont share
In order for a content consumer to share, they must engage first with the
content, and then make the decision to share that content. These actions are
mediated entirely by emotions. Many brain researchers and scientists agree that
emotion of interest is continually present in the normal mind under normal
conditions, and it is the central motivation for engagement in creative and
constructive endeavors and for the sense of well-being. Interest and its
interaction with other emotions account for selective attention, which in turn
influences all other mental processes. Thus, in order to get someone to engage
with your content, it must first and foremost pique interest. It is for this
reason that titles are so massively important. Without a title that piques
interest beyond an undefined threshold, there will be no engagement.
Assuming youve piqued your readers interest with an interesting title and have
passed the first stage, your content must now convince the reader to share. The
decision making process for this, as defined by prominent psychologist Richard
Lazarus is as follows:
Cognitive appraisal: The individual assesses the event cognitively, which cues
the emotion.
Physiological changes: The cognitive reaction starts biological changes such
as increased heart rate or pituitary adrenal response.
Action:The individual feels the emotion and chooses how to react (or not).
If the cognitive appraisal spurs a strong enough emotion, and resultantly large
physiological change, the probability of action is increased. In the case of
sharing content, if the cognitive appraisal cues a strong enough emotion and
resultant physiological response to overcome factors that antagonize sharing the
reader will share the content.
So, how do we create strong emotional drivers in our content?
In the fast paced online environment, you will only ever have a short amount of
time to get the attention of a viewer. Your goal should be to capture the
attention of a viewer, and then engage them emotionally as quickly as possible.
The faster and more deeply you are able to engage their emotions, the more
likely the viewer is to invest themselves enough in the content to share it.
Lets by addressing speed:
The speed of emotional activation
If you are not able to convey the emotionally impactful aspects of your content
quickly, you are probably dead in the water. Highly viral content will
communicate its strong emotional impact within the first few seconds of viewing.
It is for this reason that visual, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-consume
content is generally the most viral. Take one look at viral kingmakers like
Reddit.com and you will notice that 90% of the frontpage content are static
images. This is also the reason behind the success of infographics (as well as
image macros/memes, animated gifs and several other mediums). Visual,
simplistic, easy-to-consume, infographics can make excellent viral content, but
only if they can extend the benefit of their medium and illicit a strong
emotional reaction as well.
Which emotions should we engage?
Conceivably, almost any emotion, given that it is strong enough is possible as
behaving as the primary driver of sharing. In practice, though, not all emotions
are as effective in driving sharing behavior as others. Unfortunately, there
have been very few studies on the types of emotions lead to sharing. Jonah
Berger, a professor at Wharton, has done some preliminary research in this area
by looking at the email sharing rates of New York Times articles. His findings
are summarized as follows:
The results indicate that positive content is more viral than negative content,
but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex
than valence alone. Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal.
Content that evokes high-arousal positive ( such as awe) or negative (anger or
anxiety) emotions is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or
deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral. these results hold even
when the authors control for how surprising, interesting, or practically useful
content is (all of which are positively linked to virality), as well as external
drivers of attention (e.g., how prominently content was featured). Experimental
results further demonstrate the causal impact of specific emotion on
transmission and illustrate that it is driven by the level of activation
induced. taken together, these findings shed light on why people share content
and how to design more effective viral marketing campaigns.
While this is a great start in understanding the emotional drivers of sharing,
it is a very incomplete understanding. In an effort to further detail the real
emotional drivers, I sought to understand the emotional impact of content that
better fit the criteria of most viral content (i.e. visual, easy-to-understand,
and easy-to-consume content).
Exclusive Fractl research project: viral emotions
*It is important to begin by noting here that the following experiment is not
scientific or widely comprehensive. Despite this, there is a good deal of
preliminary information that speaks to some of the most apparent aspects of the
emotional drivers of viral content, and the takeaways found are likely quite
valuable. Research of greater depth will likely bear out additional information
and more granular insights.* (Raw Data)
I began by selecting a group of content that fit what I believed would be
representative of the best of the best in viral content. To make sure I was
comparing apples to apples, I decided only to use static images instead of
written or multimedia content. Memes and inside jokes were also excluded as the
factors that lead to them becoming viral can be non-emotional and more difficult
to analyze or ascertain.
The source of the content I used came from the top 50 image posts of all time
on reddit.com/r/pics, a community of 3.4 million plus content voters. I selected
25 images that I felt could stand alone, ones that required no previous
knowledge to understand (Reddit tends to boost inside joke type content on
occasion, so post that fit that profile were excluded).
I then had each image coded by 50 volunteers for the emotions that were
elicited by each image as well as the strength of each emotion. The possible
choices for the emotions included:
Possible emotion choices
What we learned
The results from this informal survey on some of the webs most viral visual
content was actually quite amazing. Much of what we found mirrored the results
found by Jonah Berger, but we also found some interesting additional takeaways.
What we found was as follows:
Positive emotions were much more common than negative emotions (14 negative
and 184 positive).
Certain specific emotions were extremely common, while others were extremely
uncommon.
The strength of the emotional impact was a great indicator for the popularity
of the content on Reddit. The top four most popular posts on Reddit also had the
top four highest aggregate emotionality scores (sum of emotional strength score
totals).
Interest, surprise, and amusement seemed to behave as emotional multipliers
for positive emotions, and empathy seemed to act as an emotional multiplier for
negative emotions. 12 of the 25 images had Amusement, Interest, and Surprise as
3 of their top emotions and all images had at least 1 of the 3 emotions (either
Amusement, Interest, or Surprise).
Contrasting emotions seemed to be helpful in increasing emotional impact. In
the cases where negative emotions were present, they seemed to directly contrast
positive emotions, likely enhancing the emotionality of the image through this
contrast. Additionally, empathy seems to be a common emotion found alongside
popular content that evokes strong negative emotions.
Enhancing emotionality for higher virality
Its clear that emotionally evocative content is essential in creating
wide-reaching viral content, and that there are even some emotions that seem to
work better than others toward this goal, but are there other ways to expand on
emotionality for virality? In other words, how can emotionality be enhanced?
Increasing emotional identification with the content
Make your content visual
On a whole, visual content is better at conveying emotionality and being
understood quickly and easily. Therefore, images and video have a leg up against
written form content. It is for this reason that image and video sharing
dominates online. It is the reason the images and video dominate Reddits front
page each day and the reason 40 of the top 50 posts of all time on Reddit are
either images or videos. It is the reason we have all seen infographics,
animated gifs, and image macros have become ubiquitous. As a general rule,
visual content is simply more engaging.
Make your content interactive
Interactive content engages the viewers senses and attention in a more active
way than simple static content. By creating an experience that your viewers must
participate in, you necessarily enhance the impact. If there is an emotional
angle to your interactive campaign, it can increase the emotional impact
substantially. One excellent way we are seeing this happen recently is through
the use of parallax treatments like these.
Make your content personalized
Customized or personalized content is, by its very nature, better at engaging
viewers emotionally than non-personalized content. Emotions are more easily
evoked when the user can actually SEE themselves in the content, instead of
relying on empathy to put themselves in someone elses shoes. Some standout
emotionally compelling, personalized, content like this, illustrates just how
incredibly viral emotionally driven, personalized, visual content can be. Have
you ever created something with 12 million + Facebook likes? Try
emotionally-driven, visual, personalized, interactive content, and you might
just be able to.
Emotional stacking with lists
If you havent been paying attention to Buzzfeed.com lately, you should probably
start. They have mastered the art of what I like to call Emotional Stacking.
Definition: Lists of disparate visual content, linked thematically, into a list
that is purposefully structured to build up a specific emotional response.
This example, for instance illustrates the technique perfectly. A list based
image post of the 45 Most Powerful Images of 2011. With each image adding to the
emotional reaction of the user, by the time you get to the end, you have been
worked up into such an emotional state that the desire to share feels almost
visceral.
Growing the viral coefficient - Beyond the emotions
While emotions generally play the largest role in determining the viral
coefficient of a piece of content, there are other aspects that can contribute
significantly to whether or not a that content is ultimately shared. Additional
motivating factors can play a key role, specifically factors that convey some
kind of social benefit or ego benefit.
The social benefits of sharing:
Social incentive/reward to share
"Ingroup vs. Outgroup"
Content that makes the viewer feel exclusive, or in-the-know, or otherwise
included can often work very well as a motivator for sharing. This ingroup vs.
outgroup effect is one of the driving forces for the popularity of memes, by
sharing the inside joke the sharer demonstrates that they are part of the
ingroup.
"Altruistic"
Content that allows the sharer to feel that they are doing tangible good can
often incentivize sharing and substantially increase the viral coefficient. This
is especially true for content that has a strong emotional hook that creates
strong feelings of empathy. This is just one excellent example of an altruism
enhanced, emotionally-driven viral effect.
"Self-identity/image bolstering"
When users share content on peer-facing communities like Facebook, they often
make sharing decisions based on how the content will represent them to their
peers. What is it that sharing that specific piece of content will convey about
the sharer to their peers? Content that, when shared, would affirm the identity
of the sharer will be more likely to be shared than content that wont. This is
one of the reasons why emotionally driven content that relates to hot-button
social issues can often be extremely viral.
We saw this exploited (in the best sense of the word) extensively by companies
like OREO, with their pro LGBT rights campaigns over the last year. Sharing was
incentivized because so many people felt compelled to position themselves on one
side of the issue or the other, bolstering their own identity to themselves and
their peers using the emotionally evocative image as a vehicle.
Step 5: Decreasing viral cycle time
As I mentioned earlier, viral cycle time can be thought of as the period of
time it takes for a viewer to share from the time they view the content. While a
viral coefficient above 1 is needed for exponential viral growth, the timeline
of this growth can be fast or it can be exceedingly slow. It is the viral cycle
time that determines how quickly exponential growth will occur in content that
has a viral coefficient above 1. It is in the best interest of the content
creator to do everything they can to decrease the viral cycle time, to help
achieve exponential viral growth in the shortest amount of time possible. So,
what can be done to manipulate viral cycle time? To be precise, pretty much
anything that can spur the sharer to consume the content faster and share the
content faster. This includes, but is not limited to the following:
1. Decreasing consumption time
Conciseness of content is extremely important. The faster content can make its
impact, the faster the potential cycle time. This is another reason why images
tend to be so viral. They can be understood and shared at lightning speed. For
instance a viral image may take only seconds to consume, whereas a long-form
article, or long video may take many minutes or more to consume. The slower the
consumption of the content, the slower the viral cycle time, and potentially the
longer it would take for the content to go viral (assuming it has a viral
coefficient above 1). The takeaway here is to do everything you can to make your
content as concise as possible, so long as you are not sacrificing the impact of
the content. Dont make the mistake of sacrificing a 1+ viral coefficient for a
faster cycle time, because without it, you wont have any virality at all.
2. Increasing ease and speed of sharing
Making your content simple and fast to share is absolutely essential for
helping to increase viral cycle time. You should do everything you can to
include sharing tools for the most popular social sharing sites (Facebook,
Tumblr, Pinterest, Email, and Reddit) at the very least. You should also make
sure that sharing is set up properly to share a compelling default title and
text.
Step 6: The limitations of virality and the importance of audience.
Ive discussed generalities about the importance of emotional activation in
viral content, but creating successful viral content can often be a bit more
nuanced than simply creating something that will strongly engage viewers
emotions. It is also incredibly important to do your best to make sure that your
content is well suited for the audience you hope to target.
Now, if you are simply trying to create something massively viral, and you dont
really care about any connection or tie-in to your company or brand, your
opportunities for topic ideas are nearly limitless. In practice, though, this
isn't often the case. The goal is usually to create viral content that in some
way ties in with the offering of the company creating the content. In this case,
it is essential to carefully define a target audience for your prospective
content, even before coming up with ideas. The reception of the content you
create within this segmented target audience is what will determine whether or
not your content will become viral.
The considerations that you may want to make are multiple, and a future blog
post will cover this topic in more depth, but in general, it is important to
consider the following aspects of your audience in order to determine the
potential reception of any viral concept you are considering creating.
What types of content does your target audience like to consume?
What specific topics tend to be discussed within this community, and
specifically, what topics are held as important by this community?
What topics are controversial? What gets this community riled up?
What is the general Zeitgeist of the community you are targeting? What are
their commonly held opinions on social and political topics?
Who are their heroes and villains?
Who are their niche celebrities?
What is their unique history? Their legends and fables?
What sorts of emotions typically are expressed by your target audience?
Failing to understand your audience can spell failure. If you are unable to
understand them enough to know how to push their emotional buttons, and which
ones to push, you will have a high likelihood of turning them off from sharing.
Step 7: Considerations for fractal virality
A fractal is the mathematical term use for a system of self-similar repeating
patterns at different scales. In the context of viral marketing, it can be
thought of as an apt descriptor for so called viral expansion loops which are
created when content has functionality built into it that provides for users or
viewers to extend or create new viral content based on or as a part of the
original content. Generally, fractal content is user generated, either actively
(the user actually does something) or passively (the users data is used, but
they do nothing). Some examples of fractal content include:
Elfyourself.com
Fatbooth, Oldbooth, and other mobile apps
UGC photo or video contests like: crashthesuperbowl.com
Altruistic DIY concepts like Dan Savages It Gets Better campaign
By giving users an opportunity to utilize their own creativity through
personalization and user generated content, it is possible to create fractal
sharing and massive exposure. Keep in mind that all of the emotional drivers
discussed with viral content apply here as well, weve simply added an additional
layer or step to expand virality. Some important aspects to consider when
attempting to create fractal content include considering:
How can this idea be adapted, personalized, or altered while retaining the
primary message?
How have you enabled creativity? Is the functionality conducive to ease of
creation and creativity?
How have you encouraged users to create compelling emotional content?
How do you plan on curating or controlling the content? Is there a potential
for a negative reaction?
Conclusions
Viral and fractal content has the potential to reach and influence massive
audiences, but in practice can be exceedingly difficult to create. By
understanding your audience and the emotional drivers that motivate them, it is
possible to increase your odds of success substantially. Through careful
investigation of the elements of virality, in the future it will be possible to
continue to improve the odds of success substantially. Here at Fractl, we aim to
do just that. Keep an eye out for several new case studies that will help
illustrate the points made here through real-life examples of emotionally driven
viral and fractal content.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
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Best regards,
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Monday, 6 May 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'We Want You to Speak at #MozCon
2013'
Posted by Erica McGillivray
Last year at MozCon, we tried something new: community speakers. The feedback
we receieved from those of you who attended was phenomal, and our four speakers
were spectacular.
So this year, we're opening up four community speaking slots again, and we
can't wait to hear from you. I know some of you have been preparing your ideas
since last MozCon. Which means this year, I expect even more amazing
submissions, harder choices, and to get over 150 submissions (which is what we
got in 2012).
We're looking for four people to deliver incredibly actionable tips in SEO,
social media, content, marketing analytics, conversion rate optimization, and
any other great inbound subject. You'll join an already killer line-up of
speakers and lots of fun.
Fabio was one of our amazing community speakers last year.
MozCon 2013 takes place July 8th-10th at the Washington State Convention Center
in Seattle. If this past weekend was any indication of how our summer's going to
be, bring your sunglasses and flip-flops for the sunshine. We're expecting
around ~1200 people, and tickets are already 50% sold out. We'll have all the
usual goodies like Roger photos and incredible speakers and a few surprises up
our sleeves.
The details about the community speaker submission process:
Your pitch must be submitted by Tuesday, May 14th at 5pm PDT.
Please submit only one pitch. We're looking for the best of the best.
Topics can range the inbound marketing spectrum, so submit something you're
passionate about.
If you've never spoke before or have spoken hundreds of times, we want to hear
from you.
Presentations will be 15 minutes long with an added ~5 minutes for questions.
These sessions will be from 2:00-3:20pm on Wednesday, July 10th.
Widescreen-format slide decks will be due one week before MozCon.
If you already have a MozCon ticket, we will refund your ticket; and if you
don't have one, we'll comp you one! Unfortunately, you will have to book your
own hotel, flight, and transportation.
You will be invited to attend our speakers' dinner on Sunday, July 7th. And
pre-dinner, there will be time to walk on our stage.
You must be at MozCon in person. Sorry, no Skype, Google Hangout, or other
video conferencing.
Our community speaker selections are final. Everyone who tossed their hat in
the ring will be notified via email if they were selected or not.
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I can't wait to see all the awesome submissions for all potential community
speakers.
If you haven't snagged your MozCon ticket yet, do it! Also check out the full
line-up, minus community speakers, of MozCon speakers. It's going to be
out-of-this-world.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/SO7upDCJxlw/we-want-you-to-speak-at-mozcon-2013
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
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2013'
Posted by Erica McGillivray
Last year at MozCon, we tried something new: community speakers. The feedback
we receieved from those of you who attended was phenomal, and our four speakers
were spectacular.
So this year, we're opening up four community speaking slots again, and we
can't wait to hear from you. I know some of you have been preparing your ideas
since last MozCon. Which means this year, I expect even more amazing
submissions, harder choices, and to get over 150 submissions (which is what we
got in 2012).
We're looking for four people to deliver incredibly actionable tips in SEO,
social media, content, marketing analytics, conversion rate optimization, and
any other great inbound subject. You'll join an already killer line-up of
speakers and lots of fun.
Fabio was one of our amazing community speakers last year.
MozCon 2013 takes place July 8th-10th at the Washington State Convention Center
in Seattle. If this past weekend was any indication of how our summer's going to
be, bring your sunglasses and flip-flops for the sunshine. We're expecting
around ~1200 people, and tickets are already 50% sold out. We'll have all the
usual goodies like Roger photos and incredible speakers and a few surprises up
our sleeves.
The details about the community speaker submission process:
Your pitch must be submitted by Tuesday, May 14th at 5pm PDT.
Please submit only one pitch. We're looking for the best of the best.
Topics can range the inbound marketing spectrum, so submit something you're
passionate about.
If you've never spoke before or have spoken hundreds of times, we want to hear
from you.
Presentations will be 15 minutes long with an added ~5 minutes for questions.
These sessions will be from 2:00-3:20pm on Wednesday, July 10th.
Widescreen-format slide decks will be due one week before MozCon.
If you already have a MozCon ticket, we will refund your ticket; and if you
don't have one, we'll comp you one! Unfortunately, you will have to book your
own hotel, flight, and transportation.
You will be invited to attend our speakers' dinner on Sunday, July 7th. And
pre-dinner, there will be time to walk on our stage.
You must be at MozCon in person. Sorry, no Skype, Google Hangout, or other
video conferencing.
Our community speaker selections are final. Everyone who tossed their hat in
the ring will be notified via email if they were selected or not.
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I can't wait to see all the awesome submissions for all potential community
speakers.
If you haven't snagged your MozCon ticket yet, do it! Also check out the full
line-up, minus community speakers, of MozCon speakers. It's going to be
out-of-this-world.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/SO7upDCJxlw/we-want-you-to-speak-at-mozcon-2013
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Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Thursday, 2 May 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Why We Can't Just Be SEOs Anymore
- Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
There's a movement happening in our industry, and many folks are chaning their
practices and titles from "SEO" to "online marketing, inbound marketing, and/or
earned media marketing." Where did this shift originate from, and where is it
taking our industry as a whole? Is it enough to just be an SEO in today's game,
or are we missing the bigger picture?
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his take on the shift from "SEO" to
"inbound marketing" and what the future holds for our industry at large.
Have something to add? Leave your thoughts and experiences in the comments
below!
Why We Can't Just Be SEOs Anymore - 20130422 - Rand
For your viewing pleasure, here's a still image of the whiteboard used in this
week's video:
Video Transcription
"Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week I want to address an elephant in the room. It's a topic that I've talked
about quite a bit on my personal blog, a bit on the primary blog, and I know
it's a topic that gets discussed all over the marketing world, from Inbound.org
to lots of blogs and news sites. It's: Why is it that there's this movement from
some folks in the field to change their titles, their names, their practices,
from saying, "We do SEO," to saying, "We do inbound marketing," or, "We do
online marketing, we do web marketing, we do earned media marketing"?
I want to try to try and take on that elephant right now. There are some
really good reasons that I think we're seeing this shift happen, and I'm
actually one of the proponents of this shift. I used to be very against it. I
used to be very passionate about building only the brand of SEO. Now, I've
revised my stance. I think that, as new data and as the world has changed and
I've become less of an obstinate son of a gun, I'm seeing this bigger picture,
and I want to try to share that picture that I'm seeing with you.
The first one is I can't argue that SEO is bigger than the way people define
or have defined SEO for the last decade. That's not really true of the 2010 to
2013 period, but it is very true of the decade before that, from the late '90s
into the late 2000, the "aughts." What I mean is there are these old-school
tactics. "Oh, you're going to do SEO? Well, that means you do links, you make my
content relevant, you put the good keywords in there, you do work on your
markup, your snippets, and your site architecture, your structure. You are done.
You have done SEO. That is SEO. Don't try to tell me that it's more than that."
This becomes very, very challenging when, as an SEO or as a marketer who's
trying to achieve good results with SEO, you say, "But wait a minute. This only
works when the ranking factors were things like link graph data, keyword data,
domain data, and topic analysis." Now, we have a lot more ranking factors,
right? Engines are looking at user and usage data. They're definitely looking at
brand signals. They're looking at offline data potential. Potentially there are
patent applications, thinking about offline data. They're looking at social
graph signals.
What's an SEO to do? If I want to influence these, I've got to be able to work
on everything that's marketing. That's everything from social media to community
building, positioning, branding, emails, CRO, product, the unique value of the
content. What am I going to do if I'm tasked with SEO, but I'm only given
responsibility over these things? It's just not going to work. In order to
influence just the very part of SEO that we touch on, which is moving up
rankings in major search engines like Google and Bing, just to do that, we have
to be able to control and influence a lot more than we ever had to in the past.
It's an untenable kind of situation.
Thus, what we'd really like to do and what we've been working hard at as an
industry is to try to change and broaden the definition of SEO. I can tell you
one of the things that I feel very passionately about is changing that branding
and working really hard to not have the word "SEO" be associated with scumminess
and bad companies and irresponsible behavior. But that perception of SEO is so
hard to change. It's been established for such a long time now, and the small
efforts of quite a few of us in the field to try and change that perception have
not been successful, at least not outside of the online marketing world. Inside
that world and with a small portion of the developers and designers who get SEO
and get marketing, it's true.
I love those of you who are watching Whiteboard Friday and who are in that
world, who understand that SEO is this bigger thing. But I know that you've felt
the same pain that I'm talking about. People say, "Oh, SEO. So you're a spammer.
You manipulate things. You're unethical. You're breaking the search engine's
rules. What does Google think of you?"
These are questions we have to answer every single time, and it's pretty clear
to me why this happens. I think the reason is actually very obvious. The primary
and first association that most people have with SEO is what? It's comment spam
on their blogs. It's a spammy, scummy email that's trying to get them to sign up
for something. It's someone wanting to trade a PageRank 6 link with them. It's a
forum, or a bulletin board, or an online community saying, "Oh, are you
wondering why this malware happened? That's the SEOs doing that." That's why all
these bad things happen on the Internet. They blame SEOs.
To be fair, early on in the days of SEO, there were plenty of us, myself
included, who would do some of these spammy and manipulative things. I'm not
innocent, by any means. But that perception, that fight is one that I don't
think we're winning. That's another reason why I think it's really hard to do
SEO well and just call yourself an SEO. I think when you change the title, you
change the perception. You change the frame of reference, and you say, "I do web
marketing. I help people grow their companies. I help attract visitors, and that
leads to more conversions on their site." They're like, "Oh, okay. I get it. Web
marketing. Understood." SEO is one of the channels, one of the main channels,
but one of the channels they focus on.
The third one, we are selling ourselves short. When you say, "I'm an SEO,"
your boss, your client, your management says, "Why are you meddling with our
design, UX, social, and ad campaigns? Why are you trying to get into this?" You
are supposed to focus on SEO. Yet, the answer is well, we can't do great even at
just SEO without influencing all these other fields that we talked about above.
By the way, we're selling ourselves short even more than just this, because
when we do work on all these channels, when we improve all of these channels,
that obviously helps our search rankings too, we are also driving a lot of
traffic from them. Social is sending us good traffic. The blogosphere and PR
efforts are sending us good links that are driving visits, good customer service
practices, community building practices, culture practices. All of these things
that influence SEO that we're trying to move the needle on to get better
results, they also drive traffic of their own. That traffic converts, and that
traffic is valuable. That traffic is measurable, and we are often the ones who
are measuring it and quantifying it and trying to gauge the impact it has on
search. Yet, we're not getting rewarded for it or treated as though we were
responsible for it. Again, we're selling ourselves short.
But I want to end on a positive note. This stuff is okay. It is okay. This is
something that we are used to. We are used to change. If there's anything that
SEOs can be assured of, it's that things will change tomorrow, that things will
change next week. No one is better prepared to handle change than we are. This
kind of change is actually positive. Every field matures. My checkmark practices
don't mature. I'm clearly getting worse at them. But every field matures. You
can see the early seeds of programming, of video, of accounting, any type of
field, right? Journalism, for sure. Any time there's massive shift or a new
industry, we have these years of immaturity, and then we get to a better stage.
I think the stage for us is deciding: Do we want to keep committing to a brand
that frankly has been put through the wringer? One that I still use and will
always use. As long as I am doing SEO work, I will use that brand. But do we
want to also take hold of and recognize that, as marketers, we want to do good
branding and good marketing? That means potentially calling ourselves something
different, taking on these other titles, expressing ourselves in other ways in
order to get more influence, and by the way, bigger paychecks too.
An SEO consultant, there are people who charge between $50 and a few hundred
dollars an hour. Then you look at business strategy consultants from Accenture,
or something like that, and you're talking about a thousand plus dollars an
hour. The more influence you have, the greater your billing is and, by the way,
the more you can effect change and have a positive influence.
I hope this Whiteboard Friday is valuable to you. I'm sure there will be good
comments and good discussion about this naming convention. I look forward to
reading them and participating too. Take care, everyone. We'll see you again
next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday."
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/wF31OjkbEc8/why-we-cant-just-be-seos-anymore-whiteboard-friday
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
- Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
There's a movement happening in our industry, and many folks are chaning their
practices and titles from "SEO" to "online marketing, inbound marketing, and/or
earned media marketing." Where did this shift originate from, and where is it
taking our industry as a whole? Is it enough to just be an SEO in today's game,
or are we missing the bigger picture?
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his take on the shift from "SEO" to
"inbound marketing" and what the future holds for our industry at large.
Have something to add? Leave your thoughts and experiences in the comments
below!
Why We Can't Just Be SEOs Anymore - 20130422 - Rand
For your viewing pleasure, here's a still image of the whiteboard used in this
week's video:
Video Transcription
"Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week I want to address an elephant in the room. It's a topic that I've talked
about quite a bit on my personal blog, a bit on the primary blog, and I know
it's a topic that gets discussed all over the marketing world, from Inbound.org
to lots of blogs and news sites. It's: Why is it that there's this movement from
some folks in the field to change their titles, their names, their practices,
from saying, "We do SEO," to saying, "We do inbound marketing," or, "We do
online marketing, we do web marketing, we do earned media marketing"?
I want to try to try and take on that elephant right now. There are some
really good reasons that I think we're seeing this shift happen, and I'm
actually one of the proponents of this shift. I used to be very against it. I
used to be very passionate about building only the brand of SEO. Now, I've
revised my stance. I think that, as new data and as the world has changed and
I've become less of an obstinate son of a gun, I'm seeing this bigger picture,
and I want to try to share that picture that I'm seeing with you.
The first one is I can't argue that SEO is bigger than the way people define
or have defined SEO for the last decade. That's not really true of the 2010 to
2013 period, but it is very true of the decade before that, from the late '90s
into the late 2000, the "aughts." What I mean is there are these old-school
tactics. "Oh, you're going to do SEO? Well, that means you do links, you make my
content relevant, you put the good keywords in there, you do work on your
markup, your snippets, and your site architecture, your structure. You are done.
You have done SEO. That is SEO. Don't try to tell me that it's more than that."
This becomes very, very challenging when, as an SEO or as a marketer who's
trying to achieve good results with SEO, you say, "But wait a minute. This only
works when the ranking factors were things like link graph data, keyword data,
domain data, and topic analysis." Now, we have a lot more ranking factors,
right? Engines are looking at user and usage data. They're definitely looking at
brand signals. They're looking at offline data potential. Potentially there are
patent applications, thinking about offline data. They're looking at social
graph signals.
What's an SEO to do? If I want to influence these, I've got to be able to work
on everything that's marketing. That's everything from social media to community
building, positioning, branding, emails, CRO, product, the unique value of the
content. What am I going to do if I'm tasked with SEO, but I'm only given
responsibility over these things? It's just not going to work. In order to
influence just the very part of SEO that we touch on, which is moving up
rankings in major search engines like Google and Bing, just to do that, we have
to be able to control and influence a lot more than we ever had to in the past.
It's an untenable kind of situation.
Thus, what we'd really like to do and what we've been working hard at as an
industry is to try to change and broaden the definition of SEO. I can tell you
one of the things that I feel very passionately about is changing that branding
and working really hard to not have the word "SEO" be associated with scumminess
and bad companies and irresponsible behavior. But that perception of SEO is so
hard to change. It's been established for such a long time now, and the small
efforts of quite a few of us in the field to try and change that perception have
not been successful, at least not outside of the online marketing world. Inside
that world and with a small portion of the developers and designers who get SEO
and get marketing, it's true.
I love those of you who are watching Whiteboard Friday and who are in that
world, who understand that SEO is this bigger thing. But I know that you've felt
the same pain that I'm talking about. People say, "Oh, SEO. So you're a spammer.
You manipulate things. You're unethical. You're breaking the search engine's
rules. What does Google think of you?"
These are questions we have to answer every single time, and it's pretty clear
to me why this happens. I think the reason is actually very obvious. The primary
and first association that most people have with SEO is what? It's comment spam
on their blogs. It's a spammy, scummy email that's trying to get them to sign up
for something. It's someone wanting to trade a PageRank 6 link with them. It's a
forum, or a bulletin board, or an online community saying, "Oh, are you
wondering why this malware happened? That's the SEOs doing that." That's why all
these bad things happen on the Internet. They blame SEOs.
To be fair, early on in the days of SEO, there were plenty of us, myself
included, who would do some of these spammy and manipulative things. I'm not
innocent, by any means. But that perception, that fight is one that I don't
think we're winning. That's another reason why I think it's really hard to do
SEO well and just call yourself an SEO. I think when you change the title, you
change the perception. You change the frame of reference, and you say, "I do web
marketing. I help people grow their companies. I help attract visitors, and that
leads to more conversions on their site." They're like, "Oh, okay. I get it. Web
marketing. Understood." SEO is one of the channels, one of the main channels,
but one of the channels they focus on.
The third one, we are selling ourselves short. When you say, "I'm an SEO,"
your boss, your client, your management says, "Why are you meddling with our
design, UX, social, and ad campaigns? Why are you trying to get into this?" You
are supposed to focus on SEO. Yet, the answer is well, we can't do great even at
just SEO without influencing all these other fields that we talked about above.
By the way, we're selling ourselves short even more than just this, because
when we do work on all these channels, when we improve all of these channels,
that obviously helps our search rankings too, we are also driving a lot of
traffic from them. Social is sending us good traffic. The blogosphere and PR
efforts are sending us good links that are driving visits, good customer service
practices, community building practices, culture practices. All of these things
that influence SEO that we're trying to move the needle on to get better
results, they also drive traffic of their own. That traffic converts, and that
traffic is valuable. That traffic is measurable, and we are often the ones who
are measuring it and quantifying it and trying to gauge the impact it has on
search. Yet, we're not getting rewarded for it or treated as though we were
responsible for it. Again, we're selling ourselves short.
But I want to end on a positive note. This stuff is okay. It is okay. This is
something that we are used to. We are used to change. If there's anything that
SEOs can be assured of, it's that things will change tomorrow, that things will
change next week. No one is better prepared to handle change than we are. This
kind of change is actually positive. Every field matures. My checkmark practices
don't mature. I'm clearly getting worse at them. But every field matures. You
can see the early seeds of programming, of video, of accounting, any type of
field, right? Journalism, for sure. Any time there's massive shift or a new
industry, we have these years of immaturity, and then we get to a better stage.
I think the stage for us is deciding: Do we want to keep committing to a brand
that frankly has been put through the wringer? One that I still use and will
always use. As long as I am doing SEO work, I will use that brand. But do we
want to also take hold of and recognize that, as marketers, we want to do good
branding and good marketing? That means potentially calling ourselves something
different, taking on these other titles, expressing ourselves in other ways in
order to get more influence, and by the way, bigger paychecks too.
An SEO consultant, there are people who charge between $50 and a few hundred
dollars an hour. Then you look at business strategy consultants from Accenture,
or something like that, and you're talking about a thousand plus dollars an
hour. The more influence you have, the greater your billing is and, by the way,
the more you can effect change and have a positive influence.
I hope this Whiteboard Friday is valuable to you. I'm sure there will be good
comments and good discussion about this naming convention. I look forward to
reading them and participating too. Take care, everyone. We'll see you again
next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday."
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/wF31OjkbEc8/why-we-cant-just-be-seos-anymore-whiteboard-friday
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'How Not to Visualize Your Data'
Posted by Dr. Pete
Lately, Ive been seeing data visualizations everywhere, including the products
in my own kitchen. This week, I had sightings on my tea and my tortilla chips.
This is a story about the box my tea came in (for the sake of my marriage, I
cant disassemble the tortilla chip bag until it's empty), and how sometimes we
take marketing too far. Over the weekend, I discovered this "Taste Profile" (the
top version is a recreation, since the real graph was only about 1 tall, but all
details are accurate to the original):
Im not attacking the company that made this, and Im not going to out them here
their product is actually pretty great. I just want to use this visualization to
illustrate some of the wrong ways to do things, in hopes that we can all raise
our game a bit.
But Its So Pretty!
I admit the earth tones are nice, and its not entirely unappealing. I guess,
for a moment, it made me feel better about shelling out $11 for an
ounce-and-a-half of leaves. Maybe thats even good marketing, although I really
doubt this 1 tall graphic on the back of the box has ever swayed anyones
decision. Im not trying to say that its an ugly picture. The problem is that its
a pleasant distraction disguised as meaningful data.
The job of a data-visualization is to communicate an idea better than the raw
data itself could. Of course, that also implies that theres actual data behind
the visualization. So, how do we get it wrong?
(1) Pick the Shiniest Style
We all know that the best chart style can be summed up with two words: big and
shiny! The radar chart above is pretty shiny its like Ive discovered some lost
continent of tea with my smooth jazz submarine. The problem is that, ultimately,
I dont know what that shape means, and I dont have anything to compare it to. A
radar chart is at its best when comparing two or more profiles. Pick the right
tool for the job, not the one that looks the most impressive on your utility
belt. Batman is a friend of mine, and you, sir, are no Batman (disclaimer: I
dont know Batman).
(2) Use a Lot of Fancy Words
Umami is the exotic fifth taste (beyond the classic four of sweet, sour,
bitter, and salty) its a Japanese word meaning Haha, I cant believe I got you
to eat sea urchin! To be fair, at least it has something to do with taste. I
honestly have no idea how Brightness or Briskness apply to tea, and if they do,
what the difference is between the two.
I do know that Lipton has spent a lot of money making us think their tea is
brisk, which raises another point why do you want to compare your $110/lb.
gourmet tea to Lipton? Even Aroma is a bit ambiguous do I want a lot of aroma?
What if its the aroma of some bad umami that I forgot to put in the fridge last
night?
The goal of a visualization is to simplify information thats too complex. If
you have to make up big words to do that, then youre missing the point.
(3) More Words? Yes, Please!
What really brings a visualization together is to explain each of your terms
with even more words, preferably ones that make even less sense. Now, please
understand I have no issue with the French. I think Paris is lovely, its cool
that you helped us win the American Revolution, and Ive never eaten freedom
fries. This product wasnt made in France, though, and I didnt buy it in Quebec.
The company is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Translating every label on the graph into French isnt just meaningless its
pretentious. These secondary labels only serve to add visual noise and make it
harder to pair the main labels to their data points.
(4) Keep the Mystery Alive
Everyone loves a mystery you dont hate Scooby Doo, do you? If you can make
your product mysterious enough, everyone will think they need it. Sadly,
sometimes smoke and mirrors is all a product has to offer, but in this case the
product is really quite good. Adding pseudoscience to the label doesnt create
intrigue it just makes me wonder if the marketing team is drinking their
product or smoking it.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
To be fair, this 1 graph was little more than a decoration on a box, and it
does that job perfectly well. Unfortunately, Ive seen similar graphs (and worse)
in blog posts, research papers, and even reputable newspapers. Every day, it
gets easier to make sexy charts, illustrations, and infographics. Its ok to
create something beautiful, but we have to remember that our first job is to
communicate. A data visualization should convey useful ideas quickly, because
ultimately thats our job as online marketers. So, think before you open
Photoshop.
Addendum: So, I've learned that "cupping scores" are not uncommon in the
gourmet coffee industry. Here's a 10-factor radar graph (hat tip to @jimbeetle).
I just have a hard time seeing this as anything but a way to justify premium
prices with pseudoscience.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/h6akvVvgoEw/how-not-to-visualize-your-data
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Posted by Dr. Pete
Lately, Ive been seeing data visualizations everywhere, including the products
in my own kitchen. This week, I had sightings on my tea and my tortilla chips.
This is a story about the box my tea came in (for the sake of my marriage, I
cant disassemble the tortilla chip bag until it's empty), and how sometimes we
take marketing too far. Over the weekend, I discovered this "Taste Profile" (the
top version is a recreation, since the real graph was only about 1 tall, but all
details are accurate to the original):
Im not attacking the company that made this, and Im not going to out them here
their product is actually pretty great. I just want to use this visualization to
illustrate some of the wrong ways to do things, in hopes that we can all raise
our game a bit.
But Its So Pretty!
I admit the earth tones are nice, and its not entirely unappealing. I guess,
for a moment, it made me feel better about shelling out $11 for an
ounce-and-a-half of leaves. Maybe thats even good marketing, although I really
doubt this 1 tall graphic on the back of the box has ever swayed anyones
decision. Im not trying to say that its an ugly picture. The problem is that its
a pleasant distraction disguised as meaningful data.
The job of a data-visualization is to communicate an idea better than the raw
data itself could. Of course, that also implies that theres actual data behind
the visualization. So, how do we get it wrong?
(1) Pick the Shiniest Style
We all know that the best chart style can be summed up with two words: big and
shiny! The radar chart above is pretty shiny its like Ive discovered some lost
continent of tea with my smooth jazz submarine. The problem is that, ultimately,
I dont know what that shape means, and I dont have anything to compare it to. A
radar chart is at its best when comparing two or more profiles. Pick the right
tool for the job, not the one that looks the most impressive on your utility
belt. Batman is a friend of mine, and you, sir, are no Batman (disclaimer: I
dont know Batman).
(2) Use a Lot of Fancy Words
Umami is the exotic fifth taste (beyond the classic four of sweet, sour,
bitter, and salty) its a Japanese word meaning Haha, I cant believe I got you
to eat sea urchin! To be fair, at least it has something to do with taste. I
honestly have no idea how Brightness or Briskness apply to tea, and if they do,
what the difference is between the two.
I do know that Lipton has spent a lot of money making us think their tea is
brisk, which raises another point why do you want to compare your $110/lb.
gourmet tea to Lipton? Even Aroma is a bit ambiguous do I want a lot of aroma?
What if its the aroma of some bad umami that I forgot to put in the fridge last
night?
The goal of a visualization is to simplify information thats too complex. If
you have to make up big words to do that, then youre missing the point.
(3) More Words? Yes, Please!
What really brings a visualization together is to explain each of your terms
with even more words, preferably ones that make even less sense. Now, please
understand I have no issue with the French. I think Paris is lovely, its cool
that you helped us win the American Revolution, and Ive never eaten freedom
fries. This product wasnt made in France, though, and I didnt buy it in Quebec.
The company is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Translating every label on the graph into French isnt just meaningless its
pretentious. These secondary labels only serve to add visual noise and make it
harder to pair the main labels to their data points.
(4) Keep the Mystery Alive
Everyone loves a mystery you dont hate Scooby Doo, do you? If you can make
your product mysterious enough, everyone will think they need it. Sadly,
sometimes smoke and mirrors is all a product has to offer, but in this case the
product is really quite good. Adding pseudoscience to the label doesnt create
intrigue it just makes me wonder if the marketing team is drinking their
product or smoking it.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
To be fair, this 1 graph was little more than a decoration on a box, and it
does that job perfectly well. Unfortunately, Ive seen similar graphs (and worse)
in blog posts, research papers, and even reputable newspapers. Every day, it
gets easier to make sexy charts, illustrations, and infographics. Its ok to
create something beautiful, but we have to remember that our first job is to
communicate. A data visualization should convey useful ideas quickly, because
ultimately thats our job as online marketers. So, think before you open
Photoshop.
Addendum: So, I've learned that "cupping scores" are not uncommon in the
gourmet coffee industry. Here's a 10-factor radar graph (hat tip to @jimbeetle).
I just have a hard time seeing this as anything but a way to justify premium
prices with pseudoscience.
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[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'A New Version of GetListed.org'
Posted by David Mihm
Today, I am excited to announce the release of a new version of GetListed.org.
While no new functionality is included in this update, the team and I hope it
provides a dramatically improved user experience on several fronts.
The best way to get a sense of what's changed is to run a business search for
yourself, but I'll run through a few brief highlights here.
Faster business lookups
GetListed is now waaayyyy faster (that's the technical term used by our
engineers) than it used to be. Previously, lookups averaged around 20 seconds.
We've cut the average response time in half to about 10 seconds, and we'll be
working to make it even faster as we analyze usage of the app and further
optimize our response times. We hope this increased speed provides a big
value-add for those of you who use GetListed in your on-the-spot client
meetings.
More consistent results
Previously, GetListed's Listing Snapshot displayed a composite listing based on
the data points returned by several search engines in our list. This led to
unnecessary confusion among business owners, and made it difficult for some of
our agency users to identify which search engines were returning incorrect
information about clients' listings. It also made tracking Listing Score
progress over time more difficult, since this score was dependent on the order
of results returned by our search engine partners, and this order sometimes
varied week-to-week and month-to-month.
The new version of the site asks users to establish their canonical NAP (Name,
Address, Phone number) information prior to running a full query for a given
business, so that the new Snapshot page and Listing Score are no longer based on
"best guess" composite listings.
Please note: this update means you may see changes in your listing scores,
including for those businesses saved to your Dashboard.We suggest
re-establishing these scores by running your listings through the new site. When
you do, you'll have a fixed data point against which you can measure your
progress over time.
Cleaner Listing Snapshot interface
When we started GetListed back in January 2009, only four search engines were
displayed on the snapshot page. As our app grew in popularity and we established
new relationships with data providers and other search engines, that list grew
ever-longer and the formerly-simple interface grew clunky and overwhelming. The
goal of the site (to get business owners to update erroneous information and add
missing information) became muddied.
We hope the new interface makes these calls-to-action much clearer--to create
listings on search engines where they don't exist, and to update information
that doesn't match reality. The new app consolidates the old Snapshot, Accuracy,
and Details pages, bringing accuracy front-and-center, and makes it easy to see
listing details inline without jumping from page-to-page.
Cleaner Dashboard interface
The new Dashboard removes the clutter of favicon-style search engine logos
(another problem created by our gradual expansion to include more listing
providers over the last four years). The new Dashboard provides a quick way to
assess listing scores at a glance, and easy access to the details page for your
listings from clickable business titles.
U.S. version only
Over the past couple of months, we've noticed GetListed UK and GetListed CA
returning an unacceptably high number of errors on business queries. As part of
this release, we've decided to temporarily suspend these versions in order to
focus on the backend and interface for our U.S. audience, which accounted for
98% of all queries run in April. After we've had a chance to analyze our
domestic audience usage on this new system, we plan to re-release UK- and
CA-specific versions (along with more international sites) later in the year.
Looking ahead
Well, that takes care of most of the major changes for this release. Feedback,
as always, is welcome. We've even added a handy-dandy tab where you can submit
feedback directly within the app; you can also feel free to email me at
davidm@seomoz.org.
I hope I've laid out a compelling case above for the rationale behind this
release from a user's perspective. From a development perspective, the goal of
this iteration of GetListed was to create a foundation for more frequent feature
releases and better integration with SEOmoz tools moving forward. It paves the
way for a number of new features we will be rolling out over the course of the
summer and fall, which all of us on the GetListed team are even more excited
about. Looking forward to sharing those with you soon!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/LLBF1mIMOqk/getlisted-feature-improvements
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Posted by David Mihm
Today, I am excited to announce the release of a new version of GetListed.org.
While no new functionality is included in this update, the team and I hope it
provides a dramatically improved user experience on several fronts.
The best way to get a sense of what's changed is to run a business search for
yourself, but I'll run through a few brief highlights here.
Faster business lookups
GetListed is now waaayyyy faster (that's the technical term used by our
engineers) than it used to be. Previously, lookups averaged around 20 seconds.
We've cut the average response time in half to about 10 seconds, and we'll be
working to make it even faster as we analyze usage of the app and further
optimize our response times. We hope this increased speed provides a big
value-add for those of you who use GetListed in your on-the-spot client
meetings.
More consistent results
Previously, GetListed's Listing Snapshot displayed a composite listing based on
the data points returned by several search engines in our list. This led to
unnecessary confusion among business owners, and made it difficult for some of
our agency users to identify which search engines were returning incorrect
information about clients' listings. It also made tracking Listing Score
progress over time more difficult, since this score was dependent on the order
of results returned by our search engine partners, and this order sometimes
varied week-to-week and month-to-month.
The new version of the site asks users to establish their canonical NAP (Name,
Address, Phone number) information prior to running a full query for a given
business, so that the new Snapshot page and Listing Score are no longer based on
"best guess" composite listings.
Please note: this update means you may see changes in your listing scores,
including for those businesses saved to your Dashboard.We suggest
re-establishing these scores by running your listings through the new site. When
you do, you'll have a fixed data point against which you can measure your
progress over time.
Cleaner Listing Snapshot interface
When we started GetListed back in January 2009, only four search engines were
displayed on the snapshot page. As our app grew in popularity and we established
new relationships with data providers and other search engines, that list grew
ever-longer and the formerly-simple interface grew clunky and overwhelming. The
goal of the site (to get business owners to update erroneous information and add
missing information) became muddied.
We hope the new interface makes these calls-to-action much clearer--to create
listings on search engines where they don't exist, and to update information
that doesn't match reality. The new app consolidates the old Snapshot, Accuracy,
and Details pages, bringing accuracy front-and-center, and makes it easy to see
listing details inline without jumping from page-to-page.
Cleaner Dashboard interface
The new Dashboard removes the clutter of favicon-style search engine logos
(another problem created by our gradual expansion to include more listing
providers over the last four years). The new Dashboard provides a quick way to
assess listing scores at a glance, and easy access to the details page for your
listings from clickable business titles.
U.S. version only
Over the past couple of months, we've noticed GetListed UK and GetListed CA
returning an unacceptably high number of errors on business queries. As part of
this release, we've decided to temporarily suspend these versions in order to
focus on the backend and interface for our U.S. audience, which accounted for
98% of all queries run in April. After we've had a chance to analyze our
domestic audience usage on this new system, we plan to re-release UK- and
CA-specific versions (along with more international sites) later in the year.
Looking ahead
Well, that takes care of most of the major changes for this release. Feedback,
as always, is welcome. We've even added a handy-dandy tab where you can submit
feedback directly within the app; you can also feel free to email me at
davidm@seomoz.org.
I hope I've laid out a compelling case above for the rationale behind this
release from a user's perspective. From a development perspective, the goal of
this iteration of GetListed was to create a foundation for more frequent feature
releases and better integration with SEOmoz tools moving forward. It paves the
way for a number of new features we will be rolling out over the course of the
summer and fall, which all of us on the GetListed team are even more excited
about. Looking forward to sharing those with you soon!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/LLBF1mIMOqk/getlisted-feature-improvements
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
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