You may have noticed in recent months that there is a new version of analytics accessible within your existing account. It looks quite different but has much of the same data. The navigation is organised in a more sensible way and the filtering options & advanced segments are easier to manage. Its a step forward in more ways that just the layout and usability interface. There are a number of new features that allow you to explore your data in deeper and more interesting ways:
Reporting in “real-time” allows you to see what’s happening on your site right now! The reports are updated continuously and each pageview is reported only seconds after it occurs on your site. For Real-Time reports look in the ‘Home’ tab.
Multi-Channel Funnels
This is an excellent new feature as it allows you to see which channels your visitors used during the 30 day period prior to them converting or purchasing. By looking at your conversion path data you can see visitors who found your site first through PPC and then returned to convert through organic search. This section measures the performance of clicks from many media channels including paid and organic searches, affiliates, social networks, and display ads.
As the number of visitors using mobile devices to browse the web increases the new mobile reports in analytics helps you understand how these new visitors are interacting with your site. By seeing how many visitors use your site from various devices you can make decisions about optimising for those devises.
This completely new report shows visually how visitors navigate through your site. This report is replaces the clunky navigation tools available in the old version of Google Analytics.
Strategy Internet Marketing are seeking to build relationships with talented journalism and creative writing students.
We are currently looking for volunteer bloggers to write interesting and engaging blogs on a wide range of different topics.
This is an excellent opportunity for any writers who are looking to gain some valuable industry experience and get published online.
What’s in it for you?
Successful blog posts will be published with the author’s name in the bio.
Authors will be provided with a link to the published content so that they can see it online.
Authors will gain work experience by dealing with our editors, working to high standards & gaining feedback to help them improve & get more publications.
Authors can reference us on their CV as being volunteer bloggers for Strategy Internet Marketing.
The opportunity for a long term relationship with Strategy, as this is an ongoing project.
The possibility of paid opportunities for other projects, for those who prove themselves and are committed.
What we are looking for…
Well written, well researched & interesting content for publication.
An ongoing relationship with good writers who are able to produce quality work and meet deadlines.
In the good name of charity and amusing facial hair, willing members of the Strategy team have decided to form a Moustache Brotherhood and participate in Movember. It’s like November, but much hairier! It also offers an excellent opportunity for us all to be lazy and unshaven without fear of seeming lazy or unshaven. Fabulous
All of the team, apart from those who are blessed with hair follicles on their faces which prevent them from participating at a genetic level (or with too much personal pride (a rarity in Internet Marketing, but there are those among us who still care about how they look)) are growing moustaches. Big, hairy ones. Massive food interceptors which reduce their pulling power (which, if we’re honest, is negligible in most cases on the best of days) to zero. Monster moustaches which say, ‘Sweet mercy, look at me. I should not be allowed in the workplace for I am ridiculous, yet here I am, so you must worship me. Bow before me and pray for the end of Movember so I may be eradicated. And please stop laughing…’
Equal opportunities are very important at Strategy Towers, and we didn’t want the ladies to feel left out, so we gave them the opportunity to join the team and grow their leg hair in a bid to help us raise some dosh. This idea was received with the same iciness which saw the untimely demise of the Titanic, so as an alternative we suggested they might consider buying some fake beards so they could go all Life of Brian. I can’t understand why, but they ignored this most reasonable of ideas and instead decided they would simply point and laugh at our hairy chops. Such is the price we Mo Bros must pay.
The aim of this selfless act of stubble growth is to raise vital awareness and moolah for men’s health, most specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men. I’ve set up a team called Strategy S E Mo (sometimes I’m so witty I amaze even myself) which allows anyone who wants to sponsor us the ability to release their unneeded copious wads of cash into the hands of people who require it and can put it to very good use. Please click on the following link to release the moths: http://mobro.co/StrategyInternetMarketing
Each week we shall be taking photographic evidence of our wondrous face foliage to share with the populace of Earth, so they can recognise our suffering for this most worthy of causes. I thank you all in advance for the huge amount of money you will be giving to charity in our support. Follow our progress on Facebook.
Happy Movember – may it be a hairy one!!
For individual Mo Team pages, see the following links:
Cloaked in secrecy, hiding in the offices of many internet marketing agencies, reside sneaky Bowling Ninjas who, on the quiet, possess legendary skills in the art of Ten Pin Bowling. Sadly, not many of them have taken up residency at Strategy Internet Marketing. Still, not liking to admit to possessing the collective bowling prowess of an out of date tin of Spam, the team decided a mission was needed. A social event was planned to find out answers. Most specifically, one answer. An answer to the ultimate question:
Who at SIM could lob a lump of plastic reactive resin down a bowling alley and cause the most devastating carnage to the neat formation of pins so beautifully arranged at its zenith?
As questions go, this is one is the Daddy. Forget lesser questions such as, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ At least you can have a pint and force an answer from this bad boy.
The photos are likely to show that the bar sidetracked many lesser-willed Bowling Ninjas and destroyed their powers entirely. Most notably, Andy ‘Bluto’ Price, client manager of extraordinary ability, but bowler of unfathomable ineptness, who chalked up the evening’s most embarrassing total of 37 after losing all hand-to-eye coordination through an overindulgence of the sweet nectar known as cider. Oh dear.
Beant ‘Badger’ Bajwa developed an extraordinary bowling technique which defied gravity. While her bowl travelled more slowly than a sleeping Sloth which had had all its limbs amputated on a whim, she still managed to achieve a mighty score of 110! See photos of this amazing phenomenon and lots more on Facebook.
But while some of the team tried to fathom how Beant’s bowling technique managed to defy the laws of physics, a battle was underway. Alex Van Halen had laid down the Bowling Gauntlet of Challenge by winning the first game with a whopping score of 129 (I told you we didn’t have many Bowling Ninjas in residence at our establishment). But low, the red mist fell on the Meadow of the Ten Pin. Those among us of a more competitive nature began lobbing bowling balls with ruthless ferocity. Pins were smashed and for a while Woolly Mattmoth and Alex Van Halen were in contention for the most coveted of prizes – the Strategy Internet Marketing Supreme Bowling Champion Trophy. But then they saw hunger and madness dancing a crazed tango in JC’s eyes and realised that if they didn’t let him win they might be out of a job.
And so, the mighty JC won the prize with a monster score of 161. The trophy now sits safe in his office behind a protective electric force-field so none may steal it. Every now and then a smile caresses JC’s lips as he remembers the sweet taste of victory. But how long can the trophy be kept from the rest of the team who are hungry for revenge and an opportunity to revel in victory? That question can only be answered on the next Quest of the Bowling Champions.
Over recent months, even years, it’s become more and more evident that search as we know it is changing. The growth and popularity of social media and location information (via GPS & IP address) means that the search engines can tailor search results to an individual, meaning that people are starting to see completely different search results than the person sitting next to them at work. In the past few weeks, both Google and Facebook have announced new social features, which just reinforces our belief that a new age of search is coming.
Google Goes Social
In the past few weeks, we have seen a big change in Google, this started with a change to the look of search results and the appearance of a black bar across the top. The filter options down the side have been given some colour, and even when signed out with personalization turned off information such as location is logged and search results adjusted accordingly.
These changes are all part of Google’s latest, and most promising, attempt at social media. Google+ is still in it’s early days, with limited user capacity, but the sounds coming from Google+ is positive, with people really liking the interface and usability. So far this is looking to be Google’s most successful attempt at social media, and one that is likely to stick.
There are a number of aspects of Google+ which show that Google have been paying attention to how people use other social media and what they’ve been unhappy with. One of the most widely hailed success stories so far has been ‘Circles’. Google have realised that people don’t necessarily want to share every part of their life with everyone they know, so when you add a new person to your friends you will be asked to categorise them into a circle, this will mean that with a circle for family and one for colleagues you can choose to share something personal with your family but your colleagues won’t see this update. Yes, Facebook have lists, and yes if you go through the effort of clicking through you can choose a list to view your status update, but it’s clunky, a lot of effort, and a lot of users just don’t know how to do it! In Google+ Circles this process is quick and simple, and everyone likes quick and simple! If you see something on any Google site you want to share with one of your circle’s you just need to look to the new black toolbar and voila it is shared.
The next feature of Google+ is ‘Sparks’ which searches the internet and pulls in elements it believes you will be interested in based on what you add to the search bar. This is a feature which is lacking at the moment, but we believe that as more users join Google+ and Google collect more information on different people and their interests, the results will become more relevant. There is also a ‘Featured Interests’ section where you can see what other people are using sparks for.
‘Huddle’ is a group messaging tool which will work across Android, iPhone & SMS. It uses your circles and means that a group of people can be part of the same instant conversation as it unfolds. Closely related are ‘Hangouts’, the best way to describe these are as the new age of forums. You can log on and make yourself available for a video chat in a huddle, friends will see you are available and can come and go as they please with up to ten people at a time in one huddle. This eliminates some of the issues with Skype where people can’t or don’t want to talk as everyone in a huddle chooses to be there.
Once a user has activated their Google+ profile their standard Google profile will be removed so that Google+ is the central point for all things Google, there are also some pretty nice features associated with the profile. Those with the android app can auto upload photos from their phone! The profile will also show all of the +1 content the user has chosen.
What is +1
Google +1 is Google’s version of a ‘Like’ button. When logged into Google, any search you do will have a +1 image next to the title tag. By clicking on this you are doing several things:
bookmarking this site for future use (available in your Google+ profile)
telling other friends that you like something as your profile image will appear in their search results as having +1′d this site
feeding information into Google and the owner of that site about who likes it and how they use it!
and once you’ve +1′d a listing:
The +1 button can also be added to websites so users can click on a page whilst in the site. The advantage to website owners for adding the button is that they can access an activity report in Webmaster Tools which shows how many times pages have been +1′d from site links and search links. They are also able to access an audience report which provides demographic information.
Social Plugin Tracking in Google Analytics
Google haven’t stopped at Google+ and their +1 button though! They have also introduced social plugin tracking for Google Analytics, this will track all social media activity from Tweets to Facebook Share’s to Google +1 clicks. By adding a bit of javascript into your site you can access a Social Engagement Report which will breakdown site behaviour for all social visitors. This means that you can see if people who use the social interaction buttons, spend longer on the site and which pages they visit and share.
This gives website owners, new considerations. They may have pages which are ‘hot’ for a few days or weeks because they are topical, or there is an e-newsletter sent out etc. But there may also be pages which are consistently ‘liked’ over a long period of time, which will give website owners the opportunity to optimise content which is valuable to their target audience.
There are some pros and cons to the tracking though; Analytics will only report on +1 interactions which occur on your website domain. Whereas the activity report in Webmaster Tools will show all +1 interactions regardless of where on the web they happened. However, Analytics is updated more frequently than Webmaster Tools which also means that the two will rarely tally up!
Google acquired Post Rank?
That’s right, Google have acquired the company who, to date, have the best methods of aggregating social engagement information. This is going to mean that as well as all the new information Google will acquire from Google+ and +1 they will also acquire all of this social information PostRank have acquired over time. This said, the services offered by Post Rank are impressive and definitely worth considering. Some of the highlights are:
real time tracking of where your visitors have come from, how they came to you, and what they’ve done on your site.
measuring of actual user activity, this will translate into the relevance and influence of your site - off-site engagement can account for 80% of the attention your content receives!
finds the influencers for your brand
benchmarks your competition
tracks your engagement points
top posts widget for blogs, meaning your most popular content is always easily available
Finally, now combined Post Rank and Google Reader enables ability to score, filter, and track the performance of your RSS feeds.
Google Offers
Set to compete with flailing group offer site Groupon, Google Offers will give companies the opportunity to get a specific offer out to potential customers who fit into their designated demographic. These customers will buy directly from Google in advance meaning that the company presenting the offers will receive a one-off payment from Google once the payment’s have gone through.
The staff at Google Offers will be advertising specialists who will be able to help in the ad and offer creation meaning that the company wanting to create the offer will have support right the way through the process.
Authorship Markup
Rel Author is a form of content tagging which enables you to tag content to highlight the author. This enables Google to distribute weight appropriate weight based on who the author is and how popular they are. This authorship markup will also link into the author’s Google+ profile so that a list of all the content they have written will be available from their profile. Pete Wailes summarised the process as “integrating Google+ and the authorship of the net”.
Facebook Edge Rank
Finally, the whole world doesn’t revolve around Google, although they would like to think it does. Facebook have been pretty busy themselves. They recently announced their partnership with Skype which will allow video calls from within the site. However, there has been a lot of talk about Edge Rank, what it is and how it works. Basically it’s what Facebook uses to ensure that what appears in the News Feed is relevant to each user.
If the News Feed wasn’t filtered it would be completely unmanageable so Facebook created a formula which takes into account three ‘edges’ each one of these edges is a component which is then fed into the formula. The components which make up each ‘edge’ are:
Affinity Score – between the user and the status creator, how much interaction is there between you, how often do you visit each other’s profile’s, comment on each other’s wall etc.
Type of Edge – Different types of activity have a different amount of weight, so a status update may be worth more than merely pressing a like button
Time – The older the edge the less important it is
What it comes down to is that new feed objects are more likely to show for people you interact with regularly, this means that companies need to be actually interacting with their followers and producing relevant content. Getting people to ‘Like’ their page and hammering out sales blurb isn’t going to be enough.
Join the discussion?
In summary, social is the next big thing, SEO is becoming more influenced by what is happening in the social landscape. It is not enough to have the right keyphrases and content anymore. As SEO’s we have to become more socially minded and truly understand the direction the internet is taking, and embrace it! Companies need to take the time to answer customer’s queries, respond to their questions, encourage discussion, and not just set up Twitter and Facebook pages as token gestures. It’s time to ‘Join The Discussion’
Just a quick post for all you developers out there – I’ve quickly hacked together a function for getting the number of shares of a url on Google+. I can’t be the only one out there who needs this, so I thought I’d give back to the community with it. This implimentation is in PHP, but it shouldn’t be too hard to understand and port.
“My, but we’ve come a long way”, we’ll say on the day when Google’s list of links finally disappears. And that day will come sooner than many think.
Over the past eight or so years that I’ve been working in the search industry, I’ve seen a lot of changes. Google News & Froogle (what was to become the Shopping search interface) had only recently launched, Google’s entire index was less than 6 billion pages, there was no Gmail, no mobile search, YouTube, Facebook, Bing was MSN Search and powered by Looksmart & Inktomi, Yahoo! was powered by Google’s technology…
More interesting though has been the lack of innovation in result UI. Oh sure, we’ve got much richer results now than we’ve ever had before, and the underlying technology is far in advance of what it was then, but in terms of how we actually deliver results, I’m not so sure.
A Future Interface
Let me clarify. Based on some recent comments by people at both Google and Microsoft, with regards to answering search queries, the interfaces of the future clearly aren’t going to look like they are now. Instead, they’re going to focus far more on actually answering the users question. We’ve seen the start of this with Google’s recipe search, and Bing’s travel search products.
However, these are just the beginnings of a greater shift in how we interact with the great database that is the Internet. For a more complete understanding, we rather strangly, have to turn to the world of TV game shows.
Search? It’s Elementary My Dear Watson
Earlier this year, Watson, a supercomputer built by IBM, trounced the two greatest human Jeopardy! players at their own game. Much like a modern web search engine, Watson runs thousands of algorithms symulatniously to actually calculate the correct answer to a question. Now, this is fine for where there is an actual answer (questions like ‘what is the’, ‘in what year did’, ‘where can you’ etc), but for ones where a user decision is required, we need to look beyond this.
At this point, we get in to the idea of a twin-structured search engine. In the first part, it’d simply attempt to answer a question presented to it. We can already see this done, if you ask an engine what the time is in a certain place, what a cinema is showing today, or if you want an answer to a calculation. It’s simply an extension (albeit a huge one) of technology that’s already in place.
In this particular area, SEO as we know it will die. Google will simply parse the question and deliver the answer. No links involved.
The second area though, where the user needs to decide based on information, is quite different. This is where the semantic web truly comes in to its own.
Second Site
The semantic web is a fairly old idea, the crux of which is that one day, all the data on the web will be understandable by machines. To kick-start this, Google, Bing and Yahoo! recently announced the launch of schema.org, a protocol similar to XML sitemaps (but with far broader scope) in that it aims to get the entire web marked up in a way that will facilitate this.
In this new web, a search engine would be able to grab any piece of data from any website, understand it, and then use it to produce better answers for the user. So if I were to type in ‘best small family car’, my results page would show me various small family cars, ratings by various associations, new & used prices, ancilliary information (videos, image galleries etc), and links to places to go to buy one.
This offers an exciting possibility for consumers – instant, well presented information on any topic, with the option to go out and view the original source information, with greater expansion on the subject if required. Think of it like an uber-Wikipedia. For a live example of something like this working, take a look at this results page for ‘yoga poses’ in Bing.
Welcome to the Jungle
Now, for the record, I don’t know what Microsoft or Google’s intentions are. But it’s increasingly clear that if they wanted, this is a direction that they could move in. With their increasingly titanic data stores, they’re in an amazing position to completely transform how we interact with the world’s information. For now though, webmasters need to consider three things:
Marking up your data probably won’t help your rankings in any particular area at the moment
Not marking up your data almost certainly will stop you ranking in different forms of search interface in the future
The websites that act now will, as always, be better placed when change comes along
So do you need to worry about getting your data marked up today? No, but have it in the back of your mind, and make sure you do it sooner rather than later.
We speak to a lot of Clients who don’t realise that it is extremely important for their site navigation, (commonly referred to as internal links or information architecture) to be extremely well considered so that the right pages get indexed easily and regularly by the search engine spiders. Connected to the site architecture is the preference that no one page contains more than 100 links, this keeps the quality score assigned to each link at a respectable level and helps the spiders move through the site properly.
Crawl Priority
To start, it helps to understand how the spiders prioritise the pages, and then crawl the site.
Spiders will visit popular pages more often, popular pages are defined by the number of back-links and the site architecture should correlate with this. For example:
Your homepage, and chosen landing pages, should be the most popular with the most back-links
First and second level category pages should be fairly popular but containing less back-links than the homepage
At the bottom of the priority are the deepest pages, these will be pages such as news pages, product pages, service price lists etc
The spiders will enter the site via a landing page, this doesn’t need to be the homepage, they will then follow links through each page looking to index the whole site. They don’t like being sent in circles and they don’t like feeling lost in too many links, so it’s important that your site architecture makes it as easy as possible for the spiders to do their job, whilst getting all the pages which need indexing, indexed. Ideally you want the spiders to be able to index everything within three clicks of arriving on the site, regardless if that is your homepage or your deepest category page.
XML Site Maps
XML site maps are seen as the quick fix for architecture issues, and this is what they are. They do not resolve problems in the site architecture and internal navigation, they merely hide the problems so that you are unaware of them.
In an ideal world, you would not add an XML site map until you know the website architecture is sound and secure and most importantly indexing on it’s own. Below are some basic architecture tips to get you started.
Keep Architecture Flat
You want to keep your architecture as flat and easy to navigate as possible, whilst retaining the three click rule (if a spider lands on one of your deeper pages, can they reach the other pages within three links?)
In a brand new website the following structure is a common one used with the 100 links per page being the absolute maximum you should have on each page.
At the top: Homepage with no more than 100 links per page First Level: Categories – no more than 100 pages (each page has no more than 100 links) Second Level: Sub-Categories – no more than 10,000 (each page has no more than 100 links) At the bottom: Detail/Products – no more than 1,000,000 pages
Index and rankings are determined by how much authority each page has, the higher the domain authority of your site the more links you can realistically get away with including on each page. As a rough guide, if your website already holds some domain authority (DA) you can increase the links on each page as follows:
DA 7-10 = 250 links
DA 5-7 = 175 links
DA 3-5 = 125 links
DA 0-3 = 100 links
So, the smaller the number of links the spiders have to follow to index the whole site, the happier they are and the more weight each page will hold.
Faceted Navigation
This is a common and useful aspect of ecommerce sites, which allows you to pick facets of a product which are important to you. For example, you could pick the category of T-Shirts, pick the colour black, and the size Medium, the results you are shown then directly correspond with what you specifically want. In essence the website has ignored anything which doesn’t contain the facets you have chosen.
Setting up faceted navigation can be tricky, and you need to keep in mind that the primary facet pages won’t rank, you want the deeper facet pages to rank as these are the one’s that will help the spiders discover all of the product pages.
When setting up faceted navigation, some of the things to keep in mind are:
URL
You must have a unique URL for each facet level. The URL’s should be clear and not complicated and hard to follow:
You also want to ensure that whatever route somebody takes to reach this facet level the same URL is shown so for example:
Somebody clicks on Tshirts, then Medium, then Black the URL they end up on should still be www.tshirtdomain.co.uk/tshirts/black/medium and not www.tshirtdomain.co.uk/tshirts/medium/black which would result in you creating unnecessary duplicate content issues!
Adding & Removing Facets
You should make it easy for your customers to add or remove additional facets as they see fit.
As they add facets to their search these should be displayed as follows so that any or all facets can be removed by the user:
Tshirts [remove]
black [remove]
medium [remove]
So that they can easily choose which facets can be automatically generated from the results meta data so it is easy for you to display the number of results within that facet, for example:
Blue [35]
Green [23]
Yellow [1]
No Index
Any pages which could be considered as duplicate content should be no-indexed, the spiders will still visit these pages but they won’t index them. To keep a page out of the index you want to add some code to the page as follows:
<meta name = “robots” content = “noindex”> – This will make the page no index
<link rel = “canonical” href = “domainname.co.uk/tshirts/black”> – This will take the spiders back to the correct page.
Filtering & Pagination
Another common aspect of ecommerce sites is filtering results. This is where you can choose a filter which will sort the products in a certain way, for example only showing 10 items per page (creating pagination or multiple pages), or showing lowest priced items first.
The ideal way to deal with pagination in category results is to programme the page to show all results rather than writing each page of results as page 1, page 2, etc.
Once the main category page has been created you can then use javascript to create the pagination. Search engine spiders don’t follow javascript so you don’t risk duplicate content from having multiple pages under each content, but all of the products are indexed.
Plan, Plan, and Plan Again
Don’t under-value the benefit of properly planning your website. Most of our examples have referred to ecommerce sites, but the same principal applies to brochure sites. Plan to succeed and your website will be a spider’s navigational dream and you will be rewarded with good search results and no duplicate content issues.
In summary, the number one rule for you to keep in mind when you are planning your navigation is that you want as few pages as possible to be indexed, whilst allowing for each and every product page to be indexed.
Yes, in case you hadn’t heard, after a two year absence, I’m going to be back speaking at SMX London Advanced. The session (copied from the agenda website) is:
Link Alchemy: Creative Ways Of Conjuring SEO Gold
Despite all the recent changes in search engine algorithms, links remain the single most important part of an effective search marketing campaign. And to successfully compete, you need to go beyond traditional link building techniques to create natural but scalable campaigns. What tools are available to analyse competitor links? What non-traditional channels, such as .edu links and retweets can be used? Our speakers show you how to reinvigorate your link building campaigns and take them to the next level.
According to Google, as many as 30% of all search queries have local intent. And according to IDC, more internet-capable mobile devices will be sold this year than computers. In short, local and mobile are both here and huge, and will continue to be an important part of many search marketer’s activities. This session looks at new developments in local search, location services, mobile apps and ads.
Philippe Huysmans, Director, EMEA Product Management, Mobile Local and Commerce, Microsoft
David Mihm, Designer + Local Search Marketer, davidmihm.com
It’s an honour to be back speaking to the industry again, and to be back as a participant after an extended period, and I look forward to seeing you all there!
TL;DR: Whilst it might be very efficient to get lots of poor outsourced content written on the cheap and pushed on to article sites, it’s nowhere near as effective as great content published and promoted properly on your own site, when it comes to attracting link weight, traffic and brand awareness.
Due to the recent Farmer update, there’s been a lot of discussion about various link building methods in of late. Based on the discussions I’ve seen going on, I’ve decided that it’s time to come out of blogging retirement, and for the first time in about two years, weigh in on the debate.
The Three Axis of Everything
Before we get in to the details of how to go about building links that have real, long term, lasting value, we need to recap slightly on the difference between efficiency and effectiveness.
Efficiency:accomplishment of or ability to accomplish a job with a minimum expenditure of time and effort
Effectiveness:adequate to accomplish a purpose; producing the intended or expected result
Notice the difference between these two. It’s entirely possible to have a process that’s exceedingly efficient, but that has very limited actual effectiveness. So how do people get trapped in these forms of processes, where they’re being efficiently ineffective?
Well, with just about everything in life, we have to choose the amount we’re willing to invest in each of three things, which determine the results of all our efforts:
Time
Cost
Quality
The more important each of those is, the more the others have to suffer. It’s at this point that we see why some organisations fail to do linkbuilding (or any other area of execution) well; their prioritisation is incorrect. In an attempt to reduce cost and time invested, quality suffers drastically.
The Devil & Idle Thumbs
Unfortunately, due to a lack of good education, a moral requirement to do something for the money being charged, and the ease with which certain things (like outsourced, low quality article marketing) can be done, it lets people get in to a situation where they’re happily busy doing things, irrespective of the efficacy of those activities.
This effect is unfortunately compounded by the way linkbuilding works, with repeated links from a domain having ever decreasing value. Thus whilst submitting to the same batch of article sites will initially produce useful returns, over a sustained period it will eventually lack the necessary utility to see that growth sustained. (In my experience, most sites will need to look at other methods to of linkbuilding after around 18-24 months, depending on post frequency and site strength)
To truly produce sustainable, long term growth, with solid benefits that will aid the site for years, we have to look beyond this approach, and move on to something a little more creative.
4C & CBEL
It’s at this point that we turn to two methods of linkbuilding that provide markedly more value and long-term traction. At SIM, we refer to these as 4C and CBEL – Creative & Compelling Content Creation and Community Based Engagement Linkbuilding. We’ll look at these in more detail separately.
First up, linkbuilding through great content:
4C: Creative & Compelling Content Creation
Welcome to the internet. There’s a whole bunch of interesting stuff here. And a lot of boring stuff too. Can you guess which of the two camps of content people view and link to the most? If you can’t, or you guessed wrong, please send an email to i_shouldnt_be_allowed_near_computers@muppet.com.
When it comes to content, the key tends to be putting yourself in the position of someone completely different, and then going looking for the tiny ponies.
I didn’t know where I wanted to be, but I was glad I was here. Because there is a horse in the Apple Store.
I made a lame joke in my mind about how the horse is there, but it’s not the one wearing the blinders. And then I pictured what would happen if the horse pooped in the middle of the floor of the Apple Store, because I am nine. I laugh to myself. The woman next to me looks up from the 17″ laptop in a judgmental fashion, probably because she could feel the immaturity radiate out of my body. She looks back down and Facebook looks back at her. “Great, the one thing she notices is me being a moron.”
Play it cool, Frank. Play it cool.
THERE IS A LITTLE PONY IN THE APPLE STORE. What the hell? A beautiful little pony, with a flowing mane, the likes of which my sister would have killed to get for Christmas when she was 7 or 8. And, NOONE is looking at this thing. I wondered: if there were kids in the Apple Store, would they notice? “Yes,” I say. “Yes, they would.” Kids have a magnetic connection to animals. But there are no children in the Apple Store, for the same reason you would not see a child in a jewelry store: things are small and fragile and expensive and shiny. And if you have a child, you probably can not afford Apple products.
But, if a child were here, they would see the pony, because when you’re a kid, you notice everything, because everything is new. My niece is like this. “Did you see that that dog loves that other dog because they got their leashes tangled up outside and then they laid down beside one another?” Or, “Once you have a baby, you can’t put it back, can you?”
It’s in this way that you need to look at your company. You need to step back and see the interesting details. Here’s a few quick examples of interesting stories told through creative ideas:
1. Video
TV’s are fairly boring, when you get right down to it. It’s a box that lets you watch pictures. So to successfully market a new television requires some out of the box (pun most definitely intended) thinking. There’s two separate approaches we can look at here.
Firstly, we’ve got Sony’s famous Balls and Paint adverts. I’ve embedded them both below so you can watch and see what we’re talking about, in case you live under a rock.
Balls
Paint
Both these adverts created huge mindshare when they arrived, due to their amazing visual impact, and the frankly absurd lengths Sony went to to create them. This was reflected in the search volume, which you can see in the graph below:
On the more low-budget front, video can be used very effectively when combined with a strong emotitive pull. Humour and incredularity work fairly well. As a couple of examples of sites that have worked this angle to great effect, let’s take a look at Zero Punctuation and XXXX
Zero Punctuation
That video was Liked on Facebook more than 54,000 times, and received more than 1,100 retweets. It would seem therefore that being consistently funny is a fairly good way of getting people to notice you. On to the incredulity front, we have:
The Cog
The Cog, by Honda, is a wonderful example of something that could be done on a relatively small budget in terms of actual cost, although this is obviously the high end. However, it’s not hard to see how someone could adapt the Rube Goldberg style to something with a much smaller budget.
2. Embeddable Content
Embeddable content, such as video or imagery is nothing new. However, there’s lots of ways that you can use the fact that people share and re-post things to your advantage. We’ll take a look at the example of infographics here, to get you started.
The trend for making infographics has really blossomed over the last 18 months or so, and unfortunately has produced a lot of really bad content. As such, before we go in to some examples of great infographics, I’m going to define what makes them great:
Visual Impact: if it doesn’t look amazing, no-one’s going to want to share it
Data Clarity: if you can’t understand the data being presented, it’s of no use
Intuitive Visualisation: it should be immediately obvious, even when doing a squint test, what’s going on
The Point: by definition, an infographic needs to make a point, or it’s going to be dull
Sharability: make sure you’ve got embed code, and retweet and Facebook Like buttons going on
So with that out of the way, let’s take a look at some people who consistently produce amazing infographics:
These places should serve to inspire you. Anyone can product something a poor infographic. A great one takes somewhat more skill. So how should you go about getting on together?
Well, I’d say first off hire a designer. If you’re not really good at visual design, you’re not going to be able to pull off something slick enough to get the kind of attention you need.
If you are doing it yourself though, we need to address the other points. Data clarity is vital in infographics, especially as you’re often going to be dealing with large data sets or numbers, which can’t be easily represented in a traditional way. Think about ways you can abstract the data, to make it more relatable. Could you show energy used by a light bulb as the amount it costs, rather than the wattage per hour? How about showing money as wheelbarrows full of notes, instead of numbers? Think outside the box.
For presentation, the graphic should have a clear visual flow, and it should be immediately obvious what the meaning behind the visual is. For some great examples of this in action, go download these slides from Extreme Presentation. That’ll give you some ideas as to how you can represent concepts visually without having to explain them in depth.
Finally, make sure you know what you’re going to try and get across. Is it just presenting data? Is it showing a point of view? Is it to quickly convey information which you’re going to expand upon below, like this post does? Know the purpose, and then build the infographic.
3. Great Writing
Nothing beats great content. Look at the best blogs, and they’re all where they are because they consistently produce great content, with a large percentage of that being written, day in day out. Again, knowing the audience is key. Sites like Engadget, The Beeb and SEOmoz all get the attention they do by having a tightly aimed focus on their audience.
The key point to note here is that the audience doesn’t have to be restricted to a small area. Whilst SEOmoz only deals with the digital marketing community, Engadget is tailored to anyone who loves gadgets and the technology industry, and the BBC aims at just about everyone. What makes this work isn’t the tight focus on writing around a certain topic, but writing for a certain audience. This means that you can have breadth in what you write, as long as it’s tailored to what your audience wants to listen to you talking about.
For some guidance on how to go about writing great content, I’ve included some resources below:
Obviously, this isn’t an extensive list. There’s widgets, images, licensed content… Lots and lots of things you can do to create content that people will want to grab and put on their own site or talk about. It’s really up to your imagination at looking at what your industry shares, what it likes, what there’s a need for, and how you can product content that satisfies those criteria. However, before you can do that, you need to create that content, which is what we’re going to look at now.
Creating Your Own Content
Pretty much irrespective of what the content you’re creating is, the process that you’ll go through is the same: Brainstorm, Execute, Promote, Analyse. Each of these parts breaks down into a distinct set of processes, so we’ll look at them one by one, and see what you can do to make them as efficient and effective as possible.
The Process: Brainstorm
In this first stage, you’re going to be sitting down and coming up with various ideas. For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll imagine that we’re working for a site that sells clothing, and who’s lead product is jeans. The first thing you need to do is map out everything you can think of to do with jeans. So that might include:
A brief history of jeans
Famous things featuring jeans (adverts, tv shows, celebrities?)
Various styles of jeans
Current issues/news stories related to jeans
Fashion trends over time, and how they’ve impacted jeans
The history of famous jeans-related brands
Current/future jeans-related fashions
Denim usage outside of the fashion industry
…and so on. For each of these you should then be able to generate a few ideas related to that topic, for a potential link building campaign. For example, for the brief history of jeans, you might want to do a jeans related infographic, along the lines of 15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee from The Oatmeal. If, like me, you spend way too much time on teh internetz, then this shouldn’t take you too long. You’ll be able to tell if this is the case, because you’ll know where this is from, and find it funny:
Having created your list, it’s time to whittle it down. There’s an element of research that you can do into this, looking at what the community that you’re targeting likes. The best way to go about that is to try and find where the community hangs around online (is it on Twitter, social forums/sharing areas like HackerNews, certain blogs (and if so, which ones and who writes them), and see what’s gotten links and attention. Pay attention to stickied forum threads, greatest hits/most visited/best of style blog posts, YouTube videos (sorted by view count), power users on social sharing sites, the number of inbound links to particular pages… What you’re looking for are the key influencers in the community, both from the point of view of the people who have influence, and the topics that influence the discussion.
By running a process like this, you can ensure you’ve got the best possible chance of getting a good result for your efforts. In the end though, you’re going to have to take a gamble as you can never truly guarantee what’s going to take off (unless you’re known enough in the community already that you can leverage that into promotion).
The Process: Execution
This is a harder part to explain, as the method that you use to execute varies wildly based on your content type and distribution channels, budget and timeline. However, the principles behind how you should execute are fairly consistent, so I’ll try and guide you through those, and then you can apply them to whatever your content type is.
Firstly, the most important thing is the quality of what you’re producing. There’s a subtlety here that deserves attention though, which is that what you perceive as quality, might not be the factor of quality that your audience cares about. So whilst to you, it might mean depth of content, to your audience it might be production value. Nailing this comes down to understanding your audience, and what they value. This is where the research you did during the brainstorming section comes in handy, because you’ll be able to see across the various types of content you found that went big before, what the community values. Is it in-depth content, is it amazing presentation, is it evidence-backed claims, is it a humorous or sober tone, is it a pretty face or a “real” person? These are the questions you need to answer, before executing, to make sure that what you produce matches the expectations of the audience you’re going to put it in front of. So we know that we need to deliver quality, and how our audience defines it. What else?
Well, the second key point is sharability. Again, this is research-led, as you need to understand where your audience are, how they share. It’s pointless having Reddit, Twitter and Facebook voting buttons on your site if you’re targeting silver surfers, as they share via email. Similarly, you wouldn’t target a tech crowd by using Send to a Friend email buttons. Knowing your audience and how the community with each other is vital to reducing friction, and enabling them to share you content as easily as possible.
Thirdly and finally, we need to consider timing. If you’re launching something to do with jeans (staying with our earlier example), it’d probably help to tie it in with something like London Fashion Week, where you can ride off the back of the promotion of that to help get your content out. Look for natural news events that you know will arise over the course of time to coincide with your content where possible, as if something’s already on the mind of your community, and you’ve got a hook in to it, it makes it more relevant for them, thus more useful, thus more likely that they’ll take the actions that you want.
The Process: Promotion
As with execution, a lot of the ‘how’ behind the promotion of your content comes down to what the content you’ve created is. For example, if you made a video, you’re going to want to get it on a video site, like Vimeo or YouTube. If on the other hand, what you’ve created is an infographic or a piece of long-form content, then a video site isn’t going to be of much use. There are however some guidelines that we can look at again though, to give our content the best push possible. So first up we’ve got:
Suitability. Video for video sites, humour for channels that appreciate it, more series forums/sites for places that appreciate a more business-like tone and so on. Make sure that your chose distribution channels match the types of content you’ve created. You’re only really able to stray outside of this is you’ve really, amazingly exceptional content, in which case the community will pick it up themselves; you don’t want to try and seed at these sorts of places.
Second, watch out for the reaction to the content. If people don’t like it, stop pushing it quickly, and come out and apologise. Acknowledge your mistakes when they happen, and the community will thank you for it. On the other hand, if something’s clearly getting good traction, engage and do what you can to keep that going and watch it snowball. But in either case, you’re not going to be able to make sure you get the best community reaction possible, if you’re not engaging there and watching the discussions that take place.
Finally, don’t be afraid to call in favours. If you’ve previously done some guest blogging for an influential member of the community, ask if they’d care to take a look at whatever it is you’ve done, and if they like it to put word out. Understanding how to leverage your relationships, without being too cheeky or overbearing is vital in the early days, as until the community start to view you as a trusted source of content, you’re going to have to build credibility, and having people they already regard as trusted experts talking about you can expedite that.
The Process: Analysis
So you’ve done your research, created your content, and the community has loved it (or not). Time to do a post-mortem. Try and gather as much data as possible on who shared, you liked your content, who didn’t, what times people shared, what methods the community used to distribute your content, where they engaged, where conversations happened… Everything you can possibly get to ensure that however well this piece went, next time it goes better.
Doing this will require a lot of monitoring to be done whilst the promotion is going on, so make sure all hands are on deck for that 24-72 hour period, so that you’ve got people checking the channels you previously identified. Also, make sure your developers are around, as if you get really high server load, you may have to scale fast, and they’ll need to know that that may happen, so they can prepare for it.
The key to this is remembering to do it whether the campaign worked or not. If it fails, you’ll learn a lot about why it failed – was it that people didn’t share in the way you thought, the content didn’t engage them, no influential people talked about it etc? Or if it worked, why it worked, where could it have worked better, what bottlenecks were there and so on. Whatever happens, this is a vital step to ensuring that things go better next time, which too many people skip. Don’t’ be one of them!
CBEL: Community Based Engagement Linkbuilding
You’ll notice that a lot of the content creation section above talked about engaging communities, researching communities and becoming known in communities. However, you might not know about how to do those things, so that’s what we’re going to look at now.
Many people miss this key aspect – it’s not a case of if you create it, they will come; it’s if you create it and they know about it, and like what you’ve done, then they’ll come. But to know what they’ll like, and to be able to tell them, there’s some work to be done. That in mind, let’s take a look at some channels we can use to engage a community.
Note that not all of these methods are applicable to all audiences, so make sure you first go around and see what methods a community uses.
Blogging
A lot has been written on the subject of blogging, both from the point of view of how to do it and how to promote your blog, so what I’ll do here is give you a brief introduction, and then provide some links for further reading.
The first key point is to understand the difference between writing to your subject, and writing for an audience. You can have breadth in what you blog about, as long as you’re ruthlessly focused on writing about subjects your audience are passionate about. As such, if you run a blog on lifehacks, you can probably also talk about diet and nutrition, fitness, and to an extent, technology. Why? Because these are all things that your audience will also likely be interested in. It also serves to break up the flow a little, and add some variety to the conversation, allowing you to better get a view on who your audience are, and where you should take your blog over time.
The second is ensuring that you don’t write unless you have something to say. It’s better to blog once a fortnight than every day, if what you put out on the slower schedule is gold-plated amazingness every single time. Look at A List Apart for instance. Low content production level, but ultra-high quality. Quality trumps quantity.
Finally, watch your stats. See where people come from. If you get a link from another blogger, thank them for it. Engage them. Develop relationships with your readers, and with other bloggers in the niche. Those relationships will prove key later when you want to promote content, or want guest blog spots, or if you need a guest blogger (if you’re going on holiday for example). As with all these methods, it’s all about asking yourself what you can do, every day, to be useful to those around you in the community.
Everything Everywhere – an example of remarkableness and engagement garnering attention
Social Site Presence & Etiquette
Different communities like different forms of social sites, and engage in different ways. For some, it’s all about Twitter and Facebook, with others people hang out on blogs. And with still others, it’s forms of forums. There’s an element here of making sure you’re known so that you can promote content effectively. However, I’d emphasise again that that’s a secondary benefit from the primary motivation, which should be to be useful to the community.
For instance, if content only gets voted for when it’s been seen on certain blogs, then you need to make sure that you’re known on those sites as a good commenter, so you can forge a relationship with the bloggers of that site, so when you product your content you can leverage that relationship into helping to push it viral. However, the reason you should have that relationship is because you want to be useful to that blogger. Do not go around pretending to be useful only so you can get something back. You get back what you want, as a result of being focused on others. Leave your self-interest at the door.
Reputation Monitoring
As a last point for community engagement, set up Twitter and Google alerts, and anything else you can get hold of for monitoring mentions of your brand online. That way, whether someone has a good or bad experience, you can jump in. If it’s good, thank them for their custom or comment or whatever it was, and reinforce that good will. If they had a bad experience, acknowledge it, and offer to do what you can to fix it. It won’t always work out well, but do what you can. As a whole, people will appreciate it.
Edit: Tom from Distilled just informed me that RM isn’t available anymore. With that in mind, I’ll post sometime soon on reputation management, and how to set up your own services for doing it.
Wrap-Up
I hope this has been useful. If there’s anything that’s been raised here that you’d like more information on, feel free to get in touch with me by email (pete@this site’s domain name), and feel free to share and talk about it over at HackerNews or on Twitter.
Yes, in case you hadn’t heard, after a two year absence, I’m going to be back speaking at SMX London Advanced. The session (copied from the agenda website) is: