Copyright © 2011 by Arnie Kuenn All rights reserved. ISBN: 1456479997 ISBN-13: 9781456479992 E-Book ISBN: 978-1-4392-8808-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010919315 Published by VM Press, Phoenix, Arizona. No part of this book shall be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts of preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss or profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. DEDICATION Dedicated to my mom and dad. If you have ever met them, you know why. Table of Contents

Title Page Copyright Page Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction Chapter 1: The Shift to Content Marketing – Understand What’s Happening Online Your Clients are Searchers How People Search The Search Engines Have a Goal Relevance and Ranking in the Search Results Understanding the Search Engine Results Page Everyone is Social and They’re Talking Online Local Search and Review Sites Matter, Too Going Forward: Searchers Are Telling You How to Market to Them! Conclusion Chapter 2: Your Customers Are Online, Looking for You! Be the Expert Build a Holistic Marketing Strategy A Lot of Content … Just Sucks! Research: The Starting Point for Creating Your Strategy Content Development: You Are Now a Publisher To Become the Trusted Solution, You Have to Be an Expert Search Engine Optimization: Understanding the Algorithm Promoting that Awesome Content Distributing and Repurposing Your Content Link Attraction vs. Link Building Conclusion Chapter 3: Information About Customers is at Your Fingertips Check Trending Topics Twitter for Research Yahoo! and MSN Offer Trending Data Answer Sites Can be a Mini Gold Mine You’ve Got Questions? Yahoo! Answers LinkedIn: Where Networking Is Big Business You’re on Facebook, Right? Quora: A New Entry Into the Question and Answer Field Social News Sites and Social Bookmarking Sites What’s Newsworthy is What’s Cool: Digg, Reddit and Mixx Digg Reddit Mixx When You Love It, You Keep Coming Back For More: StumbleUpon and Delicious StumbleUpon Delicious What Are Your Competitors Doing? Keyword Research as Market Research Conclusion Chapter 4: Targeting Your Traffic through Keyword Research Brainstorm for Keyword Phrases Use Keyword Research to Build Targeted and Optimized Content A Toolkit for Keyword Research Keyword Suggest and Instant Search Google AdWords Keyword Tool Google Insights Tool Google Trends SEOmoz.org Keyword Difficulty Tool Bing Commercial Intent Tool Some Additional Tools for Your Kit Honing in on Keyword Combinations Leveraging the Long Tail Search Conclusion Chapter 5: Determining Your Content Marketing Objectives Why Create Content? How Do I Put My Content to Work? Create Your Mindshare and Branding Generate Traffic, Leads and Sales Proactively Manage Your Online Reputation Content for Search Engine Rankings Share of Voice: Know Your Competitors and Community Developing a Content Marketing Mindset Conclusion Chapter 6: Developing Engaging Content to Meet Your Goals Get Going with Content Why Storytelling Is So Important Content Inventory: Evaluate Your Current Assets The Essentials: Editorial Calendar and Style Guide Identify Goals Conduct Research Brainstorm for Ideas Conceptualizing and Drafting Edit and Launch Can You Repurpose It? Get Inspired! Developing Content Strategies That Garners Links, Too Conclusion Chapter 7: Sixteen Examples of Content for Your Business Build a BLOG, Build Your Business Capture Success with CASE STUDIES Join the Conversation with COMMUNITY FORUMS CURATION, the Most Efficient Content Win Big with CONTESTS eBOOKS: Traditional Publishing Out, Self-Publishing In! Keep Them Engaged with eNEWSLETTERS INFOGRAPHICS, the Coolest Way to Display Data Look Like an Expert with INTERVIEWS Walk the Talk with PRESS RELEASES Provide Convenience through PODCASTS Sell with Product Pages VIDEOS, Stories in Motion WEBINARS, the New Conference Show Off Your Expertise with WHITE PAPERS WIDGETS & BADGES, Oh My! Conclusion Chapter 8: Content Must Be Maintained to Be Successful Maintain Your Content to Get the Most Value from It Defining Success Measure Progress Take What You Have Learned and Adapt For Continued Results, Update Your Content Value of Outsourcing and When to Outsource Conclusion Chapter 9: Optimized Content Gets the Best Results Optimizing Your Content Optimizing the Page Header Optimizing the Page Body Fitting Keywords Into Your Content Headers and Fonts in the Body Links in Your Content Optimizing the Page Footer Optimizing Images for Search Optimizing Videos for Search Optimizing for News Sites Optimizing for Local Search Optimizing for Social Media Conclusion Chapter 10: Put the “Marketing” in Content Marketing How to Use Social Media Interactions to Promote Your Content the Right Way Facebook – the Social Media Juggernaut Twitter – the Information Engine LinkedIn – the Business to Business Connection Developing Relationships, Building Partnerships Forum Participation Blogger Engagement Blogger Pitches: How to Approach These Sites for Best Results Press Releases and Media Outreach Email Marketing Utilize Social Voting and Bookmarking Conclusion Chapter 11: Finding the Right Distribution Channels for Your Content Create Social Profiles and Get Them Ready for Your Content Squidoo Article Publishing the Right Way Don’t Forget To Optimize It RSS for News and Blog Feeds Video, Photo and Podcast Sharing Sites Video is Booming Distribution Possibilities for Images Podcasting: Your Own Private Radio Broadcast Presentation-Sharing Sites Conclusion Chapter 12: Links Mean More Opportunity for Visibility and Success Remember the Anchor Text Internal Links – the Easiest Links to Get! Juice Up! How to Prioritize Your Efforts Based on a Link’s Value Blog and Forum Participation Using Bookmarking Sites and Voting Sites for Link Building Competitive Research and Backlink Analysis The Real Meat and Potatoes of Link Building: Search Operators How to Send a Link Request that Doesn’t Get Deleted Conclusion Chapter 13: Conclusion Marketing that Moves You Facebook Contest A Final Note – It’s a Digital Publishing World ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This will be filled with cliches just like every other book on the market. But, now I know why. An author’s name goes on the cover, the author gets the credit for the book, and the author gets all the attention. But I now realize it takes a team to get a book published. Below is that team, and I sure hope I haven’t forgotten anyone. First I would like to thank Patty Adams, the Director of Client Solutions at Vertical Measures who in one simple instant message got me started down the path to creating Accelerate! We were on a webinar together, each in our own offices, when the topic of writing a book came up, she IM’d me and said something like “you should write a book, call it Don’t Break The Chain, lay out the steps to do content marketing the right way and explain how important all the steps are.” We were encouraged to change the title, but the concept stuck. It all made sense to me. I could never have accomplished this without Sarah Moraes and Elise Redlin-Cook. Once Patty made the suggestion, Sarah and Elise would not let it die. When I wanted to quit they wouldn’t let me, when I had dumb ideas they told me, when I had too many ideas they tackled them, when they had great ideas they let me take all the credit (see first paragraph) and when we decided to self-publish they took charge. Thank you both so much. At Vertical Measures, it didn’t stop there. Liz Gessaman, our Director of Client Services, pushed to turn Accelerate! into the company’s playbook. By the time this book is published, we will have updated our presentations, methodology and website to reflect the step-by-step process I write about. Some of our staff sat through interviews covering their areas of expertise, tolerated my follow up questions, and helped create the graphics used throughout the book. So thank you James Constable, Ardala Evans, Abby Gilmore, David Gould, Kristi Hines, Ann-Marie Jancovich, Michael Schwartz, Kaila Strong, and Krys VanSlyke. A few other people really helped out quite a bit, but in an indirect way. I have read the books and watched the presentations of Kristina Halvorson, Ann Handley, Simon Kelly and Joe Pulizzi so many times over the last couple of years, that I am certain their influence is reflected throughout this book. All four of you have been true inspirations and I appreciate your leadership in this industry. I also required the help of a few experts, after all I have never done this before. We turned to Jake Johnson and Ben Snedeker, two experienced authors. Their expertise was invaluable while working with me through the entire writing and editing process. They dealt with my excitement, fears, impatience, inexperience and self imposed deadlines with patience and professionalism. John Wolfe edited the entire book one last time before it went to print. A big thanks to all three of you. Most importantly I would like to thank my family. My parents who reenforced that we all have a wonderful opportunity in this life to see and feel and think and do – they encouraged us to do them all. My brother Al, and my sister Kathy have always been supportive and loving, instilling in me the courage to try new things – like writing a book. My daughter Hillary and my son Brad, you are the reason I look forward to every day. I encourage you to take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this seems obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to reflect on this amazing fact. By astounding luck, an incredibly small portion of all the matter in the entire universe came together to create earth and us humans. You will only exist for an incredibly small time in the great span of eternity – treasure this great gift. And lastly, my wife, business partner, best friend, and one heck of a proof reader – Andi. You are the love of my life. You remind me often that people are as happy as they want to be. I couldn’t be happier. FOREWORD You see that gravestone? It reads “information intermediary.” For decades, we’ve relied upon middle-men in the guise of media to carry messages from our companies to our customers. We’ve created “news” and handed it off, hoping that the all-powerful press would find enough worth in our scribbling to tweak and redistribute it to the masses. That era is over. The first nail in the coffin was in 1997, when Timothy McVey confessed to the bombings in Oklahoma City. That day, the Dallas Morning News became the first newspaper to ever “scoop itself” and run breaking news on its website instead of holding it for the next day’s print edition. In geologic – or Joan Rivers terms – fourteen years isn’t that long. But to even conceive of an era when media ALWAYS and PURPOSEFULLY held back news so that they could print it on dead trees the next day? It seems positively Amish to modern sensibilities. The speed and searchability advantages of online content has made information intermediaries superfluous. They are exacerbated by the fact that the business model to support these middle-men evaporated faster that a puddle of sweat in July in Phoenix. The Paper Cuts blog tracks layoffs in the newspaper business. It’s a somewhat grisly, yet fascinating reflection of the times. Just since 2007, the site has documented more than 35,000 layoffs at newspapers in the United States. Yet during the same period, any objective examination would find that instead of news become more scarce due to the decimation of the newspaper industry (and times have been tough for magazine, radio, and TV too), that conversely the quantity of content has soared. We are surrounded by more content, in more formats, from more publishers than ever before in human history. And that’s because of two inexorable trends that make the book you are holding incredibly important.

First, every customer is a potential reporter.

Second, every company must become its own TV station, radio station, magazine, and newspaper.

What’s incredibly exciting about these trends is that they create a new breed of winners. Content marketing is a meritocracy. You don’t have to be the biggest company in your industry to create relevant, compelling content that creates new customers and breeds loyalty among existing customers. In fact, most of the content marketing case studies in this book are about companies of modest size and means who didn’t win with budget, but rather with craftiness, strategy, and understanding what types of content resonate with people. You can do that too. The first step in being a successful content marketer – in being your own TV station, radio station, magazine, and newspaper – is recognizing that you actually have something valid to say. It’s all too common for company owners and managers to overlook the incredibly compelling stories contained within the walls of their organizations. You get so close to the forest, you don’t see the trees. If I had a dollar for every time a Marketing Director told me, “customers don’t want to know how we make that; it’s boring,” I would be writing this foreword from a villa on Aruba. Recognize that the story you believe to be banal is actually fascinating to some people. Okay, maybe not everyone. It’s not like you’re Lady Gaga. But to your customers and prospects, the stories of your company and its customers are important, and compelling, and interesting, and useful. The key psychological leap in content marketing effectiveness is to not be so darn modest. There’s no such thing as boring companies, only boring people. The second key to content marketing effectiveness is to remove the fear. And that’s where this book is flat-out amazing. By offering a definable process – a chain – Arnie gives you the day-to-day playbook you need to create and optimize your stories effectively. As you’ll soon learn, content marketing isn’t necessarily hard, but it can be complicated. And that’s why this book is so indispensible. It show you precisely where, when, why, and how to create and merchandise content, measure the results, and improve your results over the long haul. The big advantage of this book is that it recognizes that content is just one leg of a three-legged stool that includes search and social. You can make all the content you want, but if nobody can find or share it, you’re spitting into the wind. Content marketing isn’t just about telling your stories (although without that, you have no chance at success). It’s actually about telling your stories, making them findable, and ensuring that the people that consume your content want to tell others about how awesome it is. This is the magic triangle of content marketing. This book is all about that triangle. Prepare to be amazed. Jay Baer, Co-Author of The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social. Creator of the Convince & Convert social media blog INTRODUCTION I know a little bit about you. You understand that the world of marketing has been radically changing in the last few years to a new kind of marketing. There’s been a growing shift to something called content marketing. You want to engage this phenomenon. You’ve done some homework, maybe read up on the subject or attended seminars – but you’re still looking for more, that one key that will finally unlock the secrets of this new approach to marketing. You’ve heard that today less money is being spent on traditional advertising – print, television, etc., because marketers are moving their money online. But when asked what online marketing means, you might think like many people, “Advertise on Google. Get display ads up!” But that’s not it. The companies that are succeeding right now are the ones creating content that engages their customers and brings in the business. Content marketing is in the very beginning stages and still evolving. The truth is that, to some extent, everyone in this industry is trying to figure out the best approach, even the experts. This can make creating your own content strategy a confusing endeavor. That’s where this book comes in. Many marketing books present themselves like the consultant who comes in and says, “Here’s the strategy you need, but I don’t implement. I don’t actually do it. That’s for you to figure out.” But if you’re going to be successful, you need to understand how to create and promote compelling content that brings in the customers – not just that you need to. People like you pay thousands of dollars to hear people like me speak for 45 minutes at conferences about what it means to create that awesome content. We put up 15 or 20 slides and tell you what you should be doing and get you psyched about the possibilities. So, you walk away from the conference excited, ready to implement. Then you get back to your office. Now you’re staring at your screen, saying to yourself, “Where do I start? I thought I took notes. I have the slides, but how do I get going?” Then you start thinking about how the speakers cited examples of Ford Motor Company doing this, or Microsoft doing that, and now you start to tell yourself, “Sure, they have a $10 million budget, but I’m a twelve-person company with a $40,000 budget.” So you give up; thinking it just can’t be done without a big budget and substantial resources. Well let me assure you that companies like yours and mine are creating effective and compelling content – and they’re doing this successfully, without big budgets. To prove my point, I am going to give you a few examples of small businesses that became big businesses through online content marketing. I want this book to be the one you have on your desk that says here’s how you do it. What I’m offering is a little different from what’s out there, and I think it’s what you need. You need to understand that a content marketing strategy is a chain, so to speak, and the links in the chain are each critical to its strength. The links in the chain are:

Strategy

Research

Content Creation

Optimization

Promotion

Distribution

Link Building

Measurement

Each link is important but can only work when your strategy nurtures all of them. Think of a bicycle chain: When the chain is working your effort translates to acceleration! Break the chain and you’re going nowhere—your content marketing strategy falls apart. Look, if you own a website, you’re a publisher. Period. And we all know what happens when a publisher stops publishing. As they say in publishing, content is king. A strong content strategy requires that you know how to develop, promote, and distribute your material. You need to find ways to get great content happening – and keep it happening, over and over again. My book aims to give you a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to execute a successful content marketing strategy – no matter how big or small your organization might be. Any one of the chapters in this book could be books unto themselves, but rather than write a multi-volume encyclopedia on the subject, I want to give you a portable field guide for your marketing strategy. Saying it another way, this will be a playbook for getting it done. My goal is to provide a book that can be there for you when you’re brainstorming for your next piece of content, when you are getting ready to upload that content, and when you are ready to promote it. I want to keep you excited. I want to help keep the ideas coming. In our company, Vertical Measures, we do this for a living. And since you’re now a publisher in the new world of marketing, you need to do this for a living, too. The good news is you can, both easily and effectively. Let’s make it happen. 1

The Shift to Content Marketing - Understand What’s Happening Online

“The number of Internet users surpassed 2 billion in 2010. That’s 30 percent of the world’s population. And a good portion of them are creating content, adding to the already gigantic deluge of information that can be found online. To make sense of the billions of documents and media that can be found, search engines have diligently served as our guide to relevant content. To that end, Google alone handles 88 billion queries per month — more than all other search engines combined. However, the richness of signals from the social web, sites like Facebook and Twitter, are too powerful to ignore. Social behaviors are gaining increasing influence on the search experience. As consumer information discovery, consumption, and sharing behaviors change, so must social Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content marketing. Consumers expect more than the right answers in the search results. They expect to interact with what they find. As the Internet and social web evolve and grow, so must marketers evolve their content marketing strategy. The question is, “Are you ready?” Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing, TopRankMarketing.com, TopRankBlog.com

As Lee points out in the introduction to this chapter, nearly 2 billion people worldwide are online. When they want a product or service, they don’t pick up a phone book. They go to the Internet and search via search engines or social sites because these methods promise fast results and relevant content — and generally deliver on that promise. It’s the foremost way that people get their information, whether it’s information on a product or service or if it’s to find out more about their industry or current events. You name it, people are looking for it. But you know this already, right? I think it’s a good idea to revisit briefly the phenomenon of what’s really happening online because we tend to take for granted that the Internet is part of our culture now. And when we take this phenomenon for granted, we tend to miss two important things:

1. The excitement that comes with being at the forefront of technology.

2. The fact that this is new to all of us, and everyone is trying to figure it out.

To some extent we have every right to take the Internet for granted because it’s so embedded in our lives. But if you think about it, the Internet has a relatively short history compared to the radical impact it has had on us, and we’re still in the infancy of this technology. The human race has not yet fully realized the potential of this kind of connectivity. The growth curve for Internet use continues to be sharp, even today; the percentage of people online worldwide increased 18 percent from 2008 to 2009. Driven in large part by the ability of the Internet to deliver more content at faster and faster rates for lower and lower costs, this explosive change to Internet usage has led to a massive cultural change. Not only are new users figuring this out and getting on board, but as technologies change seasoned users need to adapt. Take, for example, blogging. In effect, a blog is nothing more than an opinion column democratized so that anyone can have one. Blogging began to take off around 2004. Today, with an estimated 180 million or more active blogs on the Internet, it’s a major source of shared information. Blogging has redefined how we understand our contemporary life, so much so that major cultural events (on or offline) are measured in part by their effect on the blogosphere. Take the Egyptian Revolution1 in early 2011 for example, much of it was credited to the use of social media. With the customer’s attention shifting online, so has the focus of marketers, and it has required new marketing strategies as we begin to understand how users interact with the Internet and how the Internet works for users. Simply put, web users are consumers of content. Therefore, you need to deliver compelling content that will engage your customers and keep them coming back for more. People are calling this “The New Marketing.” Most significantly, web users are searching for content to consume. This is key for any business’s relevance and branding. In fact, Vanessa Fox in her book Marketing in the Age of Google emphasizes, “Those businesses that don’t realize that we’ve experienced a shift in consumer behavior and that customers and customer data are now centered on search will lose market share to those that do” (302). Fortunately, it isn’t too late to get on board. You haven’t missed the boat, but you don’t have the luxury of waiting to build a content marketing strategy, either. To put it a bit more bluntly, in the words of Brian Solis, you need to “Engage or Die!” (Engage, xiii3) People spend their time online, and that’s where your marketing strategy needs to go. Your potential customers are online for a variety of reasons. The public relations firm Ruder Finn conducted a survey asking, why, exactly, do people go online? They categorized their results into the following seven reasons people use the Internet, descending from most common reason to least common:

To Learn (self-education, for research, to keep informed)

To Have Fun (to pass time, to be entertained, to escape)

To Socialize (to connect, to share, to discuss, to be part of a community)

To Express Yourself (to opine, to entertain others, to emote, to be creative)

To Advocate (to influence others, to activate support, to join a cause)

To Do Business (to work, to manage finances, to sell)

To Shop (to purchase, to compare)

The survey found a key demographic: “More than twice as many people go online to socialize (82 percent) than to do business (39 percent) or to shop (31 percent)4.” Surprised? Here’s the thing: The shift to reaching out to customers while they’re using the Internet means that you have to engage them in what they’re doing online. From the list above, it’s evident that the critical mass for your content strategy will center on the top three reasons people are online: to learn, to have fun, and to socialize. You may want them to shop on your site, for example, but you connect with them by providing some form of entertaining content that leads them to your site. Users want to engage with the content they find; that is, they want to stay on the page and interact with it. If the content doesn’t engage them, they move on, or bounce, and continue searching. Your Clients Are Searchers Internet users are content consumers. They rely on search engines and social sites to meet their needs quickly and efficiently. It has been determined that people are less likely to type a web address into their browser’s address bar but instead will search for it with Google or Bing. In this way, the act of searching is the point of entry to the Internet for a user’s session. Therefore, this is also where your marketing needs to start. It’s critical that your pages rank high in search because you need to be available to them right away, at the moment their session begins. Think about it: When your potential customer searches online, there are only two possible outcomes – either they find you or they find your competitor.5 When we talk about surfing the web, think of the search engine as the surfboard. The goal of the surfer is to catch a great wave and ride it out, cutting and diving as it curls, mastering the power of the wave. If a surf run ends with a wipeout, the surfer will get back on the board and paddle out to the next wave. The same can be said for Internet users. The search engine is like the board that brings the surfer to the wave – it’s the primary tool whereby users express what their interest is in the form of a query, and the search engine finds relevant content to meet that request. The wave is like the content they find. Internet users want to be engaged with the pages that the query brings back. A good run keeps the surfer moving through the wave, and the same is true of good content. If the content that the search engine brings back isn’t relevant, or isn’t engaging, the users will bounce, going back to their query to look at other results or refining the search. As you develop your marketing strategy, it is crucial that you understand this dynamic, which is composed of two key factors:

Searcher’s intent, or how people search

The goal of search engines and how they work How People Search First, let’s get to know your searcher. Internet users are impatient, but this shouldn’t surprise you. They want the best results with the least amount of effort. Searchers don’t spend time wading through pages of results after their query. In fact, people tend to not go past the first page at all. The search population has largely caught on to how Google works and users are more comfortable refining their search rather than going through pages and pages of less and less relevant results. The simple definition of a search, or query, is a request articulated in the form of a short keyword phrase, generally no longer than three words, entered into a search engine. A query is driven by the searcher’s need for something that they believe can be found on the Internet. Since there is a massive amount of “stuff” on the Internet, there are, consequently, a number of ways that we could classify the kinds of searches people perform. A very useful classification comes from Andrei Broder’s seminal essay, “A Taxonomy of Web Search,”6 which has become the industry standard. In his essay, he presents three kinds of basic web searches:

Navigational: These are queries that have a specific, targeted intent. Users expect the search engine to go straight to a specific site on the Internet “either because they visited it in the past or because they assume that such a site exists.” An example could be searching for “ford.com” when the searcher wants the home page for Ford Motor Co. The searcher could enter “Ford Cars” for the same reason and would click on the same result because the intent was the same – to go directly to Ford’s main web page and begin exploring Ford from there. Generally, there is only one result that the searcher expects. Another example would be, for instance, a searcher who is aware of a breaking news item that her local broadcast station, KPNX Phoenix, is covering. She searches for her local station in the search engine. The results might include the home page for the news station, but it might also display a link straight to the breaking news item. She navigates directly to the breaking news item; though it was not exactly a place she had been before, it was specifically her intent to go there when she approached the search engine.

Informational (also commonly called Research): These queries are about information retrieval, and when the typical searcher thinks of what a search engine “does” for them, this is the kind of query that comes to mind. Informational queries cover a broad range of query types, and can include searches for specific places, like “Washington, DC”, or facts, such as “when was the French Revolution.” Informational searches can also include product reviews and comparisons, where the searcher might enter “golf club” to compare types of new golf clubs on the market. This search might lead users not only to articles on the subject but also to vendors selling the product or local stores where golfers could test some of the brands they are considering. As the user conducts pre-purchase research, all of these results would be useful.

Transactional: Here, the searcher is looking for a site on the Internet where further interaction will happen; that is, the searcher wants to shop for clothes, download music, or view a video. This is a kind of search similar to the informational type, but the distinction is the searcher’s intent. The searcher expects a specific transaction to occur as a result of the query and is less willing to explore alternative options. If, for example, the searcher wants to see a video clip of the running of the bulls in Pamplona, the searcher would not be satisfied by getting results for photo images or links to purchase Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The intent was to have a transaction with a video.

In all cases, a user enters the query with some degree of knowledge of his or her own intent for performing the query, as well as some expectation of the kind of content that will satisfy the request, whether or not this can be articulated at the outset. In fact, particularly with informational searches (less so with navigational), a searcher’s intent may have been so general that the results that come up actually hone in the searcher’s intent by suggesting more relevant results than the searcher anticipated. Here’s an example. A searcher performs a query in Google using the keywords “Charlie Chaplin” because she’s curious to know more about the actor. In the results, she finds a number of useful biography sites, including charliechaplin.com, but also on the results page are images of Charlie Chaplin and YouTube videos of some of his performances. All of these results are relevant because they compose aspects of his life and because other searches for these keywords have resulted in clicks for these types of content. She may not have intended to click an image of the actor at the outset, but she may find what she sees interesting enough to first click on an image and engage the content that she finds there, rather than click on a text link. Andrei Broder’s essay was written before the real advent of social media, but if social media had been around, he would have certainly included search within social media. It’s a newer phenomenon, and right now, it’s a technique used by more savvy users. But with the explosion of social media, the general Internet user is gaining more savvy. In fact, Twitter – one of the big five social media sites – has been getting search activity that exceeds that of Bing and Yahoo! combined (as of April, 2010). This means that you seriously need to understand how search works in that arena so that you can be found there. Search in social sites is performed somewhat differently than through a search engine. The search is somewhat informational in nature, but rather than seeking information across the Internet, the user is looking for results that are specific to the social media being searched. This can be incredibly useful for a searcher and can lead to adding the social entity to the feed list, incorporating updates beyond the original search. For example, assume you want to know about the upcoming concert schedule for the Dave Matthews Band, and you’re hoping you can land some tickets when the tour dates are announced and sales begin. You are logged into Facebook, so you quickly search for the band’s profile, you indicate you “like” it, and you start to follow the band’s updates. Suddenly, you’re getting content directed to you from the band. The same can be done for Twitter, but in that case you can search topically for what people are “tweeting” and join their conversations by following them. The end result of any search is essentially the same from the searcher’s perspective. Regardless of the kind of search they perform, searchers expect their search to end with relevant, engaging content. If the searcher lands on a page and does not find relevant, engaging content, he will leave and revise the search. Searchers don’t stick around. This holds true for search engines and social media alike. Our clients often ask us, “What is content, exactly?” We’re always glad to hear them ask this question because it means they’re starting to think like a publisher. Content is not just text, despite the knee-jerk definition people want to give it. Content is any multimedia experience that engages the user, enabling him or her to interact with it. If users stay and interact with your media – if it holds their attention – then they’re engaged. There are a ton of content possibilities that you can use to engage your audience, including video, infographics, audio files, and photos. A quick laundry list of text-based content shows there’s also a wide range of other possibilities, such as technical papers, news articles, blog posts, and top-10 lists. Later in this book we’ll get down to the nitty gritty with your options. I’ve got a list of content ideas that will make you a content-producing champ! In the meantime, as you work your way through the book, remember: Content is simply anything that can be produced on the Internet for human interaction. Engaging content matters enough to the user to cause him to stay and experience it. So that’s where your content needs to begin. The Search Engines Have a Goal The mission of any search engine – particularly Google, the giant in this arena – is to find the best and most relevant content for a person’s search term. Here is Google’s stated philosophy: “The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want.” This is a pretty high bar, but it’s exactly what every search engine tries to do because that’s what users demand. The competition among search engines is driven by the results they can bring back. In order to provide search results, search engines need to know first what content is available on the Internet. So, programs were developed to trawl the web with the goal of reading every page. These programs, called web bots, web crawlers, or spiders, actively read and analyze the content across the Internet and store it for retrieval in queries. As part of their cataloguing, bots measure the updating activity that occurs on a site, which affects the frequency at which it will return to read each site to look for new content. For example, bots check CNN.com almost continuously because the content is always updating, and generally users want the latest headlines and breaking news. On the other hand, the bot might read the website for, say, Todd’s Garage and see that nothing has changed, so it will check back a week later and see that still nothing has changed, and again check back a month after that. The frequency of attention from the bots reduces as the website remains stagnant. To a search engine, this can be a signal that the pages are less relevant. When bots read a page, they look for certain information on the page in order to understand it. In a way, bots read the text content on the page just as a human would. Page headers, or H1 Tags, and the page’s text content are major sources of keyword matchups. Just as humans do, bots (and the subsequent algorithm processing the data) seem to pay attention to bolded words within the text content. The title tag at the top of the page is actually a tool for the human user (this is what clues you into the page when you are juggling a number of tabbed pages in your browser, or when your pages are minimized on your computer desktop), but bots also take advantage of it, deriving from this information that you want this page to be known at a glance as being about this information.

Figure 1: Site Pro PPC Optimized Webpage Since the bot and algorithm is a computer program and not a human, it also looks at the page in a different way than humans. Algorithms pay attention to the URL page name, which human users care little or nothing about. To the algorithm, however, this information defines the page from an organizational standpoint and can indicate how the webmaster views the page’s meaning. Keywords in URLs help the algorithm identify keyword relevance. Unlike humans, bots can’t see images, so the title and the metadata that describe images are critical to a bot “knowing” that the image has keyword relevance (though in the near future users will probably be able to search by image, rather than by image metadata). This is true for video as well. In the background of your web page is metadata about the page itself, which is yet another way that the bot can determine content. Using all of these clues, bots are able to gather a huge amount of information about a piece of content and determine its relevance to search. Therefore, this is the playing field when you are developing your own content. As we get into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) later in the book, we’ll consider different methods to optimize the ways that bots look at your web page and help them understand how you want to be relevant. Relevance and Ranking in the Search Results From a short keyword query, a search engine’s job is to determine the searcher’s intent – what kind of search is being performed? Is the searcher performing an informational search? Or is the searcher shopping for a product? What kind of result does the searcher want to get back? The search engine then must compare all the available content on the Internet to the query and produce a set of results that are relevant to the query, ranked in descending order of relevance. All this gets accomplished within a fraction of a second, something that continues to amaze me. Obviously, the Google algorithm (as with any other search engine algorithm) is proprietary, so we can’t know exactly how it works, but we can see it in operation and make some very good assumptions about what it does. Because a keyword phrase is not a standalone indication of specific meaning, search engines need to use other means for making a determination of meaning so that they can determine relevance. Effectively, the philosophy for determining relevance within a query is based on these premises:

People will not spend time with irrelevant content. They will stay and engage, or they will bounce.

People tend to search for the same kinds of things, but people are individuals, too.

People will share relevant content with one another by linking their content to other relevant content.

As I’ve mentioned, you want to engage your audience with every piece of content that you produce. Not only is this imperative for the user’s experience with your product, but Google records each search session as part of its algorithm for determining relevance. This has become increasingly important, as implied by the Google Panda update in February of 2011. By recording sessions and analyzing the rate of bounce or engagement by page, Google can derive the relevance of that page for the average searcher relative to that particular keyword query. Sites that have high rates of bounce might be ranked lower in the result set. Conversely, sites that have high rates of engagement will be ranked higher in the result set. As part of this analysis, Google offers keyword suggestions in the search tool when a searcher begins entering a keyword. Based on popular searches, Google suggests popular keyword combinations that relate to the keyword the searcher is currently entering. By offering this kind of help, searchers can have their query refined without having to spend time refining it themselves. Bounce rate alone as the determiner of page relevance would only work if all people intended to find the same kinds of content when they performed a particular keyword search. It goes without saying that this is not the case. After all, people are individuals. So, to help tailor results to particular users, Google records individual user sessions, thereby attempting to identify trends in individual search activity. An individual can have a Google account – and in this case, Google has a larger set of information about the searcher whenever he or she is logged into the account – but Google also records individuals who are not logged in. A particular user’s day-to-day activity will inform Google of that person’s interests and will influence the result set. Ultimately, Google concluded that linking from one web page to another is a particularly good way to determine relevance because content that is getting links pointing to it has been evaluated by a human and determined to be of human value. Thus, links to content should represent relevance and act as a sort of voting mechanism. Google has become the dominant search engine because its engineers figured out this liking scheme before anybody else. Yahoo ranked websites differently, and with the arrival of Google people moved away from Yahoo because they felt that Yahoo’s results could be unreliable. The downside to linking is that marketers quickly figured out this scheme and began to develop link farms and other tactics, where links could be acquired wholesale in an effort to increase a site’s rankings. Google constantly adapts its algorithm to penalize link farms and other paid-link approaches. The algorithm attempts to identify the quality of links as it indexes pages. Links to a page and search activity help comprise a page’s value when determining relevance, counting as “votes” for the page. The more votes for a page, the higher it will rank against competing pages. One of the goals for your content strategy is to increase the votes for your pages so that they will be the most relevant and engaging content for your target search terms. As mentioned earlier, Google rolled out in 2011 one of its most significant algorithm updates in years, named Panda for one of the engineers on the project. The focus of the update was to penalize or remove low-quality content from the search results. According to Google, this impacted almost 12 percent of all search queries. That is huge. Millions of low-quality pages that used to be found on page one of Google searches are now nowhere to be found. Google has since stated that low-quality pages on a site can even cause the rankings for the entire site to decline, even the high-quality pages. The message from Google is loud and clear: Quality content just became king again. Understanding the Search Engine Results Page Let’s take a look at the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) from the searcher’s perspective. We’ll focus on Google, since it gets 70 to 80 percent of search traffic, but Bing has a very similar search results page. When a query is entered, less than a second later, pages of results appear, and the ball is now in the searcher’s court to identify what results are relevant to her particular needs. Search engines are continually reorganizing their results- page layouts in an effort to offer searchers an experience that leads them to their desired content faster. Despite these adaptations, the overall layout of the SERP has remained relatively constant. Search results can be broken down into two large categories: Paid results and Organic results. Paid results – or Sponsored Links, as Google labels them – are segregated at the top of the page and highlighted in pink (Bing’s are highlighted in teal) so that searchers will know immediately that the results in this set are, in fact, bought and paid for. These results get a premium front and center location in the results page, but they are limited to three or four results per query on the top line. More paid results appear in a narrower column on the right. While sponsors pay to have their pages listed in this category, these results still undergo a similar kind of analysis that organic results undergo so that they remain relevant to the search term. Organic results, on the other hand, represent the complete set of results possible for the keyword search. Organic results for some queries can amount to hundreds of pages of results, but the vast majority of searchers never leave the first page and practically never see page three.

Figure 2: Google Search Results Heat Map, based on Did-it, Enquiro, and Eyetools EyeTracking Study Take a look at the heat map showing the movement of a searcher’s eye on a results page. The highest concentration is in the upper left corner, and includes the top organic search results. The fact is that the number one position in the organic results will get clicked nearly 40 percent of the time! And organic search results receive the bulk of clicks ahead of paid results, almost across the board. For that reason, this book will focus only on optimizing for organic results. The competition for page one is stiff, but the good news is that you can get in there if you produce different types of compelling content and then optimize them. Figure 3: Organic Click Through Rate by Search Position, Source: Optify, Inc. 2011 Clearly, searchers are more interested in organic results. For this reason search engines incorporate a number of tools to help searchers understand and refine their searches. When the results appear as links, the URL alone would be almost useless to the average searcher because it contains little or no information about the content behind it. So you need to understand the concept of metatags. The result set uses the page title tag text for the link to the content (and appears on the web page at the top of the browser). Beneath the link, the description metatag is a short piece of content that contains the keywords from the query displays, giving the searcher a sense of the page’s relevance without forcing the searcher to go to the page to make that determination. A searcher can specify at the outset of a query that he or she wants the result set to be limited to a certain kind of content. Google will filter the results to only those specific results that match that category. For example, a result set can be limited to images, videos, blogs, news items, and so on. This same filtering can be applied after the initial search query has been entered in the “Everything” set. If the searcher was, in fact, interested only in blogs, he or she could click to blogs related to the search without rekeying a query. For searches that Google assumes are transactional, or location-based, the results will automatically incorporate a mixture of result types, in addition to rows of links. A map identifying nearby retail locations will display. Figure 4: Google Local Search Results Or, depending on what you search, the search engine might display some videos, if people tend to go straight to video search for a particular keyword. It might bring up a set of images for the same reason. Take, for example, a search of the term “Leonardo DiCaprio.” Based on the algorithm’s assessment of the available content and the relevance to the search term, people tend to want images of the movie star as well as information about him. The result set automatically includes images in addition to the text links, even though the searcher did not specify that images were sought. The amazing fact about this kind of relationship between search engine and user is that the searcher wants the best results but may not be able to articulate what the best results might be in terms of the simple query. Searchers rely on the search engine to do that for them. This means that by diversifying the content you produce – for local search, images, video, etc., – you will create many more ways of being found online. In an offline context, this would be like putting out ads on multiple TV venues, billboards, and in magazines. It’s the same for the Internet; you are creating more opportunities for people to see your brand, and engage with your products and services. Everyone is Social and They’re Talking Online Since we’re talking about what’s happening online, we can’t ignore social media. What began with computer-geek chat rooms has evolved into a worldwide cultural phenomenon. The Internet has become, not surprisingly, a zone of social interaction. Referring back to the Ruder Finn survey, we can see that an enormous percentage of people are drawn to the Internet for what could broadly be characterized as “social reasons.” People go to the Internet specifically to socialize, which Ruder Finn describes as connecting with people, sharing information or media with them, participating in discussions, and being part of a community. But we can expand this social phenomenon to a certain extent to the category of self-expression; that is, opinions are given to be heard, as with sharing emotions and creativity, and often the one who engages in self-expression does so on a social media platform, such as MySpace or Facebook. The advocacy category is a very social one, too. The advocate influences others and works with groups for a cause — the advocate is not typically a lone crusader but rather a member of a movement, and often times movements call for support, which take the form of grassroots, social campaigning. The members of the movement themselves tend to have forums for discussion or blogs to keep each other updated on the current events connected to their cause. You might ask, “So how does that matter to my business?” Well, here’s the skinny: It’s pervasive, so chances are your customers are already engaged with social media. The number of people using social media has grown rapidly in the last few years and doesn’t show signs of slowing down. According to a January, 2010 Nielsen survey, the growth of social media is occurring on a global scale. While the United States leads the charge with 142 million unique visitors to social media sites in December, 2009, Australian users spent the most time on social media sites, at nearly seven hours per month. Think of social media as a form of word-of-mouth advertising – which is the best kind of advertising – but it’s a new word of mouth, where word travels much, much faster. Perhaps the most incredible result of social media is that it’s becoming a place for search. Searching Twitter, for example, is like picking the brains of millions of people at once. When people are talking about your product or service, and they search the social media where the conversation is happening, it becomes another place for them to find your brand. In fact, if I was to make a prediction about the future of search, I’d say it’s here, on social media sites. So, just as you need SEO for search engines like Google and Bing, you also need to keep SMO, or Social Media Optimization, as a part of your strategy. You need to have a social media presence, and all your content on social media (yes, your profile counts as content) needs to be optimized. In light of SEO and SMO, your content marketing strategy will be barbell- shaped, in a sense. You need to network via social media in order to develop your online presence as much as you need to pay attention to search ranking – if you’re planning on succeeding. It’s through social media that your content will circulate most rapidly and you will get some of the best links pointing to your pages. A successful social media campaign will increase your search rankings, while at the same time bringing traffic to your site. In addition to content development for search engines, this book will look closely at how your content and social media presence will interact and how you can optimize both. Local Search and Review Sites Matter, Too As the web has become more and more social, websites have taken advantage of the wisdom of crowds, creating niche sites that open up possibilities for many businesses. One booming niche is local search and review sites. Local search on Google and review sites such as Yelp.com are like the phone books of the 21st Century. When location-specific searches are conducted, often local search results appear in the results. Not only do searchers use local search to find businesses in their metropolitan area, they can access review sites to give them customers’ feedback on their experiences. These provide the searcher with even more relevance to their search. Obviously, the reviews that businesses get on these sites will have a major impact on the traffic that comes not only to their websites but also to their doorsteps. Review sites, in particular, have a strong search component as well as a strong social media component. Review sites often pull aggregated data from web pages to create profiles for the businesses that are optimized for local search, which means that just by optimizing your website, your business could end up on review sites without you having to do anything at all. This will expand your footprint in the search results because your website could appear right next to your listing in Yelp.com. Even though a webpage that’s optimized for local search can get on Yelp, I would recommend that any business with a brick-and-mortar establishment register with Yelp (basic registration is free) and other review sites. Registration allows you to optimize some of the components of your business’s page, and you can engage as the business owner with the reviewers. By taking advantage of the social media aspect of review sites, you can make your page more customer-friendly, and you can show your commitment to the opinions your customers express. Going Forward: Searchers Are Telling You How to Market to Them! Between Google and Bing, we have the big two search engines determining search relevance by a very similar set of criteria. This is fortunate for us online marketers because we can, to a large extent, standardize our marketing strategies for the web and not have to spend an enormous amount of energy managing multiple approaches for different search engines … at least for now. The key to ranking in search, as well as to creating a buzz in social media, is good, solid content. Period. So, as a producer of content, you are now a publisher. You need to see yourself that way. Publishers need to make engaging content happen. If they don’t – if you don’t – you won’t succeed. As they say, publish or perish. This means you need to create engagement. You need to create relevance. In a sense, you need to learn to read the minds of the searchers in your market. The good news, the really good news, is that the web gives you free marketing data that will guide you toward creating relevant subject matter. It’s like a sneak peek into the minds of your customers. In some ways, your customers are doing your work for you. Sweet! Conclusion So, now you have a better understanding of what’s happening online. Now you can see why the “new” marketing is fast outpacing the “old” marketing. It’s time to build a content marketing strategy that engages the users that you want to reach. This book is about a marketing process that integrates key components, which when applied together will give you a strong posture to market your business on the Internet. The components of this strategy must be used together, like links in chain. When the chain is strong and being used at its fullest, the result is a robust online presence, both in search and in social media. But when the chain is broken … well, just don’t break the chain, okay? 2

Your Customers Are Online, Looking For You!

“Remember the good old days of marketing? We had a limited set of channels through which to push a marketing message. An advertisement here, a direct mail piece there … then add on a killer sales team, and we were set. Today, we have no control. Our customers do. They get 99 percent of their information from search engines, social media referrals, online news sites, and targeted informational pieces. If our business is not there among the solutions when our customers are looking, we’re lost. And even if we do get them in the sales funnel somehow, we lose if we don’t have compelling content that moves them through the buying cycle. Alas, we must publish. We must tell stories. We must become interesting to our customers so that they find, share and trust us. Who would have thought that the core of the new media revolution is one of the oldest practices in the world – publishing?” Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Evangelist, ContentMarketingInstitute.com, Junta42.com, SocialTract.com, JoePulizzi.com

Be the Expert Robyn has a Trek touring bicycle that she’s used in her commute for about three years. It has served her well, but she’s just now getting to the point where she needs to take it in for a little maintenance. It’s time to get new brake pads, tighten the derailleur, true the wheels – the works. She wants to keep riding her bike for a few more years, and she’s well aware that it has a great chance of a long life if she takes care of it. What she needs is a good bike mechanic to do the work for her. So, Robyn goes online and searches the web for a bike shop nearby. In the search results, she finds a YouTube video on do-it-yourself bicycle maintenance posted by Johnny’s Cycleworks. She also finds a video on brake work, another on tightening up a derailleur so that the gears change smoothly, even one on tweaking the spokes to true a wheel. Robyn’s first thought is, “Wow! These guys really know what they’re doing.” Her second thought is, “The videos are great, but no way am I going to do this myself!” In fact, she’s never even seen the tools that are being used in these videos. Solution? She calls Johnny’s Cycleworks to make an appointment. Robyn is able to trust Johnny’s Cycleworks because they demonstrated competence through their content. They showed that they are the experts and caught Robyn’s attention with their content in search. This is the direction your content strategy needs to go. In your industry, you are the expert; therefore, you can be the trusted solution. Like Johnny’s Cycleworks, many organizations are just now starting to understand that, along with their “traditional” products and services, one of their new products has to be information. In fact, in the age of the New Marketing, information is fast becoming a core product for many organizations. The trend is no longer about interruption-driven marketing techniques like television, radio or even newspaper ads. Businesses are now focusing on producing information – in the form of online content. In today’s world, people are willing to gather information and news from non- traditional sources. Most print news outlets have seen their readership shrink and move heavily to online content. In some cases they have made a complete shift to online content, shutting down their print operations altogether. Television news has made a similar shift to online content. The result on the Internet has been to blur the line between what was traditionally three different media forms (print, radio and television) into one: online news with mixed content forms, including text, images, audio, video, blogs, and more. Consumers have responded by demonstrating a willingness to take information from multiple sources. Internet users have demonstrated that they are willing to weigh content from traditional media outlets along with custom publishing venues, such as blogs, RSS feeds, social media, and even marketing content. Among online content consumers, the bottom line is that the content’s quality drives the decision to accept the information. For your business, this means that you can be seen by your customers as a reliable source for information about your market if you publish engaging content in a variety of forms. If your content is high quality, it will position you as the trusted solution for your customers. The goal, then, for your content strategy is simple:

Provide quality content that solves the toughest problems your market faces.

Position yourself as the trusted solutions provider for your industry and spread the word about it.

Have people rely on you for your expertise as they become your customers.

Your content strategy is about creating and emphasizing your business’s persona. As you shift to a content marketing strategy, your brand awareness will take on another dimension. An engaging content strategy enables you to be seen as a source of information for your customers and continue on as their source for products or services. Since Internet users have undergone a shift in what they accept as authoritative, you need to make the same adjustment. You need to become a publisher. Demonstrating your expertise means demonstrating to the world what you do and how you do it. Back to Johnny’s Cycleworks: In the videos they demonstrated how to work on bikes, which is the very thing their business does. You might think to yourself that they’re not doing themselves any favors by revealing their hand that way. They more or less offer their potential customers the ability to work on their bicycles themselves and never spend a dime at Johnny’s Cycleworks. In a way, that’s true. But I would argue that Johnny’s has actually done three very good things for their business by publishing this video content:

1. They generated a lead and got Robyn’s business at their physical store.

2. They demonstrated that they’re the experts, so do-it-yourselfers will visit their site for more information; if the website is really rockin’, they could offer some products to purchase online for these kinds of visitors, because the content got their attention.

3. Because of their content, they increased the traffic to their site so that they’re more likely to get others to link to and share their pages, and their position in the search results will move up.

This is the kind of value that comes from a successful content marketing strategy, and it works in any market, whether it be a small bike shop or a global corporation. The key for any content strategy is to develop engaging information, whether it’s humorous, informational or both, and to put it into action on a website. The best content will get picked up and shared. To have shareable content that works successfully, you need to be organized. You need a strategy. Build a Holistic Marketing Strategy Information is now one of your key products. So, just like your other products, it needs to be valuable. You need to distribute this product to your customers and potential customers. When they look for it online, you want them to find your new product, your content. To make that happen, you have to juggle content research, creation, promotion, distribution, and optimization all at once. Unfortunately, you don’t have the option of focusing on any one part without considering all the others. To be successful, then, you need to think of your online marketing strategy holistically, each part working together, as in a chain. Each link in this chain plays a critical role in the marketing of your products and services online. Books have been written focusing on each one of these links or steps, but not as much attention has been given to them working together. When all the links in the chain work together, just as in a bicycle chain, the net effect is acceleration. For your web content, this acceleration means directed traffic to your website, top spots in the search engine results page, and circulation of your materials around the Internet. To accelerate your business online, your strategy needs to consider each of the links in the chain.

Figure 4: Vertical Measures Chain Diagram As you begin to understand the links in the chain of content marketing, you’ll be able to understand the chain itself. We’ll lay out the strategy in this chapter, and cover the basics of each of the links. Then, in each subsequent chapter of the book, we’ll take an in-depth look at each step in the process. A Lot of Content … Just Sucks! In the last few years, content creation has exploded, all because of the Internet and how we use it. Content marketing for the Internet is relatively low-cost and can be highly effective. An unfortunate result is that some people trying to exploit the web pump out content with fervor, and often with little care for its quality or even whether it’s targeted to the right audience. It should come as no surprise, then, that so much of the content on the web sucks. I’m talking about content that has no appeal to its audience – it falls flat. It has no chance of going viral. Right out of the gate, it’s a dud. The real question is: Why do so many of these web pages stink? The answer is simple. In the early days of the web, as websites were springing up, content was actually an afterthought. Traditionally, when a company decided that they needed a website, they would tell their staff to “build us a web site.” The team would get together with a focus on creating a web architecture. Only after the site had been designed would the lights come on. The team would look around the room and someone would admit what everyone was thinking: we need to get text on our pages! In a last-minute scramble, they would have someone slap some text on each page. The part of the site that the user actually engages ended up with minimal attention in the web development process and the overall quality of the site would suffer. And those are the people who had the best of intentions, not the ones polluting the web with junk. It can be difficult for a well-meaning business to recognize that some of its pages actually stink. At first glance, they may seem fine. But the fact is the content can fail to engage its viewers, as most companies tend to write about themselves, bragging about this accomplishment or that product offering. What they fail to realize is that consumers primarily care about themselves – not you. Without understanding their target audiences, many websites have content that slips into blah. Even if these businesses worked hard to promote their products, the pages they’ve created do not do themselves justice. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you have an ecommerce site, and you sell accessories for pickup trucks. On one of your pages you are selling a toolbox for a Toyota Tundra pickup truck. Your content includes an image of the toolbox and a bulleted list of its features: locking lid, stainless diamond plate steel, removable trays. You have a price listed, and a button to add the product to the shopping cart and move to purchase. That’s it. Blasé and probably repeated on hundreds of sites selling the same toolbox. So what’s the problem? On the surface, it seems fine. It covers the bases, it identifies the product and its features, and I can buy it from that page. It communicates what it needs to, right? I say no. Here’s why: There is nothing on the page to engage the customer in a unique way, nothing original. The content offers no evidence – apart from the product itself – that would lead the customer to believe that you are an expert in this market, nothing that compels the customer to continue shopping here or even share your product information with anyone else. At no point does the content encourage the customer to continue moving through the process. The message here seems to be “this is the toolbox, buy it and be done.” Why would anyone share or link to this? Chances are, the product description is coming straight from the manufacturer and is the same as any other page that sells the same product. Viewers want to share something because it’s cool, or it shows some kind of information that they can’t get anywhere else. This toolbox product description doesn’t offer anything worthy of such a link or mention. Believe it or not, this simple, pragmatic page could be amped up from boring to magnetic by making a few tweaks. Here are some suggestions:

Write an original, detailed product description. This makes a difference and engages the customer.

Add user reviews. Now you have a conversation going about the product, and you’ve involved the customers.

How about a short editorial piece on the use of the toolbox and the advantages it offers truck owners? This deepens the conversation.

A how-to video, for example, on the installation of the new toolbox would be an excellent way of demonstrating your expertise with the product.

Add more images. You could have multiple images from multiple angles, multiple color options, etc. You could show the box opened, closed, and installed. You could have a dynamic image that shows the box in 3-D so that the user can look at the box from any angle.

A section on related products in case this toolbox is not exactly what they had in mind.

Let’s take a look at another example. Say you sold shoes on your website. This is a very competitive space and you cannot afford to slack off when it comes to content. Zappos is a brand known throughout the world. They have been one of the leading shoe sites for several years now.

Figure 5: Zappos Product Page Figure 6: Bad Shoe Product Page By providing interesting and engaging content on an otherwise utilitarian page, you can bring your content out of “stink” and up to stellar. When you generate content for your site, you need to remember that it has to work for you in multiple ways. It’s not just there to show your product or to describe your service. Your content is out there because you want engagement that leads to a purchase. You want to create something that tells everyone you are the expert in your market and therefore can be the trusted solutions provider. This is the type of information that gets shared. There’s a movement in this industry to get the content people involved at the beginning stages of web development. For a website to be successful, the content is as important as the architecture that contains it. So, it only makes sense that your web team needs to include a content specialist at the development stage. This is an ideal place to get the content specialist’s take on the kind of content that will fill the site, blending it into the architecture and incorporating it into the overall marketing strategy. Excellent content is shareable and cries out for links from other websites (more on the value of links later). In a world of low-quality content, exceptional content stands out and has a greater chance of achieving success, especially since the Google Panda update (February 2011). A successful content marketing strategy is centered on excellent content on every page. That’s why I tell people, above all, don’t create “junk”. People don’t want it, and they won’t engage it. Junk content is the wrong way to do marketing and it’s just polluting the Internet. It’s creating pages that try to trick search engines into believing that your site has relevant content. Junk content is stuffed with keywords to the point of being laughable to the reader. Marketing strategies that use black-hat tricks like this to boost page rankings or spam tactics in an attempt at promotion won’t work in the long run. Just like a human would, search engines will quickly figure out that you’ve created junk and penalize or remove that piece of content from their indexes. Think of it this way: if search engines were to continuously bring up junk results, people would stop using the search engine and switch to a more useful one. Instead, you should create compelling, interesting stuff. Keep the bar high; your pages should be not only good enough to get ranked by the search engines, but they should also be interesting enough to get the user to click on it and engage it. Search engines try to match the searcher with the best content available, so you need to be there with the best content. This is the key to rankings. Make good content happen. If you invest your time and energy into conducting your content marketing strategy the right way, I have no doubt that you will see a major return on that investment in the form of higher rankings, more traffic and better conversions. By incorporating the strategy outlined in this book, you can discover your potential customers and what interests them, and target them with the information that they want. Ultimately, a successful strategy is about embracing the entire process. Research: The Starting Point for Creating Your Strategy Searchers search with keywords. As we discussed in chapter one, keywords are the real guts of search. In a sense, searchers think in terms of keywords, just like they articulate their thoughts in terms of words. In many ways, understanding keywords and how they work on the Internet will drive your marketing strategy, as well as the kind of content you produce. By doing a little keyword analysis, you can discover how people see your products and services in your niche market. You do market research for your products and services, right? You need to do market analysis for your information product as well. You can determine how people are searching for the products and services you offer by analyzing how they search and by checking the trends on the sites on which they spend their time. Once you understand the trends and keyword phrases that are used, you can develop your content to match, tailoring it to the way they see your product offering. Going one step further, you can research what’s working for your competitors to enhance your strategy. Trends can be like a thermometer of your customers’ interests, giving you critical data. The real work is to understand how users interact with the Internet and then to spot the trends. Trending data can come from multiple sources: social media, social news, answer sites, and bookmarking sites – places where conversations are demonstrating your potential customer’s interest in your products and services. Keyword search analytics reveal how your pages will be found. In combination with trending information, keyword research on search engines can give you major insights into how your content can be found by the people looking for it. Knowing how keywords are trending, knowing what keywords in your niche are getting hits, will enable you to optimize your content and direct it to the demographic you’re trying to reach. As I mentioned in chapter one, searchers for the most part have become used to the way keywords drive search engines. For example, say a man looks online for hiking boots before he goes to a physical store to try them on and make a purchase. He uses online search to find stores in his area that sell hiking boots, as well as information on products so that he can walk into the store with a working knowledge of what he’s looking for. He enters his search with a keyword phrase – “mens hiking boots boston” – to narrow his search down right off the bat. His opening search is already refined so that he doesn’t need to start with “hiking boots,” getting worldwide results, mostly online sales portals for hiking boots of all genders, and few local stores. He may still have to narrow down his search further, but he’s already in the right neighborhood. When he has settled on a product, he might ask his friends on Twitter if they could recommend that boot, or if there’s something better out there he should be looking at. If you’re one of the physical stores in Boston that sells hiking boots, you want this guy to see your web page. You want him to walk into your store. Chances are very good that if you don’t pay attention to the way he and all the other hikers like him in New England are searching and discussing hiking boots, you won’t be able to target that traffic to your site or to your store. When you do research, you’re investigating how searchers perceive products like yours and how they are trying to find your products and services. With the information derived from your research, you can then optimize your content and promote it where it’s being discussed. That’s how, most importantly, searchers will find your content. Your content strategy won’t be successful if you drop the ball in the research department. Research is fundamental to the rest of the chain, influencing every aspect of your content strategy. Content Development: You Are Now a Publisher If you have a website, you are a publisher. Website owners need to find ways to create awesome content on a consistent basis, just like a publication would. Businesses can’t be satisfied by having a dozen good pages of content on their site. Like it or not, you’re in the publishing business now. Obviously, a marketing strategy centers on consistently developing useful content. I tell businesses that they should think of themselves as a publisher because I want them to understand that content development needs to be on your mind all the time. The kind of content that you produce will be limited to the demographic that you want to target, but you need to produce a variety of content types within the spectrum that appeals to that demographic. In fact, you need to be liberated to experiment with forms of content that might seem edgy or even in some ways out of bounds. In the chapter on content creation, we will dive into content ideas that will get you thinking about what content possibilities are out there. Your website is not just a place to inform your customer base of your products and services, leading to a sale. Your website is your platform for publication, and that’s a beautiful thing. Publication on the web should not be a frightening endeavor. Instead, it should be, well, fun. It is not about inflating your site with fluff. You’re adding interesting media that engages your visitors. Let’s start by adding a blog to your site. Boom! You have a place to add your content on a frequent basis. If you see yourself as a publisher, this is anything but boring. Your blog is a vehicle for you to put up a mixture of content on your site. The content can take many forms: lists, contests, images, video, infographics … you name it. Publishing is about consistency. Sporadic bursts of creative energy won’t work well. Instead, model content production after the periodical industry. At the heart of the publication process is an editorial calendar. This is nothing more than a calendar that plots out production plans and due dates for all the content the organization will produce. By setting and establishing a timetable for regular content release, your business will gain a foothold on your content production. When you see your content production plotted out on a calendar, it will quickly give you a sense of how much time and resources you will need to meet your objectives. For example, you may plot your goals to write a blog post twice per week, write an article once per month, comment on a forum or industry blog every day, and spruce up three product pages per week. Now you have manageable goals and can begin to move through the process. An editorial calendar isn’t much good without an editor to oversee the process and direct traffic to ensure that you meet the goals you set for your company’s new marketing endeavor. Designate someone to oversee content production and to assign tasks. This will be especially helpful when you are relying on diverse members of the staff to pull together and contribute content. An editor can gather the team, develop content ideas, and coordinate all aspects of the process. Without an editor (or content strategist) and an editorial calendar, no publication can last. As you develop your content for publication, it’s important to be familiar with your target demographic. This is where you apply your research to production. The kind of web content you use in your campaign will depend directly on the kind of audience you have. Web content takes many forms, and people engage Internet communications in diverse ways, particular to their demographic. For instance, males over 50 years old tend to be less involved with social media. Broadly, we can think of their demographic as spectators, not joiners. They like videos, so YouTube is good for them. They read. So, if your target demographic happens to be men over 50, your content had better include material that they can read, like articles and blog posts, as well as videos about your product. Often, web content producers make the mistake of trying to generate content that appeals to everyone (let’s just go ahead and say that’s impossible to do). Or they flop the other way, creating content that has such a low standard that it doesn’t appeal to anyone. Remember: Your new key product is information. Information only has value when it’s absorbed by the people it’s intended for. To Become the Trusted Solution, You Have to Be an Expert Your goal as publisher is to generate engaging pages that position you as the expert in your industry. See, there’s this one enduring problem that comes with an open and free Internet: anyone can put anything out there. While this is great for free speech, it has made web users a bit wary about the claims that are made online. Web users are famously cynical about advertising on the web. Ads that make claims of expertise fall short on the consumer. You can gain your customers’ trust by being the expert, demonstrating in your materials that you are the trusted solution in your industry. In the world of publishing, there’s an old saying: “Show, don’t tell.” This describes the posture your content needs to take. Don’t just tell the consumer that you’re the expert and expect them to buy it – everyone on the Internet makes the same claim, so what’s the difference with you? You need to show that you are the expert, prove it up front in your awesome content. Content that tells the audience that it’s coming from an expert feels hollow. That’s called advertising, and the web is full of it. Anyone can say that they’re the expert. How do you know it to be true? Experts prove it by showing you. When your pages reflect an understanding of the real needs of your potential customers, and responds to them with solutions, you’ve demonstrated you know your stuff, and your knowledge can be trusted. For example, expert content is your blog talking about the current atmosphere in your industry and how it could affect your customers. It’s an article that solves a common problem that your customers experience. It’s the slideshow you presented at your last conference. This content exudes confidence in your ability to solve your customers’ problems. It even goes one step further, demonstrating that you are the leading solutions provider in your industry, and that other solutions providers are actually looking to your company for expertise. Search Engine Optimization: Understanding the Algorithm Crawling As you produce your remarkable content, you need to be certain that it is optimized for search engines. As mentioned in chapter one, search is by far the primary way to generate traffic to your site. That means that every page on your site, every piece of content, needs to be optimized for search engines. In our business, when we say, “You need to create great content every time,” we mean not only great for the human audience but also for the search algorithm that will be reading and analyzing the content as well. Search engine bots crawl nearly every page on the Internet and store the information that they find on their servers. From there, the search engine breaks down the data that it finds and begins to derive relevance. Your goal is to have the bot crawl every page of your site. To facilitate this, your website’s architecture needs to be optimized as much as the individual pages. A key aspect of optimizing your site’s architecture is having a clean sitemap. The search engine bots use the sitemap to understand and recognize the pages on your site, following the map and indexing the content. A good sitemap will aid the search engine to crawl every piece of content on your site. According to Google’s website, “Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

Your site has dynamic content.

Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process – for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.

Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)

Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.”7

By ensuring that your webmaster understands the value of a crisp architecture and a well-organized sitemap, you will make your pages more accessible to humans and bots alike, and you’ll encourage the crawler to explore every page on your website. Indexing Google organizes the content that it has crawled on its indexing servers. These servers work like the index in a book, by organizing the information by keyword so that it can be brought back in a particular query. When a query is submitted to Google, the keyword runs through the indexing servers and matches it to all the available content. Google pays attention to how sites change from one indexing to the next. If a site has frequent updates, then Google will increase the frequency that it crawls and indexes the site. Google interprets frequent updates to a site as more relevant than a site that has stagnant content, meaning that frequently updated websites tend to get better ranking in the search results. This means that your website needs to have new content posted to your site frequently in order to encourage frequent crawling and up-to-the-minute indexing. Ranking The Google search appliance uses two primary factors when analyzing an indexed page for relevance: PageRank and Hypertext-Matching Analysis. PageRank is Google’s key feature. It’s what made Google Google. Driving PageRank is the network of links to and from websites. In fact, Google boasts of knowing the entire link structure of the web. By understanding the link structure of the web, Google can track this network of links and backlinks to determine relevance of a given page. This means that a major aspect to ranking well in search is to get links to your site. The other key to ranking comes from Google’s Hypertext-Matching Analysis, where Google analyzes the content on your pages for relevance. Here, Google looks for keywords within the content to determine relevance to a query. Google explains that “instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word.”8 Effectively, Google is saying that the content itself is, in a way, understood by the algorithm, and therefore you can’t really trick it because it factors so much of the page content together. Therefore, the best plan is to include your target keywords naturally within the body text and strategically within the metadata. Google’s algorithm works to deliver real content in the search results, and weed out junk. This is good for the searcher, since the searcher relies on Google to bring back only relevant content. Ultimately, this is also better for you, the website owner, because you are forced to put together quality content. Quality content is best for your brand and will find you the most success in the long term. Optimizing Your Pages for the Web In their book Audience, Relevance, and Search, James Matthewson, et al,9 offer a guiding philosophy that addresses the way you ought to approach your content in the context of SEO. They state: “Writing for search engines approximates writing for people” (2). Your pages should work for a human first – that is, a human should be able to understand your content and derive meaning from it relative to the search query that was performed. If that can happen, it will work for the search engine, too. When you create your metadata, it should also be recognizable and relevant to a human looking for content relative to the keywords in your metadata. Your content’s metadata is part of the larger framework for your content and will help boost the content’s relevance in search. It follows, then, that content development should include an optimization plan to be sure that all content is optimized at the outset. Optimizing metadata is a matter of knowing what keywords you are targeting for each page and getting them into the right places on the page. If your business has an SEO and a content specialist managing content creation and launch, those two will need to be in close communication. You can ensure that your pages will always be optimized by instituting a plan that governs the handoff of the new page from the content specialist to the optimization specialist for launch. That way everyone knows who’s in charge of the process and can rest assured that it’s being implemented properly. By nurturing your content through SEO, you will be doing yourself a huge favor. If you ignore SEO, your awesome content ideas will have less of a chance of being found in search and won’t be able to pack their full punch. If you include optimization as part of your content development process, rather than as a separate round of work, you will be forced to think of keyword usage in the title, body and metadata. This will lead to more naturally optimized content and ultimately more efficient output. Promoting That Awesome Content When you have created that totally awesome web content, don’t let it sit on your site waiting for searchers to find it: get a buzz going! By promoting your work, you generate interest in your content, and when people find interesting stuff, they share it in social media and link to it from their websites. To dispel the myth of viral content, I want to make it clear that your goal in promoting your content is to spread your content in an active way, rather than focusing on every page going viral. If your content does happen to go viral, it will have achieved web marketing nirvana, but that’s not something you can make happen. The very nature of “viral marketing” has everything to do with the unpredictable nature of mass social obsession, which you have no control over. It has to surprise us. So, don’t try to make every content piece a big hit. Rather, focus on making every piece interesting and engaging. You want people to be interested in and involved with your web pages. There are lots of ways to promote content. It might begin with establishing relationships with bloggers who will be willing to talk about and link to your pages from their blogs. By reaching out to bloggers who have followings and “pitching” your new content page to them, you can tap the network that they’ve already established. Each blogger’s followers will get exposed to your expertise and may click through to your website. By finding bloggers who are focused on aspects of your industry and by networking with them, you might find that your pages can offer solutions to the problems that their followers are experiencing. Today, the big enchilada for promotion is social media. Among the many social media options out there, you should be certain to have a profile on at least some of the big ones, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. As you develop your social networks, you foster relationships with the people who will share your cool stuff when you ask them. Promotion is about communicating the value of your content to the people who will be able to share it with their own networks. A lot of promotion is a matter of actively connecting with other people and being willing to share their content on your site, as well. When you link from your site to other sites, you enrich the experience your followers have when they are on your pages, and you will benefit the sites that you link to. When you’ve linked to someone else’s content, they’ll recognize the favor and will be more likely to return the favor to you when you request it. By proactively finding ways to spread your content outside of your immediate sphere of followers, you can draw a wider audience to your site and grow your own base of followers. Distributing and Repurposing Your Content The beauty of the Internet is that much of it caters to distributing content. To be successful, the more channels you have for distribution, the better. Don’t limit yourself to one or two. Look across the spectrum – there are many distribution channels out there that you can take advantage of. You’re broadcasting, so use as many appropriate channels as you can manage to target your market. You can distribute content through:

Social media

RSS

Content-sharing sites

There are plenty of options in social media, and nearly all of them are designed to communicate to the networks that follow your profile. When you have a new piece of content, you can easily distribute it to your social media channels through updates. Not only will the people in your network see your posting and be drawn to click to it, but if they like it, they can quickly pass it along to the people in their network. If your content is really good, you can watch it circulate exponentially. It pays to nurture your social networks and offer plenty of opportunities for people to sign up and follow your updates. Think of it this way: These people are already interested enough to want to know when your next piece comes out, so don’t keep them waiting too long. You don’t want to neglect them, since they have actually signed up to hear from you! Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds are another way to distribute your content to people who have asked to receive it. RSS is an awesome tool for blogs that instantly broadcasts any new content. Feed catchers receive the updates and alert the followers that new content is available for viewing. The best part about RSS is that once you’ve set it up, you’re good to go. The RSS feed will automatically distribute the content for you. There are tons of distribution channels out there. Some of the best are content-sharing sites. These sites are designed for sharing specific types of content. YouTube and Vimeo are video-sharing sites, and SlideShare is a slideshow-presentation-sharing site. Most content-sharing sites offer users the ability to have branded profiles where all of your uploaded content is aggregated. If you create content for your website that can also be shared on one or more of these sites, post it simultaneously so that it gets the greatest opportunity for being discovered. Link Attraction vs. Link Building Up to now, we’ve talked about content marketing strategy primarily in terms of creating content that gets found in search and gains traction around the Internet. Your objectives depend heavily on search engine rankings and exposure through links from other pages to your own. A major contributor to search engine rankings is the number of links to your website. On top of that, links from reputable sites to yours help increase traffic to your site. Needless to say, links to your content provide a major benefit to your efforts. So you have to find a way to get people to link to your content. Certainly, links are the best way to determine relevance. Theoretically, and largely in practice, links are where humans identify relevance page to page because if they like it, they will link to it. Many businesses, however, have had to develop links “unnaturally” by relying on link building schemes or – gasp – paying for links. Some campaigns have made use of computerized forum and blog commenting for the sake of getting a link. It turns out that spam is a really good way to annoy a webmaster (and Google), and it won’t help your reputation. To do link building the right way, you have to get personal. I’m suggesting that you ignore these less than ethical practices and focus on link attraction. If you generate awesome content and then promote it, you’re going to attract natural links. In effect, if you develop really compelling material, links will follow as the content gets shared. That’s link attraction. It’s really quite simple, and it serves as one more very strong case for taking care to publish magnetic content. The process of promoting and distributing your content gives you an edge in link building because in those cases it’s reaching a targeted audience that will be compelled to share your page by linking to it from their site.

Figure 7: Magnetic Content Link attraction plays a key role in making a link request, too. You won’t attract a link without providing some kind of value to the site that you want to link to you. The right way to request a link is to research bloggers that are blogging on topics in your industry. If your content can respond to the issues they address in their blogs, you can offer up your page as a solution. A link request that is targeted and customized will answer the question, “Why should I?” before the webmaster or blogger has a chance to ask. Conclusion Many books go deep into the specifics of the particular components of the content marketing chain that I’ve described in this chapter. You’ll find books on SEO and on link building, and there are many books on social media and content strategies. But you won’t find any that pull it all together holistically and give readers a chance to look at content marketing as a function of all these elements working together as in a chain. My goal is to show you how to approach each link in the chain and remind you that each one affects all the others. To be successful, you need to pay attention to each link and not break the chain. In the following chapters, we’re going to dive into the components and look closely at how you can start engaging your market, develop your own strategy, and begin implementing. 3

Information About Your Customers Is At Your Fingertips

“One of my favorite stories in my SEO career comes from time I spent working with NPR (National Public Radio). It was 2005 and their organization was under heavy criticism from right-wing political groups and pundits for being “too left-leaning.” To assuage this perception, NPR’s editorial team took some dramatic steps in language usage; one of the most prominent of these was the switch away from using the words “global warming” to describe climate change phenomena. Their new content on this issue was kept on the website in a section called “climate connections.” Perhaps not surprisingly, search traffic took a serious dip for the worse in this arena. Hundreds of thousands searched on Google, Bing and Yahoo! for “global warming” and related topics (there was, indeed, a “long tail” of similar queries, too), but very few searches on “climate connections” or any related vocabulary. NPR may have helped soothe some critics but in the process they lost a large quantity of potential visitors. The lesson here is simple – know your audience. The web is full of tools to determine what people are talking about, what they’re searching for, what their community tolerates and doesn’t, and how your marketing could fit into the mix. Ignoring or rejecting the critical process of market research on the web leads to terrible decision-making and lost opportunities. In web marketing, don’t go with your gut; go where the data leads you.” Rand Fishkin, CEO and Co-founder, SEOmoz Market research is about identifying what the population is interested in: what needs they have, what desires they have, and especially what they are willing to buy to fulfill those interests. To get information about what consumers were doing, market researchers had to find ways to understand what would appeal to consumers. Before the explosion of the Internet, the way to conduct this kind of research was to survey consumers and to create focus groups. It would have been impossible to ask every person if they were interested in a particular kind of product, so information was gathered through demographic research and samples within demographics. The Internet has changed the game. Information about your customers is now at your fingertips. The bulk of the population is online, and this means that, while sampling can still be useful, it isn’t quite as necessary any more. Because if you know where to look, you can see that consumers are actually making it quite clear what they need and are willing to buy. Chances are the demographic you want to target is interacting with the Internet in ways that will enable you to understand their interests and needs. You can use marketing data gathered online to see how consumers are behaving in your market. This research is valuable to all kinds of businesses, whether they are completely online or have a brick-and-mortar storefront. As you conduct market research online, you’ll be able to spot trends on local, national, and even global levels. These are some great ways to conduct market research using data available online:

Check trending topics

Look at answer sites

Check social news sites and discovery engines

Find out what’s working for your competitors

Answer sites, social news sites, and discovery engines reveal in real time what interests your potential customers. On top of that, by checking in on your competitors, you can see how they meet these demands and what they’re missing. All of this can be enormously valuable to your business as you develop your content ideas and even products. Research through social media is an effective way to get down to the “street level” and better understand how your potential customers think. You’ll get a great sense of the language they use to describe your product and how they perceive your market. As you pay attention to the buzz around the topics and concepts relating to your business, you’ll begin to see trends not only in what people are saying, but you’ll start to become aware of the subtleties in the ways your customer might phrase a search request, what content they respond to, or what content invites user comments. People outside of your industry probably aren’t attuned to the jargon that comes with being an industry insider. If you want to reach those customers, you have to understand how they perceive your product. You could miss them in search if you optimize for more technical insider language that you may take for granted. By understanding the dynamics in your potential customers’ conversations, you can develop rich answers to their most pressing questions and deliver these answers in terms that make sense to them. To remain competitive, keep abreast of the trends. This means keeping close watch on key websites that your consumers are using, and returning often to check again. As you create content, you should continue to do market research online to keep current with the trends so that you can engage your potential customers right where they are. Check Trending Topics Social media sites like Twitter and web portals like Yahoo! have millions of users posting multiple personal updates every day. These users tend to post and repost on the same topics, and within this activity, trends emerge. By looking at trending topics, you can get a sense of what’s hot in your industry. You’ll find out what people are talking about, telling each other, and sharing with their community. Knowing this information is key to how you tailor your content to respond with solutions to your potential customers’ needs. Fortunately, there are tools that can help you monitor multiple channels simultaneously to track mentions of the keywords you’re interested in. Two such tools that really stand out are SocialMention.com and Trackur.com. These sites let you peek at related conversations across multiple social media channels.

Figure 8: Social Listening SocialMention.com is a free site, but all the data it provides is on demand. You can use Social Mention to run queries by keyword or brand to monitor who and where users are talking about those specific topics. The site presents analytic data – including sentiment, top related keywords, and a graphic breakdown of volume by channel – as well as the most current social media activity. Social Mention also allows you to set options for monitoring certain mentions with email alerts, but all-in-all the site is geared for keyword and brand monitoring on demand. Trackur.com offers a free one-month trial and a paid subscription. Trackur.com monitors keywords and brand mentions, tracking the data constantly. The analytics that Trackur.com provides includes trending data, breaking down mentions by media type. It’s true that Trackur and Social Mention are very similar, but Trackur allows users to sit back and monitor their mentions constantly, whereas Social Mention requires users to do most of the work for themselves. Tracking mentions is a critical part of market research in social media, but it’s beneficial to dig deep and check the trends on sites where you expect your customers to be active. Let’s go over some of the big ones: Twitter for Research Twitter, in a nutshell, is a social microblogging site that originally was all about telling the world what a person was doing in less than 140 characters. It was quickly embraced by marketers and has become a major communication tool for any entity looking to connect with constituents, customers, and interested followers. Tweeting is the act of uploading content to Twitter for a person’s followers to view. If the content is interesting or catchy, it can be re-tweeted to other users. A tweet can have embedded in it a link to more content, so, for example, a tweet can include a link to a web page, a Flikr photo or a YouTube video. A retweet is when a user forwards a tweet on to his or her followers. Retweeting is a major way that content picks up momentum and goes viral on Twitter. Twitter tracks the content in the “twittersphere,” taking stock of popular terms and phrases. In a marquee, current trending topics are displayed and constantly updated. You can click on a topic and view the tweets that made up the trend. Pay attention to the nitty-gritty of the content you see. Remember, this is what actual people are actually telling one another. Go further in your market research by using Twitter’s search function (http://search.twitter.com). You can search directly the topics or key concepts that you’re focusing on and see how they are trending. Twitter search actively updates as new tweets are sent with the keyword you’ve entered. This is a chance to see a connection between the keywords you would like to isolate for your content and how people actively use these keywords. Not only do you have a chance to get down to the street level where people are talking, as we’ve been saying, but you might also find some great inspiration for keyword-specific content built right into the tweets. Danny Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land, talks about the “anyone know” research that can be done on Twitter. Twitter users will use the “anyone know” phrase to poll Twitter users for information on their problems. “Crowdsourcing,” as it’s called, taps the massive base of knowledge that has become accessible through connectivity on Twitter. An example of an “anyone know” search might look like this: “Anyone know where I can get good running shoes for less than $100?” People frequently pose such questions, hoping that within their network of followers they can get a quick and credible answer. These questions may or may not get answered, but when users crowdsource, they make their interests known, and this can be valuable marketing data for you. By searching Twitter for “anyone know” searches in combination with your target keyword, you can see just how much interest there is out there, as well as how the questions are being asked. So, if you’re studying trends in running shoes, you can search [“anyone know” running shoes]. Tweets like the one above will fill the results, and you can derive that some people are looking to keep their costs below $100. This will give you some great ideas for tailoring content that can answer this interest. Results for anyone know running shoes

Figure 9: Twitter Search Results for “Anyone Know Running Shoes?” When we get into promotion later in the book, we’ll discuss how you can also engage these questions on Twitter. When you have content at the ready, you can answer these requests directly, leading searchers right to your pages. Yahoo! and MSN Offer Trending Data Yahoo! and MSN are web portals that offer news and entertainment information to tens of millions of users a month. Web portals provide a number of services for their clients, but on the front page they offer a newspaper-like setup. With all varieties of news, sports, and entertainment organized for browsing, web portals are capable of tracking this media for what’s popular, and they offer a snapshot into the top trends in news and entertainment. On their home pages, both Yahoo! and MSN show current top-10 trending phrases. While Yahoo! content tends to lean toward entertainment, MSN content tends to be focused more on mainstream news. Both can give clues into what people are interested in at the time, which can have an impact on the kind of content you produce or provide an angle you can take in your communication strategy. It’s also a great place to see what’s going viral on the Internet. If it’s big-time, it will find its way to the trends on these sites. Trends for MSN are driven by top searches in Bing. Digging deeper, depending on what relates to your industry, you can check the trends in some of the subcategories. The News section is MSNBC news, and here you’ll see trend topics in news. Some of the other categories also offer trending topics. Yahoo! uses Buzz (buzz.yahoo.com) to track trending news, scrolling top trends in a marquee. Buzz is a social news site, where users can “Buzz Up” the news, increasing its popularity. The top trends in news can give the same type of insight that you get from entertainment news, showing the kinds of information and stories that the population finds interesting. The most popular news articles scroll up the Buzz Log and can be sorted by category, such as science/technology or sports. One very useful aspect to Buzz is that you can filter the results to show trends and top news in nations such as Australia, Brazil, India, and the UK. Unfortunately, with a search in these countries, you lose the trending topics marquee, but you can still gain valuable insights through the news that is being “buzzed up” in those nations. Answer Sites Can Be a Mini Gold Mine

Figure 10: Popular Question and Answer Sites Answer sites might just be the perfect marriage of social media and search. The basic concept behind an answer site is that practically everybody has a question to ask that can be answered by someone else. Everyone knows a little something about a lot of stuff, so the answers can be powered by public knowledge with consensus determining the “best” answer. Answer sites offer users the ability to be both the inquisitor and the expert. Generally, in human – shall we say, analog – interaction, we can answer each other’s questions based on our variety of personal experiences. Answer sites make it possible to do this on a massive scale. This often means that the turnaround for a question is relatively fast; many questions get answers in less than a day. In fact, most questions have already been asked and answered, so getting an answer to common questions can be almost instant. People ask questions about all kinds of things on nearly every topic imaginable, and as you analyze what people are asking, you can spot trends. From a market research perspective, this means that you’ll focus on the people that have been asking questions relating to your industry and your niche market. You can derive useful market data about the people who are looking for solutions to their problems in this manner. By searching for questions that include your keywords, you can discover how experts are perceived and how questions get asked. You can see just how hot your industry really is right now by checking out the volume of searches for your products and services. On top of seeing the trends that are happening, you can use answer sites to get real time feedback about your industry from the consumers that are engaging with it. Ask a question to an answer site that relates to your product to see what kind of response you get from the answering public. These answers can give you enlightening marketing data. Wordtracker Labs10 offers a great little tool for helping you narrow down your searches on answer sites. This tool allows you to enter a query and find the questions that are being asked on that topic. It’s a straight list that doesn’t offer depth of analytics, apart from the number of times each individual question has been posed in the last year. This gives you a great starting point as you check out answer sites and social media for particular questions related to your industry and your products. On the Internet, there are a variety of answer sites that attract different kinds of users, and the questions are characterized by the place where they’re asked. Let’s go through a few popular answer sites, find out how they work, and look at what makes them unique. You’ve Got Questions? Yahoo! Answers Yahoo! Answers11 is one of the biggest answer sites, getting hundreds of millions of questions and answers. The site gets a huge variety of questions, ranging from dating to homework to home and garden. Because of its popularity, during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and John McCain submitted questions to the site, leveraging their campaigns on the Internet and generating a huge response from the public. The way Yahoo! Answers works is simple: participants will submit questions to be answered by the community. When asking a question, the participant categorizes it by topic, making it easier to search and easier to answer. As an incentive to ensure that answers are accurate and free of spam, Yahoo! developed a point system. Answers are ranked by other users, and the “best answers” are given the most points. Users that accumulate points have proven to be reputable and are granted certain privileges, such as the ability to ask, answer, vote, and rate more frequently. With Yahoo! Answers, you can browse by category and see what kinds of questions are most popular, newest, or have received the fastest answers. And you can get specific, too. Because every user has to categorize a question by topic before submitting it, it’s easier for you to research questions that pertain to your market. You can search keyword phrases to browse questions that are being asked, either within categories or among all categories. For example, after searching for the keyword “swing set ideas” the top three questions were:

1. “Shopping for swing set, any ideas where to get a good one on a budget?”

2. “Looking for do-it-yourself plans for a short monkey bar structure for our backyard – any ideas?”

3. “Does anyone know where I can buy a nice but affordable wooden swing set?”

If I sell playground equipment, these questions give me a few ideas about what people are after. All three of these questions revolve around low-cost or do-it-yourself solutions. So, right away I can infer that to be successful in this market, I have to find ways to provide swing-set parts or plans that focus on cost savings. Many questions in this search reveal that people are looking for creative ideas when building their own backyard swing set. Notice an opportunity for some content that will offer solutions to this problem? How about a top-10 list of coolest swing set ideas? Answer sites can be bountiful sources for content ideas. LinkedIn: Where Networking Is Big Business LinkedIn12 is primarily a social networking site aimed at business professionals. Members on the site post their resume to their profile and add friends and industry colleagues to their network. Members are encouraged to include in their network colleagues from past professional experiences as well as current assignments, and then to develop a network of colleagues by industry. With more than 80 million networked individuals, LinkedIn has become the first place many people go when they think about making a move in their career, and the website has seen an explosion of activity during the recent spike in layoffs. By having an individual’s resume and contact information up to date and accessible to businesses, it’s a valuable tool for hiring. But LinkedIn is used more broadly than simply for job hunting. The site boasts the ability for linked professionals to collaborate on projects and expand their ability to communicate across their industry through LinkedIn Groups. This key communication tool brings networked individuals together through invitation to the group. The group feature connects the members on a discussion board, and updates members by email when new information is added to the board. LinkedIn offers an Answers channel as one of its tools for collaboration. The Q&A feature offers the ability for industry experts to show off their expertise to a network up to three degrees deep (your contacts, your contact’s contacts, and your second-level-contact’s contacts). Depending on how wide each level is, this could amount to a very extensive network. The driving force in Q&A is similar to Yahoo! Answers, as the motivation for answering is driven by a user rating system for credibility. Here the recognition is professional, where the best answers demonstrate a working knowledge of the industry. LinkedIn further rewards members by recognizing the top answerer in a weekly ranking. The motivation for making this list is industry-wide exposure as top expert in the field. To answer a question, you need to be networked into the Question-and- Answer group by three degrees, but you don’t need that relationship to view questions and answers. As with Yahoo! Answers, you can search the questions that are posed in a particular field because each question is organized by category when it’s submitted. Included in the categorization is the postal code of the submitter’s location, helping to give each question and answer more relevance to a geographic-specific search. Because the questions start off categorized, you can quickly narrow down the search to keep within your area of interest. LinkedIn Answers has particularly good data for Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing. You can find questions your potential customers are asking about as they try to solve their toughest questions. By spending time in LinkedIn, you’ll get an insider’s view into the problems that your business can solve for your customers. You’re on Facebook, Right? Facebook is sort of like the Beatles for the Internet, everybody seems to like it. Facebook users create a profile and update their status. Typically, status updates are announcements about what the person is doing or how the person is feeling. Updates can also be used to share content with friends – such as blog posts, images, articles, video, etc. Friends can comment on and “like” each other’s status. On their profile, users can see all the activity within their network. With more than 500 million users worldwide, about 50 percent of those users, according to Facebook, are online at any given time. Primarily the site is about networking with friends, and the average user has about 130 friends. Beyond the networking of friends, the site has had a huge amount of success with platform applications. Ranging from games to contests to promotions targeted to the user’s profile, Facebook claims that more than 70 percent of its users engage with the variety of applications. A Facebook profile is designed to accept a huge amount of personal information. Beyond gender and age, it captures the real interests of its users as they “like” pages. “Public Profiles” are pages for public entities, businesses, non-profits, and brands. Public profiles can keep followers informed on news relative to the page as the updates populate the follower’s profile page. Interest pages capture human interest topics and create followings based on those interests. For example, Public Profile pages can include “Aerosmith” or “Tylenol.” Interest pages can express sentiments or interests such as “Going to bed after midnight,” “hiking” or “travel.” Users select these pages by “liking” them and interact with them in such a way as to capture the various things that they like in the world around them. Users can like any number of pages and by doing so they generate a comprehensive personalized profile, some of the data being generally available to marketers. Users can also create their own interest pages to like if they don’t see one out there. When a user likes a page, all the friends of that user see the like and can like it, too. This gives these pages the possibility of going viral, as friends of friends like them, causing the page to gain momentum and spread exponentially throughout the Facebook community. When a user likes a page, they make their profile data available to the page creator, so many interest pages are used to capture marketing data on the users who select them. Because of the volume of activity on Facebook, it’s a great place to gauge how people think about topics and how they perceive your product, and to learn the questions they ask. By going to the Facebook Pages section (facebook.com/pages) you can browse all the object pages that have been created and see how many users have liked them. Initially, the top pages that have the most likes will display. By exploring these pages and checking out the comments on the page, you can get a feel for what the largest number of users is interested in. For more popular pages, you have to weed through spam comments, especially with unmoderated pages. To gain insights into your market area, you can search by keywords that relate more specifically to your market niche. Because anyone can create a page and duplicates are allowed, you might find several pages with the same name or a similar name, such as “Mountain Climbing.” Peruse the comments in several of these pages, not just the highly popular ones, before you refine your search. The less popular object pages tend to be less cluttered by spam, but the more popular pages can be hubs for communities that share a common interest. As of the writing of this book, Facebook’s Questions13 service has not been fully rolled out, but it’s anticipated that within 2011 it will be. Similar to LinkedIn’s version, users will be able to ask questions or answer questions, showing themselves to be an expert or to spark a conversation with potential customers or interested friends. We anticipate that once Facebook Questions is fully rolled out, it will offer a similar kind of searchable functionality as other social question-and-answer sites, allowing you to search questions. This will give you ideas for the kinds of answers that your content will be able to provide. Facebook Questions will be another place that you can promote your content by answering questions. We anticipate that in the future these questions and answers will show up in search engine results pages like Yahoo! Answers, adding another instance that your content can be found in search. Keep your eyes on Facebook and be ready for when Questions is released. It promises to be a popular arena in which you will want to participate. Quora: A New Entry Into the Question and Answer Field Also, during the writing of this book, Quora14 came to the market. We feel it may become an important player in the Q&A space, thus we feel it deserves a mention here. It appears Quora may be the next evolutionary step as far as technology and social media goes. Like the others, it is meant to be a useful knowledge- indexing tool, a database of information provided by users. However, Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers, reviewed by users, edited by users, flagged as useful or not by users, and organized by everyone who uses it. The creators’ goal is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question. Social News Sites and Social Bookmarking Sites Figure 11: Popular Social Bookmarking Sites Social news sites like Digg15, Reddit16, and Mixx17 and bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon18 and Delicious19 use voting to help users discover - content of interest to them. Whether it’s blogs, news articles, images, or videos, participants submit the content and vote it up (or down). The more votes a page gets, the more visible it becomes to other users. These kinds of sites put a more social spin on news and other consumable content than, say, Yahoo! or MSN. In this sense they are effectively a hybrid of news sites and social media like Twitter and Facebook, where users recommend content to one another. The content that rises to the top is driven by human review and sharing, thereby stirring up content around the web for users who may not otherwise find it. It’s a really good idea to get familiar with these kinds of sites and pay attention to what trends are happening there. Not only will they give insight into what kind of news, blog posts, and other content is popular outside of the main stream, but they’re also a great way to see what content is going viral, giving you a clue into what material you can produce that will be more likely to get voted up in these arenas. What’s Newsworthy is What’s Cool: Digg, Reddit and Mixx Social news is not about old-school journalism. It’s not about breaking news driven by an idealistic value set or centered on a prescribed notion of what’s important or newsworthy. At least not exactly. Social news is a democratic, Internet-based way of knowing current events. The underlying philosophy is that if something has appeal, it’s worth spreading. Social news sites recommend news topics to each user based on the preferences and history of that user’s account. Once they’ve reviewed the headlines and then the content, users have the opportunity to review them and vote them up or down. Because social news is, well, social, the news that’s being voted up in the user’s network plays a role in determining what news the algorithm suggests. Users can recommend any content to the site that they come across while online. As the content gets recommended to a social news site and the users vote on it, it will either rise in popularity or fall to obscurity. Users who recommend content that gets consistently voted up gain credibility and can earn badges or other recognition for their participation. Digg Digg is the biggest of the three social news sites covered in this chapter. As news is shared, users vote up the content by “Digging it” or vote it down by “Burying” it. With Digg, submitting content to the site is, shall we say, a big deal, and there is fierce competition for having the content you’ve submitted get “Dugg.” “Upcoming” content on Digg is content that’s rising in popularity. As users Digg it up, it gets moved out of the “Upcoming” category and into the “Top News” category. Both areas are worth exploring when doing market research. Whenever users contribute a link, they categorize it by topic for relevance. Look at Top News in “All Topics” to see what’s trending, then look at the topics that fit your market for a narrower view. In the Top News and Upcoming areas, you can always search for keywords related to your industry to see what’s trending there. Reddit Like Digg, Reddit categorizes submitted content, though the categories on Reddit can be a tad irreverent. Content can take any form, from a simple photo to a link to a news article to want ads. As users submit content they get karma, good or bad, when their content gets voted up or down. If a user self- posts content, they won’t get karma for that post. The idea with karma is that it is a demonstration that a user is a good citizen, contributing useful, interesting content to the site. Reddit users take their voting seriously, and they will quickly vote down content if it doesn’t fit the category it was submitted for, sometimes with colorful rants in the comments. Reddit uses generic categories, or Reddits, for content submission, as well as user-generated categories, called Subreddits. Subreddits categorize content into smaller niche areas. Hundreds of subreddit categories have been created, ranging from Atheism to Programming to Canada. Because they are niche areas, they generally don’t get as much activity as the popular categories. Users can subscribe to any Reddit or Subreddit. For every Reddit or Subreddit category, there are subcategories, which include “what’s hot,” “new,” “controversial,” and “top.” Content that’s getting voted up moves to the “what’s hot” category. “New” is for content that has been recently submitted and needs votes. You can also sort “new” to see “rising” content, which is getting votes and is close to moving to “what’s hot.” “Controversial” content is content that might be off-color or that expresses strong opinions that others could find offensive. “Top” features content items that have gotten top scores. You can sort this list by top scores for today, this week, this month, all time, or even this hour. Remember, while you review the content that’s being voted up, be sure to read the comments that people are making to get a clue into the street-level conversation that the content generates. Like Digg, you can get a good idea of what kind of content gets interest in your field by browsing through the generic Reddits that are getting the most activity, as well as the Subreddits related to your industry. You can use Subredditfinder.com to search for Subreddits that might be in your niche industry. Subreddits can be very useful for getting a peek into what people are saying on a niche topic. Subreddits have already done the work of filtering the content exclusively to the niche; all you have to do is browse them. Mixx Practically speaking, Mixx is quite close in concept to Digg and Reddit, and market research can be done here in much the same way as the other two sites. With Mixx, users recommend news and categorize their recommendations, and they create their own news feed, or “Mixx.” Profile pages become a personalized feed of content that the user is interested in. As content comes into their feed, users review and vote on it, moving it higher or lower in the rankings. As with Reddit, users get karma points for being a good citizen. Mixx rewards the best users with awards, which are symbols of status within the community. In the Mixx Lounge, you can view the active users and check out the awards they’ve received. To get a sense of what’s working on the site, visit the profiles for these successful Mixxers. You’ll see their news Mixxes and the content that’s earning them karma. You can also get a sense of the community value system. To see what kind of news is generally ranking, you can visit the top Mixx content by category: News, Business, Entertainment, Sports, Life, and more. Like the other social news sites, Mixx has tabbed subcategories to define the incoming content. “Popular” content has received waves of votes; “On Deck” content is gaining traction but needs more votes to move into the popular category; and “Recent” content is newly added, having not received many votes to date. Each category of content has a “Comments” tab. Here, you can see what news is getting comments and what people are saying about the content. Again, this is the place to see how the community is responding to content and to get a view into what kind of content generates user comments. Mixx has an added feature that is great for gathering interesting marketing insights, as well as some content ideas that you might be able to curate. “Polls” are user-generated polls for the Mixx community. This is a place to see how users are digesting the world around them and gaining consensus on the opinions of the community. When You Love It, You Keep Coming Back For More: StumbleUpon and Delicious Imagine I’ve had my laptop stolen and all my favorite places online that I’ve bookmarked on my browser have just disappeared with my hard drive. My insurance got me a new computer, but I have to rebuild a lifetime’s worth of favorites. When it comes to getting the most out of the Internet, bookmarking is my biggest time-saver. I did the work of finding these places and adding them once already, and I don’t want to do it again. Wouldn’t it be great if I could store all my bookmarks in the cloud20 and not worry about losing them again? Say hello to StumbleUpon and Delicious. Beyond the convenience of storing my bookmarks in one place, I can get content suggestions that complement my favorite places. Brilliant! (Note: there are many other similar sites but these are two of the biggest and best.) StumbleUpon StumbleUpon is a content discovery engine, emulating and greatly enhancing the way that people find content to bookmark in the first place. StumbleUpon starts by getting to know the user’s personal interests. Initially, this comes from a short survey when the user creates a profile, but it grows in complexity as the user engages content through the service. When using the service, users click the “stumble” button on the toolbar, which gives them a new web page to interact with. If they like what they’ve been offered, or “stumbled,” they can give it a “thumbs up”. If they don’t, they can give it a “thumbs down” vote. If the user wants to bookmark the site, they can tag it. They can return to tagged sites for more content. The StumbleUpon algorithm includes a social network element, which takes into account what the user’s network also has tagged and given a thumb’s up. Content that is voted up by the people in the user’s network will be more likely to appear in the next “stumble” for that user. To get marketing data from StumbleUpon’s massive bank of activity, you can view a number of different trending data:

Check the “Recently Hot” tags: These are the current trends that people are tagging. Drill down for more content under the tag.

Check the “Most Popular All Time” tags: These tags change less frequently but will change. To see what is gaining the most attention, look through these tags. Again, drill down for more content.

Check stumbles by topic: You can see what activity is happening by topic.

Check the Top Rated websites: These are the pages that are getting the most stumbles. Delicious Delicious is a simpler version of StumbleUpon. Delicious is more strictly a bookmarking site, the primary functionality being that users can bookmark their favorite places on the Internet. As users view web pages, they “tag” them. Delicious describes tags as “keywords that people use to describe their bookmarks.” Delicious tags are helpful to the user when categorizing their service, but they are also an awesome way to see how people actually perceive the content on the page, and the products and services within the content. Tags aren’t just for pages that users like. People will actually tag pages that they want to avoid, which can be even more informative for marketers. When it comes to gathering marketing data from Delicious, you have to really dive in and get your hands dirty. You can search popular tags or tags by keyword. Delicious keeps a running tally of the top related tags, which means that you can find a number of key terms that relate to your brand or product search. Here are some other ideas:

Check out the most popular bookmarks on Delicious. This will give you more clues into the kind of content that is being tagged.

Browse the “Fresh Bookmarks.” These are the most recently tagged pages, and will give you an up-to-the-minute glimpse at what’s hottest around the Internet.

Explore Tags. You can search the most popular tag terms right now. Drill down to tags that relate to your industry and see what’s happening there.

Search tag terms that relate to your industry. If tags relating to your industry aren’t making the top terms, search them.

Whenever you search by tag, explore the content that is being tagged, and keep track of the related tags to see how your content and your brand can fit in to the scene. What Are Your Competitors Doing? Some of the best market research comes from keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing. Your competitors are online engaging their customers and generating content that promotes their products and services. Using the research strategy we’ve discussed in this chapter, search for your competition by name. By looking at what your competitors are up to, you can gain an understanding of where your content can fit into the conversation. One great way to measure the success of your competitor’s content is to see who’s linking to their pages. As we’ve described, one key way that Google measures content relevance is by links to pages. It follows that if your competitors are getting links to their content, then it must be working. SEOMoz has a free tool that can quickly answer the question “how many links is a page getting?” Check out www.opensiteexplorer.org. Using this tool, and by specifically sorting by strongest pages, you can see the links pointing to any particular page (as long as it’s in the SEOMoz database), and you can analyze exactly the types of content that are getting the most links on your competitors’ websites. This also implies that this content is being shared the most online. As you investigate the pages they are producing, ask yourself:

What kind of content seems to be attracting the most links on their site?

How are your competitors engaging their visitors?

Is their content getting ranked up in news sites?

Are their blogs popular on bookmarking sites?

How are they using social media?

By analyzing how your competition engages with their audiences, think about ways that you can replicate their success. Most importantly, how can you do it better? You might find places where your competitors are missing opportunities, giving you the advantage as you fill those gaps. When looking through this backlink data, you will see who is actually linking to the competition’s content. Because these links represent interest in those pages, the sites that are linking to your competitors could be just as interested in linking to your content. Later in the book, we’ll also talk about how to target some of those same people to gain links to your content. Keyword Research as Market Research In the next chapter, we will dive into keyword research for searchers on Google and Bing. For content to be found in search, it’s critical to know how searchers behave on the big search engines and how they find what they’re looking for. Keywords play a powerful role in a content marketing strategy, going beyond SEO. They are critical to your market research, as well. When you conduct keyword research, you’re actually examining what people are searching online – literally what they’re typing into Google and other search engines when they want to find something. From this standpoint, keywords are like a window into the psyche of your potential customers, showing you how they view your product. Knowing how people search is critical to understanding how keyword research works as market research. By analyzing human search behavior metrics, you can spot trends that will enable you to place your product offering in the most competitive position possible online. As you track your success and continue to monitor search trends, you can work your product up in search results, and watch as sales follow. Conclusion As you may have noticed in this chapter, keywords and market research are closely connected. Much of your market research involves examining key phrases that are trending and being used in social media and answer sites. As you conduct market research in social media and look at your competition, you’ll apply your findings to your keyword research. The way that people see your products and services is crucial to how you can deliver useful content to them. Your market research gives you a ground-level experience by exploring how your potential customers share content that interests them and how content gets delivered to them through social media and your competitors. The keywords they use in search are a product of the way they interpret the market and will determine how they find content when they search. By taking what you learn in your market research and applying it to keyword research, you’ll increase your potential for getting targeted traffic to your website. 4

Targeting Your Traffic Through Keyword Research

“Two friends show up at your door to help with a home-improvement project. One brings a hammer and the other brings a paint brush. If the first friend had done his research, he would have known you don’t need a hammer to paint your house! Before you begin to sculpt, design, outline, write, and optimize your website, you have to know what your audience is searching for. You can’t rely on some uninformed higher-up who has a “pet” keyword, but you can rely on searchers themselves. This is where keyword research comes in. It shows you the actual words and phrases that your target audience uses when they search for the product, service, or information you offer. Instead of offering a hammer when what’s needed is a paint brush, keyword research allows you to not only know how much paint but what color as well.” Stoney G. deGeyter, Pole Position Marketing

Keywords play a powerful role in a content marketing strategy. They are the basic means of communication between searcher and the search engine, representing the searcher’s voice and interest. By looking at search data, you can determine just how people are getting to the products and services in your industry. This chapter is going to cover keyword research in depth. Keywords are the cornerstone of the web, thus they deserve detailed coverage. It is also designed to be a resource that you can return to time and again as you become more skilled at conducting your research. Searchers enter the best keyword phrase that will most efficiently connect them with the information they need. Because searchers tend to refine their searches less often today than just a few years ago, keyword phrases are becoming increasingly longer and specific. The average searcher is aware of the tactics that can be used to save time and effort to get them the results they want. This means that now keyword phrases can give better insight into what the searcher intended to find and what kind of targeted traffic those keywords will generate. If you know the intent behind a particular keyword search, you can develop quality content pages that are optimized to the right keywords and efficiently drive targeted traffic to your site. To start analyzing keyword trends, you’ll need to look at all kinds of metrics. Google and Bing make available to the public much of the search activities and trends that have occurred on their sites. Because there is so much data available, search engines and other independent organizations have developed a number of useful tools that offer further insights into the correlation between keyword and intent. These tools help you to answer the question, What are my customers looking for that I currently sell? And especially, How are they looking for it? Through related search phrases, you will also be able to identify your competing products and your complementary products. Search engines can track demographics, too. Some keywords are able to tell you if more men search one thing or women for another thing. So, let’s say your product offering happens to be men’s socks. You might assume you have to market to men, but after doing some keyword research, you may find that the majority of people searching the term “men’s socks” are actually women. This kind of input will certainly have an influence on the type of content that you optimize around that term. Going further, you can even identify the keywords that are more likely to lead to a sale, and which keywords will not, so that you don’t waste your time optimizing for a term that might get hits to your site but fail to lead to conversion. It’s important to keep in mind that keyword optimization goes beyond text- based content. Web content includes images, press releases, video, and social media (see universal search results in Figure 12). Whatever your content, it can be optimized for the keywords that best fit the searches that will find it. Images and videos have metatags and descriptions that can be optimized for keywords. Press releases and social media offer great opportunities to take advantage of keyword research as well, and can be optimized, even though they aren’t on your site. A word of caution: Remember that your end goal is to provide engaging content whenever you optimize for keywords. Include them naturally. Don’t create a lousy page stuffed with keywords just because you have a new term to optimize for. Think about creating quality content first. Figure 12: Universal Search Results The smarter you are with keyword optimization in your content, the more you will be able to gain targeted search traffic and increase conversion on your site. The insights you can derive from the tools that we’ll discuss in this chapter will:

Help shape your organization’s brand online

Influence your product offerings

Target your content development to the customers who are searching for it

Help your content rise in the search results and social media pages Brainstorm for Keyword Phrases When you set out researching keywords, it’s good to start off with a list of keywords that relate to your product, industry and brand. This will take a little brainstorming. As you research each term and discover the data behind it, you’ll quickly refine this initial brainstorm list. Grab a colleague or two and get ready to put your heads together. Drawing on your market research and what you already know about your industry, make a list of keywords and topics that your clients will use to search or discuss your product. At this stage, don’t hold back. Get it all out there. Think about your products in a myriad of ways.

What are the key terms that you identify with your industry?

Do your products come in different styles or colors?

Do you have model numbers or serial numbers that a searcher might search?

Would your product or service be categorized differently by region, or even by country? For example, one searcher might search “auto insurance” and another might search “car insurance.”

Consider your products or services by component parts. Let’s say you sell playground equipment; think about the components of the playground equipment you sell, i.e. swing set, slide, monkey bars.

From your market research: what kinds of questions were people asking about your industry? Did this give you any new insight into how your products are seen that you hadn’t considered?

As you brainstorm, think like a searcher. Put yourself in their shoes. It’s not uncommon to get stuck inside your own industry’s jargon. What you and your colleagues think are obvious keywords may not be what your prospective customers use when they search. Because you’re brainstorming, write down the jargon terms but put a little star by them. Go back to your starred words, and break them down further, thinking of less technical ways to say the same thing. Don’t get too hung up on particular keyword phrases. For the brainstorming, write down everything and think more broadly about who your customers are, and how they would engage with your business in indirect ways. You should end up with a relatively long and broad list of keywords. The goal in brainstorming is to get a starting point for keyword research. You’re going to take this list and run some analytics to see how these keywords are trending. Most likely, you’ll end up chopping out quite a bit of your list. Even as your brainstorm list gets refined during your research, you’ll likely discover new keywords to add to your list, honing in on keyword combinations that will target the searchers you’re after. Use Keyword Research to Build Targeted and Optimized Content Keywords are all about getting the right people to your site. To get targeted traffic that engages with your product, your pages need to rank on page one of the search engine results page for the keywords that searchers will most likely use. If the searcher intends to find products in your market, you want your content to be at the top of the results. Landing solid, targeted traffic is all about finding the right keywords to optimize your content for. People don’t always search the same way for the same things. It’s those nuanced adjustments that people make to their searches that give you leverage in finding keywords to optimize. Imagine if every person who wanted to buy a garden hose typed only “hose” into the search bar. Everyone selling hoses would be forced to compete for that single term. You’d never have other terms to optimize for, like “garden hose,” “durable rubber hose,” “100 ft garden hose,” or “hose that won’t kink.” Fortunately, the possibilities are practically as endless as the reasons people search. There are many variables with optimizing for keywords that make each effort unique, such as: What is your company budget? How much time do you have to get results? What are your company’s goals? How intense is the competition? How good is your current website? How much content can you create in the next year? And so on. If you have a strong presence online, a great website, and some money to invest in your content marketing strategy, you might be able to compete for some big terms. But, if you’re just getting started, it will take a little while before you see some significant results, so you should start with more targeted terms. Generally these are longer search phrases, often called “long tail” search terms. Keyword research is a matter of knowing what you want and what you can achieve. Sure, you want to be ranked number one for the biggest volume search term, but you’re probably not going to be – at least not right away. There is only a small number of ranking slots available for each term, and competition can be fierce for popular terms. However, if you can get number one for a few terms with lower competition and modest volume by next December, let’s say, then you’ll see some real results, which you can reinvest into your business. In this way, your content marketing strategy can grow, and as you grow, you can get more and more aggressive in attacking even more competitive terms. You would be surprised to know how many businesses have made small fortunes focusing on a “long tail” keyword phrases in a niche market. Keyword research gives you the ability to determine which search terms will work the best for your content marketing strategy. By looking at the volume of search activity by keyword, and then analyzing the level of competition for those terms, you can start to evaluate which terms you ought to be going after and optimizing for. Keyword research can show what related terms are out there, giving you plenty of ideas for additional content and more ways to optimize. In fact, behind keywords, there’s a lot of demographic information that can give you even more specific insight into the kind of traffic a keyword will generate. This kind of analytical insight will help you build content targeted to the customers searching for your product. A Toolkit for Keyword Research Expanding on our bicycle metaphor, consider cyclists taking a 100-mile trek. They would load their bikes with all the necessities to get them where they want to go. They’d have a spare pump clipped to the frame, holsters filled with hydration on the down tubes, and the satchel on the handlebars would be stocked with PowerBars. The panniers over the rear wheel would have a pair of spare tire tubes and a compact toolkit that weighed mere ounces, serving to handle any adjustments that might be needed on the fly. Before setting out on any lengthy ride, a good cyclist will inspect the state of the bike to be sure it’s in tip-top form, breaking out the toolkit to tighten a nut here, tweak a spoke there, and making sure to take it along, in case any adjustments are needed on the ride. Keyword research tools work in the same way for your content marketing strategy. Most people settle in on two or three tools that they really love and use those to find keywords to hone in on for a particular content piece, or series of pieces. Many times a little market research, in conjunction with a few good keyword research tools, can lead to some great content ideas – and ultimately the searchers you seek. Finding the right keywords for your content is a matter of knowing the tools; each one tells you something a little different from the others. If you know how to use them, much of this kind of research can be done on your own. The effort you put into keyword research will drive how much you get out of it. While you will probably settle on a few tools that tend to work for you, it’s good to be familiar with some of the other tools that are out there, too, so that you can augment your routine keyword research. Sometimes, you need different kinds of information about your keywords than you normally would get from your day-to-day tools, just as a cyclist on occasion has to take the bike to the shop, put it on the rack, and break out the specialty wrenches. On the following pages, I’ll break out some great tools that you can start using right away. There are a lot of services for researching keywords out there, but I’m going to cover the big, basic tools that work really well for general keyword research. Then, I’ll go on to touch on a few specialty tools so that you can get a broader sense of what’s possible in keyword research. Keyword Suggest and Instant Search Google and Bing both use a keyword suggestion feature to help searchers find what they are looking for more efficiently. Keyword suggestion instantly offers popular related keyword phrases as the searcher types the keyword phrase into the search box. The suggestion dynamically changes to refresh as each letter is typed in the search box. When the phrase appears that most closely expresses the idea that the searcher wants to express in the search, the searcher can select it from the list and go right to those results. For users that are logged into Google, Instant Search is a feature that Google rolled out in the fall of 2010 that has revolutionized the idea of search suggestion. Instant Search goes one step beyond keyword suggestion by actually populating the entire search results for the closest related keyword match. Instant Search is so fast that the results will update instantly as the searcher types new letters into the search. While these aren’t exactly tools designed for keyword research, you can get a lot of information from looking at how Keyword Suggest and Instant Search work to drive traffic toward particular keyword phrases in the search session. Type a keyword phrase you’re researching into the search engine and take note of how the refined search leads you to your goal search. Look at the alternative keywords that are suggested. Keyword suggestion is designed to help the searcher target the search to the results that match his or her intent. An unfortunate side effect may be to drive traffic away from keywords that you’ve optimized, while at the same time driving traffic toward keywords that are more competitive where you wouldn’t easily rank. You might even be dissuaded from using creative long-tail search phrases, at least in the early round of search, if Keyword Suggest points searchers to a more relevant keyword phrase. On the other hand, you might find some keyword phrases in the suggestions that you could optimize for. If a keyword that you’ve ranked for appears in the suggestion list, or the Instant Search results, you could benefit from users who stop there when they take advantage of the suggestions. Google AdWords Keyword Tool The AdWords tool21 allows you to enter multiple keywords to compare search volume data. The results show all synonyms and related keywords for the terms you’ve entered. Google refers to these results as “ideas” and for good reason: the huge amount of information that is returned can offer a lot of ideas for honing in on keyword combinations that relate to the query you’re interested in. For example, a search for “keyword research” brings up all search terms that include the words “keyword” and “research.” You can get hundreds of results for a term. You can also enter multiple terms to get variations on a number of ideas. By adding the term “long tail” to the previous search, the results now include related terms to both entries as well as combinations of both, such as “long tail keyword research,” “long tail keywords,” etc.

Figure 13: Results for “Mountain Bike” in Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool The analytic data that this tool includes:

The competition for each term

Number of global monthly searches

Number of local monthly searches

A bar graph depicting search volume by month

Estimated average cost per click (for paid search)

The result set of “ideas” is an excellent way to identify new, related keyword combinations. By entering a single term, you get hundreds of possible variations with useful data on each term listed for easy comparison. Monthly search volume is likely the first piece of data you’ll look at. The numbers in these columns are the 12-month average number of user queries for the keyword. The monthly search volume is given in two columns, and it’s important to know what they mean. “Global” monthly searches refers to worldwide searches across the Internet, while “Local” results refers to the nation that you’ve selected (defaulting to the country you’re in). In the Keywords Tool, you can’t narrow the local results any further than nation, but you can take keywords you’re interested in from this tool to other tools, such as Google Insights, to get more detailed geo-specific data. The Local Search Trends column displays at a glance the fluctuation of keyword traffic over the past year. Each bar on the graph represents a month of the calendar. This allows you to roughly compare on one page some of the trend information between keywords. The competition for each term is also represented by a shaded bar graph. The more shaded the bar, the higher the number of advertisers who are bidding on the keyword. Competitiveness is relative to all keywords across Google, rather than the set of results you are working with. This standardizes the meaning of the competitiveness factor so that it doesn’t change with the result set. While the competition indicator is derived from paid search data, it works for application to organic search. Businesses that want to rank in paid search will often optimize for the same terms in organic search so that their results appear on the page multiple times. So, the competition for organic search will still be intense for highly competitive terms. The average cost per click gives you another indication of the paid search value of each term. The price for a keyword goes up as websites bid for it. So relatively high-dollar keywords are also going to be competitive. The biggest advantage to using this tool is that it allows you to quickly compare multiple data points for a large number of keyword variations. You can use this tool to isolate a handful of terms that have good volume and competition and which are trending in a way that you would want to see. As a first-round keyword tool, the AdWords keyword tool is especially valuable, helping you discover a variety of keywords you might want to hone in on and further investigate with some of the other tools. Google Insights Tool The Google Insights22 tool gives you a detailed look at search volume patterns over time, by geographic region, by category (finance, sports, news, etc.), and by product. This is a fabulous tool because it brings together a variety of marketing information that can reveal why keywords trend and can help you predict the near future of the search volume. You can filter your query by a number of different factors, including location by country, and even as specific as metropolitan area; any time range, as far back as 2004; and type of search, whether it be for news, images, products, or the entire web. The results give a ton of information:

The interest over time graph shows fluctuations in search volume. This is a relative volume between terms.

Rising searches show related keywords that are on the uptrend and might be of interest for further investigation.

Peaks in the volume are tied to news headlines that occurred in the same time period with the same keywords.

Regional interest is also represented by a map and graph showing top 10 regions that searched the term.

The top 10 keywords for the term you entered are displayed and graphically show which keywords received the most volume.

The interest over time data shows how each term has been trending. You can use this to spot high and low points that may be cyclical. Here, you can compare volume between terms, though you can’t compare actual search numbers. For terms that have seasonal or cyclical patterns, the graph projects figures for the next year based on the trends. When terms emerge that do not have a clear pattern, such as a rising or falling trend, or a cyclical pattern, the graph will not attempt to project for it. Tied into search terms that have spikes in activity are news headlines for the day of the spikes. The News Headlines feature shows you the triggers that caused bursts in search activity. These triggers can be valuable information, tipping you off to what kinds of events will cause bursts of activity in the future. Insights is loaded with geographic distribution data, showing you regional interest in the terms you’ve entered. The geographic data gets very specific, down to metropolitan region. If you’re interested in data by region, you can filter your search to compare searches by region for a term. With a Google account, which is free, you have access to the Rising Searches feature, giving you a set of related keywords that are trending up. This will give you clues to other terms you might be able to tackle and which terms might be rising in competition. Google Insights is a great refining tool to look at keywords you’re ready to isolate. Because you can filter your query in so many ways, you can get loads of data on keywords in multiple ways. You can compare terms that you’re interested in and see how they have been relating to each other over time, and how they may trend in the future. Google Trends Google Trends23 offers fast comparisons of the performance of keywords over time. Similar to Insights, Trends uses a search volume index to show search volume over time as well as a top-10 list of localized search volume. This is a great tool for checking trending data for a query and comparing trends between terms at a glance. In your market research, you looked at trending sites, but Google trends goes beyond the market research to give trend information by keywords. Here you can compare terms to see relative search performance. As you look at the data, you can see if terms are rising or falling in popularity so that you can project how that keyword will perform going forward. Since many terms are searched seasonally, you can use Trends to spot search cycles and make a reasonable estimation for the next year’s search activity. Because Trends has less data than Insights in the results, there’s less clutter, and so you can make decisions on projected performance for keywords more quickly. In addition to the search volume index graph, Trends gives the top 10 regional and city search locations at a glance. SEOmoz.org Keyword Difficulty Tool The SEOmoz.org Keyword Difficulty tool24 will help determine the competition for ranking in a particular keyword search. The tool allows you to compare up to five terms to see the relative levels of competition for those terms. A high percentage indicates a lot of competition, thus, as the percentage goes up, it gets more and more difficult to rank for that term. When you used Google AdWords to compare terms for volume and competition, you may have found a keyword that had a low competitive rank with a higher volume. Keyword Difficulty is a great follow up once you have some terms you want to consider targeting. While the AdWords tool gives a rough idea of the competition for a keyword, the Keyword Difficulty tool lets you make a much closer analysis of the competition. Terms getting difficulty ratings above 50 percent are starting to get pretty competitive. As your terms lean toward a niche, difficulty tends to go down. The lower the difficulty rating, the lower the competition and the better chance you have to get ranked for a term. The tool also lets you drill down to see which pages are getting the top 10 rankings for the term so that you can see which websites are competing. Competition for keywords tends to increase for terms with high conversion rates paired with high volume. By looking at what pages are competing for a term, you can also get a picture of how well you’ll be able compete. Keyword difficulty does not necessarily help you find the goose with the golden egg, so to speak. There could be a very good reason why a particular keyword is not very competitive, even if it’s getting decent volume. For example, it may not be the kind of search term that leads to conversion. It might be a term that searchers are using only to do their own product comparison. Once they have researched all the product offerings, their follow up search – when they’re ready to commit – will be the particular brand they’ve settled on. This is often the case for large purchases and investments, rather than for smaller commonplace ones. Bing Commercial Intent Tool Once you know the search volume and competition for a keyword, you’re still missing a key component if you are looking to target traffic for conversion. Bing’s Commercial Intent tool25 offers you this by showing the probability that a given keyword search will lead to conversion or will likely not lead to a conversion. The result will either be a Commercial Intent probability or a Noncommercial Intent probability. A result of 1.00 means that the tool is 100 percent confident in its answer. For example, if you search for the term “tires,” the Commercial Intent comes back at .99. So it’s very likely that searchers using this term intend to purchase tires. On the other hand, a search for “how to change a tire,” brings back a Noncommercial Intent of .88. From this result, it’s clear that the searcher is more interested in gaining noncommercial information rather than purchasing a product related to the search. This is a good tool for cross-checking terms that are less competitive and have traffic volume that you’d like directed to your site – especially terms that you’ve found to have a low keyword difficulty. If your goal is conversion, then you want to be sure that there’s a high probability for the terms you optimize to convert. Otherwise, you could end up optimizing for a keyword that doesn’t bring in revenue in the way that you were hoping. Even though this is a Bing tool, the probability can be applied to terms searched in Google as well. The data is derived from Bing’s search volume, but searchers tend to search in the same ways between search engines. The way to look at this kind of data is to compare term by term, rather than the actual numbers. That is, look at the likelihood of commercial intent as high probability or low probability rather than as, for example, 67 percent probability. You can use this data to see that a term is probably going to lead to conversion or not. Some Additional Tools for Your Kit As you dive into keyword research, you will most likely need to acquire more information than the standard research tools give you. You should be familiar with other tools out there, as well, so that you can jump to those quickly and keep your keyword idea hot. It can be a buzz kill to have to slow down the process to find a new tool that will get you the answer you need. To keep you rolling, I’ve added some additional tools you can check out. This is a short list that aims to give you a picture of the other kinds of information you can get from keywords.

SEMRush.com will estimate what traffic your competitors are receiving. This is an awesome tool for analyzing the traffic your competitors are getting, and they offer a number of ways to analyze the data. You’ll need to establish and pay for an account, but the data you get could be worth it. Up front, you should know that this tool is designed primarily for paid search, but the information you get from this site can also be applied to organic search, since as we said before, often times websites using paid search also optimize for organic results. Two of the best features, and unique to the site, are:

1. Search by keyword to see which of your competitors are ranking for that term.

2. Enter your competitor’s domain to find what keywords they have optimized

KeywordDiscovery.com/search is a search term suggestion tool. Enter a keyword to see the top 100 related search terms. Google gives you this kind of information, too, but the bonus of Keyword Discovery is that it compiles search data from a number of engines so that your data has the potential for being richer and more broadly representative of the whole search population.

Bing Mutation Detection26 This is a clever tool for identifying common misspellings used in search. Not only might it be good to know how the keywords you’ve optimized are misspelled, but you may be able to come up with some great content ideas through misspellings.

Bing Demographics Prediction27 is an awesome tool for getting to know your search population. Enter a keyword and the predictor tells you if it leans toward male or female searchers. With this kind of functionality, you can see how this tool straddles the line between market research and keyword research. Demographics Prediction comes in handy when you want to optimize a gender-specific piece of content. From a market research angle, you may be surprised to find that your entire product tends to get more searches from one gender, which could greatly affect the kind of content you produce for that term.

Yahoo! Clues28 was rolled out in November of 2010. In a nutshell, Yahoo! Clues gives demographic information behind the keywords, such as gender distribution by age, distribution by income level, and distribution by U.S. region, with a list of the top 10 states where that keyword search was conducted. You can really gain a lot of insight from this kind of data, and again, this is in some ways more a market research tool than a keyword research tool. One significant downside is that it can only search against the most popular queries on Yahoo! Therefore, you won’t be able to get data for more refined searches. For example, you can compare the terms “lawn care” and “gardening.” (You’ll find that both terms are searched by people making less than $75,000 per year, and that lawn care is generally a male keyword, while gardening is generally a female one.) But you can’t get analytics on the term “lawn & garden” because it isn’t in the search database yet. As Yahoo! continues to improve and expand on the service, it’s expected that this problem will occur less often. Honing in on Keyword Combinations Finding the right keyword combinations for your content is a nuanced effort that takes into account multiple data points for each search term. Primarily, search volume and competition drive the process for determining which keywords to optimize for the best results possible. Often the more search volume a keyword gets, the stiffer the competition for ranking. There are some keywords that you will never be able to rank for, short of a massive campaign and some big dollars. But with some creative thinking and thorough research, you should be able to find keyword phrases that you can use and that you can rank for relatively quickly. The key to honing in on keyword combinations that will work for your web content is in the analytic data from your research. As you research the terms on your keyword list, consider the following for each term:

Volume of searches for each term

When in the course of the year people search for a term (Has a predictable cycle emerged for surges in search activity?)

Where those searches are taking place (Are there geo-specific searches for the keyword?)

Who’s searching with this term (Are they men, women, teenagers, retirees, etc.?)

The competition for each of those terms (How many pages have already been optimized for that term or are solidly fixed in the rankings and would be incredibly difficult to leapfrog?)

Is this term likely to lead to conversion, if that’s what I’m after? (What’s the commercial intent? If it doesn’t tend to lead to a sale, is it worth optimizing?)

Ideally you’re trying to find terms that have decent volume but that very few have targeted yet, so that there’s less competition for that term. If you were to join everyone else going after the term with the biggest search volume, you could get stuck on page three of the results and receive no traffic or data for your effort. It’s good to start with comparing the volume and competition numbers and then dig deeper by looking at the other analytic data. By taking into account all the factors, you will be able to narrow down your list to the keywords you’re ready to tackle. To effectively nab the keywords that are going to work best for your business, you need to have a plan for how your keywords will work in your content, for now and the future. When you incorporate keywords into your content, you’re doing some level of search engine optimization. When we get to SEO strategies later in this book, we’ll dive in to some best practices for optimizing the metatags and page content for keywords. When it comes to optimizing keywords per page, the question we often get is: “How many keywords am I optimizing page to page?” The answer: You want to target one or two phrases, but no more than three keyword phrases per page. Honing in on keyword combinations is a bit like a puzzle with a hundred pieces that you have to fit together. Many factors play into selecting keyword combinations, and it can often be a matter of trial and error as much as careful planning. If a keyword doesn’t rank as you expected, you may have to revisit your research. Every time you create more content, keyword research should part of the process. Leveraging the Long Tail Search “Long-tail” keywords are the set of keyword searches that can be described as “niche searches.” By practical definition, a “short tail” keyword includes three or fewer words in the term, and a long tail keyword includes four or more. Longer and more specific keyword strings generally have much lower volume per term than short-tail searches. Long-tail searches happen all the time, but they are hard to track because they don’t often get enough volume to register in the analytic data. The sum total volume of these small-volume searches within a market can actually rival, in many cases, the volume for a popular short-tail term. It can’t be said across the board that long-tail search terms are low-volume because some long-tail searches do get quite a lot of volume; however, as a general rule this is true. Research will make it clear when a particular long-tail keyword bucks the trend and gets high search volume because analytic data will become available for the term. The long tail is a way of describing not just the number of words in a search term but more specifically the sum total of the low-volume, or niche, searches going on within a market. The term “long tail” was coined by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine.29 Referring to the chart he developed, the vertical axis represents popularity and the horizontal axis represents products (or in our case, keyword terms). The red part of the curve represents the common, high- volume terms or products. These are where the competition lies, because this is where the masses have flocked. But take a close look at the yellow-shaded long tail. It becomes clear that the sum total of niche searches is high enough to be a strong market on its own. If a website was able to rank for a large percentage of the long-tail searches, it could actually compete with the volume of popular short-tail terms.

Figure 14: Long Tail Chart by Chris Andersen, Wired For obvious reasons, this is hard to do, since long-tail searches are unique and somewhat unpredictable, with scant analytics behind them. Nonetheless, leveraging long-tail keywords is the way to boost traffic to a site and beat the competition. To start leveraging long-tail search terms, you have to be able to anticipate the complex variations on search that individuals will use. You can get clues to these varied searches through a number of ways. Market research is a great way to start. Look at the questions people are asking about your industry on answer sites. The phrases that people use to ask questions can be the same kinds of questions they enter directly into a search engine for answers. Note, too, the trends in how they share information about your industry through media like Twitter. Believe it or not, many clues are also actually sent directly to your business. Look at your customer service emails and other correspondence from individuals seeking information directly from you; they may use phrases that would appear in search. The comments you get on your company’s blog posts are fantastic clues to how people communicate about your product or industry, what they’re interested in, and what specific terms they’re using to express their interest. By setting up Google Analytics for your website, you can gain a lot of information about the inbound searches that have landed searchers on your domain. It’s a great tool for checking up on your keyword optimization efforts. Analytics reveals all the keyword searches that landed searchers on your site and whether or not they converted while there. In the list you’ll see which long-tail keywords in particular are bringing traffic to your site. If you see long-tail searches that are bringing quality, converting traffic, you can start incorporating those terms into more of your content. The search terms in this list can also help you anticipate variations on the terms and consider other ways to expand the long-tail phrases within your content. Ultimately, the way to leverage long-tail keywords is to have a lot of content pages. The way to make this happen is to focus on being the source of expert information in your industry. An expert consistently provides content that is engaging, fresh, and timely. By targeting your pages to the long-tail keywords you’ve discovered in your research, you’ll direct more and more searchers to your site. Find ways to incorporate long-tail keywords into all the content you generate, especially text-based content. Blog posts are a fantastic way to leverage long- tail keywords as you address the pressing issues your customers face. In your blog, offer key details about your industry – details that people might be searching for with long-tail terms. When you regularly update your blog, you expand the content on your domain and give yourself numerous opportunities to incorporate new terms into your content. Product descriptions are another great way to incorporate long-tail searches. Product descriptions that spell out the make, model, color, and other options give customers searching for specific product details the ability to find them. Product descriptions are a very practical way to optimize for long tail, and may even be one of the more predictable kinds of long-tail searches you can optimize for. For example, not too long ago, the projector bulb for my DLP television set died, which is not uncommon for these kinds of sets. I wanted to save a little money and decided to replace it myself. So, I entered the model number for the replacement bulb for my search query. In the results, I found a YouTube video from FixYourDLP.com, which was optimized to my model number. The video gave simple instructions for the do-it-yourselfer who wanted to replace the bulb in their television set. At the end of the video was a link to their website, where I could purchase the exact bulb I needed. It turns out that FixYourDLP.com has a YouTube channel with instructional videos optimized for every model number, for which they sell parts. Figure 15: FixYourDLP YouTube Channel The moral of the story is that FixYourDLP.com was able to use a long-tail search for a model number to get targeted, converting traffic to their site. The volume for a particular model number is generally low, whereas competing for a higher volume short-tail term, like “DLP replacement bulb,” would be more challenging. Nonetheless, they capitalized on a logical long-tail-search string and were able to gain a sale. And it turns out they are able to gain many, many sales. I was recently speaking at an ecommerce conference and told the FixYourDLP.com story above to the audience. Lo and behold, the president of MI Technologies was sitting in the front row – they own and operate FixYourDLP.com. Ali Irani- Tehrani came up to me afterwards and told me the rest of the story. His company has grown from $1 million in sales in 2007 to an estimated $22 million in sales in 2011 to become one of the world’s largest replacement lamp resellers for the rear projection TV market. Today they are phasing out their old core business as a TV parts distributor and focusing their staff of 100 exclusively on the replacement lamp market. If there were any doubters reading this book, that should make you sit up and take notice. You can’t get much more long-tail or niche than that, and video content focused on those phrases has driven the amazing growth of their company. By having a lot of great content on your site that anticipates long-tail searches, your content can be found when those terms do get searched. As you continuously add new content with fresh long-tail keywords, you increase your chances of grabbing more and more targeted search traffic. Conclusion Keywords play a major role in your content marketing strategy. I argue that having more content means more opportunities to optimize for different keywords. It means more opportunities to optimize for long-tail searches. Of course, all of this means more chances that your pages will be found in search. When you’re strategic about which terms you can target, your content will start to rise in the search results. You just have to know how to find the right keywords and use them to shape your pages for the searchers you want to target. From the toolkit provided in this chapter, you’re now ready jump in and make a list of keywords to begin targeting. 5

Determining Your Content Marketing Objectives

“One of the biggest content development challenges for businesses of all sizes is, “What do we write about?” Focusing the content marketing strategy around primary company objectives helps simplify this process. The road map is clearly defined. The writing process is streamlined. The question shifts from “What do we write about?” to “How can we tailor this content for our readers while meeting our branding and marketing goals?” The result? Smart content marketing strategies help companies increase their brand awareness. Their search engine traffic increases. They sell more products and service more leads. Most importantly, their content marketing strategy helps them deepen their relationship with their market, encouraging a higher level of engagement – and happier customers. It’s a win/win for all.” Heather Lloyd-Martin, President and CEO, SuccessWorks, SEOCopywriting.com

Now that you have keyword research under your belt, it’s time to consider your content plan. Keyword research will shape how you develop content in two ways: on one hand it shapes how your product is perceived or how your brand fits into the market as a whole, and what niche you can fill. On the other hand, your keyword and market research is an ongoing process that takes place as you develop individual pieces – or a series – of content. Thanks to your research, you know the trajectory your content will take. But it’s necessary to understand that keyword research has informed but not formed your content marketing strategy. Your overall strategy drives the content creation and publication process, answering the questions:

Why create content?

How do I put my content to work? Why Create Content? If your business has been around for the last 10 years, you’ve probably got a website. It’s not hard to imagine that the content on your site – or even the way that you have been managing your new pages – has hardly changed since it first went live. In the last several years, the philosophy behind website design and content creation has evolved. Has your philosophy evolved with the times? Contemporary websites offer more than just information about your company, contact information, and your product offerings. They now provide resources for solving customer problems, can be hubs for social activity, and, most importantly, are rich with fresh and engaging content that is regularly updated so that customers will frequently return. Content strategy, then, begins with the question: What’s the point of your website? Many business owners think that the purpose of their website is self-evident, that the questions “Why do you have a website?” and “Why do you produce web content?” are rhetorical ones that don’t need answering. I think just the opposite. Businesses must answer these questions first and foremost. At our company, when our clients come to us for help with their content strategy, we ask them right off the bat why they want to create a content strategy. Many times, at the beginning stage, our clients don’t have a great answer. They tell us things like, “We know that content is king, so we need to add some more content.” Or, “Our competitors are putting some really great things on the web, and we need a response to keep competitive.” While both answers contain truth, they miss the mark when it comes to the strategy. We tell our clients that the question is actually quite simple, but the answer is not. Organizations should develop a content strategy because:

Web content provides the customer with clean, logical access to products and services and should funnel them to the site’s conversion pages.

Web content provides information that answers some of the toughest problems customers face.

Web content positions the organization as the trusted expert in its industry. Notice that the purpose of your web content centers on the customer’s experience. Just like keyword research attempts to identify what your customers are searching for in your industry, your website can provide the answer to those searches. A smart content strategy begins with understanding what the customer needs rather than what you want to offer them. How Do I Put My Content to Work? In order for your content to deliver, you need a strategy with specific objectives that guides your content creation. By implementing measurable objectives, you will be able to assess the success of your various projects and discover what’s working for you and what’s not. In chapter eight we follow up our content development section with a discussion on assessing your content and measuring its success. Before we can get there, we need to consider the measurable objectives that will drive your content development. The objectives for your content apply both at the macro level for your whole content enterprise, and at the micro level for each individual piece of content. Your content will be working for you when it:

Develops and increases your brand awareness

Generates traffic to your site and garners new customer leads or sales

Enhances your online reputation

Encourages natural links and optimizes your search engine rankings

Increases your competitive advantage

When you produce any single piece of content, it should accomplish one or more of these goals, and the sum total of all your content should accomplish all of them. An investment in a content marketing strategy is largely a matter of time and effort, and you want to be sure that every minute you devote to creating content yields a product that works to your advantage. By basing your content creation on your main objectives, your content development campaign will be much more efficient, maximizing the return on your investment. Keep your objectives at the forefront of every piece of content that you develop. Before you create new content, hold it up against your objectives and ask:

Will this content position my company as a thought leader?

Does it help solve my market’s challenges?

Will it generate qualified traffic to my site?

Is this content better or different than what my competitors are offering?

Begin by taking a step back and looking at your overall content portfolio. Determine if you’ve created content that fulfills these objectives in one way or another. Are there any holes? Have you neglected any particular objective? For example, has it been a while since you’ve tended to your product pages? Your objectives will guide you, not only as you create new content but also as you evaluate the current content you have. It’s critical that each piece of content works toward your objectives. Let’s go through each one of the objectives in detail to understand how they work in your strategy. Create Mindshare and Branding How do you want your customers – and the world, for that matter – to perceive you? On a philosophical level, your branding lives in the content. This is why the first objective for your content is to increase your mindshare and hone your brand. BusinessDictionary.com defines mindshare as the “Informal measure of the amount of talk, mention, or reference an idea, firm, or product generates in public or media.” For your content marketing strategy, you need to get people talking, mentioning or referencing, linking to and especially sharing your branded content. As your brand consistently provides valuable information to your customers and potential customers, you will increase your mindshare. Before you can increase your mindshare online, you need to assess your current state. By searching for your brand online and tracking all the mentions it gets, as compared to similar searches for your competition, you will be able to quantify your mindshare. This kind of assessment needs to be done with some degree of regularity to keep track of how your brand and your product fit in with your community. Increasing mindshare is all about distribution and promotion of your web pages. By consistently generating shareable content and ensuring that you distribute it through multiple channels and promote it throughout your network, your voice and your brand will make up an ever-increasing part of the conversation about your industry. The more you promote and distribute your content, the more you will boost your mindshare online, while at the same time strengthening the message that your brand is the expert solutions provider for your industry. Believe it or not, I’ve heard some professionals say that their success within the industry speaks for itself; there is no need, they say, to restate that they’re the expert. I tell them that confidence is great, and their track record may be great too, but if they want to remain the expert in their industry, they need to become a source of information for their customers. The reality is that each organization is competing with all kinds of content that attempts to engage its potential customers. If that organization’s content isn’t where these potential customers are looking, they will go somewhere else for expertise. By promoting their brand, businesses can remain a trusted solution in their industry. More and more people look online not only for products and services but to keep current in their field, finding what’s hot right now, sharing tips on how problems are solved, and what tools work best. If an organization wants brand recognition, the way to do it is to be a source of information online and join the conversations that are happening in the industry. The best way to emphasize an organization’s expertise is to produce and distribute content that demonstrates an inside knowledge of the keys to success within the industry and that offers solutions to the problems customers in that industry face. Generate Traffic, Leads and Sales You might think that traffic and ultimately revenue should have been the first points on the list. After all, isn’t the fundamental goal of a website to get people to do business with you? Yes, it is, but it’s much more than that. Many times, businesses end the objectives for their content right there. They leave it at, “We have to have a site, right? We let people know what we do and how to find us, right?” You want your content to be present in the search results. You want users to click to your site. You want them to convert. But the story doesn’t end there. A good strategy encourages visitors to the site by creating engaging content. This doesn’t happen by just having a cool website. Content has to be found where people are looking. Remember, from the search engine results page, searchers only have a limited amount of information at their disposal to make a decision about clicking on your page. By optimizing your pages for search, you increase your chances people will find them, and that when they appear in the results page, they will communicate the nature of the content to the searcher and drive traffic to your site. You can increase traffic to your site by taking advantage of social media as a promotional tool for spreading shareable content exponentially (one friend shares with two friends, who each share with two more friends, and so on). Promotion and distribution proactively move content into the arenas where your potential customers will find it even before they go to a search engine. Certainly, increasing traffic is important for your site; however, unless you have advertisements on your site, and you’re getting paid for page views, you won’t get much out of increased traffic apart from reinforcing brand recognition. The ultimate goal for increasing traffic is to increase conversion and generate sales for your business. For example, your Twitter account works for you in many ways – it can be found in search, it keeps your followers informed about your content, and allows you to interact and engage with them on many levels – but for all the good stuff you get out of Twitter, the bottom line is that it does not convert by itself! The content that you promote on Twitter, then, will need to invite conversion from your pages. Your content should always work to funnel the traffic that you’re getting to your conversion pages. If your company provides a service that doesn’t necessarily sell products on your site, lead generation is especially important. When it comes to lead generation, or Lead Gen, quality leads are the best. There are a number of ways to get leads, and many of them are not that great. For instance, the least valuable lead your content can provide is an email address that you obtain in exchange for a piece of free content, say, a white paper. This could be seen by the customer as a hurdle to obtaining the content, and they may have given out the address consciously intending to opt out. From their perspective, they have exactly what they want in hand: the free white paper. Yes, for the company it’s still a lead, but it’s not the highest quality lead. That being said, there are many great ways to get leads as well. For instance, a high quality lead is one where the user intends to engage your company and wants you to contact them. For this, a conversion page where the user completes a form works well. The page can ask for some data (such as the size of their business, their budget, or their title, for example) as well as the contact information. The best lead forms end with a submission button labeled “Contact Me.” You know in this case that the user fully expects to be contacted when they submit, and should welcome your follow-up. That should be the goal of your key content pages. Ultimately, your content will only add value to your business when it’s relevant, timely, and engaging. Content that fails in this regard won’t have a chance at going viral in social media channels, and rather than gaining valuable traffic will instead lead to high bounce rates. On the other hand, when you generate engaging content, you will find bounce rates drop and conversion rates go up; you’ll see your content take off in social media. You can objectively measure traffic increases and conversion rates. That makes this objective a great one for your strategy, not only as you develop your content but also as you measure its success. When you see positive results, you can rest assured that your other goals for your content – the ones that are harder to measure – are reaping the benefits, too. That is, if you see increased traffic to your site and an increased rate of conversion when that traffic lands there, then your brand is strengthened, your mindshare has increased. Proactively Manage Your Online Reputation If there’s one thing that can be said about the advent of social media, it’s that conversations are everywhere on the Internet. These conversations can take the form of comments on blog posts, forums for customer rants, or user reviews, for example. The topics for these conversations can be about anything imaginable – from varieties of tropical fish food to nuclear-waste cleanup. This means that there is already a conversation going on about your industry, and possibly this conversation includes your brand. Whether you like it or not. You don’t have ultimate control over this conversation, but you do have the opportunity to participate in the conversation. Online reputation management is all about your presence online. The sum total of all content about you, including mentions of your brand in places that you don’t control, makes up your business’s biomass online. As you develop your content, you need to think in terms of the big picture: maintain a high- quality reputation, ensuring that at every turn your customers and potential customers will find good mentions, excellent content, and stellar reviews. You need to ensure that the cream of the crop rises in the search results, so you don’t find any negativity there instead. Obviously, this doesn’t always happen. The Internet is full of places where consumers can vent their frustrations with products or services they’ve received. There are whole forums devoted to customer complaints. Customers do, in fact, take the time to comment on a product they’ve received, updating the original content with user-generated content (UGC) that is completely out of the control of the vendor. While this is great for consumer awareness, it can be challenging to present a balanced view of your product if there is vocalized negative press out there, especially when it seems to outweigh the good press. Keep in mind that reputation management is a major industry in its own right, and there are whole strategies to clear up a smeared reputation. This book does not aim to give a crash course in reputation management, nor are we giving you a comprehensive strategy for it. A reputation that has been marred often requires a major effort to clean up, months of work and, unfortunately, a considerable financial investment. For the scope of this book, I want to concentrate on how your content strategy can fit into your reputation management plan to prevent such problems. The mantra for reputation management is simple: don’t wait for a problem to develop. Proactive reputation management ensures that the organization’s own content fills the search engine results page when that organization’s name or key people get searched. By ensuring that the organization’s content is visible, it becomes much harder for negative content to rise up to the page one search results. Most searches generally don’t go past page one of the search engine results page. Organizations (even individuals) that want to manage their reputation ought to focus on keeping page one filled with quality content that reinforces a positive brand image. When customers search for your brand, they should find nothing but positive information about your firm, and a smart content strategy ensures that they will. In order for your organization or you as an individual to achieve this, your content should be distributed through a number of channels. Through social media, businesses can communicate to their customers and manage the communication that flows to the customer. Social media sites typically allow you to create your own profile page. Profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are great examples of starting points for developing a social media platform. If your industry has any industry-specific social media sites, these are certainly places to have a profile, as well. You have an advantage in social media when it comes to addressing negative content. Social media is about communicating to a network and receiving feedback from the network in the form of comments. Remember: you have the right on your social site to disallow comments, so you can manage this level of negativity fairly easily just by keeping up on your social media sites. When negative comments pop up on your content, make sure you address them with care. Take me, Arnie Kuenn, for example. A search for my name returns with a variety of content – most of which I have created and shared with others. A search for “Arnie Kuenn” shows social profiles and articles I’ve created filling the results page. The No. 1 result is my LinkedIn profile followed by our team page on VerticalMeasures.com. Next is my speaker bio for a conference I spoke at, and fourth is my Twitter profile. Nearly all the content on this page is content that I have developed and promoted, which is exactly how it should be. Figure 16: Google Search Results for Keyword Phrase Arnie Kuenn The same content strategy is true for the reputation of your brand as well as key executives within your organization. Again, to get your content working for your brand, fill the search page with your organization’s content and monitor the activity. For key executives, optimizing profiles or bio pages on your company website works well for ensuring that those pages rank in search. Social media profiles are the other obvious place that key executives will find their way in search. Social media can be challenging as work and personal lives overlap in these spheres. For the sake of the brand, social media activity will have to be kept at a reasonable level of professionalism. For the long term, your content strategy can beat negative content before it has a chance to infiltrate the search results. By keeping a finger to the wind, through tracking mentions of your brand in search, you can ensure that your content positions you strategically to avoid any bumps in the road. Monitor the search results for your brand and the keywords that will find your brand and your product. By keeping close track of this activity on a regular basis, you’ll get an early warning in the event that your content slips from the rankings, and of any negative content you may need to manage. Content for Search Engine Rankings Any set of objectives for a content strategy would be incomplete if it ignored search engine optimization (SEO). Without considering SEO at the development stage, the possibilities for your content are diminished. Extending our bicycle metaphor from earlier, search and social optimization are like the tires of your bicycle. You can have a really hot bike – carbon frame, alloy parts, low spoke count wheels, aero rims: the works; but if your tires are low on air, you’re going nowhere fast. By ensuring that each piece of content is optimized for search and has links to it, you give that content the best chance to be found in natural search. Content development and search engine optimization go hand in hand. On- page SEO is about assuring that each content page has the nuts and bolts in place so that the content will have the best chance for ranking highly in search. This means that your content needs to get plenty of links, both internal (your pages linking to other pages on your site) and external (other websites linking to your pages), and that onsite SEO factors – including titles, optimized metadata, and assurance that the pages don’t have excessive load time – need to be taken care of. As the content is developed, keeping these SEO factors in mind will ensure that it goes live in the best condition to improve your search engine rankings. On a larger scale, the freshness of the site’s pages can contribute to a domain’s ranking as well. As mentioned in chapter one, part of SEO includes encouraging the search engine bots to frequently crawl your site. Every time a search engine bot crawls a site and finds fresh content, the site will be considered more relevant, thus increasing its chances for having its content rank higher. Bots have a phenomenal amount of data to troll, so in an effort to conserve energy, they revisit a site more frequently only if that site has been providing new content to index. If the bot doesn’t find fresh content on a site, it will lengthen the cycle that it returns to index again. If it finds fresh content, it increases the frequency it returns, even to the point that it may, hypothetically, never leave. Just by frequently producing new content, you give your whole site a boost in the search rankings. On top of fresh content, Google and other search engines pay close attention to links in order to understand the importance of any page on the web. Every link is a vote for that page, so it’s worthwhile to make an effort to attract links to your pages. Link attraction is about focusing on developing content that users want to share, which encourages natural linking. When someone consciously links to a piece of content, it’s the strongest way to show that a piece of content has real value. The first step to attracting links to your web pages is to ensure that the content you want to develop is link-worthy. Top-10 lists, infographics, and videos are among the kinds of content that often garner links from people. But it generally boils down to two attributes that work for content: humor or information. For example the last two pieces of content that were shared with me today were a funny clip from a Monty Python movie and a blog post about the Google Panda update. However, before content can attract links, people have to know that it exists. This is why link attraction actually centers on content promotion and distribution, which is a matter of outward communication. In chapters ten and eleven, I go into detail about tactics for promoting and distributing your content. In chapter twelve, I walk you through link building the right way. At the core of link building, your content has to have value to the webmaster you would like to see a link from. The value that you can offer is, once again, your expert ability to provide a solution to a problem that the webmaster’s visitors might be facing. Before you can reasonably make a request for a link from a blogger, for example, you need to do some research to determine how your content can add value to their blog. Imagine that your company produces organic soil for a variety of garden and landscaping applications. You are interested in getting a link to your content from a blogger whose blog theme happens to be organic gardening. So, you develop a list of the top 10 most important ways to winterize your organic vegetable garden. The content is useful to the blogger so he links to your content. Now to really maximize your content – say No. 4 on your list is “be certain to mulch over your perennial herb garden to protect it through the winter” – include a link from there to the page on your website where excellent mulch can be purchased. That is the way to do link building. Share of Voice: Know Your Competitors and Community Share of voice refers to just how much of your brand is mentioned in the context of a product search as compared to other brands. For your business to compete, you need to occupy as much of the share of voice for your industry as possible. By analyzing your share of voice and the share your competitors hold, you can identify how you fit in to your community online. Your objective is to produce content that increases your share of voice and engages the community in a way that competes. Share of voice is in some ways difficult to measure, but there are a number of ways to quantify it. You can begin by going to all the places that your brand is mentioned (blogs, reviews, websites, etc.) and chart your findings, tagging each mention as positive, negative, or neutral. Also, track the keywords associated with each mention. Clearly, this would be a daunting task, and fortunately there are a number of tools available to help you with this, such as SocialMention.com and Trackur.com. You can then perform the same analysis for your major competitors to see what part of the conversation they hold and which part of that conversation is yours. Are people talking about your brand in terms of your product offering? If they are talking more about you than your competitors, are the comments positive or negative? Knowing your baseline share of voice requires monitoring it over time, so you would need to rerun this analysis on a regular basis, perhaps monthly. As you identify the areas that need strengthening, you can develop content to meet that need. By going a step further and running a Competitor Analysis, you can get a very comprehensive picture of the community environment and your place within it. As you compare yourself to your competitors, look at a broad spectrum of analytics, including:

Share of voice and total mentions

Search rankings for different keyword phrases

What kinds of content are getting the most traffic and links

This kind of analysis will give you great insight into what kind of content to create, especially if you have one competitor who’s beating you out in one particular area. Managing your share of voice and keeping up with your competitors is a bit of a chore, but it’s critical for your content marketing strategy. When you have the data, it will enable you to see what kind of content is attracting visitors both to your site and your competitors’. Developing a Content Marketing Mindset As I’ve been saying, if you have a website, you’re a publisher, and you have to think like one. This means producing fresh content on a regular basis. Print publishers create content to survive, because that’s their business. On the Internet, it’s the same for you. You need to keep thinking about content ideas at all times. You should encourage your entire staff to do the same. A content marketing mindset means always being on the lookout for new content possibilities. Keep a little notebook on hand or a voice recorder so that when you get a great idea for a top-10 list, you can record the idea. When you attend a conference, bring your camera so you that can post images of the event on your blog. You can’t create something cool once and let it sit idly online, expecting it to be cutting edge or consistently relevant to users. Instead, your job is to keep producing fresh material, even repurposing your best content, so that it reappears in a fresh form and gives you as many different opportunities to be found online as possible. The bottom line is that achieving the goals in a content marketing strategy takes some serious effort. For any business owner, to add publisher to the number of hats they already have to wear and to add information to their list of key products requires a major commitment of time and energy. I’ve found that most small businesses don’t have the budget to add more bodies to their staff in order to tackle the objectives in a content marketing program, so it becomes a matter of juggling the resources that they already have in their staff. So, how can businesses make it work? Top down buy-in is critical, especially for small businesses. Key executives need to recognize that a content marketing strategy is crucial to their success on the Internet, and they need to understand that they, too, will have to participate. Once the top has bought in, you can get the rest of the staff involved. There is a place for everyone to help create content. Here are some ideas:

You can engage key industry executives in a Twitter interview.

Poll the staff to find out who would be willing to write posts for your blog on a rotating basis.

Create a video in which the shipping manager explains the shipping process from the facility.

Have your staff set up various social media profiles to help with content promotion.

Above all, top-down buy-in means that you can look to anyone and -everyone to provide inspiration and new ideas for content. Foster a fun environment where creative expression is valued. The more you encourage creativity, the more you can gain from your content marketing strategy. Conclusion The best way to manage the creative process is to assign an individual in your organization the role of content strategist, or editor-in-chief. This person can develop an editorial calendar and ensure that your organization stays on track generating new content on a regular basis. The content strategist can assign tasks and coordinate deadlines for publishing. Factoring in your staff resources and budget, an editorial calendar will help establish a frequency for content publication that your organization will be able to manage. 6

Developing Engaging Content to Meet Your Goals

“To develop engaging content, I think you need to do two things: Appeal to human motivations. Strike a balance between original thinking and structure. What are the things that motivate us? We want to be liked, appreciated, secure, attractive, comfortable, respected, happy, and healthy. To feel important or gain knowledge, make money or save time, have fun or gratify curiosity. As you develop your content, ask yourself, Which human motivation am I connecting with? For the “balance” thing: Consider the blog title, “The Top 25 Best Practices for Harnessing the Creativity of the Master Classical Composers.” The original title appeals to the right brain and the list of 25 appeals to the left brain. This is totally balanced and something I would definitely want to read. Make those 25 items really interesting, and then I may even link to it. Utilize these elements and you’ll develop engaging content every time.” Jon Wuebben, CEO of Content Launch, a web content development and marketing firm

Get Going With Content Engaging content is genuine and believable. It appeals to our human sense of curiosity and can even inspire awe in us. The very best content has an un-self- conscious immediacy that makes it accessible to the audience it engages. Content that excels in this way has a tendency to get noticed, passed around, and, yes, attract links too. The content development process centers on the ability to keep inspired. It’s about seeing opportunities to nab raw materials and turn them into marketable content, like bringing a digital camera to a conference or keeping a small video camera in the desk at the office. All it takes is a proactive mentality and a little creativity. Sure, inspiration can be something you stumble upon, but it isn’t the only way to generate awesome content. You can proactively find ways to get inspired and stay inspired. Inspiration starts with finding the hidden gems in your existing content and ditching the content that stinks. Then it’s about setting up a plan for how you can keep the good stuff coming. Keep your mind and eyes open for new ideas and you will be on your way to making it happen. When it comes to inspirational stories about content, I can think of nothing better than my friend George Wright’s story from his days at Blendtec. He’s the one who had the genius idea to post videos online from the blender testing lab. Sounds kind of oddball, but these short clips have become an Internet sensation and were recently ranked by Advertising Age as the No. 1 viral ad in the history of the Internet.30 I recently had a chance to catch up with George and he gave me the skinny on how he found inspiration. I’d like to share that with you: Figure 17: Will It Blend?

The Will it Blend? story began the day I started up a new marketing department at Blendtec. I walked into a company that had great products but was largely an unknown brand competing in a highly competitive marketplace. Right off the bat, our primary goal had to be building brand awareness. With a microscopic budget, it was obvious that using typical brand-building techniques was not going to be an option. We began with a brand review and found that everything associated with the Blendtec brand was standardized, from the website, to the literature, and all the way down to the business cards. I highly recommend a consistency review. Think about it, before you invite guests to come to your house, you make sure your living room is presentable, right? With consistency in place, we were now ready for some awareness. Will it Blend? started as a strategy document. I spent several days brainstorming and aligning objectives and strategies for the company and the marketing department. It was obvious that we needed to show how this blender was different and that it has unmatched power and performance. While I was developing this strategy, I happened to visit the product testing lab and noticed sawdust on the floor. When I asked what was going on, I was told that this was a normal destructive test, used to stress the components to ensure that the blenders could withstand excessive stress and force. In other words, they had just stuck a broom in a blender. The light bulb came on, and the remainder of the strategy quickly came together. I asked the owner, Tom Dickson, to come in and perform some extreme blending experiments with the camera running. We gave him a white lab coat and some safety glasses and asked him to explain what he was doing and why it was so remarkable. Our plan was to blend anything and everything. Although nobody at the company really understood the proposal, they were willing to go with it – largely because it only cost about $50 to put together. As soon as I saw the first cut of the video, I knew that we had a solid success on our hands. We created a micro-site and posted the first five videos. Within just one week, we had more than a million views on YouTube. As the videos gained popularity, we experienced a 700 percent increase in online sales. We experienced massive growth in all areas of the business, including our commercial lines, but the largest growth came from our web orders. Building the brand simplified the sales process. Instead of our salesmen trying to introduce a little-known Blendtec brand, their customers were asking them, “Is this the blender that I saw on YouTube blending up marbles?” Some of the videos that we produced were instant hits. We got our hands on a new iPod when everybody was standing in line to get one, and we dropped ours in a blender. Our views for that video came in so fast we could hardly keep up. Normally, when we went live with a new video, we would first post it to willitblend.com, then to YouTube. I recall that for some reason the iPod video took YouTube several hours to upload and go live. By the time YouTube finally had the video up, six or seven of our fans that had already copied the video from our website and had it uploaded and live on their YouTube channel before the official Blendtec video and were getting tons of views. Before Will it Blend?, we had to do all of our promotion ourselves. Now our fans became our greatest marketers and they loved their new role! The secret to the success of Will it Blend? is simple: Create compelling content that fills a business objective. If your content is truly compelling, people will not only watch it, they’ll pass your marketing message along to their friends. You don’t have to be a large company with a huge budget to be successful using the new tools of marketing. It’s been five years since the first videos went live – and the campaign continues to deliver results. Sales continue to break records every year. This viral marketing campaign literally transformed an old company brand into a new, exciting entity. Brand awareness remains at an all-time high and the Will it Blend? campaign is now considered a classic. Advertising Age recently ranked it the No. 1 viral campaign in the history of the Internet, five years after it launched. Look at the list of companies that Blendtec ranked above: Evian, Old Spice, Doritos. That’s pretty impressive for a $50 marketing campaign from a small Utah company.

I know a lot of people hear George’s story and think, “Wow, I need my content to go viral like that!” Sure you do, but if that’s all you hear in this testimony, you might be missing the point. For the record, content doesn’t just go viral; viral is something that no one can predict. Even George could never have known on the day he first filmed a broom handle getting turned to sawdust that it would be a total sensation. The real moral of the story is that he created great content that could possibly go viral. It was interesting and original enough to take off. George capitalized on the excitement happening at Blendtec and took the opportunity to turn it in to quality video content. And, most importantly, he demonstrated just how tough their blenders really are to the entire world. Let’s be honest, content is the fun part of this business! It’s where you get to showcase your expertise. It’s your big opportunity to invite the world to get to know your company and to exhibit how your team is taking on the toughest problems in your industry and providing the solutions people are looking for. A big part of any content marketing strategy is trying new ideas. When you’re willing to make a leap into uncharted territory, you can be surprised by the results. It’s not about trial and error; it’s about trial and testing. When you try a new idea, measure its success. As I’ll detail in chapter eight, I recommend that every time you create content, you follow up with measurement. That way, you’ll discover what works for your target audience, and you can continue to produce the content that works. The results will guide you into your next endeavor. If you don’t measure, then you’re just throwing your ideas against the wall to see what sticks. You can’t be afraid to try new things in a content marketing strategy. Heck, that’s true for any marketing strategy. By measuring your success, you’ll reduce the risk of future wasted efforts. You have great content to provide and you want it to be seen by as many people as possible, right? Most importantly, you want your great content to reach not only a lot of people, but the right people. Success is not just in the number of hits. Ultimately, if your page gets a thousand hits, but only 10 people buy your product, it was those 10 people that were the most important visitors. It may sound like I’m boiling this down to quality versus quantity. I’m not. I don’t like the idea that you have to pick quality or quantity. In my opinion it’s a false dichotomy. I’m of the opinion that in this business it’s about quantity and quality. You don’t need to worry about having one big, fat, fantastic idea that gets a million hits on day one. Instead, to go with a baseball analogy, your job is to get a single. Then get another single, and another. Your fourth single is a run scored. You’re more likely to strike out when you try for the big, out-of-the- park grand slam. Since baseball is a statistician’s sport, let’s look at some stats. In the 2010 MLB season:

There were 165,360 total at bats.

There were 132 grand slams.

There were 4,620 home runs.

And based on the overall batting average (.257), there were 42,498 hits.

From this data, we can say that about one in four at bats will result in a hit (which implies 3 out of 4 attempts went for naught), while about one in 36 at bats will result in a homerun. Only one in 1,253 at bats results in a grand slam! This means that statistically it’s better to work your way around the bases one single at a time. I’m not asking you to lower the standard on your content. If you’re going to work your way around the bases, so to speak, the key is to actually get the single and then keep getting them. This means you consistently produce and distribute compelling, engaging content that’s targeted to your audience. If you get a grand slam, sweet! I just don’t recommend you base your business plan on it. So, what is compelling content? Primarily, compelling translates to mean “shareworthy.” This is a term we use in the industry to mean that it appeals to an audience and inspires them to share it with their network. From your market research, you have a pretty good idea of what kind of content already interests your target audience. You know what they’re sharing, what gets “liked” and what they link to. You know if they are into a particular media form: maybe videos are hot with your audience, or maybe they love infographics. That’s where you should begin. Why Storytelling Is So Important A couple of years ago while at a conference in California, I met Simon Kelly, the Chief Enthusiasm Officer at Story Worldwide. We sat on the same content marketing panel. At one point, he leaned over to me and handed me his business card. I took one look, and knew it was a keeper. It stood out so much that to this day I still have it tacked above my credenza. The funny thing is, the back of his business card faces out. You want to know why? Because printed on the back it says:

I HAD MY TIRES SLASHED BY THE KGB; LOCKED MYSELF WHILE NAKED IN A HOTEL FIRE ESCAPE IN LAS VEGAS; WORKED AS A PASTRY CHEF AT A TOP LONDON RESTAURANT; AND WAS A DEEPSEA DIVER. Which one isn’t true? storyworldwide.com/simon.kelly

Whenever I look over at this card, I smile and remind myself that it’s all about telling a great story. People love stories. When we share our lives with one another, it’s through stories. We meet over coffee to talk about what happened to us at work; we call our friend up to tell a story about our fun night last night. Compelling stories persuade and even have the power to change deeply-held beliefs. To really engage your audience, deliver stories that they want to read, watch or hear – stories they want to be a part of and will enjoy so much, that they will be inspired to share them. One of the fundamental goals of content marketing, of all advertising, is to create fans that will spread your stories for free, lowering your marketing expenses. Content that appeals to our social nature is ideal for storytelling, so find the stories about your employees, your company, your services and your products and tell them! “Story is more powerful than the brand, the best story wins. I am – simply, unabashedly, out loud, screaming, and shouting – saying, focus on the quality of your story telling. Turn that complex idea into storytelling. And if you don’t believe me, talk to an effective trial lawyer, even if she or he works on complex commercial cases.” Tom Peters, Management Guru, Sept 3, 2010 I know you are only halfway through this book, but think about the parts you have enjoyed the most. The sections that really stick out. I’m willing to bet it’s the stories. Sure, for your marketing campaign, you will have to get down to the nitty gritty and describe your services or give detailed specifications for your products. Just as in this book, I had to cover the nuts and bolts of keyword research, for example, but in the end, the most powerful marketing contextualizes the details in storytelling. You already have all the tools in place to start developing solid content. As we’ve discussed in the chapters leading up to this one, you’ve done your research, you know your audience, and you’ve established objectives for how your content will promote your brand. At this stage, you are ready to launch into creating content. If you already have a website and a blog, you have a head start because you have content assets that have been working for you. However, before you can start implementing a new or revised content strategy, the best thing to do is to take stock of your current assets. Knowing your assets will have a major influence on your content development. Content Inventory: Evaluate Your Current Assets Websites grow by accumulating new pages. As the site grows to meet the current needs of its users, old and unused pages remain in the background. Rarely, if ever, does anyone look back to see if the older pages are relevant. A content inventory of your entire site is the ideal place to start before you launch new pages. It will give you a clear picture of your assets and has some major advantages:

You’ll know which content on your site is working for you and which will need some help

The inventory will help you keep track of SEO concerns, discovering discarded pages and incorrect meta information

You’ll gain a comprehensive snapshot of your site, including all the deep pages that don’t get much traffic

When you keep your inventory up to date, you’ll have a much easier time keeping your pages up to date

Take inventory of every page on your domain and assess the content. Obviously this can be time-consuming, depending on the size of your site, but you can save yourself some time by being organized. Good old spreadsheets work really well for recording and sorting your findings about each page. Track every URL and identify the major points on each page. Look over the text, identifying the content’s purpose to see if it’s communicating what it was intended to communicate. For each URL, track:

Page title and URL

Document or content type (press release, article, product page, sales copy, how-to video, Etc.)

Topic and primary keyword

A very brief summary of the content

Date the content was created and/or last revised

Date of when it should be revisited (or expected expiration date)

Meta data usage: Are your pages optimized?

Is the page getting backlinks? You can check the raw numbers by URL using tools like SEOmoz

Who’s responsible for governing the page, caring for it?

What you will do with the content after the audit: Keep, revise, repurpose, etc. (You can make a gut reaction as you read the page, and then reassess after you’ve taken full stock of your content)

Identify “R.O.T.” This is a common acronym used to describe content that is Redundant, Outdated (no longer timely), or Trivial (serves no useful purpose).

A lot of time, the proliferation of content on a site leads to redundancy or trivialness. Especially if content is created for SEO purposes, there could be a lot of pages that are, shall we say, less than stellar. You will probably find a number of pages about very similar topics. You might find keyword-driven pages that would qualify only as junk today. Users wouldn’t find this kind of content interesting or valuable. The question is, What pages should be kept on the site? Keep content that:

Is relevant, timely, useful (the opposite of R.O.T.)

Meets your organizational goals

Adds value to your customer’s experience.

If the content accurately describes your product offering, or works toward demonstrating your expertise, then it has passed the first test. A lot of websites get out of date and inaccurate pretty fast, and if the site’s been around for a while, chances are there’s content out there that’s long been forgotten. Much of this content can be updated to make it relevant. But a page that’s gone out of date may still have real value. While the copy on the page might not be perfectly relevant, that piece of content may be getting lots of external links to it. Sometimes there’s no feasible way to update the content, and it just needs to be taken down. In those cases, take precautions when removing it. If the page has a lot of backlinks (I go into detail on backlink analysis in chapter twelve), you can set up a 301 redirect31 (ask your webmaster about this) to a more relevant or updated page. This way you preserve much of the backlink value and still deliver quality, relevant content to the website visitors. For pages that don’t actually meet your goals, you might be able to repurpose them to bring them in line with your specific goals. This could mean, for example, that you have posted a relatively dull and very technical description of a new technology you’ve rolled out. The content is relevant and describes your product, but it isn’t something in its current state that gets much attention. But maybe it’s a great candidate for repurposing into, say, a white paper that you can then promote in order to raise its profile and start getting traffic. In a content audit, you’re trying to think like a site visitor. Once you get someone to land on your page, what will their experience be? User experience is critical to the success of your business. You may have great ideas, but if the content is difficult to find or results in a confusing navigational path, the user may not find your pages to be helpful in the way that you intend. You may want to reconsider how you present material to your visitors so that they can get to the meat of your content quickly and navigate smoothly through your site. On top of assessing your website, you would do well to consider your offsite assets, too. Using a separate spreadsheet, look at your media assets, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Today, companies often have multiple social media accounts, and sometimes they don’t even have access to them anymore. At one point, for example, someone in the organization set up a profile and then forgot about it, lost the password, and, to make matters worse, they have since left the organization. If you’re trying to take control of your online reputation and brand, you need to take inventory of all your content assets. Make sure each one is accurate and leads to the correct web page. A lot of times, inaccurate asset pages will lead users to your home page when it would have been better to go to a product page. Social media is a place where your company can get a huge amount of exposure, and are some of the best channels for promoting your content. It only makes good sense to ensure that each asset is under your control and serving your best interest. After your audit is finished, you’ll have a comprehensive map of your site, page by page, charting out the value of the content and your recommendations for keeping it, repurposing it, or ditching it. You’ll also have a catalogue of your offsite assets. For all the work of compiling these inventories, it makes sense to get more than a one-time use out of the effort. Maintaining the inventory is much easier than building one. By constantly updating and tracking all your content assets, you can ensure that your pages are in tip-top shape and nothing under your control has lost relevance. The Essentials: Editorial Calendar and Style Guide Since the dawn of print periodical publishing, editors have used editorial calendars to manage the publication and ensure timely delivery of new content to readers. Just as traditional print publications have an editor who manages the calendar, a company should include a content strategist who governs the editorial calendar. This might be anyone from the owner of the small business to someone in marketing, to a brand new position created for this purpose. Because the content strategist has a wide array of media to manage – including the website, social media profiles, distribution channels, the blog, offsite content, and more – the editorial calendar is a must-have. A good editorial calendar plots out a year in advance, every piece of content that the organization intends to publish, including not only the date of launch but the steps included in meeting those goals. The content strategist and creative team frequently review the calendar to brainstorm for upcoming projects, make adjustments based on results, and manage the creation and launch of upcoming content.

Figure 18: Publishing Calendar By using a calendar to manage the process, you can control publication across multiple media platforms. While it’s recommended that you plot a year out, that doesn’t mean that you can’t adapt your calendar to changing trends. The calendar is a guide to keep you on track with your content objectives, and it can and should be updated as necessary. Without an editorial calendar, you run the risk of producing content inconsistently and possibly neglecting publishing platforms that need nurturing. For example, without a calendar, it can be very easy for a week, two weeks, even a month to go by between blog posts. And who’s covering the Facebook profile? Has anyone looked at it lately? Publishing is a discipline that requires constant attention. The editorial calendar helps keep you disciplined. The editorial style guidelines are closely tied to the editorial calendar. These guidelines govern brand consistency and goals, helping to maintain cohesion across your entire content production. Style guidelines are critical whether you’re creating a corporate website, social media campaign, or multichannel presence. Developing new, high quality content is a creative act. As with anything creative, the process and the results can take many forms. When a team comes together to coordinate creativity, a written set of guidelines will ensure that the creative expression meets your brand standards. Establishing a brand style can have challenges, but it should ultimately reflect the character of your organization. Often the first response is to create a style that is corporate (even rigid) in tone. But the good news is that you can be you! Factor in your company’s personality (every company has one). If your company has a sense of humor, create content with a light and entertaining tone; if you’re a law firm, write with vigor and authority. Consider your market research, too. What’s the tone at your competition? What is the tone of the content that people are responding to? These factors will help you find a style that’s natural to your organization and meets the needs of your customers. An editorial calendar and style guidelines detail when, where, and how content will be published on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Every piece of content has its own development process, which is managed on the calendar and governed by the style guidelines. Let’s go through each step in the process, from setting goals to launch:

Goals for the piece

Research and brainstorming

Development

Editing

Launch Identify Goals The initial conception stage begins with identifying your goal for the piece of content you’d like to create. Everything you produce should work to accomplish a specific and measureable goal. Ultimately, the goal for each individual piece of content should fit in to the goals for your overall content strategy. Based on a review of your editorial calendar and referencing your content inventory, you can determine the goals for your next piece of content. Most often, the goals for a piece of content can be narrowed down to branding, traffic, leads, or sales. At this stage, you’ve identified a need that the content can fulfill, like, “We want to attract more visitors to our site” or “We need to push out some awesome content to brand ourselves as experts.” Based on your ongoing research, you might have more specific goals that you’re after. You may want to develop content that will reach a certain demographic in a new way, or you may want to rank for a highly competitive keyword. Once you establish a goal, you can consider content that will achieve it. Conduct Research Market and keyword research will help to identify the angle you could take with the content and the keywords that you can optimize for. Whether you’re considering your next blog post or an infographic, you’ll want to do research for each specific piece. I recommend that you constantly conduct research to keep on top of the trends and to find keywords you can target. This will save time when you’re ready to create content because you will already have at your fingertips a working list of keywords you want to optimize for. You’ll have your hand on the pulse of what’s trending in social media, too. Consistent research can lead to inspiration, and inspiration can be invaluable. If you have a team working on the content, assign tasks to each person for the research. We all have our specialties. If you have a social media person on the team, assign her to listen on social media like Facebook and Twitter. Have her check out blogs to see what people are talking about. Maybe you have a person on your team that has a real knack for keyword research. Hand the job to him. Let the team know the goal for the content and set them on their way to gather and report back their findings. Brainstorm for Ideas Brainstorming is a huge part of any creative process, encouraging the free flow of ideas. If you have a content team, it’s the best way to share the research everyone’s conducted and see how the team envisions the final content piece. At this stage, not only are you deciding what your content will express but you’re also considering what type of content will work best to accomplish your goals. To help you brainstorm content possibilities, check out the next chapter in this book. I have a monster list of content ideas that you can reference to guide your decision-making or add inspiration, helping you hone in on some of the best ways to express the raw idea you’ve developed. For example, if your goal is lead generation, check chapter seven for content that’s good for that: maybe you could take your content in the direction of a webinar that people will register for, giving you their valuable contact information. When it comes to brainstorming, there are numerous techniques out there. You’ll probably settle into a particular way that works for your group to get the ideas flowing, but it can be useful to research new techniques, as well, in order to shake up the creative process. Changing the way you think can encourage creativity and limit writer’s block. Brainstorming is about gathering ideas and sorting them out. In each brainstorming session, try narrowing down your good ideas just four or five. If you’re only looking for one idea to come from your brainstorm, take the best one and work with it. You can bank the other thoughts for later: the best ideas lead to more inspiration. You know you’ve had a good brainstorming session when you end with suggestions from all over the spectrum and when you walk away with ideas that are both on topic and off. For that reason, bring your banked ideas to each brainstorming session so you can review your previous brilliant thoughts and warm up the session. Conceptualizing and Drafting Once you have come to consensus on an idea to pursue, it’s time to conceptualize the piece and put together a draft. This is a great time to turn to the editorial calendar and review deadlines for the first draft, edit phase, and launch. With the timetable established, you can then allocate adequate resources to meet your deadlines, and determine if your staff can manage the task or if you’ll need to outsource the activity to a writer or graphic designer. Moving into conceptualization, you’ll need to determine the lead person on the project, who will either create the piece or oversee the creative talent you’ve outsourced. The lead on the project will:

Determine the media form to express your idea

Draft or mock up the idea to see how it will work

Share the idea for feedback

Revise, if necessary, and complete

Going into conceptualization, you may already know how you’d like to express your idea. The drafting and mockup phase will make it clear if the idea works. At this point there are two basic paths: you can do the work in-house or you can outsource the talent. Most businesses outsource the creative talent to some extent, depending on the skill level required. For a blog post, you can probably handle that in-house, but an infographic takes graphic design skills that would best be sought through a professional graphic designer. The best way to get a sense of how your idea can work for your goal is to keep current on the kind of content that’s already successful online. Familiarity with the environment will really help you as you join in the conversation. Encourage the people in your company who will be developing content to keep current on the trends in your industry. The more familiar your team is with existing online content, the better your chances will be for creating engaging content. (This might be a good time to address those of you reading this from small businesses. I do recognize the fact that you do not always have a team of people to delegate to. Often in a small business, one or two people might have to handle all of the roles being discussed here. Sometimes, for example, the brainstorming even extends to friends and family or just a simple business lunch.) As you draft, keep the length of the piece appropriate for the kind of content you’re developing. Know the standard. Blogs are a bit looser, but beware of long blog posts: they better be pretty darn interesting if you expect anyone to read them. If you plan to post a video to your YouTube channel, then you need to ensure that the length of the video conforms to their restrictions. As you draft content, ensure everything you produce avoids a negative spin. When you have so much freedom to deliver content, there can be a temptation to get snarky or sarcastic, especially if you’re trying to put out a humorous piece. If you want to position yourself as expert, you can’t let yourself fall into negativity and risk losing the respect of your customers. Keep your content professional and retain an air of sensitivity to your subject. For example, I once came across a blog post that an insurance company wrote that discussed retirees in Florida. Basically, the gist was, “Stay off the roads because senior citizens are going to cause accidents.” The content was related to the insurance industry, but in an attempt to be funny they put a spin on it that would have probably offended a large group of people. And these people are potential customers! It should go without saying that it’s a bad move to offend some of the very people you are trying to engage. That’s why I like the idea of communication within your organization on the creative element. Collaboration in the drafting phase helps catch subject matter that might go astray of your standards. Ultimately, using collective energy, the content will be enriched. Try to pass the concept or draft around the creative team so that each person can give a little more information or add comments for revision. By the time it’s made the rounds, you will have a solid piece that has the team’s stamp of approval. The team doesn’t have to consist of all marketing pros; it could include people from IT, the warehouse, or service departments, for example. You can bounce ideas off industry people, too. This can be a great way to build networking relationships that can play out in other content areas, like interviews. Tip: Offer to help them out; everyone can use a helping hand when it comes to creating content. For some content, you might be shipping it out to a professional writer, say if you’re creating an article or a press release. If you go that route, you may still want to workshop your idea before you send the summary to writer. Likewise, if you’re working with a graphic designer for images, like infographics, it will be a good idea to refine your idea with a team before you hand off the project. That way you have the best idea coming out of your company that will fit in with the existing body of your online content. Edit and Launch After the draft is finished, give the content a final edit. Even if you receive an article or blog post from a professional writer, I suggest that you edit every piece of content to be sure it’s the highest quality before it gets posted, to ensure that it truly represents your idea and content goal. The editing phase is your last chance to review the piece before launch. When you edit, remember that this represents your brand, so it should be as crisp and clear as possible. Before you go live with any content, make sure to check for grammar, spelling, and mechanics of style. This is a quick check that someone apart from the author should do. Often a writer will get entrenched in creating, and when it comes time to check for mistakes, might not be able to see the forest for the trees. Even if you have outsourced to a writer, it’s best to review the content in detail before launch. Even professionals can make mistakes! For small businesses with limited resources for content production, try hiring an intern from a local university to do your editing. In fact, interns are great sources of inspiration for content, and they often provide a kind of energy that can only be found in college students – you may want to consider keeping an intern on board as part of your content development team. This is also your last chance to intercept “salesy” content. We’ve been saying this throughout the book, but it’s very important. Content marketing shouldn’t come across as advertising or be all about you. Content should focus on your customers. If the final draft has an advertising feel, it might need one more round of tweaking to weed out any blatant sales pitches. When it comes to launch, make a concerted effort to meet your deadlines and keep on track with your schedule. Content marketing hinges on frequent postings of fresh material. Once you launch new content on your site, remember to distribute it across as many relevant channels as possible, and start promoting right away. In chapters ten and eleven, I’ll explain the best ways to do both promotion and distribution. Your pages will get the most attention when you proactively work to get them in front of people. For this reason, you should consider promotion and distribution part and parcel with launch. Can You Repurpose It? Repurposing is a fantastic way to capitalize on a successful piece of content, or to take a fabulous idea that may not be so hot in its current form and make it work better. After your content audit, you’ll likely have some repurposing to do, but I recommend that you always look for ways to repurpose your content to maximize its potential. Starting with the goals for your content, seek out other ways to use the piece to reach a wider audience. If the content is currently reaching the demographic you’ve targeted, you may be able to repurpose it for distribution on a different channel that attracts a similar demographic. For example, if your YouTube video is successful, the same video could have a good chance of success on Vimeo, since video sites tend to attract a similar demographic. This same strategy can be employed for images. If your images posted to Flickr are getting traffic, you could consider posting them to a similar image- sharing site like Google’s Picasa. Channels that work well for Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing, like LinkedIn and SlideShare, tend to share demographics, as well. If your content is successful on one B2B channel, chances are good that it will be successful on different one. When you post content to any channel, make sure to create descriptions that include a link to the originator site (i.e. your website) to draw traffic to your pages. Don’t just post the content and leave: optimize to direct traffic to your site! In addition to repurposing for multiple distribution channels, some content can translate to multiple media forms. You can often migrate one kind of content to another form with minimal effort. For example, imagine you have a blog post that was a big hit and attracted a lot of attention. Your company is really active on SlideShare, so why not take this success and reach a new audience with it? Summarize the blog post into to a slideshow and post it on SlideShare with a link to your original source on your site. Take it a step further and turn that slideshow into a video and distribute to those channels! Most ideas for content can be expressed in a number of ways or on a variety of channels, and, by repurposing, you can take advantage of the possibilities. You might be able to repurpose the idea behind an infographic into a slide show. Or, you might have a really great slideshow that you can repurpose into a webinar. Many ideas are flexible, meaning that, with a little creativity, you can reuse them in different forms. As you set out to create a piece of content, think of ways that it can be repurposed that will extend the value of your content strategy. Get Inspired! Be on the lookout for content. Inspiration is all around you. You engage with staff, friends, customers and industry partners all the time. Turn those experiences into content that lines up with your overall game plan. Make sure you have tools on hand that will allow you to create content at a moment’s notice. By having a digital camera and a digital video recorder on hand in your office, or in your bag when you travel to industry conferences and events, you can be ready to capture activity that might lead to publishable content. At our company, we gave each person on our staff a Flip video camera for the holidays to get them thinking about content. Yes, this was a gift for their personal use, but we wanted to emphasize to them that they could generate content at any time, and this was a tool that they could use to do it. We hoped that they would keep it on their person so that it would be available at work to shoot video on the fly. You could do the same for your staff, too. Encourage everyone to be thinking of content all the time, and provide resources for capturing ideas. The best advice I can offer is this: Be willing to have fun making content. When you loosen up and have fun, you can tap a lot of creativity and end up with entertaining content. For example, let’s say your blog post has two staffers comparing solutions to a particular problem, and they are both equally good answers. You could have a tie-breaker foot race and video them racing in the parking lot32. It might be a little goofy, but it puts a personal touch to the content, and your staff comes alive to your site’s visitors. Since you have a camera on hand, you could quickly and easily shoot the race and post it on your blog. If the content turns out to be weak or fails to be funny, then you don’t have to post it. No matter what, encourage people to create content. You’ll eventually end up with some gems. The greatest value to having video and digital cameras on hand is that they can provide content from a single event that can be repurposed for multiple channels. Here’s an example. A couple of people from your staff go to a big industry-wide conference in Chicago, packing their Flip video cameras or their brand new iPhones. From the single event they generate the following content:

Summary of the conference for your blog

A “top 10 new things I learned from the conference” list, also for the blog

Photos of the event with interactions between your staff and the attendees posted in the blog articles, to your Flickr account and other photo-sharing channels

Video interviews of some key attendees. Posted to your blog and your video-sharing accounts like Vimeo and YouTube

And there could be more content that gets generated, too. It has a lot to do with how your business creatively responds to the world it’s engaged in, as well as having tools available to help record it. Developing Content Strategies That Garner Links, Too When you put your content out there, you want it to grab attention, and you want your visitors to love your content so much that they want to share it. Links are a byproduct of sharing – people have engaged with your content, and it’s inspired them to share it with others. The action you’ve triggered resulted in a link back to the page that hosts your content. People will be inspired to share stuff when it meets their needs. In the end, we’re all human and we all have needs. The question is, what needs do people have, and how can your content fill those needs?

Figure 19: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs I think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs can help answer this question. His theory, represented by a pyramid, is that all humans have a similar set of needs that increase with their level of sophistication. As we grow up and our brains become more sophisticated, our needs become more sophisticated, but we never outgrow any one of them. The most basic need is for survival (the base of the pyramid) and moves up to personal safety, to love and belonging, to esteem, and, finally, at the pinnacle, self-actualization. Compelling content that meets these human requirements has a great chance of being shared. One of the key needs people have is acceptance, so if your content offering can make your visitors feel like they’re part of a community that they can be involved in, then you can fulfill one of their needs. Self-actualization is the most sophisticated need, so if your content is able to equip your visitors to be successful – particularly as they make choices as a consumer based on your expert advice – then your content will be recognized as valuable, and as a result likely to be shared with others. There are some practical ways to fulfill needs and engage your visitors:

Be a resource. Educate them on the industry where you are the expert.

Engage them in a social context. The content on your site can have a warm, personal effect that gives visitors a sense of welcoming, making them feel like they are part of your community. Then, of course, your presence in social media takes that to the next level.

Be entertaining. Fun, light-hearted content gets a lot of attention simply because people like to be entertained.

Be controversial. By showing an alternative viewpoint, you can get users to think about the issue and draw them in for a discussion.

Engaging visitors is all about keeping them interested, and, at their core, people are interested in what they need. As you conceive of content ideas, consider how they can meet the needs that your audience has. The more they click with their needs, the more likely they will be shared, and you’ll get the links. Conclusion When we talk about great content, we’re talking about content that has genuine appeal. Many content marketers pump out content just because they know that they need to, and the result is a lot of limp and boring pages. If content lacks originality, it ends up blending in and simply adds to the noise. I’ll be honest, a few years ago I fell into the “crank the content out” trap, too. I knew that I needed to get content on my site and content on the web in general, but I felt constantly pressured for time. I prioritized other aspects of my business before content creation. I ended up doing what most of us have done at some point: I wrote bland blog posts, articles just for search engines, and boring press releases. But then I began to reflect on my own online consumer experiences. From the clothes that I bought to the travel plans I made, and even the entertainment I consumed. I realized I was buying products and service not based on price but based on how well I trusted the source. The more useful information they provided me, the customer, the more apt I was to buy their product. Remember that DLP lamp story earlier? Yep, it was informative content and I bought the bulb I needed from them. That’s when content became the focus of our company. Instead of cranking out content, we started following a much more deliberate process in developing content for ourselves and our clients, and it’s been very successful. A deliberate process for content development hinges on having an organized publication strategy. The backbone of that strategy is the editorial calendar, which keeps us on track by knowing who governs each project and when it will be launched. Pair an organized approach with a content marketing mindset – be on the lookout for opportunities to meet your potential customers’ needs with your content – and you will soon be developing awesome content, too. 7

Sixteen Examples of Content for Your Business

“Think about all the content you create as pieces of a larger whole. Instead of a “one and done” approach, think about how you can create smaller chunks of shareable content from that single content asset. Adopting a broader approach to creating content requires a shift in thinking. Most organizations are accustomed to approaching marketing as a single campaign or initiative, and less as an ongoing, long-term model – as content requires. You certainly can create a killer blog or an amazing podcast as the cornerstone of your content. But it’s more efficient and effective in the long term (and necessary for larger organizations) to take a broader view: to create content that can come to life in various formats, across many different platforms, and that can address multiple audiences. You could think of it as repurposing that larger piece of content into other formats or slicing or atomizing it into smaller bits to share. But repurposing suggests something that might happen as an afterthought – whereas we’re talking about something far more intentional, as something that happens in the first phase of your content plan development. Rather than repurposing, try reimagining. Reimagining your content in various ways, across various platforms, will allow you to reach as wide an audience as possible.” Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs, Co-author of Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business (Wiley, 2011)

Developing online content can be a daunting task at times, simply because of lack of inspiration. Many times a zealous content strategist, who’s just created some great content, hits a wall. Looking around, she asks, “What now?” It’s certainly not a question of whether or not more updated content is needed or necessary; rather, it’s more an issue of what else can we do and how can we make it work? What options do we have? In this chapter we’re going to walk through some examples of content that you can use to get ideas rolling. We’ll walk through 16 examples of content that will get your website rocking. We’ll go through each example, define it, and show how you can make it work for your needs. We’ll contextualize each example in terms of your content development objectives. Please note: This list is in alphabetical order, not in order of importance. Each option has merit of its own and should be judged separately on its value to your content marketing strategy. And I do not recommend tackling all of them unless you have unlimited resources. Pick just the ones you can do a stellar job with and add them to your content calendar! Build a BLOG, Build Your Business What is it? The word “blog” is a blend of the words “web” and “log;” therefore, it’s a place, either on your website or as a standalone site, that gets updated frequently, like a log or journal. Blogs are platforms that enable regular communication with followers and visitors. For business applications, blogs are focused on the needs of your customers and the industry in general. As long as the blog is located on your website or domain, all the content that gets generated on the blog will be content for your site. Blog content can be everything from text to video to podcasts (though nearly all blogs are centered on textual communication, incorporating additional media forms into the post). All the content in a blog is searchable and can be archived, and every post has potential for coming up in the search engine results page. Once the blog is up and running, it can be a source of content that can be repurposed for other applications, too. Practically any kind of content can be posted on the blog. I strongly recommend that you keep your blog on your website, instead of establishing it somewhere else. What’s it good for? If you need to be convinced to have a blog on your site, look at these statistics from HubSpot: Websites that have blogs get twice as many inbound links as websites without blogs. Sites with blogs will get about 400 percent more indexed pages and will see a more than 50 percent increase in traffic over websites that lack a blog. These stats alone tell you that a blog is pretty important to your content marketing strategy from a traffic and SEO perspective. The bottom line is that having a blog on your website provides you with a very easy-to-use platform to publish content on a routine basis, which gets the attention of search engines and gives people content that they can engage with. I’m calling it an “easy-to-use” platform because once your blog is set up, you don’t really have to interact with your webmaster to add new pages. Your company has already given you permission to blog, so you just log into the management tool to submit posts. Ideally visitors find your blog so interesting that they will be compelled to follow it and comment on your posts. That’s the really nice thing about a blog. Built into it is the ability for people to leave comments, which then creates a whole new set of content: User Generated Content (UGC). Visitors love UGC; they love to interact with the ideas posted on blogs, and it creates a community atmosphere on your website. Search engines love UGC, too, which is another reason search engines like blogs. I’ll be honest about blogs: They can be a lot of work. You have to be diligent in maintaining and updating your blog on a regular basis. Start off by acknowledging what kind of commitment you can make. Posting once a week is awesome; even every other week is a place to begin. The thing is, it’s a commitment. Make the commitment up front and stick to it. If you feel like it’s something you are ready to take on, then start your blog today. Don’t procrastinate on this! I always recommend that you set up a blog team if you have the staff to do it. This group can share the effort of posting, ideally on a rotation. Remember to lay out your blog posting schedule on an editorial calendar. If your small business is a one-person operation, or it doesn’t have the resources for a team, setting up a calendar will still help you meet your commitment to post. Try to get five or six ideas onto your editorial calendar and then start creating. The first few posts will feel uncomfortable, but after you get in the habit, it will be much easier. Trust me. You’ll soon find yourself thinking up possible blog posts all the time. The idea will come, and you’ll have to stop what you’re doing to make note of it or call your phone and leave yourself a message – whatever it takes to keep the idea fresh until you get the chance to write the post. When you’re starting out your blog, these are the fundamentals you should keep in mind:

Don’t just write and assume you’ll automatically get traffic. The content needs to attract visitors.

Update your blog regularly. Rock your blog by posting at least two times per week. If that isn’t feasible, shoot for one post per week, or, at the very least, once every other week.

Personalize your blog. Don’t sound like a boring corporate talking head. People like to hear from you. But remember, it’s not about you; it’s about your customers.

Assume your competitors will read your blog, but don’t let this prevent you from providing good information. In the blog post “7 Harsh Realities of Social Media Marketing,” CopyBlogger.com calls it the bikini concept: “You can give 90% of it away, but there will always be people who will happily pay to see that last 10%.” You don’t want to give away your essential trade secrets, but you do want to give some information away for free – and it has to be good enough to keep people coming back.

In every blog post, try to answer a question. Why? Because you don’t want to provide meaningless posts that prove useless to your readers. Be a valuable source of information.

Don’t be concerned if you need help managing your blog. That’s why there are content development experts out there.

A few of our customers do not have blogs on their websites, and we make every effort to convince them to add one. Often, the holdup for them is, “But what would we say?” They’re afraid they would do one post and then no more for months for lack of ideas. If, after an honest assessment, you don’t think you can commit to blogging, it’s better to hold off until you can. On the other hand, ideas shouldn’t be a problem (see chapters three and four). What you’re trying to do, primarily, is to put yourself out there as an expert in your industry, and the blog is a fantastic tool for doing that. A lot of your content should be geared toward that end: demonstrating how to do what you do in your industry. A blog is also a great place to provide answers to your customers’ questions. In fact, as an example, many of our customers have asked us what they should write about in their blog. So we posted an answer on our blog! The post was titled “50 Topics to Help You Get Started on Your Corporate Blog.” Some of the best ideas we suggested in the post are:

Introducing your newest hire in your company with a bio

I went to this industry event and this is what happened, etc.

Publicize a recent charitable donation and your reasons for donating

Put an industry spin on the holidays

Make a list of tools you use on a daily basis and can’t live without

Ask a question of your readers

Look at your comments and highlight/answer/discuss a topic your readers are interested in

Curate some content (see Content Curation in this chapter)

Provide tips on being more productive in your industry

To get all 50 ideas, which you should print and tack to your office wall, go to this address: http://www.verticalmeasures.com/website-publicity/50-topics-to- help-you-get-started-on-your-corporate-blog. Capture Success with CASE STUDIES What is it? Broadly, case studies are research reports that isolate a group, event, or individual for in-depth analysis. The way to use case studies in a content marketing strategy is to analyze a particular success your organization has had with a customer. A case study would analyze your customer’s situation, their problem, your solution, and how it led to your customer’s success. They can vary in length and form, from a brief paragraph to a full report. A case study could include graphics and charts, and even video testimony, in addition to text. Ideally, a case study should provide short examples of work that your company has done for your customers, showing the success of the project. What’s it good for? Case studies are very good for touting your results, showing precisely how others have succeeded because they’ve worked with you, complete with tangible examples of your expertise. Case studies have a number of applications, ranging from blog posts to inclusion in an eNewsletter, to a section on your website devoted to case studies – or you could repurpose the case study for all three places. I think a great place for case studies is the “about us” section of your website. This is the section that potential customers will go to find out who they’re about to do business with, and this will give them a great chance to see your success stories. They work especially well when they are quick and easy for people to read; perhaps you could offer three or four brief case studies on a page that is linked to from your “about us” section. The main challenge with case studies is actually getting your client to cooperate with you. You need to get information from them before you can create the case study. Sometimes, it can become difficult tracking your client’s successes, and, depending on your client, it can take some effort to get them to provide you with the information you need to create the study. As an example from my business, a client has a school that trains golfers to become golf pros for work at golf courses. Our client wanted to put together some case studies on students who went through their course, showing their success after graduation. One of the students actually went on to build golf clubs; others have become pros at prestigious golf courses. The graduate who built the golf-club manufacturing business was obviously proud of his success and was glad to be included in the case study. He cooperated knowing that it would also be exposure for his product. But for many students it was hard to keep track of them as they moved to various locations and took different career paths. Fortunately, though, we have found that our clients often don’t have trouble developing case studies because they tend to know when their clients have achieved successful results in a relatively short period of time. As with the golf-club manufacturer, they work even better when the case study also offers a chance to give your client some positive exposure. For this reason, case studies can be some of the easier content to develop and post to your website, and they can offer some very good benefits. Join the Conversation through COMMUNITY FORUMS What is it? I would venture to guess that nearly everyone has participated in a forum at one point in their web experience. A community forum is a discussion site where people can hold conversations via posted messages on the topic related to the forum. Discussions are moderated by the owner of the forum or appointed moderators, who ensure that inappropriate posts get removed. Some forums allow users to flag inappropriate posts or spam, but the moderator will still need to regularly review the forum to keep it weeded of unwanted activity. The goal is to keep the general user’s experience a positive and constructive one. Depending on the setup, users can be anonymous or have to register with the forum and log in to post messages. In general, sites that require registration to participate will still allow visitors to view message threads without logging in. This gives visitors a sense of what’s happening on the forum so that they may be more inclined to register. What’s it good for? Hosting a community forum adds authority, content, and traffic to your website. Heavily visited forums are a rich source of user- generated content (UGC), which search engines tend to like. They are really powerful if you have a topic that people want to discuss. To be clear, what I’m describing here is adding a forum to your website, meaning you run it. Forums can be an even more intense commitment than a blog because you have to spend every day managing and moderating the site. People will say things that you don’t want them to say, inappropriate things that you should be monitoring. If your forum is getting activity, this can mean you’re quite busy because posts happen all the time. Launching a forum is always a slow process. Forums only work when people participate, and the more the merrier. It takes a lot of promotion to get the first members to join, especially if you have a niche topic. This is not to say it’s impossible, but I want to give you fair warning. A great way to promote your new forum is with a news release, Twitter and other social media announcements, and blog postings. Once you do get it up and running, have a dedicated moderator and get some discussions going, the payoff is normally well worth the effort. The boost in traffic, the added impression of authority, and increased UGC for search engines are great reasons to make the push for a forum. On top of that, registration to join the forum could require a name and email so that you can start to build out your email list. CURATION, the Most Efficient Content What is it? Thanks to the Internet, we live in a content-rich world. It’s mind- boggling to think of the number of content pieces at our fingertips. From images to video to text, the sea of web pages is vast. We, as users of the Internet, constantly seek to find ways to make sense of all of it, to get as much useful and relevant content as we can, while at the same time filtering out the stuff we don’t care about. Some websites use algorithmic search functions to aggregate content from all over the Internet and organize it by topic, thus making it more accessible to users. Sites like Google News do just this. Curation is similar to aggregation, except that the aggregated content is filtered by a human editor rather than, or at least in addition to, an algorithm. Having humans review the content before it gets posted increases the assurance that it has maximum relevance to the audience. I will use “curation” to represent both terms for this section. What is it good for? Curation is an excellent way to show your industry knowledge and position your company as a thought leader. Through curation, you can take the best and most relevant content in your industry and present it in a crisp, easy to consume format. The value to your customers that comes from this curation will be attributed to your brand, lending you an air of authority in your industry. There are many ways to curate content on your site. You can make curated content appear occasionally on your site, say as a blog post. In a case like that, you would have an exceptional piece of content that you wanted your blog followers to know about, so you’d post a summary of the content, give a reason why it’s so great, and a link to the full content, citing the source. Using curation as a supplement to your original content is the least demanding way to curate, and can be very beneficial to you. Your audience will see you as a contemporary organization with a finger to the wind in your industry. With some more effort from an editorial perspective, you can also develop an entire section of your site as a curated news center. An editor, or team of editors, would manage the content, ensuring that it was frequently updated and always high-quality. For a site like this, you would likely incorporate a mix of curated and original content. Your curation page would serve as an intelligence hub for visitors to keep current on industry news and trends. This kind of page could draw huge numbers of links, get significant traffic, and you’d be delivering tons of fresh content. There are plenty of software programs that you can acquire which will help you aggregate content. These kinds of programs reduce the burden on the human effort to search for content by providing a slush pile of content that’s organized and ready for the editor to work through. At the end of the day, the editor selects the content that appears on the page. You need at least one editor working to review content and ensure that it is adding excellence to your site. The editor will either draft summaries of the content or they will work with a writer. You can get employees in your company to participate in the curation effort by having each one serve as a content trawler. As with the content style guide discussed in chapter five, you’ll need to define what “great content” you’re looking for. By setting a standard for the quality of the content you want to curate, you will help your content trawlers to keep the bar high. They can search for any kind of content – blogs, video, white papers, and so on. Use the content ideas in this chapter to help define what kind of content you’re looking for. I would argue that curation can be one of the easiest ways to get content on your site, especially when you curate for a blog post. Using an RSS feed, you can find content and sift through it to pull out the content you want to summarize and curate. An excellent example of the use of curation for a blog is Kikolani.com’s Friday Mashup of news from the week. Every Friday, Kristi Hines (disclosure: Kristi is part of the Vertical Measures team) curates the buzz in her industry, wrapping up that week’s news. This is her followers’ big chance to make sure they don’t walk into the weekend having missed any important news that week. This kind of curation has a very natural feel to the followers, and encourages them to tune in regularly for that post because of the value it adds to their industry knowledge. And quite often the people or posts mentioned in her wrap-up will link to it, Tweet about it or otherwise help promote it. Since curation is the act of taking someone else’s content and putting it on your site, you don’t want to violate copyrights or plagiarize. The right way to curate is to summarize the page you’re curating and link to it. In the summary make it clear how the article relates to your industry and the value it has to your audience. Always remember to follow the guidelines of fair use. According to the copyright act of 1976, when determining whether or not the use of a work in a particular case is fair use, the following four factors must be considered:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

2. The nature of the copyrighted work;

3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

To make fair use of the content, you will need to:

Summarize the work

Cite the author/original source

Encourage your audience to visit the original work

Copyright issues can get sticky, so if your company has a legal staff, check with them on how to curate according to your company’s policy. We suggest you check out www.copyright.gov for more information on copyright in the United States. In the end, curation on a small scale can be a huge time-saver, that is, when you supplement your original content with curated content. If you are struggling for ideas for your blog, curating the content for that post can be a great way to shake off the writer’s block. It could also be a regular supplement to your content, such as a “what’s happening industry wide?” feature. By curating content, you will keep fresh content on your site while passing along the value of your aggregation and editing efforts to your visitors, a value that they’ll attribute to your brand. Win Big with CONTESTS What is it? The idea behind running a contest as part of a content marketing strategy is to entice traffic and backlinks to your site. Having a prize can encourage your target audience to participate in some capacity to win the prize. Ideally, the entrants submit something that can be posted as content for your page. By having visitors judge the contest, contestants would encourage their social network to visit your website and vote.

Figure 20: Vertical Measures Marketing that Moves You Facebook Contest What’s it good for? Contests create content on your site and attract traffic and links to your page. They may even be useful in adding to your fan base or prospect list. Contests don’t have to include over-the-top awards like a grand- prize trip to the Bahamas. They can be as simple as targeting journalism students, asking them to submit a short piece explaining why they want to win a $1,000 journalism scholarship, posting the top 10 entries, and having people vote for the winner. A bridal shop that I know put on a contest to win a bridal package. In this case the contest didn’t actually cost them anything extra. The shop got local businesses to donate a veil, flowers, and some other wedding- related odds and ends in exchange for advertising. To enter, all that the contestants had to do was submit their engagement story. People voted on the entries, and the winner received the package. Contests can be a lot of fun for your customers, but sometimes they can be tough for you to pull together. They often cost money for prizes, and generally they take time to coordinate. Remember, you’re putting this content on your site. Sometimes, you can do it on your blog, but more often you need to create a whole new page for it, which can be tougher. A lot of times, for larger companies, setting up a contest might require additional hoops that you may have to jump through with your legal department to make sure the contest is allowable, from their perspective. Running a contest can be a real boon, and depending on your market, could be exactly the kind of thing that will attract new customers. The engagement story and the journalism scholarship were two types of contests that were relatively simple to run. Give it a try, and if there is a solid return on your investment, you can add them to your content calendar to run on a frequent basis. eBOOKS: Traditional Publishing Out, Self-?Publishing In! What is it? eBooks are book-length documents for reading on computers or eBook-reading devices; even mobile phones can interact with eBooks. While these originated as electronic versions of paper books, they can now start off as electronic books with no paper publication equivalent. eBooks are a very dynamic form. They can be full book length or shorter, something like the equivalent of a novella, but they ought to be substantial pieces of content, something akin to a white paper on steroids. eBooks can be on any topic imaginable, just as a paper book. When it comes to -developing an eBook for your business, you are going to do the same thing that most of your other content attempts do: address your customers’ problems and offer solutions as an expert. It’s the kind of writing you’d hope your reader will consume on their Kindle on their morning subway commute, so it needs to really engage your reader.

Figure 21: “Ed Frawley’s Philosophy on Dog Training”, a part of his series of dog training eBooks What’s it good for? What better way to show your expertise in your industry than to show that you have a book published about it? The real benefit of an eBook is the caliber of content that it represents. With an eBook, you’re delivering a resource that has standalone value and demonstrates your ability to address the real concerns of your customers and your industry. eBooks, if they’re good, have a way of taking off and becoming a market of their own. You get all the benefits in terms of reinforcing your credibility with your customers and your industry with an eBook, but you can also sell it. Yes, you have to invest in this content up front, but it could be worth it. Because you can sell your eBook, you can recover some, if not all, of the cost of producing the document. It’s one of the rare pieces of content that has the potential to pay for itself on sales alone. One way to utilize the eBook format is to target 40- to 60-page books on very specific topics. This makes the eBook a little more accessible, both to you as the author and to readers consuming your content. The most common way to go with this length of book is the how-to route, explaining a process and giving solutions. For example, you could write on “How to Market Your Restaurant Business Online” or “How to Become a Golf Pro.” As we’ve said, you can do an eBook on any topic related to your business, and your credibility in the field will make the book buyable. The challenge with developing a full-on eBook that you want to complete as a book is that you need to understand publishing and that will take a bit of research. However, you can publish a document as an eBook in as simple a format as a downloadable PDF on your website, which will make it readable on eBook readers and computers. It really depends on how you want to make use of the eBook. Writing for eBooks – or paper books, for that matter – requires a special kind of writing; if you want it to be successful, you’ll either need to hire a writer, or pay very close attention to the writing style of books like the one you want to produce. If you decide to try to write it yourself, beware: it’s a big time commitment, and you’ll want to have a trustworthy editor look at your final manuscript before you proceed with publishing. eBooks seem intimidating because you need writers. But you don’t need to be quite as intimidated as you might think. You might already have the content for an eBook on your site. For example, we run an interview series on our blog, and we accumulated about 40 interviews with industry experts. We plan to take all those interviews, compile them, and make an “Expert Interview Series eBook.” Not long ago, I had dinner with a friend of mine in New York, Stoney deGeyter. As we were talking, I told him that his blog is one of the few that I actually try to set aside the time to read. He tends to write long posts, and he only posts every two weeks or so, but each one is high quality and very interesting, so I make sure to read each one. I said to him, “I recall you did a 16-part blog series; you could turn that into a book.” Stoney said that’s exactly what he planned to do. It turns out that he took the time to write blog posts that he actually planned to make into a book. My message here is that sometimes the content for an eBook is already on your website, or you can do like Stoney did and develop content in one way that you intend to compile into a book later, killing two birds with one stone. The secret to generating content is being able to creatively repurpose it, and eBooks are an awesome way to repurpose large-scale content. Keep Them Engaged with eNEWSLETTERS What is it? An eNewsletter is a publication regularly distributed via email. Generally, eNewsletters focus on one main topic of interest to its subscribers. In the case of eNewsletters for your business, the topic of interest is the product or service that you provide, as well as industry-related information such as news, hot topics, and events. eNewsletters work very well as monthly publications and help with customer retention. A regular publication will continuously keep your customers informed and remind how great it is to do business with your company. What is it good for? Keeping your brand in front of your potential customers can be somewhat challenging. Much of your content tends to be available when your customers are looking for your product. eNewsletters are one of the ways that you can proactively put your content in front of your customers and routinely reinforce your brand. Your eNewsletter reminds your customers that you are the expert in your industry. The content in an eNewsletter should be easy to digest so that it will get viewed. We suggest making it short so that when viewed in email the bulk of the text is above the fold (viewable without scrolling), making sure any calls to action are kept at the top. Every article should be kept to two or three crisp opening sentences with a link to read more. By offering a tip or useful piece of information that your customer would be interested in, you can keep them engaged. You want your content to be as relevant as possible so that the customer will be less likely to unsubscribe. If it works for your business, an eNewsletter is a great place to offer discounts or coupons for your product, which would encourage customers to visit your site to redeem them. From a cost perspective, there’s no excuse not to produce an eNewsletter. You can get newsletter software virtually for free online, which will help you develop a template so that all you need to do each month is provide new content. Some inexpensive and easy-to-use email newsletter services include:

AWeber

Constant Contact

iContact

MailChimp

VerticalResponse

The real cost of an eNewsletter is time, as is the case with most content development. Setting up a template is not difficult. Ensuring that you put the time into writing for your eNewsletter, that’s where the challenge comes in. Like a blog, it’s a commitment, and you need to consider whether or not you can meet your commitment before you start out. To make an eNewsletter work, you have to build an email list. If you’re going to produce an eNewsletter, you should get every email address you can on the distribution list. But, even if you have only a handful of email addresses to start, it wouldn’t hurt to get an eNewsletter out to those people. This is how you nurture the email addresses that you’ve collected in your lead-generating efforts. Another bonus from eNewsletters is that they can also become additional content for your website. Ideally, you would post each new issue to an eNewsletter archive page on your website. This adds yet another quality piece of updated content, and searchers who come across your eNewsletter page can sign up if they like what they see. INFOGRAPHICS, the Coolest Way to Display Data What is it? An infographic is a graphic that conveys a visual representation of information using images and words. They are a great way to capture a variety of pieces of information and communicate them in an interesting and condensed format. Infographics often make use of charts and graphs, but they can also include pictures or maps. The possibilities with infographics are nearly endless. When it comes to content on the Internet, infographics are hot stuff right now. Everybody seems to love them because they’re easy and fast to read, and are perfect for passing around via social media.

Figure 22: Sample Representation of Infographic What is it good for? Most people would rather look at a picture quickly than read a whole article, especially in the middle of a busy day. Time is valuable, and infographics save quite a bit of time. Because of their appeal, infographics are a great way to drive traffic and, especially, links to your website, which is one of the biggest benefits they offer. When someone finds an infographic that they think is really cool, they will link to it from their page or embed it on their site and post it on their blog. When someone grabs the content to post on their website they credit the page they got it from with a link. That’s usually seen as a fair exchange – it’s basically giving credit where credit is due. The infographic benefits the person who’s grabbing it because it’s content that will interest their viewers, and the link serves to acknowledge who created it, driving traffic to the source’s page. Therefore, it serves you well to create your own infographics so that you can derive backlinks from them. Infographics make excellent blog posts, and they have that ever-tantalizing possibility of going viral. Developing an infographic is not as hard as you might imagine. Come up with a concept and ship it off to a graphic designer who will find a clever way to present the data in an easy-to-read format. Almost any graphic designer with at least one foot in the 21st Century will know what an infographic is and how to work with you on it. But a graphic designer can’t do everything for you. They can develop a color scheme and some of the visual elements, but you’ll need to provide them some important details to get them started. Come up with a concept for the infographic. This is usually a simple idea that will in some way end up being the title of the infographic. Let’s say you have a landscaping business. You might create “Best Routes for Fall Leaf Peeping.” Make a list of the information you want to convey, and settle on the clearest, most concise way to express the data. For our leaf peeping example, we would tie each route we’re highlighting to a map of the United States with facts and an inset photo for each one. We might highlight the Blue Ridge Parkway – 469 miles across two states, with stunning mountain scenery, and slow going with 17 million other visitors each year. After you have your facts, create a wireframe of the graphic to give the graphic designer a sense of what you’re trying to achieve. They’ll take it from there. Some websites have actually been so successful with infographics that they’ve built whole libraries of them. One of our clients built out a whole subsection on their site devoted entirely to infographics they’ve created. Anyone who wants a financial infographic can go there and grab one. The stipulation with grabbing one is, of course, that you have to link back to their site. Their page is getting all kinds of juice from that campaign. In fact, there are whole websites that only compile infographics from all over the web because they are in such high demand. Frankly, I don’t recommend nabbing an infographic from someone else. We always recommend to our clients that they commission all their infographics. By generating your own, you have the right to all the traffic, citations and backlinks. On top of that, the content of the infographic should be the kind of information that demonstrates your inside understanding of the market or industry your business is in. Fundamentally, there’s nothing wrong with posting someone else’s infographic on your site, but if you can go the extra mile and generate your own, you’re going to be much better off. Look Like an Expert with INTERVIEWS What is it? This is one of my favorites. Here, we’re talking about interviewing industry experts to find out how they tackle issues in your industry, and what tools they use to solve their problems. You can ask them their opinion on industry trends or to give a market outlook. The possibilities are limitless. It doesn’t hurt to ask the same questions of different interviewees, to gain multiple perspectives, as long as you don’t develop a template question-and-answer format. The idea with an interview is to have a feel of real curiosity and investigation on the interviewer’s part. There are a number of ways to use interviews as content on your site. They can be short, or they can be intensive. Depending on what your interviewee is willing and able to do, you could go big and interview a panel, or have a longer, more in-depth conversation with an individual. Typically, however, time is precious for your interviewee, so conversations should be concise, getting answers to a handful of specific questions. You have three different media choices for conducting an interview:

Text-based

Audio

Video

With text-based interviews, you will send a customized email to the industry expert you would like to interview with 10 to 15 questions. You ask them to answer eight or so. Then, post the text of the interview, add a bio and a headshot, and there’s your interview. Email interviews are by far the easiest interview to obtain. Likewise, you can contact your interviewee and ask for a phone interview for audio. Again, the interview should be about eight questions, netting you maybe 10 or more minutes worth of audio. For video, you have the option of doing a webcam interview, if the interviewee is up for it, or you can snag them at a conference for an impromptu interview. Video interviews should generally stay short because many video sites like YouTube limit the size of video that can be uploaded. What is it good for? By having frequent conversations with other experts in your industry, you rank yourself among the top experts, and you show that you are connected to the cutting edge in your field. Interviews demonstrate that you’re hungry to stay on top of the industry. They make fantastic blog posts and can generate traffic and backlinks to your site, especially when you interview bigger names. Just by association, interviews rank you among the experts. As they say, you are the company that you keep. Try to do regular interviews and tie them to your editorial calendar so that you can be sure to keep the content rolling. To find an interviewee, occasionally we have to do some research online and see who’s speaking at conferences to find experts and their expertise; other times, we use experts who are well known. Out of the 40 or more interviews we’ve requested, we have only had one individual turn us down, and only a couple have been late. The reason is: They want the exposure as well! Interviews are mutually beneficial. I get requests for interviews periodically, and I never turn them down. It’s branding for our company, so if I can meet the deadline, why would I say no? Video interviews are a dynamic format that works well as content. I go to conferences frequently, and I see people walking around with video cameras. I watch them grab an industry expert, pull them aside, and do a quick one- or two-minute hallway interview. Right there is content for your site. Whenever we host conferences and bring in a guest speaker, I guarantee that one of our staff members will be there with a video camera to interview people at the event. One conference could lead to several interviews for posting later on our website, which helps us meet our goal of an interview a week. Occasionally, interviews can be more elaborate. For example, in preparation for the start of 2010, we decided to create an interview series to kick off the new year. We rented a green room and brought in 10 local Internet marketing experts. We had a scripted interview with them, asking for their predictions on Internet marketing. In half a day, we cranked out 10 interviews. We then published a different interview each day for the first 10 days of 2010. Our total out-of-pocket expense for this was about $1,000, and we ended up with 10 fantastic pieces of content. Another way to optimize your interview content is to transcribe audio (including the audio portion of your videos) to text. Using transcription software, this is extremely easy. By posting audio or video with their text transcriptions on the same page, you can optimize the whole content piece for search engines. You can also go the other way by using special reading software to produce audio of your text interviews. Then, all of your interviews are turned into podcasts for another piece of content. The fact is that interviews are easy. What I mean is that they have one of the highest ROI’s because the investment is so low and the payoff is so great. And if you can conduct one interview per week, at the end of a year, you’ll have 52 interviews that you can package into an eBook, as we mentioned above. Interviews offer major potential for repurposing. Twitter offers a more interactive (and fast paced) way to conduct an interview. By planning ahead, you can schedule an interview that adds the element of social media. By establishing a hashtag to follow (example: #pestcontrol) that identifies your interview, you can identify a period for the interview. When you promote the event, your followers on Twitter can use a service, such as TweetChat.com, to follow the hashtag conversation. You can conduct an interview that engages the whole community. Come prepared with some specific questions, but be prepared for the interview to take on a life of its own as the community gets involved in the conversation. After the interview has ended, you can use a service like WTHashtag.com to transcribe the whole event. The transcription can be posted to your site as a new piece of content, capturing the excitement of the social interview. The toughest part of conducting an interview – and most of the time investment – is actually coming up with the questions and finding the person to interview. I’ve found that by rotating topics monthly on the editorial calendar, it eases the strain of coming up with questions, because the topic itself steers the questions. For email interviews, it’s only possible to have the interview if you send the questions ahead of time; however, for other interviews (live, audio, video, or text via chat) you absolutely must have your questions laid out ahead of time. Never walk into an interview and try to “wing it.” Always be ready. If you’re at a conference and conducting a hallway interview with a panelist, you’d better have a cue card of questions ready if they agree to the interview. Walk the Talk with PRESS RELEASES What is it? Typically, a news release or press release is a written communication directed at the news media for the purpose of announcing a newsworthy piece of information. For your business, “newsworthy” doesn’t have to mean headlining in The New York Times. This means announcing events relative to the activities in your business. These releases go out to the online press, but if they happen to be really good, they may get picked up by the big news outlets. The communication needs to be presented in a professional way and is usually very concise for business announcements. What is it good for? Press release marketing will help expand your brand and exposure by targeting those that are interested in your industry’s services. Many websites have RSS feeds, which grab news releases off the press wires so that content will keep flowing on their site and will keep their viewers up on the latest news in their area of interest. RSS feeds scan the press wires looking for certain keywords. If your press release has keywords that these feeds are looking for, your news will spread. Remember that section on content curation? There are websites that you may never have heard of looking for content that you may have. Say, for example, a Ford Mustang hobbyist website has a RSS feed that’s set to collect any news coming off the wires that has the words “Ford” and “Mustang” in it. So it monitors PR Wire, and if it sees a post with those terms, the post gets posted on the feed. In addition to expanding your potential customer base, press releases can help you gain backlinks by embedding links in the text of your release back to your site. If that content gets picked up and reposted elsewhere on the Internet, that’s more links back to your site. For a small fee, a press release service will issue your announcement to the press wires in hopes that Google, Yahoo!, Bing or the AP wire service picks it up. And that actually happens more often than you might think. If you get approved ahead of time, Yahoo! News and Google News, for example, say, “You’ve got news? Great! We’ll post it, keep it coming.” If nobody clicks on it, normally it’s gone by the end of the day, but if it gets read and passed around, it moves up to their hotlists, and that’s what you really want – traffic and links from the hotlist. More than likely, for day-to-day news released on the online press wires, there won’t be anyone on the press side to edit the article. So whatever you write will hit the online press in the form you submit it. For this reason, you might consider finding a freelance journalist to write the actual press release for you. That way you can be sure that it conforms to press standards. Here’s the basic information you’ll need to provide the writer or follow for yourself:

Headline: Incorporate your primary keyword phrase in the headline of your press release, and keep it at or under 10 words. The headline should be catchy and act as a lead-in to the article.

Summary: Provide a short summary of the announcement (10 to 20 words) highlighting the press release main subject.

Optimize: You want to optimize each press release for keywords, because these get picked up by RSS feeds. Try to fit two or three keyword phrases into the body of the announcement, with the most important keywords in the title.

Add Links: Be sure to include the URL you’d like to link to in the press release.

A Quote: A press release should include a quote from a person in your company. Be sure to include their name and title.

I suggest you incorporate press releases into your editorial calendar so that you produce them on a regular basis, targeting at least one per month. The obvious question is, “What do I write about? What do I have to announce, especially that often?” Actually, you’d be surprised at how much newsworthy activity is happening around your business. You can issue a press release on just about anything that’s happening with your company. Here is a list of ideas to get you started:

A new employee has joined your staff

An individual in your business will serve in a leadership position for a charitable organization

Recognition of the company, product or executives by a publication

A statement of position regarding a local, regional, or national issue

Announcing the results of research or surveys you have conducted

Making public statements on future business trends or conditions

Announcing that you’ve reached a major milestone

Forming a new strategic partnership or alliance

Expanding or renovating the business

Announcing free information available on your website

Sponsoring a workshop or seminar

Celebrating an anniversary

The bottom line is that you can write press releases about your company, your products, your employees, your customers, community activities, and even your marketing efforts! Provide Convenience through PODCASTS What is it? A podcast is basically a non-streaming webcast, in audio or video form. Podcasts are typically downloaded through web syndication via a Podcatcher. The Podcatcher is a software client that downloads podcasts and can manage the transfer of files to a portable media player. iTunes is by far the most popular Podcatcher, but there are many services that can catch podcasts. Audiences typically subscribe to a podcast channel, so whenever you publish a new podcast, it gets distributed to all the subscribers. What is it good for? Since podcasts can be either audio or video, they are great ways to publish those kinds of media and to effortlessly distribute them to subscribers. The popular term “podcast,” as opposed to “webcast,” came about with the invention of the iPod, so podcasts are generally associated with audio syndication. But technology for handheld devices is constantly evolving and iPods, mobile phones, and other multimedia devices can handle video without any trouble, which wasn’t the case when podcasts were first introduced. Podcasts have evolved with the device technology and now include video. So, you can make use of the syndication power of podcasts by syndicating the videos you produce, as well. Many radio news outlets, for example, make use of podcasts as a way to distribute their news, sometimes even parsing it out by topic (music, politics, business, etc.). Podcasts are a huge distribution channel, so it can help with building your brand, image, and authority. Because they can get forwarded, podcasts do have the potential to go viral. Many people continue to use podcasts for audio. They will download their latest podcast and listen to the newest audio files while commuting or working out at the gym. Don’t discount the value of audio in the face of video. What’s great about audio is that you can use it to turn your blog posts into podcasts. You could either have someone read your blog post into a microphone and record the reading of the text if you want a human narrator. Or you can use a special reading software tool to read the text to an audio file. Dictating blog posts, for example, is a great way to make them more accessible. The files can be repurposed to a podcast for an additional distribution opportunity. Podcasts are a great way to distribute your email interviews, too. Any audio you produce for your webpages should be podcasted. For the minimal effort, you get the huge bonus of expanded distribution of your content. Sell with Product Pages What is it? If your company is an e-commerce site, you probably have tons of content that serves a very utilitarian purpose: to describe each of your products. Every single product gets its 15 minutes of fame on a page to itself. If your product descriptions are like the bulk of descriptions out there, they are probably set up to just get the job done. “The job” is to showcase your product in such a way that consumers know what they would get if they add it to their shopping cart. Many times, that means giving a product name, a graphic image, and a price – and often the image, description, and price come straight from the manufacturer, having nothing unique about them. So, why would anyone want to link to or engage with your product pages? They wouldn’t – unless you give them reasons to, reasons like providing information they cannot find anywhere else or giving them an opportunity to discuss the product. What’s it good for? Utilitarian product descriptions are great for the customers that are in the act of shopping or price comparison, but they don’t generally get shared or inspire your visitors to purchase. You can change that. By sprucing up your product description, you can make it work much more to your advantage. Through original content and some personalized attention, you can make your content catchy and link-worthy. Product descriptions, if done well, could be a fantastic way to build links to your page and draw traffic to your site – and away from your competitors’. Here are the general components of a typical product description that are fodder for creativity:

Title/Description

Images

User Generated Content

Product Comparisons

Statistics The title and description are the main text of the product description. This is where you have some flexibility to get really creative and even – as companies like Woot33 have done with their product descriptions – get exciting and become a phenomenon. Primarily, you have to keep your keyword research in mind for the product, especially the title. If people are searching for the product exactly by name, you may not have as much room to modify the title. The description, however, is a great placed to get creative. Enthusiastic content that has personality can engage visitors and lead them to link to your page. It’s similar to having an enthusiastic salesperson in a store. When you walk in and the salesperson demonstrates his knowledge and interest in the products he sells, you will be much more likely to make a purchase than in a store where the salesperson remains behind the counter and lets the product sell itself. Why use one dull photo when you can have multiple, interactive photos? Get users to click on the photos and view the product from different angles. Try taking your own photos of the product from new and interesting perspectives. In an image search, the same exact photo for a product can come up multiple times for different sites. Be the unique photo in the results. Heck, don’t stop there, be the unique video in the search results! If you provide a place for users to comment on the product, you’re offering a fantastic opportunity to do two things. First, you will get user-generated content on your page, which search engines love. Second, you’ll get users helping one another decide on their product. User comments, even negative ones, can be very useful. If the product description fails to describe the actual product in a user-friendly way, you’ll hear about it in the reviews. It’s a great place to get feedback on how you’re presenting your product. You can get creative with your comments section by using forms to get directed feedback from your users. You can ask questions like, “How did you use this product?” or “Would you recommend this to your friends?” There are many possibilities for user comments that can make your website useful to users. Look around the Internet at other product user reviews that you might be able to replicate. Shoppers spend a lot of time comparing products. Why not help them? If you add a product comparison to your description, your page will become much more useful to the visitors than the standard product page, and your visitors be more likely to return to your site to shop because they can get research information consolidated on your page. They will see your page not only as a product source but also a researching tool. For examples of some excellent product comparison features, check out Amazon.com and Zappos.com. With social media, people have become hyper-conscious of trends and trending activity in the world around them. A number of e-commerce sites are now adding statistical information with the product descriptions to show how the product is trending. Do people primarily buy this product in the summer? Is it big in California? Perhaps show the top five cities to buy this product. A really great statistic is to show what people who bought this product also bought, and link to those product pages on your site. The goal with developing great product description pages is to take them from utility to exciting and engaging. Make them more useful, more helpful, and more interesting than the typical product description so that people will want to share the experience they had on your site with others. You want them to point to your site as a resource for the product. VIDEOS, Stories in Motion What is it? In this section, I’m talking about simple video that you can produce yourself rather than high-end production video. With the rise of YouTube, where average people upload their own videos for mass consumption, low-budget video is now completely acceptable. So, you can paint -yourself as the authority using just a handheld Flip video camera. Short two- to five-minute videos are best, particularly because they can be posted to YouTube and other sites if they are kept to that length. But these lengths are also preferred because viewers tend to have short attention spans for online video content. Within those constraints, video can be used for anything – videos can be educational or entertaining. The only limit is the imagination. Think about videos you’ve seen on the Internet that would never meet quality standards for television production or advertising but have served to make a point that you nodded your head to. Maybe your favorite blogger is sitting at a bistro in San Francisco and is leaning into a video camera that’s propped on the table and he’s discussing a fantastic strategy for your industry. The quality and film angle would never say “professional” in other media outlets, but it’s great online. We feel like we’re right there, getting a personal lesson. In fact, video that gets momentum and goes viral tends to be filmed on the spur of the moment. Remember the instructional videos we discussed in chapter four for FixYourDLP.com? Those were created with their own employees and a handheld video camera, and the set was their stock room. What is it good for? Videos can draw traffic to your website and can turn a blasé content idea into a winner. FixYourDLP.com could have produced step- by-step text content for replacing your DLP TV bulb with handy illustrations, and would have, more or less, offered the same information to its customers: instruction. But by making a video, the content came alive and became dynamic. By taking a day or two to go through all of their products and create five-minute videos for each one, they spent minimal time and effort to create a huge amount of content that boosted their traffic tremendously. They supplemented their content on their site by setting up a YouTube channel for all their videos, expanding their opportunity to be found in search. There are many places to post video. Everyone knows YouTube, but there’s also Vimeo, Viddler, and other sites, which give you the ability to post your videos on multiple channels. If you optimize your videos and get people to talk about them, they can do well in search, directing traffic to you as a result. While professional video production can be expensive, do-it-yourself camera work is very low-cost. To start, get your staff some video cameras and get everyone thinking, “How can this be videoed and how can it become content?” Don’t be timid. You’re going to have to get in front of the camera. This may be easier said than done, but you have to get over it if you’re going to do video. Maybe someone in your office has a great presence on the camera, so they become a bit of an office celebrity. If your group gets used to having a camera around, they will start to ease up and act more natural. Go to where work gets done and find ways to make video content. Do you have a loading dock? How about an interview with your distribution manager right there? Don’t forget the hardhats. You can start filming conferences, whiteboard presentations, and even lunch in your break room. To create videos, you don’t necessarily need a video camera. If you have a great PowerPoint presentation, you can narrate it and post it as video. Anyone should be able to do that. I recently did three hour-long training courses for a company in California called the Online Marketing Institute, and that’s exactly what we did. We created a PowerPoint presentation, I came in on a Saturday, knowing it would be quiet, and sat and narrated each one using the record feature in PowerPoint. Now the videos are presented as part of an online course. This is something that’s often missed – you don’t have to shoot live action video just to get a video made. Videos – of all of the content that’s out there – are the most likely to go big- time viral. Everyone that gets into video wants to make the one that hits it out of the park and gets millions of views. However, it’s pretty much proven that the content that tends to go viral was rarely intended to do so. Viral video is like a lighting strike. It just happens. While you can’t force a video to take off, you can develop video content that is of quality and has appeal. Of quality means it offers some kind of value to the viewer; it’s not just noise. It shows your industry knowledge and experience, capturing your brand within that context. In the pursuit of creative video, occasionally you’re going to create one that you review and realize is junk. So you don’t post it. But try again, and the next time you’ll get something you really like. The key to success is to keep loose; don’t be stiff. Video is a medium that can be taken too seriously, but really works best when the atmosphere is relaxed and fun. By establishing a standard for the quality of your content and having fun at the same time, you have a great chance of creating video that will increase your traffic, generate backlinks, and maybe, just maybe, skyrocket to viral. WEBINARS, the New Conference What is it? Webinars are web-based seminars, live presentations where users remotely engage in the presentation from their desktops. These are fantastic ways to bring together customers from anywhere on the planet. The limitations on participation are only a matter of user access to the Internet at the time your webinar takes place. To manage the connectivity and presentation, you can use a webinar service, such as GoToMeeting.com, InLink.com, or Webex.com. Usually PowerPoint is used for the video display, though anything that you can display on your computer monitor can be displayed on the webinar. Because webinars are interactive, anyone who has joined the webinar can interact with questions or even tag-team the presentation. When we host webinars, we also record them, and then post the recording to our site for more content34. In essence webinars are videos, but because of their size, they are not necessarily something that could work with most video distribution channels, like YouTube. So you might have to pay for a premium subscription at a site like Vimeo, or you can post the video directly to your website for downloading or viewing. What is it good for? Yet another tool for showing your industry knowledge, webinars are excellent ways to directly engage customers and potential customers with solutions to your industry’s toughest problems. Through a webinar, you have an extended time with your audience, and this gives you the ability to show your leadership and depth of knowledge. I’m really surprised that businesses don’t do webinars more often. Anyone can do a webinar on any subject. You might be surprised to know that there’s a wide range of people out there who are willing to attend webinars, too. Webinars aren’t just for business executives. For example, REI hosts a number of webinars, with topics on choosing boots to choosing tents. Depending on how in depth you go with the subject matter, webinars don’t take long to prepare for, either. Generally, you prepare a PowerPoint and walk through it online. From your PowerPoint, you can link out to other sites or other content that you’ve created on the topic. Webinars tend to range from 30 minutes up to an hour. Because people are there for the education and the webinar happens live, people will engage for a longer period than they will for many other kinds of content. Remember to leave time for a question-and-answer session at the end. That’s another cool thing about webinars: as people interact with the content that’s being presented, you can capture all that activity when you record the session. That kind of human interaction is another way to show your ability to contribute solutions to your customers in a direct way. Webinars require registration in order to participate. So, when participants register, you can acquire their name and email, which you can add to your eNewsletter list, as well as your contact list for leads. The real challenge with hosting a webinar is that you need people to show up in order to have some level of success. This means that you will need to use your promotion tools – Twitter, Facebook, news releases, you name it – to get the message out that you have a webinar coming up. You’ve got to push it. Having regular webinars helps establish a set of returning participants. If they like what they’re getting, and they know exactly when the next one will be, it’s much easier for them to come back. Show Off Your Expertise with WHITE PAPERS What is it? Normally about 8 to 12 pages in length, a white paper is an authoritative document used to educate readers or help them make decisions. Sometimes, white papers are considered research reports or technical briefs. All white papers deal with issues that require in-depth explanation and argue that the benefits of a particular technology, product, or policy to solve a problem. Business white papers can take the following forms:

Business-benefits: Makes a business case for a certain technology or methodology.

Technical: Describes how a certain technology works.

Hybrid: Combines high-level business benefits with technical details in a single document.

Depending on the solution you have to offer, you can create a white paper as a standalone document, or you can present a series. If the content is rich enough, a series might be a good idea, but because of their length, this can be difficult. Many times larger companies will publish a white-paper series on each of the various technologies they’ve been developing. For example, Cisco might do a white-paper series on wireless routers, with each document outlining one of the routers they develop. A white paper series is a strong way to demonstrate your authority on a topic. In fact, you might even turn them into an eBook or even a webinar series, but you don’t need to aim for a series to have a successful white paper. Standalone white papers are very strong examples of your industry expertise and require a fraction of the time investment to develop. What’s it good for? White papers serve to promote your company’s solutions or technologies in response to vital issues that your customers face. These kinds of documents are perfect for demonstrating thought leadership on issues vital to your business. Your customers are often looking for the solutions your white paper can offer, and because of this they work really well online because electronic distribution is so easy and inexpensive. The way to make use of a white paper for your content marketing strategy is to put it on a page on your site and to promote it. You can also set it up so that when someone goes to get your white paper, they have to give you a name and email address in exchange, making it a great lead generator. Your link could say something like, “If you would like our free white paper on such and such topic, all we ask is that you give us your name and email address.” People tend to be more than willing to do this, seeing it as a fair trade. If they don’t like the email correspondence you send them, they can unsubscribe. The other advantage with white papers is that if they’re done well and offer real value, they often get passed around. They can become a quasi-viral marketing tool, demonstrating that you’re the expert and promoting your brand. When a white paper offers customers a valuable solution, your customers tend to spread the word, whether by linking to it on their blog, sending it by email, or just handing the printed version off to their office- mate. The challenge with white papers is the same as with a lot of content production: yes, they paint you as the expert, they can go viral, they can get generate leads, but they require effort to create. To get value out of an 8- to 12-page document, you have to commit yourself to the bigger picture. If you can dedicate the hours required to write a white paper, in the end it may turn out to be a relatively small investment to get you leads and reinforce your brand. It just takes the initial effort. For example, we spent several hours creating a white paper on SEO Best Practices35, and now it gets downloaded nearly every day. WIDGETS & BADGES, Oh My! What is it? A widget is a mini-app that displays or updates data either locally or on the web. Widgets have a wide range of applications, including tickers for news, sports, stocks, or other trending data by certain keyword or category. Some widgets can have more complex applications, such as in video games or photo-editing applications. All widgets have a single, specific purpose and are intended to be to be embedded on web pages and shared among users. A badge is a simple graphic, and like a widget they are designed to be embedded on a web page. Badges:

Promote certain standards online36

Refer back to products used in the creation of the web page37

Can be a way for a user to show their interest, support, or participation in an activity or organization38

Or can be just for fun, adding a bit of flair to a web page.

What’s it good for? The best thing about widgets and badges is that the cool ones get shared and can even go viral. Through creative designs and interesting utility, they can be great ways to spread your brand as people pick them up and pass them around. Even if you don’t create branded widgets and badges, you can still benefit from them. Most include a link in the code back to the originator’s site. That way, whenever someone embeds your widget or badge to their web page, they’re building a link back to you. Not everyone has the kind of business that would benefit from widgets or badges, but be creative and you may be surprised to discover that you can get more use from them than you might expect. For example, a landscape architecture firm might benefit from developing some quality badges that promote sustainable landscaping. People with an interest in sustainable design could post a badge on their sites to show their support for that cause. This same firm might develop a widget that shows the top-five trending flowers on the Internet by hardiness zone. Anyone with an interest in flowers, gardening, or landscaping could pick it up and post it to their website. Conclusion While I’ve given you a big list of content ideas in this chapter, this isn’t the end of the possibilities. Keep researching the content your competition and industry are producing to get ideas for other forms. The main purpose for a list like this is to generate ideas when you’re brainstorming for adding content to your website. This is a go-to guide that can inspire your next project. When I present, I have a slide that bullets these content ideas and I often see the audience taking note of all the options. So, I know that people are interested in a list like this and can get a lot of value from it. But do not let it overwhelm you. Unless you have unlimited resources, you cannot tackle it all. Instead, get out your content calendar and target just a few types of content that you can do well on a consistent basis. This whole book is designed to help you through this process, but the key is to dive in. You will make mistakes, you will produce boring stuff, but keep at it. I can tell you first-hand that our business has grown steadily right through the recession and it is all because of the content we produced. At first it was just me writing blog posts at night; as we grew we were able to delegate to our staff, and now we produce new content several times per week, leveraging everything I am outlining in this book. Don’t delay, put a plan together and start right now! 8

Content Must Be Maintained To Be Successful

Psychologist and philosopher Paul Watzlawick writes, “You cannot not communicate.” Leave nothing to chance, because the effect may not mirror your intentions. Content strategists, copywriters, you who create, aggregate, curate, or otherwise share content: What are you trying to communicate, and how do you know if you’re successful in that goal? Is it enough to simply test if your target audience indeed found the right page, or should you check whether a paragraph helped them in a task? If it hit the mark – if it interested, engaged, and truly communicated – when you launched, how do you know if it still does those things now? That video or call to action that helped pitch the product or change minds six months ago seems trite now … or worse, it hints at an unrelated issue. And there’s the rub: If you commit to content today, you commit to it as its context changes over time. Watzlawick’s statement comes back to haunt us if we forget content communicates over time – now, and as your brand, competitors and the outside world continue to change. It’s a big commitment, but all communication is. Read on to explore ways to manage the work and its impact. Margot Bloomstein, Brand and content strategy consultant, Appropriate, Inc.

Imagine that you own a bicycle. Maybe you commute to work on it, maybe you ride it on the weekends, or maybe you race with it. When you left the store with your new bike, it gleamed. The mechanics were in perfect alignment. The chain worked over the gears in near silence. The brakes pinched tightly with barely a squeeze of the levers. After a year of riding and a couple hundred miles of road grit, the gears are gunked over, the brake cables have stretched and loosened a bit so you have to grip hard to stop. The tires are a tad soft. Your bike needs some maintenance to bring it back to tip- top shape. After a good wash, tightening of some bolts, and a little air in the tires, it’s back in business. To keep the bike in its best riding condition, any rider will tell you that you have to inspect the bike often and correct any issues you find right away.

Figure 23: Bicycle In a similar way, content will start off fresh but as your business evolves – as your content evolves – older content may begin to lose relevance or links may break. Once you’ve created a piece of great content and published it to the web, you aren’t done with it. Content needs constant maintenance to be successful. If you’re paying attention and tracking the results of your content efforts, you’ll discover what’s working and you can work toward creating even more success. This means measuring your efforts and governing your content to ensure that your published content is the absolute best that you have to offer and is working efficiently to help you meet your goals. You can’t ignore maintenance. Your content represents your brand and your expertise, your ability to meet the needs of your customer. Whether on-site or off-, the content you publish needs to be kept up to date in order to remain relevant, timely, and accurate. (Many times governance of the content tends to get neglected in favor of new content production.) Governance is about knowing who will take care of the content that you’ve produced and who will measure its success to ensure that new content has the best chance to meet your goals. Maintain Your Content to Get the Most Value from It Success in content marketing is goal-oriented, which comes down to tracking your efforts and measuring your return on the objective. As I’ve said, at the conception phase for content, the objective should be clearly stated. You need to establish clear, measurable objectives and then use analytics to compare performance to objective. For each content launch, you should:

Define what success means for your content and how you will measure it

Establish a timetable for measuring and using web analytics to gather data on the activity on your site

Use analytic data to adapt future content for optimal performance Defining Success You can’t measure success until you’ve defined it. Content development is directly linked to the goals in your strategy. But how do you know if you’re meeting that goal? Say your goal is to increase traffic to your site. At what point can you say you’ve achieved that goal? The answer is that every goal should be contextualized to include measurable milestones so that you can clearly see whether or not you’ve been successful. If your basic ambition is to increase traffic to your site, work into that goal one or more milestones that establish a timetable and measurable benchmarks. Articulate your goals so that they are clearly established and make them as specific as possible. So, a goal of “increase traffic to our site” could be better stated: “Show a 50 percent increase in traffic to our ‘Contact Us’ page in six months.” This restated goal specifies what area of your site you’ll focus on, it gives a firm, measurable definition of what level of increase you’re looking to achieve, and it establishes a date at which you will be able to determine the success. Measure Progress Using web analytics, you can measure the return on your objectives. What are web analytics? According to the Web Analytics Association, web analytics are defined as “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.”39 By using web analytics, you can get detailed metrics behind user activity on your site and other pages. On-site analytics measure user activity as they engage your website. They track users’ paths through your content, revealing what is important to their experiences and identifying areas where you could bring forward the content you want to emphasize. Using tools such as Google Analytics, you can get huge amounts of metrics back on the activity on your site. You can identify which keyword searches are leading to visits per page and, ultimately, conversion. Using these tools to develop your onsite analytics, you’ll be better equipped to make milestones for future content because you’ll know exactly what you can measure. By developing web forms on your site, you can drive the analytics with precision to gather metrics on user behavior. By tracking user interactions with forms, you can identify who’s using your content, what kind of people are converting, what they want from your products and services, and a host of other possibilities. By establishing a web analytics program for your business, you can determine if you are meeting your goals, what content works, and what needs improvement. Measurement always begins with establishing a baseline benchmark from your current analytics. Establishing a baseline is generally not difficult, especially if you’ve been monitoring the analytic data already. From the baseline, establish a goal and a timeline for achieving the goal. Generate your content and run the analytics according to your timetable. Here are some examples of objectives and some practical analytics you can run to measure success:

Let’s imagine a company will be launching a new blog and they want to get the word out and drive traffic there. In this case, because it’s new, the baseline is zero traffic. After a set period of time, say six months, they can check back to see how their promotion efforts have been working. From web analytics, you have hard data on the number of visitors and the number of subscribers to the blog.

For web copy, you can use Google Analytics to check bounce rate on the traffic for that content page to see how visitors are behaving. Are they staying and engaging, continuing through your site, or are they bouncing? Are they converting by purchasing, or filling out your web form? The answer will shape future web copy and help you improve it to meet your goals. Or, if the content is meeting your goals, analytics will help confirm your decision to continue on the same path.

If your goal is to increase branding, an excellent measuring tool would be share of voice. Use tools like Trackur.com, Radian6.com, and Spiral16.com to get baseline metrics on how your product or brand name is getting mentioned around the web. They will give you a rating, the sentiment, and the number of mentions, which you can compare against your competitors’. Essentially, this will show you if the majority of people are talking about you or your competitor. After you’ve established a content plan to address your branding, set a goal period – this time, maybe a year. At the end of the period, run the share-of-voice report and check how your brand is trending. If you see your share of voice increase, or your positive mentions go up, then you’re seeing good results that you can then start to attribute to your content efforts.

An excellent way to benchmark success for a content page is by measuring how many quality links it is getting (backlinks). There are a number of tools available for measuring backlinks. One such tool is Yahoo! Site Explorer. Just enter the URL for the content page and see how many backlinks you’re getting. Track these metrics over a specified time to see if the number goes up. Because these analytics will give you the URL for the page that’s linking to your content, you can also track link juice (the power of the link – more on this in chapter twelve), allowing you to judge the quality of the links as well as the quantity.

Web analytics will give you a vision for future content development. All content you develop should work toward a measurable goal. By using analytics to both establish your goal and measure your efforts, you can be smart about each new effort, which will actually free you up to follow bold, creative ideas with confidence. Take What You Have Learned and Adapt As I’ve said before, in content marketing the mantra is “be willing to try new ideas.” But it’s not about trial and error. It’s about trial and testing. It’s not exactly science, but you shouldn’t have to take a shotgun approach, either. It’s far more efficient to take rifle shots. In other words, you can generate targeted content that has been informed by experience and research. Through measurement, you can hone in on the kinds of content that have historically worked for you and for your competitors. You have the ability to use analytics to adapt your content toward what is likely to work and not waste as much time producing content that doesn’t have a chance at success. For Continued Results, Update Your Content Kristina Halvorson said it best: “Your web content will never take care of itself.”40 It’s your job to ensure that your content remains up to date, accurate, and relevant to your visitors. In the dynamic world of the Internet, content can quickly become irrelevant, possibly to the detriment of your brand. Often when we focus on delivering new content, it can seem like a real chore to go back and ensure that what we’ve created remains up to date and relevant to visitors. But, as Kristina said, it’s not going to happen on its own. Responsible content delivery includes dedicated oversight. In the industry, we call this level of content quality assurance governance because it’s about actively setting and enforcing standards and policy that will ensure your content is at its peak quality at all times. While web governance can be defined in many ways, we’re looking at it from a content perspective. I suggest that you appoint someone to keep your content updated and maintained properly. This person will serve as a content governor or web managing editor and will be in charge of ensuring that all published content conforms to the standards you’ve set for your content strategy. If you don’t have the resources to appoint someone to the role, you will have to add it to the list of hats your content strategist wears. It’s not a task that can be ignored. What standards are we talking about? You want to ensure that your brand is associated with the expert industry knowledge that your content purports. Any time that a searcher finds old, inaccurate or irrelevant content, it undermines the expertise you’ve been working to demonstrate. Your web managing editor will patrol your content looking for content that needs to be updated or removed. Some frequent content issues that need updating include:

Broken links within the content

Outdated or inaccurate information

Policy changes that may affect the content

Inconsistency with branding style

SEO/metadata updates to adapt to changes in search tactics. If your business is going to ensure that content is updated, begin monitoring your existing content assets. This means you will need to conduct frequent audits. This is tied to the content inventory discussed in chapter six. You’re going to review every piece of content to identify where content needs updating. The audit schedule is cyclical. Rather than a random cleanup of your assets, you should conduct routine audits to keep your content in healthy condition. Your audit schedule should be incorporated into your editorial -calendar; in fact, it should be the first thing that you populate when you set up for a new year. You might want to do semiannual audits, say in the spring and the fall. However, conducting an audit every six months may not always be enough. Certain major events within your organization, such as a major shift in policy or brand look, might make it necessary to audit off cycle. When you audit, update your content inventory. Having a current inventory will make the audit go more smoothly and it will certainly be more organized. Naturally, the more content that you generate, the more content you will need to maintain and keep up to date. The more you have to keep updated, the more frequently you will want to conduct audits, perhaps sectioning off your content and cycling through areas of your site. There’s an old adage that says to keep a house painted, you should paint one side every year. Every four years, then, you’ve painted the whole house. Thus by breaking down a large job and tackling portions on a cycle, you make the job more manageable. If you are going to approach your audit schedule this way, you will reduce the load for each audit, but you’ll want to increase the frequency within the schedule so that you’re keeping everything up to date and not letting any one section sit for too long. Governance is also a matter of knowing how you’re going to treat content that has become outdated. How much effort will you spend to update it? Are you going to take content down when it’s no longer useful? Many times you can repurpose old content into something new, and breathe fresh life into it. It might seem like a major chore, but at the core of governance is quality, and for that reason you can’t afford to ignore it. Value of Outsourcing and When to Outsource The lesson learned so far should be that content production is both doable and challenging. This book aspires to convince you that you can develop a content strategy for your business and that you can find ways to implement it. I also want you to know that a successful content strategy is a commitment. You have to continuously develop a variety of fresh content to engage the people looking for your products. Each piece of content that you develop has a life cycle, starting with the seed of inspiration, through research and production, to updating and nurturing, to the day you take it down from your site. It’s quite likely that you will discover that you do, indeed, need a content marketing strategy, but that you may not be able to commit your staff to setting up and running a program. You might need some help. Why not consider outsourcing? Making the decision to outsource can be a difficult one. Content marketing is a major commitment of resources, namely time and energy of your staff. Large organizations with ambitious goals for their strategy will need to consider how to allocate staff resources as much as a small business with a skeleton crew and modest goals will have to do. The bottom line with making a decision of whether or not to outsource is that you want to complement the resources that you have on hand and are able to commit to your content marketing strategy. This means that first you have to take a close look at your existing staff and budget to see what you can bring to the table. If you have holes that you need to fill, how will you fill the holes? Is it a matter of hiring new staff to your organization or reorganizing your current staff? Do you outsource? The fact is that content marketing is enormously valuable to the success of your business online. If you can’t run a content marketing program, then you’ll need to find someone who can. For an organization that has financial resources to do so, developing a content marketing team headed by a dedicated content strategist could have the strongest impact. But this can quickly become a costly endeavor. For the small business owner who happens to be a chronic do-it-yourselfer, the decision to keep content marketing in house will mean that much of the effort will need to be shared by the existing staff. As with any do-it-yourself endeavor, there’s a tradeoff when you opt to save capital: you spend the time and effort of your personnel. Outsourcing some of the content marketing chain can help free up your time to focus on the other aspects of the chain that you feel more -comfortable with. After judging the talent within your staff, you might consider outsourcing for areas where your group may not be able to contribute:

An SEO expert will ensure your content is optimized to the maximum.

A link-building expert can do the legwork to get links to your content.

Outsourcing the maintenance and analytics of your site can free up much of your time to be creative.

After polling your staff, you may not find much enthusiasm for the creative effort. Outsourcing talent is a strong option, freeing you up to monitor your content program for performance and to guide its direction.

If outsourcing all the creativity seems too intense, a great way to ease the burden on your staff’s time is to hire a writer to provide you with text for your content ideas. Conclusion As I’ve described, information in the form of online content is now one of your key products. For many businesses – especially small businesses – adding a brand new product to the core business requires a shift in resources. Many businesses would rather focus on their core products and services than develop their content marketing strategy. For this reason, outsourcing can be a cost-effective way to manage a full-fledged content marketing strategy. 9

Optimized Content Gets The Best Results

“What’s the secret to optimizing content for search and social media? Solve people’s problems. Help them accomplish their tasks. Start with understanding who you’re targeting, what they’re searching for, what they need. By focusing your efforts there, you not only build long-term value that does well in search and social media no matter how ranking algorithms evolve, but you also truly connect with visitors who come to your site, which results in return visits, conversions, and higher customer lifetime value. All kinds of data exist about what people are searching for. Take advantage of that data to ensure that you are providing exactly what your audience is looking for. Content is only half the battle. You also need to make sure your site is architected in a way that search engines can effectively crawl and index it, that you’re leveraging awareness efforts for greater visibility and links, and you’re using web analytics data to determine what’s working and where you should make adjustments. But lose focus on solving your audience’s problems and none of the rest of it will matter.” Vanessa Fox, author, Marketing in the Age of Google

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process for making web content search-engine-friendly. SEO facilitates the search engine bot crawling your pages and makes the nature of your content clear to the search engine algorithm so that it’s recognized as highly relevant and will likely appear high in the search results. This chapter covers a lot of optimization detail that is critical for your online marketing success. I recommend you read though it once to get an understanding of what you need to be aware of, then return to it as necessary as an SEO resource. Search engine optimization is not an exact science. Search engine algorithms are proprietary, so we can’t know exactly how they work. Instead, SEO is based on theories that have been carefully thought out and tested across the Internet. Therefore, it’s not guaranteed that optimized content will automatically rank higher in search. But by following good optimization practices, you will greatly increase your content’s chances to beat the competition. SEO can seem technical for some people, and therefore it can get written off as the responsibility of the webmaster or at least someone with a computer science degree. I’m willing to bet, however, that you could look at a web page and identify whether or not it’s following good SEO practices without ever looking at a line of programming code. That’s because optimization practices not only work for the search engines; they also make the page readable and clear to humans. Search engines reward content in the search results for being clear and user-friendly, so optimization is about making content exactly that. Certainly, you should ensure that your webmaster understands SEO, but your web content creators need to understand optimization, too. This means they should understand some of the technical stuff – so that every content creation effort includes optimization (rather than leaving it as an afterthought). Optimizing Your Content First things first, you can’t avoid working with code for some of your SEO, so you should know how to see the code behind your web page and be able to identify some basic aspects of it. Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, is the fundamental coding language for the World Wide Web. Over the years many languages have been built on top of it, but HTML typically forms the framework for most web pages. In the code is some background information that not only tells your browser how to display the page but identifies key aspects of the page’s relevance to the search engine bot. You can display the code for any web page by going to your browser and opting to see it. For Internet Explorer, this entails going to “view” in the menu, and then selecting “source” from the drop-down menu. For Firefox, go to “view” and then “page source.” Every browser allows you to see the source code. For most browsers, like Google Chrome, Firefox and Explorer, the code will be displayed in a separate window so that you can compare the code and the displayed web content side by side. Web pages are divided like most paper documents: they have a header, a body, and a footer. In terms of the coding, the information will contain “metadata.” It’s considered meta because it’s data about your page, and most of it never displays on the page itself. This is code that bots consider important. So you must consider it important, too! Let me de-mystify code a little bit. HTML is actually pretty simple to read for the casual user. It’s built on tags that define the contents within them. HTML tags are command words set off by angle brackets. Generally speaking, there is an opening tag and a closing tag (identified with a slash). The text between the tags is defined by the tags. For example, to indicate that the word “example” should appear in bold, the code would look like this: bold example /bold . Knowing this little bit about how to read HTML will enable you to take a quick look at your code to ensure that it’s optimized. You need to know the names of some of the basic tags and what they do, but once you know them, you’re on your way. If you see a tag in your code that you don’t recognize, Google it. If you would like to know even more about HTML, check out http://www.html-reference.com/. The sexiness of your page’s coding, believe it or not, actually matters to search engines. Inefficient, poorly written code can slow down the load time for your page. Search engines measure the time it takes to load a page and penalize pages with excessive load times. So do humans, who have short attention spans and won’t tolerate slow-loading pages either. You can speed up your page-load time by allocating to a separate file certain aspects of coding like JavaScript and other scripting, or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and inline style data. (Entire books are written on that subject.) Making your code crisp and concise can reduce your bounce rates and improve your rankings. Optimization is about making your content understood by the search engine bots. Right now, search engines can’t follow or index certain non-text-based site navigation, such as JavaScript, Flash, or even pure images. While this kind of coding can offer a cool experience for your visitors, it won’t do much to help your page rankings. When a search engine bot crawls your page, it needs to be encouraged to explore your pages. If it can’t follow the navigation, then it won’t be able to completely explore your site unless you have created a comprehensive site map.41 It’s best to avoid non-text-based navigation as much as possible and instead use text-based navigation to help your pages be found. Navigation should be natural and clear, allowing visitors to find their way through your content and not miss out on critical information. Search engines generally do not consider the keywords used in navigation, so there is no reason to try to fit them in unless they would be there naturally. Optimizing the Page Header The header of your page is set apart in the code by the tag Head . The metadata within the header gives a huge amount of information about your website to the bots. The metadata also provides information about the page that appears in the browser and in the SERP, which searchers will see but may not consciously recognize as page content. Figure 24: Title Tag and Meta Description in Search Results for “Men’s Hiking Boots” The page title tag is set off by the tag title and it serves a number of purposes. It usually states what the page is about and is viewable to users in a number of places. In the search engine results, and on many social networks, the title appears as the link for the website. It also appears at the top of the browser when you are viewing the page, and if your browser is tabbed, it will be the name of the tab for the page being viewed. Therefore, it’s meaningful to humans as the identifier for your page’s content. It also has a major significance to search engines. Optimize your title tags like this:

Title tags should contain at least one keyword phrase related to the page’s optimized content. The closer to the beginning of the title, the better.

Make certain that the title is no more than 70 characters long.

Be strategic. Don’t repeat titles. Each page should have a unique title.

And for your visitors’ sake, as much as for the search engine, titles should match the content of the page.

Next, you have the meta description. The meta description is one single tag (rather than text sectioned off between tags). The tag for example description is formatted: meta name=”description” content=“example description”/ . The meta description typically would be viewed by the user in the SERP as the descriptor text about the result. For the humans viewing the search results, this description is very important and should make it quite clear what visitors will find when they click to your content (see figure 24). Therefore, you should avoid generic descriptors, like “Welcome to our home page.” The description ought to include your keywords, but you should never create keyword-stuffed descriptions. A good description is a complete sentence that concisely states the purpose of the page content. It is your opportunity to sell the individual on clicking through to your page. Search engines limit the amount of real estate they will give to descriptions and normally have limit of about 150 characters. Anything more than that limit is usually cut off. The meta keywords tag is your chance to tell the search engine exactly what keywords you’re targeting. The search engine algorithms are a tad wary of this tag because it can be easily manipulated, but we still recommend adding two or three keyword phrases in this field rather than leave it blank. The tag for example keyword is formatted: meta name=”keywords” content=”example keyword”/ . Use commas to separate keyword phrases. This tag does not get displayed for human visitors, so it does not necessarily have to be meaningful to a human visitor. As mentioned, meta keywords don’t seem to have a major impact on helping page rankings. Actually, as late as fall 2010, they’ve been known to hurt rankings if overstuffed with keywords. Some webmasters have been known to paste as many keywords as possible into the tag just to get them in there, and they lazily place the same keyword tags on all pages. They have found out the hard way that this has had a negative impact on their rankings. The lesson is: Optimize the tag but go easy. Err on the side of caution and include only a few truly relevant keywords. One last word about meta tags: When it comes to optimizing them, it’s not the time to get lazy. Typically, people spend a lot of time creating awesome content, then they go to upload it and suddenly remember that they need to optimize. Anxious to post, they blast through the last optimization step, giving it very little thought or even skipping it altogether. But it happens to be a step that needs your close attention. Remember, the description and title meta tags will feed into the SERP and other places, describing the results that the searcher can expect to find. These tags are critical to search engine indexing. You don’t want to sell short your fantastic web content by letting SEO slip by. Optimizing the Page Body

Figure 25: Search Engine Optimized Webpage The page body is the page content that displays as the web page. The page body is for people first and search engines second. So, start by providing content that people want to read. Organize the page content in a way that is clear and natural for humans to engage and, especially, share. Natural links (links that other people create out of interest in the content) are the ultimate SEO boost, and you won’t get natural links if your content is badly organized, sloppy, or redundant. Fitting Keywords Into Your Content If you’re targeting a keyword phrase, then your content should relate to the keywords. People search keywords because they want information related to the keywords, and they have no tolerance for a page that optimizes a keyword and then delivers unrelated content. This will get you nothing but a huge bounce rate and lowered rankings. Keyword stuffing – overloading a page with keywords to the point that the text of the page is unnatural, or worse, unreadable – is another no-no. I still get asked about the appropriate density for keywords on a page so I feel compelled to address it here. In short, don’t worry about it. Just write for your audience. Now, if you can work your targeted keyword phrase into the first sentence and then maybe once or twice more throughout the body, you will probably do your potential rankings some good. Remember that humans come first, and cheap tricks with keywords can hurt your brand reputation. You’ll have little chance of people seeing you as an expert if your content is not valuable and relevant. For SEO, the list of “don’ts” is long, but the “dos” are just as important. Keyword use in the body text should always strive to appear natural. Headers and Fonts in the Body Just like in a word processor, HTML allows you to manipulate the text by creating headings, bold text and colors. The tags that control fonts get a close inspection by the search engine bots. The page headings are tagged H1 , H2 , etc., with H1 as the top level heading. Search engines pay close attention to the H1 tag, and less to the subsequent heading tags. Here’s how to use them:

Each page should have only one H1 tag. (If you need to have headings for multiple sections on a page, you should use H2 or H3.)

H1 tags should be located at the top of your page content above any other heading tags.

If possible, put your important keywords into your H1 tag.

Above all, the H1 tag should serve like a title and should communicate what the page is about.

Believe it or not, even font size, color and bolding are considered by the search engines, but only slightly. Fonts should be kept to a readable size, which is in the range of 10 to 18 points. When choosing color, readers want to be able to engage the text without getting a headache, so use colors that work well with the background. There’s a dirty trick for keyword stuffing to use a font colored the same as the background to hide extra keywords in the body. Humans don’t see it, but search engine bots do. Because there is little reason for text that is camouflaged, bots easily weed this out and your results will suffer. So don’t do it! Links in Your Content Your page content will have links in it. The way that you handle links is an important part of SEO. Most importantly, make it clear where a link will take your visitor – don’t surprise them. Bots are programmed to look for the same kinds of clarity that humans want. Fundamentally, you are free to color your links any way you want, but it’s recommended that you make it obvious they are links. A link’s color should be different from the main text. Most people expect links to be colored blue and be underlined, so you might want to keep that in mind as you set up your style sheet. Remember, there’s no shame using the default font style if users will be able to engage the page with ease. The actual text that is linked, i.e. the text that’s colored differently and underlined, is called the “anchor text.” Because you’ve set the link apart by color and an underline, it naturally draws the reader’s eye. The words that are highlighted, then, can be a very good clue to the content that you are linking to. You should use terms that make an effort to communicate where the link is going and avoid sending your visitor to a page that they aren’t expecting. On that note, it should go without saying, then, that all of your links should be functioning properly. Broken links look sloppy and give the impression that you’ve forgotten about the page. Not only do your users dislike broken links, but search engines frown upon them, too. Search engines want to see links in your content. An internal link is a link to other pages on your own site. Internal links are as good for you as they are for search engines; they are clues to your website’s relevance. By using internal links, you encourage your visitors to engage your content on multiple levels, and you’re demonstrating your depth of knowledge as an expert in your industry. When using internal links, avoid generic anchor text, such as “click here” or “more.” It’s a tempting way to link because it’s fast and easy to say, “Want to read more? Click here.” But search engines want to see relevance in the anchor text. The best way to ensure relevance is to make sure that the anchor text for those links matches the title of the page it links to, whether it is a page on your site or a page on another website. Above all, links should direct users to a page that is relevant to the content that they are currently engaging. You want to keep them engaged, and directing users away from the topic at hand is a surefire way to lose their attention. Optimizing the Page Footer At the bottom of your web page is the footer. Like the footer of any other document, it serves to signal to the reader that she’s reached the bottom of the document. Search engines give very little weight to links in the footer. So it’s recommended that you not attempt to insert keyword-heavy links in this section. Rather, the footer should be crisp and concise, giving the human visitor a few pieces of critical information:

Links to core pages on your site.

Your fine-print information: links to your terms of use, copyright, and privacy policy.

Your contact information (especially if you’re concerned with local search, be sure to include a local address and a local phone number). Optimizing Images for Search Because images get searched quite regularly – they are perhaps the most commonly used vertical search type – the images on your website need to be optimized. Images can appear in the main search results if Google determines that image results are relevant to a particular search. Your image could appear, even when your other content pages don’t. This gives your content more chances for competing in search. Because search engines can’t derive full meanings from images, they rely on the context of the page on which the images are found to identify relevance to the query. The search engine uses keywords on the page on which the image is located, along with the meta tags for the image, to understand the image’s contextual meaning and its relevance in search. The metadata for images includes source (i.e. file location and name), alt, and title tags. For best results in search, all of these tags should be used and optimized for your images. Alt tags serve as alternate text to describe the image when the image is not available. If there’s an error loading the source image, the alternate text will display. For text-reading software, alt tags are read aloud so that images can be understood by the listener. Though it isn’t as common today, users with slower Internet connections may turn off image loading so that they can peruse the web faster, and the alt tag lets them know what image was supposed to be there. The image title tag is similar to the alt tag, but it displays on the scroll-over by the mouse. The title will help the visitor to understand the context of the image, and therefore it should describe it accurately and with detail. A good alt tag is a simple phrase that is keyword-rich and adequately describes the image. The title tag should be keyword-rich but it should also give a better sense of the context of the image. The alt and title tags are imbedded within the image source code as follows: img src=“pepperoni_pizza.jpg” alt=“pepperoni pizza” title=“pepperoni pizza with proper distribution of pepperonis” . Not only should your alt and title tags be keyword-rich, but the filename for your image should also contain the keyword that you’re optimizing. All of the information contained in the tags provides clues that search engines use to understand exactly what the image on the page really is. As with all the content you produce, try to provide the best user experience on the page that you can. This means that you will need to consider how the images will help the user engage your page. Offering high quality images is not only good for your user experience but they will also help them retain quality when they are displayed as thumbnails in SERP. By taking the time to make thoughtful captions and title tags, you enhance the user’s experience. It’s always advantageous to use unique images that attract interest and possibly links on your website. For eCommerce sites, make an effort to generate your own product images rather than use images provided by manufacturers. This can help your images stand out among the results, and can make them appealing enough to get links. If you create your own unique images, you may want to specify that others are free to use them in exchange for a citation or link back to your website. This way, your content gets circulated and you are able to build links back to your source pages. Remember, if you use images from other sources on your site, be sure that you have permission to use them. You don’t want to set yourself up for a copyright-infringement issue. Optimizing Videos for Search Shooting, editing and publishing video on today’s Internet is so easy and so popular that it can’t be ignored. Video offers a huge opportunity for marketers. Video has exploded on the Internet because of sites like YouTube and Vimeo that have enabled casual users to upload their videos, create channels for their content, and encourage user comments. Paired with the boom in video recording technology, like the Flip camera and today’s cell phones, creating and publishing video can be a snap. The Internet video phenomenon has made it much easier for anyone, including marketers, to use video for communication. Video does not have to be professionally produced in a studio to be interesting, enjoyable, or go viral. It only needs to be compelling. When a video gets big time views, you want all the benefits, like traffic and links, coming to your site rather than going off-site to YouTube or other video-sharing sites. On the other hand, YouTube gets so much viewership that it can offer you the opportunity to get much more exposure, and a successful video can lead traffic back to your website. The burst of activity around a successful video generally remains with the hosting site, so, ideally, you would want to host the video on your site and simultaneously post it to sites like YouTube to maximize traffic. For simultaneous launch, you can save yourself some hassle by first posting your video to a video-hosting site and then embedding the video onto your webpage. Most video-hosting sites provide an embed code that you can paste into your webpage’s HTML, allowing visitors to play the video from your page. Post the video to YouTube and, when it goes live, grab the embed code and post it to your site. That way, you make use of your video posted on YouTube but publish it on your website. You should also create and optimize branded channels for your business on YouTube, Vimeo and others. This way you can increase your brand recognition and leverage your successful videos to promote your other content. Here are some tips for optimizing videos:

Make sure your video title is keyword-rich, but give it some pizzazz. Drab titles that appear to viewers as only keyword-conscious will lead them to believe that the video itself is just marketing propaganda. By using an interesting title, you draw viewers in and make your effort seem more natural.

For the video description, make sure it clearly represents the content of the video and contains your keyword phrase. Lead the description with a link to the most relevant page on your website, that way it will ensure that it displays so that users can easily click on it.

As with images, when posting video to your site, be sure to optimize the description and title tags.

Optimize the video filename and URL in the same way that you would with images. Make sure they incorporate the keywords you’re targeting.

Here are some tips to use when you’re in video production. These will help the humans who watch your videos, and will give your videos a better chance of going viral:

During production of the video, consider lighting, camera angles, and audio. Online video viewers are tolerant of amateur video, but you should aim to make your content as viewable as possible and to give your production a level of quality that supports your professional image. If you are doing an interview, use a tripod to keep the camera steady. Run a test to make sure that the lighting works well and doesn’t blur the subject of the video. Be sure that the audio is being picked up by the microphone and that the room doesn’t distort the sound or create an echo.

When you select your thumbnail of the video, take an image that’s going to lead viewers to click on your video, especially when they are faced with a queue of suggested videos, or when it gets shared on social media. The thumbnail should be interesting and should also attempt to make it clear what the video is about.

Keep in mind copyright if you use music for the background in your video. You’ll either have to get permission from copyright holders to use their music, select royalty-free music (from providers like GarageBand), or generate your own original music.

Encourage user comments and ratings for your video. Search engines pick up on and favor user-generated content.

Allow other websites to embed your video in exchange for a link back to your site. Also, encourage sharing of the video by adding social media share buttons, such as the Facebook “Like” button or the Twitter “Tweet This” button. Optimizing for News Sites Journalists today have found that print is competing with online journalism at a frenzied rate. Journalists now need to get their articles discovered in search results rather than just in print magazines and newspapers. In fact, they’re finding that they actually have to fight to get their headlines found. Even if you’re not a journalist proper, you might find that you produce industry-related news all the time, whether it be through your blog or other means, and that you want to be recognized as a new source in your industry. Though it’s a great time to jump into online news, it still takes work to get news content to rank in search, so it’s critical to know of ways to optimize your news-oriented content. If you’ve been building a follower base, make sure you get your news to your followers first. By setting up an RSS feed, you can publish news content to your followers the instant it’s created. Many RSS followers want to read the entire article from the feed, so if you can do it practically, it’s best to send the complete article through the feed rather than a summary. Include a link to your page content to enable users to navigate back to your site. If you publish an RSS feed, then growing your following should always be a key focus. By placing an RSS feed button by your content, you will make it easy for people to start following you. Other social media applications like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are also great ways to share your news and will make it easy for others to pass it along, encouraging others to join and become followers. To publish news content that ranks with actual news sites, you’ll need each article that you produce to exist on a static URL, meaning that every article you produce will be listed on a separate page, rather than having multiple articles compiled on a single page. In order to have your website’s news feed included in Google News, you’ll need to submit your blog or press release sections directly to Google News. They will review your content, and once it’s approved, they will start including your content in their news feed. Google News has specific requirements for adding news sites to their pages.42 To routinely appear in news feeds, you should produce newsworthy content frequently. And to make sure you regularly produce fresh content, the editorial calendar, once again, is the tool to use. News articles should be optimized for keywords in the same way that you would optimize other content. The body of the article should have your keywords included but the article should not run the risk of appearing to be keyword-optimized. Article headlines should be interesting and grab your readers’ attention. Sometimes, you won’t be able to get the keyword you want into the headline. Be sure, then, that you’ve optimized the meta data (title, description, and keywords) for the keywords you want to isolate. By including the keywords that you want to rank for in the title tags, you greatly increase your chances to get ranked for that keyword. Take advantage of news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo! News. Submit your stories to these sites. Fresh news is published at the top of these sites. So, when you submit a story, you’ll temporarily rank at No. 1 just by writing an optimized article. This doesn’t last for a long time, especially for competitive search terms, because new postings will immediately rank on top, but you have a great chance to get your content found when it sits at the top of the rankings. If the content is good, social news sites like Digg.com could pick it up as readers begin to share it. Optimizing your content for hot- trending keywords is a great way for your news to get picked up by social media users and shared. Optimizing for Local Search Google Maps, Bing Maps, and even local search and review sites like Yelp.com provide vertical searches for businesses based on their geographic location. Not only do many search engines use vertical search for localized results and directory information, but they have also begun to emphasize local search results in the main results data. Certain product searches will return vendor location suggestions in the area near the searcher. If a location is entered into the results, the searcher will get results relative to the location specified. Even if location is not specified in the search query, if the search engine can determine where you are and that the query is appropriate for local search, it will return localized results. This means that if your product or service has an application for localized search, you need to optimize for it. When optimizing your content for local search, you should follow many of the same SEO best practices as you would for other pages on your site, such as keyword use in meta tags and H1 tags. The key to success is targeting geo- specific keywords among your other keywords. Just as you would for all your other keywords, research geo-specific keywords that you can rank for. By way of example: “Miami-Dade” vs. “Miami, FL” vs. “Dade County.” Ensure that your full physical address appears on your website’s pages. If your business has multiple locations, you should dedicate at least one page on your site for each location. This is better than listing all your locations on a single page because you can optimize all the on-page SEO elements for each location. You want your pages at the top of the search engine results when your keywords are paired with location. For example, say you own a chain of cycle shops in south Florida. You want to be found when someone searches “bike rental Miami.” Here are some tips to help make that happen:

Each local-search-optimized page should include tons of relevant details about your business, including an exact address, hours of operation, maps, and directions.

Get user-generated content (ratings, comments, reviews) on your pages that are optimized for geo-specific search. This will help raise the awareness of those pages with search engines.

Build links to each location page, in addition to your home page and other pages on your site. Links specific to your location page help search engines recognize that it’s a page that users are interested in, raising its relevance in search. Optimizing for Social Media While it is important to pay attention to onsite SEO, your offsite social media presence should be optimized as well. When your business chooses to create one or more social media profiles, each one should be optimized for that network’s user experience. Social Media Optimization (SMO) generally refers to the social aspect of marketing strategies and is typically applied in two ways. First is the promotion angle, in which marketers take advantage of the power of social media to promote their content and their brand. This book focuses on the promotion angle in Chapter Ten. Right now, we’re going to explore the second angle, which is to optimize branded social media profiles to increase their search rankings. Social media gives you more places to post your content and to link back to your website. Setting up profiles and encouraging prominent people within your organization to engage with social media on behalf of your business is a great way to evangelize your brand. Anyone can set up a business profile and start engaging followers. Just as onsite SEO can be forgotten or lazily overlooked, social profiles can fall victim to the same kind of neglect. At the very minimum, if your profiles aren’t optimized, you’ll miss out on some great ways to communicate with your followers and promote your business. At worst, you run the risk of having a generic looking and easily forgettable profile. Instead, this is an opportunity to make your profiles stand out. To get your social media profiles rocking:

Make sure your keywords are in your profile or page, especially for sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. This will help your profile or page rank higher in search, whether it be searches within the social site or on search engines like Bing. As with SEO, you don’t want to overdo it with keywords. Find ways to place your keywords into your profile naturally. Summary sections and “About Me” sections are especially great places to describe your business using the keywords you want to optimize for.

Take advantage of websites that allow you to customize the color schemes and backgrounds. Use clean, appealing themes that complement the layout of the profile. Avoid busy backgrounds or obnoxious themes that detract from the content. Sites like Twitter and Slideshare allow for graphic optimization.

Going even further than just the background, some sites let you customize the profile banner. This is an opportunity to make your profile shine. Some profiles can be customized to such an extent that they start to look like an entirely new website and less like a channel on a social media site. In the banner, incorporate your brand logo and your slogan. Sites like MySpace, Vimeo, and YouTube give you the opportunity to make fantastic profiles.

Make sure to give your profile a face. Nothing is more uncool than encountering a profile that has a two-tone silhouetted bust – or auto- generated cartoon character – to go with the name. Don’t be that profile. Nearly every social media site allows you to put a face or logo to the name. Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare, and Twitter rely on the profile image to attribute visual uniqueness to the content within the profile.

Link to your website. Nearly every profile allows you to do this, and some allow multiple links, so don’t forget to add them.

Facebook is great for communicating your status updates to your friends, but it has a number of other features that can get overlooked. Make sure you offer rich information about your business. Facebook has an events box for posting events that you will host or be involved in, discussion boards, video and photo boxes, and many more. You can control which boxes appear on your profile. Some business profiles fail to take advantage of the possibilities that Facebook offers and thus fail to make their profile a destination. They might get liked and updates might appear on their followers’ pages, but their followers may never come back to their page for more interaction. By creating an engaging profile, you encourage more user engagement.

Video sites offer multiple formats for displaying your playlist and organizing your content. Consider ways to keep users on your channel. Feature your coolest related videos in your playlists. Invite user comments on your channel.

For any channel that gives you the option, display the subscriber list. It’s always good for people viewing social media to feel like they are part of an active community. Showing other members of the community can encourage that sensibility. Conclusion At first, SEO might feel like you’re adding more work before your content can even go live. It may even feel like a bit of a drag on the creative process but, believe me it will pay off in a huge way if you take the time to do it. In a sense, you can think of your website as your resume. Your work experience on the resume is your content. You wouldn’t hand off a resume to a potential employer without checking to be sure that your most important details are in the right place, that you included powerful words to express your strengths, and that the contact information is correct. SEO is much like optimizing your resume for an interview. You should give it that level of importance by including SEO as an integral part of the content development process. It isn’t extra; it’s part and parcel. If your content producers are thinking of SEO as they develop text, images, and video content, it will greatly ease the effort on SEO development. Your content isn’t finished and ready to launch until it’s optimized. 10

Put the “Marketing” in Content Marketing

“Quality content is only half the battle. Getting maximum exposure for that content is the other half. You can have the best content in the world, but it’s only as good as how pervasive you can spread its visibility. Marketing your content comes down to one fundamental aspect: networking. Like PR professionals, the extension of your network and respect for you or your company are what aids getting the ball rolling. Scratch backs to earn reciprocal favors and network at any opportunity. After the initial seeding, the snowball effect takes care of it naturally. Remember, each online community or individual will react differently to different approaches and types of content. Do your research first to see if the content is a good fit or things may backfire.” Jordan Kasteler, SVP of Content Development and Managing Partner, BlueGlass, Inc.

Up to this point, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the content part of content marketing. But once you’ve created that great webinar, blog post, or infographic, you want it to get some attention. It’s time to put the marketing in content marketing, and that’s where the power of social media really kicks in. By leveraging social media interactions, you can circulate your content and put your brand in front of potential customers. If you’re paying attention to where your target audience hangs out online, you can interact with them there. As I’ve said, traditional marketing through television, radio, and even print, is more interruption-driven, whereas content marketing engages your customers with something they are already interested in, often providing them creative solutions to their problems. This makes the social web the ideal place to promote your business as the source of information that your customers are looking for. Promotion is the work of announcing what you have to offer and ensuring that it gets distributed to the people that you want to see it. Many times, this is a matter of sharing media within a network of relationships that you’ve established and nurtured. To make the most of social media, you need to know how these relationships can benefit you and how you need to care for them in order to sustain them. Every business will have a unique approach to how it promotes its content, based on the industry and customer profiles. Small businesses with very small staffs may not be able to manage a huge social media campaign. In many cases, you’ll need to pick and choose what kinds of social media you have the time to work with. There are a number of possibilities to choose from, including: blogging, commenting on blogs, participating in discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles. To identify what you should be doing for your industry, start by taking a look at how your competition is using social media. The cool thing about social media is that you can more or less spy on your competitors because content is all out in the open. So, if your competition has 3,000 people interested in a subject, you might want to start targeting some of those people. You may not be on their radar right now, but they are interested in your industry and they could be your potential customers in the future. Look closely at your competition’s activity in social media. If you see their activity isn’t getting any traction, then it probably isn’t working for them. If, on the other hand, you see lots of activity, you know that it’s a network that you should get in on. What channels are they using? How many fans do they have on Facebook? How many followers do they have on Twitter? Maybe your competitors are working in blogs and forums. If not, why not? Are there any niche forums out there that have audiences that might be interested in your work? Check out the media and bloggers that normally write about your industry. Make friends with these bloggers. Then pitch your content to them! How to Use Social Media Interactions to Promote Your Content the Right Way The greatest value in social media is, of course, that it’s social. This means that you have the opportunity to engage customers in a way that wasn’t possible in the past. A key executive in your business could post an update via Twitter and interact with potential customers, industry experts, and any other followers. This kind of engagement can add a sense of familiarity and comfort to your brand image. On the social web, where content is instantly accessible, people want to engage with the brands in much the same way that they interact with everyday people. This means that by engaging through interesting, conversational content, you can keep your brand in front of customers so that when they’re ready to look for products in your market, they’ll think of you. Facebook – the Social Media Juggernaut Your profiles are communication tools that you can use to maintain brand awareness by promoting your business as well as your content. Keep in mind that in order to be social, you have to have status updates that are social in nature. Engage with personality in a way that’s appropriate for your business and works for your industry. Here’s a fantastic example of what I’m talking about. In Prescott, Arizona, a hip, revitalized motel called The Motor Lodge is doing a bang-up job using social interactions the right way – engaging would-be customers and using interesting Facebook updates to create an engaging personality for itself. The coolest part of their success is that The Motor Lodge is a two-man operation, managing to run a boutique hotel and at the same time acquiring nearly 1,200 fans on their Facebook page.

Figure 26: The Motor Lodge Facebook Page Check out a few posts from their profile, and you’ll get the idea:

Aker Musical Festival is tomorrow 5:30-8:30pm. Downtown businesses stay open and host a variety of different musical groups … fun and very festive! Start out at Tastebuds Pizza for a pluckin’ good time as they are hosting the guitar masters from Mercy Guitar!

Beat the crowds with a sneak peek of the Courthouse Christmas lights tonight from 5:30-6:30pm (the official Lighting Ceremony is Saturday).

Time to get shopping so, for our Facebook buddies we will add 15% to any gift certificate that you purchase for holiday giving. Think of it, you provide a fun place to stay for your favorite people while appearing to be 15% more generous than you really are…It’s a win, win!

We thought you should know that waterboarding at The Motor Lodge has stopped! In case you never had the chance to experience the torture that was our showers, imagine standing in a phone booth while a 55 gallon drum of water was dumped on you from 8’ up (a classic case of form over function…sorry). New and improved, …adjustable and reachable showerheads make cleansing your beautiful body an absolute pleasure. Enjoy!

Time to name the cat that adopted us 3 months ago! Whoever comes up with the winning name wins a free night in our swankiest room, #6 (get your friends to become a fan of TML and vote for your submission). The cat is a neutered male, very friendly, green eyes and has a hole in his left ear. Voting ends Sunday at 5pm. (The post included a video of the cat.)

The Motor Lodge is a great example of a small business taking advantage of its online persona. They’ve generated a following on their page and are keeping that following engaged with life at the hotel, even though most of their followers aren’t, at the moment, looking to spend the night in Prescott. You can bet that when they do decide to make a getaway from busy life in Phoenix, they’ll think of this hotel. The success of The Motor Lodge comes first from a quality website43 that demonstrates who they are, is appealing to visitors, and is easily navigable. Second, they consistently post interesting content on their social media profile, in this case, Facebook.44 Notice that the first two updates we shared from their Facebook page aren’t necessarily about them but instead focus on reasons to come to Prescott. This is about enticing potential customers to Prescott, which gives them a reason to stay at the hotel. These kinds of announcements don’t sound like advertising, but for last-minute getaways, this quaint little town will be on the radar for the Motor Lodge’s followers – and they’ll have a reason to stay at the lodge. This tactic is about building relationships via social media so that when you have some content to promote, you have an audience that’s ready to receive it. The other status updates on this list directly promote the motel (i.e., cat, come to our place for a good shower). All the updates are engaging and interesting and treat followers as friends. Most importantly, the down-to-earth posts encourage comments and community interaction. If you were to approach a small hotel about using social media to promote their business, 99 percent of the time they will say, “What would I say?” Or, they may take you up on it, and end up with a profile with so much radio silence that they attract few followers. The Motor Lodge is an awesome example of how to use social media the right way! Notice how the everyday life of the hotel becomes a reason to post and update. With a creative spin, it can become fun and engaging. Social media interactions work best when they invite the social network to actively take part in the ongoing, vibrant life of your business, just as The Motor Lodge does. With a mix of incentives to visit their website and engaging content, the Motor Lodge’s owners find a way through regular posts to consistently deliver content to their followers and keep them interested in their brand. Social media updates that encourage comments serve to keep followers actively engaged with your profile. Furthermore, when updates generate comments, other followers in the network take notice and register that your brand is making a buzz. That kind of excitement is contagious, and people pick up on it. To nurture comments and facilitate active participation in your updates, be sure to circle back to posts that are getting comments and reply with comments of your own. This is true for all forms of social media, from Facebook to blog posts. Your participation demonstrates your social savvy, and makes a big difference to your followers. Twitter – the Information Engine Twitter is a self-proclaimed “information engine.” That moniker alone should tell you that it can be an awesome platform for promoting your content and subsequently your business. The primary application for Twitter is to keep your followers informed about the cool products and services that your business can provide. The secondary application is to actively engage the phenomenon of crowd-sourcing. By meeting the needs of individual users head-on, you can actively promote your content to the potential customers who are looking for answers. To make the most of Twitter, it’s imperative to build a following. Your Twitter handle should appear on every page of your site – of course, this rule goes for all the social media you use. If your page visitors like the content they find on your pages, they should be able to follow you in a heartbeat. No one should have to search for your handle. Keep in mind that page visitors may be reluctant to follow you if they don’t know what you’ll be tweeting. If you make it clear what to expect – “Follow us for coupons and specials only available to our followers,” or “We tweet tons of insider advice: follow us!” – you will be more likely to get followers who are truly interested in your content. Don’t limit your handle to only your web pages. Put it on your email signature line and put it on your blog. Everyone who sees your content should be able to start following you and should know what they’re in for when they do. Your content pages with your handle can attract followers, but to build a following proactively, you can do yourself a big favor by catching the attention of influential Twitter users and getting them to follow you. To gain the following of someone, follow them first. Many Twitter users will return the favor. You can contact a person directly and suggest they follow you, but be sure you have a compelling reason for them to accept. If they are showing interest in your niche industry, let them know that your tweets will benefit them. You can use directories, such as WeFollow.com, to find Twitter users who have registered themselves by category. The directory allows you to browse by categories related to your industry and to find users who are influential and to whom you can reach out. While you’re there, register your handle! Anyone looking for the category tag you’ve registered for could find your name, especially if you have been building a significant following relative to the other users registered for that tag. Promotion begins with your followers. When you develop new content, tweet it. Your followers will be expecting it. If you tweet your content, your followers can retweet it, bringing traffic to your pages and expanding your brand recognition. Some third-party applications like TweetDeck and HootSuite can help you schedule tweets so that you don’t bombard your audience over a short period of time. This can be a life-saver with a promotion push that needs frequent attention. When you set up your blog’s RSS feed, add it to your Twitter feed, too. Every time your blog has new content, your Twitter followers will know about it. Of course, you should promote your content, products and services, but I’m a big fan of just being yourself and tweeting about your interests too, which gives people the opportunity to know the person or people behind your brand. Figure 27: Promotional Tweet You can take advantage of Twitter as an information engine to actively promote your content to users who aren’t currently your followers. This is your opportunity to use your content as a resource for the people who are crowd-sourcing via Twitter. Using search.witter.com, you can find people who are tweeting your keywords. By searching for questions that you can answer, you have the ability to respond with your content. This is not to be confused with an opportunity for a sales push. Rather, it’s a chance to position yourself as the expert, providing useful, engaging responses. At the end of the day this is about making and maintaining connections. This means that if your followers tweet at you, you should make an effort to respond in a timely way. As your following grows, it will be more challenging to respond to all tweets. Be sure to check in to see who’s tweeted at you or mentioned you, and make an effort to respond. TweetDeck or HootSuite will add functionality to help manage your Twitter account and keep you connected to your followers. For example, you can set up lists by keyword so that you can track and engage in conversations that are happening in real time. LinkedIn – the Business to Business Connection Recently, I reached out to my buddy, Neal Schaffer, author of Windmill Networking: Maximizing LinkedIn45. He had a lot to say about using LinkedIn to promote your content and your brand. Here’s what he shared with me: People Figure 28: LinkedIn Profile for Neal Schaffer By now you probably understand that LinkedIn is the premier social networking site that is devoted solely to professionals. It is said that LinkedIn’s 100 million members include an executive from every Fortune 500 company. There is no other social networking site where you have a greater chance of being able to interact with an influential decision-maker. LinkedIn remains the best social networking site to market your business-to-business (B2B) products and services because of this special demographic. Even for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, LinkedIn is important. Not only are wealthy consumers also members of LinkedIn but even B2C companies have B2B marketing activities with regard to distributors, agents, and strategic alliances. Imagine if all of your key management for sales, marketing, and business development were all contributing to LinkedIn in any of the following ways. It could be a powerful way to obtain mindshare and eventual thought leadership, which could generate revenue for your business. LinkedIn Companies: Inbound marketing on LinkedIn begins with ensuring that your company can be found in the LinkedIn Companies directory, a database that comprises information that is primarily user- generated. LinkedIn Companies is quickly becoming an alternative free source of company information. Should someone be searching for a company with your expertise, you want to ensure that you are found and that your best information is on display for potential customers. You can do so by optimizing your company profile so that is in sync with your company website. Use the “specialties” section to add any keywords that you want your company to be found under but that aren’t represented in your description. Make sure you choose the most appropriate Main Company Industry section because this is a field that may be used in a search to find your company. LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to enter up to five locations, so make sure you take advantage of this. Enter your corporate blog’s RSS feed to show your latest blog entries. If your company has a Twitter account, make sure you include your username to include your latest Tweets on this page as well. Every Employee is a Sales Person: Since LinkedIn is a social networking platform, many people seek out those with expertise by doing a keyword search under “People.” Every employee representing your company that is on LinkedIn increases your chances that your company will be found indirectly. And the more connected your employees are to others, the easier it will be for those wanting to contact any of your company employees to do so through the LinkedIn platform. Status Updates: Just as tweets can be a powerful way of sharing your knowledge, so can the LinkedIn Status Update. While only your LinkedIn Connections will see your status update in their network updates, you can display your status update for public visibility so that those that view your profile can see what you are saying. Obviously, LinkedIn is not Twitter and, therefore, it is not about quantity of updates but quality. Aim for one update a day on information that you find compelling, new relevant content you have to offer, or noteworthy news about your company that might be interesting to your target demographic that you are already connected to. LinkedIn Answers: LinkedIn Answers is a Q&A database that has more than 2 million answers submitted by LinkedIn users. Many businesses with real problems are posing questions on LinkedIn Answers because they know that answers will come from the professional community with real profiles attached to their name, not anonymous submissions like other Internet Q&A sites. There are a total of 22 LinkedIn Answers categories that cover most industries and disciplines, and some of these categories have multiple sub-categories. This is the forum for you and your company to display your expertise by responding to questions that appear in the category (or categories) where your target audience is most likely present. Not only do the answers you submit to LinkedIn Answers become part of your profile should you want them to be, they are also indexed by Google and thus may come up in future search results. Furthermore, if the answer you provide is chosen as the “Best Answer,” you have the potential of being listed as an “Expert” on the page of your target category and/or sub-category. LinkedIn allows you to create a “widget” on your home page where you can subscribe to an Answers category or you can simply import the RSS feed into the reader of your choice. All it takes is a once-a-day check to stay on top of your category, seeking chances for your organization to display its expertise. LinkedIn Groups: Creating a LinkedIn Group is surprisingly simple, as is indicated by the sheer number of groups that exist. That being said, there is one very important thing to consider that will make or break your group: Your LinkedIn Group name. No LinkedIn user wants to be sold to; therefore, the name of your group should NOT be your company name, instead try something like “Hiking the Southwest.” Once you start a LinkedIn Group, what do you do next? It’s all about promotion, and that starts with introducing your community to relevant professionals in your own LinkedIn network. This is where you are already at an advantage if many of your employees are already established users with LinkedIn connections. Of course, your employees should only be introducing your group to those that are in your target demographic and that would feel it is a valuable resource; otherwise, your innocent introduction of your LinkedIn Group could be perceived as spam. Social media marketing is really about relevance, so it is important to keep your group relevant by actively managing and keeping the irrelevant information out. To be at the forefront of your targeted audience and to be found by them, there are usually multiple LinkedIn Groups where you can be participating outside of your own. LinkedIn allows you to join up to 50 groups, so why don’t you and your employees join the maximum if there are enough relevant groups to be found? This can only help you and your business get found on LinkedIn. Don’t know where to start when joining a new group? Look at the “Most Popular Discussions” section and check out how many comments it has. If those who already commented are still subscribing to receiving follow-up comments by email, you can make a quick splash by adding a relevant and thought-provoking comment to the discussion, which then could go out by email to hundreds or thousands of people. SlideShare: There are many optional applications that LinkedIn provides to customize so that you can utilize the website, but if there is one that I would recommend to help market your business it would be SlideShare. SlideShare is a social networking site of its own and is the leading website for sharing your PowerPoint presentations. SlideShare claims to get 25 million visitors a month to its website, and many companies aiming at getting business from a demographic similar to LinkedIn have established custom “Channels” there. When you install the SlideShare application on your LinkedIn profile, you have the ability to display your latest company PowerPoint presentations on your profile. The SlideShare application also gives you the ability to upload a YouTube video, which might be appropriate for your company if you spoke at a recent conference or have a visual product. What’s more, your content has the chance to be discovered both by other SlideShare application users as well as on the Slideshare.net website itself. Because there are so many things your business could be doing on LinkedIn, marketing your business there can take some time. Until you can say “We landed this account because of LinkedIn!” it will require a little sweat equity. Like any other social media marketing effort, becoming an active and contributing user on LinkedIn will undoubtedly help your marketing efforts and assist your company in gaining thought leadership, which will contribute to greater business closed in the future. Just be sure to measure your results vs. your time invested. Developing Relationships, Building Partnerships Like social networking sites, forums and blogs are community-centered media where content can be shared. Through active participation, you build trust and recognition with other members in those communities. If you earn a reputation as an upstanding member of the community, the other community members will be more likely to share your content and promote your products with their subscribers and followers. As you -establish relationships through engagement, you’ll have the opportunity to leverage those relationships to promote your content. Leveraging social media for content promotion boils down to nurturing relationships within online communities and finding ways to put content in front of potential customers. For small businesses, the work of tending the social garden, so to speak, could seem like a fulltime job. A daily to-do list like the one below can appear excessively time-consuming:

Updating one’s social profile status

Responding to comments

Contributing to forum discussions

Commenting on other blogs and building blogger relationships

Bookmarking content to enhance your profile

How do people keep up? The answer is that much of this can be parceled throughout the week, adding up to only a relatively small time commitment each day. The key is being disciplined with your time. If you have to, block off specific hours for this work and stick to your schedule. The hardest part of social media is setting up a profile and optimizing it. Maintaining it and commenting can require a commitment of only an hour per day, depending on the level of engagement. This is a modest investment given the potential return. As you develop your social persona through multiple media outlets, you’ll open up a variety of options for promoting your content. The more you are able to take on, the more opportunities for promotion you’ll create. Engaging in social media may also require a shift in perspective. Historically, social activity was seen as mutually exclusive with efficient work practices. Social media is no exception. (You mean my employees are going to be on Facebook all day?) The truth is that your employees can be excellent sources for branding and promotion. Your employees’ social networks effectively expand your corporate reach, and you can leverage these networks for content promotion. To manage social media at work, it’s good to have a company policy that covers how and why social media is useful to the company and how it’s to be used on the job. Try to have a relaxed policy so that your employees can engage with their networks in a natural way. The bottom line is that you need to use social media in some capacity to promote your content. Establish your baseline by identifying what social media you need in order to compete in your market. Here, again, research is critical. By knowing what your competitors are doing and what your target demographic uses, you can find out what you need to prioritize. You can then weigh that information against what you’re capable of taking on. Because you can’t afford not to engage in social media promotion, start by focusing on the channels from which you’re able to derive the most value. Hone in on the communities that are really engaging with you and your industry. Content marketing is all about trying, testing, and measuring results. Some businesses might find that their Facebook profile isn’t getting a lot of traffic but that their YouTube channel is. So, they may want to focus on videos. There are many social media channels to work with, and there are tons of content options. The key is to find options that are working and invest your promotional efforts there. Forum Participation Forums are the evolutionary descendants of chat rooms. They aren’t necessarily as popular as other forms of social media interaction, but there are some avid users of Internet forums. Many industries have niche-related forums. It’s worthwhile to dedicate some time and effort to participating in industry forums. Through forum participation, you can:

Demonstrate your expertise by offering answers to participants’ questions

Promote your content pages by linking to pages that might interest or benefit the group

Develop relationships with other forum participants, who might be willing to promote your content in their networks, such as their blogs or other social media spaces Blogger Engagement The essence of blogger engagement is networking. By networking with bloggers, you can pitch your content, and even ask them to write a post for your content. Practically speaking, you build your network by searching for the bloggers with whom to network through media lists and Google blog search. At the center of blogger engagement is commenting, which fosters relationship-building. Bloggers welcome good comments that are on topic with their posts because they enhance the quality of the blog and increase its favorability with search engines. This means that you can leverage blog commenting to your advantage in order to promote your web content and your brand, if you engage blogs in the right way. By engaging bloggers with great comments, you get the opportunity to:

Reach out to potential customers who subscribe to those blogs by joining in the conversations they’re having, demonstrating to the blogger and its readers that you are an expert in your field

Continue your link building and promotion efforts by including a link back to your web pages (but not all the time)

Build partnerships with other bloggers, which can lead to more link building and content promotion

When you have a new piece of content to promote, seek out blog posts that your content can complement. If a blogger with links to 10 great infographics in your industry, for example, you can respond with a comment, saying, “Awesome post!” These infographics really rock. I really like the third one using the timeline to demonstrate how fast things are changing in our business. Here’s a link to one that we created that I believe your readers will enjoy. Check it out.” Then, link to one of your infographics. Make sure that your comment is thought out, on topic and contributes to the conversation. Remember, your comments brand you among the other commenters, visitors, and bloggers. So, it’s only to your advantage to take the time to make the comment count. It takes some effort to find quality blog posts that you can comment on. You can start by commenting on the blogs that you subscribe to as an investment in your relationships with those bloggers. Eventually, however, you’ll want to reach out beyond that circle, and you’ll have to actively search out appropriate blog posts. Once you start interacting with bloggers through commenting, keep track of the individuals you’re working with. Use a spreadsheet to keep track of the blogger’s name and website. You may want to segment (by topic, etc.), depending on what your engagement is like. Over the long term, blogger engagement and forum participation will provide the opportunity to foster robust industry relationships that you can leverage to promote your content. Keep in mind that, just as with any relationship, blogger partnerships require give and take. If a blogger in your network approaches you with a pitch for some content to include in your next post, try to accommodate the request. You proactively boost your favor with a blogger by linking to them in your content. When a blogger gets linked to, WordPress and similar blog platforms can alert them to the new link. Bloggers take note of links to their blog, and the prevailing culture is to return the favor at some point. You’ll build a reputation as a friendly blogger and other bloggers will be more likely to do the same for you. Blogger Pitches: How to Approach These Sites for Best Results Beyond commenting, you can pitch your content directly to bloggers to get them to include your content in a post. You can search for bloggers out of your network and pitch your content to them, but you’ll likely find more success pitching to your network of bloggers. This, of course, reiterates the importance of nurturing your blogger relationships. The key to pitching content to a blogger is to start by examining the kind of posts and comments that the blog has been producing. Your goal is to ensure that the content you’re promoting is in line with the blog you’re pitching to. You have the option of finding blogs that suit your content, or tailoring your content to fit in with the blog. Once you’ve identified a blogger to reach out to, develop a customized pitch. Make every effort to address your pitch to the personal email of the blogger, rather than a webmaster’s mailbox. The more personal you can make it, the more likely you will be to get their attention. Tell the blogger that you have a great piece of content that you think the audience would really like. Ask if the blogger could drop a link in a post, or even write a full post about it. If all goes well, your content will be compelling, and they’ll take your suggestion and write a whole post about it. Why would a blogger post something about your content, you ask? The benefit to the blogger is that your content is what his visitors want and will generate more traffic to his site. The more you know about the blogger’s posting history and a little about the subscribers, the more specific you can get about how your content will appeal to the community. You don’t need to go over the top, but you should make a clear case how the content you’re promoting will benefit the blogger. You could also offer to write the post for them, to save them some time! You can increase your chances of promoting your content if you’re willing to do the legwork of writing the post, which saves the blogger some effort. When you’re creating content for distribution, you want content that people are going to find and say, “Wow, that’s awesome! I have to share this with my friends!” Don’t try to pitch advertisements for your products because bloggers will never pick it up. In fact, if you write the post for them, much of the time you shouldn’t even mention your business’s name in the text. The content should contain a link to your website, and that’s all. For example, imagine your company sells bedding material. You produce a piece on the “Top 10 Things Needed to Decorate a Dorm Room.” Within the list, one of the suggestions could be “use a vibrant bedspread.” From there, you link to one of your site’s product pages. The reader likes the idea of a vibrant bedspread, and follows the link to your product and makes a purchase. The content funneled the reader to your website but never appeared as overt advertising. This is exactly the kind of content that bloggers pick up on. In this example, the bedding company would pitch to bloggers who cater to college students. The bedding company’s top 10 list lines up with the kind of content the blogger wants to provide. The blogger wins because the content helps drive traffic to the site, and the bedding company wins because it gets a link to the product page, which they hope will provide targeted traffic. Press Releases and Media Outreach Starting from scratch in a media outreach campaign, including pitching to bloggers, can seem daunting. There is such a plethora of media outlets on the Internet that it would be nearly impossible to keep track of who’s writing what and for which target demographic. Fortunately there are public relations firms managing all of this data on media lists, and they can help you pinpoint your media target. Companies like Vocus and Cision specialize in media outreach and have active databases that can help you target pitches and press releases. Media lists provide detailed information for a wide range of media outlets, from television to newspapers, to magazines, to blogs. While these lists are comprehensive and include offline media, for the purpose of this book, we’re focusing on the benefits of ties to online media outlets, specifically links and traffic. When you want to make an announcement in the form of a press release, media lists can connect you with niche news outlets that might be more likely to pick up your release than some of the larger outlets. When your release gets picked up, you get the benefit of a link, exposure and the possibility of traffic. It’s worthwhile to pursue niche news media that might run an article on your release, creating a URL that links to you. Using a media database can also give you an edge when you’re developing content that you want to promote through blogger pitches. Media lists not only contain information on the outlet, but include contact points for each outlet. Knowing the blogger’s name and contact information is a major advantage as you create your custom pitch. When you develop a press release or a blogger pitch, keep in mind that a lot of journalists and bloggers like the fast approach. If the press release or a pitch contains enough information, they will often repurpose it with a few tweaks and post it up, rather than rewriting an entire article. The recommendation? Provide enough information in your pitch to make it easy for them to repurpose it. It will give you a big edge. In Chapter Seven, we discuss press releases in detail. In short, press releases should conform to press standards and be article-ready when you make the release. By writing a professional news release, you’ll greatly help smaller media outlets, which are more likely to pick up your story. You’ll save them the need to follow up with you for further details before they run the article. For blogs, frame the pitch with the same information that a blogger would normally give when posting a piece of content. Namely, why would the audience like it? Briefly describe the value of the content to the readership: “This is a great top 10 list that gets us thinking about the healthy ways we should be spending our time after work!” News outlets and blogs are driven by similar motivations when it comes to picking up content to publish. They want content that will attract traffic to their site. When you pitch, your goal is to find the outlet that will benefit the most from the content you have to offer. That is, your content will most likely attract the visitors that they are looking to attract. As you work through media lists, keep in mind what kind of traffic the media outlet is targeting. If the content you have to offer is likely to generate traffic to their site, they will be more likely to go with your pitch. Email Marketing Email can be a great way to ensure that you deliver content to a specific community. Your eNewsletter is the best way to alert your subscribers to your latest content, promotions, and tips. You can deliver your eNewsletter and other promotional material to the mailing list that you’ve built through your lead-generating efforts and networking. The very best email list is the one that has individuals who want your email to begin with. You can build up an email subscriber list by providing ample opportunities for visitors to your website to volunteer their email address. Even better, offer them an exchange by giving away free and useful content – such as a white paper – in return for an email address. People are often more willing to give an email address if they can immediately get something that they want. As a means of promoting your content, eNewsletters are great tools for announcing content and promotions that you’ve recently developed. Some examples for your eNewsletter include:

We have a great white paper on ______you can download from our site.

Our blog post about ______is generating a lot of buzz. Check it out today.

We’re having a contest where you can win______! Enter today!

We’re hosting our monthly webinar on ______. Join us at 12 p.m. July 8th! Utilize Social Voting and Bookmarking Social voting and bookmarking sites are a fantastic way to promote your content. With some of these sites, content can gain serious momentum as it gets voted up by the site’s users. Every time you recommend a web page to one of these sites, it creates a backlink to that content page. Sharing in this manner is an easy way to get attention for your content with the benefit of the link. At the very least, you should make sure to share every piece of new content with multiple bookmarking and voting sites for that reason alone. With a little legwork, however, you can make even better use of these sharing sites. Leveraging the social element of voting and bookmarking can be very advantageous. With most sites, like Delicious.com, Digg.com, Reddit.com, and StumbleUpon.com (for these purposes we will call them all voting sites), you can network with users by following them. These relationships can help you gain voter attention for your recommendations. The more votes a page or piece of content gets, the higher up the ranking it will go, continuing to attract even more attention. The more attention your content gets, the more traffic you’ll get. Once you’ve posted a new page or URL on Digg and other sites, especially a page that you’re really proud of, reach out to your voting community. Announce that you’ve just recommended a piece of content, and ask them to vote for it. And if you happen to know some power users in a network, you might suggest your content to them once in a while, too. These are influential users who have a significant following, and they tend to get things to rank. Because they have so many followers, power users can boost your content exposure exponentially. I know a blogger who posted some pictures of a rare Thailand Parrot Flower to his site (yes, the Parrot Flower is a flower that looks like parrot, and it’s awesome). The post took him just 15 minutes to put together, being mostly just images of the flower. Several months later, a power user on StumbleUpon found the blog post, thought it was cool, and stumbled it. Within 48 hours, the page had received an unprecedented spike in traffic of 12,000 visitors! Images have a real propensity for viral success, and can often be some of the easiest content to create. If you can attract the attention of power users with creative content, you can increase your chances for driving traffic to your pages. For a post like the Parrot Flower, 15 minutes of effort could lead to thousands of visitors if it gets in front of a power user. To gain a following, you need to be an active user and begin following other users. Establishing a network takes a little time to grow. Be a good citizen by recommending interesting content (and not just your own) on a regular basis, and you’ll soon develop a following. Active users on these sites aren’t as likely to follow other users who exclusively recommend their own content and appear to engage the community only for their own gain. To be a credible user, your recommendations should be industry-related, but not exclusively your own content. Mix it up. Interact regularly with other users by voting up content they’ve recommended, too. If you devote enough effort to establishing relationships within these voting sites, your promotion efforts can snowball and your content may even land on the front page. Conclusion The social web provides great opportunities to serve your content to potential customers. People love to share the content that appeals to them, and social media has simplified sharing. If you get your content in the hands of the right person, it can spread like wildfire. Through targeted pitches and social media interaction, you can increase your chances of landing your content in the spaces where that person is likely to be found. 11

Finding the Right Distribution Channels for Your Content

“Great content is food for the mind. It feeds the deep desires of people. It enriches lives, solves problems, educates, and even entertains. Great content has a magnetic quality that points the internal compasses of people directly toward your business. People love to discover new ideas that can help them improve themselves or their businesses. Great free content – designed to provide your readers precisely what they seek – is highly valuable to people. It’s a gift. The content you steadily produce becomes a powerful fuel to help you grow a massive audience. That very same fuel will quickly take your business to new places as your reader-base eats it up with great joy.” Michael A. Stelzner, author of Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition, Despite the Odds and founder of SocialMediaExaminer.com

At this point you have awesome content on your website. It’s great stuff – you should be proud of it! It’s time to open up channels where you can distribute your ideas and claim even more real estate online. Distribution channels create more opportunities to deliver content to potential customers and to possibly include a link back to your products and services. I’m talking about finding ways to put your content in the hands of potential customers; in addition to creating fresh content specifically to post on other websites where potential customers can find it. The difference between promotion and distribution is that promotion is all about generating a buzz around your content, and distribution is a matter of finding a lot of different ways to get your content to appear in the search results. To maximize your ability to distribute your content, diversify or repurpose it so that you can reach a variety of channels. Diversifying your distribution channels gives you the opportunity to fill the search results with your content. Your branded social media profile on Facebook or your article published at the Huffington Post might just outrank similar content on your website. If you have a diverse distribution strategy and you target the right keywords, you could potentially fill the search results page with your content! In this chapter, we discuss how to distribute content through social media channels to a network of followers and how to use an RSS feed on your site. Beyond distributing to social networks and followers, content can be distributed through article publishing sites, video sites, and other kinds of sites looking for specific content. By distributing content on numerous properties, your business can claim more real estate online. Create Social Profiles and Get Them Ready for Your Content Social media sites are not only great for promoting your content and generating excitement, they are a great way to directly distribute your content to your followers and the search engines. By setting up branded social media profiles, you can update your followers on new content that you’ve created. To expand your footprint even further, consider Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo or Posterous. In effect, these sites ask members to generate web content in their area of expertise, building a resource for anyone seeking information on any number of topics, ranging from food to photography. These types of sites have been around for quite a while, sustained by revenue generated through advertising in a quid pro quo relationship with the writers. However, this is a good time for a word of caution. The Google Panda update in February 2011 targeted sites generally considered to be “content farms.” Sites that were littered with advertising and poor content were hammered, and rightfully so. My recommendation is that you find only the strongest sites for your specific market, sites like CafeMom and FanNation. There are a lot of really good sites in your industry looking for professional articles and even blog posts. Take the time to find and build relationships with them. Those niche sites, and even some sites like Squidoo, allow you to promote your content on their site by being an active member of the community. The social element is incredibly important to your success on these sites. Because members are not required to be externally recognized as an expert, the social aspect of the site helps to vet the legitimacy of the individual’s expertise. By being active and engaging with the community you will be demonstrating that you’re a real person and not spamming. Because of the social aspect to these sites, great content always has the potential to get picked up and passed around by the site users, increasing its odds of going viral. To participate in these distribution channels, members create original content about their industry and post it to the site. As an offsite distribution channel, the website requires that you contribute content specifically written for it. The publishers of these channels intend for the content to be unique and not simply cut-and-pasted from other websites, including your own. Because these are social sites, spam gets called out very quickly. So, when you develop content for the site, make every effort to create new, interesting content that engages the social network. However, allow me to take this opportunity once again to praise the beauty of repurposing. You can take an existing piece of text content, tweak it with some new, original content, and submit it. So you can get the feel for this, let’s take a closer look at one example: Squidoo. Squidoo Squidoo has a somewhat unique take on web pages, describing user content pages as “lenses.” A lens is a page that is centered on a particular area of interest, and can be updated multiple times with new content. Lenses are specifically distinguished from blogs because the content ought to be focused on the subject of the lens and updated only to the extent that the topic is covered. Each user, or “lensmaster,” can create hundreds of lenses. When working in Squidoo:

Be social on the site, and learn the etiquette for social activity. Squid U offers a lot of information on how to be successful in Squidoo’s social circles. The social aspect of Squidoo is the No. 1 way to gain credibility and distinguish your content from spam.

Ask other lensmasters for feedback on your lens. This will get traffic coming to your lens and help build a following.

Post multiple lenses. Establish keyword-specific lens titles that are specific within the topic you’re targeting. Each lens is a single URL, which means that even if you’ve posted multiple entries to the lens, they will only amount to a single result in the search engines. By generating multiple lenses, which most lensmasters do, you will have more opportunity for your lenses to be found in search. For example, if your topic is “Food & Cooking,” you can create a lens for “Over the Top Birthday Cakes,” and another for “Knock ‘Em Dead Graduation Cakes.”

Consider donating income through Squidoo to a charity, if you don’t necessarily need it to recover the costs associated with maintaining your Squidoo activity. Your charity selection shows on your profile, and it never hurts a brand to be altruistic.

There are many other similar sites such as About.com and eHow.com, but this example gives you an idea of what can be possible with this kind of distribution media. By opening up places to create original content, your brand can soar in search. Article Publishing the Right Way People turn to the Internet to find expert information for solutions to their problems, and you need to find as many outlets as possible to get your information in front of them. As we discussed previously, sites such as eHow.com, About.com and Squidoo provide channels for experts to distribute advice, instruction, and even caution to the curious public looking for answers in their respective industries. The business model for these sites is simple: Articles respond to a real need and, therefore, drive traffic to the site. By running ads surrounding these articles, they can sustain their business. Because articles have a benefit to marketers, too, an entire industry has sprung up around article marketing. Articles are perceived as expert content and lend that expert authority to the author. At a minimum, most article sites allow writers to include a link to a website at the end of the article in the byline. So, every well-written article has the potential to strengthen a business’s brand and funnel targeted traffic back to that business’s site. Unfortunately, the article industry also has a dark side. Online marketers quickly realized the potential for gaining links and began submitting the same article to hundreds of these sites, ignoring the quality of the article altogether. As a result, there are many article sites that support content that is utter junk. The better sites have actual editors and publication policies that disallow junk, sharply cutting down on spam and raising the bar on article quality. Every day, the search engines are working at determining the best sites and will display their content, while trying to remove the junk sites. Google is on the warpath to cut down on articles and content that is just polluting the web. In my opinion, Google’s Panda update was a huge step in the right direction and made awesome, compelling content more important than ever. Article publishing the right way takes a “rifle approach” by directing quality, targeted articles to reputable publishers with the objective of -positioning the writer as the expert and funneling targeted traffic back to a website. To publish articles the right way:

Write creative, compelling articles that conform to all of the publisher’s standards.

Submit only to reputable sites that have an editorial process.

Take the time to edit and optimize the article before you publish.

By maintaining a higher standard for the articles, they will be more likely to appear in the search results and drive quality traffic to your site. Authentic articles will grab the reader’s attention and keep them reading. Your article will take off when you get inspired and provide creative solutions to the problems your potential customers’ experience. As an expert that offers creative insights, you demonstrate your insider knowledge on how your industry works, and you become the trusted solution. Don’t Forget To Optimize It It bears mentioning that the critical factor in article distribution is to have your article discovered in search. Obviously, this means it should be optimized for the keywords you’re targeting. Here are a few ideas to keep in mind:

Keywords must appear in the article’s title, near the beginning of the title.

Write for the reader first and foremost, but try to use the target keyword phrase in the first paragraph and then a couple more times throughout the article.

Do not underscore or bold words in an effort to make them stand out for SEO purposes. RSS for News and Blog Feeds Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, has been a part of the Internet for more than a decade. In technology terms, that’s some serious longevity. As technology has improved over those years, RSS has updated to keep up, but the basic idea has remained the same. There are millions of blogs and other providers of news content on the web. Who wants to spend their time going directly to every website and blog to check for new content? It makes more sense to have new content sent directly to readers so that they can check into one central location and then read the new stuff at their leisure. As mobile devices have grown more sophisticated, and e-readers have hit the market, RSS has become the ultimate way for people to keep up with news and blogs – anywhere and anytime.

Figure 29: RSS Feeds So it goes without saying that RSS and blog feeds are awesome ways to distribute your fresh content to the masses. Not only does RSS deliver updated news to subscribers who are following your feeds, but it can also be picked up by feed catchers, widgets, and other applications that aggregate RSS content by specific keywords. RSS ensures that your content will get to the people who want to receive it. The bonus with RSS, thanks to aggregators, is that if your posts are of great quality, it just might compel that person to follow your blog when they found your content in their aggregator inbox. Encourage your site visitors to start following your feeds! All of your pages should have an RSS feed icon to encourage RSS subscriptions. Every page of your site should encourage users to share the content they find as well as to subscribe to the future content you will provide. Without a doubt, if you have a blog, you should make use of an RSS feed. Most blog platforms such as Typepad, WordPress, or Blogger already have feed capability built in. All you have to do is set up the feed and your blog will start transmitting. All your new posts will flow through your feed so that it immediately gets distributed to your RSS subscribers. Once you’ve established an RSS feed, the maintenance is minimal. Your content goes out to your subscribers and to feed-catchers looking for your keywords. Just as fast as you can develop content, your RSS feed pumps it out. RSS is great for getting content to subscribers, but wouldn’t it be great to have some analytics on how your RSS is working? Historically, it has been challenging to know much about subscribers and to find out what articles are catching their attention and which ones they skip over. Fortunately, online converters like Google’s FeedBurner can provide you with analytics that can help shape the content you distribute through RSS. These analytics will help you determine which feeds are getting attention from subscribers, and who’s clicking through to your site from a feed to get the whole article. Analytics on what’s gaining the most interest from subscribers can be enormously helpful as you consider future posts. Video, Photo and Podcast Sharing Sites Hopefully, by now you are either excited to start or are already producing lots of audio, video, and photo content for your site. Whether you’re reporting your success at conferences in photos, interviewing industry experts with video, or issuing audio versions of your content for the visually impaired, you will have some fantastic content in a variety of media formats. It only makes sense to open up distribution channels where you can post that same content simultaneously. Figure 30: Produce Content in Many Formats Including Video, Photos and Podcasts. Once you’ve opened up these channels, you now have an incentive to continue producing these media forms. As you think of content to put on your site, think in terms of the channels you have opened elsewhere (off-site) so that you can distribute it broadly. If you have a YouTube channel, think of content ideas that include video. When you have events, bring a camera to post photos to your Flickr account. When you create customized, branded channels for showcasing your video, photo, and audio content, you add more opportunities for that content to be discovered in search. Try to create content experiences that can be posted on multiple channels. The more channels you can employ, the larger your footprint. Let’s look at some of the ways to open up these channels: Video is Booming You hear a lot about video, in this book and everywhere else. Video content is highly visible and easily digestible. It’s a great medium for communicating your thought leadership, your expert know-how, and it’s probably the most entertaining way to connect to your audience, opening up the possibility for creative, fun content. Not only should your videos appear on your site, but you should also get them onto sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and, if possible, MetaCafe. Video is easily shareable, and for this reason you should make as much use of distribution channels as possible. Video channels create numerous opportunities for you to engage your viewers beyond simply posting to their sites:

YouTube and Vimeo both offer the ability for users to create branded channels where you can upload your video content. If you haven’t done so already, set up branded channels for both sites. You can set up background images to show your brand logo, and coordinate the color theme to match your brand style. When you optimize the channel, make sure to link back to your website.

Promote your video channels to gain followers. When you post new content to your channel, your followers will be alerted to it.

YouTube allows users to recommend content to their followers. Recommending is a form of promotion, and it’s great for a few reasons. First, it’s a fantastic way to network. By promoting other users’ content, they may return the favor. Next, it keeps your channel on the radar for your followers. If you don’t have any new video content of your own, you can provide other, useful content that your followers might be interested in, giving the sense that new content is still flowing from your channel. As with any form of content promotion, if you keep the recommended content relevant to your audience, you reinforce your thought leadership in your industry.

Vimeo offers a group feature, similar to LinkedIn. The cool thing about groups is that you can often post new videos to a group without having to be a member of the group. If you have relevant content, search for groups by keyword and post your video to the group. Groups make for excellent targeted distribution. If you are actively producing video, you should engage Vimeo groups, both by joining groups and hosting your own. If you host your own, as with LinkedIn, the name of the group should not be your business’s name; instead, use an industry-related and keyword-optimized name that will get people interested in joining the group. As a group owner, you’ll be responsible for moderating the content – so you’ll need to remain active to keep it up to par, especially if you allow non-group members to post content.

Vimeo also gives you the ability to categorize your content. Make sure you optimize for the relevant categories. Many video searches are narrowed down by category. Without optimizing your category, you could be missed in these searches.

MetaCafe is not set up to be an open video-sharing site like Vimeo and YouTube. Rather, it’s designed to be an entertainment hub for short videos. Users can upload video content by category, but it will get posted only after review. So there’s no guarantee that it will be posted. If you have content that is going to be entertaining and high quality, you can submit the content to MetaCafe. Depending on the quality of the content you produce, you may be able to join as a media partner, in which case you can have a branded channel. The bar is pretty high for quality at MetaCafe, as much of the content is derived from television and film clips. But don’t discount it if you are developing quality, entertaining video. The site has a how-to section that could provide opportunities for you to promote your expertise while providing light-hearted content.

When it comes to video, remember to repurpose. Repurposing a video interview to text or to audio is a great way to get more mileage out of your video content. Likewise, if you have a great piece of text content, try having a dynamic person in your organization present it in video format. When you repurpose other media content to video, remember that the presenter shouldn’t dictate the message into the camera. Make sure they do something to keep the video from being boring, even if that means they simply work at a whiteboard. Distribution Possibilities for Images If you’ve developed some cool, original photos, you should be sharing them. Photo-sharing is a great way to keep people engaged with the excitement that’s happening in and around your industry. Photo-sharing sites center on the concept of the photo album. Many users engage these sites to collect photos of their memories for the purpose of sharing them with the friends in their networks. For this reason, photos and images are extremely shareable. When you take advantage of photo-distribution channels, like Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa, you not only raise the visibility of your content but also encourage it to be shared. Photo sites offer a lot of ways to organize, optimize for search, and share images. When you distribute your content on these channels, take advantage of the options. Optimizing images might seem like extra work, but the payoff can be well worth the effort. Not only will you increase your opportunities to be found in search, but you’ll also enliven the experience for the viewers:

Almost every photo-sharing site makes it easy to publish photos to other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. This can make it a snap to expand your distribution throughout your social media footprint. When you publish content to a photo site, share the photos to your social media platforms to let your networks know that you have new photo content available for viewing.

Most sites have a “places” tag linked to Google maps and other maps for photo albums. This is a fantastic way to add dimension to photos, especially when you bring them back from an event away from your headquarters. Say your staff attended a conference in Dallas and took photos of the experience. Optimizing the album for location will make it more engaging for users, and a search for your content by that city will bring up your images.

Make sure to use the description feature for each photo you publish. Make your description natural, but be keyword-conscious. Descriptions are the critical information that search engines use for identifying relevance and can get your photos into the search results.

Sites like Flickr use category tags to aid searching. Make sure you optimize your images for tags. Category tags are another way to get images found in search by adding relevance. Podcasting: Your Own Private Radio Broadcast People all over are keeping up on industry news through audio. By delivering audio files to these listeners, you can capture an important niche audience. Typically, people listen to podcasts when it isn’t possible to engage in other forms of media, like text and video. By providing your content in this format, you can make your content available to your potential customers even when they are away from their computer. To take full advantage of podcast distribution:

Keep in mind that podcasting evolved rapidly with the invention of the iPod. Essentially, podcasting centers on an audio RSS feed from your site. When you set up a RSS feed for your audio, you are effectively broadcasting your audio file over the Internet. Anyone with a podcatcher that’s set to search for your feed or keywords in your feed will download your file. But that’s not the only way that people pick up podcasts. Many users go to podcast directories like iTunes and Podcast Alley to browse podcasts to download. You want to ensure that you’ve established accounts with these sites and set them up to receive your feed. This way, your feed will go not only to individuals with podcatchers but will also be available to anyone browsing the directory sites.

When you set up the feed from your site, be sure that the metadata description of the episode is optimized for your target keywords. As always, the title should be natural for the human reader browsing directories, but it should contain keywords that will get it picked up by podcatchers searching for your term. Because most browsers use keywords to find podcasts to follow in directories, you need to optimize for them, too.

For each directory you register with, you’ll be able to give your podcast channel a title, description, and a link back to your web pages. The title should be optimized to be catchy but also express at a glance the nature of the content that you’ll be providing. Your description should be a short, meaty description of your offering. You want to attract a listener at this point, so your description should be both pragmatic and attention- getting.

When you set up an account with podcast directories, you don’t always have the opportunity to establish a branded channel, but with iTunes, you do. iTunes is the Mecca for podcasts, and it makes sense that you’d get some great features there. To set up an account and a feed, iTunes requires an image as cover art (300x300 pixels). This is your chance to include your brand logo, and to splash some color onto the page.

The medium attempts to mimic the idea of a radio broadcast, and for that reason podcasts are geared toward episodes; in fact, that’s the term iTunes uses to describe each file. Your branded channel, then, will work well as an industry news channel, which will allow you to repurpose much of your content to an audio format and still stay within the scope of your channel description.

Once you start transmitting podcasts, don’t slow down. When you gain a following, they will expect regular content delivery. In fact, iTunes states that it favors podcasts that get frequent content updates and will reduce search rankings for podcasts that have not provided content in a while. Presentation-Sharing Sites For business to business, slideshows are the way to knock ‘em dead with your expertise. Not only is this a way to diversify your distribution by posting your slideshow presentations, but you can also find creative ways to use presentation-sharing sites to distribute content beyond traditional slideshows. The fact is that slideshows are gaining popularity outside of B2B because they contain easily digestible text with graphic images. The bulk of content shared on SlideShare and other presentation -sharing-sites is the traditional presentation. However, I’ve seen some very creative uses for slideshows that go beyond presentations. For example, travelogues are finding their way into the slideshow format. They work well because the traveler can post pictures from a trip and add text descriptions of the experience. As another example, President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address was turned into a slideshow46, complete with enhanced infographics, to demonstrate the key figures he discussed in his address. Some people have delivered eBooks, white papers and even product comparisons as slideshows. Sites like SlideShare.net, MyPlick.com and AuthorStream.com offer functionality that can enhance the old-fashioned slideshow and turn it into an awesome distribution channel:

Some sites enable you to add and synchronize audio to presentations to make them more dynamic.

Some sites will allow you to convert presentations to video for uploading to video-sharing sites, making it simple to repurpose the same content in multiple formats.

SlideShare allows paying customers, for a relatively low fee, to have access to lead gen through the show, adding another incentive to use that site.

Users can comment on the slideshow.

Text content is extracted and searchable on some sites, like MyPlick, making keyword phrases within the presentation searchable.

SlideShare has a widget for LinkedIn, putting your slides right on your LinkedIn profile. Conclusion The core message for distribution is, “Find ways to get it out there!” The more you capitalize on the myriad online channels for distribution, the more you will put your great content in the hands of the potential customers who need it. Distribution is where you get to show your brand’s ability to deliver industry wisdom. The more you create content for distribution, or repurpose content for distribution on multiple channels, the more your brand will show up in search, and the more opportunities you’ll create for sharing. You have great content – get it out where it can be discovered! 12

Links Mean More Opportunity For Visibility And Success

“When you think about it, links have a pretty heavy job description. They are workhorses; moving millions of people a day through billions of web pages and helping both humans and search engines determine what a “quality” page is. When a lot of links point to a page, the page is seen as a valuable commodity and becomes a gauge and a guide for others to seek favor from. These pages are highly desired as link partners; you want the marketing value they impart and the algorithmic popularity they pass along. This chapter will help you identify key elements of a quality page and provide a core of proven strategies and tactics you can implement to build links.” Debra Mastaler, Alliance-Link/LinkSpiel Blog

The way I look at it, the right kind of link building is all centered on creating excellent, quality content that has inherent value to the person linking to it (and their audience). The industry term for this kind of content is “linkworthy.” I like to think of link building as a rewards program for your content. Do it right, and you’ll get rewarded with relevant, traffic driving links to your content. High quality links are the right way – and the best way – to make your content rise in search engine rankings. A significant part of content marketing involves achieving these links. Link building has traditionally meant that you reach out to a website and ask them to link to you. Part of link acquisition today has included paying for links because website owners understand the value of having links. But this often leads to bad practices and low-quality links. In fact, Google will penalize websites that both sell and buy links. The best alternative to paying for a link is generating linkworthy content. Think about it. If I contact you and ask you to link to my web page, the first thing you’re going to think in the back of your head is, well, why should I? Linkworthy content already answers that question. If my content adds value to the audience of the website I’m reaching out to, then it will benefit the website by enhancing the content on its page and, ultimately, the experience for its visitors. The content stands out as interesting to their audience so they would readily be willing to link to it. Top-notch content makes the strongest case for getting natural links, that is, links from genuinely interested website owners or editors. Linkworthy content generally gets more links from a variety of different sources, which is enormously valuable to your rankings and overall success. And the traffic that those links generate typically attracts a better potential customer. Put the effort in at the content development stage to make your content rock, and the links will follow. Remember the Anchor Text Anchor text (the words that the site owner uses to hyperlink to you, usually colored blue and underlined) is one of the strongest factors that will help you rank in the search results for your target keywords. Unfortunately, you can’t always control which keywords the website owner will use in the link’s anchor text to your website. When the keyword in a link’s anchor text matches the keyword your page is optimized for, Google recognizes that this is a good link relationship, giving the link a higher value. For example, if I want to rank for the term “content marketing,” I want the anchor text on as many sites as possible to contain that phrase in their links to my page. I don’t necessarily want the anchor text to say, “Check out Arnie Kuenn’s site for more” or, worse, “Click here.” It turns out that Adobe ranks strongest in search for the phrase “click here” because everyone links to the free Adobe Reader download with the common phrase: “To get a free copy of Adobe Reader, click here.” There’s no talk about “click here” on Adobe’s page, and they didn’t optimize for it, but Google sees the accumulation of all the links going to that page for that term and thinks that it’s the most important page in the world for that term. Clearly, Google recognizes the connection between the anchor text and the URL it references, so keep it in the back of your mind when making links and requesting them. On a refreshing note, most webmasters understand your needs, too, and they may respect your request. Chances are, they’ve asked for links of their own. Internal Links – the Easiest Links to Get! Before we get into tactics for building external links to your content, let’s back the truck up a second. Let me remind you that you own a website with multiple pages of content over which you have complete control. Through internal linking, you have the ability to generate links to your own content, and you control exactly what’s in the anchor text. A lot of people fret about building links to their site and completely miss the big opportunity to build links internally – and these are the easiest links to get! I’ll admit that it’s not exactly obvious that internal links can benefit your site. We often think of internal links as pragmatic, natural ways to move a visitor through our site with the goal of funneling them to a sale. That’s certainly true. But Google recognizes internal links when it indexes your pages, and the algorithm counts them highly. Internal links not only guide visitors to content pages on your site but the bots follow them, too. Internal links keep the bots moving through your pages, thus increasing your exposure. By linking to your own content from within your own content, you give visitors – and search engines – a chance to explore and engage. The best part about internal links is that you can build them right now! Of course, when you develop the next piece of content for your site, you’ll find ways to strategically link to your content. But I actually mean right now when I say “right now.” Go back to your existing pages, and find natural link opportunities that are there as we speak. Tweak those pages to make connections, paying close attention to the anchor text. Be sure the anchor text for each link is optimized for the page you’re linking to. This means that after you finish this chapter, you can go immediately to create links to your content and that you have complete control over the whole process! I’ve seen many people try to cheat the search engines over the years, even with internal links. Internal linking adds value only when it’s within the page content, not filling up the navigation or headers and footers. Sometimes, people think that by adding a bunch of links in the footer or other navigational elements, they’re building links, but actually they could get penalized for this. The best internal links appear naturally within the text. Juice Up! How to Prioritize Your Efforts Based on a Link’s Value Your strategy for seeking offsite link opportunities begins with link juice. “Juice” is an industry term for rating the value that search engines attribute to any particular link. The more “juice” a link has, the more value search engines give it as a factor in ranking. Think of “juice” in terms of our biking analogy. When you saddle up for a big ride, you have some options for filling your water bottle. You could certainly fill it with water, but the human body needs more than just water for hydration. Without electrolytes, water alone won’t get you very far, and if you over-exert yourself in the heat, you can actually do your body some harm by drinking water alone. If you’re going to ride hard, you’d be better off filling your water bottle with a sports drink that adds electrolytes and sugars to replenish what gets lost in perspiration and to add energy to give you the ability to perform at your best. Link juice is like a sports drink for your link building effort. Here’s how link juice works: When search engines evaluate a page for ranking, they have to determine the page’s relevance and value compared to other pages that are ranking for the same keyword. Because links make one of the best determiners of overall value, the search engine looks at the links to each page. Let’s imagine that two pages are competing for the No. 1 search result for a given keyword. Now imagine that both pages have the same number of sites linking to them. How would the search engine determine which of the two pages is the most valuable to a searcher? The search engine effectively checks the backlinks to each page linking to it. If the first page is getting a link from a page that has 20 links to it, and the second page is getting a link from a page that has only five links to it, then the first page is getting more link juice. The search engine considers a page that’s getting a lot of links from quality sites to be more authoritative than a page that’s getting fewer links, and so if that page links to another page, it adds the weight of its authority to the relevance. Link juice is simply a measurement of this authority. Figure 31: Link Juice, Source: Website Rock Stars Link juice isn’t just about the number of links coming in. It’s also about the quality of those links. Spam sites that link to a page count low for juice or, more likely, for no juice at all. On the other hand, some domains are considered by the search engines to be automatically big on link juice. Educational sites (with the extension .edu), government (.gov), and military (.mil) sites appear to offer more link juice. It is generally felt that those pages are highly governed and will not link to just anyone (student blog pages being the big exception). When you’re building links to your pages, juice up! Look for pages that are going to give you the most bang for your buck with search engines. When you research pages that might consider linking to your linkworthy content, check for juiciness. Later in this chapter, we’ll talk about ways to target some of the domains that have the highest juice, and we’ll get into targeting pages that have successfully attracted links to their own content. Blog and Forum Participation Blogs and forums offer some nice link building possibilities. Not only do you have the chance to add a link to your own content while participating in these spaces, but as you develop relationships within these communities, you can make personalized requests for links, offering you a greater likelihood of gaining an in-content link. When you participate in blog and forum communities, don’t miss the chance to deliver a link back to your page that is relevant and on topic. The link you add should point to interesting content that will actively contribute to the conversation at hand. In your comment, engage the topic and briefly explain how your content can contribute or is a solution to the problem being discussed. This will not only keep the comment from being disallowed as spam, but also will give viewers more incentive to follow the link to your page. By giving comments that demonstrate your knowledge of the industry and provide links to valuable content, you’ll build links the right way. Commenting is an important part of participation in blogs and forums, but the long-term benefit is that it will develop relationships with bloggers and participants. Your comments and contributions to the conversations offer your content as a solution or enhancement of the topic, positioning you as the expert. To get there, your comments must be valuable to the community, and the links you offer to your content should fit in with the conversation. If you don’t participate the right way, it will hurt your credibility. When you remain in good standing in these communities, the relationships you build will open up opportunities for link requests. You can approach the individuals that you have engaged with to write about your magnetic content. And, because they recognize you as an upstanding member of the community, these people will be more likely to honor your request to put your keywords in the anchor text. This strategy for networking with bloggers and forums is a great way to increase targeted traffic to your pages. By focusing on the network of bloggers and forums in your niche, you know that when your comments are viewed – and better yet, when bloggers agree to link to your content – the links that are created will be in spaces in which your potential customers will be looking. You’ll be providing direct solutions to the people who want them the most. Using Bookmarking and Voting Sites for Link Building More than likely you and the employees at your organization are bookmarking stuff you find online, creating a list of bookmarks or favorites of the pages you like. So, what’s happening is you’re creating links to those pages! Suddenly the light goes on, “You mean, I can simply recommend my new content to social bookmarking sites every time I have something new to offer and I’ll generate a link to my content? And it can go viral? Get out. For real?” Yes. For real! I discussed this quite a bit in chapter ten as a way to promote your content, but whenever you recommend a URL to a bookmarking or voting site, like Delicious.com, StumbleUpon.com, Buzz.Yahoo.com, Digg.com, or Reddit.com, you generate a link to your content. It sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Well it is. You can use social bookmarking as a tool to build links to your content, just by posting it. For the short run, it will get you a link; for the long run, it’s great to use social bookmarking sites to promote your content. Since linkworthy content is your goal, social bookmarking is a fantastic showcase for your content. Quite honestly, there’s no reason not to bookmark your new content. It only can serve you well. Social bookmarking gives your content a chance to get a lot of attention and some links. The more energy you invest in bookmarking, the better the return. Competitive Research and Backlink Analysis If I can impart anything to you on the subject of link requests, it is that you want to focus on links with a lot of juice that will result in targeted traffic to your website. This means that before you can make a link request, you have to know a little bit about the website you’re requesting it from:

What kind of traffic is the page getting? Is it the kind of site that will benefit your site with targeted traffic?

What kind of juice does the page have?

Are they linking to your competition? If they like what your competitors are offering for content, it’s likely that those same people would be interested in linking to you.

Backlink analysis is the way to answer all these questions. Backlink analysis is simply a matter of looking at the links coming into a page. By investigating who’s linking to pages that are similar to yours, you can discover a lot about what’s working for that page, and then you can infer what might work for your own content. Using tools like SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer47 and Yahoo! Site Explorer48, you can enter any URL to see the links to that page. Yahoo! Site Explorer is a free service, while SEOmoz has some free and paid-for services. Nonetheless, both of these tools offer you the ability to enter a URL and find out who’s linking to it. You then can run a second-level backlink analysis on any one of the pages linking to that page. This way, you can evaluate one URL and see, for example, that it’s getting linked to by, say 120 pages, while another page is only getting 20 links of its own. This gives you the ability to track and target the strongest page.

Figure 32: Open Site Explorer Results for Huffington Post On top of link analysis, Open Site Explorer gives you the ability to see the anchor text associated with the inbound links. This can give you a big advantage as you consider the best anchor text to suggest for your own link request. As you research a competitor’s page that has content similar to yours, the anchor text will give you clues as to how the people who are linking to that kind of content are likely to refer to it. This can help you optimize keywords, and this data can help you anticipate how the natural link is made, in the event that the website owner makes the decision to link in their own way. A good link building strategy starts with analyzing the links coming into your competitor’s pages, using the tools described above. Competitor analysis serves two valuable functions. First, it helps you see what kind of content has successfully attracted links to your competitor’s pages so that you can get on board and target similar content. Second, it’s about discovering who’s linking to your competitor’s pages so that you can approach them with your content. Links are a great litmus test for the success of a piece of content. If it’s interesting, chances are it will attract links; similarly, if a piece of content has a lot of links to it, it’s probably interesting to its audience. As you develop quality content, you need to keep in mind what kind of content is hot in your industry. One way to find out is by spying on your competition. By checking the backlinks to their pages, you can see what seems to be working for them, and what’s working for your industry. As you look to target website owners for link requests, it would be good to know whether or not those individuals would have interest in the content you’re offering, right? Through competitive analysis, you can search your competitor’s pages for content similar to the piece you want to build links to. Then, check out who’s linking to their content. Most often these links will be from others who are interested in the page content or their site’s target audience would find the content interesting because it pertains to their industry. These are exactly the people who you want to target for link requests because you know they’re already interested. Your competitors give you a clear sense of what’s attracting attention in your industry, but you can go beyond your competitors and seek out similar content on other websites too. Find out who’s linking to those pages, and why. If they are interested in similar content, they may be interested in yours. Here’s an example: Let’s say you own a hip cocktail supply shop selling high- end mixers and accessories like muddlers and shakers. As part of your content strategy, you’ve developed a video about techniques for muddling certain popular ingredients, like mint, limes, and cucumbers. Now you want to build some links to your new content. So, you go to the web to find pages with similar content. In this case, you’d be looking for a video or other content centered on barware, drink prep, and even party hosting. When you find pages similar to yours, you can analyze who’s linking to them and why. The people who have linked to a page on barware might be very interested in a video on techniques for muddling, and those are the best people to approach for links. At the core of a good link building campaign is research and analysis. By spending the time to search out sites that are showing interest in the kind of content that you have to offer, you can most effectively identify pages to approach with link requests. Through tracking content that’s already getting links, you can identify what kind of content successfully attracts links in your industry so that you can be sure to develop content that will fit in. The Real Meat and Potatoes of Link Building: Search Operators Now it’s time to get a tad technical on you. When you’re honing in on sites that might be interested in your content, you can search for pages online on which to perform some backlink analysis. As you may have found in your own day-to-day searches, standard keyword searches don’t always lead to the results you’re after. If you’re looking for something specific, you can spend a lot of time refining your keyword search and shuffling through pages of results with little luck. Search operators provide a way to narrow down your search in a search engine that goes beyond simple keyword phrases. Search operators are commands that are entered with the keyword phrase to refine the search results to a more specific set. There are literally hundreds of commands that you can employ to refine a search. You can even use multiple search operators to get uber-specific. We aren’t going to go into detail about specific search operators, because, trust me, there are a ton, and it’s beyond the scope of this book. Instead, be aware that search operators are tools that the pros use, and you should keep them in your toolbox. At the end of this section, I’ll leave you with some links to some pages that break down search operators in detail and give you some great examples for application. For now, I’ll give you a few examples of search operators in action to give you a sense of how they can get applied in your research:

Let’s say I have an infographic that I want to spread around to local coffee shops. In this case, my business is located in Phoenix, so I conduct a search using an operator that will include the term “Phoenix” and “café” or “Coffee” in the URL. I want to target pages that are linking out to or about cool coffee-related content, so I’d start off with an operator like this and explore the results: Phoenix inurl:cafe OR coffee

When you’re looking for blogs to engage with, you want to find a blog post that is on topic with your new piece of content. In this case, you want to find a blog post that specifically has your keywords (let’s say in this case the keywords are “internet cafe”) in the page title of the post because you think this will get you closest to the topic at hand. You would use the search operator to look at BlogSpot blogs: allintitle:internet cafe + site:blogspot.com.

In another case, we want to target college students in the Phoenix metro area by offering them a discount on our coffee when they use a promotion code and show their student ID. To find colleges that will be willing to link to our content, we want to find colleges that are willing to link to pages that offer discounts to students. Our search operator would look like this: phoenix student discount site:.edu

There are thousands of combinations of search operators you can use, and it takes quite a bit of creativity to use them well. If you would like a deep dive into link building and search operators, check out Ontolo’s Link Building Book49, by Garret French and Ben Wills. The following sites are also great places to begin learning about some of the nitty-gritty of search operators:

http://jameseo.com/13-search-operators-ultimate-link-building/

http://www.michaelwall.co.uk/seo/search-operators-for-seo-linkbuilding/

http://seohimanshu.com/2010/08/10/10000-search-engine-queries-for- your-link-building-campaign/

http://ontolo.com/link-building-tools/LinkBuildingQueryGenerator How to Send a Link Request That Doesn’t Get Deleted Now that you’ve targeted some websites to approach, you’re ready to send that request. You might think, “Well, the odds are slim that my request gets picked up, so I’ll target a lot of potential sites and fire off a whole bunch of emails. Since I’m going to be doing so many, I’ll just make a basic boiler-plate email and send that. If I get links from a few of them, I’ll be happy.” We can call this the scattering our seeds to the wind approach (or spamming). Sure, it can work to a small extent. But the truth is that for all the hard work of researching and identifying potential sites to request links from, it would be almost silly to send out your requests expecting such a low hit rate. Not to mention that a boilerplate email really doesn’t convince anyone that your content is right for their site or their audience, nor does it convey your pride in your work. Why not craft a link request that doesn’t get deleted? Why waste all your research effort? Making link requests starts by taking the high road: produce quality, linkworthy content. This is the very first step to getting your link request honored. If your content sucks, no one will want to link to it, right? When your content rocks, it’s just begging for links. All it needs is to be shown to the right people. When you’ve got that rockin’ content, follow these tips to make a link request that is bound to take off:

TARGET the right site. Through blogger and forum engagement, and through research, target sites that are likely to be interested in the content you have to offer. Remember to visit their site and get to know it before you fire off your request, in order to be sure that your content will be of interest to their audience. When you make the request, position yourself to show that the link that you want them to add to their site is going to be good for their site. You want it to sound like it’s so valuable to them that they’d miss out on a fantastic opportunity if they were not to link to you. You should be able to say with confidence: “Hey, you should add this link to your site because I know your audience is going to love it.”

Make it PERSONAL. Find a name. If you’re tapping your blogging network, you probably already have a relationship that you can call upon. If you’re reaching out to someone new, you may have to be more proactive to find out who the real contact should be, i.e. Dave handles the website, so email Dave, not [email protected]. You want to prove that you’ve looked at the website. As we discussed in chapter ten, you may be able to use media lists to find out contact information for bloggers, if you are having trouble finding a real name otherwise.

BENEFIT the webmaster. While you’re checking out the site to see if it fits your content, see if there’s a little tidying they could do. This will help strengthen your effort to show the webmaster that they will be the biggest beneficiary of your efforts. For example, check links of the page to see if any are out of date and broken. You might be able to offer your link as a more up-to-date replacement. By helping webmasters update their content, you may find they want to return the favor by posting your link. Even if the link you might want to replace is not broken but in your pitch you include a heads-up on some links that are broken, you still save the webmaster some work, and they often appreciate it. Once, I had someone say, “I wasn’t actually planning to add your link, but then you started giving me all this good advice, so I had to link to you; I would suck if I didn’t, since you helped me out!” (Actual quote.)

Share the LINK LOVE. As discussed in chapter 10, a big part of relationship building begins with linking from your page to their page. Bloggers will know that you’ve done this, and they’ll likely return the favor when the time comes for you to make a request. If you can be generous with linking to other sites, the good karma can come back to you. As in love, be a giver. It only works in your favor! Conclusion In some circles, link building has developed a bit of a bad reputation, but that’s not how it has to be. You can take the high road and build links to your content with a clear conscience! In fact, when you show some self-respect and manage the relationships you develop with bloggers, in social media, and in your industry in general, you can earn a reputation for doing business the right way. When you pair up your awesome content with a reputation for link building the right way, you’ll only serve to strengthen your position as an industry expert. When bloggers think highly of you, it’s like getting word-of- mouth advertising on steroids! Webmasters get inundated with spammy link building requests all the time – how much more will they respect the person who sends a considerate link building request that stands out from the crowd? 13

Conclusion We did it! We’ve walked through each important link in the chain of a content marketing strategy. If I could leave you with one parting thought, it would be this: You are now in the publishing business. My goal in writing this book is to get you thinking like a publisher and to encourage you to take on a content marketing mindset. By embracing this approach, you’ll find inspiration in the possibilities all around you. Above all, I want to get you excited about creating. Successful publishing is about consistent quality. When you do it right – when you strive for quality – you’ll produce content that compels people to share it on social media, that attracts links, and that meets the real needs of your customers, positioning you as the critical solution provider. The bottom line is that you’re publishing in order to create conversations in which you can engage as the expert. Once you start thinking like a publisher, get organized like a publisher! Just ask a sharp content strategist and she will tell you that you’ll never get a content marketing strategy off the ground without being organized. You need to have a plan. At the center of any publication, and the key to keeping it organized, is the editorial calendar. I can’t emphasize that enough. The editorial calendar is the hub of activity for your online publishing effort. By treating your content marketing strategy like a publishing operation, you will find the sense of engagement and commitment that’s necessary to get the job done. The beauty of the editorial calendar is that it highlights the publication process, revealing where you’re succeeding and where you can find ways to improve your efforts. When you step back and look at all the links in the chain I’ve described in this book, it’s clear that there’s a lot going on. I don’t deny it can seem daunting. And it is – if you aren’t organized. There are simply too many moving parts. An editorial calendar will help you visualize the process and will help you manage the content cycle. From research to content development to promotion and distribution, it all falls on the calendar. Plot out your calendar, and you’ll see the convergence of search, social, and content marketing right before your eyes. As you see the links in the chain working together (strategy, research, content creation, optimization, promotion, distribution, links, and measurement), it will be quite clear why I say, “Don’t break the chain!” Publishing is about finding opportunities to be creative. Every piece of content is an opportunity for more content. It’s inspiration for your next piece. Repurposing is an awesome way to multiply your creative efforts by spreading the excitement to new forms on different channels. BUT YOU CANNOT DO IT ALL. Even though I have tried to cover everything related to search, social and content, you just cannot do it all. Our company does not do it all and I doubt even large organizations do it all. Just pick a few types of content that you think you can move all the way through the chain with a high degree of quality and consistency and focus on those. If there is one single thing I would recommend you start with, it’s your blog. Get one on your website and commit to posting something new two times per week. If you can do that, you are off and running. Hey, at the end of the day, creating engaging content is fun! It’s your business to demonstrate that you have expert industry knowledge, and that’s not only something to be proud of, it’s something to have fun with. We at Vertical Measures considered the publishing of my book to be an occasion for creating new content that would excite our audience, opening an avenue to put some of our online audience in the book! You could say that this book accomplishes what it promotes. On the other hand, you could just say that I have a content marketing mindset! Marketing That Moves You: The Facebook Contest To show you just how fun creating content can be, we chose to run a Facebook contest to promote my book. Titled Marketing that Moves You, the goal of the contest was to discover some the best examples of content marketing that really excite people. Participants were encouraged to submit examples of content marketing from any organization they felt was really doing it right. Bulbstorm50 developed the contest platform, building it into the Vertical Measures Facebook page51. Participants simply had to become a fan of Vertical Measures in order to enter. We didn’t require them to submit an entry, but they could engage in other ways and gain points by voting for entries, commenting, sharing the contest, and participating in other activities. There were more than 500 prizes in the prize vault that participants could claim with their points. The two grand prizes included an Amazon Kindle, a Flip video camera, recognition in this book, and free passes to must-attend marketing events around the country. By the time the contest closed, more than 100 entries had been submitted, ranging from video campaigns, to contests, to great informational content. We were overwhelmed by the response we received. It brought to light how many people and organizations are recognizing the importance of content marketing. The winning entry was submitted by James Haddox, from all places, North Pole, Alaska. The content James submitted was for a Cheez-It® campaign called Choose the Cheese52, created to encourage fans to pick the next Cheez- It® flavor. With a choice of three flavors – Asiago, Colby or Romano – fans could select a favorite and multiply their vote by playing a variety of games. The top 50 voters in the contest would receive a year’s supply of Cheez-It® crackers. With so many companies engaging their audiences with awesome content, it was difficult for our judges to choose the grand-prize winner. What drew us to Cheez-It® was that it is a large, established company that has been doing business for years. They have secured name-brand recognition for their product, packaged in that characteristic red box. Now, with this campaign, the company was embracing a new way of marketing, exploring the possibilities that content marketing can create for a company of any size, large or small. While we’ve all been accustomed to seeing the same of old cheddar Cheez- Its®, now we, the people, have the power to choose the newest flavor! That is exactly what content marketing is all about: Giving your audience the power to make the most informed decisions about your brand. That kind of content excites people and keeps them coming back for more. And the good news is you don’t have to be a multi-national corporation to do that. Anyone can do it with a computer, an Internet connection, and determination. You can do it. This book has given you the tools – and hopefully the motivation. Now it’s your turn! A Final Note – It’s a Digital Publishing World You might be wondering why I decided to self-publish rather than go with a traditional publisher. Let me explain. Our company was exploring the concept of offering eBook consulting as part of our client services. So why not start with our own eBooks? Just to make this a full-fledged challenge, we decided to write and publish five “how to” books on topics specific to the search, social and content industry. (You can find those books listed on the following page.) Then I decided to join the fun by writing this book. We live in the fast changing world of Internet marketing and knew we had to get the books published as quickly as possible after writing them, so you could have the timeliest information possible. In addition, during the 4th quarter of 2010, Amazon announced that the Kindle was their number one selling product of all time. Shortly thereafter, Google announced their book selling strategy called Google Books and of course Apple has rolled out iBooks for their devices. Then in early 2011, Amazon announced that eBooks had just outsold traditional paper based books, and it outsold hard covers by a factor of three to one. All of this led us to the decision of abandoning the world of traditional publishers to go with self or on-demand publishing. While I love my Kindle and the convenience it and other eBook readers provide, and truly love saving trees, I understand there is still something to be said for holding a book, reading that book while everyone else has to shut off their electronic devices during take-off and landing, and easily sharing books with your friends. So we are also providing a print option for all of our books. Why am I telling you all of this? Partially to explain why you don’t see a hard cover version of this book from a major publisher, but mostly to explain that you can do this too! I’d thought about writing a book over the years but never, ever thought I’d actually do it. I even jotted down some ideas for books in the past, but I never took it very seriously because I thought it was complicated, would never be able to convince a publisher to take on my book idea, and of course did not seem to have the time. If that sounds like you, I am telling you, you can do this. And if you are reading this, it means I did it and now I can show you how to do it too. It’s just a matter of making a commitment - making it a priority. This leaves me to my final words. Many years ago, I jotted down this observation: “The fundamental difference between two individuals is the order of their priorities.” Change yours today and get started on that book! The Vertical Measures How-To Guide Series Available Now!

The Vertical Measures How-To Guide Series is for marketers, entrepreneurs and executives that are ready to embrace emerging technologies that are taking businesses to the next level. The books highlight tactics that are worth focusing time and effort towards as well as those tactics to avoid. The series provides deep insights into the world of emerging business technologies and covers topics including; Keyword Research, Facebook, Twitter, Local Search Marketing, Blogging and more.

Succinct tactics for companies who are either using or plan to use new technologies to grow their business

Written by industry experts with hands on experience in the field or discipline described

Written specifically with the business and/or marketing user in mind – combining solid technical expertise with savvy advice.

Get discounted prices and take advantage of the opportunity to receive additional bonus materials and other VM Press books online at: www.verticalmeasures.com/store/books Footnotes 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Egyptian_revolution 2 Vanessa Fox, Marketing in the Age of Google, 3 Brian Solis, Engage or Die 4 http://www.intentindex.com 5 Kristina Halvorson presentation 6 Andrei Broder, A Taxonomy of Web Search 7 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156184 8 http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html 9 James Matthewson, et al, Audience, Relevance, and Search 10 http://labs.wordtracker.com/keyword-questions 11 http://answers.yahoo.com/ 12 http://www.linkedin.com/ 13 http://www.facebook.com/questions/ 14 http://www.quora.com/ 15 http://digg.com/ 16 http://www.reddit.com/ 17 http://www.mixx.com/ 18 http://www.stumbleupon.com 19 http://www.delicious.com/ 20 http://www.techterms.com/definition/cloudcomputing 21 https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal 22 http://www.google.com/insights/search 23 http://www.google.com/trends 24 http://www.seomoz.org/keyword-difficulty/ 25 http://adlab.msn.com/online-commercial-intention/ 26 http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Mutation-Detection 27 http://adlab.msn.com/Demographics-Prediction/ 28 http://clues.yahoo.com 29 Chris Anderson, Wired, http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/about.html 30 http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=145673 31 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=93633 32 http://www.verticalmeasures.com/link-building/race-for-the-best-link- 2010/ 33 http://www.woot.com/ 34 http://www.verticalmeasures.com/webinars/ 35 http://www.verticalmeasures.com/resources/seo-best-practices-guide/ 36 http://www.w3.org/html/logo/ 37 http://www.apple.com/about/webbadges/ 38 http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/webbadges 39 http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/?page=aboutus 40 Kristina Halvorson, Content Strategy for the Web, 155 41 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_map 42 http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/topic.py?topic=8909 43 www.themotorlodge.com 44 http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Motor-Lodge/168575485275 45 http://windmillnetworking.com/linkedin-book/ 46 http://www.slideshare.net/thecroaker/obamas-state-of-the-union-address- 2011 47 http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ 48 https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com 49 http://ontolo.com/link-building-book 50 http://www.bulbstorm.com/ 51 http://www.facebook.com/verticalmeasures 52 http://apps.facebook.com/choosethecheese/