Recent tumultuous challenges and strategic planning sessions brought something to mind. Business is just business, and digital media, however much it’s changing and how quickly, is just media, just business. Complex, fast moving, and difficult to keep a hold of the pulse of things? Sure.  More challenging than ever. But it still generally follows general business principles. The challenges are principally the same.

A decade ago I was facing challenges of leveraging technology for business efficiency and improved customer (reader) satisfaction. I was designing and implementing programs that made processes easier, helped employees press buttons to do things faster and easier, and reduce operating costs. Subsequently, margins were being squeezed, there were intense downward pressures and increasing competition meant having to get the very best from every resource to deliver value. Trying to upskill, cross train, integrate, and motivate a team was difficult as expectations increased and there was a need to do more, with less. Attracting great people both from within the industry and from outside it was a constant challenge. The “production process” of the work we did back then was a stubborn logjam mess of issues, frustrations, and complexities, so trying to organize and streamline this became a core focus. That’s just as true in search marketing now as it was a decade ago in print media. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

In the late 90’s a tidal wave of competition from free Metro publications and every local printing house producing an in-house real estate, auto or general classified free inky mag meant possible death by a thousand cuts.  It was clear then as it is now that only the very best would survive. In many sectors businesses coast on, deluded by this fact or sleepily oblivious to it, but it’s there all the same. The demise of the print version of Seattle’s Intelligencer newspaper shows that to be true. Business, or should we say the market, has little favor for misty memorabilia, historical sentimentality, and the quaint romanticism of the US’s oldest newspaper. 146 years old and done with like yesterdays hamburger wrapper. The brutal onrush of progress continues unabashed, crushing everything in its way whether we like it or not. So I guess we’d better like it. So adopt, or die.

The search marketing industry is seeing commoditized offerings from every basement-run two-bit SEO company with a fancy website, cool brand imagery and a stainless steel and glass office table and a couple of shiny MacBooks to impress clients. The key players in search need to aim for the continued demonstration of real value and ROI. And let’s be very clear about that. Let’s make it even more transparent than it is. Show our depth of knowledge and connectivity, our insight, and embrace all the new platforms that throw themselves in front of us disguised as challenges, by which I mean social media, web 3.0, the semantic web, and the ramp up of mobile search. Key players need to show their strengths and do whatever they choose to do well, with passion, genuine interest, and with an approach that’s based on solid information, backed by research, and by leveraging the use of external resources. When we hear from clients and prospects about their stories of broken promises from agencies, and the failed delivery of guaranteed ROI, or a shoddy end deliverable we know we need to stay true to our goal of delighting the client.

So all of the challenges that we see now in the search marketing biz is actually old news repackaged. By staying true to proven approaches and trusted methods, the best players win through the challenges we face. Key players need to use their core values, strong guiding principles, beacons of inspiration, and by referencing proven best practice upon which to make good business decisions.  The cream always rises to the surface, so be sure your client offering is thick, creamy and well produced – something of substance and proven value, with great packaging. A good client feedback loop helps too. 

 Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

• Giving users what they are used to: More than half the world prefers Google’s search results and are comfortable interacting with the search box as well as the search results. Google Custom search engine provides the exact same search experience as Google.com but on YOUR site.
   
• Building your own search engine is difficult: Have you ever tried designing your own site search functionality, it’s definitely not simple. It’s difficult to apply the same type of algorithms Google does so that you can sort your results smarter than just alphabetically. With the custom search engine the algorithms are applied for you and you gain all the benefits of the awesome performance.
   
• Access to deeper content: Many sites on the Internet have some of their best content buried deep within their folder structure, the custom search engine allows your users to find that deep content within 1 click without getting frustrated and abandoning your site.
   
• Access to new content, not a huge issue anymore: One previous draw back of Google Custom Search vs. a proprietary search was that Google took a little while longer to index newer content which made a given site’s internal search results not as fresh. However, with the recent changes, your new content can be made available quicker by leveraging Google’s XML sitemaps.
   
• Customization: Google Custom Search Engine allows you to customize your configuration in many different ways including: look and feel of results, style of search box, placement of ads, sites to search within, ability to introduce AdSense, method of displaying results and refinement labels for popular website topics.

Original Post: Web Analytics World

 

With CompleteRSS you can say goodbye to invalid RSS and partial entries — your feeds show your entire article no matter what, bringing you the traffic you deserve, and no longer use the very-much abused ‘content:encoded’ tags that cause many feed readers such a headache.

I am not sure what the deal is with HTML in WordPress (or Blogger for that matter) but they constantly mess up. There have been numerous occasions where I tried to copy and paste an HTML table from a different blog into one my blogs and ended up losing the table formatting completely. My suggestion is to find some sort of FCK Editor Plugin to replace the default editor OR to use the "copy from word" option located in the default editor. It looks like this:

 Original Post: Web Analytics World

• URL vs. Title: The URL of your post doesn’t have to be the exact same as the title of your post. Creating a custom URL allows you to insert additional keywords which can benefit your post from a search engine perspective. Some blogging platforms such as WordPress allow you to define a custom URL for a post (also known as the post slug) whereas platforms such as Blogger construct the URL by taking the post’s title word for word (it also applies a character limit for the URL). For platforms that don’t allow custom naming I recommend creating a keyword rich title initially and then after posting, changing it to something enticing to draw in readers.
• Interlinking of Top Posts / Hot Topics: As a blogger you will occasionally write a post which will considerably outperform your other posts OR you will blog about a hot topic in your industry which you hope will perform well in the search engines. For both cases, a good idea is to hard code keyword rich links to these posts on your blog’s side bar or in your footer so that they receive added attention from search crawlers and readers.
• Re-Ignite Past Posts: Staying on the topic of hot posts, it is often a good idea to keep the momentum rolling on popular topics by updating their content or adding 2nd and 3rd parts to the original post. What has worked well for me in the past is to create a 3 or 4 part series on a popular topic and then combine all the posts into a PDF which readers can download.
• Yahoo/Google Finance: When writing about publicly traded companies it is a good idea to mention the company’s full name or even their stock symbol. Many times these types of posts get aggregated into a given company’s news section of their Google/Finance page which leads to more readers coming back to your blog.
• The Importance of Variety: Offering posts which vary in length, topics, format (lists vs. news vs. opinion vs. interviews), or content type (images vs. video. vs text) can prolong the life of your readers. Mixing up your posts will keep your readers coming back rather than being bored by the same old content day after day.
• Relationships with Companies/Bloggers: It is important to have relationships with companies or their PR firms because they will potentially release information to you before it goes to the public giving you an edge on your competition. Additionally, companies can offer you access to software/services during test periods before it is officially released. Relationships with other bloggers is key because they can help you spread the word on your most potent posts as well add value to your blog by guest blogging from time to time.

We received a number of questions on everything from search engine trends to video optimization, from Facebook to Web Analytics.  We're still sifting through the number of questions that we have received and you can expect to find commentary on them soon… but for now here's a look at a sample of some of the issues that we have discussed in 2007.

• What’s Hot at the Search Insider Summit? Two Words: Sep Kamvar
• Discover Your Ideal Blogging Formula
• Mobile SEO as a Part of B2B Online Marketing
• Ten Ways B2B Marketers Can Become Cutting Edge with Online Marketing
• Podcast: Marketing in the Google Era
• An Intimate View of the World through the Eyes of Google
• The New Role for Outsourced SEM
• The Three C’s of Search
• Advantages of In-house SEO
• Yahoo + Yang = Google + (Page + Brin)?
• B2B Marketing: What Do You Want as Part of Your Online Strategy?
• Come on Canada, It’s Time to Clue into Search!
• What Influences Universal Search?
• Planning for Personalization
• SEO 2.0: Will Content Still Be King?
• What is Google’s Universal Search?
• Should Google Acquire Facebook?
• Why is Online Reputation Management Important?
• Personalization doesn’t have to make search perfect, it just has to make search better
• What Should I do if my Blog’s Traffic has Plateaued?
• Google Alerts: Can You Use them for Online Reputation Management?
• What Are Some Organizational Challenges with SEO?
• How do I Leverage On-Site/Behavioral Targeting?
• How Important is the Yahoo Directory?
• What is Often Overlooked in a Web Analytics Implementation
• Website Usability: How Can You Improve It?
• Eye Tracking on Personalized Search: A Tough Nut to Crack
• Buzzing ‘Bout Ask
• How Can I Optimize My Videos?
• How Should I Compare Thee to Google?
• Is Facebook a Serious Threat to Google?
• In Search of B to B Landmarks
• Which Key Performance Indicators Will Be Important with Web 2.0?
• What Are Some Useful Video Optimization Resources?
• 4000 Ads a Day, and Counting
• What are 5 Great Mobile Marketing Resources?
• Your Facebook Group is Setup, Now What?
• How Can Yahoo Search Assist Be Leveraged as an SEO Tool
• Agencies Get Search? Don’t Hold Your Breath
• Does the Fact that Your Site is Hosted in a Different Country Affect Your Search Engine Rankings?
• Can Facebook Ads Work for You?
• Do Reciprocal Links Get More Weight Than Paid Links?
• Why Should I Set Up a Blog?
• Highlights from the Search: 2010 Webinar
• Where Can I Submit My Videos?
• What’s In Store for Search Marketing in 2008?

Below I have come up with 9 ways to kick-start your blogging:

• Hot Industry Stories: Everyday you hear about acquisitions, mergers, companies releasing new technology/services or even executives getting fired. Unless you are one of the first blogs to cover these stories, it becomes somewhat useless to your readers. Rather, I recommend you add your personal perspective on the story as well as help your readers leverage the news by offering advice on how to apply it to to their own businesses.
• Relationships with PR Firms: Try making relationships with PR firms who work for companies in your industry. It's a win/win situation, you get hot news off the press and the companies get publicity in exchange. As you become more authoritative, PR firms will begin to approach you first.
• Google Hot Trends: This an excellent way to determine the buzz across the Internet, however you do have to apply your own filters per industry. Google Hot Trends also allows you to see a graphical trend on the level of interest for a given topic.
• Correlating Common Interests: You probably enjoy other interests outside of your niche such as sports or politics, so why not bring something your other passions into your professional life? I like to sometimes use Google Trends, Technorati and Social Bookmarking to reference the NBA or sports playoffs.
• Guest Bloggers: When you're completely out of new topics try leveraging guest bloggers to offer their thoughts on new topics. This gives you a little break and gives your readers some fresh perspective to digest. Guest bloggers can be people from your industry or even fellow employees. Make sure to prescreen your writers so they adhere to your high quality of content.
• Reigniting Old Topics: Dig into your stats and figure out posts which have been historically popular (consider seasonality if appropriate) and then write an update to those posts explaining how strategies have changed or Part 2.
• Credit Other Bloggers: In any given week there are dozens of posts and articles around your industry which people should definitely read. This is your opportunity to categorize these other posts and spread some link love. Both Search Engine Land and Marketing Pilgrim both do this on a regular basis.
• Create a Compilation: Have you ever written 3 or 4 posts on the same topic which you think an organization can circulate around to it's employees, then try combining those posts and offer them in a PDF version.
• Attend a Webinar: If you wanted you could probably attend 2 or 3 webinars everyday (and realistically 1 every 2 weeks) and for those who can't make it, provide a brief summary for them detailing the "nuggets" from the webinar.

1. Prominent, Accessible and Ease of Use: Make your subscription buttons available on all pages and place them above the fold. Using technology like FeedBurner you can get a sense of your subscribers' favorite feed services and begin making subscribing to those services even easier.
2. Repeat in Footer: Something that has worked well for me is adding the subscription option to the footer of each individual post. What this does is remind visitors to subscribe after reading one of my posts.
3. Subscribe by Email: Depending on what industry you're in adding an option to subscribe by email can dramatically increase your subscribers. Many authors of travel sites have noticed that email is even more popular than feed readers.
4. Add Option in Emails: In FeedBurner you can also publicize your feed's content by placing a widget in outgoing emails. Through this widget people can also subscribe to your feed.

    

Increasing Feed Subscribers: Additional Resources

• The Blog Studio: How to Increase Subscribers by 50% in 30 Days
• Pro Blogger: 11 Ways to Find New RSS Subscribers for Your Blog
• Daily SEO Blog: Increase the number of subscribers to your blog overnight
• Copy Blogger: 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers
• Rob Malon: Decrease Bounce Rate – Increase Subscribers and Visit Time
• Internet Marketing Students: How To Increase Blog Subscribers
• Jimmy Thakkar: Techniques to increase subscribers for BLOG
• Ades Blog: Increase your RSS subscriber count with FeedSmith
• Garry Conn: How To Increase RSS Feedburner Subscribers
• Jonh TP: Tips To Increase Your Blog Subscribers

Tips to Grow a Successful Facebook Group:

• The Right Configuration: Make sure you select a title, category and description that is relevant to your brand because this will entice people to join your group. I also suggest that you be as transparent as possible and offer information such as contact information, website, phone number and location. This allows group members to associate the group to an actual person rather than any old computer generated content. To offer a real community appeal, enable the ability for anyone to post discussions, wall posts, pictures and videos. Initially you should make the group public which allows anyone to join and invite people to the group; remember you do have the ability to remove members if needed.
• Leverage existing Facebook Friends: It's important to attract a strong base of members to your Facebook group, so invite existing friends that may find your group valuable and who could become evangelists for your group. This is where the viral part comes into play: your friends' friends will notice that they joined a new group which will spark interest from them to check it out as well.
• Use your email contacts: Don't forget about your friends outside of Facebook because Facebook Groups provides the ability to import and send group invitations to your contacts from Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail.
• Press Releases/Blog Posts are other methods which you can use to invite new members to your Facebook Group. Personally, I created a call to action and placed it above the fold which reminds my readers to join my group.
• Keep the Content Fresh: Update your group's Recent News, photos, videos, events and links regularly so that members have a reason to return. Another simple tactic is deploying a welcome message which greets new members and enforces the 'human factor' of the group.
• Create relationships with new members: If you have a group which is open to the general public then you will notice people who are not your 'friends' join your group. These are the types of people are there to get a feel for the quality of the group therefore make it a habit to personally address them.

Tracking Your Group's Success

Here are some metrics and tactics you can use to measure the success of your Facebook Group:

• The number of members you have in your group.
• New members who join per day/week/month.
• Ratio of new members to people who left the group.
• Ratio of members who are your Facebook friends vs. not.
• Engagement: Activity on Wall Posts and Discussion Boards.
• Members who also accepted invitations to join your events.
• Links posted in your group back to your blog/website should have parameters appended to them so that they can be segmented in your analytics separately.

Original Post: Web Analytics World

No Network is an Island

First, let's cover Granovetter's work. In an oversimplified version, it states that social networks are not uniformly dense in their make up. There are very densely linked nodes. These are families, circles of best friends, immediate co-workers and other very close relationships. These clusters, or islands, are then loosely linked by more fragile ties that span the clusters. They include formal acquaintances, lapsed or dormant friendships, more distant relationships and other "arm's length" connections. These are Granovetter's "weak ties". For a viral spreading of information, we can assume that word will spread quickly within the tightly linked clusters, the "strong ties", but for it spread widely, it has to be passed through the "weak ties". Otherwise, it will never spread outside a cluster, thus the importance of these "weak ties" in the structure of the social network.

But there is another factor, and that is the cooperation of those "weak ties". Are they motivated to pass on the information? In the words of Frenzen and Nakamoto: "Instead
of an array of islands interconnected by a network of fixed bridges, the islands are interconnected by a web of "drawbridges" that are metaphorically raised and lowered by transmitters depending on the moral hazards imposed by the information transmitted by word of mouth."

The Principles of "Passing it On"

In Frenzen and Nakamoto's study, they introduced two variables: value of information and moral hazard. In this case, they used the framework of an exclusive sale. The value of information varied with the size of discount on the prices. And the moral hazard was the scarcity of inventory available at this discounted price. So in the low value/low moral hazard version, it was a smaller discount (20%) and there was plenty of inventory available. There was no danger that close friends and family would "lose out" by sharing this information with a wider circle. In the high value/high moral hazard version, the discount was high (50-70%) and the number of items available at this price was very limited. A scarcity mentality was imposed. They also varied the structure of the network by assigning different "tie strengths" to the linkages within the group.

The results were striking. In the low moral hazard scenario, where there was maximal cooperation to pass along information, everyone in a 100 member social network, composed of 5 loosely linked clusters, received the information in a maximum of 7 time periods (the actual period used was not stated), even with a varying  link strength of the network. In fact, in the strongest structure, everyone knew by the third time period.  But in the high moral hazard situation, transfer of information was much slower and less effective. In the strongest structure, it took 8 time periods for 100% spreading of the information. And in the weakest structure, even after 15 time periods, still only 66% of the group had received the information.

WOM Moved Online

So, what does this have to do with search? Simply this. The weak ties are now moving online. If we have great news or a great product story to share, we can now share this information on line. We can blog about it, post a comment or leave a review. But we're most likely to do this when there's low moral hazard. We pass information where there's no "scarcity mentality". So we'll happily post about a great travel destination, a restaurant or a piece of software because by doing so, we're not running the risk of losing out ourselves. We're much less likely to blog about that exceptional deal on men's suits at 70% off, where they only have 6 left. That information is reserved for our closest friends. It only gets passed along through our strong ties.

There's another factor at play here that was beyond the scope of Frenzen and Nakamoto's study. We are motivated to pass on information online when it's remarkable. Product or brand experiences have to earn the right to be passed on. As online mavens, we're motivated by being "first to know" and by passing on value. Therefore, we carefully consider the trustworthiness of the information and it's authenticity before we decide to share it. After all, we're staking our reputation on it. Although these online posts become Granovetter's "weak ties" online (because we usually don't have strong personal relations with all the readers of our various online "footprints") they only happen when the nature of the information bears passing along.

If we're depending on the spread of word of mouth for our marketing, we have to start with some basic understanding of how the dynamics of the network works. All too often, we assume that everyone is like our best friend, eager to spread the word about our product or service. In the wired world, this would include leaving footprints online, through blog posts, comments and reviews. There, future customers can connect with them through search. But a successful viral campaign is largely dependent on those weak ties being motivated to pass along the information. It needs to be remarkable in some compelling way (i.e. Godin's Purple Cow), it has to eliminate a scarcity mentality, it has to feel authentic and, to appeal to the mavens, it has to have the feel of news.

Originally published in Mediapost's Search Insider, August 2, 2007

• Creating top 5, 10, 20 lists
• Submitting your blog to blog directories and Dmoz
• Using your blog's URL in your email signature
• Linking to your blog in MySpace

Thinking outside the box these days becomes challenging because the box is SO big. If you're looking for something new, give some of the blog promotion strategies below a try. They may not lead to instantaneous traffic nor are they necessarily easy to implement, but they will help you build your brand and help grow your long term traffic:

1. When writing a blog post trying using full names of organizations, using organizations' stock symbols and linking them to their Google Finance page (if applicable). Google Finance often has a section for blog posts related to an organization. If your post makes it onto a popular company's Google Finance page you can expect some decent referrals.
2. Release a free PDF of your blog's top posts or write a 4-5 part series on a given topic and develop that series into a PDF to give away for free. Within the PDF provide links for people to subscribe as well as information regarding advertisement opportunities.
3. Blogs such as the Google Blogs and Seth Godin's Blog have trackbacks turned on, meaning if you link to one of their posts that blog post will automatically generate a link back to your original post. This strategy has to be done in the right context because I definitely don't recommend linking to these blogs' posts in irrelevant context or overusing this tactic.
4. Rather than simply linking to your blog within your Facebook profile, develop a community surrounding your blog by developing a Facebook group. This can really expand virally if you have a large network of friends.
5. Reignite past hot topics with updates. If you wrote about "How Google Makes Money" last year, consider writing a quarterly or year update to this post.

*BONUS: People absolutely love widgets and apps, so I am going to give you a suggestion for an app to build: FeedBurner offers an API which allows you to retrieve a given blog's subscribers (if it's enabled), I would love to see an app which quickly allows you to compare subscribers between bloggers or EVEN better take a page out of GoogleFight's book and develop a FeedBurner Fight application.

The most fun and most difficult part of blog promotion is to be creative, although with millions of bloggers in the blogosphere it can become awfully challenging. To be successful, a blogger has to find their 'zone' and motivation, mine often comes when I start scribbling ideas on a piece of paper rather than typing them directly into my laptop. Sounds a little old school but it works.

Original Post: Web Analytics World