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Study Declares LinkedIn the King – or Does it?

February 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Thanks to a new study released by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, blogs around the internet are declaring LinkedIn the new king of the social media mountain. Not only does this draw some unrealistic conclusions from the data, but it also ignores some of the more potent, useful information found in the study.

Most articles are citing the data visualized in the image to the left, which would seem to indicate LinkedIn is rapidly overtaking other social networks for business use, but with any study of this nature you have to look at the sample. In this case, the data came from a survey performed on business listed in the Inc. 500, an index of the 500 fastest-growing private businesses. It’s a small sample, and the companies listed here would seem to share a specific characteristic – a strong focus on growth.

 

Stop Trying to Pigeonhole Businesses into a Specific Social Media Venue

It would have been great to see some information about the specific industries of the companies surveyed. It seems likely that what looks like an overall shift in preferred social network is actually evidence of how the specific types of companies surveyed best use social media, and not a directive for all businesses.

As marketers in the social media arena, we need to be extra careful not to fall into this sort of trap. For example, were I to recommend that a client at a B to C that sells a physical product focus the bulk of their efforts on LinkedIn, I’d be doing them a great disservice. People don’t shop or window shop on LinkedIn. It doesn’t even begin to have the same consumer power as more visual venues like Pinterest, YouTube or even Facebook.

In fact, if you take a quick look at the full list of 5000 Inc. published in 2012, you’ll find certain types of industries filling pages and pages of data: Business Products and Services, Advertising and Marketing, and IT Services are among the top performers. Even companies in the top 500 who list themselves as providing Consumer Products and Services tend to be in fields like investing and event planning.

Take this report and others like it with a grain of salt, and realize that there hasn’t been one social network to rule them all for many, many years. You have to understand who your customers are and what motivates them, and develop your social media strategies based on that information. Reaching the largest audience of people who aren’t looking for your products or services generates the wrong kind of leads, if you get any leads at all.

What the Study Does Tell Us

Looking beyond the catchy headline, you can actually dig down and find some really useful information from this study. Once you understand that the survey respondents were from growth-focused businesses, you can learn a lot about how they accomplish that growth.

63% of respondents stated that their CEO is active in their content creation and social media, and blogs are far more popular among the Inc. 500 companies than among the Forbes 500 – a list that tends to include more established businesses. This tells us that businesses using social media avenues to increase growth are finding success with those methods, and that their growth is also due in part to humanizing their upper management, thereby giving a level of transparency to their corporate culture.

This information is the real take away from the study. Concepts like blogging and increased visibility for upper management span every industry, and these methods seem to have proven successful for the businesses on the list.

Filed Under: Online Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Infographics – A New Frontier or Too Much at Once?

February 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Unless you’re completely new to developing SEO optimized content, or have been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you’ve certainly heard of the infographic – many outlets and marketers have extolled the virtue of including infographics in your content marketing mix.

Some have placed them on a high pedestal, going so far as to say you’re really behind the curve if you’re not including them in your content mix.

Others, while enthusiastic about infographics, are a bit more restrained.

Commenting in an interview with CMI, co-founder of JESS3 Leslie Bradshaw says that infographics should be viewed as a “…high-level tactic that are good for educated audiences.” For consumer audiences, infographics may be a bit much. “Consumer audiences are much more likely to share something on Facebook that’s really ‘snackable,’ Leslie explains.

So in order to develop “graphic” types of content that will get shared through Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and others, Leslie and her team develop what they call “data graphics”, which are basically shorter visual representations of one or two data points.

We of course like to take a more restrained approach…

Understanding what infographics are, and more importantly how you should approach them is way more important than putting one together for the sake of doing it.

However, we certainly appreciate the old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”

Visualization is very powerful, and the ability to convey complex information graphically is what lies at the heart of an infographic.

Infographics is a short hand term for “information graphics” – they can be defined as graphic visual representations of information, or as explained in this CMI piece by Ahava Leibtag, a true infographic takes “…a complex data set and translate(s) it into an easily understood picture.”

Ahava goes on to explain that many pieces marketed as infographics, while good, are really “posters” since they lack complex data. While her example from Copyblogger is a really great, informative piece of content, it really lacks the sophisticated data that takes it to the infographic level – I would suspect Ahava would have the same opinion of an infographic, or “poster,” we did for an e-cigarette client some time ago…

If you’re looking to include infographics in your content mix, there are a few rules you need to follow says Paul Gustafson at CMI. These rules include:

  1. Tell a story
  2. Communicate complex data simply
  3. Make sharing through social media easy

Some of the most successful infographics in fact take very complex information and concepts and boils them down into their simplest, most easily digestible form.

Avaya provides us with some questions you must consider before embarking on the infographic voyage. Answering the following questions is critical to developing a successful infographic she explains.

  1. Do you have something relevant?
  2. Do you have a clear call-to-action?
  3. Can you post the infographic in more than one place?
  4. Do you have a good designer?
  5. Does the infographic approach fit into your branding?

In the end, it all really boils down to determining the purpose of building an infographic in the first place, its relevancy to your brand and message, and its ROI potential

Once you’ve addressed these important questions and you determine if and how an infographic will work for your site, you’re ready to get started.

There’s a plethora of templates out there for you to check out, or you can design a custom one…this handy infographic from Infographic Labs (below) provides a great overview of the “how.”

So in the end, are infographics the new content nirvana, or do they overload audiences and not deliver on the promises so many claim them to hold?

The answer of course – it really depends on a host of factors. If your audience in more “consumer” driven, perhaps you should consider the smaller, or more “snackable” pieces JESS3 develops.

If your audience is more sophisticated (some B2B), perhaps a two-level infographic makes sense…

We should caution though, you have to address the fundamental questions of purpose, goals, relevancy, sharing, ROI and more before you develop an infographic.

Have you developed any infographics for your website? If so, how did they work out?

Let us know in the comments field below or on our Facebook or Twitter profile today.

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Content Marketing – 5 Predictions for 2013

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Content Marketing over Traditional Advertising – Making the Case

Making your Content Work for You in Better, More Valuable Ways

 

What Is An Infographic? by Infographiclabs

 

Filed Under: Copywriting/SEO Content Development, Online Marketing, Social Media, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Link Building Post Panda – Is Article Marketing Still Viable?

January 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The short answer is yes, if you’re mindful of the needs of your audience and make quality over quantity the core of your link building efforts…

In the early days of online marketing and SEO, syndicating articles through directory sites like Article Alley was an effective way of generating links and building rankings.

Over time though, whole software and online marketing tools made this task very easy – some even go as far to generate content automatically. Spinning software is another tool available that takes an article and modifies the keywords. While some phrases may be different, the piece is essentially the same.

As the Google algorithm has taken a more critical eye toward content, the effectiveness and legitimacy of this tactic has considerably waned.

The term article marketing, as seen in this video from SEOMoz, has in fact taken on quite a nasty meaning in recent years.

Wistia


Because the term has been tarnished though doesn’t mean article marketing isn’t a viable strategy – that is if you do it properly and not overly rely on links from the lower quality article directory sites.

To better understand the best way to approach article marketing for link building purposes, you should first understand why the old way of looking at article marketing doesn’t work anymore.

1.     Article directory sites offer low-quality links – Google’s Panda/Farmer updates in 2010-2011 dramatically reduced the value of links from article directory sites.

2.     Duplicate content – Submitting the same content to multiple sites leads to duplicate content filters, rendering the links worthless

3.     Readers and search engines are more discriminating – As the web has developed, so have its users, who demand more informative, easy to understand content. Realizing this, search engines work to filter out content that is blatantly link building in nature.

Therefore, writing one piece and distributing to multiple, even hundreds of sites, or using “spinning” software to make multiple keyword variations on the same piece isn’t just ineffective, it’s potentially damaging in that it will make your business appear not so reputable.

Link Building through Article Marketing in 2013 and beyond

Having the ability to build anchor-text links to the exact pages you want, when you want, is still extremely valuable. If you have a high-level page targeting a valuable keyword, you want to get as many high-quality links you can.

High-quality being the operative word of course…

Article marketing and guest posting is one of several ways to get these links. You can see some of our prior discussion on guest posting below.

Speaking of article marketing more broadly though, you can still target content to relevant sites looking for outside contributors and guest content. The best approach is to find the best sites in your niche’ and create direct relationships with them.

Some ways you can find these sites include:

1.      Combine your top keywords with phrases commonly found on sites looking for guest content. These phrases include – looking for writers, guest blogger, submit an article, contribute content, write an article, and others.

If you’re an e-cigarette retailer for example, you could enter “e-cigarette” + “looking for writers” into a search to find good sites.

2.          Search through DMOZ and Google directories for more authoritative, trusted sites. Any site you find in one or both of these directories have already gone through an editorial review, so you can trust them more.

3.          See where other authors are publishing their content. If you’re visiting an article directory site, enter an author’s name in a Google search to see all of the sites where their work is featured.

I understand how I can find good sites to post content for link building purposes, but how do I find the time to actually write the articles, blog posts, etc. etc.?

If you’re focusing on quality over quantity, you will of course have to be able to generate the content. Software tools that automatically generate or “spin” the content are no good since the copy typically doesn’t reflect what an actual person would write.

Producing quality content does take a little bit of effort, but the benefits of thinking quality over quantity cannot be overstated.

One approach you can consider for producing content is to write an article on your target topic/keywords. Set that piece aside, and write a second piece on the same topic, without looking at your original. You can do this several times over in fact.

This approach can help you write pieces very quickly since they’re on a topic you’re already familiar with. But in order for you to make them unique, you absolutely cannot look at the prior drafts.

How about your efforts to build links through article marketing and guest posting?

Have you had to change your approach following Google’s big updates of the last couple of years?

What sort of challenges have you run into with article marketing, and link building in general?

We want to hear from you – please feel free to leave us a comment below, or on our Facebook, Google+ or Twitter feed today.

Related Posts

 Penguin Update Targets Link Schemes and Low-Quality Content

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Link Building in the Post Penguin World – Guest Posting

 

 

 

Filed Under: Copywriting/SEO Content Development, Online Marketing, SEO Technology, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

SEO and PPC – Which is Better?

November 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Businesses just starting to wade into the waters of online marketing often ask which channel is better – should I focus on search engine optimization or pay-per-click advertising?

Although they’re displayed together on a search results page, organic search results and paid search marketing are quite different from each other.

In Google, organic search results appear in the left column of the search engine results page. Organic search results are considered free in the sense that you don’t have to pay anything if someone clicks the link. Where a particular site appears in organic search results depends on how the algorithms have scored the website and landing page based on its relevance to the keyword or words used.

Getting a website to page 1 based on the search query entered by the user is one of the main measurements of success in search engine optimization.

Paid search advertising from Google AdWords appears along the top and right side of a search results page. When a visitor clicks a link in one of these advertisements, the advertiser pays a fee based on the results of an auction that occurs every time a search takes place on Google. How much a click costs depends on the competiveness of the keyword in question, the optimization of the landing page the ad is linking to and the homogeneity of the keywords and ad copy.

As far as the question posed in our title, ideally you should include both SEO and paid search advertising in your online marketing strategy

And from our experience, we know that SEO can take weeks or even months to start yielding benefits. Paid search advertising on the other hand can be setup relatively quickly and, if properly managed, can provide immediate traffic to your website. Stoney deGeyter at Search Engine Guide recommends you start on your PPC right away to bring in profits sooner, if you can afford it.

When customers are able to set aside part of their marketing budget for paid search advertising, we recommend beginning an AdWords campaign as soon as properly optimized landing pages are in place. This allows you to reap the benefit of immediate traffic to your website while you shift your focus to all of the SEO work – namely optimizing your website, targeting keywords, building content, links and growing a social base.

In other words, paid search helps fill the traffic void while you work to ramp up your SEO efforts.

Another point to consider is how search engine optimization improves site usability since it takes visitor behavior into account. Over the long term, SEO and PPC work together to “…generate a synergy effect on visibility and conversions.”

In the future paid search advertising may take a higher priority, especially for keywords with high commercial intent according to an infographic we spotted recently.

In fact, paid search ads targeting high commercial intent keywords garner nearly 2/3 of clicks according to data. SEO on the other hand is still very dominant for informational keyword searches.

One other point to consider is the fact that SEO and PPC reinforce each other according to Mike at Search Engine Guide. With the rise of universal search, it’s possible for a website to have more than 2 options for a searcher on a results page, each with its own unique message.

Each approach has its own pros and cons.

Paid search advertising, for example is much easier to measure than SEO. You can get data on traffic and conversions for a particular page almost immediately. Engaging ad formats yield high click-through rates and ROI.

On the other hand, Google makes it much easier for you to spend rather than save money on PPC campaigns.

While SEO is free in the sense that a click doesn’t cost anything, it does take a lot of effort to get your website ranking on page 1. Compared to paid search, it’s increasingly difficult to measure and execute. However, SEO does provide the foundation for building a sustained web presence over the long term.

This quote from Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief at Search Engine Land, provides the best explanation we could find – “It’s one of the most important rules of search engine optimization. Don’t depend solely on SEO. I’m always surprised when people fail to learn this lesson. Those hit hard by last week’s Penguin Update are just the latest to learn it again.”

In the end, we can’t really answer which method, SEO or PPC, is better.

As we said above, it’s best to have a mix of the two as one complements the other.

Related Posts

You can learn a lot from a little button: Part I – Top vs. Other

10 ‘On Page’ SEO Tactics You Should Avoid At All Costs – Part I

10 ‘On Page’ SEO Tactics You Should Avoid At All Costs – Part II

Why You Shouldn’t Rely Solely on PPC to Bring Traffic

Filed Under: Forum Watch, Online Marketing, PPC Advertising, SEO Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

You can learn a lot from a little button: Part I – Top vs. Other

November 6, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Finding Google GoldI get a lot of phone calls from customers asking questions that are more easily answered by showing them where to find the right data. Walking the novice PPC customer through the AdWords interface every once in a while is a great idea because it gives them a certain amount of control over their advertising dollars that they would otherwise forfeit to ignorance.

It is also an opportunity to educate them by showing the value in what I am doing for them. The way I see it, whether I show them the way around their AdWords account or not, I will always have customers that want to know the most minute details. By showing them how to find the information themselves I reduce the inquiries and increase their awareness of things like their budget (and why they might want to increase it).

There are a lot of dimensions to the data AdWords can show you about your account’s performance and finding the answer you are looking for can sometimes be a challenge. That’s why I want to spend time over the next few posts showing you the “hidden” value you may be missing by not utilizing some of the lesser-used tools that Google provides.

Segmenting your data: Top vs. Other

AdWords campaign settings

To check the box or not to check the box?

If you’ve ever set up a campaign in AdWords, you have probably seen the option to allow your ads to run across Google’s Search Partners network. While this box is probably left un-checked by the majority of users, I often find little thought is given to it before or after the decision to enable search partners is made.

So I want to briefly explain what Google’s search partner network is and how you can view campaign performance based on where (generally) your ads run.

In many cases Google’s Search Partner network can provide great exposure for your ads for less money than the same ad bidding the same keywords on Google. First, search partners like AOL (and other legitimate search engines) display the same ads, usually in similar positions, to quality search engine users. And because there is less competition on the partner network, a little work on your part could help you buy comparable clicks for less money.

Here’s a real world example of a keyword that performs well on both platforms:

Disclaimer: decisions based on a keyword’s history should be made when a statistical sample (100-300 clicks) is achieved. In this example there are far fewer clicks than this so it may not be a good idea to make decisions based on this data alone.

In the image above you can see how the “Top vs. Other” segment (Keywords Tab–>Segment–>Top vs. Other) shows a keyword’s performance in four locations:

  • Google search: Top- This is when your ad appeared in the to 3 positions on Google search
  • Google search: Other- This is when your ad appeared anywhere on Google search but was not in the top 3 positions
  • Search Partners: Top- Same as Google top but on their partner network
  • Search Partners: Other- This is a mish-mash of partner sites like Amazon & Ask.com. Although clicks are usually cheap this can sometimes drag your overall CTR into the basement.

As you can see the same keyword was MUCH cheaper on the search partners network in the “Top” (1-3) position.

If  you’ve never segmented your data in this way and you have search partners enabled you owe it to yourself to see where your money is being spent. The most useful way I have utilized this tool is by identifying keywords that are out of our budget on a Google search but worth bidding for at a lower price on search partners.

I do this by looking at the average position of the keyword and the average CPC and then setting a max bid based on an estimated cost for the “Search partners: Top” position.

In the above example I see my average CPC on search partners is $1.17 and my average position is 1 so I will set my max keyword bid somewhere around $1.17. Granted this doesn’t work in every case but finding these little “nuggets” that can wring more value out of Google is what regular AdWords maintenance is all about.

There are other ways to segment your data that will help you make more informed decisions about your paid search engine marketing and I look forward to talking about them in the next few weeks.

If you have any good data segmentation tips feel free to leave them below.

 

Filed Under: PPC Advertising Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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