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How to Get Your Community to Build Links For You
Published November 13, 2010 | 
Posted by Geoff Kenyon
Building links is widely regarded as one of the most difficult and time consuming aspects of SEO. If you have a community centric site, you should spend some of your time allocated for link building on creating features that will get your users to do your link building for you. Implementing these community link building features can result in a scalable flow of links to your site.
Profiles
If you give users a self-serving reason to link to their profile, they will be much more likely to link to it. Turn the profile into a portfolio; use a member’s profile to show off their achievements and their top contributions to the site. Double up the incentive and enable members to be freelance through the site – have a “hire me” button on their profile. Something like this would work well for sponsorship sites like Hookit, which has done this well (image from a hookit profile below), putting a "Sponsor Me" button bellow the name and profile shot of each athlete.
Sharing Call To Actions
While this is pretty basic, there are many sites that do not ask users to share their content in any visible way. This can be as simple as adding buttons to share the content in a ribbon at the end of content or in a sidebar. Be careful not to go overboard on the buttons though. While your users may be on many different networks, poppularity of these networks tends to follow the Pareto Principle, where 20% of networks receive 80% of your users’ submissions and attention.
Sharing your content doesn’t guarantee links as social links are often nofollowed, but social is thought, by some, to be a factor in the ranking algorithm so encouraging users to share shouldn’t be neglected.
Voting Content Helpful
Do you enable users to vote content up or down? What do you do with it after it’s been voted helpful? When a user votes something up, it means they think the content is good content but they may not be thinking of sharing. You can remind them with an async overlay that appears after voting up. This could easily become annoying, and cause people to stop voting content helpful so it might be a good idea to only do this only one out of every seven or ten times. An easier implementation of this is putting the Facebook “like” button on your site as “liking” content automatically publishes it to your wall.
Promote Controversial Content
Content that gets people riled up also has a tendancy to get a lot of links. Look at Derek Powazek’s rant on how SEO’s are a bunch of Spammers. Everyone reading the SEOmoz Blog would probably agree that Derek’s rant isn’t valid, but he got a lot of links out of it. Open Site Explorer reports 2,374 links from 423 root domains – some of them from really strong sites like Search Engine Land and Newsvine. Mission Accomplished. Regardless of whether he wrote this as link bait, it became link bait. If there are controversial threads on your site, promote them like crazy. Try and stir up that hornet’s nest and see what happens.
One really easy way to keep these threads/posts going is to promote the most active discussions in the sidebar or at the bottom of other threads. There are a lot of "top discussions" plugins that will highlight content so that you don’t have to worry about manually promoting controversial content. That said, if you do notice controversial content, it would probably be smart to promote it in other ways such on Twitter.
Awesome Community Badges
If you have a strong community that loves you, create badges for the community and make a big deal out of them when you release them. Sometimes you can get multiple links out out these badges, but you need to be really careful about how you go about this. I would suggest reading the Unofficial Google Widget Bait Guidelines and Widgetbait Gone Wild. SEOmoz did a great job with their badges and has received links from 485 different root domains with the alt text: i <3 seomoz. Feels good to be loved.
<a href="http://www.seomoz.org"><img src="http://www.seomoz.org/img/i-heart-seomoz.png" alt="I <3 SEO moz" /></a>
Ego Boosting User Centric Badges
In addition to creating badges highlighting the community, you should create badges that are focused on the users and their achievements. This will play to the ego of your community members so these badges should really hype up how awesome your users are. Give your users the ability to “level up” and then graphically distinguish between levels of users on the badges; this gives users a) pride in their accomplishments and b) motivation to contribute more to the community. Experts-Exchange has done a great job creating badges, shown below, that show off a users’s accomplishments. In the badge below, you can see the user’s top categories, how many questions they have answered, how many articles they have written, and how many points they have.
Email Users at Critical Points
What the critical points of interaction for your site? When a users registers, contributes content, “levels up”, when the user’s content is voted up, and when users’ content is promoted by staff are some of critical action points that many community sites have in common. Identify which points of contact are critical for your site, then email users at these points and ask them to share either the site or what they have just done. For example, if a user’s review is going to be promoted on the front page or on a popular category page, email the user and let them know that they created something great and that their review is going to be promoted. Encourage the user to tell their friends about their review being promoted on the homepage.
When users register, collect their Twitter names. When their content is being promoted, as in the situation above, you should tweet about it. SEOmoz does a good job of this; when a user’s content is published on YOUmoz, SEOmoz tweets it and includes the @username.
Embed Photos
Like videos, photos are shared frequently; the catch is that most sites that host their own videos offer you the ability to embed the video. Most sites that offer photo galleries don’t offer this option. Sites like Pink Bike could stand to benefit from this by having code to “embed this image” below the photo with a couple different sizing options. This is applicable to any site, not just sites offering galleries; if you allow users to upload images to a forum or for a review, you should enable and encourage users to embed the image. Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday on Linkbuilding Through Embedded Content. There are so many opportunities to leverage embedded content, most sites could find a way to build links through embedding content. This is an example of how photo galleries should incorporate this:
Create a Leaderboard
Stroke your top contributors’ egos a bit; dedicate a page to your top users and make sure they know about it so that they can promote it on their own blogs. While a lot of sites do this, I think Medpedia Answers does an especially good job. They provide the avatar and name of the contributor, how many point they have, qualifications and accomplishments, and they link to each members profile and another page with their answers. Medpedia, a medical Q&A site has done a good job recognizing their top users, below is part of their leaderboard.
Combining Tactics FTW! Creating a leaderboard can help you get links, but people might not think to link to it on their own, but with a little encouragement…it could become awesome. When users make it onto this list, they should be informed that they made it on to the list of top contributors. Email them. They can again be notified once they have cracked the top 10, top 5, and 1st place. In the notification email, give them the URL and tell them they should share it with their friends. You could also include a special badge for top contributors (with a rank number) that communicates their accomplishment. Leaderbeard, Email, Sharing, Badges. Double Rainbow.
Interview Top Users
The key to interviewing members is to promote it well. If you prominently position the interview on the site, the contributor will be more likely to feel a sense of accomplishment about the interview, as the article will inherently get more attention because of its prominence. Since they feel proud of their interview, the user is likely to blog about the interview (maybe having an active blog could be a screening requirement for choosing interviewees).
Interviewing experts is often a way to get links as these experts will want to mention these interviews either on their blog or on Twitter. Take this concept and apply it to your users with blogs and strong social media accounts.
What is really important is to always publish interviews to the same URL and make sure that this is the URL that you share with the user, for example: domain.com/user-interview/. When you have a new interview to publish, simply move the old interview to a different location (domain.com/user-interview/username-date.html) and keep the links concentrated on the interview page.
Syndicate Your Content
There are a lot of sites that are hungry for content and would be willing to feature some of your content with an attribution link. If there is a popular news site in your industry, you could ask them if they would be interested in featuring a weekly article, review, blog, photo… that they could feature on their site. Make sure you get attribution links out of it though. An example of a good attribution line would be: How to Fight Bears (link) is part of a weekly series by Adrenaline Adventures (link).
To get users to syndicate your content, offer them custom widgets that could be easily placed on their site or blog. The widget could highlight their recent contributions to the community. This widget would act like an RSS feed that would sit in a user’s sidebar. This Whiteboard Friday is a good resource if you are looking to learn more about syndicating content.
Ask Your Community to Help Grow the Site
If you have a strong bond with your community, explain the basics of SEO to them and ask them to help you out. You can ask them to link to your site and share the content through social media. If you are feeling bold, you can even ask them to link to you using your keywords as anchor text. It is really important when you are directly asking your community to help you with SEO is that you emphasize how this will help the community and how it will help the user who links to the site. Etsy does a great job of explaining what SEO is and how their community members can help to optimize their contributions.
Having a page about helping a new site grow isn’t that uncommon. On these pages, sites will often ask users to link to the community and offer the user badges they can put on their site to show their support. BallHyped, a new sports community, has done a great job of asking people to link to them by putting an emphasis on it being beneficial for the user and the community. As a result, they are having success getting users to support their site with their “Vote For Me” badges (shown below).
While not all of the strategies in this blog post will work great for every site, there should be at least a few that will work for most sites. I hope you are able to apply some of these and have your community bear some of your link building burden. How do you get your community to build links for you? Let me know in the comments.
Hi everyone, my name is Geoff Kenyon and I recently joined Distilled as an SEO Consultant. This is my first post on the SEOmoz blog, but you can expect to see me writing here and on the Distilled Blog. If you have questions or want to say hi, hit me up on twitter @geoffkenyon.
Ho Ho Ho, Go Google Go
Published October 29, 2010 | Some sites have seen pretty drastic drops in Google search traffic recently, related to indexing issues. Google maintains that it is a glitch:
Just to be clear, the issues from this thread, which I have reviewed in detail, are not due to changes in our policies or changes in our algorithms; they is due to a technical issue on our side that will be visibly resolved as soon as possible (it may take up to a few days to be visible for all sites though). You do not need to change anything on your side and we will continue to crawl and index your content (perhaps not as quickly at the moment, but we hope that will be resolved for all sites soon). I would not recommend changing anything significantly at this moment (unless you spot obvious problems on your side), as these may result in other issues once this problem is resolved on our side.
An example of one site’s search traffic that was butchered by this glitch, see the below images. Note that in the before, Google traffic is ~ 10x what Yahoo! or Bing drive, and after the bug the traffic is ~ even.
Not that long ago I saw another site with over 500 unique linking domains which simply disappeared from the index for a few days, then came right back 3 days later. Google’s push to become faster and more comprehensive has perhaps made them less stable, as digging into social media highlights a lot of false signals & often promotes a copy over the original. Add in any sort of indexing issues and things get really ugly really fast.
Now this may just be a glitch, but as Tedster points out, many such “glitches” often precede or coincide with major index updates. Ever since I have been in the SEO field I think Google has done a major algorithmic change just before the holidays every year except last year.
I think the reasons they do it are likely 3 or 4 fold
- they want to make SEO unpredictable & unreliable (which ultimately means less resources are spent on SEO & the results are overall less manipulated)
- they want to force businesses (who just stocked up on inventory) to enter the AdWords game in a big way
- by making changes to the core relevancy algorithms (and having the market discuss those) they can slide in more self promotion via their vertical search services without it drawing much anti-trust scrutiny
- the holidays are when conversion rates are the highest, so if they want to make changes to seek additional yield it is the best time to do it, and the holidays give them an excuse to offer specials or beta tests of various sorts
As an SEO with clients, the unpredictability is a bad thing, because it makes it harder to manage expectations. Sharp drops in rankings from Google “glitches” erode customer trust in the SEO provider. Sometimes Google will admit to major issues happening, and other times they won’t until well *after* the fact. Being proven right after the fact still doesn’t take back 100% of the uncertainty unleashed into the marketplace weeks later.
Even if half your clients double their business while 1/3 lose half their search traffic, as an SEO business you typically don’t generally get to capture much of the additional upside…whereas you certainly capture the complaints from those who just fell behind. Ultimately this is one of the reasons why I think being a diversified web publisher is better than being an SEO consultant… if something takes off & something else drops then you can just pour additional resources into whatever is taking well and capture the lift from those changes.
If you haven’t been tracking rankings now would be a great time to get on it. It is worth tracking a variety of keywords (at various levels of competition) daily while there is major flux going on, because that gives you another lens through which to view the relevancy algorithms, and where they might be headed.
Shit Justin Halpern Says
Published October 29, 2010 | or: How Shit my Dad Says Happens
An online definition of Shit My Dad Says states, "In 2009, Justin Halpern, an aspiring comedy writer, was dumped by his girlfriend and moved back in with his parents. He began using Twitter as a way of keeping track of the brutally funny, off-color things his father said around the house."
The popularity of Halpern's Twitter feed spread quickly. Soon, he had hundreds of thousands of followers. Today, almost two million people follow this feed to hear the shit Sam Halpern says. But this hardly tells the whole story.
The popularity of Halpern's Twitter feed brought in bigger offers, and helped him to land a book deal in September of 2009. Released in October to universally warm reviews, it quickly became a bestseller. But it still doesn’t stop there.
In November, Halpern signed a deal with Warner Brothers. Halpern and his writing partner, Patrick Schumacker, were paired with the creators of "Will & Grace" to write a pilot episode (“Bleep My Dad Says,” when spoken in polite company). Picked up by CBS, it stars none other than William Shatner. (Shatner!) It's part of the current Fall Line-up, and you can see it now airing on Thursday nights, prime time on CBS.
To say Justin Halpern has made the most of moving back in with his folks is a bit of an understatement.
No longer living at home these days, we were able to recently reach Justin for a few quick questions about his success.
When you chose Twitter, did you trim your dad's statements to fit the medium? Do you ever paraphrase him, or are his quotes always literal?
Sometimes I'll tweak a word here or there to get it to fit in to the 140. Other times I'll take the first sentence and the last sentence of a paragraph's worth of stuff and put them together to make the thought more concise, but honestly, it's basically just exactly what he says. I wish I could say I had more to do with it.
How long after you started posting did you start getting any feedback?
I would say about three weeks, after Rob Corddry tweeted it. Then it sort of went viral.
What made your Twitter stream so different?
Well, I wasn't giving updates about what I was doing, because I know I'm not interesting. And I wasn't linking to anything, or trying to sell anyone anything. It was just simply a voyeuristic look into my life with my dad.
When I found your twitter feed, I referred to it as the best use of Twitter I had seen. Do you think that it would have been as effective in any other medium? How responsible is the vehicle for the spread of your work here?
Oh, I think the vehicle was unbelievably vital to the success of this. Could it have existed somewhere else on the web? Maybe. Would it have achieved the same success? Probably not. Can I ask myself more questions and then answer them in a paragraph? Yes, but I won't.
It's been widely reported that Rob Couddry's interest is what catapulted the Twitter popularity. Can you talk a little bit about what happened?
Well, I actually ran in to Rob months after he had sent my site viral, and I asked him how he found it and he couldn’t remember. He was the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet, especially since I was just this spaz coming up to him in a best buy being like "Hey, I'm the shit my dad says kid!" I would have punched myself in the face if I were him, but he sat there and had a fifteen minute conversation with me. Basically he said he saw it, thought it was hilarious, and just tweeted it and then everyone started retweeting and that’s what did it. Essentially, I owe Rob Corddry shitpiles of money.
Reports of your work status (at the time you began in 2009) vary pretty widely on the web. Were you still writing for Maxim.com at the time? How much time did the feed take?
I was still working at Maxim.com at the time, yes. The feed took up eleven seconds of my day. The time it takes to hear my dad say something, then type 140 characters on a computer.
How did you view the extra attention being paid to the feed? Did you feel any obligation in what you posted, or how regularly? Do you now?
I don't really feel an obligation. I post less now because I see my dad less. It's funny, the feed is the same now as it always was, but when stuff gets popular, people are like ""e sold out,” but the funny thing to me is that I'm just writing down what my father says and he doesn't care, just like he didn't care a year ago.
What was the first request received that made you realize there might be something really special here?
An agent Direct messaged me and said "there might be a book here." That blew my mind.
How does your dad seem to like William Shatner playing a character based on him?
He seems to enjoy it. He and Mr. Shatner don't really care to have anything to do with one another, but he really seems to enjoy Mr. Shatner's performance.
You've found success in writing for a mainstream website, a microblog, on a regular blog, in a book, and on a television show. Is time to revisit screenwriting now, or what future plans are you developing?
I plan to write another book in the next two years, and although I'm focused entirely on the show right now, I had been developing a show with Comedy Central before all this happens and I liked the idea and someday I’d like to go back and revisit it. But not as long as this show is on the air.
When success in one medium happens, it is rare to have an ability to leverage it across a variety of mediums and not diminish the quality while crossing them. To what do you attribute the ability of your work to move across media channels and find a welcomed place in all of them?
Well, before the project went in to a different medium, I tried to think of a)why should it even be in this medium, and b)If it should, how will it need to change. With the book, I had stories I wanted to tell, and thought I could give people a more thorough detailing of who my dad is, but at the same time, do it in a way that was concise so that it wasn’t this monumental leap from 140 character sayings to this dense book. As my dad says, "You’re not Hemingway. Just write something fun." I felt as though with the book, I had given the raw, uncensored version of my relationship with my dad, and that if this transferred to television, any attempt at trying to accurately depict that would seem really strange to me. So instead, we looked at TV as a chance to use the tone of my father, but in a way that would speak to more people. The book sold well, but if a show got the books numbers, an executive would put a gun to his head and end his life. Therefore we tried to appeal to a greater number of people by easing them in to a character and a relationship that had a similar tone, but was relatable.
It has been a fast ride, and it certainly is creating great opportunities for you. How have you balanced taking full advantage of the possibilities being offered, and yet not jumping into too much, too soon?
To be honest, I have no idea. I haven’t really had time to sit back and think about that.
You've done phenomenally well with something that didn't start as anything pre-calculated. Yet, at the same time, you had projects where you were definitely investing more time and care into developing something that weren't finding the same levels of success. How does this experience now affect your approach as an artist, or does it?
Well, the one thing I think I've learned is that you have to keep doing stuff you think is funny, or interesting, and hopefully it sticks.
Do you have a favorite quote from your dad?
Yes. One time he came home from the dog park with our dog and he steps inside the house, and takes a deep breath and goes "Well, we're banned from the dog park. I guess it’s okay to bark, and it's okay to hump, but doing both at the same time freaks people out." I think I'm the only one who likes that one, but the image of my dog humping and barking other dogs and my dad being told he was banned made me laugh harder than anything.
Thanks for your time, Justin – and here’s to your continued success!
You can See Bleep My Dad Says airing Thursdays on CBS at 8:30/7:30c. Justin's bestselling book is on Amazon, and is called Sh*t My Dad Says. And of course, you can join the millions of readers that regularly follow him on Twitter.
Marty Lamers is an SEO copywriter you can visit at Articulayers.Com. Since 2001, Articulayers has been fixing the world, one word at a time.
Facebook Vs Google: No Contest
Published October 29, 2010 | 
So the conversation in tech media of late is that Facebook is set to become a bigger cash cow than Google.
Why?
People spend more time on Facebook. Facebook has users locked-in (kinda). Facebook “owns” the social map. Facebook is popular. Facebook is everywhere. Facebook is big.
Uh-huh.
Facebook may be all those things, but when it comes to translating “viewers” into revenue, Google currently wins hands down.
Google wins because Google’s advertising is closely aligned with the users primary activity, which is to seek topics and click links. The primary activity of a user on Facebook is to socialize. Translating this activity to a commercial imperative, in a way advertisers find profitable, is the challenge Facebook faces.
The primary user activity on Facebook isn’t yet as conducive to effective advertising as the topic-matching system used by Google. This shows up in the revenue data.
Google’s revenue, with supposedly fewer users than Facebook, is $23.531 billion – and rising. Facebook, with more users, who reportedly spend more time on the site, has estimated revenues around $1b. Admittedly a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison, but useful to get the two entities in perspective. Facebook is nowhere near Google in terms of advertiser revenue.
In short, being popular doesn’t necessarily translate into revenue, or marketing value. Ask any popular blogger who is blogging on a non-commercial topic. It can be difficult to convert some audiences, and some activities, into revenue and advertiser value.
As a commenter, Chris Norstrom, on the TechCrunch page I linked to above pointed out:
500 Millions users does not mean those users want to accomplish EVERYTHING on your site. Facebook already tried their own version of “yahoo.Answers” and it failed. People come to facebook to lol with friends and waste time, nothing more. Not to check inboxes, not to ask questions, not to participate in groups, not to rate stores or check into places, not to send or receive money, not to edit documents.
Is he right, do you think?
Like Button Replacing The Link
Some commentators have suggested that the “like” button on Facebook will replace the link
Enter the Like button, the social solution to search, and the replacement of the link as a voting mechanism. The people as a whole are more effective at determining what content is relevant and most of those people are unfortunately not effective at creating links
A “thumbs up” system doesn’t say much. It may help people find out what is most popular amongst the heard on any given day, but as anyone can see from Digg, exploding pancakes doesn’t mean much, popular as the topic may be. I suspect Facebook users will use the Like button even less when they come to realise it’s a form of permission marketing.
Google, on the other hand, is oriented around topical queries. Relevance is decided by alorithms that measure over a hundred different factors. It’s fair to say that if a simple “Like” button worked as a means to determine relevance, Google would have implemented it years ago. They pretty much have one, but who really uses it?
In short, user voting is fraught with problems. It won’t replace sophisticated algorithms. The link, the basis of the web, isn’t going away.
Fit The Message To The Medium
Which, in a rather long-winded way, brings me around to my point.
The Google vs Facebook contest doesn’t really matter as far as marketing is concerned. Both environments are valuable to marketers. Both need to be approached in different ways.
As we discussed in Google Keyword Research Tool: Not Popular, search is suited to concepts and services of which the searcher is already aware. Facebook is better suited to distraction media, viral campaigns, and marketing targeted at specific demographic groups.
Facebook may be useful at introducing people to new concepts – especially if those concepts fit into an existing social activity, as defined by members of a specific demographic i.e. the group “Porsche Owners Club” may be interested in new Porsche merchandise, whether they’re actively seeking it or not.
Keep in mind the core function of Facebook. The Facebook user isn’t likely to be actively hunting for something. They are killing time, or socializing. As a result, Facebook is less suited to direct sales, as it is difficult to determine which phase the buyer is at in the sales funnel. Facebook is more suited to brand building and awareness campaigns. It is suited to relationship building. Adjust your marketing approach accordingly.
For further reading on the specifics of Facebook marketing, SEOMoz offers a great overview of marketing approaches on Facebook.
Interview with Tamar Weinberg
Published October 29, 2010 | Only on very rare occasions can you say that someone "wrote the book" on a topic of relevance and it jumps from metaphor to accuracy. Tamar Weinberg, a social media strategist and author of 2009's O'Reilly published text: The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, makes a wonderful exception to the rule. An expert trusted worldwide for her experience, opinions and guidance in all things social, Tamar's book on the subject remains a vital, comprehensive and important work on understanding how to consider social media in marketing efforts.
We recently caught up with Tamar. The following interview shares her thoughts on social media, privacy protection and other topics of interest for webmasters, SEOs, and business owners trying to make more of their social media and holistic marketing efforts.
What types of limits make the most sense when attempting to be active socially, yet still protect your privacy? What kinds of personal information are most commonly offered, in your opinion, erroneously?
Most people would say the following: don't post anything to a social network that you wouldn't want your mother or grandmother to see. I think this rule is especially applicable in the social space. Even if you have no friends or followers, someone might be watching.
Think twice before you post something. Would you want to remove it in the future? Some sites won't let you, and worse, your message may have already been shared with the rest of the world.
How do you, as a media-recognized individual, view privacy with respect to adequately protecting and distancing your family members? Is it sometimes better to be anonymous? Are you currently surfing invisibly very often, or do you trend to identifying yourself most often?
This is a good question. My parents are definitely a lot more traditional than I, but I suspect that my 16 month old son is going to be living a pretty public life. I think that being more open is simply a way of the future, whether many of us like it or not. We're seeing the gradual push in that direction.
I present myself as Tamar Weinberg almost 100% of the time. There are very rare instances where I will come across as someone else, and those are mostly under accounts I created more than 5 years ago when anonymity was the norm in the social media space. Slowly, the online world evolved and so did my behaviors and habits. I know I'm not alone.
What are the simplest things a business owner can do to protect their privacy when increasing their social media presence and activity?
It comes down to really using your best judgment and thinking twice before you do anything you might regret. It also comes down to common sense. Use a different password for your email account that isn't the same as your Twitter or Facebook account, especially if those are very frequently used. You'd think this isn't an issue but it becomes increasingly more important as social media interactions come trusted, so accounts are really in heavy demand. I can't tell you how many tech savvy friends in the SEM space have told me that they were stranded in England and needed a wire transfer or just scored a free iPad and that I could get one too.
I don't think any of this is specific to business owners versus the average Joe. If you really are a public face of your company, though, or if you're looking to get a job in the near future, you should either avoid associating yourself with images of your drunken nights out and/or you should learn and master privacy controls of the various social news sites. You should keep your tweets and blog posts purely professional or at least not convey anything that would raise red flags either among your customers or your prospective employers.
How strictly should you maintain the lines between personal and professional when investing in your social media presence? How is this distance likely to impact your effectiveness?
Thankfully, there's no "one-size-fits-all" answer for this. My @tamar Twitter account actually is a mix of personal and professional tweets. I share social media and small business information, and I also talk about my son. Heck, I even announced the birth of my son on Twitter less than an hour after he popped out. 
The answer is determined by who you want to be and what your followers expect of you. If you're blogging about technology and your entire blog is focused on tech – we're talking 50 posts a day here – and all of a sudden you blogged about how you were going through a divorce, it probably won't resonate with your readers. Then again, if that's all you blog about and built a community on that, taking on an unrelated theme may not really work for you either.
On Twitter, I actually think that having a healthy mix of personal and professional tweets is encouraged. If you're strictly professional, you're seen as a corporate drone. If you humanize your business approach, people will be enamored by what you have to say or do. A "blog" that is purely corporate speak isn't going to warm any of your prospects to you. Adding humor, avatars of the real people behind the posts, and giving more of a genuine human touch gives your customers a reason for doing business with you: because they want to do business with a person. They like dealing with people like them.
Social media has really fostered this shift of bringing people back in the picture. The last era that preceded this was devoid of emotion and it's about time that has come back.
Since it is such a young and emergent field of marketing, what are some of the criteria you use to decide to try a new socially-focused service or software? How does it earn trust and staying power?
There are now a zillion tools on the market. I'd love to try everything out but it's hard to really know them all and/or assess whether it would address my personal needs. I often represent the small business or startup and find that budget is a huge issue. Many people love social media because while it has a huge time commitment, most of the tools are free. For the smaller companies I work with, free does still take precedence. Of course, costly applications might be considered too if they boast great functionality, offer features that are not seen in the free solutions, and have an easy to use interface.
In this day and age, though, there are just so many people offering paid services for products that are already free. There better be a real unique selling proposition because trying to usurp the market leader isn't always going to be easy.
Sure, I pay for apps too, and usually I do so because the tool rocks. I love what it does, I love what functionality, and more importantly, I love the people behind the product.
How has early adoption paid-off or hurt you?
There's definitely a benefit to exploring the space before it gains momentum. You can get deep insights into the community before it gets saturated by spammers and those looking to make a quick buck. Plus, there's simply the competitive edge you get out of it. Having knowledge of a new community and knowing how to benefit from it gives you the opportunity to boost your own visibility. There will need to be some effort made on your part, though, to study the landscape and make some assessments on how to proceed. As an early adopter, you're probably going to be learning as you go along. You won't be able to wait for someone to spell it out to you in a blog post.
In the meantime, though, being first helps you build your own presence and become a leader in the space. That's what made Twitter beat-out Pownce. That's what helped some of the Twitter rockstars you'd have never heard of outside Twitter.com become so visible. That's what helped the folks in the Apple iTunes store build applications that actually earn the developers money, especially in a sea of hundreds of thousands of applications all vying for some attention. Being first really does have its benefits, but being first usually entails extra effort and attention to detail. If you're willing to go for it, I strongly encourage it.
What do you see as the long-term impact of mobile on social media? Is it happening already? How can you be more proactive in mobile social media?
It's funny you ask this on the day I finally bought a mobile phone that is finally catching up with the times. (I had a 3 year old Palm Treo with PalmOS. Yes, PalmOS was decommissioned last year. It's a long story.) While I held onto the phone, it wasn't because I love old gadgets; it's quite the contrary, actually! Today, with such widespread adoption of social networks, it proves that there's a much more compelling reason to go mobile. We love interacting online, but it's hugely powerful to put two and two together and meet an online friend face to face.
Mobile social media is all about doing more outside the convenience of your home computer or office PC. It's about networking face to face, which ultimately translates to greater successes as people who love you share all the great reasons why they do.
Mobile social media is also really in its infancy, but taking advantage of meeting persons of interest on sites like Gowalla, Foursqaure, and even Facebook Places can help build those strong relationships that are critical of social media. Plus, it's the early adopter mentality. You have an edge if you start now.
What are some of the warning signs that it is time to rethink or restructure a social media effort? What makes a clear point-of-no-return?
A lot of different factors could be the cause of a social media effort that isn't yielding favorable results. It depends on the goals you've set. If you're looking for followers and aren't getting any, you might need to reassess how you're going about it. If you're looking for traffic but none is coming, you may be using the wrong approach or targeting the wrong communities. If you're trying to get sales and are working at a social media strategy but see no movement after several months of effort (this isn't an overnight process), there's something to be said about the approach you're taking and it's time to try again.
Make sure you have some strong goals in place. Take a look at the landscape and see if there are untapped communities or influencers you have not been able to reach. See if your messaging is solid. Speak to other people in your community to see how receptive they are to your content. Just try again and keep working hard. Every business is social – but you might not be doing the right things to get what you're looking to achieve.
Sometimes it helps to fish where the big fish already are. Yes, it's great to be an early adopter, but it's even better to go where you know your customers are and where you're already hearing of success. You'll still need to work at it and revise your tactics if there's not much coming out of it.
But don't give up if you're at least getting some traction. Nobody said it will be easy. It is a process, and it will take lots of time.
You have a bit of a background in programming – so how much do you attribute this basis for your obvious agility through multiple social media platforms? Do you need to be a semi-programmer today to be able to stay in-tune with gadgetry, software and effectively balance all of the leading programs of social media?
LOL, my computer science programming background was…well, it ended after my very first class in college. I actually did graduate with a major in computer science, but I can't say I understand a thing about programming!
Therefore, while I programmed in a few classes in school, my background isn't reflective of where I am today. I've been living in the social media space since I got my first Internet-connected computer in 1992. I was using AOL when it was called Promenade and cost $9.95 for 5 hours (plus $5.95 for each additional hour). I thrived on local message boards. I actually went into computer science because I fell in love with the social media space before it was called social media, and I figured that computer science was going to get me closer to whatever it was that I wanted to do with myself! The schooling didn't, but I found myself where I knew I belonged after connecting with some great folks who introduced me to SEM right around the time that social media marketing started building momentum. The rest is history.
Agility might be a characteristic of programmers, but I think that once you really get involved in this space, it's a byproduct of your activities. Five years ago, I definitely wasn't multitasking as much as I do today. Now, I can't envision my life any differently. I can't see myself working at an office again because I do my best work at crazy hours with "breaks" that let me focus on other projects. I'm writing this at midnight. It's what I do and I flourish in this kind of environment. It can be learned and has nothing to do with a computer science degree.
I think a big reason for success in this space for me is that every action I take online is out of a passion for social media and being as effective and productive as I can possibly be. I wake-up every day with the goal to accomplish big things, and I try to explore the space as deeply as I can.
If you come into it with a passion for what you do, everything will come easy to you. If not, fortunately, there are so many people who are comfortable enough who can walk you through the tools and teach you how to get the most out of it all.
You've said that at a minimum, businesses need to be proactive and listening to social media. Do you believe that brands not yet established are able to sustain momentum simply by listening and reacting in an "appropriate" manner – or will they get lost in the shuffle without the aid of something more colorful and (occasionally) dramatic? Has social media become necessary for smaller business success?
Social media is absolutely necessary. I work with extremely small businesses in addition to companies in the Fortune 500. Sure, small businesses may not necessarily have much drama to act upon, but there are a ton of insights you can glean from the social media space. You can see what your larger competitors are doing and figure out how to run with your own campaign or see how to do it better. You can monitor your industry and find out what is happening that you should act upon in the social space.
The big concern comes to businesses who are so small who realize that they're not seeing much traction or conversion in a week's time. That's not abnormal. Social media takes time. Build the relationships first and then they will come when they need you.
With social media, ongoing communication is critical. Furthermore, small businesses especially have more flexibility to do it because they aren't restricted by their legal departments. The key, though, is to work at it. Social media isn't called social media for no reason.
In your book, you offer the study of how a Comcast rep used Twitter to find and recruit a Verizon customer. Is this type of scenario happening or even likely on other platforms, or is it the real-time response that has made Twitter such an effective customer outreach tool?
I actually once blogged about an online service I was disappointed with. The founder of a competing service wrote a comment on my blog post and I actually checked out the site. If they didn't reach out, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
Real-time response, though, is golden. If you reply immediately when someone is angry with your competitor, they may be more compelled to check you out while they're angry and thinking about how much they hate the competitor. Plus, what if this prospective customer doesn't know who you are? That's a good opportunity to build brand awareness.
What is the main thing people misunderstand or overlook about Twitter?
I think people still don't get it. Twitter's mission is to get people to answer the question of "what's happening?" or "what are you doing?," but at the end of the day, most people don't understand that Twitter is a social network. They hear that it's all about people sharing what they ate for dinner and don't realize that they can connect with people they know or admire and even engage with them.
What are 5 social media tools that you simply won't live without anymore? How does this list differ from the one you had one year ago?
As much as I love new tools, I also am pretty steadfast in my ways especially when something really works. My top 5 tools are:
- Google Reader, which I have been using for about 2 years (I was a Bloglines addict before that, though)
- HootSuite, but before that, it was all about the Twitter web interface and Twhirl. I also use Seesmic Desktop occasionally.
- Skype and Digsby, because basic communication is still at the core of social media interactions. I used to hate Skype, but now I tolerate it mostly for video chat. J Digsby is a great all-in-one IM client. It just doesn't have Skype support. Before Skype and Digsby, I was using AOL Instant Messenger with the DeadAIM logging program (the last DeadAIM-supported version of AIM stopped working last month, so I'm bummed) and Pidgin. Yeah, I am a PC.
- WordPress. Yes, I did use MovableType once upon a time, but years ago, I moved to WordPress because it was easier to install (the cgi-bin requirement of MT always threw me off!). WordPress has tens of thousands of plugins that help enhance the blog and make it feel like a real site.
- Rapportive: This is an amazingly useful social CRM that integrates with Gmail (I run my dozen email addresses through Gmail's interface, so this really works for me) and gives me information about the people I am corresponding with. I can get their LinkedIn bios, locations, avatars, social networks, and more without having to manually look them up. As for what I used a year ago, well, there's nothing else quite like it!
Being active socially on the web is, or can be a full-time occupation. How does a lone, small business owner's participation differ from that of the lone, successful multi-site webmaster? How does one effectively scale social media efforts?
Don't spread yourself too thin. Try to build your presence where you know you can really make a difference, and branch out slowly if you want to experiment. Hopefully your marketing tactics will pay off to the tune of more business, more money, and the ability to hire more people who can help further your marketing message in the world wide open. 
Tamar Weinberg is a social media enthusiast and strategist who helps businesses boost their visibility on the social web. As the author of The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, Tamar cuts through the nuances of social networks and tells you exactly how to succeed online. She is also Mashable's Community Support & Advertising Manager.
Marty Lamers owns a Freelance SEO Copywriting company you can visit at Articulayers.Com. Since 2001, Articulayers has been fixing the world, one word at a time.
Inside Voices, Please
Published October 29, 2010 | Marketers often rely on a facade. If marketing and advertising were truly transparent few marketers would ever be seen as heroes
When information didn’t spread as widely it was easy for one public relations hero to scam one country into bombing and destroying another for the benefit of their client.
Distortions and misinformation can work in the short run, but with the web people are connected all the time and the memory is deep.
What is risky about the gap in the narratives is that it gets harder to cover over as time passes. And if you are aggressive + swim with sharks eventually one of them will get mad at you…so your inside voice goes public.
This sort of parallel is almost everywhere in business. Google’s Eric Schmidt highlighted how amazed he was at how lobbyists write legislation. In the same way, Google writes their guidelines for webmasters to follow. Follow them or accept great risks.
How do you know a person is a big link buyer? If they tell you not to buy links and that they don’t buy links then they are probably lying. It is a lie you are *expected* to spread to minimize the risks of Google coming down and crushing you.
Some of the most profitable businesses rely on having multiple business models and multiple brands that monetize markets in different ways. To the person who is afraid of risk you sell the fear – don’t buy links. To the person who wants the juice you sell the juice. Then you use the data from their link purchases to figure out what keywords you should be targeting and what domain names you should be buying.
When DIY SEO launched one of their “advanced” tips was to ensure you were not buying or selling any links. And that is from a person who sold a text link network for north of $30 million & is rumored to be associated with yet another text link network. If a person tells you that the links they are selling you are giving them the information needed to figure out what domains to buy then they lose the data source.
But if the person comes out and tells you that you should buy links then that puts all their other publishing enterprises at risk. For me to even write about this weird dichotomy would make some people think “well that person is black hat” when in reality simply observing and stating truth is as white hat as you can possibly be. So as an SEO you either have to lie, or absorb additional business risks for being stupid or naive enough to be honest in a market dictated by a monopoly which preaches the value of openness.
The weird thing about that appreciation for openness is that (beyond a marketing & public relations angle) it never applies to anything core to their own market position, but rather to competing business models. With their own business they don’t have the time of day for their paying customers.
It is hard to beat someone by following their lead. As a new business with limited leverage & capital you must create your own value systems if you want to find opportunity & create a lasting business. This is especially true because many value systems are arbitrary.
Early Google research highlighted how they hated ad based business models and how they felt that having a pure search service was crucial. After they gained market leverage they also gained amnesia. Now on some searches half of web users see nothing but paid ads above the fold. 
Certain markets & certain business models rely on using a key piece of misinformation to dupe consumers (even Google highlights how searchers do not realize AdWords ads are paid placements). If you are new to market and you have nothing to lose then one of the easiest ways to cause a stir and get noticed is to highlight those types of issues and/or cannibalize those business models.
There is a bit of a water cycle to businesses and business models. Notice how Blekko is pushing hard on openness and sharing data? Great market entry strategy.
Once you are more established the risk/reward ratio is significantly different. Which is precisely why you rarely read a blog post like this one. By the time a site is as wide read as this one is there should either be a bit of common sense or an investor who has me on a short leash.
I should be telling you to not buy links and stay away from the types of folks who have ever even considered thinking about it.
The point of this post isn’t really about link buying, but rather that you need to consider risk and reward with anything, and do so using your own value systems if you want to compete. Most media has some fibs in it, as concision requires reductionism & it is rarely profitable to give away the farm.
We promote how fair society is and how important meritocracy is. But the conclusion I have come to is that the concepts are largely a farce. Your job as an entrepreneur is to succeed *in spite of* the lack of meritocracy, the extreme corruption, and the debt slavery that are core to modern living. And the first few years are the hardest part!
And I am convinced that this sort of dichotomy isn’t unique to the field of SEO, but is rather well ingrained in every large highly-profitable market. It is core to capitalism. After all, there is the a reason the banking class can get away with repeatedly systemic violation of the rule of law and you can’t: lobbyists write the laws.
Public Relations Lessons From Matt Cutts
Published October 29, 2010 | The latest video from Matt Cutts talks about the value of SEO to Google.
The questioner asks:
“Why does Google support SEO specialists with advice? Google’s business is to sell text ads…”?
Matt explains that Google sees SEO helping, rather than hindering, their business model long term.
How?
SEOs create – and encourage site-owners to create – the very sites that Google’s technology demands i.e. context accessible by an automated crawler, largely text based, and clearly marked up.
By having sites that jive well with Google’s technology, this lowers Google’s costs, and helps make Google results more relevant in the eyes of the end user. The larger their index, the more chances Google has to answer the query. SEOs love creating crawlable content!
This means the end user keeps coming back, which in turn translates to Google’s bottom line.
It’s also a good idea to give webmasters something, else Google risks an more adversarial relationship, which again can cause Google problems.
So SEO is good for Google’s business – the “good” type of SEO, as defined by Google, of course.
Win-Win
Matt, as always, is giving the side of the story Google wants you to hear.
His position sounds reasonable, generous, and inclusive, and it is – in many respects. But make no mistake – Google aren’t there for webmasters. Google will do what is good for Google. If SEO was bad for Google, Google would not be reaching out to the SEO community, in much the same way they don’t reach out to, say, the malware writer community. They just stamp it out.
Matt is a master of public relations. Webmasters can learn a lot from Matt in terms of how to handle their own public relations challenges.
Here are a few pointers, based on Matt Cutts approach:
Public Relations Is Relations With The Public
Matt doesn’t talk from on high. He doesn’t talk at his audience. He talks with them. He attends events where his audience congregate, and he encourages interaction and questions. This activity serves to build a personal relationship, which helps make his messages easier to convey and sell.
Look for ways in which you can go *to* your audience/customers. Where do they hang out? Address them on their own terms, and in their own environment. Regularly encourage questions, criticism and feedback. When it comes time to announce new products and services, your audience is likely to be more receptive than if your communications are anonymous and sporadic.
Ok, this might be all very well for Matt Cutts. Everyone pays attention to Google, because Google are important. However, no matter how big or small your audience, you still must find a way to relate to them.
These days, it’s not so much what people say, it’s often who is saying it. Modern media is driven by personalities. The content of the message is seldom good enough to stick, unless it is truly remarkable.
People listen to Matt in ways they don’t listen to an anonymous Google press release because of the personal relationship he has worked hard to establish. This works just as well for small businesses. In fact, this is one of the big advantages of a small business – the personal touch. Google is a big company, but they work hard to appear like a small one, at least in terms of their personal relations approach with webmasters.
Matt also gets out in front of issues. If there’s something going on in the web community relating to his area, he’s almost certainly quick to comment on it. By doing so, he can control and frame the conversation in terms that suit Google. If there are industry issues that relate to your work or company, use them as an opportunity to grab the spotlight. Try to become the media go-to person in your local community for issues by building relationships with media and news outlets.
PR consultants aren’t quite as necessary as they used to be. They aren’t redundant, but the most important lesson to learn from Matt Cutts is that PR is something you need to embody. It’s not just a function that you slap on, or hire in, when it suits, and still be as effective. Make PR flow through all you do.
Matt’s greatest skill is not making it look like PR at all.
Anita Campbell Interview
Published October 29, 2010 | Since 2003, Anita Campbell is perhaps best known as the Founder and Executive Editor of Small Business Trends, a website bringing over 1 Million readers annually a clear focus on small business news, trends, advice and everything small business. A multi-award-winning site (including a 2010 SEMMY Award), Small Business Trends has remained a dependable and provocative resource of relevant, small business-related content where expert opinions fuse into passionate, intelligent user discussions.
Anita's journey includes a variety of senior executive positions in the corporate world, as well as being an executive and associate counsel for a regional bank working on lending, credit cards, bankruptcy, real estate, large contracts and financial transactions. Her move into several successful years online could easily be seen in many ways as a model of entrepreneurial success. An outspoken, passionate advocate of all things small business, Anita Campbell has an opinion that has been widely recognized and celebrated by her peers, colleagues and the various pillars supporting the small business community.
We were recently lucky enough recently to get Anita's thoughts on a few things surrounding her success, the current state of small business, and what it takes to make a website meaningful and effective…a powerful force that commands attention.
Daily, you are having one-to-one communications with business owners around the world. This allows you a uniquely intimate perspective. Kindly share your general thoughts regarding:
- How do you see prime-time media's perspective differ from the way conversations trend on your web sites? On which topics do they tend to be more in-synch? The media tends to portray the economy and the condition of small businesses as more negative than they are. If you only watched TV news, you might get the sorry impression that the typical small business owner is some sort of loser who couldn't possibly succeed in business without government "help. " We portray business owners as being in control of their own destinies. The people who participate at Small Business Trends are for the most part optimistic (entrepreneurs are the world's biggest optimists!). They're much more self-sufficient and "can do" in attitude. We give them advice and tips they can use to solve their own problems.
- How do you see the general confidence level of business owners today, compared to five years ago? What are the short-term factors that offer sway? It's hard to tell, because the media colors our perceptions so much. And the media tends to focus so much on the negative – they emphasize 7 out of 6 problems. How much is truth? How much perception? I would say that throughout this recession the small biz experience has been mixed. I've heard everything from "this is the worst we've seen it in 30 years" to "business is booming. " Why such vastly different confidence levels in this recession? In part it depends on how strong the business was before entering the recession – the strong were better equipped to ride it out and even grow…no surprise there. It also varies by industry. For instance, online businesses and service providers to online business are doing well, or have experienced only a small drop in results from 2008-2009 and are bouncing back already in 2010. That's largely due to the growth of the Web as a business channel. Example: online advertising and publishing are growing in 2010, even as their print counterparts are declining rapidly. So ask a print publisher how business is doing and you hear a tale of woe. Ask an online publisher and you hear a different story.
- What, if any, is the common cry among business owners regarding:
- Finance: There's a lot of lawmaker blather about the "credit crunch" being a huge problem for small businesses. Some give the impression that there's nothing ailing small businesses that a loan wouldn't cure (whether we need a loan or not!). Here's the reality: only a minority of small businesses need or want loans. Sure, for those who do need loans, conditions are tight and some businesses will fail if they don't get desperately-needed credit. But loans are hardly a silver bullet. Take, for instance, SBA loans. I'll be the first to say SBA loan programs have been good for the small business community. But remember that they touch a small percentage of businesses – last year there were fewer than 100,000 new SBA loans made (and 27 Million small businesses). What would help the majority of small businesses far more is for consumers and B2B customers to have the confidence in the economy to buy from small businesses and pay them promptly. But it's much harder for lawmakers to convey leadership and inspire confidence than to simply spend the people's money on another banking bill.
- Opportunity: Capitalizing on opportunities has a lot to do with your attitude. Even in difficult economies enterprising entrepreneurs spot and seize opportunities. Some quick examples: recently we saw TechCrunch, a 5-year old blog-based business, being acquired by AOL for anywhere from $25 to $40 Million, depending on which report you believe. In other words, an entrepreneur created 8-figure value in 5 years, part of which was during a recession. It was during the recession that Zappos, a 10-year old company, cracked $1 Billion in sales. So far in 2010, Google has made 24 acquisitions of small companies – meaning 24 startups have created enough value to get a big payday at the tail-end of a recession. Success stories are all around us – especially in the online space.
- Government relief programs: Being of a free-market capitalist bent, I am not a fan of most government programs, for 2 reasons: (1) Someone has to pay for them in the form of taxes, and the tax burden usually hits successful business owners hardest. (2) Government programs are contrary to the entrepreneurial mindset. Successful small business owners aren't looking for government help. They just want the government out of their way.
Small businesses generally tend to be the most limited in terms of resources. What made you decide to focus on helping that market?
I have always kept my ear to the ground, and could tell that large companies were increasingly interested in the small business market, so I took a risk that would be great advertiser support – and it has paid off. Plus, I myself am proud of being a self-sufficient, responsible business owner. We Americans dream of being entrepreneurs. It's a high calling – who better for me to serve?
You have had years of success with your business-related podcasts and audio downloads, but the market is continually changing as computers can handle larger bits of information, faster. There is now a veritable cornucopia of loosely related, potentially strategic media buys. What would be your general advice for someone looking to invest in broadcasting business information in 2010, and perhaps having it go beyond? What type of format has been the most cost-efficient, and/or scaled the best for you so far, when measured over time? Any new ones you are trying?
Text-based information forms the bulk of our published content, and in the future will constitute 80% of our content. I think that's true for most B2B sites. Text is easy to consume quickly. It's easy to quote and cull statistics or other biz info from, and is capable of getting readily indexed and ranked in the search engines.
We do podcasts but find that only about 10% of our audience who read information will listen. Not everybody has the time to listen – it's faster to read. And some people simply don't absorb information in an auditory fashion – they have to SEE it. However, people who listen to podcasts download them to their iPods and take them with them while working-out, on trains and planes, while driving in the car – in short, away from their computers. So you are reaching people well beyond their computers, and you get more of their mindshare during those times. For that reason, some of our most rabidly loyal audience are our podcast listeners. With podcasts you exchange breadth of audience for depth of attention.
We haven't done as much with video up to now. We plan to do more. It takes more technical know-how to create quality videos, than write an article. And there's a bit of a learning curve we haven't made time for, to figure out how to optimize online video for YouTube and search engines. But video certainly deserves attention by entrepreneurs in their content strategies.
You have a variety of guest authors, and it keeps the content on SmallBizTrends and your other sites fresh, unique, and diverse – and perhaps most importantly, relevant. How would a smaller player attract any level of talent or look to fill a website without resorting to a "content-mill" approach of adding semi-legible filler to try to compete? To avoid staffing, how have you found it effective to generate unique, user-generated content? Is it volume, depth of expertise, or unique style that seems to be the biggest and most consistent draw?
To attract contributors you have to first create a credible site people want to be seen on. If you fill it with "content-mill" type content, what person would risk their good reputation by guest posting on your site? Webmasters and site owners may not want to hear this, but it takes time and a bit of money to create a credible site. To jump start the guest posting, try recruiting paid authors who already are known in their fields – find some good ones, especially those who also amplify their own articles on social media – and make them an offer they can't refuse. Emphasize quality over quantity.
Also, make sure you have the infrastructure and staff to support guest authors – they need a lot of care asnd feeding. You won't notice this with just a couple of guest authors, but as your site scales up, it will eat up more and more time.
It's a misperception that guest posts are a free source of content for your site – nothing is truly free in business, and you pay one way or another. I am not blowing my own horn when I say we could have 50 times the number of guest authors as we do – after 7 years on the Web with a laser focus on the small business space, it's the truth. But we don't have the internal capacity to answer their questions, get them set up in the CMS system, review and copy-edit their submissions, find and add images to their posts, etc. All of that takes time, and you have to have staff to handle that. Some sites let almost anyone post – as in "if you have something to say, say it on HuffPo." But few sites have the wherewithal of a Huffington Post to pull that strategy off. For most sites, quality will inevitably slip and it becomes a race to the bottom. Your most loyal audience fades away, your best guest authors get disgruntled because quality is going down, and advertisers don't want to pay premium rates to be seen on a low quality site.
We deal with this issue via a multi-tier strategy to include as much of the community as possible to share their content, yet still maintaining quality control. We have different levels/types of sites. On Small Business Trends, we accept a (relatively) small number of guest authors – right now around 100. There, we focus on original articles of roughly 500 words. Then we have a smaller blog that takes guest posts from those who we don't know as well. If they get a good response, we invite them to post on the larger site. We also run a social bookmarking site, BizSugar.com, that anyone can share their small-business related blog posts on – that site is tightly moderated by a global team of moderators 24/7, but as long as your content is relevant and informational in nature, anyone can post there. Finally, we do a hand-curated (by our editors) recap of 10 small biz news articles and high-quality blog posts, daily M-F, from around the Web. This way, we keep control over quality, but highlight as many voices of the small business community as we can. Our motto is: be INclusive, rather than EXclusive – but still maintain quality.
How much is visibility worth? At some point, the traffic and credibility of your site increased, and likewise I assume, did your negotiating power with both content producers and advertisers. Was there a specific point when you recognized your traffic stream and potential as a meaningful bargaining chip and realigned your thinking and negotiations?
Visibility is priceless for marketing – you just have to remember that it's not a business model. Visibility (brand recognition, followers, traffic) is much more critical to actively go out and seek when you're first starting out. A lot of entrepreneurs barter services in exchange for visibility. But at some point you should start scaling back on the bartering as your visibility grows, and make sure you're not spending all your time trying to get visibility, but rather are making money. So think of your efforts in two stages:(1)early on, do guest posts, appear at events, etc. in exchange for visibility, without expecting to be paid. (2) Later, as your brand gets its legs, scale back on the barter activities, and start reaping the benefits. This is when you can command money for speaking engagements and require payment for your writing.
How much of the success you've measured fits into any original plan you had for it? What is the best thing that happened to you (in this regard only) that you never saw coming?
I knew the small business market was hot. What pleasantly surprised me was the level of advertiser interest, which has only grown during the recession. The single best thing that happened was getting recruited by Federated Media, which brings blue-chip advertisers and sponsors. It's been a strong partnership that I value. That partnership has funded the hiring of staff and numerous independent small businesses as service providers. Looking back it seems like a no-brainer to have signed with FM, but at the time FM was an untested startup and I agonized for two months before signing a contract.
According to Alexa.com regarding SmallBizTrends.com, "Search engines refer approximately 17% of visits to the site." Given your knowledge of SEO and the contextual depth of the site, this number seems rather small. Care to comment on its relevancy? How do most people find the site?
The Alexa number is off – the search traffic is higher than that. But I can tell you that search accounts for less than 50% of our traffic. Much of our traffic comes from:
- RSS feed
- direct referral (people typing in the URL or coming from bookmarks);
- social media (Twitter is our single largest social media referrer, with Facebook, LinkedIn, OPENForum, Business.com Answers, BizSugar and BusinessExchange following);
- third-party newsletters and syndication (we're in a traditional B2B space where a lot of information is distributed via email newsletters and private intranets);
- and other sites including other business blogs.
While search traffic is important, having multiple sources of traffic de-risks your business – you won't be driven out of business if some Google change cuts your search traffic.
You are an outspoken advocate and user of social media, and were recently recognized for your Twitter influence. Which 4 tools do you now find essential for managing an active social media presence? Has this changed much over time?
I must be different from most, because I prefer the experience of actually visiting the Twitter site. Tools like TweetDeck to access Twitter have a lot going for them, but I find they immerse you too deeply into the stream of your tweets, and isolate you with tunnel vision. I tend to graze sporadically during the day, on Twitter – jump in, jump out. Plus, I like to click through links that people share on Twitter, so it brings me back to the Web anyway. That said, I do recommend some tools:
- SocialOomph.com to schedule tweets in advance – sometimes if I come across something I'd like to share on Twitter, but it's 10 pm, I will just compose a quick tweet and schedule it for the next morning so I don't forget. Or when I know I'll be tied up in meetings or traveling, I will schedule some tweets in advance. SocialOomph does a lot more, but I use it mainly for scheduling. Hootsuite is a similar tool.
- Postling.com is a tool I am playing around with right now. It sends a daily email roundup of social mentions.
- Twitter search – use the Twitter search function to find like-minded people and information relevant to your business. This is the tool I use most often.
- Bit.ly – I have the Bit.y URL shortener button on my browser so I can quickly shorten a URL in one click, to share on Twitter or another social site.
How much SEO infuses into your strategies today when compared to two or three years ago?
For one thing, I appreciate the power of SEO much more today – and it's all because I know more. I still use an outside SEO consultant and an SEO copywriter (both are members of the SEOBook Forums). But together we get more done as a team, because we speak the same language, without too wide a knowledge gap. And I just feel more confident with more knowledge. Confidence is such a huge part of success. Lack of confidence makes you slower to jump on opportunities and hesitant to take calculated risks. As far as our publishing business, we do some things differently today as a result of understanding SEO better:
- create better titles for articles, with better use of keywords
- target niche content so we can leverage long-tail searches
- use more text along with individual podcast recordings to help them get found better by people searching in Google or Bing
Even writers and editors now need to know a little about keywords and how they affect traffic. Bloggers tend to be savvier about the how social media and search can bring a bigger audience for their writings. Professional journalists, on the other hand, tend to think their job is done when they submit their article for publishing, and tend not to think about how a publisher gets traffic (although they should).
In your experience, is content truly king, or can algorithm knowledge routinely trump quality?
There's a glut of content on the Web today. It's much much harder today to attract attention to good content than it was just 2 or 3 years ago. I've heard other small publishers say they are publishing more content than ever before, yet their traffic has barely increased. I just think the competition is greater – so you have to work harder just not to lose ground. What that means, I think, is that if you want to grow a website and keep competing strongly and attract more clients/customers, you can't just "create it and they will come. "
Bloggers especially got a little spoiled thinking SEO was easy. Many got used to thinking that if they just put up a routine blog post they'd attract traffic. That strategy worked better when there weren't as many blogs – but as the number of blogs and content sites exploded, more than content is necessary.
When competition is tough as it is today, you have to have more arrows in your quiver. What's the answer? Today it's 2 things. Search is one. I'd add social media as the other. If you don't at least know the basics of SEO and social media, you'll have a harder time growing your website and your business, especially if you have the itty-bitty marketing budget most startups have.
I see a lot of ads around the web where fortune 500 brands are paying to market you. How did you build into those types of relationships?
These are relationships built on mutual respect and benefit. The advertiser, quite honestly, is leveraging off of my name and site's recognition and our following in the small biz space, as much as we are leveraging off of their sponsor support (which is what pays our many talented service providers who do a great job keeping the sites going).
We (and in particular, I) had to first build-up visibility and a reputation in the small business space before we could even think of those kinds of relationships. That was not an overnight thing. First, I'm a bit older than some Web entrepreneurs and bring a lot of business experience to the table, having been a senior executive in a publicly-traded company. Second, I've also owned businesses with my husband, so I experienced business ownership before I started the site and could speak with authority. And third, Small Business Trends has been around for 7 years, with me working 12 hours a day on it most of that time (I admit to being a workaholic). The first few years I toiled in blissful obscurity. It wasn't until 2005 that things started to pick up, and then they ratcheted-up another notch in roughly 2008, and they are now ratcheting-up yet another notch, here in 2010. I am glad I stuck with it – persistence is vastly underestimated as a success driver!
Anita Campbell is the Founder of Small Business Trends which has been following trends in small businesses since 2003. She is host of the weekly Small Business Trends Radio Show, with over 300 interviews logged; and owner of BizSugar, a social media site for small businesses. Reach her over at Twitter: @smallbiztrends.
Marty Lamers is an SEO Copywriter with a Freelance SEO Copywriting company you can visit at Articulayers.Com. Since 2001, Articulayers has been fixing the world, one word at a time.
Forbes.com – Home to The Best Press Releases in the World!
Published October 29, 2010 | Forbes AdVoice, a new Forbes editorial strategy that does away with the traditional barriers between advertising and editorial content:
The pitch is this: We’ll sell you a blog, and your content will live alongside that of Forbes’ journalists and bloggers. This isn’t the “sponsored post” of yore; rather, it is giving advocacy groups or corporations such as Ford or Pfizer the same voice and same distribution tools as Forbes staffers, not to mention the Forbes brand.
“In this case the marketer or advertiser is part of the Forbes environment, the news environment,” Mr. DVorkin said.
If that stuff has legs & spreads across most the major media sites then Google’s “authority first” relevancy algorithm strategy is dead.
Google has always considered paid links bad (as Forbes certainly knows) but as paid content spreads how will Google fight it? And if that content contains links then is it still a paid link? Will Google once more end up purging the payola?
The other question is … when media has tons of press releases alongside the articles, what value add is there for consumers to pay attention to the media? And if the media teaches advertisers to create their own media, won’t many of those advertisers do so on their own websites & cut the mainstream media out of the loop?
How to: Out Yourself for Buying Links
Published October 29, 2010 | Effective marketers leverage marketing channels.
Scammers & spammers ruin them for everyone else.
There is a long line of this on the web…
- Email was personal, then it was easy to automate & done in bulk.
- Guest books and blog comments were a way to add value, then they were sources of free links.
- Links were a signal of relevancy, then they were bought and sold in bulk.
As people get burned the web as a whole gets more cynical. The scammers steal from the plates of honest folks as the web adjusts to a new level of cynicism…each round more cynical than the last. This is why you have to prove to people that they are going to get a 20x return when they buy from you, because a half-dozen scammers already ripped them off, and by the time they find you they simply have no trust in internet marketers (and perhaps none for humanity).
This is why people view SEO as a scam like anything else in marketing…most people who jump online get hosed.
Sometimes cost protects a channel. For instance, since people have to pay to be a member of our forums we don’t really have to deal with spam in there. But as far as media formats go, things that start off as expensive can often be made cheaper through systemization & outsourcing … so any given format that was once too expensive to do poorly eventually becomes accessible to do in bulk with marginal quality (blogs can be autogenerated, so can books, video is getting cheaper, and infographics can be done cheaply if you are not concerned with quality).
The thing about infographic promotions is that they are easy to like…part of what makes the media so appealing is the great lengths they go to in order to find new, innovative, and interesting ways to format content. Years of learning go into creating a graphic like this – which can be consumed in 5 minutes. But any interesting format gets used then abused.
Are most infographics created by independent webmasters designed for promotional purposes? Absolutely. They cost thousands of dollars to create (in terms of research, editing, formating & promotion) especially if you do good ones.
The big issue with any format is not the format itself, but pollution in the marketplace. Pollution leads to cynicism, which destroys the market for EVERYBODY who is not the bulk spammer churning out trash.
Not too long ago there was an IamA thread on Reddit highlighting how infographic promotions work & making them seem seedy. That led to an infographic being created about how off-topic infographics are being used to promote sites of marginal quality.
What did the guilty parties do in response? They not only didn’t stop or change strategy, but they increased their volume and started offering to pay people to syndicate their infographics.
I know you’re really busy, so I will try to make this quick and painless. My name is Sarah and I work with a company that creates and distributes infographics. I was wondering if you’d like to be part of our infographic distribution list. We are willing to pay you for every infographic you post.
Here are a couple examples of the work we do:
mashable.com/2010/05/10/ipod-revolution-infographic/
huffingtonpost.com/brian-clark-howard/the-meteoric-rise-of-crai_b_649183.html
neatorama.com/spotlight/2010/06/17/13-things-worth-knowing-about-super-mario/We would love to provide you with content while paying you for it. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions. I hope to hear from you soon!
Thanks!
What does Super Mario Bros. have to do with Home Owners Insurance? It’s an easy way to buy links. But likely one that won’t last long given that these people are killing the medium with irrelevant trash.
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