The Social Job Seekers

The social media job market is hot! This infographic visualizes the 2011 Social Job Seeker Survey that was conducted by Jobvite.  It examines who the job seekers are and how they are utilizing social media to find jobs.  Some interesting statistics you may not be aware of:

• 61% of all employed Americans are open to a new job or actively looking for a new one.
• 4 out of 10 job seekers are “Super Social” and have 150+ contacts on Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin.
• 1 in 6 job seekers found their last job through an online social network.

This Week in News About Google

“How to Get Actionable Data Out of Google Analytics”  Proper goal setting is second to none when running a website or blog.  If your goals are not properly setup then you are missing out on the most actionable metrics of your website.  This article provides some great tips on setting up and measuring your website goals.  Via KISSmetrics.

“Pages With Too Many Ads “Above The Fold” Now Penalized By Google’s “Page Layout” Algorithm”  Do you shove lots of ads at the top of your web pages? Think again.  The “page layout algorithm”  takes direct aim at any site with pages where content is buried under tons of ads. Via Search Engine Land.

“Google+ Now Lets You Share Straight From Search Results”  Aimed at making it easier for users to join or start discussions on particular topcis, Google+ has recently beefed up their search capabilities.  Additionally, Google+ will automatically attach search terms to your posted items.  Via Mashable.

“Google Real-Time Insight Finder”  This tool helps users make sense of data and spot emerging trends more quickly.  It also allows companies to gain insight in to attitudes, perceptions, and needs of your consumers so that you can adjust your strategy quickly to meet their needs.  Via YouTube.

“Google+ brands growing faster than brands on Twitter?”  A statistical comparison by Socialbakers shows that brands are growing their fan bases faster on Google+ than brands on Twitter.  How is this happening?  Read on to find out.  Via Socialbakers.

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Content Marketing for the Masses

“3 Content Marketing Ideas You Should Steal from Coca Cola” Heavy hitter Coca Cola has realized that a 30 second advertisement will no longer cut it.  They have instead turned to content marketing , which aims to double Coca Cola worldwide consumption by 2020.  Via copyblogger.

“3 (more) business blogging tips for beginners”  If you are one of the many bloggers with a new years resolution that includes doing more with your blog, then this post is for you.  What is the first step?  Be realistic!  Via SEO Copywriting.

“How to Overcome the 7 Most Crippling Blogging Challenges”  Time to take the “but’s” out of blogging.  This article does a great job of providing solutions for many of the excuses would be bloggers have today.  Via socialmediatoday.

The Social Media Beat

“7 Ways To Improve Your Social Media Skills and Influence” Social media sharing is still a very new role for many employees.  This article helps prepare newbies and social media dabblers for life in a social world.  Via Forbes.

“9 Small Business Social Media Success Stories”  Case studies speak for themselves.  Applying a real life example of success can make a large impact on your perception of a tactic or marketing strategy.  This post provides 9 great examples of how social media has helped small businesses grow.  Via Social Media Examiner.

“Facebook Expands Service That Lets Users Share Online Activities”  Facebook announced this week that they are adding over 60 new partners to a service which will allow users to let their friends know what they’re doing online from listening to music to news articles they are viewing.  Via Bloomberg.

“Twitter Acquires Social Aggregation Start-Up Summify”  Following Twitter’s other recent acquisitions it was announced today that Summify, a social news aggregation service has also been acquired.  If you’re a Summify user beware! Services will shut down in a few weeks.  Via Wired.

From the TopRank Newsroom

Alexis Hall – “Average Viewer Watched 23.2 Hours of Online Video Content in December”
According to the latest research from comScore Video Metrix, the average viewer watched 23.2 hours of online video content in December 2011.  That is a lot of time people are spending online, engaged with this channel. This post from Search Engine Watch discusses the impact of this research on marketers, including the reach of video advertising on YouTube.  Via Search Engine Watch.

Brian Larson – “PIPA and SOPA Co-Sponsors Abandon Bills”
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is on the minds of many marketers. From image sharing and content curation, to linking and keyword research, SOPA has the potential to drastically change the way we create, share, promote and optimize content. With the co-sponsor’s abandoning the bill, is this a sign that the public outcry was heard?  Via Mashable.

Ken Horst – “Twitter is adding 11 new accounts per second and could pass 500 million in February, says report”
If anyone is still holding out on starting a Twitter account, now would be the time to start thinking about it.  When Twitter hits 500 million, it will be very hard not to acknowledge Twitter as a strong channel for online marketing.  The trick is how to leverage Twitter and you can learn that by reading our post from earlier this month; 4 B2C Examples of How Companies are Using Twitter to Attract & Engage Customers.  Via The Next Web.

Emily Conley – “Yahoo’s Co-founder Jerry Yang Resigns”
Just weeks after the announcement of new CEO Scott Thomson joining Yahoo, the company’s co-founder Jerry Yang has announced his resignation.  Thompson called Yang’s 17 years with Yahoo a legacy of innovation and customer focus for the iconic brand.  2012 is shaping up to be an eventful year for Yahoo.  It will be noteworthy to follow how these changes trickle down to impact the world of SEO!  Via Search Engine Land.

Time to Weigh In:  What do you think of Google’s new search tactics?  Have they taken it too far?  Also, what other newsworthy items did you read this week that you think should be shared with our readers?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | Online Marketing News: Say NOPA to SOPA, Google+ Strikes Again, Coca Cola “Gets It”, Twitter Gobbles Up Summify | http://www.toprankblog.com

Curation is essential for sorting through the mass of data published online and with the closer integration of social media and search, each of us is becoming a mini-search engine for the benefit of our networks and for sites like Google and Facebook. Essentially, Google, Bing and even Facebook are just elaborate and massive content curators. The question is, how can we as marketers take advantage of mass curation and crowdsourcing for the benefit of our own online marketing?

One answer is to become a great content curator. Plenty of business websites and blogs are making lists this time of year, reflecting on the past 12 months as well as predicting what 2012 has in store. There’s something about seeing a sorted collection of useful information that motivates people to read and socially share. A well-sourced and thoughtfully-written list can evoke a strong emotion that inspires commentary and engagement.

Like them or not, credible, sorted lists and collections of resources are powerful blog content and social media marketing tools. Unfortunately, many marketers are overusing the same old tactics ala “link bait” for a quick hit and not looking at the longer term benefits or impact. Through trial and error, we’ve made the same mistakes but with good web and social media analysis, we’ve been able to make some great improvements.

Who doesn’t want to increase traffic and engagement in their blog and social media marketing programs? I thought so. Here are three types of curated lists and resource collections bloggers can use to efficiently create useful content that attracts, engages and inspires their readers to action.

Curated Resource Collections

Think of much needed resources in your industry. Are there tips, how-to’s, reports, examples, tools, events, networks, or something else that could be aggregated and made useful? Think about different formats including text, image, video, audio, or something interactive. Use bookmarking to save interesting things as you go vs. trying to create a list in a single effort. I have 20-30 categories of resources I add to every few days. Spread your resource collection effort over time and across your team when researching larger collections. You can also crowdsource them from your own social network.

Here are a few examples of the Resource Collections we’ve published that have attracted tens of thousands of links, visitors and by association, attention to our online marketing agency:

• List of of 100+ Blog & RSS Directories
• 100+ Search Marketing Resources
• 22 Social Media Marketing Management Tools
• 5 Reports on B2B Social Media Marketing & New Media Trends
• Free Tools for Social Media Optimization
• 5 Must Read Reports on Social Media & Public Relations

What exists in your industry that’s highly valued but not easy to find in one place? Bring those things together in a list. Also, think about what you can do to creatively involve your community with the sorting of the list. What can you do visually to make your collection stand out?

Curated Lists of People or Blogs 

While you’ve seen many lists of the most popular individuals for a particular category (especially in the social media realm) on just about every blog online, they fact that many of them are arbitrary or playing industry celebrity favorites means there’s tremendous opportunity to do something unique and more interesting.

We’ve been active creating lists of people to recognize their contribution as well as crowdsourcing content from individuals into lists of tips for many of the 8 years this blog has been publishing online. Some of the more popular examples in terms of search traffic and links include:

• 2010, 2011 Women Who Rock Social Media
• What are the best UK Online Marketing Blogs?
• 10 Most Subscribed Search Marketing Blogs
• BIGLIST of SEO Blogs

Some of these lists are a one time effort, but some of them are annual, such as the Women Who Rock Social Media list. Qualitative lists inspire those included to help promote and with a collective effort more exposure to the list brings more attention to each individual. The key is for the list to be relevant, well sourced and written.

Crowdsourced Lists of Tips and Insights from Industry Experts

Another way to include disparate, useful resources into one collection is through crowdsourcing. By that I mean asking a group of subject matter experts the same question or similar questions and curating the results into one, topically specific (and keyword optimized) list.  You could also make sure that when you interview industry experts, that some of the questions are the same same for all interviewees. Then you can re-purpose the different answers to single questions as a meeting of the minds post that brings together different, well-respected thought leadership in a single topic.

Here are a few examples of tapping a network of awesome people I’ve come to know for insight into topics that are consistent with our editorial plan:

• Must Read Social Media Marketing Tips from 25 Social Media Experts
• Social Media Strategy – A Definitive Guide from 44 Social Media Experts
• 10 Thought Leaders Share Their Definitions of Content Curation

When asking well known and influential people to contribute, be respectful of their time and make it easy to contribute. Don’t ask for them to write War and Peace. Ask one simple question via email and offer to capture it verbally over the phone/Skype if that works better. When you publish the curated collection of tips, be sure to give participants an individual (as in personalized/unique) heads up that the list is published as well as to thank them for their participation. Recognition is important to everyone, whether they’re well-known or just starting out.

Surely there are unrecognized people or resources in your industry. What or whom could you recognize in an original and thoughtful way that aligns well with your own unique selling proposition and key message? If your business sells Kindle Fire Cases, then couldn’t you curate a list of Kindle resources? Clever reasons to use a Kindle case? Book suggestions from Authors? Game, App or Movie reviews? Use a metaphor in your list title that includes target SEO keywords: Authors on Fire: Kindle Style, One the Case with Kindle Apps. They’re not a direct match, but that’s the art and science of SEO copywriting – a topic for another post.

Tips on Sourcing, Promoting, and Repurposing Curated Lists

As with any marketing endeavor, think about the purpose and intended outcome of your list first. What search keywords and social topics represent interests, needs, and goals of the influencers and end customers that you’d like to connect with? Pick a topic and stick to it.

Sourcing. As you understand your community, what are the unmet needs in information that you could satisfy? What unrecognized individuals or companies with powerful networks could be resources for, or included in the list? How will it fit in and complement your content marketing and social media strategy? Incidentally, I have an entire book dedicated to this topic coming out in March.

Creation. Put qualitative effort into creating your collection or list. Make it special, useful, and unique. Make it snarky or funny and by all means, make it shareable! Gimmicks are not nearly as important as quality and relevance to the community you’ll be promoting to. That said, you do need to think of what will make your collection promotable. Great content isn’t great until it’s consumed and shared.

Repurposing. Lists of things like people, books, reports, quotes, or just about anything can be repurposed as a PowerPoint on SlideShare or made into a video with bumper messages, narration, and music to be promoted on YouTube. If you’re smart about sourcing and making the collection promotable, then don’t just do it once. Plan on making the list annually, quarterly, or monthly.

Understand that with collections and lists, people and companies have an inherent desire to be included and recognized. At the same time, lists are exclusionary, so offer your readers an opportunity to add to the list you’ve created. Encourage them to participate and think about the group social needs, not just your own. A qualitative approach that focuses first on relevance of a collection to the community you’re promoting to will result in much better reach and engagement for you.

By the way, if you like this post, then you’re going to LOVE this book: Optimize. Published by Wiley, it will come out mid-March this year and is full of ideas, tips and insights.

A distant version of this article originally appeared on my Social Media Smarts column for ClickZ.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | Social Media & Blogging Listmania with Curated Resources & Lists | http://www.toprankblog.com

If you are a B2C company, interaction on a social platform like Twitter can increase engagement and even sales if executed properly.  Small businesses like Tender boutique in Birmingham, Michigan have promoted special offers on Twitter and sold out in just a few days.

Social interaction via platforms like Twitter allow companies to gain a true understanding of their prospect base and serve as a real-time source of market research.

Customer engagement is a key benefit of executing a B2C Twitter marketing strategy. A recent survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey found 67% of Twitter users are more likely to buy from or recommend a brand they follow.  Twitter is also a great resource for crowdsourcing new ideas, getting feedback on current products or campaigns, and figuring out what it is that your customers really want.

Still not convinced that Twitter has potential for impacting your business?  The four examples included below provide insight into how other B2C businesses both small and large have used Twitter to attract and engage new customers.

San Francisco’s Creme Brulee Man

Photo from @cremebruleecart

Curtis Kimball began selling crème brûlée from a food cart in the Mission District of San Francisco in 2009.  At the time, the  crème brûlée cart was not licensed, so his only way of communicating with potential customers was through the use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.  After only a few years, The Creme Brulee Man has over 20,000 followers on Twitter alone.  Curtis still uses his Twitter account as a means of letting consumers know where he will be on a daily basis.  What started as a small meager cart has now become thriving catering and food cart business in the heart of San Francisco, largely due to one man’s innovative use of Twitter.

JetBlue Tackles Issues via Twitter

Photo from @JetBlue

JetBlue Airways has taken a customer focused approach to Twitter since first signing up in 2007.  The airline company is focused on solving customer issues, providing flight information for concerned passengers, and receiving feedback.  The flow of communication almost reminds you of talking to an actual employee at the ticket counter.  JetBlue will do everything from looking up your flight number, to providing refunds or credits via the communication on their Twitter account.  With over 1.6 million followers JetBlue is keeping customers happy and encouraging interaction.

Frozen Yogurt with a Twist

Photo from @tastidlite

Tennessee based frozen yogurt company Tasti D-Lite has been in business since 1987.  Recently, the frozen yogurt company has taken social innovation to a new level.  In addition to an active blog and social networks the company has created a loyalty program that is linked to customers’ social profiles.  A swipe of the card in-store can create a check-in, Tweet and Facebook status update. A recent article in Entrepreneur magazine said that Tasti-D-Lite has found 1 in 5 TastiRewards members are generating connections to at least one social network, and 18% of those are generating automatic check-ins on foursquare.

Sharpie Attracts a Younger Generation

Photo from @sharpie

Sharpie recently ran a campaign to attract teenagers via their Twitter network.  The campaign was aimed at self expression through creativity using the product.  Through a combination of promoted Twitter accounts and a tweet campaign targeted at users with interests in music and writing, Sharpie was able to increase their follower base 600%.  Users also began using the hashtag #Sharpie which reflected positive brand association with conversations about creativity.

These four B2C companies are only a fraction of the consumer focused businesses online who are seeing an impact on customer acquisition and engagement through the use of social media sites like Twitter.  As you can see there is a common theme of:  listening to the customers, providing information customers need, and rewarding customers for their loyalty.

What B2C companies do you think have done a good job of engaging their followers?  Which companies do you follow?  Are you following @toprank on Twitter? You should!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | 4 B2C Examples of How Companies are Using Twitter to Attract & Engage Customers | http://www.toprankblog.com

Taking on a blog can be a large undertaking.  There are many things that should be considered including cost, availability of resources, strategy creation, time commitment, and measurement.  Simply creating content and expecting instant success is not realistic.  If you have recently decided that you would like to start a business blog, or have started a blog and are not seeing the success you had anticipated then the tips below are for you.

Tip #1 – Become a Blog Follower

Starting in the mindset of a consumer is key in determining need.  I recommend you take a look at the list of blogs that you read and ask yourself some questions about why you read them.  If you aren’t currently following any blogs I suggest that you see if some of the newsletters, magazines, or newspapers that you are already reading have a blog.  This will help you kill a couple birds with one stone.  You are still consuming the information that you already enjoy but you are also doing some research for your own blog.  What are some questions you should ask if you are looking to start a blog?

• What blogs do you follow?
• Why do you enjoy them?
• Do you believe they help solve a problem for you as an end user?
• Does the blog have one or multiple voices?
• How often do you read these blogs?

Tip #2 – Work Smarter Not Harder

In a tough economy marketers are being forced to do more with less.  The same strategy can be applied to business blogging.  If you have an understanding of content that works well and the mindset of your target audience you can easily create different forms of blog content to keep information updated regularly and efficiently.

Newsworthy items can be a great source of blog content.  You are presenting your audience with information that is important to their business while utilizing statistics and content that has already been created.  Reviewing current business blogs is also a great vehicle for creating content.  This allows you to create a scoring criteria and share with readers what you like and dislike about the blogs that are being reviewed.  Interviews and guest posts can also be a source of content curation for your blog. If you can convince others within your industry to participate in your blog they will be likely to share it with their audience as well.  Guest blogs also add some additional creativity and voice to a business blog.

Tip #3 – Tap Into Available Resources

There may be members of your team that could be a great addition to your company blog.  Contributors from different departments can position themselves subject matter experts and your readers may look forward to the variety that is being provided in the blog content.  While the overall responsibility of the blog may fall on the shoulders of one person or department, that doesn’t mean that other team members cannot contribute.  Multiple authors allows you to tap into multiple networks and is much more sustainable from a content creation perspective in the long run.

While business blogging is not always easy it can be a great project to inspire creativity, teamwork, engage your audience, and improve your brand visibility.  If you are interested in more tips on business blogging please take a look at some of the following posts from the TopRank Online Marketing blog.

• 5 Tips on Crowdsourcing Content for Marketing
• The Dynamic Duo of Business Blog Marketing: Optimize & Socialize
• Need Great Ideas for Blog Content? Start With Questions

I am curious to learn a little bit more about the experiences of our readers.  What are the biggest challenges that you have faced as an online marketer as it relates to business blogging.  What are some additional areas of blogging that you may not understand and would like TopRank to provide more information on?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Blogging On A Budget: 3 Tips for Bigger Impact | http://www.toprankblog.com

Most marketers and bloggers understand the basics of a good business blog and the notion of search engine optimization but often focus more on keywords than the customers that are actually searching.  Adding keywords to blog posts is a common SEO tactic but developing a blog content plan around both search keywords and social topics that represent what customers care about can result in content that is inherently more search, social and customer media friendly.

The Business of Optimizing Social Media

Social Media Optimization involves optimizing social content for topics of interest to both the brand and the communities they seek to engage. SMO also focuses on the ability for social communities to share links and media they find interesting.  Links to content shared on social networks and media sites can drive direct traffic to blog content and serve as a signal that search engines use for ranking blog web pages.

Essentially, socialized and optimized blog content can drive traffic through search and those visitors can share that content through social channels, driving even more traffic. Social sharing can also impact better search visibility, providing  more relevant visitors that are actively looking.

Search and Social Media Friendly

As Internet marketers have emphasized making websites search engine friendly over the past 10 years, the importance of making websites and blogs social media friendly is also important. Great blog content isn’t really great until it’s consumed and shared, so consider how your customers find information online that is most likely to inspire them to do what you want them to do.

A Better Business Blog Strategy

To get more out of the opportunity to improve online discovery of business blog content, here are a few key questions to ask for an “Optimize and Socialize” blog strategy:

• Who is the blog intended to influence? Prospects, customers, employees, industry analysts, reporters, bloggers.
• What content will your blog offer that will meet target audience needs?
• How will addressing those customer needs and telling the brand story manifest as a blog content plan?
• What search keywords and social topics are relevant to your target audience?
• Where does your blog content fit in the customer lifecycle of communication with the brand?
• If the blog content is properly optimized and socialized, how will it influence (directly or indirectly) measurable business outcomes?

Interest In Your Blog Is Related to Your Blog’s Interest in Readers

One of the reasons business blogs fail as being optimized and socialized, is that their content tends to be very brand-centric. Most business blog posts talk about the brand, it’s products and services without a lot of consideration for customer perspectives and language.

A self-centered business blogging approach tends to push ideas out, hoping to get a reaction in the form of search engine rankings, fans, friends and followers.  Many SEO centric blogs share these characteristics.

The problem with a mostly brand content focus is that there usually isn’t as much sharing, engagement or direct influence on business outcomes because the content is all about the brand, vs. empathizing with customers and the language customers use.

To Be Great, Your Business Blog Must Participate

Conversely, a search and social optimized business blog develops and participates in social communities online, offline, internally and externally. To do that, blog editors need to figure out where the great ideas and stories are in the company.

All this said, it’s not enough simply to have an optimized and socialized blog content plan that aligns brand solutions and ideas with those of your target audience. To tap into a high quality stream of customer-centric content ideas for your business blog, it’s essential to engage relevant social communities. Ask them questions, crowdsource content ideas, give those who participate recognition and repeat.

By shining a light on the awesome within your community, you’ll provide the fuel of positive reinforcement to motivate fans and customers to partake in both content creation and promotion.

Walk the talk by telling your brand stories and those of your community. Lead by example and your community will start to tell your stories for you. And so will their friends, and their friends’ friends. That’s the benefit of optimizing your business blog beyond search to include social media, networks and communities.

A version of this post was originally published on my ClickZ Social Media Smarts column.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | The Dynamic Duo of Business Blog Marketing: Optimize & Socialize | http://www.toprankblog.com

#1 – Winning! Measuring Social Media Success

While I doubt that Eli Goodman and Tami Dalley will be channelling Charlie Sheen I am still very interested to hear their take on measuring the success of social campaigns.  I would recommend having your social media metrics handy if possible ( I know I will), so that you can apply the speakers instruction on estimating the value of your fans and followers in real time.  Who knows, we may find that we score better than anticipated.

#2 – Information Architecture for the Modern Website

This session featuring Shari Thurow really caught my attention.  Why?  As marketers and SEO professionals we are mostly aware of best practices for optimizing a site and making it search friendly.  But what about the site structure and content flow?  Is it user friendly? Does it allow my audience to get to where they want to go as hassle free as possible?  As the online landscape evolves I for one intend to learn as much as I can to help my company engage our audience.

#3 – Conversion Tools of the Master Crafstman

Having the right tools in your arsenal can quantify a companies social media strategy.  However, when shopping around the question always arises: do I use the tools that are free and might have limited capabilities, or go for the Ferrari that may be outside of the current budget?  Author Bryan Eisenberg will be providing the audience with the lowdown on tools (free and paid) that assist with identifying and fixing web conversions.  Also, be sure not to miss Bryan’s guest post on the TopRank Online Blog next week which will have a preview of some of the tools he recommends.

#4 – The Convergence of Search, Social, and Content Marketing

Working with Lee Odden I’ve come to realize just how important the combination of search, social, and content really is.  I am curious to hear the methods that the panel moderated by Anne Kennedy and featuring Aaron Kahlow and Arnie Kuenn recommends for combining the three to target and engage an audience.  I am also very interested in the step-by-step case studies that will be provided as examples for compiling a list of our own successes for our clients.

#5 – Keynote – Search: Where to Next?

I have my own ideas on where search will be within the next year or two, but five to ten years?  No clue!  Thursday morning’s keynote moderated by Anne Kennedy and featuring speakers Eli Goodman, Zephrin Lasker, Alan Osetek, and Dana Todd will provide insight into the next generation of search and what it means for marketers.  I would be prepared to take great notes during this session so that you can begin dialing in your strategy for not only 2012 but what you should be on the lookout for in the years to follow.

#6 – Content Marketing Optimization

If it can be searched it can be optimized.  Makes sense right?  So much of the social web has become focused on content creation, promotion, and optimization.  What is the point of creating all of this useful content if your audience can’t find it?  This session by Lee Odden will provide strategies and tactics for executing on a successful content strategy while keeping optimization and search in mind.

And Don’t Forget To Network

As a conference attendee I’ve found that I often learn just as much while networking as I do during the sessions.  While I wouldn’t recommend charging at the presenters from across the room when you spot them I would ask that you keep a couple things in mind:

1. If you have a question that you would really like answered be sure to write it down during the session so that if you do catch the attention of a presenter you have a clear and concise question to ask.
2. Attend the conference organized meals if possible.  This is a great opportunity to get to know other people within your industry and learn from their experiences.

I hope to see all of you at SES Chicago in a few weeks.  Be sure to follow the conference buzz on twitter under hashtag #SESCHI.  Check out SES Chicago’s information page for a full schedule of sessions and training.  TopRank will also be live blogging and tweeting at the event @toprank, @leeodden, and @azeckman for those of you who don’t already follow us.

Are there some great sessions you’ll be attending that I didn’t include?  Feel free to share your top picks for SES Chicago by commenting on my post.  Also, if you’re a foodie like me and you have an opportunity to explore the city, Chicago Magazine recently released a list of the 22 best new restaurants in Chicago.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Grab Your Jacket – The Windy City Blows In Big Talent For SES Chicago 2011 | http://www.toprankblog.com

When Mack Collier asked me to join #BlogChat to talk about liveblogging in anticipation of the upcoming BlogWorld Los Angeles conference, I had no hesitation. Liveblogging has helped TopRank Online Marketing and myself personally achieve numerous business and marketing goals at a fraction of the cost and far more effectively than many traditional marketing, advertising and content creation tactics.

Despite the practice being around for quite a long time, many people have no idea what liveblogging is. In fact, technology and tools have evolved to change much of what it means to liveblog events. It used to be that you’d sit in on a session, write notes into an article and file the story/blog post within 1/2 hours or so after the presentation ended. Now, liveblogging can take the form of live tweeting and then taking those tweets and compiling them into a post later or curating tweets through tools like Storify.

During the #BlogChat focused on Liveblogging on Sunday night, Mack wanted to focus on two key questions. I’ve taken a stab at listing insights, advice, processes and suggestions for each.

What are the Top 2-3 things you should know before you attempt to live-blog an event?

Thanks Mack! Appreciate the opportunity & really looking forward to this. I have a lot more than 2 or 3 (fortunately and unfortunately) I’d like to split my 2-3 things answer into suggestions relevant to pre, during & post even liveblogging. This is by no means a comprehensive post about liveblogging – but a summary and elaboration of what came up during the #blogchat about it.

Let’s get a handy link out there right away: 12 Live Blogging Tips for Better Event Content Creation

Pre Event Live Blogging:

• Answer why, who, what, when, where – Plan for specifics but be open to spontaneity. It’s really useful to have firm ideas about the purpose of liveblogging. For some it’s just a way to capture content for personal use. For others, it’s a way to create content for a blog or even repurpose into a compiled guide of tips for conference attendees. Or it might serve multiple purposes as in my case where I needed to build my writing skills, attend events on a budget and create content. Also, liveblogging can create connections with speakers.There’s an expression I’ve used many times – If you want to get into the media, become the media. Liveblogging was the proxy for me to do that here with Online Marketing Blog.
• Create suspense - Write a pre-event post, reach out to session speakers for tips, crowd source sessions to cover. I learned this from Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable. Create a grid of sessions you (and/or your team) will be covering during an event.  Pre-event posts will inform your readers and subscribers what’s coming. This can be important if your blog posting frequency goes way up. It also gives you the opportunity to mention the speakers in the post. Their Google Alerts for their names will put you on their radar.I’ve had success with reaching out to speakers beforehand, advising that I’ll be liveblogging their session and to see if they have any tactical tips to share for a pre-event blog post that will promote their session.  A small number of tips from each speaker is easy for them to do, and results in a great compilation.  Here’s an example of where I’ve done that: 37 Tips for Optimizing Blogs and Feeds – SES New York. Obviously it helps if you a c0-speaker or moderator, or if you know at least one of the presenters.
• Be a media sponsor. TopRankBlog was the 1st Blog Media Sponsor for SES, Pubcon, SMX, eMetrics. Although, we are currently only sponsoring SES and OMS. Being a media sponsor is more than a press pass. It’s mutual exposure for the blogger and the event: online, offline and through email. Advertisers pay huge $$ for sponsorships and media sponsorships used to be reserved to print magazines and large email lists.Not just any blog can become a media sponsor. You really need to be a credible blog in the category with a pre-existing audience. Size and quality of other social networks come in to play besides blog subscribers as well as a healthy email subscriber list. However, getting started liveblogging events that you’re already attending is a great start.
• Duplicate yourself. There’s only so much you can cover on your own, so recruit other people to liveblog with/for you and you’ll provide mutual exposure as well as another source of great content. Find out if other people are already going to attend the conference or if you have secured a media sponsorship, see if you can give away a free pass as part of your event promotion. Then require the winner to liveblog with you.
• Be open minded about what “event” means for live blogging. “Real world” conferences, workshops, press events and training sessions are common situations for liveblogging, but also consider virtual conferences, webinars, tele classes (where allowed). There’s a ton of archived content that’s never been blogged. In fact, if you can’t afford to attend conferences, get started with free webinars.  Video archives of conference presentations are also a great opportunity to practice liveblogging skills with the added benefit of being able to replay the video as often as you want.  With webinars, be sure to mention speakers, the event and link to the brand site that hosted the webinar in your blog post. That can get you on their radar.As a speaker in webinars, I’ve suggested to participants that there’s nothing wrong with liveblogging the presentation I’m giving and that has turned into blog posts (and links).
• Identify specific sessions, topics, approach and a “hook”. Think about style: transcription, running commentary, pure reaction, real time article. There are a variety of formats for liveblogging, so pick a format and even an angle to the session beforehand if you can. This will provide structure to fill in the blanks, providing you know about the topic and the speakers.
• Live tweeting running commentary can be used as liveblogging. It was suggested during the #blogchat that maybe live tweeting has replaced live blogging. That is true to some extent. As you’ll see from the links at the bottom of this post, curating those live tweets has also replaced roundups and liveblogging to some degree.  It’s easier to do, but not quite as valuable as summarizing highlights and takeaways.  There’s no reason you cannot mix a little of both live tweeting and blogging together.
• Pre-write portions of the post such as intro, speakers and other language that is fairly predictable.  Having static information pre-written can save time and also adds to the format you’ve decided to follow for liveblogging.
• Use Evernote then post to WordPress or your blogging platform of choice. Evernote is awesome because you won’t lose your work as can happen with a WordPress glitch or bad internet connection – an inevitability at most conferences. Plus Evernote synchs between devices, which can be handy.
• Have the right equipment – charged laptop, camera or phone, backup internet source and a power strip. A computer that runs out of battery power just as the keynote speaker finally says something interesting can ruin your entire morning. Same for internet access if posting in a timely manner is important to your liveblogging goals.

During Event Live Blogging:

• Get yourself in the right frame of mind and bring the skills. Focus on what you’ll be doing and type FAST. If you don’t type very quickly, then learn. Or you’ll be miserable. Same goes for multi-tasking. Taking photos (and resizing them), live tweeting and writing a 800 word liveblog post within 45 minutes is very doable, but only with lots of practice.
• Sit in front, take photos, (video is usually a no no at conferences). Smart speakers love livebloggers and may even call you out during their presentation, which helps when you network with others. I’ve never left a conference thinking I’ve taken too many photos or networked with too many new contacts.  I have however, regretted not sitting closer to the front to get a decent photo.  Most people are afraid to sit up front and those are the best seats. Do what others are unwilling or unable to do and you’ll create a competitive advantage from the start.
• Follow a format. Trying to capture everything that’s said can be boring & impossible, especially if speakers don’t follow any kind of structure. To get a good liveblog post from a session with speakers that ramble, or a topic you’re not super familiar with, just listen for the best quotes, stats and highlights for a “10 tips about topic XYZ post”.
  You can also use some of those nuggets to live tweet with the conference hashtag during the session.

Post Event Live Blogging:

• Share your post via social channels & use the event hashtag in the title tag and the body copy. Great content isn’t great until it gets consumed and shared. Over and over again. Help that along by promoting your liveblogging efforts and of course, make it easy to share.
• Do a roundup post of all that you covered each day or at least at the end of the conference including images, video interviews and tweets. Link to other livebloggers that are covering the same event.
• Add a post-session video of yourself giving commentary. Do an interview with speakers or with attendees.  Adding multiple media formats can really spice up your liveblogging efforts.

What are the advantages to live-blogging an event versus simply doing a recap post once you get home?

Real time isn’t a luxury, it’s expected at events. People are going to get the information from somewhere, why not from you? If you can consistently provide quality live blogging coverage, you’ll win many new friends: speakers, event, media, subscribers and maybe even prospective clients and employees.

Live coverage meets a need for event attendees, speakers/brands (they view as news coverage) & those not attending However, there’s no rule that you can’t do some kind of real time coverage AND do a recap post once you get home.

Liveblog coverage is treated as media coverage by many Public Relations departments and that means a link from company newsrooms.

Live blogging events can take many forms and there are so many ways to gain value from it that there’s really no “right” or “wrong” way to do it. Like anything, if you set goals, make a plan to reach those goals, execute and evaluate the results to refine future efforts, you’ll undoubtedly discover what flavor of live blogging is right for you.

More about press passes: Since 2005 I’ve been able to attend numerous events due to liveblogging. Initially, I was able to get “sponsored” to liveblog on a press pass. Once basic credentials were established, I was able to secure a press pass for several other events in exchange for pre-show promotion and liveblogging during the event. Then Matt McGowan agreed to have TopRank’s Online Marketing blog as the first blog-based media sponsor of the SES conference and we’ve been working with SES in this regard longer than any other blog. Media sponsorship agreements allow me to bring 1 -4 of my staff to each event to liveblog.  These passes are not a given and must be earned through quality work. The agreements must be renewed each year.

Today, I rarely ask for (or get) press passes because I speak at nearly all conferences I attend.  However, we do still send staff to liveblog events as part of our media sponsorship agreements.  Over nearly 6 years of liveblogging events, my team and I have benefitted from about 54 press passes. This was not a steady number over each year, as it has fluctuated like a bell curve. 2007 through 2009 were highlight years and the number of staff we send has decreased since. We do plan to increase again in 2012.  I wanted to clarify this from the #blogchat thread, since the 50-60 press passes mentioned includes my team and I.

Thanks again to Mack Collier for having me on #blogchat and also for everyone that participated. I was great to see friends like @copyblogger, @heidicohen, @ed & @rochelleveturis stop by

Here are links to a few creative curation and recaps of the Live Blogging #blogchat:

• Mack Collier Tweet stats, contributors & transcript via Hashtracking
• Socialscraps curated and organized tweets from the #blogchat via Storify
• Kristof Top links shared via Tweetreports
• SmartCollegeVisit collection of tweets from the #blogchat via Storify

Are you a conference live blogger and what are some of your live blogging tips?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Liveblogging Tips from #BlogChat | http://www.toprankblog.com

Blogging has been cited as one of the most effective forms of social media marketing for achieving top visibility in search and on the social web and corporate investment in social media is growing significantly. This is as true for agencies like TopRank Online Marketing as it is for any business with a good story to tell. We’ve promoted blogs as the centerpiece of a hub and spoke model that has been adopted by many other agencies and corporate marketers.

While there are numerous success stories and sources of best practices, most companies handle their business blog in a way that disappoints. Even those corporate blogs that do manage to implement a customer-centric editorial plan, neglect to leverage key discovery and engagement channels like content optimization for search engines and social media optimization.

On November 5th, I’ll be giving a presentation to help business bloggers solve that problem and more, with “Optimize & Socialize for Better Business Blogging“. This presentation  will identify key principles and specific tactics that I’ve learned over the past 8 years of blogging here and for other sites, plus working with numerous client blog consulting projects. The session will provide hard won insights into leveraging SEO and Social Media as key tools for blog content planning, creation and promotion from the editor of the only 3 time #1 ranked Content Marketing Blog (Junta 42), #2 Social Media Blog (Social Media Examiner), top marketing blog (Advertising Age).

Key takeaways for the session include:

1. Plan your way into an infinite number of compelling and relevant content ideas that boost search traffic & engage readers
2. Create campaigns that incorporate blog content with other marketing tactics for extended search & social visibility
3. Promote blog content that inspires social sharing, link building and search traffic

In each area I’ll break it down into:

Blog Content Ideas & Planning

• Key Problems:  Running out of ideas, Lack of effective ideas, Difficulty in sourcing contributors
• Solutions: Tapping into front line staff, community and the competition using a feedback loop that will boost effectiveness and motivate others to join in.

Blog Content Creation

• Key Problems:  Corporate narcism, inconsistent publishing and quality as well as content that does not result in the desired outcomes.
• Solutions: Audience empathy and guidelines for content strategy that result in content that inspires action and sharing.

Blog Content Promotion

• Key Problems: Great blog content with low subscriber counts and poor engagement.
• Solutions: A process to integrate blog content distribution and syndication as well as engagement that will leave readers waiting to see what will come next.

As I’m prone to do, I’ll pack as much actionable information as possible into the session and provide a copy of the PPT deck to attendees. I hope to see you there!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | BlogWorld LA: Optimize & Socialize For Better Business Blogging | http://www.toprankblog.com

One particularly effective way to get content ideas for blogging comes from reviewing web analytics for the kinds of questions people type in to search engines like Google or Bing that deliver visitors.

For example, with derivatives of ”social media” as a group of target keyword phrases for this blog, I noticed that numerous visitors each month literally typed in to Google: “what does a social media manager do?” and “what does a community manager do?” sending them to a post, ”A Glimpse at What a Social Media Community Manager Does” that ranked well for those questions.

After looking in our web analytics to see which pages those visitors viewed and any goal pages reached, it has served as inspiration to explore other related questions by providing content in the form of answers. ”

Be careful with chicken before the egg advice. I’ve heard advice from other marketers that looking at your own web analytics is the best way to find keywords to use for search optimization. Please understand what a “cart before the horse” idea that is.   This only works if a website is to some degree optimized and attracting a diversity of search traffic. That means it has numerous, relevant links pointing to it (with new links shared on social media sites on a regular basis) and new content is being published regularly. Without some kind of pre-existingrelevance to search engines in the form of new content and links, web analytics is only going to reveal what you already know in terms of keyword topics.

Give them what they want to get what you want. Using questions is simply a matter of literally finding out what information people want and giving it to them based on data that is easily discovered through web analytics.  This can be as simple as doing a search within your web analytics dashboard on the referring keywords that sent visitors to your website from search engines to find instances of words like “what” or “how” in conjunction with keywords and topics that are a reflection of the interests and needs of your target audience.  You could also just search for instances of “?” in conjunction with target keywords or “?” alone to reveal the kinds of questions people are using as search queries that result in visits to your blog.  I happen to use Clicky real time web analytics “filtering” options for this. All Clicky data is real-time, not just one report as is the case with Google Analytics.

Sourcing questions for new blogs. This particular tactic of extracting topic ideas is for refinement of a blog that has been in play for a while, not establishing a content plan for a new blog. For a new blog here are a few other ideas about how to leverage questions for developing a content plan:

• Survey your customers using a tool like Zoomerang or Survey Monkey
• Survey front line employees working in your Customer Service and Sales departments to get an idea of the common questions that come up in their interactions with prospects and customers
• Visit Q/A sites like Quora or Yahoo Answers for common questions related to keywords you’re tracking
• Tap into niche sites for aggregated questions. LinkedIn Answers and Focus Q & A are good examples for business and marketing related topics.
• Use Google Suggest as a way to anticipate what questions people are asking. Just start typing in a question in any Google search box to see how Google tries to complete it. What Google’s Autocomplete feature is a reflection of popular search phrases and potentially your own web history so be aware whether you’re logged in to Google or not when you do this. Since you can’t copy the text from Google’s suggested search queries, check out the free and easy to use Ubersuggest which will provide you with a txt file.
• Use SEO tools that compile questions like Wordtracker called Keyword Questions. This particular tool requires registration and I’ve not had the best luck finding suggestions for niche topics without a large search volume, but it’s an option.

Hopefully these suggestions provide you with some useful ideas for sourcing blog content through sourcing questions to answer. It’s a great formula that I’ve been using and advising clients to use for years. If you have an existing blog with some degree of diversity in new content and active inbound linking, then you may find a rich store of ideas in the keyword referring data from web analytics. If you have a new website, then start by literally asking your customers about their top questions and review some of the industry websites that aggregate Q & A to gain insight into what topics are hot and worth addressing in your content plan.

The fundamental takeaway: Create the kind of content (with SEO keywords as inspiration) that people are actively searching for and you can shorten sales cycles, inspire more social shares and be more useful to your community.

Have you used question sourcing tactics to build or complement your blog content plan? What have you tried that worked? What didn’t work?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Need Great Ideas for Blog Content? Start With Questions | http://www.toprankblog.com

Is it great because the author thinks so? Or because the content was retweeted 700 times and shared 150 times on Facebook?  Was it great because there were 70 comments? Those are all things most marketers would feel satisfaction from in regard to content they created and published. But there’s a common disconnect with this idea of “great content”.

What’s the problem with 700 retweets, 150 Facebook shares and 70 comments? Nothing if you’re trying to win a KPI contest.  The lost opportunity is that most content that aspires to be “great” is created following subjective interpretations designed to achieve KPI outcomes.  ”Let’s create an infographic!”, or “Let’s make a viral video!”. These content creation efforts are often mechanical, albeit often creative, efforts to produce something “great” but don’t necessarily answer the questions of “For Who?” or “Why?”.

As marketers, “great content” isn’t just defined by me or you is it? It’s defined by the people the content is intended for – prospects, customers & influencers. It’s defined by the people we’re trying to attract, engage and influence.

Not ALL content needs to be customer defined of course, because many people simply don’t know what they want or like. There are plenty of opportunities to produce content in support of defining a new market, category, concept or way of thinking.

I should mention part of the inspiration for this past was from a Tweet that Scott Stratten shared yesterday morning:

He’s right. Great content, I mean, “great freaking content”, is indeed what people share/spread/link to.  But there’s more to the story to make that work.

1. In order for the content to be more than superficial SEO Linkbait, the idea of “great” should consider customers – their interests, needs, pain points and preferences for media formats and sharing . So find out what that means in terms of customer-centric topics, the types of content they best respond to, social channels and even keywords.

Of course we’re not after a filter bubble effect, so there’s plenty of room for creative content that isn’t entirely sourced from customer personas and preferences, but re-framing what “great” means in terms of the final audience is important and often overlooked.

2. Promote the content to people who have influence over distribution (Tell 2 friends, who tell 2 friends, and so on).  The ability for your message to propagate is directly related to relevant social networks and community connections. Great content without an audience is pretty damn lonely.  As I like to say, “Great content isn’t great until it’s consumed and shared.”

In today’s competitive content marketing environment, promotion of content is essential to get traction. Then it will flourish or not on it’s own merit with the networks of interest that consume it. If you have an interest in sharing your brand’s ideas and affecting influence, then can you really afford to leave “great” content distribution to chance?

There’s a cycle to social and SEO for content sharing that shows some of the most valuable aspects of content marketing. Promoting great, customer and influencer centric content helps grow your network and attract links, which exposes your great content to an even larger universe of people who can share and link, and so on and so on. Each step of the way you can collect data that helps further refine your subsequent content efforts.

An additional reason for considering SEO and Social Media Marketing with great content is the increased weight on links within social content like Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus as influencers on search engine visibility.  Great search ranking of content isn’t just about keywords in title tags and links between web pages anymore.  A quantity of quality references and links within social channels (as well as the authority of those sources and rate of occurrence) are also important and are a big part of what happens when content is promoted.

So, if you want to create great content, maybe the first step might not be to decide which infographic designer to hire or which tabloid-inspired title tag to write for that monster list of resources you’re going to compile. The starting point is in understanding what it is that your target customer or influencer considers “great”. How does that manifest as topics, search and social keywords? What does it mean in terms of content format? Does it mean images, video, short format tips, long format lists, cartoons, infographics, user generated content and so on? What has worked before in the channels where your customers and influencers spend their time? What hasn’t?

Figuring out what your customers care about along with strong creative, social and SEO execution, means you can create content that is valuable, useful and far more likely to inspire specific business outcomes than something based on a personal, subjective definition of “great” and leaving it to chance to spread.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | What Does “Great Content” Mean, Anyway? | http://www.toprankblog.com

There are numerous apps one could use to modify photos, but what I find interesting are apps that use photos to create an end product like a Comic, Collage or even an Infographic – all from your iPhone. Below are 5 examples of graphics (using my very limited creative skills) and the iPhone apps used to create them – each with some level of social sharing built-in.

ComicBook! (1.99)

Conference Comic from Content Marketing World

This is a feature rich app that is only limited by your own creativity. While I’ve only ever used this app for “Conference Comics” with single graphics, I could see someone creating multi-page comics with the app and putting them together into an interactive experience (using some other tools) that would allow viewers to turn pages, tag people and share easily on social sites. As it stands, I’ve really just started experimenting, but my running “Theme” is Conference Comics.  What theme could you see using using Comic Book?   Here’s more info on ComicBook!.

WordFoto (1.99)

Ann Handley of MarketingProfs and I in San Francisco

This is a fun app that uses word sets to re-create images that you import. You’re unlikely to achieve “a picture made of a 1,000 words” but the words you do use, can add context to the photo.  This app works best with images that have balanced contrast and simple segments of color. A complicated group shot of 20 people isn’t going to work as well as a portrait shot of someone’s face.   Here’s the info page for WordFoto.

Postale (.99)

Dreamforce Keynote with Marc Benioff 2011

You’re on the road, so why not send a post card from the event you’re attending? Well, maybe not a “snail mail” postcard, but a virtual card using this handy tool. I don’t find the card options outside of “AirMail” very interesting, but that’s enough for a few creative uses of this app to highlight a photo and message for use in email or as an illustration in a blog post. Here’s more info on Postale.

ToonCamera (.99)

Lee Odden & Brian Clark at SXSWi 2011

I wouldn’t exactly call the images and video you can shoot with this app a cartoon exactly, but it’s an interesting effect – especially since you can shoot both video and images with it. Images in your photo library can be converted one by one as well. There are also varying effects in color and black & white. You can get these effects with several other apps but they don’t offer the video option. Here’s more info on ToonCamera.

Pic Collage (Free)

SES San Francisco 2011

This is a very simple tool for creating a collage from various photos, slightly similar to Comic Book! but without the comic effects. It’s a great way to summarize key images from an event. Photos can come from your photo library or Facebook. What’s lacking is the ability to overlay a title, but there are other iPhone graphics programs that you can use to do that. Sometimes a super simple app is all you need and for those times Pic Collage fits the bill. Here’s more info.

Hopefully I can do another roundup of creative iPhone apps that focus on interesting video effects.

What are your favorite creative iPhone apps for graphics and photo editing?  If anyone has iPhone infographic creation apps they’re aware of, please share.  If you have examples of creative graphics generated from an iPhone app on your blog, please describe and link to them in the comments. (Excluding spammy stuff of course)

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | 5 iPhone Apps for Creating Fun Social Media Graphics at Conferences | http://www.toprankblog.com

The B2B Track during day one of Content Marketing World in the “Gold Room” was jam packed for each session. That includes this session about Corporate Blogging and Globalizing your Editorial with two speakers from SAS and Intel. Since the topics were so different, I decided to split the liveblog post into two. This is part one.

Speaker: Alison Bolen @alisonbolen Content Editor SAS
Presentation: Results-Driven Blogging for B2B Brands

Alison’s presentation focused on corporate blogging and the blog program at SAS (a $2 billion business analytics company).

The history of SAS and social media started in 1976 with the first SAS Global Forum, 2004 internal blog program, 2006 SAS communities launched, 2007 the first external blog launched and in 2011 the transition to the WordPress platform. You can find SAS blogs here: blogs.sas.com

Alison works in the Public Relations organization at SAS along with 8 other corporate journalists.

How to Grow a Corporate Blogging Program

Develop a strategy: Find out where the current corporate strategies are and find a hook into them. For the SAS blogging program, there were 3 main goals: to align with PR, Marketing and Customer Support.

Blogging supports each stage of the funnel:

• Identify the problem / opportunity
• Research solutions
• Evaluate
• Consider
• Purchase

SAS blog efforts are meta data enabled: by persona, by category, by industry. For content to be relevant and valuable it must be persona based and aligned with steps in the buying process.

The next step in corporate blogging strategy development is to find the right content. Ask these important questions: Where do stories live? (Word Docs, PPTs, Videos, Live Events) Where does knowledge live? (Sharepoint, White papers)

Now it’s time to find the right people. Alison gave the example of two SAS bloggers that write for distinct audiences.

Blog Planning with Monthly Assignments. All posts are due on a specific date each month. The most timely posts are published first. Breaking news and fillers are published as relevant. A schedule ensures there is content to work with each month.

Another planning option is to focus on one specific topic. For example, each Quarter, focus on a specific topic for each blogging contributing to that particular blog.

Another angle on corporate blog planning involves themes every week. Example: Monday (Getting Started Articles) Wednesdays (Topics the Blogger is Trying to Learn & Documenting that Process) Friday (Posts in reaction to a particular topic from other blogs)

Tap Internal Subject Matter Experts: If the organizational structure supports it, you can divide blogging assignments by areas of specialization. Example: 16 Think Tank team members for healthcare at SAS that includes authors who specialize in specific areas. They are assigned to blog on their area of expertise at least once a month.

Have a blog that new bloggers can contribute to in order to show their commitment. SAS also has an internal blog network of 700+ bloggers that also acts as a testing ground.

If you have a group blog, you must have an editor. No assignments and nobody in charge = NO CONTENT. A blog editor is a content chaser, people watcher and project manager – not necessarily a corporate communications person.

For events, plan across blogs as needed. Map topics and aspects of the events to be covered by the different blogs in your organization to ensure coverage.

If blogs don’t work out, retire them.

Coach and advise, don’t micromanage. Be patient with different learning styles. Don’t pre-judge and expect too much.

Results: Customer Support – Positive comments and links to your blogs.
Results: Marketing – Bloggers invited to speak at conferences, getting calls from journalists, posts picked up by industry publications and bloggers getting invites to write books
Results: The New PR – Journalists contacting SAS after seeing blog posts. It’s the new PR.
Results: The Blog is the top news source on the sas.com website. In fact. compared to other news pages on the SAS site, the blogging effort is blowing other content out of the water in terms of traffic.

I think Alison gave some really useful ideas for blog content and planning. One of the most common objections I hear from companies that really should be blogging (and not all companies should) is that they have difficulty with creating content on an ongoing basis. It’s a big mind shift and kudos to SAS for having 8 Corporate Journalists on staff.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | SAS on Results-Driven Blogging for B2B Brands #cmworld | http://www.toprankblog.com

I can empathize with that concern and have addressed it with many companies over the past 7+ years that I’ve been blogging here on TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog. To help anyone interested in ideas for creating business blog content, check out the following 8 tips. They’ve worked for us and for many of our clients and may very well work for you too.

Oreo Cookie News Posts - Set up Google Alerts for keywords you’re tracking and when an article or blog post surfaces that meets your editorial criteria, excerpt in a blog post using your own intro and conclusion. That’s the “oreo cookie”, sandwiching a portion of the Google Alert with your own copy setting up why it’s important and your own conclusion or opinion.  Always cite the source of course.

Short Lists – (Like this one) Create short lists of tips according to keyword themes, especially information that is in high demand but short supply. You can also focus on the kind of information that could help customers during various stages of the buying cycle:  5 Tips on How to Buy a New Widget, 5 Tips on Getting the Most Out of Your New Widget, 5 Things You Can Do With Old Widgets, 5 Common Problems with Widgets and How to Solve Them, etc.

Large Collections – Compile large collections of resources according to a search keyword or social topic theme. If you can find disparate resources that don’t normally get included together, it can really resonate as a unique and useful content object that will get bookmarked and shared. Long form and media rich content will often get bookmarked  more because readers aren’t likely to consume it in one sitting.

Really relevant, unique and useful collections of resources can be hard to compile in one sitting, so set a task to collect such resources a few at a time, over time. A few minutes a day over 3 weeks is barely noticed compared to 2 uninterrupted hours in one day.

Interview Industry Influentials - First you need to define what influential really means to your particular industry. Those with the most subscribers, friends and fans (in social media terms) may not be the people who can be the most cooperative and giving.  When approaching really well known industry people, it’s often easier to ask 10 people 1 question and compile the answers. That makes it easy for them to participate and when they see who else is involved, it can motivate them to participate. That means starting off with a few “internet famous” people that you know will participate, and reference them in requests to others you don’t know as well.

When interviewing subject matter expert “unsung heros”, use more questions and think about using keywords in the questions themselves, structuring the questions so that they might result in keyword rich answers. Of 10 questions asked of 10 people, make sure 2 or 3 questions are very tactical. Aggregate those tactical responses from the 10 interviewees later in a new post. There’s so much more you can do with repurposing content in original ways, but you get the idea. The key is to plan ahead.

Curate Comments - Aggregate the best comments from your blog or even other blogs according to a particular topic.  Identify important blogs in your industry, especially those with active commenters.  When you cite another blog, the content doesn’t need to be limited to the blog post. It can also include the comments from other blogs. You can chose to organize those comments according to keyword topics (citing the source blog of course) or a particular position that you’re taking.

You can also compile some of the best comments from your own blog as a way to recognize community participation.

Crowdsource Content - Think about doing surveys, polls & contests that result in content. Give readers an incentive to participate in a promotion where entry into the contest is based on some kind of content: short articles, images or video. Enable your blog readers to rate entries and promote the winner.  Don’t just do this once, because if it works well at all, you can build momentum by running the promotion annually or quarterly depending on the volume of interest and participation.  I recently posted about crowdsourcing content on ClickZ.

Answer with Subject Matter Expertise – Many subject matter experts and business executives are too busy to write blog posts. But if you ask them a question, they’ll talk your ear off. Use that behavior to your advantage and get business blogging staff to ask subject matter experts in the organization questions verbally – in person or on the phone – and use the answers in corporate blog posts.

Frontline Answers – Another goldmine of content for blogs is from frontline employees that interact with prospects and customers.  Customer support staff and sales people answer questions all day long. Find a way to harvest that knowledge into edited FAQ’s for your blog.  Always make sure you give feedback to whoever helps provide content to your business blog. That will contribute to their feeling of contribution and can help motivate future participation.

These ideas are just an excerpt from one slide of my solo presentation on Content Marketing Optimization. There are many other things you can do to create interesting content for your business blog, especially if you’ve done homework with customer profiles, search keywords and social topics.  We’ve created processes around content calendars for blogs and other content marketing efforts that makes this a very straightforward process. Lists like the one above can certainly fuel an initial content calendar to either start a business blog or introduce new content to an existing blog.

Are you facing challenges with your business blog? What’s stopping you from launching a new blog or with content creation?  What creative content ideas have you seen on other blogs that you’d like to share?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Content Marketing Optimization: 8 Content Ideas for Business Blogs | http://www.toprankblog.com

One of those speakers was Lionel Menchaca, the Chief Blogger at Dell and a real pioneer in the world of blogging and social media for the enterprise. Lionel told the story of Dell’s initial blogging efforts that turned the tide of Dell Hell as well as other practical insights. Here are his tips on best practices blogging for the enterprise:

1. Write about topics that matter to your customers, especially the tough ones. Dell has a social media command center to track topics and inspire ideas, issues to deal with.

2. Provide context for a range of customers. Be thoughtful about the interests for specific segments of customers. Find a balance that allows you to appeal content to a range of customers. To do that effectively, you must listen online and understand the convergence of issues that you can address with content though the blog.

3. Write to educate and serve. If you’re doing your job correctly you’re doing both. Informing customers about more than products, including industry news and trends as it relates to your customer’s perspective builds trust and makes your corporate blog a source of information that’s meaningful towards what customers care about.

4. Be authentic, be human. If you can look back and see what established a blogger as a personality that audiences engage with, that’s what’s important. Write from a personal perspective, not from a “brand messaging” perspective.

5. Let your passion and personality show through. There will be points that the brand wants to make, but it’s important that the blogger’s personality show through. When tapping Subject Matter Experts for contributed blog posts, coach them on writing from a personal perspective vs. just providing the facts. [This reminds me of the Facts Tell, Stories Tell adage]

6. Provide an inside look. Content should complement, but also offer a different view than corporate website content, press releases, and other brand communications. Examples: Video interviews with internal subject matter experts about product features and what they personally like about them.

7. Don’t be afraid to disagree, if you can back it up. Dell uses Radian6 as a listening tool to monitor for discussions. Techmeme is also a useful site for tracking stories that drive discussion in the tech space. Show that you’re there to be part of the conversation when you find dissent, vs. trying to steamroll it.

While blogging within businesses has been around for a very long time, I think a it’s important for companies to take a second look at how their communicating through blogging platforms. Far too many business blogs are lacking in reach, readership and engagement because of approaching business blogging solely as a distribution channel vs. a platform for engagement.  It’s by finding that right mix of personality and brand representation  Thanks for the insights Lionel.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Big Business Blogging, The Right Way #IntelSMP | http://www.toprankblog.com

All marketing efforts should start with a goal and means for measuring success, so I do not get into specifics on those tasks in this list, but focus more on the content and promotion.

1.  Social SEO Personas

While blogging evolved out of personal expression, business blogging is less about corporate egocenticism and more about empathy with customers. Customer centric content for blogging is more relevant and does a much better job of engaging. In the way that direct marketers segment customers by key characteristics, online marketers that blog can create buyer personas to create more relevant experiences for their readers.

Personas are customer profiles (preferences for information discovery, consumption & sharing) that represent groups of customers that a brand wants to engage and do business with.  Information from Personas drives keyword research & optimization, content plan and promotion. More about persona creation here. So one of the first things a blogger should do after defining objectives and general audience, is to understand who they’re trying to reach by developing personas.

Collect data through reader / customer surveys, analytics, social monitoring and other tools to form a profile. That profile represents topics, behaviors and preferences that can translate into search keywords, social topics, social channels, editorial calendar and promotion plans.

2.  What is your unique selling proposition?

When people (or search engines) visit your website, is the primary topic crystal clear? With the increased competition in search and for attention in social conversations, it’s essential for blogs to stand out.  Being able to articulate your Unique Selling Proposition helps distinguish your content the value of your blog content for people and search engines. The screenshot above shows a blog that is crystal clear in it’s focus. The result is reflected both in popularity and search visibility (#1) for highly competitive phrases like “digital photography“.

Developing a Unique Selling Proposition for your blog (h/t SEOBook) is pretty straightforward: Identify the key benefits of your blog’s content and how you will address customer/reader pain points. As you communicate your USP, be specific, concise & show proof. It’s also important to live your USP so that it’s a key component of your messaging.

3.  Search & Social Media Keywords

Personas and your USP represent the intersection of customer interests and the goals for your blog. In order to activate your blog content for effective discovery via search and social media channels, it’s essential to create a search phrase keyword glossary for Search Engine Optimization purposes and a social media topic glossary for Social Media Optimization.

SEO Keywords: Resources like Google’s keyword research tool are a great start for finding which words and phrases are in demand, relevant to the content you’re publishing on your blog. It’s tempting to be egocentric and use whatever language you want, but if there is an expectation to attract significant search traffic and an interest in using language that resonates with a community in search of what you have to offer, keyword optimization of content is very appropriate.

Social Topics: Social topic tools that work like a SEO keyword tool are very rare and a to really get into useful source information, there’s a lot of manual research necessary. However, to get started, tools like socialmention.com offer a list of social keywords (bottom left of search results page) that can be downloaded as a CSV file for use in your Social Topic Glossary. Social keywords represent topics of interest to the people your blog is intended to reach and engage. By researching these topics and the specific language the community uses to express their interest, your blogging can be more effective at being relevant and shared on the social web.

The SEO Keyword and Social Topic glossary provide guidance towards editorial plans and specific phrases/topics can be mapped to content for search and social media optimization. It’s a great management tool that keeps SEO and SMO efforts accountable.

4.  Create a Content/Editorial Plan

Keywords inform content and documenting an Editorial Plan for your blog can ensure that content is true to the goals of the business and interests of the community that reads it. An content plan also offers ideas and guidance, months in advance, which is priceless when bloggers hit creative roadblocks. This is inevitable, and after 7+ years of blogging myself, I can’t vouch enough for the guidance of an Editorial Plan.

Keep in mind, such a plan is a guide – not a set of hard and fast rules.  It’s effective to schedule recurring themes with posts, like “Thought Leadership Monday”, “Practical Tips on Tuesdays”, “News Roundup on Fridays”. But it’s also important to allow for wildcards, because opportunities will come up spontaneously based on events within your company or the industry that require blogging. And you don’t want to delay publishing important news or a reaction to news, just because it wasn’t planned for that day.

The Editorial Plan defines the application of keywords in topics to be covered, categories, titles, tags and how/where/when the posts will be promoted. It also allocates for the future repurposing of appropriate blog posts.

5.  Search & Social Media Optimization

Optimizing content for search on websites like Google and optimizing social content for ease of discovery and sharing within social channels is essential for reach and engagement of blog content. Optimizing for search & social media is the one two punch of blog marketing. If SEO efforts are initiated with an existing blog, then a SEO audit would be completed, including a review of the blog templates and configuration, existing content, internal links and links from other websites. If you’re starting a new blog, then SEO would be baked in to the editorial plan via the keyword glossary.

Optimizing for search is about helping search engines do a better job of connecting readers with your content. It’s not about tricks or manipulations. It’s about providing search engines and people what they need to find, consume and be inspired to share your blog content.

Optimizing for social media is about search as well, as in the search that’s possible within Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. But SMO is also about optimizing content editorially to resonate with social audiences. It’s about ease of discovery and sharing through things like feed distribution and widgets that make it easy to ReTweet or post to the reader’s favorite social sites.

SEO and SMO are about making life easy for both search engines and people to connect with, interact and share your blog content.

6.  Links: Internal and External Acquisition

Links between pages and links acquired from relevant websites in the industry provide a good user experience and strong signals for search engines when they crawl, index and rank web pages. Following best practices for internal linking is one of the most impactful things a blog can do to help website realize SEO benefit.  For example, a tips blog that cross links the keywords relevant to specific products being sold gives readers and search engines a quick and relevant way to move from editorial about how to use and get benefit from a type of product to a page that actually sells the product.

Attracting links from other relevant websites as pictured in the diagram above is essential for attracting new visitors to your blog, directly and indirectly because of the effect relevant links have on search engine visibility.  What’s important to remember is that links to your blog home page are important, but relevant links into specific category or individual blog posts is essential  External link sources that are relevant to broad topics that link to your home page or category pages provide the user (and search engine) with a very relevant connection.  Links from niche sites to your specific blog posts do the same.

There are myriad ways to attract links for blogs ranging from commenting and guest posting to creating content that attracts links from other bloggers and the media.

7.  Content Promotion

Content isn’t great until it gets shared. A lot. That doesn’t mean a blogger should aggressively promote every post. It does mean that when a particular post is especially promotable (you would know this because you planned for it in your Content Plan) then it warrants special attention.  Blog content can be promoted in a variety of ways and effective promotion is tied to the quantity and quality of the networks you’ve built. That includes readers and subscribers of your own blog, an email list, Facebook Fan page, Twitter, LinkedIn and other relevant sites where people with common interests interact and share.

Some content promotion is automatic, like RSS feeds, syndication of blog posts to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn or content syndication partnerships. Other content promotion might be tied to the content itself, like using industry thought leaders to crowdsource insights into a topic (your keywords) of importance to your readers. Those participants will often help you promote the post. You can also reach out to your network and suggest or share relevant posts they might be interested in. Commenting and being social on/offline are also effective promotion methods.

The bottom line with content promotion is that great content that isn’t promoted vs. mediocre content that is promoted in a relevant way, will often lose in terms of traffic and therefore meaningful engagement with a greater number of readers. The amount of content being published on a daily basis creates levels of competition never before experienced, so promotion is essential to stand out and get noticed. But it has to be content that’s WORTH promoting.

Summing it all up.

The implementation and refinement of these steps is a work in progress. The web continues to change in terms of technology and how people use it. It’s essential that companies follow an adaptable online marketing strategy when focusing on the social web and search engines. Opportunities will reveal themselves in web analytics and social media monitoring and the promotion efforts outline above apply to those real-time marketing situations just as well as tasks included in a Content Plan. Hopefully these guidelines are useful to you and if you need more specific information, you’ll likely find it in blog posts we’ve published in the past. At TopRank Marketing we do this kind of consulting on a daily basis so there’s a lot of rich information published in our archives.

What other types of insight about blogging and blog marketing would you like to see? What are some of the biggest obstacles you’ve had (and maybe overcome) when it comes to implementing blog marketing tactics like those mentioned in this post?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Blog Marketing Strategy: 7 Steps to Social SEO Success | http://www.toprankblog.com

The lowdown on this session: How bloggers can better understand the world of advertising, marketing and PR to avoid common mistakes.  How can we learn from the crappy behavior of the bloggers before us.

There’s a low cost of entry to become a blogger. Basically, all you need is a pulse and an internet connection. But, just because you’re a blogger, doesn’t mean you’re a diva. When you start to evolve as a blogger is when you attract an audience. You’re still not a rockstar, but you’ll be making progress when people are paying attention to you and engaging.  For perspective, many advertisers require a minimum of 100k pageviews per month. If your blog isn’t at that level, you’re still building.

Blogger eg0 = trouble. Getting some attention and audience is an accomplishment but it’s not a reason to be a dick.  Jason statistic: 15-20% of people in a given vertical think they’re god’s gift to blogging.

The conflict comes for the vast majority of bloggers who are not marketing bloggers or have marketing expertise.  They don’t understand how the world of marketing and advertising works.

Soliciting money is advertising sales. (Paid Media) Any time you solicit money from an organization for space or exposure on your blog, that’s advertising. FTC requires disclosure of any kind of advertorial or ads.  When you take money for publishing editorial content, you will degrade some trust with your audience – but not lose it.

The discussion you have with securing advertising on your blog might be with a media buyer, or with a larger organization, a media agency.  This includes ads for media as well as advertorial.

Public relations is earned media.  PR agencies or staff within companies may pitch stories to bloggers. There are PR software companies like Vocus, Cision and My Media Info that will aggregate contact information for influential bloggers within particular verticals. PR can be an information resource and go between with a brand that you want to write about. PR doesn’t buy advertising (or they shouldn’t).

Blogger Horror Story 1: After being pitched, a blogger responded demanding that instead of the blogger writing about the brand, that the brand should advertise on his blog.  While the blog was topically relevant, it didn’t have anywhere near the audience that the brand’s media buyers would consider.

Blogger Horror Story 2: Jason pitched a blogger about a brand he represented and the blogger responded saying that to have a conversation, she’d charge a consulting fee.  Basically, this blogger responded to PR pitches with a consulting pitch.

The situation where bloggers have built up a certain size of audience and consider themselves a diva is where blogging douchebags came from.

Blogger Horror Story 3: Fortune 25 company, big brand, wide array of products. Identified 15 bloggers and pitched them to go to an industry conference – all expenses paid (airfare, hotel and conference). While at the event, the brand wanted to show the bloggers their products.

A week before the event, one of the bloggers left a message saying they’ve decided to turn the trip into a family vacation and requested more airline tickets. Then the blogger threatened that if the brand didn’t do this, there would be editorial repercussions on her blog.

Jason says there’s a high concentration of this type of blogger in the gaming and the mommy blogger groups.

The problem with this minority of bloggers is that brands end up not wanting to deal with bloggers at all.

As you build an audience and gain reputation, it’s important that there’s a difference between being a proud person and being a jackass. There’s an attitude of entitilement plus ignorance about how advertising and public relations works.

Trust: Your audience trust you less if you’re paid for creating brand content. There’s a perceived bias.
Respect: Mutual between bloggers and the brands that communicate with them. Loss of respect means loss of relationship and the benefits that come with that.
Reality: Jason shows a series of graphs that represent mainstream media reach compared to blogs – blogs barely show up, let alone compete. (There were no sources cited in these graphs and that was very disappointing, especially from a professional like Jason)

Bloggers have a place in the advertising and media world online, but in the majority of cases, do not come close to having the same reach or clout as mainstream media. Many bloggers that gain a certain size of audience and degree of influence start to overestimate their authority and impact, plus many don’t understand how relations between advertising and advertisers, media/publishers and public relations work.

What Bloggers and Brands need to consider:

• Ethics and impact of pay for play – disclosure
• Think of bloggers as journalists
• The effect of advertising and PR on your audience
• There’s no right way, only a right way for you

Opportunities for bloggers:

• Make PR be helpful. When you get an irrelevant pitch, offer PR feedback.
• If you want advertising, ask for the media buyer, not the PR person.
• When discussing advertising opportunity with a brand, make a compelling argument with facts from a third party on your audience and community.
• Partner with other blogs.

Opportunities for brands:

• Understand the power of niche
• Make all outreach relevant. This is a huge problem and persists across many verticals.
• Know & respect bloggers have differences. Some bloggers are not PR friendly, so don’t pitch them.
• Have a plan for when you get requests for advertising

Check out Jason’s community online: ExploringSocialMedia.com

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | BlogWorld NY: @JasonFalls No BS Guide to Advertising & PR for Bloggers | http://www.toprankblog.com

Is blogging dead? A number of high profile bloggers and news media sites from Scoble to Wired to the New York Times have opined the demise of blogging as a consequence of growing social destinations like Twitter and Facebook.

The reality is that like many other forms of media, blogging is evolving and with the right strategy, highly effective. Short attention spans are served by short form content like Tweets and status updates. When it comes to influence on business, longer form content like that found on blogs serves an essential purpose. Rather than displace the most valuable attention spent on blogs, social sites like networks, microblogging, media sharing, news and bookmarks facilitate awareness and engagement with blog content.

Smart online marketers see this and are putting their budgets and priorities where it matters. According to eMarketer, 1 in 3 businesses publish blogs for marketing and HubSpot’s recent  2011 State of Inbound Marketing reports that more companies rated blogs as “critical or important” (62%) than any other social channel. These investments are paying off: AdWeek’s “Changing Scope of Advertising” infographic cites blogs as the leading source of customer acquisition over any other social channel.

Key Messages of Your Niche Provide Focus for Content Promoted from the Blog to Networks and Channels of Distribution.

Blogs are perfectly suited as social media information hubs for companies or individuals that want to dominate their niche online. Blogs can play an essential role in an integrated search, social media and content marketing strategy that directly influences consumer information discovery, consumption and sharing. But with literally millions of blogs published online and mainstream media getting involved, how does a blog stand out, let alone dominate their niche?

The first step is to understand what your niche is.  Formalize your unique selling proposition (USP):  How is your content unique and how does it serve the needs of the people you’re trying to reach better than any other blog?  What does your blog stand for?  What specific can you focus on that represents demand (search keywords) and topical discussion (social)?

The mechanics of a coordinated blogging effort that leverage search, social and content marketing involves:

• Goals & objectives
• Key message and differentiator – USP
• Persona development
• Search and social keyword research
• Editorial plan mapped to search and social content
• Optimization
• Link analysis
• Social channel development
• Intersection with online PR, media relations, advertising
• Content promotion
• Real-time, adaptive
• Monitoring, measurement & refinement

Whether you’re frustrated with the performance of current blogging efforts or you’re starting a new blog and want to maximize effectiveness, following a coordinated online marketing approach with a focus, can force multiply the effect of a company’s ability to “Be where customers are looking” (search), “Be where customers are talking” (social) “Be a source of influence, trust and engagement” (content). The result? You dominate your niche because all signals of credibility point to your social hub whether it’s via search, social, media – push or pull.

For the full presentation, you’ll have too attend BlogWorld New York this week. Hope to see you there.

Sometimes I like to open presentations common questions people have on the topic. What questions do you have about making more out of your business blogging effort? What challenges do you have in your efforts to dominate your niche?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Dominate Your Niche with Social SEO & Blogging – BlogWorld Expo New York | http://www.toprankblog.com

Another tool was an Editorial Plan that documents articles/blog posts, media, promotion and planned re-purposing. There are basic building blocks for becoming more efficient with search engine optimization tasks, but I’ve received a lot of requests for them.  I thought they might be useful to our readers to use for inspiration to create their own and maybe even modify and mashup into something better.

Below are screen shots which you can click to see larger versions.

Basic Keyword Glossary

After conducting research using one of the various keyword research tools, organizing that information in a useful format like a Keyword Glossary helps SEOs manage their on page optimization and it brings a measure of accountability as well. The example of above shows a matrix of competitors sites that have been optimized for the target phrases, a list of primary and secondary phrases with measures of popularity and competitiveness. The phrases are also mapped to category levels or individual pages so you know which pages are being optimized for what keywords.

Basic Content Plan for a Blog

It’s no mystery that we like blogs as an online marketing, Social, SEO and content marketing tool. Planning content through an editorial calendar (as a magazine other publication would) is essential for producing content that is of interest to the target audience, that represent target keywords, and keeps authors on track and flush with ideas on what to write about.

The spreadsheet above shows dates for publishing, titles, keywords, categories, media used, cross-posting, promotion channels/tactics and future re-purposing of the content.  Organizing an editorial plan like this helps online marketers gain maximum value for their investment into content creation and also makes curation more valuable.

The best tool or format depends on your own needs and applications. That’s why I don’t link to the actual spreadsheets – at least part of the reason.

However, will be making the actual spreadsheets available at BlogWorld New York and the Vocus User’s Conference in Baltimore.  Be sure you check out my sessions if you’re attending those events.

What kinds of templates have you created for managing SEO and content marketing tasks?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Core Content SEO Tools: Keyword Glossary & Editorial Plan | http://www.toprankblog.com

Concurrent with SXSWi in Austin, Texas this weekend was the TECHmunch event for food bloggers run by Babette Pepaj of Bakespace. Babette rounded up a stellar cast of characters to present on a variety of topics including numerous food journalists from the likes of CNN and the LA Times plus PR pros like Erik Deutch, Sarah Evans and Eric Schwartzman. Of course, no event during the week of SXSW would be complete without appearances from well known digerati like Brian Solis and Robert Scoble.

My task was to talk about SEO with a dash of Social Media and Content for blogs. Knowing just a few things about blogging, I shared the following info with abundant food metaphors to about 150 food bloggers and journalists.

Audience – Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Many bloggers start out writing about their passion and decide topics based on what’s top of mind or as a reaction to others from the community they’re involved with.  That is as it should be. But if a blogger expects traffic from search and social channels to be competitive, then it’s important to empathize with the information needs of the people you’re trying to connect with.

Bloggers that say one should never consider keywords or SEO and just write good content are on to something: It’s called pure ego.  They are blogging only for themselves and that’s fine. But those bloggers seeking to grow an audience and monetize increasing traffic will see the value in creating content that serves personal interests AND the information discovery, consumption and sharing behaviors of readers.

If you’re planning a dinner at your house and you decide to have your favorite beef pot roast but invite several vegetarians, those guests are unlikely to return.  That’s what ego-centric blogging is.

Alternatively, if you make an effort to understand the needs of your intended audience in terms of what they’re interested in, the keywords they use to search and the topics they’re discussing on other blogs and social media sites, you can craft a “menu” of content, aka editorial plan that shows that you have something interesting and important to say as well as empathy for readers’ needs.  Listen and give people what they want, even better than the competition, and those “guests” are likely not only to return again, but to say great things to others about you.

Keywords – What Do They Like to Eat?

There’s a lot of competition in the blog space and online content in general.  Consumer discovery via search is still the dominant way to find information online.  Bloggers can gain essential insight into the words that best represent interest in topics they plan to write about by using keyword research tools to create a keyword glossary.   A list of keywords can serve as a guide or reference to word use in content on and off the blog to better represent the interests of the readers you’re trying to reach.

Back to the dinner metaphor: If you say you’re going to have “flesh melon” for an appetizer and your guests only know it as Honeydew melon, they may not be interested. Knowing the keywords readers use to search for information can guide copywriting so that it better informs and also improves search visibility for phrases that are more in demand. Being easy to find via search for more popular and relevant phrases will increase blog traffic and user experience.

Content SEO – Which Ingredients?

Applying the insights gained from keyword research for improved user experience and search visibility comes through incorporating keywords into content planning, categories, copy, links and tags.  The most important places for keyword use are the title tag, body copy and links.

The bloggers that have the biggest issue with SEO will often say keyword use compromises their writing style and creativity. WordPress blogs can use the Headspace or AllinOneSEO plugins to enable a literal and keyword-rich title tag for search engines and another more creative title that might be a pun, ironic, inferred meaning or sarcasm, which people understand in context, but search engines usually do not.

Great SEO copywriting is transparent to the reader and should actually improve user experience.  It’s as simple as using words in links to give the reader an idea of what to expect when they click vs. just “click here”.  Or avoiding the overuse of pronouns and instead using descriptive words (that also happen to be relevant keywords).

Optimizing content is more than text – it means any digital asset that can be published online: audio, video, images and other document types like PDFs and MS Office docs.

As for our dinner metaphor, this means using words we know our guests are interested in, with the communications used to invite them, in our conversations about the dinner and how we present the food during the dinner.

SEO copywriting is like making a promise to the reader.  Keywords in copy and links help your blog content show well in search results. Visibility on keyword phrases sets an expectation for the searcher that when they click the link, they’ll find the information and experience you’re promoting. If not, they’ll just go somewhere else.

Links & Social – How Will We Invite Our Guests and Help Them Spread the Word?

Great content is dead unless someone shares it. Blogs include RSS feeds so there is some automatic promotion of content but in a competitive category, it’s important to create, optimize and promote content that attracts readers and inbound links from other relevant websites. People that publish online can link to your content, but only if they know about it a like it. Search engines can see those links, whether they’re present in blog posts or Tweets. Search engines use links as a way to discover new content and as a signal in the search result sorting or ranking process.

Essentially, the more relevant links to your content, the better your content will do in search results.  There are many other factors, hundreds, but behaviorally, the thing to focus on is making it easy for both search engines and people to discover and share your content.  Assuming you are keeping the promise made through keywords in the form of high quality and relevant content, readers are more than happy to share and link to it.  Just make it easy and compelling from them to do so.

That might mean creating content that is unique and cleverly packages to attract social promotion and links. It might mean recognizing collections of influential people and/or blogs in a clever way to attract links. Including social sharing buttons in blog posts also helps extend awareness of your content to new readers and those inclined to link to things they find interesting.

Most dinner parties do not have the objective of attracting as many other people as possible, but if you wanted to reach more of a certain kind of guest, you could make sure the promise of the dinner and the experience are congruent and exceed expectations. You could also do things like give guests recipes of the dishes served to extend the experience or take photos during the party and print them so guests can have them as a momento.  A thank you card after the dinner also reinforces the experience and combined, the thoughtfulness, relevance and ease of sharing will inspire word of mouth.

Tools – Which Cookware and Dinnerware to Use?

There are a variety of social media SEO tools available for free or low cost to bloggers. Most of the keyword research a blogger may need to do can be accomplished with tools like Google’s Keyword Tool, Google Trends, SEMRush and of course paid tools like Wordtracker.

Social search tools like socialmention.com are handy for social keyword checking and PostRank is useful for measuring on and off-blog social engagement.   Alexa Site Audit and Blekko toolbar (not available for Chrome??) offer intersting SEO related information about websites that can help identify duplicate content issues and the need to focus on certain keywords. Google Analytics is an excellent web analytics tool for blogs to measure performance.

For our dinner party, do we need to use professional grade cookware and our best china? It depends on the outcomes you’re after.  Most tools are only as effective as the talent of the people using them.  There are abundant choices but it comes down to your ability to use those tools to help automate redundancies or create better quality outcomes more efficiently.

Do you have blog content, optimization or link building tips to share? If you’ve experimented with different ways to attract links, what worked? What didn’t?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Recipe for Successful Blog Marketing & SEO at TECHmunch Austin 2011 | http://www.toprankblog.com

I’ve also seen far too many bots that automatically find blog posts that are of a certain age, written on a certain keyword topic and that have follow vs. nofollow links. Once found (automatically using software) they scrape parts of previous comments to create a new one with embedded links to their Viagra SEO New Delhi Insurance Leads spam site. Bleh.

Then there are the benign “good job [insert blogger name here] comments or those that have been translated into another language and back into English. Here’s another good one: comments from reputable people from reputable companies that insist on leaving their full email signature in the comment. One link isn’t enough, they must have two or three or more. Greedy.

It’s truly amazing how some people choose to add value (and when doing so it defintely gets on my radar) but that so many choose to be spammy.  When people add value, I notice. When they spam, I am quick to blacklist.

What should you write in a comment? Opinion, reaction, questions, resources and most of all, something relevant. There are no bad comments when they come from a real person with real substance related to the blog post.

I understand people blog for a variety of reasons. TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog exists as an information source that gives our community a peek into the expertise and point of view within our marketing consulting agency. It demonstrates thought leadership and serves as a hub for our social media participation. TopRank Marketing’s presence on the social web is to engage with prospective customers, peers, potential employees, marketing partners, vendors and the media.

We do have a comment policy. It’s linked right above the comment box. It serves to provide readers a simple DO’s and DONT’S for commenting that creates value and that supports our purpose for having a blog.  Each time I see a new comment without a person’s name or handle in the name field, I have to ask: “Is this a person or a thing?”

We’re here to engage with people, not bots and certainly not comment spammers or greedy link-types. Many, many conversations have been inspired by the thousands of posts authored here over the past 7 years. We welcome them all. Agree, disagree, it doesn’t matter.

Hopefully if you have your own blog, you’ve created your own blog comment policy. It won’t stop the bots or the 5 cents per post offshore outsourced comment spam, but it will provide human readers some guidelines.

Mainstream blogging has been around for about 10 years or so, but there are many people who are new to reading blogs or are not familiar with what’s appropriate. Help them by providing guidelines. The benefits will be improved quality in the comments, which motivates others to join in and revisit the blog.

Some of the best content on a blog is in the comments, not the blog posts. When a comment thread takes off, that’s the magic in blogging (to me). The exchange between an Author and readers is a highly valued outcome. Inspiring exchange and discussion between our readers, between real people with opinions, is priceless.

If you’re a blogger or read blogs fairly frequently, what do you consider comment spam? What kind of comments do you find most useful, interesting and worth responding to?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Blog Comments: Are You A Person Or A Thing? | http://www.toprankblog.com