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Online Marketing News: Say NOPA to SOPA, Google+ Strikes Again, Coca Cola “Gets It”, Twitter Gobbles Up Summify

Posted on 20. Jan, 2012 by Ashley Zeckman in Blog, Blog Marketing, Search Industry News, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media jobs

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

BlogWorld LA: Optimize & Socialize For Better Business Blogging

Posted on 24. Oct, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, BlogWorld, business blogging, Marketing PR Conferences, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

After a successful Blog World Expo New York, I’m very much looking forward to BlogWorld Los Angeles in just under 2 weeks.  Judging from the conference agenda, there’s an impressive roster (275+) of experts, pundits and long time bloggers presenting on just about every relevant topic you can think of.

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

Need Great Ideas for Blog Content? Start With Questions

Posted on 10. Oct, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, blog content, Blog Marketing, content marketing, Keyword Research, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

A lot of the blog content planning for business blogs focuses on different ways to tell the same story about a company’s products, services and key messages. If it’s an SEO approach, then the focus is on content to justify visibility on search engines for specific keywords. Blogs are a great resource for people that are searching for answers, insight, how to’s, others’ experiences and opinion. Finding a way to create content that meets customer needs as well as achieving high search visibility for relevant business solutions is what makes blogs such useful online marketing assets.

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

Content Marketing Optimization: 8 Content Ideas for Business Blogs

Posted on 19. Aug, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, Blog Marketing, content marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

At the SES conference this week I gave several presentations on Content Marketing: “Content Marketing Optimization” and “The Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing”.  In the CMO session, I provided SEO tips for each spoke in a hub and spoke model. The hub in this situation was a blog and one of the most common issues with business blog success is fresh content. In fact, one of the most common reasons companies don’t start a blog is over their concerns with creating useful content.

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

Blog Marketing Strategy: 7 Steps to Social SEO Success

Posted on 26. May, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, content marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media optimization

At BlogWorld Expo in New York this week I presented a session about Dominating Your Niche with Social Content and SEO.  It was crammed with information and I know there are many online marketers looking for practical advice on business blogging and blog marketing that didn’t attend.  Based on the blog marketing we do here at Online Marketing Blog and in the consulting that I do, here are  7 practical steps online marketers can take for social media and SEO success with a blog.

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

Dominate Your Niche with Social SEO & Blogging – BlogWorld Expo New York

Posted on 23. May, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, blogworld expo, content marketing, Marketing PR Conferences, Other Events, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social SEO

BlogWorld Expo is holding it’s first conference in New York this week and I’ll be presenting “Dominate Your Niche with Social SEO & Blogging” on Tuesday at 10:15am as part of the Social Business Track. This post is a light preview of that session and I hope to see you there.

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