31 Pro Tips for a Successful, Satisfying, and Insanely Profitable 2012
Posted on 04. Jan, 2012 by Sonia Simone in Blog, Featured, productivity, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Uncategorized
Obviously, everywhere you look this week, people are offering advice about what to do differently in 2012.
What to focus on. What habits to cultivate. What to stop doing. What to do more of.
Productivity, health, getting enough sleep, flossing your teeth.
Copyblogger spoiler alert: You can trust that in 2012 we’ll continue to push you toward better content, more effective copywriting, and creating success on your own terms.
I thought I’d join the fun and ask some of the brightest people I know — namely our brilliant Copywriter guest writers (plus a few friends of the blog) — to share their favorite “Pro Tip” for the new year.
So why read this list instead of a hundred others?
Because these are people who have built something worth having. They aren’t just talking about success, they’re creating it.
Some of them have “big name” blogs and some are well on their way, but they all have something to teach you. So without further ado:
31 smart ways to have an absolutely amazing 2012
Leo Babauta, Zen Habits
Don’t mistake busy-ness for effectiveness. Work on what matters, and don’t just be a whirlwind of activity. If you’re a blogger and you’re not creating content, you’re not doing what’s most important.
Chris Brogan, ChrisBrogan.com
This is the big year for video. If you haven’t jumped in, jump in this year. If you’re in, but still “phoning it in,” get in deeper. Make great video and make it matter to your business. Good lighting and good sound aren’t expensive, and editing does actually matter. Make this the big year for video for you and your business, and watch the rewards come to you.
James Chartrand, Men with Pens and Damn Fine Words
Learn from what you have done, believe in what you’re doing now, and look ahead to what you want to do next.
Susan Daffron, The Book Consultant
Step away from the computer. Your best writing ideas rarely arrive when you’re sitting at your desk. Take time for yourself and have fun with the people (and pets!) you love.
Sean D’Souza, Psychotactics
The insane way to getting things done, is to try and reach your goals all by yourself. As the African proverb says: “If you want to go quickly, go alone, if you want to go far, go with a group.”
Jonathan Fields, JonathanFields.com
To stay sane, productive and creative, pulse and refuel. Ninety minutes of intense focused work, then 10 to 30 minutes of any activities that completely removes you from work. Meditate, Walk, exercise, listen to music, eat great food. This allows the part of your brain responsible for problem-solving, attention and creativity to refuel and helps stoke self-regulation — aka willpower — that keeps the mean-nasties and distraction at bay.
Chris Garrett, Authority Blogger
One thing I learned from 2011 is that you can’t do this on your own. You have to network and connect, you need to collaborate. Another key lesson I am taking into 2012 is to implement. Take your ideas and test them, and don’t concern yourself with achieving perfection. Treat your projects as experiments not exams!
Charlie Gilkey, Productive Flourishing
It’s easy to want to go for a broader reader base as your blog gets more traction and it’s usually the worst thing to do. Be fanatical about upleveling the people keeping your lights on and it’ll work out much better for you in both the short and long term.
Jeff Goins, Jeff Goins Writer
When it comes to content marketing, the secret to success is helping people. Want to sell something? Teach. Need help networking? Serve. This business is all about earning permission and building trust; be over-the-top generous and see if people don’t notice you.
Jennifer Gresham, Everyday Bright
There are two kinds of mentors: those that help us develop a needed skill and those that help us cultivate the life we want to live. The former requires depth of experience, the latter breadth of experience. No matter how smart, talented, or successful you are, make sure you have at least one of each.
Chris Guillebeau, ChrisGuillebeau.com
To be awesome in 2012, ask what the world truly needs that you can genuinely provide. Then, spend some time every day for the rest of the year building that thing. Better get to work: you only have 361 days left.
Amy Harrison, Harrison Amy Copywriting
When you get overwhelmed by other peoples’ projects, step away and write. Whether jotting down ideas, or creating a blog post, just stuff everyone else and build your own bank of content bit by bit. Keep producing, publishing and testing and you won’t go far wrong.
Derek Halpern, Social Triggers
In 2012, stop promoting your silly social media profiles, and instead, build your email list (that’s what real businesses do right now, and it works beautifully). You might think your readers and customers are different, but they aren’t. They read email just like everyone else.
Lewis Howes, LewisHowes.com
In order to go big in 2012 with your business you’ll need to focus on three main things. First, overcoming your fear of failure — this will allow you to move forward with the things necessary to breakthrough. Second, staying focused — too many times we paralyze ourselves simply by lack of focus. Third, being consistent. Those who consistently take action win in the end.
Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA
Change the structure of your environment to support your goals. Behavioral change is easy when you STOP relying on willpower and START making small decisions to change the world around you. By making it impossible to do things you don’t want to do, and brain-dead easy to do things you want to do, you’ll get more of what you want and less of what you don’t.
Jennifer Louden, Teach Now
Identify an “ouch” spot in your business, like “How to engage students in my e-course?” or “How to format my newsletter?” Ask yourself, “What could I learn today that would help?” It’s so tempting to believe there is something wrong with you or your business when you get stuck, to forget that while you are surely an scintillating expert in your subject, you probably aren’t such a fount of knowledge in all that it takes to get your great work out in the world. Zero in on what you need to know right now, and get into action today.
Ali Luke, Aliventures
Get a friend to help edit your work, especially if you’re working on a paid product (such as an ebook) or a crucial part of your blog (such as a sales page). It’s incredibly hard to spot your own typos and clunky sections – a fresh pair of eyes makes a huge difference.
Hugh MacLeod, Gaping Void
Don’t spread yourself too thin. Pick one or two places that really matter- your blog and Twitter, say, and stick with them through thick and thin. Worry about the other places a lot less. You can’t be “everywhere,” and the ones who try never succeed.
Jon Morrow, Boost Blog Traffic
Instead of just setting goals for this year, also set sacrifices. Here’s the idea: your life is already too full, and if you’re going to add anything, first you have to take something out. So, decide what you will sacrifice. Is it your family? TV time? Perfectionism? Sleep? Job security? For every goal, choose one sacrifice.
Erika Napoletano, Redhead Writing
The question I get asked the most is “How do I expand my audience and reach more people?” The answer is to be yourself. It’s entirely too much work to be someone else and people can see through it in an instant. Be you, be true, have an opinion. Opinions start conversations — being wishy washy sends people running. Which do you think will help you build a following faster?
Amber Naslund, The hidden startup …
Have a day without calls or meetings where you can control your own pace and work on projects that motivate you. Workaholism isn’t impressive, and it doesn’t make you a rockstar or a martyr. It makes you burn out fast and hard. If you want a shot at kicking ass in 2012, recommit some time in your professional schedule to improvise or reset.
Sean Platt, Ghostwriter Dad
Every writer should be taking advantage of the Kindle, even if you don’t plan on making a full living through publishing. Many writers think self-publishing isn’t worth it since the dollars are low unless your sales rank is high. And while that’s true, front end dollars aren’t the only reason to publish. Using Amazon to publish your eBooks is one of the best sources of lead gen in the world, and smart writers should take advantage of the opportunity.
Roberta Rosenberg, MGP Direct
Read your copy aloud in a natural speed and cadence. It’s the fastest way to identify typos, weird tense changes, inconsistencies, run-on sentences, and non-conversational language. (Even faster tip? If you run out of breath reading a sentence aloud, it’s too long. Shorten it.)
Pamela Slim, Escape from Cubicle Nation
When building your business this year, remember that skill, competence and results are built by thousands of tiny actions taken on a daily basis. Once your main goals for the year are set, break your week, and day, into a handful of tasks so small they are almost insulting. Then execute for 365 days. Your results will be so much stronger than a string of all-nighters followed by 3 months of recuperation.
Stanford Smith, Pushing Social
Make your own rules and challenge the “best practices.” Remember it’s your business, your blog, your organization and you have to live with the results. No one ever made a difference by selling themselves short or preaching from the middle of the pack.
Terry “Starbucker” St. Marie
If there’s a key word for me in 2012, it’s going to be this one: Precision. There’s so little these days separating the business winners and losers, and we need to find every little advantage we can grab. We need precision — in our decision-making, in the quality of our products, and, most importantly, in our processes. How can we get this precision? The best way I know is to do something very analog in this digital world — talk to your customers. They’ll tell you everything you’ll need to know to get it.
Carol Tice, Make A Living Writing
Just ignore the negativity out there. Put your head down, make your plans, and market your ass off. There will be loads of opportunity out there for anyone who can offer something that helps people.
Johnny B. Truant, JohnnyBTruant.com
If you’re serious about producing something that’s unique, meaningful, and truly yours, do yourself a favor and pick up Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. You can read it in an afternoon. Most of what’s stopping you from getting what you need to get done is you, and the sooner you see exactly how that’s happening, the sooner you can start making your mark.
Andrea Vahl, AndreaVahl.com
Create an editorial calendar for Facebook so you don’t have to wonder what to post every day. Schedule at least 1-2 posts per day and make sure you are building in posts to promote your business (sales posts should be no more than 10-20% of your overall content). Maybe Monday is a helpful link in the morning and a social question in the afternoon. Tuesday could be a featured fan and then a hot tip. You get the idea.
DJ Waldow, Waldow Social
Whatever you do, however you feel, remember to smile and laugh every single day. If you are not having fun, why bother?
Pamela Wilson, Big Brand System
A writer I knew once was blocked
The blank white page sat and mocked
He took a short nap then
Filled out a mind map
And the exit for words was unlocked
Dan Zarrella, DanZarrella.com
Don’t be fooled by unicorns and rainbows myths about social media. Demand real data and science to prove every piece of advice you hear.
What’s your Pro Tip?
What’s your very best advice for how Copyblogger readers can have an incredible 2012? (If it’s a tip you need to implement yourself, that’s fine too!)
Let us know about it in the comments.
About the Author: Sonia Simone is co-founder and CMO of Copyblogger Media. Share your favorite pro tips for fabulous success with her on twitter.
Video SEO Basics – Whiteboard Friday
Posted on 23. Sep, 2010 by Aaron Wheeler in Uncategorized
Posted by Aaron Wheeler
Video SEO isn’t something we always think about when optimizing, but we really should. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Danny Dover reviews some of the video SEO basics that every SEO should know about. After all, it’s a largely untapped market, unlike the Canadian maple tree market. Which is very tapped. (The Canadian maple tree video market, however, is quite untapped, but based on my scientific and extremely boring research in YouTube, I don’t recommend you pursue that market at all).
Anyways, we have a very special visitor this week, what with all of Danny’s meta discussions this month. Great Scott! That’s what happens when you get all meta and self-referential on us, Danny.
Video Transcription
Hello, everybody. My name is Danny Dover. I work here at SEOmoz doing SEO. For today’s Whiteboard Friday we’re going to be talking about video SEO. Now, last week I mentioned that was the most meta video we’d ever done. It was optimizing SEO resources, right? Now, this one is a video on video SEO. So this one, this one is the new champion of the most meta video that we have ever done here, and possibly the most meta video that you have ever seen. If there is some kind of disruption in the space-time continuum, totally my fault. I apologize.
–1.21 Gigawatts!?!–
That was unexpected. That was Doc from Back to the Future. A poor impression of it. Totally derailing my Whiteboard Friday. You’re killing me.
All right. Now, video SEO, huge opportunity here. This is more of a serious thing. Video SEO has low competition. You see in the universal results that video thumbnails show up about a third of the way from the top, right. You’re seeing little thumbnails. A lot of times it’s YouTube, but you also see Vimeo and lots of other video providers showing up. You are seeing those in lots and lots of SERPs, and increasing so actually. There is a huge demand from people because, you know, Google is doing A/B testing or multivariate testing. They’re seeing people are clicking on those. But, at the same time, you’ll have low competition. You’ll see a lot of times for very high competition keywords that have video results that the video results will just be kind of mediocre. They just kind of showed up there. Part of that is because it is new. Not a lot of people are optimizing for video, which is becoming extremely important. So, a lot of opportunity there.
The other part of this, I guess I can only talk for the United States, where I live, but the way that people are starting to consume media is changing drastically. We’ve all seen YouTube. We’ve all seen Vimeo. Now the devices people are using and the places they are watching video are different. You have things like the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPayWayTooMuchForGadgets and I am an Apple fanboy, kind of thing. You’re seeing these all over the place. There is the Android model, the operating system that is running lots and lots of things. system. You’re seeing the way that people are consuming media very differently. The market is growing. Based on that, the demand is high but the competition is really low. Lots of opportunity. This smells like money to me. This is huge. This is a big deal.
How do you take advantage of this? Well, there are different metrics the search engines use to look at video content. When the search engines crawl normal content, they can get some kind of idea of what text is trying to say by using their natural language processing algorithms. They can get some idea of what this text says just simply because they put so much time and so much energy into developing these algorithms to get some kind of semantic feeling for what text means. Now, this doesn’t translate directly into video because, part of the reason at least, is video is much bigger files. It takes a lot more processing to get an understanding of it. It is a lot more zeros and ones. With these Google and the search engines have provided Meta information that you can do about a video.
The two most important ones here are the title of the video — what do you title your video. That’s probably what people are going to search for, right. If it is the shoes video on YouTube or whatever it may be on YouTube. Those are a lot of times what people are searching for. That information turns out to be very important for video SEO.
Likewise, the description is also very important because it gives you more than whatever may be the character limit, probably around 140, I would guess for the title. But it gives you more text to describe it in more depth. This helps the search engines understand the video without having to go through all the intensive video processing.
Now, as video SEO is maturing, we’re starting to see more and more metrics start to affect the algorithm. So, let me be totally straightforward with this. This is just my speculation. I have not done tests on these ones. But they seem very likely to be impacting the video search results. My guess would be that they’ll be more impactful going forward. So, they are something to start paying attention to now.
The first one I see here is engagement stats. The most obvious one here is views. How many times is a video viewed? I know that when I go to YouTube and I search for something, after I look at the text, the title and the description, I then look at the views. Has this been watched 30 times or has it been watched 10 million times? It seems very, very likely to me that click-through rates are going to correlate with high view rates also. So, I think views are becoming increasingly important and are something that you should keep an eye on.
Number two is ratings. So, on YouTube they offer a five-point scale. On things like Vimeo and other things, they use a thumb up and a thumb down. That’s more similar to the Reddit system. These are actual humans who are giving their opinions and their expertise on video content. This is very helpful because search engines are designed to provide results for humans. Any imput you can get from humans is helpful for getting output for humans. This is something that Google figured out very early and is something that is very important.
Number three, comments. What could be more human than commenting on videos? In YouTube’s case, it is some of the lowest thresholds of intelligence we’ve ever seen on the Internet, which is really saying something. You have floor chant, below that you have YouTube comments. It is kind of rough, right. But this is a metric of actual human beings engaging with content and with the author or producer of the video. This seems like a very important metric to me. I don’t think it is the content of the comments, because they are awful. But I think it is the volume of it and the kind of themes that people are talking about. Are they saying, “this is awesome” or “this sucks?” I think that does have some kind of impact on it.
The last one is social metrics. Really, I think this is universal. It is not just the video vertical; I think it is the other verticals as well. By social metrics, I mean things like the amount of tweets or what people are saying in tweets, Delicious popular saves, or submissions to Reddit or Digg or any of those other things. How are people talking about this with their friends? So, you have things like the QDF algorithm, which is Google’s Query Deserves Freshness algorithm. What this does is it will artificially inflate the ability for something to rank based on temporal metrics. So, if lots and lots of people are linking to something or tweeting about it, then it can artificially rank higher than things that normally wouldn’t just because it is very important. You see this a lot of times with natural disasters. Things will just rise to the top when normally they wouldn’t. Michael Jackson stuff. We saw lots and lots of QDF stuff really blowing, making things rank when normally there was no way they would. This is something to keep in mind also. These social metrics.
Now, duration. I think is the last one. This one is more about the extremes, finding the outlier. If a video is three seconds long, it is probably not something that Google, Bing, or Yahoo will want to rank highly. At the same time, if it is something that is multiple hours long, they might want to rank it, but it is probably not what people are going to look for when they are doing video. One of the things about video and content on the Internet in general is that people want to consume it quickly. They like bulleted lists. They like quick pictures, inforgraphic types of things, and they like short videos. I should probably take my own advice and get to the end here. So, I’ll try to do that.
The last one we have for you is tactics. I have expressed that there is a huge opportunity here. I have talked about some of the metrics that are important. Now, tactics, the search engines have given you several tools on how to do this. Video sitemaps is, not new, because video sitemaps have existed for a while, but the protocol was recently revamped by the major search engines and the people who are involved with that protocol. They’ve added a couple of things that are interested. They’ve added the location of the thumbnail of the video. They’ve added things like if it is family friendly or not. They’ve added the URL of where the video is embedded. So, from an SEO perspective, this is really interesting. We don’t want links going to YouTube anymore because YouTube has plenty of links. Instead, with the new video sitemap, you can provide the URL of where it is embedded and then when the search engines index that content they’ll link back to you. So, it’s not so much that you get a link from it per se, but you get the click-through. So, someone clicking on the SERP, clicking that thumbnail, is going to go to your blog, where you embedded the video, rather than to the hosting provider. This is a big win for us SEOs and for us content producers.
The other one is transcriptions. So, what could be easier than just going back and using the old tactics you already have for creating content? With transcriptions, you take video, you take the audio from the video, and you turn it into plain text. This is something that the search engines can then use and interpret just like they do a normal web page. This is important for search engines, but it is also important for human beings as well. People with hearing impairments who can’t hear this video right now can then go through and read it. They can understand it that way. International people who are speaking different languages can then go through the content and read at their own pace. They can do whatever tools they need to translate it. It helps spread it more. It is both good for humans and for users, which is a win-win and that’s always the situation I try to get when I do SEO.
I recommend that you always try to go for those win-wins, because ultimately what the search engines are doing is chasing after the idea of getting the best information to human beings. I think that’s what it really comes down to, crafting your content for human beings. It is harder to do with video SEO, but it is becoming more and more possible to do it.
I appreciate your time today. I will see you next week.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
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