Posted by RonGarrett

Keeping up with the rapidly changing pace of SEO best-practices can sometimes be as difficult as juggling flaming batons while reciting the alphabet backwards. As an agency or business owner, you need a checklist to help make sure you’re staying competitive, focusing on the right tactics, and building your business in the right direction. 

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Ron Garett discusses how to position your business for whatever the future of SEO may bring. Leave your thoughts and questions in the comments below!

For your viewing pleasure, here’s an image of the whiteboard used in today’s video:

Video Transcription

“Howdy SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Ron Garrett, and I work with Distilled out of their New York office. I’m just down here this week in Seattle, and Rand invited me over to tape an edition of Whiteboard Friday. Either which way, I hope you like it.

Today I’m going to primarily be talking to agencies, business owners, freelancers, and consultants. The topic is positioning your business for the future of SEO. Now we all know that SEO is rapidly changing. The skills that you need to be successful in SEO, whether it’s technical, being good with analytics and big data sets, UX design, content creation, all of these different facets, we need to constantly innovate and make sure that we’re at the top of our game.

What I’ve done today is put together a checklist of things that you, as an agency or a business owner, can go through your business and review to make sure that you’re staying competitive, to make sure that you’re focusing on the things that you should be focusing on, and really trying to figure out where you should be building your business.

Let’s go ahead and start off. Use the resources within your organization. Let’s go ahead and start over here.

First, start talking to your salespeople. They’re oftentimes the first defense to clients. So oftentimes when clients reach out, they’re going to be the first to talk to the clients and get a sense of what they’re looking for, get a sense of how they think about SEO, get a sense of how they’re spending for SEO and how their teams are working, their digital, their content, all those different teams are working together to be able to bring SEO and integrate it. Try to figure out what they doing, how they’re doing it, and how you can take that information and integrate it back into how you sell, how you talk to clients, those types of things.

Also talk to your consultants. They spend a great deal of time working with each of the clients that you have to have a deep understanding of their needs, what their business goals are, what the biggest opportunities are, and where the biggest flaws or weaknesses or challenges are within the organization. Talk to them and try to get a sense of where the common threads are across most of your clients.

Also, once you have a relationship with a client and your interests are aligned, reach out to them. Take them out to lunch and see how they’re doing. Get a sense of what’s going on in their organization, how they talk about SEO internally, how they spend on SEO internally. Is SEO at the table when everybody is discussing content strategy, technical and all these different things?

Also reach out to other companies in your industry. I think one of the things that I love most about the SEO community is the fact that it is just that. It’s such a great community of people. Even if you have a competitor that you may compete against for business, they still may be a great resource for you to go out and chat and see what’s worked well for them and what hasn’t worked well for them and see what the commonalities are there.

Also make sure that you’re following what’s going on in the industry. Making sure that you are either putting on events or attending events is a great way to see what are some common topics that are coming up quite frequently. Take a look at the trends and the commonalities there.

Also take a look at the talent and the people that are coming up within the industry and the things that they’re talking about, the things that they’re passionate about, and the things working for them. That’s a great way to keep a pulse on the industry.

Also take a look at emerging technology. There are some pretty impressive startups and impressive technology companies, like SEOmoz, Conductor, and all these different companies who are creating technology that allows SEO agencies and businesses to scale and be efficient within their organization. Take a look at those emerging technologies and see how you can utilize those as a business to take your business to the next level.

One big thing that we talk a lot about at Distilled is how we can continue to tinker and test ideas. This is really important because sometimes you won’t have enough knowledge. You don’t know what you don’t know. We encourage and recommend all of our consultants to continuously test and continuously tinker with things and figure out some interesting things that are working and not working. Oftentimes there is no way that we can plan for those types of knowledge gaps that we get there.

I also want to discuss really quickly what’s worked well for us here at Distilled is our value are set up as “Discover, Implement and Learn.” That’s really given us a nice framework to be able to make sure that we’re constantly testing things, we’re constantly putting things out there, we’re constantly figuring out what works and what doesn’t work, and we’re integrating that back into the solutions that we’re providing our clients. That’s been quite nice.

Next, you as an organization figure out whether or not you want to specialize or whether or not you want to be a comprehensive business, whether or not you want to provide a specific solution, such as integrating SEO with PR, or whether or not you want to be a full-fledged agency where you’re providing digital solutions from a technology standpoint, to content creation, to outreach, to digital PR. Really figure out what your niche is going to be. Even if you do choose to specialize, don’t think that you can’t take on other types of work. It just helps customers understand what your value proposition is and what they can expect when they come to you. You can always show them other things that you’re capable of providing, but I think having that starting point can be really beneficial.

Here is a checklist that I put together of when you’re looking to assess your business and figure out, “All right, where are my strengths? Where are my weaknesses? Where can I make improvements?” Start to look at if you were to make certain decisions within your business, what are the different risks and rewards that you would get out of making certain decisions and try to forecast a little bit. Try to take a look at some of the data that you’ve accumulated over time and think, “If I were to make this decision for my business today, what are some of the things that I can anticipate?”

Also, it’s important to take a look at your current strategy to see what’s working and what’s not working and continue to improvise upon that. Reevaluate that strategy and figure out what’s working and what’s not working.

Also, I think it’s important to have a good balance between aspirational and pragmatic. Take a look at the things that you as a business can accomplish in the short term, given the resources that you guys have, and how you need to think about achieving some of your long-term goals and being realistic. Figure out ways you can get that kind of minimal viable product out there. Figure out what’s working and what’s not working and continue to innovate on top of that. That can be really beneficial as well.

Also evaluate your company mission, vision, and values. I know a lot of companies are taking a look at the values and making a lot of their decisions based on their values. So making sure that with where your company is at and where your business is at that those things still apply. Those things can be really powerful drivers for why somebody would want to come work for you, why somebody would continue to stay working for you, and the purpose they get out of the job they have. Just make sure that you’re constantly looking at and evaluate that.

I also think it’s important to take a look at the client mix. Take a look at the percentage of clients that are currently on a project basis versus a retain basis. These types of things can influence cash position and cash flow within your organization, and looking for ways to either drive up the amount of retained clients that you have or figuring out just really beneficial projects that you can take on that are either going to drive the knowledge gap forward or drive the cash flow position forward. Just make sure that the types of projects that you are bringing on are helping you achieve your goals.

Take a look at your company and your employees, and take a look at their strengths and weaknesses. I think being pragmatic about that as well can be very beneficial, especially when you start to reach critical mass at your company. You go from 10 employees to 50 employees, 50 employees to 100 employees, and the dynamic of your company starts to shift, and you get a very eclectic group of people that end up coming in that all have different strengths and talents, and they get very passionate about different things. Understanding the dynamics that those play and what works well with one another can be really important for you to understand when making these types of business decisions.

It’s also important to understand as a company your tolerance for risk. You can have all the aspirations in the world, but if your company hesitates to make certain types of decisions and you don’t feel like it’s a decision that you can fully make and commit to, it may be good to reevaluate whether or not that decision is something that you should look to make further down the line or what type of infrastructure or what things you would need to be able to make that decision sooner. Just being realistic about the tolerance levels that you have at your organization.

Take a look at how you currently make money. At different companies we love the places we work, and ultimately we have to be able to figure out ways to be able to make money. Taking a look at where your big drivers for cash are and how those are marking your company money can be really beneficial.

Future aspirations. We all want to have goals. We all want to work toward something that’s going to create purpose for us, that’s going to help us get to where we want to be, and we want to make sure they’re big enough to where it’s not easy for us to attain in the short term, but it’s something that we can all believe in and work towards as a company. I think figuring out what your future aspirations are, both at a company level and at an employee level, can be very, very powerful.

Last, but not least, if you’re looking to make investments in your organization, understanding the types of investments that you can and cannot make now based on your current cash flow position or whether or not you have access to capital and just understanding the dynamics between that can help determine how quickly you can make certain decisions or what types of clients you’re going to have to bring on before you can make those types of decisions.

I know I’ve provided you with a lot of information today, but ultimately I wanted to help give you a framework and a checklist for you, the business owner or the agency, to take a step back and to evaluate your company, to evaluate your employees, to evaluate all the things that make you great, and to evaluate the areas where you need to make improvements and get to where you want to be. I think once you have a deeper understanding of all this, it will help you make business decisions, it will help you communicate those decisions to the employees there, and it can help empower people at your organization to do some pretty incredible things.

So get out there, keep building.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by becole

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

As you likely already know, the goal of content marketing is to build up familiarity and trust with your prospective customers. In this case, the content isn’t designed to sell a specific product or service, but rather to sell you, and to interested potential customers.

People buy from people that they know, like, and trust. And if you haven’t heard it yet, let me be the first to tell you that “familiarity” breeds trust.

Content marketing certainly isn’t new, but it’s been getting a lot of new attention online lately (and for good reason). Small business owners across the globe are re-discovering these tried and true marketing practices, and using them to get a big leg up on the competition.

One of the really big advantages small business owners have over the titans of industry is that you can get much more personal with your target audience than they can. You have a face and a voice. You can be human with your audience. And, as it turns out, one of the best ways to do that is by talking to your customers. One of the best ways to get a feel for some of the best-practices around the industry is to follow and watch how others are succeeding. As such, I’ve cherry-picked some of my favorite content marketing tips from experts around the web.

1. Don’t build on rented land

Publish your best content on web properties that you personally own (i.e., your own self-hosted website). Social media has hit the business world like a freight train, and there is great value in spreading your message far and wide via these cheap media channels. The point of all that chatter, though, is to get all those eyeballs back to your own site. Once they’re there, it’s time to convert them, either into customers or, at the very least, into email list subscribers. Social media is for mingling and chatting (and, obviously, marketing). Your own site is where the magic should happen. That’s where you answer your potential clients’ questions in depth. That’s where you create loyalty.

Social media is great. Use it aggressively, but never forget what you’re using it for: to get all those eyeballs back to your own site for conversion.

“Before you create a single piece of content, think about where that content will live and how audiences will get to it. Effective content marketing takes work. You’ll need energy, thought, and time to create good content. This means that nearly all of the content you create needs to live on a domain you control, using a platform you can do as you please with. That means you’re not producing the bulk of your creative content for Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, and you’re not publishing on a “website in 20 minutes” solution that forces you to use someone else’s domain. If your domain isn’t www.YourWebsiteName.com, you don’t own your platform. If you can’t publish what you please, with the wording, sales messages, and images you please, you don’t own your platform.”

- Sonia Simone via copyblogger.com

2. Help, not hype, your customer

The goal of content marketing is to allow the potential customer to develop a trusting relationship with you. One of the best ways to develop that trust is by answering customer questions and offering information in a clear, honest, and transparent way.

If the product or service that you offer is part of that message, then feel free to reference it. But if your content comes across more like an advertisement or a sales letter, then you’re not doing content marketing; you’re doing sales and advertising.

Trust is not built by pushing sales. Trust is built by selflessly helping people looking for help. In fact, anything but hard selling will probably do just fine. Some people tell personal stories. Some people seek to entertain. Some people seek to inform. It all depends on your target audience. What are they interested in? What do they care about? As long as you’re not selling, the possibilities are pretty much endless.

“Content marketing is not just about amplifying your message to your customer, it is about helping them find what they are looking for. Discover your customer needs by searching what they are looking for online and what they are saying about your category/sector. Provide them with a program to meet these needs, whether it directly impacts your business or not. Your audience will find the help useful and you will become top of mind when they are looking for someone in your sector. And don’t forget the power of the face to face contact or ‘just asking’ the question.”

- Kaitlin Walsh via bluechipcommunication.com.au

3. Write what people want to read, not what you want to write

If you’re planning to succeed in your content marketing efforts, there is one big thing that you have to understand right from the start: it’s not about you. It’s never about you. It’s not about your company. It’s not about your product. It’s not about your service. It’s not about how great your company/product is. It’s not about the amazing charity work your president does. It’s not about how fun it is to work at your company. It’s NEVER about you. And the minute you try to make it about you, that’s when you lose their trust, and that’s when you lose another potential customer.

Repeat after me: It’s ALWAYS about them, never about you. This is content marketing. It’s not sales, and it’s not advertising. If you want to do sales and advertising, that’s perfectly fine, but just don’t do it in your content marketing. Write for the reader, always.

“Your content should always have an audience in mind. That means you should have their needs in mind, too, not your own. Remember, content marketing should provide something valuable to people. So although you may want to write about how terrible your day was or how someone should do something about the lines at delis in grocery stores, that’s not the kind of thing people will want to read. They want to read something that’s written about the things they’re thinking about. So ask yourself what concerns and delights your audience, then go from there.”

- Blaise Lucey via constantcontact.com

4. Reference industry influencers

Even if you are the undisputed thought leader in your specific niche or areas of expertise, it doesn’t mean that you are the only person with something valuable to add to the conversation. In fact, you make yourself seem more trustworthy and confident when you reference other players in the marketplace.

I’m not saying that you have to specifically cite your direct competition (although sometimes that’s a great idea) but people are way better informed these days than you might think they are. Customers are savvy. They know that you’re not the only expert, so if you try to pretend that you, are guess what? Say it with me this time: they start trusting you less.

Referencing other experts is also a great way to show that there are others that agree with what you’re saying. This is huge. Guess what else? Search engines love it, too. And just in case you’re not fully convinced yet, try this one. The people that you reference will be thrilled that you mentioned them, and will likely help promote your content for you for free! Ahhh, viral marketing, sharing…everybody wins!

“When discussing a specific topic within your content marketing piece, it can be helpful to reference and cite individuals who are known to the audience and have authority on the topic. People love to see their own names published and will likely promote the content on their own for free, thus further spreading the exposure and influence of your brand and its expertise.”

- Marc Purtell via searchenginejournal.com

5. Create content for all types of readers

Branch out from your normal niche and target readers in a wider variety of related niche. This doesn’t mean that you go way off on a huge tangent from your core demographics, but people do have other interests. For example, accountants aren’t just interested in accounting.

Let’s say you’re a real estate broker. What things, other than buying a house, are people moving to a new city interested in? People with houses often have pets. Where are the best dog parks in your area? People with houses often have kids. Where are the best schools in your area? Best restaurants in the area? Best home improvement contractors in the area? Best landscapers in the area? Best doctors in the area?

Let’s also revisit #4 here for a minute. How thrilled do you think the local contractor/doctor/restaurateur will be with you and your company if you reference and link to them in a piece of your marketing content? Especially if it’s a ‘best of’ type post, you’ll come out ahead. 

That may have been an easy example, but use your imagination for your specific industry/niche. What other things are your target customers interested in? You know your customers better than I do (right?).

Another point is that people have friends, and you never know who will see your content and pass it on to a friend that they think it will be more useful for. I do this all the time, and I’ll bet you do, too. I may not care about buying a house, but if I happen to see a post entitled ‘Best Pizza Shops in Yourtown, USA’ written by a local real estate agent, I may just tell my friends that are looking for a new house how cool I think your real estate agency is for writing such a post.

These actions go a long way toward showing your customers that you care about them and that you’re trying to help them, not just trying to sell them on your company. That, more than anything else (arguably), builds massive trust.

“The cardinal rule of content marketing says that you need to create content for your ideal reader in order to attract the right leads and customers. Most companies follow this to the T, no matter how niche their industry is. So even though their content is excellent, it does not get seen by too many people. Content marketing success takes time and I suggest that you create content for readers other than your ideal reader so that it attract more traffic to your website and social media pages. Instead of focusing on creating just one type of content for your target audience, create some popular content to service other readers.” 

- Jessica Davis via socialmediatoday.com

6. There is more to content than links

Content marketing is so far above and beyond the classic SEO link building tactics of the past. These days, it is likely better to think of links in terms of the direct traffic you’ll get from them, rather than any SEO benefits they may or may not contribute. I’m not suggesting that backlinks are no longer important for SEO. What I’m suggesting is a change in mindset. Links that will actually get clicked through to your site are the better ones for SEO, anyway.

That being said, if you think of content marketing as a way to get link juice, you’re doing it wrong. Content creation is all about engagement building and trust building. Let the SEO benefits work themselves out. What’s good for engagement and trust is also good for search engine optimization.

A link from a reputable site is valuable because of the number of people that will click on it and come learn more about you and your company. And it just so happens that the search engines will love it for that exact reason too; win-win.

“Content Marketing is so much more than getting links. It’s the glue that holds your funnel together. It’s the reason a prospect visits your site, it’s the reason they choose to move further down the purchase path, buy a product and return to your site time and again.”

- Kieran Flanagan via seomoz.org

7. Don’t forget the “marketing” in content marketing

Until now, I’ve talked mostly about content creation, but there is one other huge piece to this content marketing puzzle: content promotion.

It’s incredibly shocking, but one of the biggest problems I see is that small business owners seem to be embarrassed about promoting their content. None of them seem to have any trouble trying to promote their products and services within their content, but once the content has been created, they’re timid about telling people it exists.

My best guess is that they’re not proud of their content. Maybe that they don’t think their writing is very good, or that their content is boring, or something along that vein. If that’s the case, let me try to help you a bit with that.

In general, if you’re being helpful, people don’t really care if your writing is a little rough around the edges. If you’re getting people the information and answers that they’re looking for, they will very easily forgive non-perfect writing. In fact, very often it can make you seem even more human to them.

Furthermore, the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it. Nobody starts out being a great writer, a great blogger, or a great content marketer, but the sooner you start ‘practicing,’ the sooner you’ll get better at it. I promise, it gets a lot easier very, very quickly. As a matter of fact, read my I Hate Blogging post here and you will see I am in the same shoes as many people who struggle with writing.

You don’t ever have to be perfect; you just have to help and/or entertain your readers. If you do that and keep working at it, you’ll be fine. But you must promote your content. If you don’t promote it, then no one will ever read it, in which case, it’s useless. The days are long gone where you could just post a new piece of content and hope that people would find it via search (or because you had built boatloads of spam links to it).

As discussed in point #1 above, this is where social media and your social media connections come in. Use your social channels to guide traffic back to your freshly minted content. If people like you on social media, they’ll want to learn more about you. Give them a way to do that.

If you’re just starting out on sharing your content through social media, here’s an example of what you can say:

“Hey there folks, I just wrote up a quick post about some cool local resources I’ve been working on recently. If you have a moment, take a quick peek and let me know what you think. I’m just getting started with this whole content marketing thing, so any feedback you can give me will be greatly appreciated. Here’s the link, thanks!”

This may be the one piece of advice I can give you that will determine your fate in content marketing more than any other. If you are too embarrassed to promote your content, then you may as well give up on the whole idea of content marketing right now. Go do PPC instead.

“Do you know why your content marketing campaign is going to fail? It’s not because you can’t write great content… it’s actually because you don’t know how to promote it. You can learn how to write great content, but if no one reads your content and links to it, there’s no point in putting it out there.”

- Neil Patel via quicksprout.com

8. It’s all about relationships

If people can see you actively participating and being a team-player, then they will treat you accordingly; as a member of the team. [ Insider Tip: That's the goal! ] The bottom line with social is this: you have to be an active member of the team. It’s not enough to just stop in and share a few things here and there, a day or two before you’re going to need those same people to share your stuff for you. You have to be active. You have to be part of the team; a member of the community. It’s not a wishy-washy kind of thing. It’s a commitment; a commitment to your community. Your network depends on you to be there for them, just like they are there for you.

This doesn’t mean that you have to be on social sites all day long. This also doesn’t mean that you have to promote every piece of content that every member of your social network produces. It does mean however, that you stay involved and engaged consistently.

If people see you actively sharing and promoting other people, they will be that much more likely to share and promote your stuff when the time comes. The time to make friends on social media channels is way before you need them.

“I’ve heard this mantra a lot, but it wasn’t until my first crack at this that I really understood how crucial relationships were. The people who were ultimately the ones to contribute something to the post were the ones I built the best relationships with. They were the ones that (for whatever reasons) responded to comments I left on their blog posts or replied to my tweets in the initial weeks. They were the ones who I was able to engage with in a personal way over email. And now they’re the ones who are appreciative of the opportunity and exposure and are interested in working with me again in the future.”

- Mike Arnesen via mikearnesen.com

9. Think like a publisher

Whatever business you’re in, your website and/or blog is now a venue for that industry/niche. That’s just pure fact; no way around it. The trick, though, is learning to re-train your brain to treat it as such. Go down to your local book store and grab a few magazines that catch your eye, and then study them. Study their format, study their layout, study their focus. Whether you like it or not, you are in the “online magazine” publishing business now. The fun part is that you get to talk about stuff you’re already an expert in.

Use your site to engage, entertain, and inform. That’s all you really have to do. The hardest part is remembering to do that every time you sit down to write another piece of content. One of the quickest/easiest ways to do that is to write content that answers common customer questions. That sounds simplistic, but it’s incredibly useful and engaging for people seeking answers. And if you can do that in a fun interesting way; all the better.

“You are not an advertiser [emphasis added]. An advertiser disrupts but a publisher educates and connects in a two way communication. Don’t put too much emphasis on your brand. The goal is to engage your visitors and in due time, your brand will get the proper recognition. Always put value in your content. To be accurate, content is not king but value is. It’s not enough to have content that is readable and no grammar mistakes. What matters is the substance of the content. What’s in it for your visitors? What value will they get?”

- Mark Acsay III via webbythoughts.com

10. Use other sites to find out what kind of content people want

I saved this one for last because it always seems to be a major sticking point with small business owners, and I wanted it to be fresh in your mind as you finish up this post. Small business owners oftentimes think that they have nothing to say, and nothing to write about.

We started this conversation in #2 above, and then again in #9 talking about answering customer questions in a fun, interesting way (and that should get you started in a big way), but eventually, you’ll probably want to start branching out a bit with your topic ideas. The best way to do that is to watch what your competition is writing about, and also what other industries closely related to yours are writing about.

Read other good blogs on your topic and then just write similar articles with your own opinions and insights on the same topic, and try to make it better. I’m not suggesting that you copy anything from them obviously; just that you get inspired from them. This is also a great way to incorporate #4 and #8 above.

Everyone does this. Everyone gets inspiration from things that they see (and read) elsewhere; it’s how the world works. Inspiration comes from building on top of what has come before.

This very post is a perfect example. I was inspired by the people that I quoted here. I read their posts, I picked my favorite tips from each of them, and then I added my own thoughts on the topics. I didn’t have to quote and cite them, this post would have been perfectly fine on its own, but I did quote and cite them because it makes for a more interesting and engaging article. Plus it helps with a bunch of the other tips mentioned above.

“Sometimes it’s hard to know what people want to read about. One way to find this out is to visit sites within your industry. Check their blogs and see what posts get the most tweets and shares. In the internet marketing niche, social media is all the rage. If you write a post about Facebook or Twitter, it’s guaranteed to get more shares. Do some research to find out what kind of post are popular in your industry and write that type of content. You don’t want to write these types of posts every time, but it’s a great way to boost traffic when it fits into your publishing schedule.”

- Joseph Putnam via kissmetrics.com

Conclusion

It’s a wonderful time to be a small business owner. The Internet and content marketing has made it possible for us to stop chasing the media, and instead, become the media. You are now a magazine publisher for your own industry (and/or a local niche). Your voice can be as big or as small as you want it to be. It can start small and then grow. Or it can just stay small and that’s okay too. You are in total control here. There’s no reason to ever feel intimidated by the process because you control the process.

Just remember, the goal of content marketing and its sidekick social media marketing is to inform and entertain prospective customers in a way that inspires them to trust you for the right reasons; authentic, legitimate, deserving and well-earned trust. When the time comes for them to buy something, they buy from people they trust: you. Which, as I may have mentioned once or twice already, is the whole point of all this stuff. Trust, trust, trust; burn that into your brain. Content isn’t king. Trust is king. Content is just how you get there.

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Posted by James Finlayson

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

How do you get links in a post-penguin world? For far too many the answer seems to be, exclusively, guest posting. Today I’m going to give you four reasons why I think this tactic is as dangerous as those it replaced.

Note: I’m not about to say that ‘all’ guest posting is bad – in the same way not all directories are automatically spammy. I’m also not about to say ‘all’ guest bloggers will be penalised. What I will do is point out the dangers of guest posting as Google becomes increasingly intelligent; and what you can do to avoid them.

Link Quality

Penguin really hurt sites that relied on low-quality links. Many have responded by setting a minimum domain authority threshold when prospecting. To keep the process efficient they then remove sites with a DA over a certain level – seeing these as less likely to accept content.

No new site owner ever sat down and thought ‘hmm, well I best not link to buybluewidgets.com today, my domain authority’s only 28 – I’ll wait a few months’. Equally, the reason Mashable’s not linking to you isn’t because your DA has yet to hit a magical level. If you offer something of value links naturally come from a huge variety of high, medium and low quality sites. High quality links are rare naturally, that’s part of what makes them so valuable, but they do occur. As a result, a completely natural link portfolio looks something like this:

I’ve now started to see new sites, fresh out of a ‘successful’ outreach campaign whose link portfolio looks like this:

There’s little way that this could have occurred un-engineered and, if it’s obvious to us then it’ll be obvious to Google too.

“Mass guest posting is dangerous because it creates an unnatural looking link quality graph.” [tweet]

Link Type

Conventional wisdom tells us that directories are bad, blogs are good and academic links are amazing. Tools like Link Research Tools and Linkdex allow you to break up your competitors’ links by type – if SEO tools can do this then so can Google. I took a vertical at random and wasn’t surprised to see this:

It’s not unusual to find sites with a huge percentage of their links coming from directories and these are sites we currently think of as having engaged in low-quality link building. So your site proudly strides in to the market and builds this profile:

I’m not saying that you need to replicate the industry standard – that’s not going to put you ahead of your competitors. I am saying “A link profile made up of only one type of link looks unnatural – whatever those links are.” [tweet]

Link Location

Google devalued footer links because they’re too easy to game. Google devalued sidebar links because they were being purchased en masse. Are links in author boxes next? When you’re consistently relying on links in guest-post author boxes you’re building a very obvious footprint. Due to the author box’s proximity to the author markup, relatively standard layout and positioning on the page it would be incredibly easy for Google to algorithmically target them in the same way it did sidebars and footers.

When a link’s in the middle of a post there’s an assumption that it’s there because it’s relevant. When a link’s in the author box it’s rarely there for the benefit of the user – it’s the writer’s payment for the post. It’s a box in which the author advertises themselves. So it could be argued the author box is a form of paid advertisement. How long until Matt Cutts does a video saying those links should be no-followed?

That’s all before you consider that the link’s in a box that gets skipped over by readers. That means you can expect virtually no traffic from it. Wouldn’t it be better to be building links that drive traffic as well as rankings?

“Anchor-text-heavy links in author boxes look fishy, even to non-marketers; let’s stop building them.” [tweet]

Authorship

Google’s really started to push authorship as an important signal. So, many guest bloggers have used their own name (or repeatedly the same name) in each of their guest posts to build up their authority. This has led to a great new form of competitor link-building. If you’re an agency, this creates a competitive issue:

Whoever you are, this creates two other problems:

1. Your competitors can Google your name and easily find your link-building efforts – no SEO tool necessary.
2. Whichever domain you’re building links to has a large number of their links coming from a single author.

Every SEO knows how important domain diversity is; having a large number of your links coming from a single author is the authorship version of putting them all on the same domain. Assuming all other factors are equal (including average link quality), which of these do you think Google would be likely to rank more highly:

In real life it’s natural to assume a company that has lots of people talking about it is more important than one nobody’s heard of – that has very few people mentioning it; shouldn’t Google follow the same principal with linking authors?

Let’s assume Google gets smarter still. On your Google profile there’s a nice box for you to enter your employment history. What if Google used that data to make a graph similar to this?

Search engines see links as an indicator of quality because they’re essentially recommendations. If most of a company’s recommendations are coming from its own employees would you trust them? You’d probably just ignore those recommendations. What if Google decided to discount all links created by a company’s own employees? Simpler still, what if Google decided to ignore all links created by SEOs where those links are in articles that aren’t talking about SEO? Google’s collecting all this data now, why wouldn’t it use it?

“One person authoring the majority of your links looks like link building – because it is.” [tweet]

Fundamentally, this all comes back to Dr Pete’s Top 1 SEO Tips For 2013 – diversify. Each of the issues is a problem of oversimplifying the link building process. I’m convinced that taking a holistic view to inbound marketing not only provides the highest ROI, but will increasingly become the only ‘safe’ way to aggressively grow a company’s reach online.

Takeaways:

1. Don’t rely on any one type of site for a majority of your links; build links of all types into your plans.
2. Be aware of the quality of links you’re building, but make sure to keep the overall portfolio looking natural.
3. Don’t use a single author for all your content – vary it between different, real, people. When using external writers, use their authorship to help further vary the mix.
4. Split up different parts of a client’s campaign between different team members; that way there should naturally be a slightly different approach applied across the client’s links.
5. Oversimplifying a link building process may make it faster, but the footprint it generates also makes it riskier.

Have you begun to scale back, or even phase-out, guest posting? Let me know in the comments below.

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Posted by KelseyLibert

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Let’s assume you know the basics: content marketing is one of the best ways to engage with audiences and potential customers online. It is useful for improving search rankings, increasing brand engagement and loyalty, increasing brand visibility, and encouraging social sharing and interaction. If you are a consumer-facing company in this day and age, you simply cannot keep up with the competition if you are not actively building your content marketing skill set. 

Easier said than done though, right? You’ve probably dabbled in content marketing before, or maybe even hired a “top agency.” Maybe you have even seen some results; a few links here, a few hundred shares there, but then what? Certainly no fireworks, no massive ranking improvements, and no lead or sale increases. Maybe it wasn’t the panacea you’d hoped it might be. Short on time and money, you probably gave up and reinvested your money into tried and true marketing practices that could at least drive a few conversions. You chalked content marketing up to something too expensive or too difficult to find any real success with.

If any of this resonates with you, you are most definitely not alone. Doing content marketing properly is no easy task, and to beginners it can seem to be next to impossible to create anything that will stand out and get noticed. Add to that the explosion of agencies who claim to be gurus and deliver tragically poor results, and the whole “content marketing” arena can start to feel like a convoluted mess that can’t deliver on its promises.

So, what do you do? Other tactics are losing efficacy, your site is losing rankings, you can’t get social engagement for the life of you, and your frustration level is at an all-time high.

You go back to the beginning, and you relearn the truth about what it takes to come up with content that works: content that shows what content marketing can really do for your business. Content marketing that can transform a company overnight.

When content goes viral: The example above shows a near 10 fold increase in our client’s organic search traffic (from Google alone) after a single successful viral campaign. The big spike in the beginning of December marks the launch of the campaign.

Step 1: Understanding the truth about your competition

You may assume when you first begin that your only competition are your business competitors, the companies online that fight for the same search phrases, or sell the same products or services. When it comes to content marketing, these businesses are only the beginning. What you must remember is that when creating content, you are fighting for attention against EVERYONE; all content creators, not just businesses. Your content must stand its ground against those who are creating content for entirely non-commercial reasons. This means that when coming up with your campaigns, you must not only do better than your competitors, but you must do better than almost everyone talking about your subject area.

Step 2: Engagement is good, but viral is better

In content marketing, going the incremental route can be an effective way to go. Loyal audiences can be built by creating a great deal of relevant, useful, but not particularly viral content. Through persistence and often grueling content creation schedule it is possible to find a positive ROI over the long term. If you have the capacity to pump out 5-7 thoughtful and moderately useful pieces of content weekly, eventually you will likely see good results. However, as Rand Fishkin said, you have to “be willing to fail for a long time.” 

In fact, for companies that can afford it, this can be an essential piece of the content marketing pie, and it is often something we recommend to our clients who have longer timelines. But this style of content marketing will not change your business in the short term. It can take years of consistent effort to see substantial improvements in rankings and in audience growth.

What if you don’t have years; don’t have the time, energy, or budgets to create compelling content on a regular basis; or simply need to build an audience fast? The answer is this: you must create something viral; content that can spread in a way that creates massive attention. Content that will boost you above the writhing masses, and make others take notice.

Below, you can see our viral content marketing campaign results, which impacted our client’s 271% organic traffic increase. It’s important to note that these results were generated by a single outreach placement on Buzzfeed.com, with a nofollow link.

Step 3: Understanding what it means to “go viral”

If you have done any reading on viral marketing, you have probably come across attempts at formulas for describing virality, but none that have made it very concrete beyond the understanding that to go viral means to have a high level of visibility. The truth is that virality and the act of going viral isn’t really all that complex. Having something “go viral” relies on having specific values for three important variables. These variables include:

I’ve adapted a spreadsheet that looks at how these factors actually influence the anatomy and eventual success or failure of a piece of content. The bones of this spreadsheet were originally created by Mark Devisser. Feel free to make a copy of this document and play around with the three variables mentioned above. As a note, you will likely notice some key aspects of virality just from playing with this including:

• True virality along with the telltale “hockey stick” graph can not be created without a viral coefficient of greater than “1.” The higher the coefficient, the faster the spread of the content and also the sooner and more abrupt the hockey stick you will see on the graph.
• The size of the initial seed is important for the length of time from the initial publishing it takes for virality (hockey stick) to happen. The larger the initial seed, the sooner you will see a potential viral effect, assuming the coefficient is still greater than 1.
• Extending the cycle time will extend the length of time it takes to see a viral effect (hockey stick) Fortunately, with web based content, the cycle time happens extremely quickly thanks to social channels and the nature of digital content. If you were measuring the virality of say a snail mail chain letter, the cycle time would be on the order of weeks, and creating virality would take much longer assuming a viral coefficient greater than 1.
• The size of the Total Available Market has an enormous bearing on the total number of cumulative views. This makes it extremely important to think about your target audience during idea development. If you want a viral smash, you must have content that appeals to the masses (more on this later).

Step 4: Creating content with a viral coefficient above 1

So, understanding what virality is great, and understanding the levers for virality is even better, but how does this translate specifically to content? How do you take the ideas we just learned and make them work for you in your content marketing efforts?

To begin, the first, most important, and most difficult step is to create a piece of content that you think will likely have a viral coefficient greater than 1. When it ultimately comes down to it, there is no perfect way to gauge whether or not a particular piece of content will have a viral coefficient above 1. Ultimately, you won’t know until your content gets out onto the Internet. However, by exploring the top-level qualities that exist within most viral content with a coefficient above 1, it is possible to give yourself a much higher probability of viral success.

Strong emotional drivers

Put simply, emotions drive almost all behavior. When an emotion is triggered in your brain, your nervous system responds by creating a subjective experience (feelings). A great deal of your decisions are informed by your emotional responses because that is what emotions are designed to do: to appraise and summarize an experience and inform your actions. The stronger the feeling, the more likely to spur a responsive action.

When it comes to sharing online, the potential actions related to emotional activation are relatively simple. Essentially there are four options for your typical content consumer when approaching a new piece of content.

• Engage or disengage
• Share or don’t share

In order for a content consumer to share, they must engage first with the content, and then make the decision to share that content. These actions are mediated entirely by emotions. Many brain researchers and scientists agree that emotion of interest is continually present in the normal mind under normal conditions, and it is the central motivation for engagement in creative and constructive endeavors and for the sense of well-being. Interest and its interaction with other emotions account for selective attention, which in turn influences all other mental processes. Thus, in order to get someone to engage with your content, it must first and foremost pique interest. It is for this reason that titles are so massively important. Without a title that piques interest beyond an undefined threshold, there will be no engagement.

Assuming you’ve piqued your readers interest with an interesting title and have passed the first stage, your content must now convince the reader to share. The decision making process for this, as defined by prominent psychologist Richard Lazarus is as follows:

• Cognitive appraisal: The individual assesses the event cognitively, which cues the emotion.
• Physiological changes: The cognitive reaction starts biological changes such as increased heart rate or pituitary adrenal response.
• Action: The individual feels the emotion and chooses how to react (or not).

If the cognitive appraisal spurs a strong enough emotion, and resultantly large physiological change, the probability of action is increased. In the case of sharing content, if the cognitive appraisal cues a strong enough emotion and resultant physiological response to overcome factors that antagonize sharing the reader will share the content.

So, how do we create strong emotional drivers in our content?

In the fast paced online environment, you will only ever have a short amount of time to get the attention of a viewer. Your goal should be to capture the attention of a viewer, and then engage them emotionally as quickly as possible. The faster and more deeply you are able to engage their emotions, the more likely the viewer is to invest themselves enough in the content to share it. Let’s by addressing speed:

While this is a great start in understanding the emotional drivers of sharing, it is a very incomplete understanding. In an effort to further detail the real emotional drivers, I sought to understand the emotional impact of content that better fit the criteria of most viral content (i.e. visual, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-consume content).

Exclusive Fractl research project: viral emotions 

*It is important to begin by noting here that the following experiment is not scientific or widely comprehensive. Despite this, there is a good deal of preliminary information that speaks to some of the most apparent aspects of the emotional drivers of viral content, and the takeaways found are likely quite valuable. Research of greater depth will likely bear out additional information and more granular insights.* (Raw Data)

I began by selecting a group of content that fit what I believed would be representative of the “best of the best” in viral content. To make sure I was comparing apples to apples, I decided only to use static images instead of written or multimedia content. Memes and inside jokes were also excluded as the factors that lead to them becoming viral can be non-emotional and more difficult to analyze or ascertain.

The source of the content I used came from the top 50 image posts of all time on reddit.com/r/pics, a community of 3.4 million plus content voters. I selected 25 images that I felt could stand alone, ones that required no previous knowledge to understand (Reddit tends to boost inside joke type content on occasion, so post that fit that profile were excluded).

I then had each image coded by 50 volunteers for the emotions that were elicited by each image as well as the strength of each emotion. The possible choices for the emotions included: 

Possible emotion choices

What we learned

The results from this informal survey on some of the web’s most viral visual content was actually quite amazing. Much of what we found mirrored the results found by Jonah Berger, but we also found some interesting additional takeaways. What we found was as follows:

1. Positive emotions were much more common than negative emotions (14 negative and 184 positive).
2. Certain specific emotions were extremely common, while others were extremely uncommon.
3. The strength of the emotional impact was a great indicator for the popularity of the content on Reddit. The top four most popular posts on Reddit also had the top four highest aggregate emotionality scores (sum of emotional strength score totals).
   
4. Interest, surprise, and amusement seemed to behave as emotional multipliers for positive emotions, and empathy seemed to act as an emotional multiplier for negative emotions. 12 of the 25 images had Amusement, Interest, and Surprise as 3 of their top emotions and all images had at least 1 of the 3 emotions (either Amusement, Interest, or Surprise).
5. Contrasting emotions seemed to be helpful in increasing emotional impact. In the cases where negative emotions were present, they seemed to directly contrast positive emotions, likely enhancing the emotionality of the image through this contrast. Additionally, empathy seems to be a common emotion found alongside popular content that evokes strong negative emotions.

Enhancing emotionality for higher virality

It’s clear that emotionally evocative content is essential in creating wide-reaching viral content, and that there are even some emotions that seem to work better than others toward this goal, but are there other ways to expand on emotionality for virality? In other words, how can emotionality be enhanced? 

Increasing emotional identification with the content

Make your content visual

On a whole, visual content is better at conveying emotionality and being understood quickly and easily. Therefore, images and video have a leg up against written form content. It is for this reason that image and video sharing dominates online. It is the reason the images and video dominate Reddit’s front page each day and the reason 40 of the top 50 posts of all time on Reddit are either images or videos. It is the reason we have all seen infographics, animated gifs, and image macros have become ubiquitous. As a general rule, visual content is simply more engaging.

Make your content interactive

Interactive content engages the viewer’s senses and attention in a more active way than simple static content. By creating an experience that your viewers must participate in, you necessarily enhance the impact. If there is an emotional angle to your interactive campaign, it can increase the emotional impact substantially. One excellent way we are seeing this happen recently is through the use of parallax treatments like these.

Make your content personalized

Customized or personalized content is, by its very nature, better at engaging viewers emotionally than non-personalized content. Emotions are more easily evoked when the user can actually SEE themselves in the content, instead of relying on empathy to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. Some standout emotionally compelling, personalized, content like this, illustrates just how incredibly viral emotionally driven, personalized, visual content can be. Have you ever created something with 12 million + Facebook likes? Try emotionally-driven, visual, personalized, interactive content, and you might just be able to.

Emotional stacking with lists

If you haven’t been paying attention to Buzzfeed.com lately, you should probably start. They have mastered the art of what I like to call “Emotional Stacking.” 

Growing the viral coefficient – Beyond the emotions

While emotions generally play the largest role in determining the viral coefficient of a piece of content, there are other aspects that can contribute significantly to whether or not a that content is ultimately shared. Additional motivating factors can play a key role, specifically factors that convey some kind of social benefit or ego benefit.

The social benefits of sharing:

• “Ingroup vs. Outgroup”

• “Altruistic”

• “Self-identity/image bolstering”

Step 5: Decreasing viral cycle time

As I mentioned earlier, viral cycle time can be thought of as the period of time it takes for a viewer to share from the time they view the content. While a viral coefficient above 1 is needed for exponential viral growth, the timeline of this growth can be fast or it can be exceedingly slow. It is the viral cycle time that determines how quickly exponential growth will occur in content that has a viral coefficient above 1. It is in the best interest of the content creator to do everything they can to decrease the viral cycle time, to help achieve exponential viral growth in the shortest amount of time possible. So, what can be done to manipulate viral cycle time? To be precise, pretty much anything that can spur the sharer to consume the content faster and share the content faster. This includes, but is not limited to the following:

Step 6: The limitations of virality and the importance of audience. 

I’ve discussed generalities about the importance of emotional activation in viral content, but creating successful viral content can often be a bit more nuanced than simply creating something that will strongly engage viewers’ emotions. It is also incredibly important to do your best to make sure that your content is well suited for the audience you hope to target.

Now, if you are simply trying to create something massively viral, and you don’t really care about any connection or tie-in to your company or brand, your opportunities for topic ideas are nearly limitless. In practice, though, this isn’t often the case. The goal is usually to create viral content that in some way ties in with the offering of the company creating the content. In this case, it is essential to carefully define a target audience for your prospective content, even before coming up with ideas. The reception of the content you create within this segmented target audience is what will determine whether or not your content will become viral.

The considerations that you may want to make are multiple, and a future blog post will cover this topic in more depth, but in general, it is important to consider the following aspects of your audience in order to determine the potential reception of any viral concept you are considering creating.

1. What types of content does your target audience like to consume?
2. What specific topics tend to be discussed within this community, and specifically, what topics are held as important by this community?
3. What topics are controversial? What gets this community riled up?
4. What is the general Zeitgeist of the community you are targeting? What are their commonly held opinions on social and political topics?
5. Who are their heroes and villains?
6. Who are their niche celebrities?
7. What is their unique history? Their legends and fables?
8. What sorts of emotions typically are expressed by your target audience?

Failing to understand your audience can spell failure. If you are unable to understand them enough to know how to push their emotional buttons, and which ones to push, you will have a high likelihood of turning them off from sharing.

Step 7: Considerations for fractal virality

A fractal is the mathematical term use for a system of self-similar repeating patterns at different scales. In the context of viral marketing, it can be thought of as an apt descriptor for so called “viral expansion loops” which are created when content has functionality built into it that provides for users or viewers to extend or create new viral content based on or as a part of the original content. Generally, fractal content is user generated, either actively (the user actually does something) or passively (the user’s data is used, but they do nothing). Some examples of fractal content include:

1. Elfyourself.com
2. Fatbooth, Oldbooth, and other mobile apps
3. UGC photo or video contests like: crashthesuperbowl.com
4. Altruistic DIY concepts like Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign

By giving users an opportunity to utilize their own creativity through personalization and user generated content, it is possible to create fractal sharing and massive exposure. Keep in mind that all of the emotional drivers discussed with viral content apply here as well, we’ve simply added an additional layer or step to expand virality. Some important aspects to consider when attempting to create fractal content include considering:

• How can this idea be adapted, personalized, or altered while retaining the primary message?
• How have you enabled creativity? Is the functionality conducive to ease of creation and creativity? 
• How have you encouraged users to create compelling emotional content?
• How do you plan on curating or controlling the content? Is there a potential for a negative reaction?

Conclusions

Viral and fractal content has the potential to reach and influence massive audiences, but in practice can be exceedingly difficult to create. By understanding your audience and the emotional drivers that motivate them, it is possible to increase your odds of success substantially. Through careful investigation of the elements of virality, in the future it will be possible to continue to improve the odds of success substantially. Here at Fractl, we aim to do just that. Keep an eye out for several new case studies that will help illustrate the points made here through real-life examples of emotionally driven viral and fractal content.

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Posted by Erica McGillivray

Last year at MozCon, we tried something new: community speakers. The feedback we receieved from those of you who attended was phenomal, and our four speakers were spectacular.

So this year, we’re opening up four community speaking slots again, and we can’t wait to hear from you. I know some of you have been preparing your ideas since last MozCon. Which means this year, I expect even more amazing submissions, harder choices, and to get over 150 submissions (which is what we got in 2012).

We’re looking for four people to deliver incredibly actionable tips in SEO, social media, content, marketing analytics, conversion rate optimization, and any other great inbound subject. You’ll join an already killer line-up of speakers and lots of fun.

Fabio was one of our amazing community speakers last year.

MozCon 2013 takes place July 8th-10th at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. If this past weekend was any indication of how our summer’s going to be, bring your sunglasses and flip-flops for the sunshine. We’re expecting around ~1200 people, and tickets are already 50% sold out. We’ll have all the usual goodies like Roger photos and incredible speakers and a few surprises up our sleeves.

The details about the community speaker submission process:

• Your pitch must be submitted by Tuesday, May 14th at 5pm PDT.
• Please submit only one pitch. We’re looking for the best of the best.
• Topics can range the inbound marketing spectrum, so submit something you’re passionate about.
• If you’ve never spoke before or have spoken hundreds of times, we want to hear from you.
• Presentations will be 15 minutes long with an added ~5 minutes for questions.
• These sessions will be from 2:00-3:20pm on Wednesday, July 10th.
• Widescreen-format slide decks will be due one week before MozCon.
• If you already have a MozCon ticket, we will refund your ticket; and if you don’t have one, we’ll comp you one! Unfortunately, you will have to book your own hotel, flight, and transportation.
• You will be invited to attend our speakers’ dinner on Sunday, July 7th. And pre-dinner, there will be time to walk on our stage.
• You must be at MozCon in person. Sorry, no Skype, Google Hangout, or other video conferencing.
• Our community speaker selections are final. Everyone who tossed their hat in the ring will be notified via email if they were selected or not.

Thank you to everyone who submitted their community speaker ideas for MozCon 2013. We’ll be in touch very soon!

I can’t wait to see all the awesome submissions for all potential community speakers.

If you haven’t snagged your MozCon ticket yet, do it! Also check out the full line-up, minus community speakers, of MozCon speakers. It’s going to be out-of-this-world.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by bradfriedman

Hey Mozheads, Brad here! It’s a beautiful Friday here in Seattle, and I hope the day finds you well wherever you are.

We’ve got a May Mozscape index for you to check out! As always, the new data can be seen on Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, your PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

This is a very special release, you guys. This is the first Mozscape index that was processed by our virtual private cloud in Virginia! This is a big part of our long-term strategy to streamline our processing for maximum freshness and value. For now, some of our indexes will be from our Elastic Compute Cloud clusters and some will be from our VPC in Virginia while we figure out how best to use our resources.

Our histogram shows that the index was crawled from the second half of March through the first half of April.

And now, the juicy details — metrics for this latest index:

• 90,875,257,743 (91 billion) URLs
• 8,514,925,232 (8.5 billion) Subdomains
• 163,482,796 (163 million) Root Domains
• 917,461,264,950 (917 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.15% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 56.4% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 43.6% are external
• Rel Canonical – 14.83% of all pages use a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 76 links on it
  • 65.49 internal links on average
  • 10.95 external links on average

And here are the correlations with Google’s US search results:

• Page Authority – 0.36
• Domain Authority – 0.19
• MozRank – 0.24
• Linking Root Domains – 0.30
• Total Links – 0.25
• External Links – 0.29

Please feel free to leave your thoughts and comments! And check out a list of our previous index updates with metrics here.

Have a great weekend, everybody, and May the 4th be with you!

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Posted by randfish

There’s a movement happening in our industry, and many folks are changing their practices and titles from “SEO” to “online marketing, inbound marketing, and/or earned media marketing.” Where did this shift originate from, and where is it taking our industry as a whole? Is it enough to just be an SEO in today’s game, or are we missing the bigger picture?

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his take on the shift from “SEO” to “inbound marketing” and what the future holds for our industry at large. 

Have something to add? Leave your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!

For your viewing pleasure, here’s a still image of the whiteboard used in this week’s video:

Video Transcription

“Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to address an elephant in the room. It’s a topic that I’ve talked about quite a bit on my personal blog, a bit on the primary blog, and I know it’s a topic that gets discussed all over the marketing world, from Inbound.org to lots of blogs and news sites. It’s:  Why is it that there’s this movement from some folks in the field to change their titles, their names, their practices, from saying, “We do SEO,” to saying, “We do inbound marketing,” or, “We do online marketing, we do web marketing, we do earned media marketing”?

I want to try to try and take on that elephant right now. There are some really good reasons that I think we’re seeing this shift happen, and I’m actually one of the proponents of this shift. I used to be very against it. I used to be very passionate about building only the brand of SEO. Now, I’ve revised my stance. I think that, as new data and as the world has changed and I’ve become less of an obstinate son of a gun, I’m seeing this bigger picture, and I want to try to share that picture that I’m seeing with you.

The first one is I can’t argue that SEO is bigger than the way people define or have defined SEO for the last decade. That’s not really true of the 2010 to 2013 period, but it is very true of the decade before that, from the late ’90s into the late 2000, the “aughts.” What I mean is there are these old-school tactics. “Oh, you’re going to do SEO? Well, that means you do links, you make my content relevant, you put the good keywords in there, you do work on your markup, your snippets, and your site architecture, your structure. You are done. You have done SEO. That is SEO. Don’t try to tell me that it’s more than that.”

This becomes very, very challenging when, as an SEO or as a marketer who’s trying to achieve good results with SEO, you say, “But wait a minute. This only works when the ranking factors were things like link graph data, keyword data, domain data, and topic analysis.” Now, we have a lot more ranking factors, right? Engines are looking at user and usage data. They’re definitely looking at brand signals. They’re looking at offline data potential. Potentially there are patent applications, thinking about offline data. They’re looking at social graph signals.

What’s an SEO to do? If I want to influence these, I’ve got to be able to work on everything that’s marketing. That’s everything from social media to community building, positioning, branding, emails, CRO, product, the unique value of the content. What am I going to do if I’m tasked with SEO, but I’m only given responsibility over these things? It’s just not going to work. In order to influence just the very part of SEO that we touch on, which is moving up rankings in major search engines like Google and Bing, just to do that, we have to be able to control and influence a lot more than we ever had to in the past. It’s an untenable kind of situation.

Thus, what we’d really like to do and what we’ve been working hard at as an industry is to try to change and broaden the definition of SEO. I can tell you one of the things that I feel very passionately about is changing that branding and working really hard to not have the word “SEO” be associated with scumminess and bad companies and irresponsible behavior. But that perception of SEO is so hard to change. It’s been established for such a long time now, and the small efforts of quite a few of us in the field to try and change that perception have not been successful, at least not outside of the online marketing world. Inside that world and with a small portion of the developers and designers who get SEO and get marketing, it’s true.

I love those of you who are watching Whiteboard Friday and who are in that world, who understand that SEO is this bigger thing. But I know that you’ve felt the same pain that I’m talking about. People say, “Oh, SEO. So you’re a spammer. You manipulate things. You’re unethical. You’re breaking the search engine’s rules. What does Google think of you?”

These are questions we have to answer every single time, and it’s pretty clear to me why this happens. I think the reason is actually very obvious. The primary and first association that most people have with SEO is what? It’s comment spam on their blogs. It’s a spammy, scummy email that’s trying to get them to sign up for something. It’s someone wanting to trade a PageRank 6 link with them. It’s a forum, or a bulletin board, or an online community saying, “Oh, are you wondering why this malware happened? That’s the SEOs doing that.” That’s why all these bad things happen on the Internet. They blame SEOs.

To be fair, early on in the days of SEO, there were plenty of us, myself included, who would do some of these spammy and manipulative things. I’m not innocent, by any means. But that perception, that fight is one that I don’t think we’re winning. That’s another reason why I think it’s really hard to do SEO well and just call yourself an SEO. I think when you change the title, you change the perception. You change the frame of reference, and you say, “I do web marketing. I help people grow their companies. I help attract visitors, and that leads to more conversions on their site.” They’re like, “Oh, okay. I get it. Web marketing. Understood.” SEO is one of the channels, one of the main channels, but one of the channels they focus on.

The third one, we are selling ourselves short. When you say, “I’m an SEO,” your boss, your client, your management says, “Why are you meddling with our design, UX, social, and ad campaigns? Why are you trying to get into this?” You are supposed to focus on SEO. Yet, the answer is well, we can’t do great even at just SEO without influencing all these other fields that we talked about above.

By the way, we’re selling ourselves short even more than just this, because when we do work on all these channels, when we improve all of these channels, that obviously helps our search rankings too, we are also driving a lot of traffic from them. Social is sending us good traffic. The blogosphere and PR efforts are sending us good links that are driving visits, good customer service practices, community building practices, culture practices. All of these things that influence SEO that we’re trying to move the needle on to get better results, they also drive traffic of their own. That traffic converts, and that traffic is valuable. That traffic is measurable, and we are often the ones who are measuring it and quantifying it and trying to gauge the impact it has on search. Yet, we’re not getting rewarded for it or treated as though we were responsible for it. Again, we’re selling ourselves short.

But I want to end on a positive note. This stuff is okay. It is okay. This is something that we are used to. We are used to change. If there’s anything that SEOs can be assured of, it’s that things will change tomorrow, that things will change next week. No one is better prepared to handle change than we are. This kind of change is actually positive. Every field matures. My checkmark practices don’t mature. I’m clearly getting worse at them. But every field matures. You can see the early seeds of programming, of video, of accounting, any type of field, right? Journalism, for sure. Any time there’s massive shift or a new industry, we have these years of immaturity, and then we get to a better stage.

I think the stage for us is deciding:  Do we want to keep committing to a brand that frankly has been put through the wringer? One that I still use and will always use. As long as I am doing SEO work, I will use that brand. But do we want to also take hold of and recognize that, as marketers, we want to do good branding and good marketing? That means potentially calling ourselves something different, taking on these other titles, expressing ourselves in other ways in order to get more influence, and by the way, bigger paychecks too.

An SEO consultant, there are people who charge between $50 and a few hundred dollars an hour. Then you look at business strategy consultants from Accenture, or something like that, and you’re talking about a thousand plus dollars an hour. The more influence you have, the greater your billing is and, by the way, the more you can effect change and have a positive influence.

I hope this Whiteboard Friday is valuable to you. I’m sure there will be good comments and good discussion about this naming convention. I look forward to reading them and participating too. Take care, everyone. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.”

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by David Mihm

Today, I am excited to announce the release of a new version of GetListed.org. While no new functionality is included in this update, the team and I hope it provides a dramatically improved user experience on several fronts.

The best way to get a sense of what’s changed is to run a business search for yourself, but I’ll run through a few brief highlights here.

Faster business lookups

GetListed is now waaayyyy faster (that’s the technical term used by our engineers) than it used to be. Previously, lookups averaged around 20 seconds. We’ve cut the average response time in half to about 10 seconds, and we’ll be working to make it even faster as we analyze usage of the app and further optimize our response times. We hope this increased speed provides a big value-add for those of you who use GetListed in your on-the-spot client meetings.

More consistent results

Previously, GetListed’s Listing Snapshot displayed a composite listing based on the data points returned by several search engines in our list. This led to unnecessary confusion among business owners, and made it difficult for some of our agency users to identify which search engines were returning incorrect information about clients’ listings. It also made tracking Listing Score progress over time more difficult, since this score was dependent on the order of results returned by our search engine partners, and this order sometimes varied week-to-week and month-to-month.

The new version of the site asks users to establish their canonical NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information prior to running a full query for a given business, so that the new Snapshot page and Listing Score are no longer based on “best guess” composite listings.

Please note: this update means you may see changes in your listing scores, including for those businesses saved to your Dashboard. We suggest re-establishing these scores by running your listings through the new site. When you do, you’ll have a fixed data point against which you can measure your progress over time.

Cleaner Listing Snapshot interface 

When we started GetListed back in January 2009, only four search engines were displayed on the snapshot page. As our app grew in popularity and we established new relationships with data providers and other search engines, that list grew ever-longer and the formerly-simple interface grew clunky and overwhelming. The goal of the site (to get business owners to update erroneous information and add missing information) became muddied.

We hope the new interface makes these calls-to-action much clearer–to create listings on search engines where they don’t exist, and to update information that doesn’t match reality. The new app consolidates the old Snapshot, Accuracy, and Details pages, bringing accuracy front-and-center, and makes it easy to see listing details inline without jumping from page-to-page.

Cleaner Dashboard interface

The new Dashboard removes the clutter of favicon-style search engine logos (another problem created by our gradual expansion to include more listing providers over the last four years). The new Dashboard provides a quick way to assess listing scores at a glance, and easy access to the details page for your listings from clickable business titles.

U.S. version only

Over the past couple of months, we’ve noticed GetListed UK and GetListed CA returning an unacceptably high number of errors on business queries. As part of this release, we’ve decided to temporarily suspend these versions in order to focus on the backend and interface for our U.S. audience, which accounted for 98% of all queries run in April. After we’ve had a chance to analyze our domestic audience usage on this new system, we plan to re-release UK- and CA-specific versions (along with more international sites) later in the year.

Looking ahead

Well, that takes care of most of the major changes for this release.  Feedback, as always, is welcome.  We’ve even added a handy-dandy tab where you can submit feedback directly within the app; you can also feel free to email me at [email protected].

I hope I’ve laid out a compelling case above for the rationale behind this release from a user’s perspective. From a development perspective, the goal of this iteration of GetListed was to create a foundation for more frequent feature releases and better integration with SEOmoz tools moving forward. It paves the way for a number of new features we will be rolling out over the course of the summer and fall, which all of us on the GetListed team are even more excited about. Looking forward to sharing those with you soon!

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Posted by Dr. Pete

Lately, I’ve been seeing data visualizations everywhere, including the products in my own kitchen. This week, I had sightings on my tea and my tortilla chips. This is a story about the box my tea came in (for the sake of my marriage, I can’t disassemble the tortilla chip bag until it’s empty), and how sometimes we take marketing too far. Over the weekend, I discovered this “Taste Profile” (the top version is a recreation, since the real graph was only about 1” tall, but all details are accurate to the original):

I’m not attacking the company that made this, and I’m not going to “out” them here – their product is actually pretty great. I just want to use this visualization to illustrate some of the wrong ways to do things, in hopes that we can all raise our game a bit.

But It’s So Pretty!

I admit – the earth tones are nice, and it’s not entirely unappealing. I guess, for a moment, it made me feel better about shelling out $11 for an ounce-and-a-half of leaves. Maybe that’s even good marketing, although I really doubt this 1” tall graphic on the back of the box has ever swayed anyone’s decision. I’m not trying to say that it’s an ugly picture. The problem is that it’s a pleasant distraction disguised as meaningful data.

The job of a data-visualization is to communicate an idea better than the raw data itself could. Of course, that also implies that there’s actual data behind the visualization. So, how do we get it wrong?

(1) Pick the Shiniest Style

We all know that the best chart style can be summed up with two words: “big and shiny!” The radar chart above is pretty shiny – it’s like I’ve discovered some lost continent of tea with my smooth jazz submarine. The problem is that, ultimately, I don’t know what that shape means, and I don’t have anything to compare it to. A radar chart is at its best when comparing two or more profiles. Pick the right tool for the job, not the one that looks the most impressive on your utility belt. Batman is a friend of mine, and you, sir, are no Batman (disclaimer: I don’t know Batman).

(2) Use a Lot of Fancy Words

Umami is the exotic fifth taste (beyond the classic four of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty) – it’s a Japanese word meaning “Haha, I can’t believe I got you to eat sea urchin!” To be fair, at least it has something to do with taste. I honestly have no idea how “Brightness” or “Briskness” apply to tea, and if they do, what the difference is between the two.

I do know that Lipton has spent a lot of money making us think their tea is brisk, which raises another point – why do you want to compare your $110/lb. gourmet tea to Lipton? Even “Aroma” is a bit ambiguous – do I want a lot of aroma? What if it’s the aroma of some bad umami that I forgot to put in the fridge last night?

The goal of a visualization is to simplify information that’s too complex. If you have to make up big words to do that, then you’re missing the point.

(3) More Words? Yes, Please!

What really brings a visualization together is to explain each of your terms with even more words, preferably ones that make even less sense. Now, please understand – I have no issue with the French. I think Paris is lovely, it’s cool that you helped us win the American Revolution, and I’ve never eaten “freedom fries”. This product wasn’t made in France, though, and I didn’t buy it in Quebec. The company is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Translating every label on the graph into French isn’t just meaningless – it’s pretentious. These secondary labels only serve to add visual noise and make it harder to pair the main labels to their data points.

(4) Keep the Mystery Alive

Everyone loves a mystery – you don’t hate Scooby Doo, do you? If you can make your product mysterious enough, everyone will think they need it. Sadly, sometimes smoke and mirrors is all a product has to offer, but in this case the product is really quite good. Adding pseudoscience to the label doesn’t create intrigue – it just makes me wonder if the marketing team is drinking their product or smoking it.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

To be fair, this 1” graph was little more than a decoration on a box, and it does that job perfectly well. Unfortunately, I’ve seen similar graphs (and worse) in blog posts, research papers, and even reputable newspapers.  Every day, it gets easier to make sexy charts, illustrations, and infographics. It’s ok to create something beautiful, but we have to remember that our first job is to communicate. A data visualization should convey useful ideas quickly, because ultimately that’s our job as online marketers. So, think before you open Photoshop.

Addendum: So, I’ve learned that “cupping scores” are not uncommon in the gourmet coffee industry. Here’s a 10-factor radar graph (hat tip to @jimbeetle). I just have a hard time seeing this as anything but a way to justify premium prices with pseudoscience.

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Posted by TomRoberts

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

A great deal of emphasis is placed on inbound marketing and attracting new customers. However, we should be careful not to neglect the existing clients that we may have. These people are just as important as new customers and more often than not can provide you with a great return of investment. We should give our existing clients the marketing focus they deserve.

In this guide, I will look at why remarketing and reconverting your clients can be a valuable tactic for your business, while also providing examples on how we can do just that.

I hope you find this guide to be something a little bit different than what we normally see on Moz and, most of all, I hope you find it useful. I’d love it if you could read through the whole post, but for those revisiting or those strapped for time, here are a few links to jump you to each chapter:

Prelude: What Prompted the Post

I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told. We don’t see an awful lot of in-house SEO perspectives here on SEOmoz and even less so from the financial services sector, of which my current role is in. This does give me the opportunity, however, to provide a real case study of how a company has identified the need to get more value from the client base and how they have done so.

Basically, our company provides a way for people to trade the financial markets, things like equities, currency pairs and so on. We provide this service in a number of countries across Europe, with the UK being our primary market.

The curious thing about this industry, over the last 6-12 months is that, while we as a company have acquired new clients somewhat exponentially, the trading volumes of those clients, effectively the amount that they have been trading, has not seen the same amount of growth. This is something that is reported to be affecting the industry as a whole.

There are likely a number of factors that are contributing to this. Market volatility as a whole is at a record low, while we are also reviewing our marketing channels to see which ones are providing the most worth to us. However, the thing that we felt we had most control over was ensuring that our clients were as happy as they could possibly be with us, which in turn would extend the time period they want to trade with us and would do so with more frequency.

This guide will aim to show what we have done as a company to help ensure our clients are satisfied with us and want to reconvert and how these methods can apply to a wide range of industries.

Chapter 1: I Demand Satisfaction

If you’re trying to get people to come back to your business and reconvert, they better have had a bloomin’ good experience the first time round. It goes without saying that people will need to have a positive experience with your company to even consider returning, regardless of whatever marketing campaign you are using to entice them back.

Therefore, the first part of any reconversion strategy is ensuring that the conversion the first time round is as smooth as possible. If you’re working on an ecommerce site, cart abandonment is always a hot topic and I really like Russ Henneberry’s guide on decreasing abandonment over on CrazyEgg.

The best way to know whether or not you are being well received is to have an open dialogue with your clients. SEOmoz is a great example of this, while at ETX Capital we always display a free contact number on our website, so that people only have to pick up the phone to talk with us. Being readily available on social media, particularly Twitter, is another great way to garner client feedback. Over 30% of top brands have launched a dedicated customer service handle and I’d advise you to check out the Simply Measured case study on brands’ Twitter activity.

You may also want to consider asking your clients to leave you their feedback on external review sites, such as Review Centre. Not only do you often get detailed feedback from people leaving reviews, your ranking here can help you obtain rich snippets in your PPC ads. If you receive over 30 reviews for your business and keep an average rating of 4 or more, you can have fancy, shmancy stars appear next to your ads like these:

Oh my God – it’s full of stars!

Finally, you definitely need to check out Joshua Unseth’s SEOmoz post on using Google Analytics for a Q&A strategy. Not only is it a brilliant resource, it can also help you discover what people are asking about your brand in Google search. You may find some trends on your service that you can address prior to people converting.

Chapter 2: Don’t Count Out a Discount

Source: NoSweatShakespeare.com

It might seem simple, but it is often effective. Offering discounts to returning customers is a great way to have them return and to build up a bit of brand loyalty. I can remember in November last year that I had a mullet to rival Billy Ray Cyrus and I decided that it was time for a smart cut. I went to Rush salon with no intention of returning for regular cuts, as I thought it was a bit pricey. One loyalty card stamp and two 25% off cuts later and I’m already looking forward to my next princess day!

Repeat customers very often cost less than acquiring new customers, so when you’re working out your margins and what discount you can afford to give, cost is definitely something you will want to consider.

Implementing the discount system is something that should not be underestimated either. For the ecommerce SEOs out there, you can find some very useful extensions for your CMS. OpenCart is arguably one of the best CMS systems out there right now and these three extensions may be of interest for you.

Providing physical discounts is still a very popular method as well. Providing branded cards with a discount code is a popular trick used by Amazon, when sending out its products (I must have had £600 worth of wine vouchers sent to me in three months, what are they trying to say?). I have to say I am a fan of the loyalty stamp card and I’ve often wondered why more businesses do not employ an online solution to this. For all intents and purposes, the Tesco Clubcard is a loyalty card that stores your data online, allowing you to redeem points for discounts – perhaps this could be applicable to your business?

It looks as though that more companies are heading towards loyalty stamp apps, if sites such as Stampfeet and Stampme are anything to go by. This could also be a useful discount solution for you.

Gamification is not something to be underestimated either. We see a lot of gamification in the health industry – I’d love to see a gym take it one step further and have a workout leader board. When you join the gym, you would be given a chip that logs all of your exercise on the machines. The people who run the most miles, burn the most calories, generate the most watts and so on would be given discounted membership for 1/3/6 months. It would offer an incentive for people to exercise harder, which can only be a good thing, while giving the gym some really positive PR.

Chapter 3: The Best Things in Life are Free

The Fandom of the Oprah is plain to see

Everyone loves free stuff, am I right? But how does giving stuff away for free translate into returning customers?

Remember, this is all about building brand loyalty and a satisfied consumer base. If you can achieve that, not only might customers be more inclined to use your services again, but happy customers may refer their friends to your business as well. Repeat customers can be walking billboards for business.

Having said that, it would be wise to plan your giveaway so that you can gain something else as well, in case the reconversions don’t come. Let me use an example of a recent contest we held on our Facebook page.

We recently offered some trading credit to our clients if they could correctly guess the US employment report, also known as the non-farm payrolls, at the start of the month. The ultimate aim was to reignite interest in trading and to see an increase in trading volumes, but we knew that we could also see the following benefits, if planned correctly:

• An increase in ‘likes’ on our page.
• An increase in engagement on other posts.
• An increase in traffic and conversions, assisted or otherwise.

Because of the potential multi-benefits, we were happy to go ahead with the giveaway and I’d recommend that people look for similar multi-level benefits before parting with their product or service for nothing.

After contacting our existing clients by email on the day that the contest went live, as well as previewing the contest earlier in the week via our social media channels, we ended up seeing some great results. The ‘likes’ on our page increased substantially, analytics is reporting an increase in assisted Facebook conversions that week and we’ve also been seeing some increased engagement on our regular market updates, which is great to see. Having this open communication with our clients allows us to keep in touch with their wants and needs.

The icing on the cake is that we have also seen increased trading volumes in the days and weeks since the competition was launched. Without giving away too much sensitive information, I think it would be safe to say our initial outlay in terms of cost has been recuperated and then some.

Chapter 4: The Lost Art of Email Marketing

Source: poofytoo.tumblr.com

According to the DMA 2012 conference, for every $1 spent on email marketing $40.56 is returned (The Email Marketing Trend Slideshare from Silverpop is a great read, if you’ve not seen it already). It surprises me that we don’t see it mentioned more often here, as it can be a great way of getting your clients to reconvert.

Many of the previous tips I have mentioned in this post have been used emails in order to generate interest, such as contacting our client base to alert them about the Facebook contest we were running. That’s not really marketing, but it is an indication that email is still one of the best ways to communicate with your customers.

Email marketing is a great way of interacting with your inactive user base and get them reconverting. There is a great CNET case study on Marketing Sherpa that looks at how offering incentives can get people to reconvert. The key takeaways are making sure that you:

• Accurately segment your lists – ie knowing what group has been inactive for 60-120 days, which clients have been inactive for 120+ and so on.
• Come up with a number of engagement tactics to test.
• Identify with your team what constitutes as reactivation or reconversion.

If you’re using a decent CRM system, you will be able to track user activity, or lack thereof, in a lot of detail, such as date of last login, recent transactions etc. Using this data, you can segment your users how you want and can judge for yourself what classifies as an inactive user, for example. We use SalesForce for this purpose, but different size businesses may find better solutions elsewhere, so it is worth researching. PC World has featured five useful CRMs for small businesses in the past.

The above CNET case study makes for a great read and I think an email marketing campaign can be taken one step further by running a Facebook custom audience campaign. There is an excellent SEOmoz blog post on this topic that you should definitely check out, with one of the key highlights of custom audiences being that you can import and target people from your email list only. This obviously relies on a person using the same email for Facebook as they did with your website, but there’s a fairly decent chance that they would have. With this level of targeting, you can serve them relevant ads to supplement your email campaign, without breaking the budget.

If you’re looking to learn more about email marketing, the Aweber and Deliverability blogs are great places to start, while the email marketing whitepaper from MailChimp is a great free resource as well.

Chapter 5: Community is Key

Erm…probably not this Community

Community managers: rejoice! This chapter celebrates you and all the things that you do.

This is arguably the most important section of the guide. Nurturing your community is essential for reconversion, which is something that I have alluded to throughout this guide. The better the experience a customer has with your site, the more likely there are to return, reconvert and refer.

Remember, your community is most likely an open forum and not just the people who have used, worked with or are associated with your online business. This means that you need to create a positive community for people pre-conversion as much as you need to create a positive one for post-conversion folks.

Having high quality engagements with your community is one of the most direct ways of catering to their needs. Social media is an obvious outlet for this, but sometimes it can be hard to work out which social media channel would be best, both for levels of engagement and also for usability reasons. We have already talked about how customer service handles on Twitter can offer a direct response channel, but LinkedIn is often overlooked.

Linkedin discussion groups can be a great place to engage with your community, whether it’s in your own group or joining in the discussion elsewhere. More often than not, when you’re providing and contributing to useful discussions on LinkedIn, you are not just helping your community, but also your unaided brand awareness. One of the most famous examples of a big brand using LinkedIn is Hewlett Packard.

That is a summary of the HP case study provided by LinkedIn, which you can read in full here: http://marketing.linkedin.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/LinkedIn_HPUKCaseStudy2011.pdf. HP identified that their community and the demographic that they wanted to target were present on LinkedIn and so created a non-branded, general small business discussion group that allowed users to help one another out. Despite it being non-promotional, HP saw great results as a result of unaided brand awareness and the work that they had put into the community.

Hosting discussions such as these on LinkedIn brings with it an element of trust, as it is being hosted on a website people can trust and they would probably be more inclined to engage on than perhaps your own hosted forum. Furthermore, the benefit of being able to connect with users very quickly is a very valuable one, particularly when you bear in mind that HubSpot has reported that LinkedIn is up to 277% more effective at lead generation than other social networks.

It is worth noting that setting up a LinkedIn discussion group will be a time-consuming task. Moderation and encouraging engagement can take its time, so be sure that you can commit the human resource to the project in order to help it be as good as you want it to be. There’s a great resource on social media examiner on how to build a thriving LinkedIn group, while HubSpot also provides some useful tips on how to manage groups.

Alternatively, Google+ is well on its way to matching and possibly succeeding LinkedIn as the discussion group king. Google+ communities work very much in the same manner as LinkedIn discussion groups, with the added benefit that they are arguably more visible to people surfing the net. For some industries, there is already a thriving presence on the network, with SEO being chief among them. The Google Authorship community is probably the stand out example (and you should definitely check it out if you have not done so already). It would be tough work to host discussion groups on both networks with limited resources, so it is worthwhile dipping your feet in some already existing groups in your industry to see whether or not there is an appetite for what you want to discuss.

It is a good idea to find communities in your industry that are not based on one of the big social media websites. There is a forum called Trade2Win that is extremely targeted to our audience and it serves as a great resource to them. We try to engage with our audience there as well, in order to let them know about any of our new developments and for them to also offer feedback and ask questions about our service. It can be a very open and frank discussion at times, but you have to respect with communities like these that you, as a brand rather than a consumer, are on ‘their turf’ as it were, and so you should treat it with the utmost respect. The one thing about engaging on a forum that you do not control of is that you are potentially open to attack, with no way of removing slander unless the forum master deems to do so. With that in mind, it is important that you establish a clear social media policy within your organisation before you engage, with clear rules of engagement for how to handle certain kinds of negative engagement.

Of course, nurturing your community is not exclusively an online pursuit.

There are many great things that a business can do to connect with their community offline. In London, where I am based, there is a relatively new artisan bakery called Gail’s. Their mission statement is to not only provide the best quality bakery products out there, but to also become integrated within their local communities. They do this by customising what products they stock in each store, for example in the region of Hampstead, where there is a large Jewish community; the store stocks more rye bread goods, among others.

Gail’s goes one step further than this and also holds community events in each store. Some events include book-reading clubs for their store based adjacent to a primary school, so that families can come after school and enjoy themselves. The Hampstead store also organises a garden party each year, where they invite businesses that offer local produce to set up market stalls across the high street and invite people to come and sample some tasty food. Both of these events are not designed to generate profit, but to increase the brand awareness of Gail’s and to also give back to the community that they are integrated in.

Incidentally, I don’t have much need for Gail’s anymore, as I’ve taken to making my own bread!

Note: Pacman Onesie not obligatory

There’s method in my madness: can you imagine if Gail’s asked people to post pictures of their loaves and funny bakes on their Facebook page, with the entrants getting discounts or even free items? That would be a prime example of a company engaging with its community online and to help them reconvert.

If you’re looking for more community ideas, you should look no further than the folks here at SEOmoz. They do a great job at engaging with their community. Just this week I was sent this swag from the team:

The slap-wrist has brought me much joy and my office much annoyance.

Conclusion: Let’s Get Out There

I hope this guide has inspired you to look at fun and engaging ways to spark reconversion. Let your customers know you love them and they’ll surely love you back!

I’d love to get some feedback from you in the comments below, as well as some cool stories about how you have worked on reconversions and building up your lovely communities.

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