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- How to Build Trust by Association
This guest post is by David Edwards of www.asittingduck.com.
When I started my site I had no clue about animation, illustration, or online marketing. It’s almost three years since the site went live, so by now I could have started University again (I quit in the first term at the age of 20) and have an official qualification in one of those fields.
Let’s say I did that, and today I started my website. Would I still have to build trust and gain success by association? Yes! The good news is, if you haven’t got a degree and you want to run a successful website, there is nothing stopping you!
Even to this day people are intrigued to know how I managed to convince a small team of animators to trust me and build a viral series around a few doodles that I did on the back of a house bill. This is how I did it, and how you can do something similar within your own niche.
I started with one contact…
Out of my whole high-school year, as far as I’m aware the only pupil to leave and start a company was a mate of mine, Matthew Adams, who started Webfactore. That was the first rung on the ladder to success—a nice discount on the website!
Then I used the Facebook search box to hunt down an animator in Cardiff. Why animation? I like drawing and I was fascinated by a viral animation from America called “Charlie the Unicorn.” I thought it was amazing that one guy and a couple of mates managed to get millions of people to view their cartoon—it’s even been the topic of a question on “Jeopardy”!
Luke Hyde was the first animator I found and he was happy to meet me. It was luck, really, as he was the first person I asked, and at the time he had no contracts to work on. You can get lucky, but if you don’t, keep searching for someone!
Through Luke, I tapped into a creative world that I’d never been a part of.
I’ve always doodled and sketched—it used to help pass the time away when I worked in a telesales job. But I never knew that people actually made money from it. Through Luke I met Flash animators, illustrators, sound engineers … the list goes on!
When you start to build an online business it can feel overwhelming and you tend to think that everyone seems to be more resourceful than you. If you’re an avid reader and blogger, well, believe it or not, that’s a very powerful skill to have, and you can trade that skill with other people to get what you need.
Also if you have patience and show that you’re not just going to sap someones resources and run, you will have the chance to gain respect from the person and his or her circle of friends.
I never got complacent with networking
If you do gain a bit of success through association, keep going. I cemented links in the creative industry, then set my sights on the marketing industry. Why? Because these guys are crushing it when it comes to work ethic and connections. Five top affiliate marketers can reach out to tens of thousands of potential customers!
I did some more searching and eventually found Alex Jeffreys, who’s well know in the affiliate marketing world, having launched several successful coaching programs. I spoke to Alex on the phone and he was happy to help me. I also attended his seminar in London, which was an awesome opportunity to meet other marketers, and meet Alex in person.
Alex has taught me some key points to rapidly grow my presence online. Here are some of his tips:
- Leverage each stage you’re at: If you only have five people that are helping you online, that’s not
just five people! It could be 500 people, if each person has a social network of 100 friends. For instance, if you were friends with me on YouTube, and I liked your video, I have 10,000 friends to share it with. That’s very powerful leverage! - Don’t market to the whole world: Alex has built a very profitable business from looking after his confirmed subscribers. He very rarely reaches out to the masses on Twitter or Facebook, as lots of his subscribers do it for him.
- Consistently add value: You should look to email a useful piece of content once a month and build up trust. Go from a blog post, to an audio podcast, to a video. Once people get a range of content over six months or so, they will absolutely love you!
Building trust by association will help with sales
Many bloggers and site owners try to make and launch products. There is a huge market and there are hungry buyers, but from my experience, you have to concentrate far more on networking and connecting with successful people, than on locking yourself in a room until your ebook is complete.
Once you have established yourself with people in your niche, then interact with your prospects, you’ll have a much better idea of how loudly your till is going to ring!
Have you tried to connect with other website owners face to face? I would love to read your stories.
David Edwards is an internet marketing consultant and the founder of www.asittingduck.com.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How to Build Trust by Association
Переслать - Leverage each stage you’re at: If you only have five people that are helping you online, that’s not
- Creating Great Content for Today's Social Web
This guest post is by Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting.
Welcome to an increasingly social landscape on the Web. Social media started this shift from information to conversation, and now with the search engines increasingly using social signals to determine what to show searchers it’s a trend that, as a publisher, you have to get on top of to write and promote great content.
This post will discuss the movement of Bing and Google towards social search, and how that affects the organic search landscape. Then I’ll provide some tips on how this impacts your writing and promotion of your content.
Search and social integration
The integration of search and social media is already here. Back in October 2010, Bing and Facebook announced plans for tighter integration. As I learned when I interviewed Bing’s Stefan Weitz, Bing is already using Facebook signals as a ranking factor:
“… if any of my friends anywhere have liked any (relevant) link across the entire world wide web, I am going to inject that link into my results page.”
Stefan refers to the notion of boosting a search result just because one of my friends Liked it. But that is just the beginning, as we also can see that Bing is making use of the wisdom of the crowd, as per this example search on the New York Post:
Even if none of the 54 people that Liked "15 Best Dresses" are my Facebook friends, Bing thinks the article’s popularity is still noteworthy enough to show it to me.
Google does not have as close a relationship with Facebook, but is making use of other social services such as Twitter, and recently launched Google+
The bottom line is that social signals are a ranking factor in the search engines’ algorithms, and you can’t ignore this.
The social media revolution has much broader implications
We don’t know exactly how the Web will continue to evolve, but we know that more major changes are coming our way. To get a perspective on why this is, consider the three major stages of the Web’s evolution so far:
- the initial failure of the Dot-Com Bubble from 1998-2000: too much focus on a land-grab mentality without understanding how to make money in the process
- the combined revolutions of ecommerce (Amazon, EBay, et al) and getting instant access to all the world’s information online (Google): this second stage is still unfolding and the third stage is already underway
- the social media revolution: this is driven by instant and continuous access to your friends, and the ability to communicate and engage simply. Texting, Facebook, Twitter are the current driving forces, but more are to come. People love these short communications so much that email is becoming passé, and the idea of making a phone call seems unnatural to many teenagers.
What has come with this third wave is a new way of communicating and a whole new emphasis on relationships. People are beginning to associate online familiarity with your personality and who you are, and with trust. And trust sells, trust engages, trust makes people come back.
The implications of this on how you approach your writing are profound. And, chances are that the importance of this social approach to writing will only become more important.
Impact on your writing: three critical concepts you must adhere to
1. Build relationships with your audience
Social networks like a personal approach. They want to see your personality. They want you to share. They want you to evoke emotions. These elements are key to creating engagement not just with your content, but with you. Social networks make you more accessible to your potential readers and can play a significant role in growing your reach.
I remember when I first began publishing sites on the Web, the approach I used was dry and academic. This was the strategy I used to communicate authority and trust. I am beginning to think that this is no longer the right approach. Do you trust the advice of a university professor that you have never spoken to? Or does the combined opinions of your friends count for more?
The wisdom of the crowd is very much upon us and it is only going to get stronger. As a writer, you need to accept the notion that trust comes from familiarity with you, and your ability to be approachable will enable you to communicate your message.
2. Tell me why I care
The other big factor that emerges from the ability to get all the world’s information online is that there is too much information. We are more impatient than ever. If I am going to spend the time reading your article, whether or not I trust you, tell me why I should read this article in the first paragraph. Get to the point.
3. Strive for uniqueness, not "me too"
Lastly, don’t waste your time writing “me too” content. To see what I mean, consider this screen shot:
Making French toast is really, really easy. I have not made it in 20 years, but I can still tell you how in two minutes. We don’t need 2.54 million web pages on the topic!
For the search engines, showing multiple results with little distinction from one another is a waste of time. For your average web surfer, reading more than one such article is a complete waste of time. So even if I trust you, and even if you tell me what the article is about in the first paragraph, don’t waste my time with a useless review of something that tons of other people have already covered. Give me something new!
Mastering these concepts is essential for today’s bloggers. Those who get there the fastest will be tomorrow’s authorities.
Promoting your writing
This may be the most straightforward part of this post. You do need to integrate basic social elements into your posts. This includes elements such as the Facebook Like, Send, and Share buttons, a Tweet This button, and perhaps a Google +1 button. While the +1 button does not have the same usage level as the other elements yet, one can expect a meaningful integration into Google+ in the near future.
Going a little deeper, consider using Facebook Comments instead of the built-in comments capability of your blog platform. The content from the comments does not show up as search engine-visible text on your web page, but given that you are writing original posts, this is probably not critical.
But what it does do is function like a Facebook Share. It shows up in the News Feed of the commenter, and the News Feeds of all their friends. This is a great way to spread the visibility of your posts. It also provides some inherent spam protection, as no one will leave a spammy comment behind unless they have taken the trouble to setup a throwaway Facebook account.
Also, think of ways to entice your reader to engage more with your blog. Ask a leading question at the end of your post to invite comments. Install functionality that suggests other related posts they can read next.
The most subtle part of promotion is the way you use the social networks themselves as a direct extension of your blog. Daily activity on Twitter and Facebook may prove to be a great way to build the personality and trust that people are looking for. They both offer great platforms for viral spread of ideas you want to communicate.
Use these platforms to communicate the same types of messages as you do on your blog, but in smaller doses of course. Use them to establish your personality and build the trust.
Is your content social-web-friendly?
Fully embracing the social revolution is key to the blogger’s long term success. Based on the pace of the evolution of the Web over the past decade, it is reasonable to expect that the next major shift in web behavior is around the corner.
Three years from now, those of us who are centered on Facebook, Twitter, and texting, but have not yet adopted the next new thing that comes after them will be seen as being behind the times. There will be many more paradigm shifts in our lifetime, and it will be important to stay as current as you can. Use the media that your audiences use to communicate with your audience. It sounds simple, and yet it is critically important.
The first step though, is to adapt to the changes that have already taken place. I could call this a requirement for survival, but I always use a positive mindset—I consider it an opportunity to excel.
Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting, a 20 person SEO and PPC consulting firm with offices in Boston and Northern California. Eric is a crusty old veteran with 30 years working experience in technology and the Internet. STC provides Internet Marketing Optimization services <http://www.stonetemple.com>to companies ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Creating Great Content for Today's Social Web
Переслать - Why Bieber SEO Copywriting Sex Doesn't iPad Work Minecraft
This guest post is by Greg McFarlane of Control Your Cash.
Today, I bring you heresy. Not on the scale of Galileo trying to convince Pope Urban VIII that the sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, but close enough.
Stop believing the lies. SEO is a fool's errand.
SEO copywriting is the worst invention since the vuvuzela, and does at least as much to drown out coherent thought. I'm not talking merely about the damage SEO does in the hands of independent bloggers like (presumably you) and me. Visit the landing pages of some major corporations and other business entities, and you'll see particular words and phrases dispersed and repeated through the text so awkwardly that the finished product barely qualifies as English.
Here's an excerpt from a famous American hotel's landing page. Discretion forced me to substitute the name of another city for the hotel's actual city, which will make it .002% more difficult for you to figure out what hotel the passage refers to:
Your Ultimate Cincinnati Experience Begins At Our Cincinnati Hotel Resort.
Elevate your experience at the (5-word phrase describing the hotel). See all the changes that make our Cincinnati hotel new – up down and all around. The best value on the Cincinnati Strip, the (5-word phrase describing the hotel) offers affordable dining, spacious hotel accommodations, exciting Cincinnati hotel casino games, headline entertainment and some of the best thrill rides in the world, all in a central location. Boasting the tallest freestanding observation tower in the United States west of the Mississippi, this iconic Cincinnati hotel is recognizable all over the world. Visit the indoor and outdoor observation decks in the (5-word phrase describing the hotel) to see why our panoramic view of Cincinnati was voted the Best of Cincinnati for 2010 and 2011 by the Cincinnati Review-Journal. Dine in the city's only revolving restaurant, Top of the World, offering 360 degree views of Cincinnati. Grab a drink at one of our many lively bars. Take advantage of our exceptional Cincinnati hotel deals and relax in our spacious rooms.
Wait, where are you located? And what type of establishment is it again? Thanks, I wasn't sure. The accompanying photos of the hotel and the iconic skyline it inhabits weren't giving me a clue either.
No one has ever read that preceding dreadful paragraph in its entirety, possibly not even the person who wrote it, ran it through an SEO program and then posted it.
The worst part is that the people responsible know that SEO "copywriting" results in non-syntactical gibberish, yet don't care.
Why?
SEO devotees got trapped in the minutiae and lost sight of the ultimate objective: getting people to buy. Everything else is secondary, including intermediate and tertiary goals such as moving up in Google rankings.
It's as if you were to make it your life's work to keep your car's license plate as legible as possible. You shampoo it daily, then buffer it with the most reflective wax you can buy, letting the plate serve as a gleaming reminder to the vehicle behind you of who you are and what state you live in. Meanwhile, you never bother to change the oil, check the tire pressure, fix the shattered windshield, or even confirm that you filled the tank and inserted your key in the ignition.
SEO not only shouldn't be an end in itself, it runs counter to the more basic goal of getting people to hear what you have to say. The above paragraph could have read something like this:
The best value on the Strip boasts affordable dining, enormous rooms, casino games, spectacular entertainment and world-famous thrill rides, capped by the highest observation tower west of the Mississippi. Stand behind the glass, brave the elements, or even enjoy a gourmet meal, 1,149 feet above the ground.
It's not Shakespeare, nor even Dickens, but it gets the point across. More importantly, it would get read. Perhaps not by Google crawlers, but by eyes connected to heads (and indirectly to wallets.)
If you're writing for Google crawlers, or anything other than humans, the battle is already lost. Otherwise, who are you writing for? Literally no one. For people who preach SEO as a moral imperative, verbal resonance doesn't matter as much as strategic keyword placement.
Oh, isn't Greg being cute and naive. His right-dominant brain thinks that cold science is sullying his precious art.
No. SEO isn't a hard discipline like chemistry or physics. It's an attempt to codify a metric that has only a tangential relationship (and occasionally an adversarial one) with the more important one of attracting customers. You remember customers, right? The people who buy your products?
Telling a talented writer to write for SEO is the equivalent of someone having told Mozart, “Those concertos of yours are okay, but you should include at least one diminished seventh chord and a couple of appoggiaturas every ten measures.”
There are even better arguments for the death of SEO, one of which is an insurmountable little mathematical problem. Just as not all children can be above average, not all sites can be optimized. If they could be, then your definition of optimization is wrong. If every blogger in your field intersperses the same select words and phrases throughout her copy, the result is nothing. You can't have everyone move up in the rankings. If you have 100 competing sites, and they all adopt the latest SEO practices, what remains are … 100 competing sites. When every blogger spends less time creating content and more time trying to please algorithms, the result is that no one benefits and readers now have a more difficult time sifting through everything. It's the Tragedy of the Common Nouns.
And another thing. No one mentions that every time you Google something, the initial page grossly overstates the number of results. People see an intimidating 7- or 8-digit monstrosity that's supposed to represent how many instances of the relevant phrase exist online, and then those people panic. For instance, entering "control your cash" (with quotes) ostensibly returns 8,410,000 results. (Fortunately, the top six that appear in the screen capture all happen to reference my site.)
Of course, I indeed searched for that phrase when I was thinking of names for my site. At that time, had I wanted to, I could have thought, "Oh my Lord. Even if I somehow add enough keywords in my copy that I reach the 99th percentile, there will still be 84,100 results ahead of me. Google displays them ten to a page, so unless a searcher is willing to press the arrow labeled "Next" at the bottom of the page 8,410 times, no one will ever see me."
Try pressing that "Next" arrow anyway and see what happens. Go ahead, I'll wait and meet you back here 8,410 clicks from now.
"Control your cash" doesn't return 8,410,000 usable results. It returns 479 unique results. And that's for a fairly generic phrase. If you want people to search for something more specific, such as ("heating ventilation and air conditioning" + "Fremantle" + "open Sundays"), you don't need to season your pages with endless repetition of the same words. You just need to exist and be a little self-aware.
Writing is still the fundamental form of communication among literate people, last I checked. And those same literate people expect other literate people to speak to them as clearly and concisely as possible. That sound you heard was Strunk and White emerging from their graves, bloodied but undead, ready to tap a bony finger on anyone who thinks that doing the opposite of writing something compelling is going to boost business.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the book here (physical) or here (Kindle) and reach Greg at greg@ControlYourCash.com.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Why Bieber SEO Copywriting Sex Doesn't iPad Work Minecraft
Переслать - You MUST Post Every Day on Your Blog [Misconceptions New Bloggers Have #2]
This post continues our Misconceptions New Bloggers Have series and looks at one of the most common questions I’m asked about when speaking about blogging—posting frequency.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard prebloggers dismiss the idea of blogging because they don’t have the time or discipline to produce daily blog posts.
The belief is that to be successful they need to get posts out daily (if not multiple times per day). The reality is that there is no single approach to successful blogging when it comes to how often one must post. There are plenty of examples of highly successful blogs that operate at both ends of the frequency spectrum (I’ll highlight some less frequent posters below).So what can we say about how often you should post? Let’s take a look at some of the factors we need to consider.
Regular contact builds relationships
The blogger/reader interaction is a lot like any relationship—the more you see one another as friends, the more you begin to know about each other, the more intimacy develops, and the more you get to trust each other (a big generalization, I know).
Regular posting on your blog puts you and your brand in front of people on a regular basis, and this opens up the opportunity for a deepening relationship. Infrequent posting can lead to readers feeling disconnected, and to even forget who you are completely.
This was highlighted to me once at a conference when, after getting off the stage from speaking, I was almost knocked over in a warm embrace from one ProBlogger reader.
Through her tears she stammered, “I … just … feel … sob … like … I … sniff … know … you … so … well!”
Why did she feel that way? Every day she’d received an email from me with advice on how to build her blog.
Over-posting can be annoying
Of course if we look at “real life” relationships we also have to acknowledge that the amount of time you spend with someone can also have the opposite effect. Have you ever had a friendship with someone that became a little too much? You know the relationships … where the other person leaps in so far that you end up feeling a little smothered!
Posting too regularly can get a little like that too.
I once surveyed readers here on ProBlogger about the reasons they unsubscribed to RSS feeds and the number one answer was “posting too much.” Respondents expressed that they developed “burnout” and would unsubscribe if a blog became too “noisy.”
There’s a tipping point for every blog where one more post just becomes too much and readers begin to disengage.
It comes down to usefulness and relevancy
So what’s the tipping point? How many posts will grow the relationship and how many will destroy it?
Unfortunately there isn’t a single number that will work for every blog—instead I suspect it really comes down to the relevancy and usefulness of the content you’re producing. If what you’re writing is going to solve problems and be valuable to them, they will forgive a lot, whether that’s lots of posts or a long period between them.
One question to ask yourself on this front is, “What do my readers need?”
- On one hand, you might find in answering that question for your readership that they need lots of short, sharp posts because there is a lot of breaking news in your niche that they want.
- In other cases you might find that your readers actually need thoughtful analysis—longer posts that they have time to chew on before moving onto another topic.
The answers to this question will depend a lot on the type of blog that you’re running, the niche or topic, the style and length of content that you’re producing, and the types of readers you’re hoping to attract.
Other benefits of more frequent posts
There are a few more benefits of more frequent posting that are worth mentioning:
- More entry points into your blog via the search engines: Daily posting means 365 entry points into your blog for search users every year as opposed to 52 if you’re posting weekly, or 12 if you go with monthly.
- More entry points into your blog via social media: Similarly, by publishing and promoting your content, you’re also providing more doorways into your blog on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Daily posts give your readers more opportunities to share those links around.
- More connecting points for RSS subscribers: Similarly again, the more you post, the more alerts or updates those who subscribe to your blog via RSS will get.
Benefits of less frequent posts
On the flip-side, there are benefits of less posts, too:
- Potentially higher reader engagement: I’ve noticed on my own blogs that if I post once in three or four days, the posts tend to get higher levels of comments and conversation among readers when compared to times when I post two posts in a single day. I guess frequent posting pushes posts off the radar of readers faster, as there’s always something new coming out.
- Absence can make the heart grow fonder: I know of a couple of bloggers who post quite infrequently, but have built up almost a cult following, and who build a lot of anticipation among readers for the next post. Posts become highly anticipated and valued, and they get shared around the web at a higher rate than if the posts were coming out multiple times a day (I’ll give some examples of this type of blog below).
- It helps to avoid writer burnout and can lead to higher quality content: After the initial adrenaline rush that often comes with launching a new blog subsides, many bloggers hit a wall when, a few months in, they begin to struggle to find things to write about. The pressure of daily posting can add to this, so a less frequent publishing schedule can give a little more space to write only about the things that they think really matter. They are free to write the most useful content, and to avoid burnout as they do so.
Examples of blogs that post less often than daily
I asked on Twitter for examples of blogs that post less frequently than daily, but which still have been successful. I was inundated with examples. Here are some that were most commonly suggested by my followers:
- Zen Habits: updated an average of eight times per month over the last few months
- The Art of Non Conformity: Chris Guillebeau’s blog, which has averaged just under ten posts per month lately
- SimpleMom: posts more regularly than the above two, but usually has a day or two off per week—a good example of regularity with breaks
- The Four Hour Work Week: as you’d expect, Tim’s not going to be updating daily on this given his topic (he posts three or four times a month), yet it gets a lot of engagement
- Unmarketing: Scott Stratten commented on Twitter that “infrequency is my middle name.” However, keep in mind that Scott’s working hard on developing engagement on Twitter—he’s closing in on 75,000 tweets!
- Social Triggers: Derek Halpern posts two to four times per month, but the quality is high and there’s a lot of reader engagement.
- Penelope Trunk: Penelope is another great example of someone who has regular posting but doesn’t feel the need to write something every single day.
Check out the other posts in the Misconceptions of Blogging series.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
You MUST Post Every Day on Your Blog [Misconceptions New Bloggers Have #2]
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